PEASANT WOMEN AND CHILDREN. 225 



the poor parents were obliged to let them go. There 

 was a difference in favour of Devonshire, where children 

 were not employed quite so much on farm work as in 

 other counties ; and in 1868 Boards of Guardians in 

 Devon expressed the opinion that children should not 

 work on farms until over ten years of age. Women, 

 too, were not so much employed in that county as 

 formerly, and farmers found it increasingly difficult 

 to get them. The same decline was noticeable in Wilt- 

 shire and in some other counties. The Wiltshire Com- 

 missioner, Mr. Norman, stated : 



" Those whom I visited and talked to often told me that 

 although they themselves had always been in the habit 

 of working, they had made up their minds that it did not 

 answer, and that they would not encourage their children to 

 take to it. /They seem to be arriving at a conviction that 

 where a cottage is to be kept clean and tidy, and a family 

 provided for, the whole time of the mother of the family 

 should be spent indoors ; and that the money she can earn 

 by going into the fields is insufficient to compensate her 

 for the necessary loss which is occasioned by her absence 

 from home." 



He remarked, further, that the increased employment 

 of machinery tended to a decrease in women's labour, 

 because the kind of work done by machinery was largely 

 that done by women and children ; and, moreover, 

 the women themselves got more and more to prefer 

 indoor occupation. It is rather distressing to learn that 

 sometimes children of the tender age of five were made 

 to do some kinds of work a very sad state of things, 

 because children of that age were little more than 

 babies. 



As to women, and oftentimes very old women, there 

 were cases where farmers preferred to employ them 

 because of the cheapness of their labour. Here is one 

 little picture gathered from the writer's personal 

 observation : 



" We met a poor old woman, with a bronzed and weather- 

 beaten face, toiling along under a load of long poles which 



'5 



