We told the Bishop of Manchester that he would have
the 'parable of a Penny a, Day pitched at his head, and here it is, with some other texts, thrown by Lady Stradbroke. Her ladyship tells the Bishop that there is no combination of employers to resist the demands of the labourers, the farmers only declining to engage men who join the Union ; that wages in Wangford have always been regulated by the price of provisions ; that Manchester is much more extravagant than Suffolk ; that the men in the Eastern Counties are offered 18s. a week all the year round ; that they have cheap cottages, benefit clubs, shoe clubs, and coal "mainly supported by the employers ;" that the labourers in the Eastern Counties are better off than the labourers in the North; that their children are rosy and they have trim gardens, and that if the men get high wages and few hours' work, they will, as in the North, have miserable, unfurnished homes, squalid -wives and children, and may even—horror of horrors I—" throw away" their country. We dare say Lady Stradbroke is kind to her poor, and sees that their gardens are trim, and keeps the mothers well up to the duty of scrub- bing ; but then, all that patronage, and petting, and advising, and general treatment as good little children, is precisely what the labourers want to be done with. They want to be men, and would sell all the idyllic life Lady Stradbroke describes for 18s. a week, all round, in silver. Otherwise, they will remember a text not mentioned in her ladyship's letter, and go to a land as English as this is, where every man "dwells . safely under his vine and under-his fig-tree."
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