to milking on the Sunday morning, returned
to his family during the day for a taste of
home, a shave, and a clean shirt, and went
back to the afternoon milking; so that he
walked, in addition to his farm work, forty-
eight miles a week—about two thousand five
hundred miles a year.

During the recent wet weather he had to
wade through water over his half-boots, and
being drenched with rain last Christmas,
already stooping and infirm with premature
old age, he took a chill, and is now dead. The
sedentary man may walk to business through
London streets, starting at nine A.M., or even
eight, put on his overcoat, or take an
omnibus only in foulest weather, and be better
for the exercise, even though it should amount
to about fifty miles a week. But for the man
whose business is a long day of limb-labour, to
start before the dawn, and to take such added
exercise over rough country roads morning
and evening, through flood, heat, or frost,
with never a hope of omnibus, or overcoat, or
even Sunday rest, is quite a different affair.
How little of the charm of rural life can
touch the jaded senses of a countryman so
worn and used-up for the sake of saving
parish A the cost of any possible relief he
may require, and throwing the same upon
parish B! Such a man when he gets home
of a night goes straight to bed, and quits his
family at dawn, taking his solitary dinner
with him; he is in worse condition than the
plough-horse, who is not fetched every morning
to his work from stables three miles
off, he knows less of a domestic circle than
the ox whom he sees daily

'' Leaning his horns into the neighbour's field
And lowing to his fellows."

We are not putting forward any rare or
isolated case; and, before we found any
remarks upon these matters, or endeavour to
point out how inconsistent with good economic
policy as well as with true charity, are all
such ties upon the labour-market as we find
to have been fastened by the laws affecting
Settlement and Poor Removal, let us take a
few more illustrations of the facts as they
now stand. Parliamentary reports are before
us in which it is shown that the effect of this
crowding of the labourers upon their neighbours
by the holders of close parishes is, that
hundreds upon hundreds of men are
compelled to live at distances varying between
one or two, and even eight miles, from the
fields in which they work. From the
adjacent country, field labourers are especially
liable to be forced back for residence and
settlement upon the towns. Some examples
of this in the case of Reading are cited at
length in a report addressed by Mr. G. A.
à Beckett to the Poor Law Board. We give
the pith of two or three of them, altering the
names of men, not facts.

Charles Weary has a wife and five young
children. They can obtain no home in their
own parish, and are compelled to live in
Reading, where they pay two shillings a week
for three small rooms in Bank Place, among
dirt, and filth, and noise. For the same rent
a cottage in the country could be provided,
with comfortable accommodations, and a
garden. Charles Weary starts out of his
filthy home at half-past four or five in the
morning, and walks three miles to his work;
his wife often goes the same distance to earn
eightpence a day. Charles comes home so
tired, that as his wife says " when he sits
down, he hardly knows how to get up." He
is almost as tired in the morning as at night,
and his wife when she goes to labour feels in
the same way the want of rest. Their children
—who must be left in the court—become
dirty and depraved.

But what is to be done? An owner of a
close parish making his own statement puts
the case of the whole class of the Wearies as
he sees it, very candidly. In such parishes,
he writes, " great care has been taken for
many years not to make a settlement, indeed
I have known instances in which the leases of
the farms have contained a covenant of penalty
for any settlement which the tenant might
occasion by harbouring labourers; and, in
these parishes, old cottages have in many
instances been destroyed; the farm-servants
being obliged to go into the large villages and
towns to hire habitations, built by speculators
charging exorbitant rents. Some of my own
labourers in hay and harvest time, as late as
ten o'clock at night, set off to walk nearly
three miles home to their supper and bed, when
they must be again at work by five o'clock
on the following morning. But I am
deterred from building cottages for their
accommodation, because if I require a man
to remove (i.e., dismiss him) from any cause,
I should perhaps be burthened by the parish
with his maintenance, and that under cir-
cumstances more objectionable than mere
expense; or I should be compelled to have
an order of removal, probably involving me
in a lawsuit." As the law of settlement now
stands those last considerations are quite
true, although we do not think the refusal to
build cottages, economically speaking, to be
at all an unimpeachable deduction from them.

Then here is another illustration of the
system. Richard Worn has a wife and three
children. He also walks three miles to his
work. He used to live at Caversham, but
was obliged to leave that place because he
could get no house, though he had worked
there under different masters for twenty-four
years. The walking, he says, fatigues him.
When he gets wet, " his clothes dry on him
and makes him shiver." His wife says that
the distance makes a difference of two
shillings a week in the expense of living. The
man when he comes home is oppressed by
the foul air that surrounds his dwelling, and
says that " Reading don't suit country people
at all." He has known Caversham all his