Foot and mouth disease was first observed in England in 1839,[660] and it was malignant in 1840-1, when cattle, sheep, and pigs were attacked as they were during the serious outbreak of 1871-2.  In 1883 no less than 219,289 cattle were attacked, besides 217,492 sheep, and 24,332 pigs, when the disease was worse than it has ever been in England.  Since then, though there have been occasional outbreaks, it has much abated.  Another dread scourge of cattle, pleuro-pneumonia, was at its worst in 1872, a most calamitous year in this respect, when 7,983 cattle were attacked.  In 1890 the Board of Agriculture assumed powers with respect to it under the Diseases of Animals Act of that year, and their consequent action has been attended with great success in getting rid of the disease.

At the end of this halcyon period farmers had to contend with a new difficulty, the demand for higher wages by their labourers at the instigation of Joseph Arch.[661] This famous agitator was born at Barford in Warwickshire in 1826, and as a boy worked for neighbouring farmers, educating himself in his spare time.  The miserable state of the labourer which he saw all around him entered into his soul, meat was rarely seen on his table, even bacon was a luxury in many cottages.  Tea was 6s. to 7s. a lb., sugar 8d., and other prices in proportion; the labourers stole turnips for food, and every other man was a poacher.  Arch made himself master of everything he undertook, became famous as a hedger, mower, and ploughman, and being consequently employed all over the Midlands and South Wales, began to gauge the discontent of the labourer who was then voiceless, voteless, and hopeless.  His wages by 1872 had increased to 12s. a week, but had not kept pace with the rise in prices.  Bread was 7-1/2d. a loaf; the labourer had lost the benefit of his children’s labour, for they had now all gone to school; his food was ’usually potatoes, dry bread, greens, herbs, “kettle broth” made by putting bread in the kettle, weak tea, bacon sometimes, fresh meat hardly ever.’[662] It is difficult to realize that at the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when Gladstone said the prosperity of the country was advancing ‘by leaps and bounds’, that any class of the community in full work could live under such wretched conditions.  Arch came to the conclusion that labour could only improve its position when organized, and the Agricultural Labourers’ Union was initiated in 1872.  Not that the idea of obtaining better conditions by combination was new to the rural labourer.  It was attempted in 1832 in Dorset, but speedily crushed, and not till 1865 was a new union founded in Scotland, which was followed by a strike in Buckinghamshire in 1867, and the foundation of a union in Herefordshire in 1871.[663] It was determined to ask for 16s. a week and a 9-1/2 hours’ working day, which the farmers refused to grant, and the men struck.  The agitation spread all over England, and was often