men on sufferance, and keeping them,
however mildly, under the thumb, is a system totally at variance
with the tenets of our time. It is a most expensive system, and
ruinous to true self-respect, insomuch as it tends to teach the
labourer's children that the only way they can show the independence
of their thought is by impertinent language. How much better for a
labourer to be perfectly free--how much better for an employer to
have a man to work for him quite outside any suspicion of
sufferance, or of being under his thumb! I should not like men under
my thumb; I should like to pay them for their work, and there let
the contract end, as it ends in all other businesses. As more wages
cannot be paid, the next best thing, perhaps the absolutely
necessary thing, is a fixed home.

I think it would pay any landowner to let all the cottages upon his
property to the labourers themselves direct, exactly as farms are
let, giving them security of tenure, so long as rent was
forthcoming, with each cottage to add a large garden, or allotment,
up to, say, two acres, at an agricultural, and not an accommodation,
rent. Most gardens and allotments are let as a favour at a rent
about three times, and in some cases even six times, the
agricultural rent of the same soil in the adjoining fields.
Cottagers do not look upon such tenancies--held, too, on
sufferance--as a favour or kindness, and feel no gratitude nor any
attachment to those who permit them to dig and delve at thrice the
charge the farmer pays. Add to these cottages gardens, not
necessarily adjoining them, but as near as circumstances allow, up
to two acres at a purely agricultural rental. If, in addition,
facilities were to be given for the gradual purchase of the freehold
by the labourer on the same terms as are now frequently held out by
building societies, it would be still better. I think it would turn
out for the advantage of landowner, tenant, and the country at large
to have a settled agricultural population.

The limit of two acres I mention, not that there is any especial
virtue in that extent of land, but because I do not think the
labourer would profit by having more, since he must then spend his
whole time cultivating his plot. Experience has proved over and over
again that for a man in England to live by spade-husbandry on four
or five acres of land is the most miserable existence possible. He
can but just scrape a living, he is always failing, his children ar