of Scotland, has no hesitation in preferring it to the system of weekly wages. The most important benefit it yields to the labourer is the certainty of constant payment for the whole year, in health and in sickness; this insures an unfailing supply of good, wholesome food, including abundance of meal and milk for the children; there is also to be considered the freedom from anxiety which a man must feel, who has nothing to apprehend from 'want of work for the whole year, when once his engagement is made; and the absence of temptation to spend his earnings, on a Saturday night, in the public house. The hirings, we must observe, are made at one period of the year, over the whole country; and thus when the hind wishes to leave one place, he usually finds little difficulty in getting a fresh engagement, at least if he be a good workman, and of good character.

Mr. Henley, who had carefully observed the working of this system in North Northumberland, said in his Report upon that county, 'From my own observation in many cottages, and much conversation with the wives of labourers, I am convinced that those who are paid in kind are best off.' Mr. Culley quotes this statement with approbation, and adds, 'Such certainly has been my experience in Scotland: the most comfortable homes, the most contented labourers, are to be found in that part of my district in which the kind payment is most developed; no small part of these advantages I would assign to the cow.' This is fully borne out by the evidence of the labourers themselves: some of them declared that but for the cow, they could never give their children the education they should have. A hind's wife in Selkirk parish said in her broad Scotch, 'We a' hae coos here, and the maister's rale gude to the kye: when a maister's gude

to the kye, he's gude to his servants. . . . Some farmers gives 7l., and some as high as 9l., instead of the coo; but it is no a gude job for a family to want the coo; they're just the mainstay o' us poor folk; and it's easy to see the difference: when the children get their milk, they look kind of robust-like, beside them that doesn't.'

An objection has been made to this system of yearly hiring and payment in kind, that the labourer and his family are compelled to occupy the house that is given to them, however miserable a tenement it may be, and however distant from any school; but it is a sufficient answer to this objection that cottages are on the whole in the best condition, and education best attended to, in that very district where this system most prevails.

Equally beneficial is the effect of the Scotch system on the economy of the farm: it tends to a very much better management of horse labour, and to greater care being taken of all the animals on the farm. Each ploughman has two horses specially assigned to him, which he works in the day, and takes charge of himself after the day's field work is done; this could not be unless the men lived close at hand hence they usually take great pride in the good condition and working power of their horses. 'In case of any kind of emergency,' says Mr. Culley, the farmer has always at hand a little regiment of men and women all interested in the success of his operations; the general result is an amount of discipline which you may look for in vain upon an English farm.'

:

The rate of wages is very equal through the whole of the district of which we are now particularly speaking, which extends, on the east side of the island, from the Tweed and the Cheviots to the foot of the Grampians. It only varies

from 158. 8d. in the border counties to 148. 6d. in the Carse of Gowrie, in Perthshire. This is considerably higher than the rate of wages in English agricultural counties. The present Bishop of Manchester, in his Report to the Commissioners, estimated the wages in Sussex at 138. 6d., or 138. a week, in Norfolk 128., in Essex 118., on the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire 108. (in Dorsetshire and some other counties we know they are still lower); while the Bishop makes this remark: 'It must be remembered that these contemplate only the case of the first class labourer, who can turn his hand to any kind of farm work, and suppose constant employment throughout the year.' The difference, therefore, in the money value of the remuneration of the northern and southern labourer is far from showing the actual difference: not only is there constant payment to be set against loss of payment through sickness and want of work, but there is the difference between the estimated value of the cottage, garden, and the cow's keep, and their real worth to the labourer. The cottage and garden are put down as only equivalent to 31.; much less than what a labourer in the south usually pays for inferior accommodation; the cow's keep is set down at from 71. to 91., possibly more than it costs the farmer, but considerably below its true value to the family of the labourer; one of whom, in Mid Lothian, we find saying that, after supplying his own family, he had got 81. for the butter and milk he sold from his cow; while the wife of a hind in Berwickshire valued her privilege of keeping one at 127.

