ENTIRE DEPENDENCE ON MONEY WAGES 411 



form of reproductive investment. They meant a step upwards in 

 well-being. But the labourer of to-day saves for a different object. 

 His weekly earnings, on which depend his livelihood and home, are 

 all-important. It is against sickness, therefore, that he tries to 

 secure himself by painful thrift. What he pays for insurance is 

 not an investment ; the money that he puts into a Friendly Society 

 is not capital which he can ever use. Once paid, it is gone for ever. 

 His savings do not in fact help him to put his foot on the ladder of 

 prosperity. They only serve to protect his family and himself 

 against a possible adversity. The great number of labourers who 

 insure in Friendly Societies is a pathetic proof of their total depend- 

 ence on weekly earnings and of their haunting dread of the loss of 

 wages through sickness. But the popularity of Slate Clubs shows 

 their consciousness of the disadvantages of the ordinary insurance. 

 By dividing out at the end of each year, they are at least able to 

 secure the use of a portion of their annual savings as capital. 



Under the older system, peasants were rarely without some real 

 stake in the agricultural community ; they were not members of 

 an isolated class ; they were not exclusively dependent on competi- 

 tive wages for their homes and livelihood ; they were seldom without 

 opportunities of bettering their positions ; they had not before them 

 the unending vista of a gradual process of physical exhaustion in 

 another's service. Under the modern commercial system, the 

 conditions from which peasants were generally free are those under 

 which the average agricultural labourer lives, though exceptional 

 men may struggle out of their tyranny. They have no property 

 but their labour. Even of that one possession, such are the exigencies 

 of their position, they are not the masters. If they fail to sell it 

 where they are now living, or if they lose employment by a change in 

 the ownership or occupation of the land on which they work, they 

 must move on. Their home is only secure to them from week to 

 week. For all wage-earning classes, the modern conditions of 

 industry are approximately the same. But in villages they are 

 relieved by few of the compensations which to the eyes of country 

 visitors appear to be offered in towns. In money wages, artisans 

 are better paid ; they have greater chances of rising to higher rates 

 of remuneration ; they have larger facilities for recreation and 

 amusement ; so far as then- homes are concerned, they are less 

 directly under the thumb of their employer ; they belong to a less 

 isolated and more numerous class ; they live in the midst of a 



