So it seems to me, looking back at the cruel record of two years, that woman, for all her losses, has gained, that what she has lost is matter for her private sorrow, and what she has gained is matter for universal joy. She has found the uses of adversity, she has accepted self-sacrifice for the sake of those who will be the better able to enjoy the rich fruits of life. In this knowledge she will labour, for the sake of this truth she will persevere with a confidence in the future that no shifting tides of chance can shake. And her watchword in the coming year is, Hope.
VII CHILD LABOUR ON THE LAND
It is a commonplace that war brings in its train evils without number, but there are certain ills that are added to the inevitable ones either by greed of gain, indifference to progress or a determination to make profit at the expense of the State. We have in our midst at all times certain people who are concerned only with their own ends, and who regard all the means to those ends as legitimate. War time reduces the measure of restraint that the common sense of the community imposes upon its greedier members. They find and seize their hour when normal conditions are upset. It would be easy to multiply instances, but in writing this paper I am concerned with one only—the employment of children on farms.
To the average man who does not know a swede from a turnip or the difference between sainfoin and clover this is a small matter; to those of us who know the land and its problems, who administer estates large or small, who are morally if not legally responsible for the happiness and well-being of village communities, it is a tragedy.
I can remember hearing my elders talk of the bad old days when the gang system prevailed all over England. The ganger was a contractor of irregular labour. He would enter a district in charge of his wretched company of men, women, and children, and would supply their labour at fixed rates to the farmer who needed it. He charged so much a day for each hand; he saw to it that one and all did their full day's work. They were fed abominably, housed in barns and out-houses, and lived in a promiscuity that would revolt a gipsy. At last even the thick-skinned countryside could endure the abomination no longer, and the "ganger" disappeared. It took years for the Legislature to discover that, apart from the cruelty involved in the custom, it was creating fresh material for gaols and asylums, that children needed education rather than field labour, that the mothers could not combine maternity with hard work in the fields, that if you deprive people of the means of living decently they will revert to the state of savagery.
The agricultural labourer's struggle has not been limited to the land. He has been fighting for years to raise his miserable wage. When I was a girl it was about a shilling a day with "small beer" of the farmer's brewing thrown in. It is about 3s. 6d. a day now; but against this the price of necessities has gone up between 50 and 100 per cent. Saving is impossible, and even the old age pension that lightens the evening of his long day hardly avails to keep him from the workhouse—unless he has a wife of equal age or children who, out of their tiny means, will render a little assistance. He lives in a cottage that, if often picturesque, is nearly always overcrowded; his food and clothing are of the roughest, and for holidays he has Christmas Day and the wet weather, when he may sit at home—at his own expense—for when there is no work there is no pay. But he lives in hope; and sometimes he goes on strike, to the disgust and indignation of his employer, and his children have been getting a better chance in life than he had. They are supposed to be kept at school until they are fourteen. He was rook scaring at the ripe age of ten for a penny a day.
Rural education is a poor thing enough. Children may have to walk two miles or more, in all weathers, to the village school. Their father cannot afford to buy them good boots or a water-proof coat; it is beyond his means to give them nourishing food, and so help them to fight the diseases of childhood; but he feels that something is being done for them, and, as a rule, he does nothing to make them wage-earners before their time. Now they are taken from school two years before an age that the trade unions hold to be insufficient; they are sent on the land to work for a wage of eighteen pence a day, in any weather, on any soil, without the proper clothing and with insufficient food. There they will undersell the rural labour market, they will be robbed of their childhood, they will go without supervision at a time when they need it most. And the Bumbles of our Education Councils have nodded thick, approving heads.