To gentlemen accustomed to receive a regular income, a small lump sum like ten or twenty pounds appears a totally inadequate provision against old age.  They institute elaborate calculations by professed accountants, to discover whether by any mode of investment a small subscription proportionate to the labourer’s wages can be made to provide him with an annuity.  The result is scarcely satisfactory.  But, in fact, though an annuity would be, of course, preferable, even so small a sum as ten or twenty pounds is of the very highest value to an aged agricultural labourer, especially when he has a cottage, if not his own property, yet in which he has a right to reside.  The neighbouring farmers, who have known him from their own boyhood, are always ready to give him light jobs whenever practicable.  So that in tolerable weather he still earns something.  His own children do a little for him.  In the dead of the winter come a few weeks when he can do nothing, and feels the lack of small comforts.  It is just then that a couple of sovereigns out of a hoard of twenty pounds will tide him over the interval.

It is difficult to convey an idea of the value of these two extra sovereigns to a man of such frugal habits and in that position.  None but those who have mixed with the agricultural poor can understand it.  Now the wages that will hardly, by the most careful management, allow of the gradual purchase of an annuity, will readily permit such savings as these.  It is simply a question of the money-box.  When the child’s money-box is at hand the penny is dropped in, and the amount accumulates; if there is no box handy it is spent in sweets.  The same holds true of young and old alike.  If, then, the annuity cannot be arranged, let the money-box, at all events, be brought nearer.  And the money-box in which the poor man all over the country has the most faith is the Post-office.

CHAPTER XXVIII

HODGE’S LAST MASTERS.  CONCLUSION

After all the ploughing and the sowing, the hoeing and the harvest, comes the miserable end.  Strong as the labourer may be, thick-set and capable of immense endurance; by slow degrees that strength must wear away.  The limbs totter, the back is bowed, the dimmed sight can no longer guide the plough in a straight furrow, nor the weak hands wield the reaping-hook, Hodge, who, Atlas-like, supported upon his shoulders the agricultural world, comes in his old age under the dominion of his last masters at the workhouse.  There, indeed, he finds almost the whole array of his rulers assembled.  Tenant farmers sit as the guardians of the poor for their respective parishes; the clergyman and the squire by virtue of their office as magistrates; and the tradesman as guardian for the market town.  Here are representatives of almost all his masters, and it may seem to him a little strange that it should require so many to govern such feeble folk.