by the law of settlement or otherwise, to the free removal of labourers from county to county, to promote emigration direct from the country districts, to extend the cultivation of land, and to increase the commerce and manufactures of the country." You may notice that this was exactly 100 years after Goldsmith had lamented the general depopulation. Whether the teaching of the philosophers has permeated down to the labourers or not, there can be little doubt that the excess spoken of has been very rapidly reduced. The census has plainly shewn us the great disturbance of the balance between the rural and the urban districts. The Press and the politicians have made it a familiar subject. It is almost universally assumed that legislation is needed to induce the labourer to remain on the land. Five-andtwenty years ago the proposed legislation was to induce him to leave it. In previous times it was the policy to attach the labourer to the soil, first by compulsory laws, and then by rates in aid of wages. Now it is recognised as desirable to attach him by gentler, but far more expensive, experiments. I suppose we are all agreed in regretting the rapid removal of the rural population to the towns. Though we may not agree with the Arcadian picture of "Sweet Auburn," we may still think the country better than the town. One of our old poets remarked that the first garden was planted by God, and that the first city was built by Cain. We may observe in many places that cultivation is deteriorating, and weeds increasing. Above all, we may believe that stronger and healthier children are born and bred in the country than in the town. We may remember the words that Horace addressed to the dissipated citizens of Rome nearly two thousand years ago: "Non his juventus orta parentibus Sed rusticorum mascula militum Matris ad arbitrium recisos Or, if we may adapt a paraphrase to England, "It was not the progeny of such parents as these that stained the sea with the blood of Spaniards, and beat Louis XIV. at Blenheim, and Napoleon at Waterloo; but the manly sons of rustic soldiers, trained to turn up the soil, and cut the wood, and drive the oxen." The country population has always supplied the soldiers best fitted to endure the hardships of a campaign. It is alarming to find the Inspector-General complaining of the few recruits now obtained from the rural districts. Nevertheless, I think we may feel confident that our town populations are better than they were. Improved sanitation, and abundant food, and athletic sports and games, and the volunteer system, have produced their effects; and we may hope that our people are not following the example of the effeminate Romans of the declining Empire. And it may be observed that our towns are not quite so crowded as formerly. In our largest towns, and especially in London and Liverpool, there is a central district in which the resident population is actually diminishing. The area is occupied by banks, and shops, and warehouses; and the people who crowd into them every morning spend their evenings and nights in purer air. Even the city of Exeter is slightly decreasing in numbers, while the suburban district is increasing considerably. THE LABOURING POPULATION. What is the position of our labouring population_at present, as compared with former times? is a question that is not very easy to answer. There are few subjects on which so much nonsense has been talked or written. I met with a paragraph in a newspaper, given as a quotation from a higher authority, stating that in the fifteenth century the English agricultural labourer worked eight hours a day, and received twenty-four shillings a week! That is one of the most wonderful blunders I ever met with. Unfortunately for the authority, the rate of wages in former times is one of the few things that we really know accurately. There was an Act of Parliament passed in the fifteenth century ordaining that the labourer should work in summer fourteen hours a day, with two hours' interval for rest and refreshment, and at other times as long as it was light; and that he should receive threepence a day in winter, and threepence-farthing in summer. Afterwards the Court of Quarter Sessions was empowered to fix the maximum rate of wages. I found the original orders among the records in the Castle of Exeter. In 1594 the rate for the "husbandry labourers" of Devonshire was 3s. 6d. a week in winter, and 4s. in summer, with half as much again in harvest. In 1654, sixty years afterwards, the maximum was 5s. a week, and 6s. in harvest. In 1714, after another period of sixty years, it was 5s. 6d. in winter, and 6s. in summer, with 1s. 4d. a day, or 8s. a week, in harvest. Towards the end of the last century, Arthur Young recorded that wages in Norfolk were 6s. a week in winter, and 7s. in summer; in Essex about 1s. more; and in Oxfordshire about 1s. less. The increase was no doubt very slow. Within the present reign wages in some parts of Devonshire were not more than 7s. or 8s. They are now about 12s. or 13s. The rate of wages in money is not difficult to discover. What was the purchasing power of those wages, and what was the real position of the labourer, may not seem equally clear. Arthur Young found the price of bread generally about 2d. a pound. Meat, which did not so much concern the labourer, was about 4d. a pound. We must remember that the poor were liable to seasons of dearth, or even of famine, such as we have never known. There is a tradition that the price of wheat once touched a guinea a bushel. The average price in 1801 was 132s. a quarter. The intention of the Corn Law of 1815 was to keep the price at about 80s. Yet Mr. Canning, speaking in 1827, asserted that the price of wheat fluctuated between 112s. and 38s. There is a tendency at present to rate highly the advantages derived from the old commons. Probably