On the Treatment of Under-Gardeners. & L 1 



adamise the road, as G. R. G. expresses himself, for the 

 improvement of others, we quote his leading argument. " One 

 thing only is wanted in order to render under-gardeners in- 

 telligent and moral, and that is, pay for their labour at the 

 same rate that other journeymen tradesmen are paid for 

 theirs." G. R. G. has entered into various details to show 

 that the wages of gardeners ought not to be inferior to those 

 of bricklayers and carpenters, and one of his arguments is, 

 that gardeners require fully as much previous education as 

 they do. Our young friend, however, should not overlook the 

 difference between the prospect of a journeyman carpenter 

 and those of a journeyman gardener ; the former, in general, 

 can look forward to nothing beyond that of a journeyman, or, 

 if he becomes a master, it is in consequence of having been so 

 long a journeyman as to have saved money : the journeyman 

 gardener, on the contrary, after he has been two or three years 

 out of his apprenticeship, mounts at once into the condition 

 of master, and, if he has attained a first-rate situation, he is 

 perhaps as well off at twenty-five as an industrious journey- 

 man carpenter at forty-five, because it would probably require 

 that time before the latter could save sufficient money to enable 

 him to become a master. The fact is, that while other trades- 

 men require both skill and capital to assume the condition and 

 reap the advantages of a master, the gardener requires skill 

 only. Knowledge, therefore, to the gardener is money as 

 well as knowledge ; it is both skill and capital ; and it will not 

 be denied that skill can be acquired by labour of the mind 

 sooner than capital by labour of the body. Hence the pro- 

 fession of a gardener has peculiar advantages for those who 

 engage in it with a proper degree of scholastic education ; 

 and hence also, if gardeners were as well paid as carpenters 

 and bricklayers, the market would soon be overstocked with 

 them. The price given for any description of labour will, in 

 the long run, always be found a just price. But while we state 

 this, we know it to be perfectly true that a journeyman gar- 

 dener can barely exist upon his wages. We consider it highly 

 commendable in G. R. G. to use every argument in favour of 

 raising them, and we certainly think if they were raised, the 

 masters would be gainers as well as the journeymen. In all 

 businesses a man works according as he is paid ; and all poli- 

 tical economists agree that it is better for a country that the 

 wages of labour should be high than low. We have received 

 a clever paper on this subject from " Sensitiva," which we 

 regret we have not room for in this number. In the mean- 

 time, as no general improvement in the wages of journeymen 

 Vol. I. No. 4. f f 



