These rookeries do not furnish forth burglars and accomplished pickpockets, like those of cities, but they do send out a gang of lazy, scamping fellows and coarse women, who are almost useless.  If their employer does not please them—­if he points out that a waste of time has taken place, or that something has been neglected—­off they go, for, having a hole to creep into, they do not care an atom whether they lose a job or not.  The available hands, therefore, upon whom the farmers can count are always very much below the sum total of the able-bodied population.  There must be deducted the idle men and women, the drunkards, the never satisfied, as the lad who sued every master; the workhouse families, the rookery families, and those who every harvest leave the place, and wander a great distance in search of exceptionally high wages.  When all these are subtracted, the residue remaining is often insufficient to do the work of the farms in a proper manner.  It is got through somehow by scratch-packs, so to say—­men picked up from the roads, aged men who cannot do much, but whose energy puts the younger fellows to shame, lads paid far beyond the value of the work they actually accomplish.

Work done in this way is, of course, incomplete and unsatisfactory, and the fact supplies one of the reasons why farmers seem disinclined to pay high wages.  It is not because they object to pay well for hard work, but because they cannot get the hard work.  There is consequently a growing reliance upon floating labour—­upon the men and women who tramp round every season—­rather than on the resident population.  Even in the absence of any outward agitation—­of a strike or open movement in that direction—­the farmer has considerable difficulties to contend with in procuring labour.  He has still further difficulties in managing it when he has got it.  Most labourers have their own peculiar way of finishing a job; and however much that style of doing it may run counter to the farmer’s idea of the matter in hand, he has to let the man proceed after his own fashion.  If he corrected, or showed the man what he wanted, he would run the risk of not getting it done at all.  There is no one so thoroughly obstinate as an ignorant labourer full of his own consequence.  Giving, then, full credit to those men whose honest endeavours to fulfil their duty have already been acknowledged, it is a complete delusion to suppose that all are equally manly.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE COTTAGE CHARTER.  FOUR-ACRE FARMERS

The songs sung by the labourer at the alehouse or the harvest home are not of his own composing.  The tunes whistled by the ploughboy as he goes down the road to his work in the dawn were not written for him.  Green meads and rolling lands of wheat—­true fields of the cloth of gold—­have never yet inspired those who dwell upon them with songs uprising from the soil.  The solitude of the hills over