see, sir, or we would have got ten shillings. We had a fortnight at this."
This appears an average case. Whatever way we look at it, an Oxfordshire labourer's wages, all things considered, can hardly amount to much above twelve shillings a week. These people had only two children, but most labourers, as we know, have many more. Could such a pittance keep more than bare life in their bodies?
In my late perambulation through this district, in one day I came across several cases, showing what is the result of this semi-starvation on the constitutions of the people,
Early in the day at Bladon I met with a poor distorted creature, who had had erysipelas in his legs for the last thirteen or fourteen years, brought on by overstraining himself at his work. He had commenced labour at nine years of age, and his was doubtless an extreme form of a common evil, noted by Dr Batt, of Witney, in his evidence given in the Government Report:—"Children are employed too young in heavy ploughed land, it tells on them later in life; when they get about fifty they go at the knees, and are very much bent."
But that it became more than mere distortion with this poor man was certainly due, as Dr White of the Woodstock Union says, in referring to the fact that farm labourers are not so healthy as they should be, "to the low wages, which will not allow men with families to procure food in quantity or quality sufficient to keep up the standard of health, and they are therefore more easily affected by outside influences inimical to health."
At the next village. Long Handborough, I came up with a man who had a most wretched look. He had caught a severe cold a year or two before, mowing, and ever since his eyes had been so bad that he could not do any regular work, but was obliged to live by such jobs of porterage as he could pick up at the railway station. And late in the same day I met with another.
No one can walk far along a country road or enter a village without meeting those who in its heaviest form have borne the primeval curse. Poor, rheumatic creatures, dragging their unwilling limbs over the stones, deaf, dark, and dull. Or you enter a cottage, and as the woman talks with you she holds her