There is a further circumstance which tends largely to account for the admitted superiority of the condition of the family of the northern over that of the southern agricultural labourer. We shall give it in Mr. Culley's own words: An Eng

lish couple usually begin with no provision to set up a house, and therefore begin the battle of life in debt. A Scotch couple (save when the marriage has been hastened by a "misfortune" on the part of the woman) seldom marry without a providing of something like 40l., equally divided between the man and woman. As soon as the elder children have received what the hind considers a sufficient education, the position of the family is one of comparative ease. Under the family system of the Lothians and Border district, with its accompanying family purse, incomes of from 751. to 100l. coming into a hind's cottage are by no means uncommon.'

What then is the cause of this remarkable difference in the condition of the population of two parts of the same island, engaged in the same occupation and placed for centuries under the same government? We are convinced it is mainly to be attributed to the superior training which, since the Reformation, the people of Scotland have enjoyed in their parochial schools, and to the value which they themselves have for the last three centuries attached to the good education, and right bringing up, of their children. Much also is due to the absence, until recently, of a poor law; but it was the school law that fitted them to do without the poor law.

There is one point, however, in which, taken as a whole, the agricultural poor of Scotland can lay claim to no superiority over persons of the same class in England; that is, the condition of their cottages. Although much has been done by many landed proprietors in the Lowlands to remedy this defect, there is still crying need for more cottages, and for improvement in many of the present ones. In some of the west counties, and in the Highlands generally, with only partial exceptions, the state of the habitations of the labourers is a

scandal and a disgrace to any civilised community. In some places they remain very much as they are represented by Macaulay to have been in the seventeenth century; many of them are still mere turf huts thatched with heather, a hole in the roof, for the smoke to go through, supplying the want of a chimney. In the Lowlands the cottages originally were not much better, though generally built of the rough loose stones which the country so abundantly supplies; the customary one-roofed cottage of the border counties was frequently divided into two compartments, by a couple of box beds placed across the room; behind these the cow stood, with her tail to the door. Latterly the cow's apartment, somewhat enlarged, was divided from that of the family by a stone partition, and, save that the cow has been banished, some of these cottages, built to afford a common shelter for man and beast, remain to this day. During the last twenty years a great change for the better has taken place in the south-eastern counties, becoming everywhere more marked as one travels from Perthshire to the Border. So that Mr. Culley is able to say, 'As a whole, farm labourers are now better housed in the Lowland part of my district than in any of the south midland counties of England; and I know no county in England where the average cottage accommodation is so good as in Berwickshire-a remark which would also apply to part of Roxburgh and East Lothian.

Even in Berwickshire there are still to be found some of the oldfashioned one-roomed cottages, described above; and at the last census it was found that forty per cent. of the houses in Berwickshire and Roxburghshire had only one, or no window.

In the west there has been far less improvement. Mr. Tremenheere, speaking of Ayrshire, says,

The inadequate supply of cottages for the labouring class, and their deplorable condition, present a marked contrast to the high cultivation, and general prosperity, which are everywhere conspicuous in Ayrshire. The cot

tages have seldom more than one room, in which a man, his wife, and seven or eight children are herded together; the younger children, with the father and mother, occupying one bed, and the elder children sleeping promiscuously in the other. Between

Ayr and Girvan is the extensive property of the Marquis of Ailsa, which is laid out in large farms, generally within a short distance of, or contiguous to the sea. The ploughmen's cottages on this noble domain are lamentably defective. Stables, byres, cartsheds, dilapidated farm-houses, and disused dog-kennels have been converted into abodes for the people who live on the estates. In some of these wretched places, consisting of one room, as many as ten or eleven persons are living. The damp broken clay floors are covered with beds: the decaying thatch roof is pervious to rain, which in some cottages is kept out by guano bags, stretched across the rafters. A considerable farmer, who rents one of the largest estates on this property, assured me that it was always with a feeling of shame and humiliation that he introduced a newly hired ploughman to one of these hovels as his future home.' And in speaking of the adjoining county of Dumfries, Mr. Tremenheere says, 'Some of the worst cottages I have met with in the course of this enquiry, either in England, Wales, or Scotland, are those on the estates of the Marquis of Queensberry. I counted more than a dozen in the parish of Tynwald, a few miles from the town of Dumfries, with only one room, and that room crammed with box