The Strike of the Agricultural Labourers may be considered over.
The farmers of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk have held out with the obstinacy characteristic of their class, and the Union funds are so near exhaustion, that their Committees have signi- fied that the allowance hitherto paid to all men looked out or on strike must cease. They can only offer the men the means of emigration. We doubt their ability to help the men much, but of course the general result of the failure will be an immense stimulus to emigration, the men refusing to live in a, country where the first civil right, that of combination, can be refused by employers who gain their own strength from the strictness of their Trade Union. It is evident from the course of the struggle that too many men have-been engaged in agriculture ; that -the farmer, once put on his mettle, can do with half his usual supply; and that the remainder must either go, or submit to live on 2s. a day. The strike has, on the whole, done good. It- has raised the average rate of wages 2s: a-week, has broken the farmers of their notion that they have any right over their men except contract, and has cured the labourers of the belief that their own degraded position is like hail or drought, or anything else unpleasant,— part of the natural order of things.
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