The English Agricultural Labor Question

There aro two reasons why Americans should be interested ia tho great upria ing of the English agricultural laborera against the proprietora and farmer-tenants of English land. One Í8 that it 13 stimulating the euiigration to this country of a physically staiwart and tolerable Bkillful clasg, and will aid in filling up the fertile virgin expanses of the West, and will supply to tlie agricultural labor market material of an excellent quality. The other is that tho wrotched condition under which the English poasants exist, and have existed from a reinóte period, a betrayed by the facts which have been brought to light by the uprising, afford a very atriking and suggestive contrast to the condition of the same class in the United States ; and this contrast is calculated to impart contentment to the laborors who in this country find their situation to be one of coinparative comfort and opportunity. It is rather less than two years since the plain and unpolished Methodist revivalist, Joseph Aroh, himself once a peasant, but risen by hia own sturdy effort to the independence of a modest proprietor of his own homestead and farm, flred the dull niind of the agricultural serf with the sense of his injuries, the conception of his rights, and the courage of resistance. An article ajipeared in llarper's Magazine in April, 1873, giving an account of this man - his life, his adoption of the mission to elévate and better the class in which he was bom and to which he considered that he still belonged, and the beginninga of his crusade against the tyrannies of landed property. Since that article appeared the movement of coinbination, organization, and resistance has gone on with a momentum whioh Arch himself did not probably foresee. The exposure of the miserable condition of the peasants throughout England, and even in many parts of less feudal Scotland, has constantly added new, pregnant, and often startling facts tö the evidence of whioh Arch was the rudely eloquent witness ; and the peasants have proved themselves capable of exercising a formidable power which oould scarcely have been anticipated a year ago. The subject is a niuch broader one, moreover, than one of mere agricultural trades-unions, of strikes and lock-outs, ot' the conflict betwoen a certain kind of capital and its corresponding complement of labor. It involves great questions and conditions lying at the very basis of English society and the English constitution. In comprehends the momentous subject of the tenure of the land, the still substantial remains of the old Fnglish feudalism, the power and future of the hereditary aristocracy, and thus elementa which are in the very center of the