they are somewhat exaggerated; and the other "privileges" of the agricultural labourer have increased rather than diminished. The discoveries of science, and the facilities of communication, have alleviated his lot, as well as that of others. It is not so very long ago that he had no potatoes, no tea, no coffee, no tobacco, and in the southern counties no coals. Within our own time we have seen the introduction of such things as lucifer matches and mineral oils, which are now necessaries rather than comforts. Clothing and all manufactured articles are cheaper. But, on the other hand, a labourer's family used to reap some advantage from the home industries, such as spinning and weaving, of which our Honiton lace may be considered a very poor survival. And the spinners and weavers were able to get good agricultural wages during the corn and hay harvests. On the whole, it may be thought that the condition of the agricultural labourers has advanced, but advanced slowly. The condition of the artisans, if measured by the rate of wages, has advanced much more rapidly. But the latter are more liable to periods of want of work, and consequently to a depth of poverty such as is seldom experienced by the dwellers in the country. They pay higher rents, they are more crowded, both in the factory and in the home, and they are worse provided with air and water. THE HOUSING OF THE WORKING CLASSES. The housing of the working classes is one of the most important questions of the present day, and the welfare of our people depends in a great measure on its improvement. The old cottages of Devonshire are extremely picturesque to look at, but might perhaps be better to live in. As a Devonshire man, I shall not speak of the "mud cabins" in the way that may be remarked in the utterances of some outsiders. We know that the old cob cottage, if the walls are thick and the roof well thatched, is at any rate warm and comfortable, though not roomy or convenient. Plenty of them remain in our county, but the art of constructing them appears to be lost. I never saw a new cob cottage, and it is many years since I saw a new cob wall in process of erection. Cottages, and even garden walls, must now be of brick, except in localities where stone is more plentiful. And while almost all manufactured articles are cheaper than they used to be, the cost of human habitations seems to be constantly rising. The art of building appears to me to be the art in which there is least progress, and to which machinery has been least applied. Of course there are cases in which new materials and new processes have been adopted. The Crystal Palace and the Forth Bridge are examples of works of which our ancestors never dreamed. But looking at the ordinary habitations of poor men at the familiar bricks and mortar-we see nothing but the slow and laborious processes of manual labour, of spreading the mortar, and laying one brick after another and, waiting for the building to dry, without any improvement for the last two thousand years. Indeed, anyone who has been to Rome and Pompeii has seen brick-work of the time of Augustus far superior to the brick-work of the reign of Queen Victoria. I cannot doubt that the age which has invented so many marvellous machines, and has flooded the world with their innumerable products, is capable of applying machinery to ordinary building, and of supplying our working classes with far better dwellings at a far cheaper cost than has yet been attained. THE WORLD-MOVEMENT. Whether the tendency of our people to leave the rural districts will ever be remedied remains to be proved. It is the fashion now to seek the remedy in Legislation-in allotments and small holdings, provided more or less at the public expense. Such things may do some good. They may make a few families, or even a few hundred families, more comfortable. But if this movement of our times is indeed a great world-movement, it will not be stopped or controlled by such legislation. Human nature is not to be annulled by an Act of Parliament. I agree with half of what Dr. Johnson said "How small, of all that human hearts endure, The part that kings or laws can cause or cure.". I believe that kings and laws have caused a great deal more evil than they have ever cured. History is full of instances of unwise legislation. But people who know nothing about history are not deterred by its lessons. They are ready to bring the power of the State to interfere with everything, regardless-or rather ignorant-of the fact that such interference has almost always led to disaster, and that hastily-devised remedies for temporary evils have almost always brought serious damage upon trade and industry. We must have legislation, and legislation must, I fear, be always to a certain degree experimental; but our best hope is that legislation should be directed by science and experience, and not by passion and ignorance. Politicians are apt to think that everything can be done by legislation. They do not seem to recognise that legislation can do much to repress or to destroy, but that it can do little or nothing to impel or to invent. The great movements and changes in the world are due, not to Legislation, but to Science and Art properly so called, to knowledge applied to practical use to what Bacon called "the relief of man's estate." How small appear the kings and conquerors, from Cæsar to Napoleon, beside the mighty shades of the inventors and discoverers! If we were ever in danger of forming a false estimate, it is not in the present year, or in this place, that we should be so led astray. We have come to the four hundredth anniversary of the greatest event in the history of the human race since the revelation of Christianity. Almost this very day, four hundred years ago, Columbus sailed on the voyage that resulted in the discovery of a New World. If |