During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick, trying to brighten the lot of the poor.  I learned then some of the lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able in after-years to teach from the platform.  The movement among the agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch, was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their life-conditions.  In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping in one room—­the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; 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 human dwellers.  How could I do aught but sympathise with any combination that aimed at the raising of these poor?  But the Agricultural Labourers’ Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and they would give no work to a “Union man.”  One example may serve for all.  There was a young married man with two small children, who was sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it on his return home.  No farmer would employ him in all the district round.  He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and took to drink.  Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a “lean-to,” I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed.  In answer to my soft-spoken questions:  Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no work.  Why did she leave the dead child on the bed?  Because she had no other place for it till the coffin came.  And at night the unhappy, driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the dead child, all lay in the one bed.  The farmers hated the Union because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never struck them that they might well pay less rent to the absent landlord and higher wage to the men who tilled their fields.  They had only civil words for the burden that crushed them, hard words for the mowers of their harvests and the builders-up of their ricks; they made common cause with their enemies instead of with their friends, and instead of leaguing themselves together with the labourers as forming together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with the landlords against the labourers, and so made ruinous fratricidal strife instead of easy victory over the common foe.  And, seeing all this, I learned some useful lessons, and the political education progressed while the theological strife went on within.