CHAPTER XXXII. 



GLANCING BACK AT DWELLINGS AND 

 WAGES. 



ONE of the most crying evils in connection with the 

 condition of English agricultural labourers was the 

 state of their dwellings : and the evil was especially 

 marked in the counties of Devon, Dorset, Somerset and 

 Wilts. It had been growing rather than lessening 

 between 1843, when a Poor Law Commissioner's report 

 was issued, and the period from 1868 to 1870, when 

 further official reports were published ; and on, in fact, 

 to the period, 1872, when the present writer's "'Romance* 

 of Peasant Life " was issued. 



It is notorious that Blue Books do not attract the 

 same amount of public attention as what may be called 

 private volumes issued by individual authors. Ela- 

 borate reports crowded with hundreds of pages of 

 reliable and valuable evidence too frequently lie perdu, 

 so far as accessibility by the general public is concerned. 

 Even those especially interested in the subjects too 

 frequently just dip into the masses of printed matter and 

 " skim " the tables and summaries. It is probably 

 the uninteresting and complex methods of producing 

 official reports that are largely answerable for the delays 

 in bringing about remediable measures. Busy legisla- 

 tors, pressed by other work, have not time to unravel 

 threads that could be made much more easy for them 

 than they commonly are by the investigators. Now 



and then the eye lights upon interesting passages that 



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