The agricultural labourer's struggle has not been limited to the land. He has been fighting for years to raise his miserable wage. When I was a girl it was about a shilling a day with "small beer" of the farmer's brewing thrown in. It is about 3_s._ 6_d._ a day now; but against this the price of necessities has gone up between 50 and 100 per cent. Saving is impossible, and even the old age pension that lightens the evening of his long day hardly avails to keep him from the workhouse--unless he has a wife of equal age or children who, out of their tiny means, will render a little assistance. He lives in a cottage that, if often picturesque, is nearly always overcrowded; his food and clothing are of the roughest, and for holidays he has Christmas Day and the wet weather, when he may sit at home--at his own expense--for when there is no work there is no pay. But he lives in hope; and sometimes he goes on strike, to the disgust and indignation of his employer, and his children have been getting a better chance in life than he had. They are supposed to be kept at school until they are fourteen. He was rook scaring at the ripe age of ten for a penny a day.
Rural education is a poor thing enough. Children may have to walk two miles or more, in all weathers, to the village school. Their father cannot afford to buy them good boots or a water-proof coat; it is beyond his means to give them nourishing food, and so help them to fight the diseases of childhood; but he feels that something is being done for them, and, as a rule, he does nothing to make them wage-earners before their time. Now they are taken from school two years before an age that the trade unions hold to be insufficient; they are sent on the land to work for a wage of eighteen pence a day, in any weather, on any soil, without the proper clothing and with insufficient food. There they will undersell the rural labour market, they will be robbed of their childhood, they will go without supervision at a time when they need it most. And the Bumbles of our Education Councils have nodded thick, approving heads.
It is hard to write patiently of such retrograde devices, put forward, as all such proposals are, in the name of the country's needs. If these needs be genuine, which I doubt, if there be no adequate supply of female labour to be obtained for a fair price, why should the children of our poorest, the little ones whose physique has never been strengthened by sufficient nourishing food and by the hygiene of the home, be called upon to bear the burden single-handed? Why should not Eton and Harrow, Rugby, Marlborough, Winchester, and other schools without number, serve the national need? The lads at these expensive establishments can at least complete their education after the war, they can carry health and strength to the fields, they can acquaint themselves at first hand with the realities of labour, a knowledge that, with the changing times ahead, will be valuable to many of them who will inherit land in days to come. Will the farmers who are sending to the fields the half-grown children of their ill-paid labourers contribute their own to work by their side? I am sure that the mere suggestion will rouse the wildest indignation; but all the children, whatever their advantage or disadvantage, are British citizens, and it is not too much to suggest that those who have a stake in the country should at least do as much as those for whom fortune provided no birthright. Let us be democratic in deeds as well as words. I am quite sure that, if the doubtful privilege extended to the rural labourer's children were conferred at the same time upon the children of all patriots, the councils would expunge their fatuous resolutions from their minute books; they would make all possible haste to forget them.