, in nursing the sick, in trying to
brighten a little the lot of the poor of the village. But here, again, I
was out of sympathy with most of those around me. The movement among the
agricultural laborers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch, was
beginning to be talked of in the fens, and bitter were the comments of
the farmers on it, while I sympathised with the other side. One typical
case, which happened some months later, may stand as example of all.
There was a young man, married, with two young children, who was wicked
enough to go into a neighboring county to a "Union Meeting", and who was,
further, wicked enough to talk about it when he returned. He became a
marked man; no farmer would employ him. He tramped about vainly, looking
for work, grew reckless, and took to drink. Visiting his cottage one day
I found his wife ill, a dead child in the bed, a sick child in her arms;
yes, she "was pining; there was no work to be had". "Why did she leave
the dead child on the bed? because there was no other place to put it."
The cottage consisted of one room and a "lean-to", and husband and wife,
the child dead of fever and the younger child sickening with it, were all
obliged to lie on the one bed. In another cottage I found four
generations sleeping in one room, the great-grandfather and his wife, the
grandmother (unmarried), the mother (unmarried), and the little child,
while three men-lodgers completed the tale of eight human beings crowded
into that narrow, ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels,
through the broken roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism
and ague lived with the dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise
with any combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But to
sympathise with Joseph Arch was a crime in the eyes of the farmers, who
knew that his agitation meant an increased drain on their pockets. For it
never struck them that, if they paid less in rent to the absent landlord,
they might pay more in wage to the laborers who helped to make their
wealth, and they had only civil words for the burden that crushed them,
and harsh ones for the builders-up of their ricks and the mowers of their
harvests. They made common cause with their enemy, instead of with their
friend, and instead of leaguing themselves with the laborers, as forming
together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with the
landlords against the laborers, and so made fratricidal