"Agricultural labourer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from another quarter. Lord Lee, who as we know was the Director of the Food Production Department at the Board of Agriculture, spoke some time ago on this aspect of the case, and said: "Take the agricultural labourer for example. Does anyone suppose, or suggest, that he should return from the trenches—where he has distinguished himself in a way unsurpassed by any other class in the community—to the old miserable conditions ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... the unemployed male is, of course, not nearly so modern as that of the unemployed female. It may be said in England to have taken its rise in almost its present form as early as the fifteenth century, when economic changes began to sever the agricultural labourer from the land, and rob him of his ancient forms of social toil. Still, in its most acute form, it may be called a ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... ancestors did well to esteem the Romans who lived in the country above those who dwelt in town. For as our peasants today contemn the tenant of a villa as an idler in comparison with the busy life of an agricultural labourer, so our ancestors regarded the sedentary occupations of the town as waste of time from their habitual rural pursuits: and in consequence they so divided their time that they might have to devote only one day of the week to their affairs in town, reserving ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... tacit acquiescence, or even the cooperation of Lord Pharanx. You have described the conspiracy of quiet which, for some reason or other, was imposed on the household; in that reign of silence the bang of a door, the fall of a plate, becomes a domestic tornado. But have you ever heard an agricultural labourer in clogs or heavy boots ascend a stair? The noise is terrible. The tramp of an army of them through the house and overhead, probably jabbering uncouthly together, would be insufferable. Yet Lord Pharanx seems ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... sell, because, for a long while past, he has had nothing upon which to feed them, the milk being sold. The pigsties are full of weeds; he can hardly fatten one for his own use, and has scarcely better facilities for keeping pigs than an agricultural labourer. The carriage of the milk to the station requires at least two quick horses, and perhaps more; one cannot do it twice a day, even with a very moderate load. The hard highway and the incessant work ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... rarely obliged to take advantage. A plot of common ground is included with the cottages that are let to them; and the cultivation of this, helps to keep them and their families, in bad times, until they find an opportunity of resuming work; when they may perhaps make as much in one month, as an agricultural labourer can in twelve. ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... unending rows of figures, do, in fact, the same things year in and year out till his youth has withered into age. He himself becomes little better than a mechanism. There is no form of outdoor employment of which this can be said. The life of the agricultural labourer, so often pitied for its monotony, is variety itself compared with the life of the commercial clerk. The labourer's tasks are at least changed by the seasons; but time brings no such diversion to the clerk. It ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... sister, and for the happiness she had in hearing it; and she gazed at him and the laden brows of her Madge alternately, encouraging him to repeat his recital of his pecuniary means, for the poetry of the fact it verified, feasting on the sketch of a four-roomed cottage and an agricultural labourer's widow for cook and housemaid; Madge to listen to his compositions of the day in the evening; Madge to praise him, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... me still more than these brilliant salons, was the tour that I took through the country, and the careful observation of the condition and prospect of the small proprietors so numerous in France and Flanders. The contrast between the French small landowner and the English agricultural labourer is very great. Nothing has struck me as so pathetic as the condition of the English farm labourer—so hopeless, so cheerless. Our Scottish peasants have more education, more energy, and are more disposed to emigrate. Their wages are fixed more by custom than by competition, and their ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... large fields of industry in which such a saving would be almost or absolutely impossible. We have had melancholy evidence of how utterly insufficient most forms of women's wages are to provide the needed margin. The same thing is true of the agricultural labourer in the more depressed districts in England and in large tracts of Ireland and Scotland. Even in the more remunerative employments innumerable special circumstances would prevent a thrifty and deserving man from ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... out again into renewed lamentation. He has told us that we are physically deteriorating, and in such awful tones that we have shuddered, and many of us have believed. And considering that the death-rate is decreasing, that slums are decreasing, that disease is decreasing, that the agricultural labourer eats more than ever he did, our credence does not do much credit to our reasoning powers, does it? Of course, there is that terrible "influx" into the towns, but I for one should be much interested to know wherein the existence of the rustic ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... be seen and studied peasant property in many stages. I would again remark that any comparison between the condition of the English agricultural labourer and the French peasant proprietor is irrelevant and inconclusive. In the cottage of a small owner at Osse, for instance, we may discover features to shock us, often a total absence of the neatness and veneer ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... it be to reduce the labourer's wages—and it must also tend to throw land out of cultivation. But what will the relaxation of the tariff do? Will it lower the price of manufactured goods in this country to the agricultural labourer?