It is the rule rather than the exception that the laborer’s cottage is overcrowded. Even when there are eight or nine children in a family, there may be no more than two sleeping rooms — a condition that is plainly bad both morally and physically.

One of the most interesting views of how the laborer lives and how it all ends, I got one day from a village shoemaker. My American shoes had early given out on the gritty English roads, and to make them once more serviceable I sought out this cobbler. While he worked on the shoes I sat and talked with him. I was asking about the farm workers when the shoemaker looked out of the window and said: “There’s a man just goin’ past. He’s been workin’ from early morning, ten hours, for his master. Now he’s goin’ home to have tea, and work in his garden awhile, and then he’ll be goin’ out again for two or three hours to help his wife, ’op-tying. He and his wife has to work all they can to get along. They couldn’t live on their weekly wages. They has to do task work to earn something extra, or they’d have to go to the workhouse. That man in harvest just slivers into it and works night and day, and the wife helps. The employers! — they don’t care whether a man lives or dies, and if they get a man down they tread on him. They can do anything to a man, or to his wife or children-and they does pretty roughish things sometimes—and the man daren’t make any complaint. If he does, come Saturday night, there’s his wages, and he’s not wanted any more. Then where’s he to go, and where’s his next week’s food to come from?

“Yes, these laborers travel from hedge to hedge till they are wore out, and they’re so dependent on their master that some of ’em are afraid to say their soul’s their own. As soon as they can’t do a fair day’s work they are sent to the workhouse. You can depend on ’t they don’t stay there long before they’re brought home in a little four-wheel trap, and buried in the churchyard.