WHAT OF THE HARVEST ? 



239 



Laws, were not represented on that Council. The farm labourer 

 was tied hand and foot to the farmer. He was reminded of the 

 saying that 



To be Shropshire born and bred 

 Is to be strong in the muscle. 

 And weak in the ycd. 



And it is to keep these children weak in the head that they had 

 this request for boys of twelve on the land." 1 



Few more poignant statements have been made than the 

 passionate utterance of Mr. George Edwards at a Norfolk 



County Council meeting : 



" He owed," he declared, " his smallness of stature to being 

 dragged into the fields as a boy of six years of age ; to overwork 

 and bad living ; and he was anxious that the rising generation 

 should not be dragged into the field and back into the old system. 

 . . . He had followed the plough when he was ten, and he had 

 been handicapped all his life in consequence." 



Our country had not sunk to such, depths of despair that 

 farmers were obliged to call in the labour of little children 

 of twelve years of age to help us to fight the enemy at our 

 gates. Had they offered higher wages, they might have 

 obtained, perhaps not all, but most of the men they wanted. 

 Though the War Office was responsible at a later stage in 

 endangering our food supply by a reckless enlistment of 

 men from the land, the blame was not tlieirs in the winter 

 of 1914-15. Soldier labour \vas offered, and strong, 

 robust girls were eager to lend a hand ; and had the mem- 

 bers of education committees shown the same eagerness 

 to have their own children taken away from school as they 

 did the children of labourers, farmers could have had the 

 labour of athletic boys of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and 

 seventeen years of age. But the farmers would not pay 

 sufficiently high wages to attract adult men ; their conser- 

 vatism at first prevented them from employing strong girls 

 of the middle classes ; and the just payment demanded by 

 the War Office for soldier labour found no favour in the 

 eyes of the farmer. 



" The truth of the whole matter," wrote a land agent, " is that 

 1 Oswestry Advertiser, March 17, 1919. 



