conducted unwisely and with a bitter spirit, but the labourer was embittered by generations of sordid misery.  Very reluctantly the farmers gave way, and generally speaking wages went up during the agitation to 14s. or 15s. a week, though Arch himself admits that even during the height of it they were often only 11s. and 12s.  With the bad times, about 1879, wages began to fall again, and men were leaving the Agricultural Union; by 1882 Arch says many were again taking what the farmer chose to give.  From 1884 the Union steadily declined, and after a temporary revival about 1890, practically collapsed in 1894.  Other unions had been started, but were then going down hill, and in 1906 only two remained in a moribund condition.  Their main object, to raise the labourer’s wages, was largely counteracted by the acute depression in agriculture, and though there has since been considerable recovery, there are districts in England to-day where he only gets 11s. and 12s. a week.

The Labourers’ Union helped to deal a severe blow to the ’gang system’, which had grown up at the beginning of the century (when the high corn prices led to the breaking up of land where there were no labourers, so that ‘gangs’ were collected to cultivate it[664]), by which overseers, often coarse bullies, employed and sweated gangs sometimes numbering 60 or 70 persons, including small children, and women, the latter frequently very bad specimens of their sex.  These gangs went turnip-singling, bean-dropping, weeding &c., while pea-picking gangs ran to 400 or 500.  Though some of these gangs were properly managed, the system was a bad one, and the Union and the Education Acts helped its disappearance.

FOOTNOTES: 

[613] Cylindrical pipes came in about 1843, though they had been recommended in 1727 by Switzer.

[614] R.A.S.E.  Journal (1st series), xxii. 260.

[615] R.A.S.E.  Journal, 1890, pp. 1 sq.

[616] Ibid., 1894, pp. 205 sq.

[617] McCombie, Cattle and Cattle Breeders, p. 33.

[618] These classes, however, did not comprise all the then known breeds of live stock.

[619] R.A.S.E.  Journal, 1892, pp. 479 sq.

[620] At the show at Birmingham In 1898 there were 22 entries of Longhorns; in 1899 a Longhorn Cattle Society was established, and the herd-book resuscitated.  More than twenty herds of the breed are now well established.

[621] R.A.S.E.  Journal, 1901, p. 24.

[622] Caird, English Agriculture in 1850-1, pp. 252 sq.

[623] Porter, Progress of the Nation, p. 142.

[624] R.A.S.E.  Journal, 1901, p. 25.

[625] Ibid. 1896, p. 96.

[626] Ibid. (1st ser.), vi. 2.

[627] Ibid. (1st ser.), v. 102.

[628] 1838, 64s. 7d; 1839, 70s. 8d.; 1840, 66s. 4d.; 1841, 64s. 4d.

[629] Tooke, History of Prices, iv. 19.