82 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



borrowed capital, and run great risks. The wonder is 

 that they have done what they have for the labourer, 

 ' finding him with better cottages, better wages, better 

 education, and affording him better opportunities of 

 rising in the social scale.' 



It is, he goes on to say in his second letter, the 

 labourers themselves who will not rise — will not pay 

 threepence a week in school-fees. They walk into Swindon 

 from places six miles oft to earn not much higher 

 wages in the Great Western Railway factory, and then 

 have to pay for house and garden more heavily than as 

 agricultural labourers, and are liable to instant dismissal ; 

 and ' manufactures and immorality seem to go together.' 

 The farmers have done more than their duty ; they work 

 hard, run heavy risks, and just make a living. Then 

 he points out that millionaires ' pay no poor rate and no 

 local taxation, or nothing in proportion.' 



In the third letter he describes the garden allotments 

 at Liddington, near Coate, founded and carried on by a 

 rector of that parish, thus adding ' one more to the 

 numberless ways in which the noble clergy of the Church 

 of England have been silently labouring for the good of 

 the people committed to their care for years before the 

 agitators bestowed one thought on the agricultural poor.' 

 In a sketch by Jefferies belonging to this period, called 

 * A True Tale of the Wiltshire Labourer,' a man is de- 

 prived of his allotment for drunkenness ; and, deserted 

 by him, the wife is in consequence not visited by the 

 rector in her distress. The farmer comes for the rent, 

 and offers her sixpence as the price of her prostitution. 

 She dies after the birth of a still-born child, and the 

 husband becomes a confirmed drunkard. This is another 

 side of the matter, which it was not convenient, probably, 

 to reveal in the letters to the Times. 



These letters are conspicuous for lucid, forcible, and 

 simple exposition of his own observation and the ideas 

 of the tenant-farming class. They sprang readily out of 

 a large experience, and deserved their success. They 



