30 MAY 1874, Page 14

THE AGRICULTURAL LABOURER.

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPROTATOR.1 SIR,—" The Devil quoted Genesis, like a very learned clerk ;" and so your correspondent "L." gives chapter and verse from Mr. Carlyle on " cash payment," with the suggestion that those other- obligations which Mr. Carlyle insists on between man and man are recognised when the farm labourer's wages are supplemented' by beer, cider, a cottage, and so on, but not recognised if he is paid in silver such wages as would obtain all these things at their market price.

But has " L." never read what Mr. Carlyle says of " shams," or how he illustrates what he holds to be the most gigantic sham the world has seen—the relation of man to man before the French Revolution—by comparing it to the substitution of inconvertible paper for bard cash ? Doubtless these paper " promises to pay"' the labourer so and so on demand are as good as coin to the benevolent lords and ladies and other newspaper correspondents who are putting them in circulation, and have only to pass them- on ; but a very small proportion of them will be cashed in full, when at last presented for payment by the labourer himself.. There are instances in which the labourer gets, in addition to his money-wages, a good cottage, good beer, good meal, or other allowances, in such measure as he really wants, and at less than the retail market price. But we all know that these- are the exceptions, and that for the most part, the labourer, with the same money wages as his more lucky fellow, has to put up with a hovel to live in, and other payments in kind, which neither in quality nor in relation to his actual requirements fairly repre- sent their assumed equivalents in cash. How can it be otherwise, seeing that farmers are not angels, but men,—not better, though not worse than other men ? They require their own wives and children to be content with the inferior produce of their farms, while they take the best to market, and it is not possible that they should be more liberal to their labourers in this, their struggle for existence. There is a worse, though there is a better, relation than that of cash payment between farmer and labourer ; we have everywhere stink into that worse state, and the only way out of it is through that simple cash payment which the Spectator advocates.