necessity. But now all this is changed. The farm hands have become day
labourers almost everywhere, are employed only when needed by the
farmers, and, therefore, often have no work for weeks together,
especially in winter. In the patriarchal time, the hands and their
families lived on the farm, and their children grew up there, the farmer
trying to find occupation on the spot for the oncoming generation; day
labourers, then, were the exception, not the rule. Thus there was, on
every farm, a larger number of hands than were strictly necessary. It
became, therefore, the interest of the farmers to dissolve this relation,
drive the farm hand from the farm, and transform him into a day labourer.
This took place pretty generally towards the year 1830, and the
consequence was that the hitherto latent over-population was set free,
the rate of wages forced down, and the poor-rate enormously increased.
From this time the agricultural districts became the headquarters of
permanent, as the manufacturing districts had long been of periodic,
pauperism; and the modification of the Poor Law was the first measure
which the State was obliged to apply to the daily increasing
impoverishment of the country parishes. Moreover, the constant extension
of farming on a large scale, the introduction of threshing and other
machines, and the employment of women and children (which is now so
general that its effects have recently been investigated by a special
official commission), threw a large number of men out of employment. It
is manifest, therefore, that here, too, the system of industrial
production has made its entrance, by means of farming on a large scale,
by the abolition of the patriarchal relation, which is of the greatest
importance just here, by the introduction of machinery, steam, and the
labour of women and children. In so doing, it has swept the last and
most stationary portion of working humanity into the revolutionary
movement. But the longer agriculture had remained stationary, the
heavier now became the burden upon the worker, the more violently broke
forth the results of the disorganisation of the old social fabric. The
"over-population" came to light all at once, and could not, as in the
manufacturing districts, be absorbed by the needs of an increasing
production. New factories could always be built, if there were consumers
for their products, but new land could not be created. The cultivation
of waste common land