House and Garden 
not thousands, ot acres. The second, a relative of 
the first, occupies another of the half-dozen farm¬ 
houses of our village, and the remainder of them are 
let to middle-class folk of whom, as one of them, I 
may be permitted to say that they are not a tenth 
part as useful to their humhler neighbors as working 
farmers would be. They di\ide between them the 
services of one or two so-called gardeners, they buy a 
little from the village shops, they give some employ¬ 
ment to the mason and the blacksmith—there is no 
carpenter—and that is all the use they are to the 
villagers. In the hamlet, where five farmers once 
lived and, presumably, made a living, there is now 
but one, and his business can hardly be described as 
farming. The hamlet looks the more miserable of 
the two aggregations of buildings, because the farm¬ 
houses are empty and derelict, that is all. The 
dominant fact that remains is that land formerly in 
the hands of nine or ten men, all of them farming on 
a considerable scale, is now absolutely in the hands 
of two men, and their power over the people is irresis¬ 
tible. Let there be no misunderstanding. I do not 
say that this power is misused by either of our farmers; 
on the contrary, having regard to the influence which 
they might exert, it seems to me that they interfere 
openly but little. The fact is they have no need to 
interfere, for the people understand that their 
masters have absolute control over their little des¬ 
tinies, and they are only too anxious to find out how 
to humour the wishes of those who have the power 
of giving employment, and of taking it away. “You 
may say as if you offends one you off ends ahl,” said 
a labourer to me not long since. It put the whole 
position in a nutshell. 
Village and hamlet, then, live under a system of 
silent despotism; but that, in itself, is no fatal 
obstacle to happiness. Some wise man (Hume, 
if memory serves correctly) has explained that under 
a despotism that is good the conditions of life may be 
every whit as tolerable as in the most absolutely free 
of democracies. I do not say that our despotism is, 
in itself or in feeling, an unkindly one, or that our 
despots do not do their duty to their subjects accord¬ 
ing to their lights. But “by their fruits ye shall 
know them,” and when I look at the conditions of 
life in our village community I cannot help wishing 
that there were just a little more competition, just a 
slight increase in the number of men who demanded 
the work of the labourer. Let us look first at the 
all-important question of wages. I read with admi¬ 
ration in official books that recent investigation has 
shown the average earnings of the agricultural labour¬ 
er in England to be sixteen shillings (^4.00) a week. 
When I knew country life familiarly in Anglesey 
a quarter of a century ago, an agricultural labourer, 
hired by the half-year, received thirty-six pounds 
($180) a year and his board and lodging; the lodg¬ 
ing, it is true, was rough, and so was the food, hut 
this last was abundant. In Carnarvonshire, owing 
to the proximity of the slate quarries with their de¬ 
mand for labour, wages were a trifle higher. In 
“ Highways and Byways in Sussex,” Mr. E. V. Lucas 
gives a delightful and obviously authentic account, 
which I transcribe^ minus dialect, of the conditions 
of the labourer’s life in Sussex thirty years ago. 
Out in the morning at four o’clock. Mouthful of bread and 
cheese and pint of ale. Then off to the harvest he’d. Reaping 
and mowing till eight. Then morning breakfast and small beer. 
Breakfast—a piece of fat pork as thick as your hat is wide. Then 
work till ten o’clock; then a mouthful of bread and cheese and a 
pint of strong beer. Work till twelve. Then at dinner in the 
farmhouse; sometimes a leg of mutton, sometimes a piece of ham 
and plum pudding. Then work till five; then a nunch and a quart 
of ale. Nunch was cheese. ’Twas skimmed cheese though. Then 
work till sunset; then home and have supper and a pint of ale. 
This was in harvest time, when wages and work are 
apt to be heavy, and one is permitted to hope that the 
call upon dura messorum iha was not always so 
severe. But it is stated that the wages of the reg¬ 
ular servants, the men “in the house,” who were of 
course boarded and lodged, were from three pounds 
ten shillings (^17.50) to two pounds ten shillings 
($12.50) per month; or much the same as those of 
Anglesey. Of the Sussex of to-day I cannot speak 
with knowledge, but I do not think the Anglesey 
wages have fallen much, if at all. 
Let us contrast, not Sussex in the golden days, not 
North Wales (which being largely pastoral, has felt 
depression less severely than agricultural England), 
but the official average with that of our little com¬ 
munity. There is not a labourer in the village who 
would not regard sixteen shillings ($4.00) a week as 
wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. The so- 
called gardener of whom I employ an aliquot part (he 
sometimes “gives me an extra day,” totidem verhis, 
at a price) earns the princely sum of half-a-crown (62 
cents) per^diem from me, and I have been accused of 
raising the tariff. He is much richer than his neigh¬ 
bours, and once, when I was discussing with him the 
problem how those in the stratum below him con¬ 
trived to live at all, he propounded the opinion, “I 
think every man ought to be able to earn two bob 
(50 cents) a day.” That is surely a sufficiently 
modest ambition. Unfortunately, those who attain 
to it are few and far between. The average wages 
of labourers—carters earn a shilling or two more— 
are ten shillings ($2.50) precisely. They are hired 
by the week, and, if the weather is so wet that “us 
can’t get on the laand,” and there is no work avail¬ 
able under cover, they lose a day’s wages. In winter 
superfluous hands are turned off, just as they are at 
manufactories and works when employment is slack. 
Cottage rent is from is. (25 cents) to 2s.6d.; (62 cents) 
club payments must be kept up at all hazards by men 
whose earnings are thus small and precarious. That 
men so situated contrive to exist and to bring up 
140 
