bank manager to let him have.

A second illustration. Forty years ago, on our farm in the south of
England, two men with flails used to begin threshing wheat in the
long barn about 1st November, and used to thresh till 1st April. They
got eight shillings a week with us, but in adjoining counties seven
shillings (and even six) were winter wages. Now the steam threshing-
machine will empty that long barn in two short days' work. It takes
half a dozen men to do the work, and they get about fifteen shillings
a week, though their labour is much shorter and easier than that of
the old flail men. At the same time our farmers now are much poorer
men than they were forty years ago: they have less capital, they have
made for many years past a low rate of profit, and they are
frequently themselves complaining that they cannot afford to pay
their labourers well, and inferring that they should get Protection
back again in some shape or other. The labourers on their part
imagine very generally that their increased wages for less work are
due to Mr. Arch and agitation; that the employers of labour will
never pay more than is wrested from them (this is in large measure
true); and that employers must pay whatever agitators are strong
enough to demand (this is wholly erroneous).

In this case it is evident on the surface that the labourers who
thresh with the steam-thresher are more efficient than the flail-men:
their labour is worth the half-a-crown a day to the employer, and
therefore the employer, however poor, can afford to pay it as he
receives it back with a profit. On the other hand, if the flail-men
were raised from the dead, no farmer would now pay them even eight
shillings a week for threshing; their labour would not be worth even
that.