The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1878-05-14 00:00:00

a gri cu I tur a I ittms.

THE LABOURERS' ENEMIES.

That his three beet friends are indnetrv, sobriety,
and virtue, all will admit; but that his word enemies
are drink. agitation. and emi.Tration will he very genet..
ally questioned or disputed. It is impossible to exagge-
rate the evils of drink. It ruins men—body, soul. and
spirit ; gape their independence, drowns their intellect,
burns out their hearts, and converts them to worthless
drudges and burdensome tempers It condemns men
to ignorance. wives to misery, children to rage It is
the cause of wretchedness and crime. It causes 11
feeling between masters and men, quarrels between
fellow-workmen and neighbours, and stirs up all the
worst elements of human nature. In • word, drink in
excese—and it often is so taken when It can be bat!—
degrades man below the level of the beast, renders
him totally incapable of giving • fair day's work for •
fair wage, converts his borne into • wretched bedlam,
end unfits the working man for his duties in this world
or happiness in the world to come. It is the withering
blight that hovers, like a horrid nightmare, over
myriada of rural homes, and blights all their fair
prospect., and wrecks every promise of happiness,
usefulness, or peace.
But I say the agitator has done more good than harm
to the labourer. No doubt agitation has its unpleasant
side, and many rural agitators may not have been
over wise. But all clams make mistakes. Cobden
waa • great agitator, and no one was more heartily
abused. But what agriculturist will now assert that
his work was mischievous. Cobden cheapened the
working man's food. larch's aim is to raise the man
himself—body, soul, and spirit. To raise him to
citizenship, from • working machine to • man,
Such a greet work can hardly be done without
agitators. Stir up • stagant pool, or an open sewer,
and the remit I. by no means pleasant to those nearest
to It. Ilia. and has been very much so with rural
agitators. They have stirred roughly, unsiciUully it
may be, the questions of low wages and wretched
homes. The result has often been for • time to
embitter and render lees pleasant many old-edablished
social relations. . . .

But already wages have risen with leaps and bounds.
Hovels have been levelled and given place to homes,
and labourers are treated more like men and are about
to be made citizens. The agitators have had • good
hand In all this and much other good work, and there-
for* I cannot agree with you that the agitator has
done the working man more harm than good; and the
sentence in which you sum up the demerits of the
agitator as follows iv more worthy of the very worst
of that clam than of the calm, judicions-like, usual
utterances of the Agriceltansl Gazette :—" The pro-
fessional agitator will arouse the working man's
passions, play on his ignorance, live on his pence, and
use him in other ways for his own ends." No;
working men of the present day are too shrewd to
permit this, were there any agitators now abroad with
any such aims, which is doubtfuL Neither does it
seem quite fair to rank the swindling villain who
lately cheated so many families through a clumsy
confidence trick with emigration agents, and thus
selling off the English labourer, his wife and family,
Into the bondage of poverty and helpleamess. That
I. certainly what alone= is of them have been remoestl
from into Independence and plenty through emigration
a4ents, to the obvious advantage of fanner. and
labourers. Look at the poor-houses and unions every-
where being pulled d urn or converted to other uses
through diminution of pauperism and crime, and say
whether emigration has not had a powerful share in
bringing about those most desirable objects as well as
the diminution of the rates.
No agitation and emigration have both done much.
Anything, any form of life Is preferable to the stagna.
tion of hopeless inaction, and the sheer mental and
I moral death to which so many agricultural labourers
had stink. The overcrowding on the land had also
become an insupportable burden to all concerned.
One well fed, well housed, well clothed man, can very
well do the work of two. The other is doing better ea
• rule in the new world than the one left behind is yet
doing in the old. But the great problem of the day
now in regard to labour, is to inlet each MAD by
education and good living to his highest working
capacity, and to devise means, by pleas-work or other
to have his maximum amount of work-foroe
ex."—p7eM for his own interest and equally for that of
his master's, and the country to which he belongs.
D. T. FISH.