etting so much food and firing by his own labour, he
might go for weeks without needing more than a few shillings to make up
occasional deficiencies. His purse was subject to no such constant drain
as that for which the modern labourer has to provide. In short, the
regular expenses were small, the occasional ones not crushing. But
to-day, when the people can no longer produce for themselves, the
proportion has changed. It has swung round so completely that nearly all
the expenses have become regular, while those of the other sort have
wellnigh disappeared. Every week money has to be found, and not only, as
of old, for rent, and boots, and for some bread and flour, but also for
butter or margarine, sugar, tea, bacon or foreign meat if possible,
lard, jam, and--in the winter, at least--coal. Even water is an item of
weekly expense; for where the company's water is laid on to a cottage,
there is sixpence a week or so added to the rent. The only important
thing which is still not bought regularly is clothing. The people get
their clothes when they can, and when they positively must.

As a result, the former thrift of the village has been entirely
subverted. For earning and spending are not the whole of economy. There
is saving to be considered; and, in consequence of the turn-over of
expenses from the occasional to the regular group, the cottagers have
been obliged to resort to methods of saving specially adapted to the
changed conditions. The point is of extreme importance. Under the old
style, a man's chief savings were in the shape of commodities ready for
use, or growing into use. They were, too, a genuine capital, inasmuch as
they supported him while he replaced and increased them. The flitches of
bacon, the little stores of flour and home-made wine, the stack of
firing, the small rick of fern or grass, were his savings-bank, which,
while he drew from it daily, he replenished betimes as he planted his
garden, and brought home heath and turf from the common, and minded his
pigs and his cow, and put by odd shillings for occasional need. Notice
that putting-by of shillings. It was not the whole, it was only the
completion, of the peasant's thrift. At a pinch he could even do without
the money, paying for what he wanted with a sack of potatoes, or a day's
work with his donkey-cart; but a little money put by was a convenience.
When it was wanted, it was wanted in lump sums--ten shillings now, say,
for a little pig; and then