8S ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



for what appeared to him political unrealities, and his enthu- 

 siasm for Gladstonian candidates distinctly cooled. 



Had Arch stuck to his " last," as in the early days of the 

 Union he declared he was determined to do, when politicians 

 tried to lure him to follow will-o'-the-wisp reforms, he would 

 not have suffered defeat a second time, and his L'nion, in my 

 opinion, would have had a longer run of prosperity. 



" No, thank you," he said to the political reformers in 1872. 

 " I'm for re-form as much as anybody, but it's got to be the 

 labourer first, and reform all round after. . . . It's a poor shoe- 

 maker that can't stick to his last. Well, to raise the wages, 

 shorten the hours, and make a free man out of a slave is mv last, 

 and to that last I'll stick as tight as beeswax for the present. 

 Raise a man's material condition to the level of self- respect ing 

 decency, and the moral will rise, too." l 



Thus spoke the shrewd English peasant before his head 

 was slightly turned by the great politicians at Westminster ; 

 and in speaking thus he spoke almost the same words as his 

 great predecessor, Cobbett, who said : " I will allow nothing 

 to be good with regard to the labouring classes unless it 

 makes an addition to the victuals, drink, or clothing. As 

 to their minds, that is much too sublime a matter for me to 

 think about." 



Dr. Jessopp attributed rural depopulation to the shameful 

 Lousing conditions. No less than 0,^,250 labourer-- iu 

 Great Britain had left the land between 1871 and iSXr. 2 



" Men do not run away in shoals," he p rtinenily remarked, 

 " from Immes where tin ir childhood \vas happy. . . . They do 

 run away from the odious thought of living and dying in a. 

 squalid hov< 1 \vith a clay floor and two d;;rk cabins under the 

 rafters n ac!u d by a ricketty ladder, in the one of which sleep 

 father and mother as best they can, whi!<- in the fu-iid air of the 

 other their offspring of both sexes huddle, sometimes eight or 

 nine of them. amon<, r them young m< n and young wom< n out 

 of whom you are stamping all sense of shani'-. Y< s. ] eople do 

 run away from a life like this ; leaving it behind them as a 

 dreadful pa-4 \\hich they n nieinlx r only with indignation or 

 r belling against the prospect of it as a future too hideous to be 

 < -nter taiiied except with scorn. I, for one, do not blame them," 



