CHAPTER XLII. 

 WAGES ADVANCED. 



NOTWITHSTANDING the recurrence, during the period 

 from 1873 to 1880, of a severe agricultural depression, 

 there had been appreciable improvement in the rate of 

 pay an improvement which had affected all our agri- 

 cultural districts. It is not proposed to give in detail 

 the changes in every district, but to select the repre- 

 sentative area of the four western counties of Wilts, 

 Dorset, Somerset, and Devon. To traverse that district 

 as we did occupied a rather appreciable time. For an 

 individual to have gone similarly all over the kingdom 

 would have taken so long a time that the information 

 gathered in the first visited districts would have grown 

 somewhat stale and out of date before the end of the 

 inquiry, and would require to be supplemented. In 

 fact, for an individual writer to attempt to present a 

 complete and simultaneous account, no part of which 

 shall be out of date, would be impossible. Royal com- 

 missions with a plethora of members pursuing simul- 

 taneous inquiries, and each undertaking a comparatively 

 small district, take years to report in similar circum- 

 stances. The only way in which what may be called 

 a coup d'ceil of this subject uniformly representative 

 of the condition of things at a particular moment, so 

 to speak may be given, is by the employment of official 

 machinery simultaneously set in motion. For this 

 purpose the Poor Law and other official machinery 



offers a convenient method ; and in the section of this 



260 



