s would bear. No trace of oppression in wages
can be found. The farmer gets allowances from his landlord, and he
allows something to his labourers, and so the whole system is kept
up by mutual understanding. Except under a very important rise in
wheat, or a favourable change in the condition of agriculture
altogether, it is not possible for the farmers to add another
sixpence either to the sum paid to the individual or to the sum paid
in the aggregate to the village.

Therefore, as education increases--and it increases rapidly--as the
push of the world reaches the hamlet; as the labouring class
increase in social stature, and twenty new wants are found; as they
come to look forth upon matters in a very different manner to their
stolid forefathers; it is evident that some important problems will
arise in the country. The question will have to be asked: Is it
better for this population to be practically nomad or settled? How
is livelihood--_i.e._, wages--to be found for it? Can anything be
substituted for wages? Or must we devise a gigantic system of
emigration, and in a twelvemonth (if the people took it up) have
every farmer crying out that he was ruined, he could never get his
harvest in. I do not think myself that the people could be induced
to go under any temptation. They like England in despite of their
troubles. If the farmer could by any happy means find out some new
plant to cultivate, and so obtain a better profit and be able to
give wages to more hands, the nomad population would settle itself
somehow, if in mud huts. No chance of that is in sight at present,
so we are forced round to the consideration of a substitute for
wages.

Now, ten or twelve years since, when much activity prevailed in all
things agricultural, it was proposed to fix the labouring population
to the soil by building better cottages, giving them large gardens
and allotments, and various other privileges. This was done; and in
'Fraser' I did not forget to credit the good intent of those who did
it. Yet now we see, ten years afterwards, that instead of fixing the
population, the population becomes more wandering. Why is this? Why
have not these cottages and allotments produced their expected
effect? There seems but one answer--that it is the lack of fixity of
tenure. All these cottages and allotments have only been held on
sufferance, on good behaviour, and hence they have failed. For even
for material profit in the independent nineteenth