THE NEW POLITICAL INTRIGUE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " EPEOTATOR.1 Sin,—Your article upon " Mr. Dieraeli's Flank March " con- tains the following words :—" Greatly as the artizans may stand in need of some social reforms in which. the State might lend a help- ing hand, the agricultural labourers stand in need of more and greater, and what is more to the purpose, the natural leaders of the people' could practically do a great deal more for them even without legislation, than they can for the artisans with it."
You will not object, I presume, to insert a valuable testimony to your opinions, though it appeared so long ago as September 26, 1863, in the Saturday Review:— "When the dull season of the year cornea round (it is between October and the meeting of Parliament) all sorts of odd persons and things have their share of public attention, and even agricultural labourers are pitied and discussed. At other times they live on with no one much to care for them, the farmers looking on them as their we:: natural enemies, the parson's kindly soul getting weary of his IonWe com- bat with their helpless, stolid ignorance, and the squire not knowing what he can do for them further than build two or three Elizabethan cottages, covered with honeysuckle, close to .his. gates moved to a languid shame and sadness by thinking how true the picture is, and what wretched, uncared-for, untaughTthberrueteiss athweapileinopgleomveter
who raise the crops on which we live
dirt and vice and misery that must prevail in houses where seven or eight persons, of both sexes and all ages, are penned up together for the night in one foul, vermin-haunted bedroom. The picture of agricultural life unrolls itself before us as it is painted by those who know it best.
We see the dull, clouded mind, the bovine gaze, the brutality and reck- lessness, the simple audacity of vice, the confused hatred of his betters, which mark the English peasant, unless some happy fortune has saved him from the general lot."
Those who dwell in agricultural districts can testify at this hour to much that is true in the Saturday's statement, and if this be the case, would it not be better for the Peers and others who have given their adhesion to the " New Social Movement " first to look at home, or at all events to include the agricultural labourer in their programme ? The new movement may prove as politically disastrous to its promoters as their attempt at Reform in 1867.-
I ans, Sir, &c.,
Penmellyn, St. Columb, October 16, 1871. W. H. NORTIIY.
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