this or that.' They often thought otherwise; and it usually ended in a
compromise, the master having his way in part, and the men in part. This
lack of decision ran through all, and undid all that his hard work
achieved. Everything was muddled from morn till night, from year's end to
year's end. As children came the living indoors became harder, and the
work out of doors still more laborious.

If a farmer can put away fifty pounds a year, after paying his rent and
expenses, if he can lay by a clear fifty pounds of profit, he thinks
himself a prosperous man. If this farmer, after forty years of saving,
should chance to be succeeded by a son as thrifty, when, he too has
carried on the same process for another twenty years, then the family may
be, for village society, wealthy, with three or even four thousand pounds,
besides goods and gear. This is supposing all things favourable, and men
of some ability, making the most of their opportunities. Now reverse the
process. When children came, as said before, our hard-working farmer found
the living indoors harder, and the labour without heavier. Instead of
saving fifty pounds a year, at first the two sides of the account (not
that he ever kept any books) about balanced. Then, by degrees, the balance
dropped the wrong way. There was a loss, of twenty or thirty pounds on the
year, and presently of forty or fifty pounds, which could only be made
good by borrowing, and so increasing the payment of interest.

Although it takes sixty years--two generations--to accumulate a village
fortune by saving fifty pounds a year, it does not occupy so long to
reduce a farmer to poverty when half that sum is annually lost. There was
no strongly marked and radical defect in his system of farming to amount
for it; it was the muddling, and the muddling only, that did it. His work
was blind. He would never miss giving the pigs their dinner, he rose at
half-past three in the morning, and foddered the cattle in the grey dawn,