nterested, a few miles away from this valley. The men,
he said, holding their cottages as one of the conditions of employment
on the farms, had grown idle, and were neglecting the cottage
gardens--were neglecting them so seriously that, in the interests of
the estate, he had been obliged to complain to the farmers. Upon my
asking for explanations of a disposition so unlike that of the labourers
in this parish, many of whom are not content with their cottage gardens,
but take more ground when they can get it, my friend said deliberately:
"I think food is too cheap. With their fifteen shillings a week the men
can buy all they want without working for it; and the result is that
they waste their evenings and the gardens go to ruin."

With this remarkable explanation I am glad to think that I have nothing
to do here. The point is that, according to a business man with lifelong
experience in rural matters, country labourers now have time at their
disposal. Without further question we may accept it as true; the
cheapening of produce has made it just possible for labouring men to
live without occupying every available hour in productive work, and in
this one respect they do profit a little by those innovations--the use
of machinery, the division of labour, and the free importation of
foreign goods--which have replaced the antiquated peasant economy. It is
not necessary nowadays--not absolutely necessary--for the labourer, when
his day's wage-earning is done, to fall to work again in the evening in
order to produce commodities for his own use. Doubtless if he does so he
is the better off; but if he fails to do so he may still live. While he
has been earning money away from home during the day, other men he has
never met, in countries he has never seen, have been providing for him
the things that he will want at home in the evening; and if these things
have not been actually brought to his door, they are waiting for him in
shops, whence he may get them in exchange for the money he has earned.
Some of them, too, are of a quality such as, with the utmost skill and
industry, he never could have produced for himself. Modern artificial
light provides an example. Those home-made rushlights eulogized by
Gilbert White and by Cobbett may have been well enough in their way, but
cheap lamps and cheap paraffin have given the villagers their winter
evenings. At a cost of a few halfpence earned in the course of the day's
work a cottage family m