90 
Farm Labourers, their Friendly Societies, 
from legislation, but the fear instead that his earnings would 
benefit, not himself and family, but the ratepayers, he consents 
to cross over the frontier-line, and at last to abide under the cold 
shade and desolating sway of the Poor Law. 
There are many thousands of honest and respectable farm 
labourers in this country who are in a similar condition, and 
whose prospects are the ultimate provision from the rate ; the 
effort to save these men from the degradation to which they 
submit themselves is yet to be made. 
There is another class, and that a numerous and costly one, to 
be taken into account, the members of which recruit the gaol as 
well as the workhouse. As young men they were disobedient 
sons, idle and disreputable, whom no farmer would employ 
unless under compulsion. My specimen of this class is the son 
of a pilfering sire, his mother a slattern and a scold ; his 
earliest recollections, probably, are of his father coming home 
drunk on a Sunday afternoon and finding him and his brothers 
and sisters crying for food, and beating his mother, for which 
he was sent to prison, while the wife and family found refuge in 
the union. In the union (he remembers it as one of the horrors 
of the place) they forced him to learn to read, and hence his 
hatred of learning. He will never work if he can help it, and 
calls himself a bricklayer's labourer. Now and then I see him 
on the farm, as an additional hand, when there is nobody better 
to be had, or as ostler at the public-house. He is out at elbows, 
out of victuals, and generally out of work. He joins a beer- 
house club, held at a beer-shop in the wood, which offers unusual 
facilities for him and other choice spirits like him, inasmuch as 
it is secluded and not often troubled by the police. He drinks 
his full share of the beer supplied in the way of fines for absence 
from the meetings and for oaths unawares let slip during the 
business hours of the club, which at a pint an oath supplies a 
good deal of beer. He has a turn on the treadmill, after a little 
preparatory training in the winter at the union, where he refused 
to break stones or pick oakum, and came within the definition 
of a refractory pauper. He manages to pick up a wife, a girl 
Avho insisted " on going out," i.e. leaving the union at the fair- 
time in a neighbouring town, and is married at one-and-twenty 
at the register office. She ends the honeymoon with a confine- 
ment, and has parish doctor and nurse, and within six months of 
matrimony you may see her a wretched, half-starved, and ragged 
woman, with a black eye, and a puny child, which cries piteously 
and unceasingly. He has the common luck of idle men, an 
accident, which gives him a right to the sick-fund of his club. He 
applies for union relief, and then discovers that instead of receiv- 
ing as large a share of " his rights " as a former companion, who 
