for recrimination. Then one, or even two of them bring home a wife, or at
least a woman, and three families live beneath a single roof--with results
it is easy to imagine, both as regards bickering and immorality. They have
no wish to quit the place and enter cottages with better accommodation:
they might rent others of the farmers, but they prefer to be independent,
and, besides, will not move lest they should lose their rights. Very
likely a few lodgers are taken in to add to the confusion. As regularly as
clockwork cross summonses are taken out before the Bench, and then the
women on either side reveal an unequalled power of abuse and loquacity,
leaving a decided impression that it is six to one and half a dozen to the
other.

These rookeries do not furnish forth burglars and accomplished
pickpockets, like those of cities, but they do send out a gang of lazy,
scamping fellows and coarse women, who are almost useless. If their
employer does not please them--if he points out that a waste of time has
taken place, or that something has been neglected--off they go, for,
having a hole to creep into, they do not care an atom whether they lose a
job or not. The available hands, therefore, upon whom the farmers can
count are always very much below the sum total of the able-bodied
population. There must be deducted the idle men and women, the drunkards,
the never satisfied, as the lad who sued every master; the workhouse
families, the rookery families, and those who every harvest leave the
place, and wander a great distance in search of exceptionally high wages.
When all these are subtracted, the residue remaining is often insufficient
to do the work of the farms in a proper manner. It is got through somehow
by scratch-packs, so to say--men picked up from the roads, aged men who
cannot do much, but whose energy puts the younger fellows to shame, lads
paid far beyond the value of the work they actually accomplish.

Work done in this way is, of course, incomplete and unsatisfactory, and
the fact supplies one of the reasons why farmers seem disinclined to pay
high wages. It is not because they object to pay well for hard work, but
because they cannot get the hard work. There is consequently a growing
reliance upon floating labour--upon the men and women who tramp round
every season--rather than on the resident population. Even in the absence
of any outward agitation--of a strike or open movement in that
direction--the farmer has