As wages must eventually always depend upon prices of produce raised by the labour for which such wages are expended, when the agricultural labourer buys his bread he is only buying back his own labour in a concrete form plus the other relative expenses on the farm, and the cost of milling, baking, and distribution, so that when he gets a high price for his labour he must expect to pay a high price for his food; and when the price of food is reduced the price of his labour also falls.  Here, again, the rudiments of economics, taught in the schools, would conduce to his understanding the position, and the eradication of discontent.

It is impossible, economically speaking, to defend the system of equal wages to the most capable and industrious men on the one hand and to inefficient slackers on the other; and as a graduated scale of payment, according to results, is not practicable without arousing ill-feeling and jealousy, the farmer’s only remedy is to get rid of the slackers.  Inefficiency and slacking are often due to a man’s enfeebled mental and physical condition, owing to neglect in his bringing up as a child, or to insufficient or unwholesome food provided by an improvident wife in his home.

I was fortunate in meeting with very few of these degenerates, but I remember one tall, delicate-looking man who seemed unable to apply either his strength or his attention to his work.  He was denounced by the foreman under whom he worked as not only useless, but “the starvenest wretch as ever I see,” intended to convey the impression, and confirming my own conclusion, that cold and hunger were really the cause of his inability to render a fair day’s work.

I remember, too, when some elderly women, with a younger one, were hay-making, one of the old ladies, dragging the big “heel-rake” behind the waggon in course of loading—­always rather a tough job—­tried to induce the younger woman to take her place with, “Here, Sally, thee take a turn at it; thee be a better ’ooman nor I be.”  My bailiff, overhearing, at once interposed:  “Be she a better ’ooman than thee, Betsy, ov a Saturday night [pay-night]?”

Hard-and-fast laws and fixed prices for agricultural labour will be found very difficult to maintain as to piecework; no wage board can fix just prices, because conditions are so variable.  Of two men cutting corn on separate plots in the same field, the one at 12s. an acre may really earn more money per diem than another man at 15s. an acre on the other side of the field, owing to the difference in the weight of the crop or its condition, it being, perhaps, erect in the first case, and laid by heavy storms in the second.

There is, too, a vast difference in the value of boys’ work and usefulness; one may easily be worth double another, yet no difference is allowable by the new law; or one may demoralize another, so that two are less effective than one.  A good old saying puts the matter very plainly:  “One boy’s a boy, two boys are half a boy, and three boys are no boy at all!”