from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
in one room--the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
they would give no work to a "Union man." One example may serve for
all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
round. He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and
took to drink. Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a
"lean-to," I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in
her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed. In answer to my
soft-spoken questions: Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no
work. Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? Because she had no
other place for it till the coffin came. And at night the unhappy,
driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the
dead child, all lay in the one bed. The farmers hated the Union
because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never