can obtain
regular weekly wages. The farmers are already paying as many as they
can find work for, and not one extra hand is wanted; except, of
course, in the press of hay-harvest, but no one can settle on one
month's work out of twelve. When ten or fifteen thousand acres of
land fall out of cultivation, and farmers leave, what is to become
of the labouring families they kept? What has become of them?

It is useless blinking the fact that what a man wants in our time is
good wages, constant wages, and a chance of increasing wages.
Labouring men more and more think simply of work and wages. They do
not want kindness--they want coin. In this they are not altogether
influenced by self-interest; they are driven rather than go of their
own movement. The world pushes hard on their heels, and they must go
on like the rest. A man cannot drift up into a corner of some green
lane, and stay in his cottage out of the tide of life, as was once
the case. The tide comes to him. He must find money somehow; the
parish will not keep him on out-relief if he has no work; the
rate-collector calls at his door; his children must go to school
decently clad with pennies in each little hand. He must have wages.
You may give him a better cottage, you may give him a large
allotment, you may treat him as an equal, and all is of no avail.
Circumstance--the push of the world--forces him to ask you for
wages. The farmer replies that he has only work for just so many and
no more. The land is full of people. Men reply in effect, 'We cannot
stay if a chance offers us to receive wages from any railway,
factory, or enterprise; if wages are offered to us in the United
States, there we must go.' If they heard that in a town fifty miles
distant twenty shillings could be had for labour, how many of the
hale men do you suppose would stay in the village? Off they would
rush to receive the twenty shillings per week, and the farmers might
have the land to themselves if they liked. Eighteen shillings to a
pound a week would draw off every man from agriculture, and leave
every village empty. If a vast industrial combination announced
regular wages of that amount for all who came, there would not be a
man left in the fields out of the two millions or more who now till
them.

A plan to get more wages out of the land would indeed be a wonderful
success. As previously explained, it is not so much the amount paid
to one individual as the paying of many individuals tha