Page:Agricultural labour.djvu/13

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AGRICULTURAL LABOUR.
9

ways to the district, and letting only the inferior ones go. This will of itself legitimately raise wages.

8. An improved administration of Poor Law, one aspect of this whole movement is a protest against the present degrading administration; and one distinct object of the West of England Labourer's Association is to gradually exterminate rural pauperism as it has been shown to be exterminable (see their programme.)

Then here is a short description of the way in which this movement has been practically met in three places in West England, distinguished as Districts X. Y. Z. Although one only of those districts was in connection with the West England Association, yet the same moderate far-sighted principles which have guided those Western Pioneers, exercised a wholesome influence in the two other neighbourhoods, as no doubt has been the case in many other counties where intelligent men have come forward and set an example. And note here the great value of the presence of one or two intelligent employers, who understand some of the conditions of labour apart from actual farm operations, and know the relative value of a good and an indifferent workman. In one instance the man who took the lead was a farmer who dealt in timber, and employed occasionally thirty or forty men; he introduced a system of classification for his labourers just as he had worked his timber-men, which was adopted by others. In another case, a leading farmer of large intelligence and capital who had come from a distant country as a stranger to the local residents, set about a system of piece work in a low wage district, and with the help of an active landlord induced the surrounding farmers to do the same. In another place a farmer set the example who had been the manager of some Scotch estates, and understood something of draining and