92 
The Allotment System. 
siderable confidence in it as a probable future average result. 
When experiment shall have discovered some method of purify- 
ing the produce, so that it shall fetch the ordinary market-price 
of neutral spirit, there will, apparently, be a sufficient return from 
the manufacture to make it profitable ; and English agriculture 
will certainly derive a great advantage from any plan by which 
the whisky and the gin at present obtained from barley shall 
thus be derived from a fallow crop. 
VI. — The Allotment System. — By John C. Morton. 
Everybody now admits that the so-called allotment system is 
beneficial both to the labourer and his employer. If the posses- 
sion of a store of field and garden produce be, as is alleged, a 
temptation to dishonesty, by the facilities which it affords for 
secreting the property of an employer, it is even more power- 
fully and in a variety of ways a security for good behaviour. 
The allotment of land which provides tliis store attaches a man 
to the locality in which he lives — it gives him employment for 
those hours both of his children and himself which would other- 
wise be wasted — it adds to the comforts of his home — and it is 
generally a subject of common interest to himself, his neighbour, 
and his superiors. All these things tend to make him both 
contented and respectable. And if, as has been also said, the 
cultivation of an allotment does prove a tax upon the powers of 
the labouring man, incapacitating him in some degree by its need of 
extra Avork for those ten hours' labour which are due to his em- 
ployer, it must be remembered, on the other hand, that, by every 
addition to the comforts and the means of home which it confers, 
his strength for those ten hours' labour is increased. 
But there is ample proof of the influence which has been 
actually exerted by the allotment svstem in many a district 
throughout the country ; and we need no longer speak of its pro- 
babilities or tendencies as if it were still an untried thing. Tlie 
object of this paper is to describe its operation in two or tlirce 
instances, so as to induce its extension to other places where its 
eff'ects upon the character and condition of the labouring popu- 
lation may be still unknown. The first of these instances — 
that with wiiose history I am best acquainted — occurs on the 
estates of the Earl of Ducie, in the parishes of Thornbury, 
Cromhall, Tortworth, Charfield, and VV'ickwar, in the county of 
Gloucester. The system here is not necessarily called for by exces- 
sive population ; there is no special difiiculty felt either by 
euij)loycrs in providing labour, or by workmen in obtaining a 
livelihood : it was carried into operation as an addition to the 
comforts of an already tolerably satisfactory condition of the 
