rt of the country, a superior
farm-servant, neither grieve nor foreman, receives eight pounds in
money, six and a half bolls meal, three cart-loads of potatoes, and
the use of a cow, generally estimated as worth from ten to twelve
pounds annually. His aggregate wages, therefore, average from about
twenty-four to twenty-six pounds ten shillings a year. And we are told
by another proprietor of the south of Scotland, that each of the
better hinds in his employment costs him every year about thirty
pounds. In fine, to the south of the Grampians, the emoluments of our
more efficient class of farm-servants range from twenty-three to
thirty pounds yearly. We need not refer to the wages of railway
navvies, nor yet to those of the superior classes of mechanics, such
as printers, masons, jewellers, typefounders, etc. There is not a
printer in the _Witness_ office who would be permitted by the rules of
his profession, to make an arrangement with his employers, were he to
exchange piece-work for wages, that did not secure to him twenty-five
shillings per week. To expect that a country or Church can possibly
have efficient schoolmasters at a lower rate of emolument than not
only skilled mechanics, but than even unskilled railway labourers, or
the 'stackers and sowers' of our large farms, is so palpably a
delusion, that simply to name it is to expose it. And yet of our Free
Church schoolmasters, especially in thinly-peopled rural districts and
the Highlands, there are scores remunerated at a lower rate than
labourers and farm-servants, and hundreds at a rate at least as low;
and if we except the fortunate hundred and twenty-nine who receive the
Government grant, few indeed of the others rise to the level of the
skilled mechanic. Greatly more than two-thirds of our teachers were
placed originally on the L15 and L20 scale of salaries: these are now
paid with L10 and L13, 13s. 4d. respectively. There are many
localities in which these pittances are not more than doubled by the
fees, and some localities in which they are even less than doubled;
and so a preponderating majority of the schoolmasters of the Free
Church are miserably poor men: for what might be a competency to a
labourer or hind, must be utter poverty to them. And not a few of
their number are distressfully embarrassed and in debt.

Now this will never do. The Church may make herself very sure, that
for her L10 or L13 she will receive ultimately only the worth of L10
or L13