—that is, after the diminished duty is paid, can foreign manufactures be imported here at a price which shall compete with the home manufactures? If so, the home consumption of our manufactures, which is ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... northern parts of the empire very little land is left uncultivated. The hillsides are laid out in terraces and carefully irrigated in the dry season, the channels being often two miles or more long. Of all the cereals barley is the most widely grown. The average rate of pay to an agricultural labourer is about threepence a day in addition to food, which may cost ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... by either motive. Apparently the whole village knew of Mr. Glenthorpe's intention to draw this money which was in his possession when he was murdered—he seems to have been a man who talked very freely of his private affairs—and the amount, L300, would be a fortune to an agricultural labourer or a fisherman. Such a man would know all about the bedroom windows on that side of the inn opening on to the hillside, and would naturally choose that means of entry to commit the crime. And, if he were a labourer in Mr. Glenthorpe's employ, the thought of concealing ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... perhaps, came to cure their eyes, and will leave at the shrine a picture on linen of the organs affected. Some are merely there for a jaunt, to see the sights and the country. We saw a group on their way home, climbing a steep hill for no apparent purpose except to look at the view. What English agricultural labourer would do as much? But the Chinese are not "agricultural labourers"; they are independent peasants; and a people so gay, so friendly, so well-mannered and self-respecting I have found nowhere else in ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... of moment, led into making interesting confession. As he says, only he put it stronger, general impression is that he is not particularly attached to Agricultural Labourer. BOBBY SPENCER, when he made his historic declaration—"Mr. SPEAKER, Sir, I am not an Agricultural Labourer"—understood to have JOKIM in his mind; endeavouring to ingratiate himself with the statesman who, at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... understand how the pleasures of the ashen faggot are looked forward to with delight by the hard-working agricultural labourer, for whom few social enjoyments are provided. The harvest home, in these days of machinery, seems lost in the usual routine of work, and the shearing feast, when held, is confined to the farmer's family, or shepherd staff, and is not a general gathering. Moreover, ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... LINCOLNSHIRE moved the rejection of the Agriculture Bill. Adapting an old joke of Lord SPENCER'S, made in "another place" a generation ago, he observed that this was no more an agricultural Bill than he himself was an agricultural labourer. He knows however how to call a spade a spade, if not something more picturesque, and he treated the measure and its authors to all the resources of a varied vocabulary. Possibly his brother peers, while enjoying his invective, thought that it had been a little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... heated discussion, Polson and Gurney, as representative of the officers and crew of the ship, were duly elected members of council; the other four being William Fell, once a solicitor's clerk; Henry Burgess, lately a colliery agent; John Monroe, formerly a builder; and Samuel Hilary, late agricultural labourer. These four last, as may be readily understood, owed their election not so much to their superior qualifications as to the fact that they were red-hot Socialists, full of plans to enable everybody to enjoy a maximum amount of comfort at the cost of ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... would have been to give such a standard as that of "M.D." to the agricultural labourer about the middle of last century, a typical one with a large family, and one who worked as men do not work to-day, and had to rear his family on a few shillings a week. How could such a one have provided more than a fraction of what "M.D." says is necessary, ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... were, a spirit of picnic. The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted and drank in the sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong effect of large, open-air existence. The fellow who drove me was something of a humourist; and his conversation was all in praise of an agricultural labourer's way of life. It was he who called my attention to these jugs of ale by the hedgerow; he could not sufficiently express the liberality of these men's wages; he told me how sharp an appetite was given by breaking up the earth in the morning ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sensible effect upon the condition of the labouring people. However brightly the sun of prosperity might gild the eminences of society, the darkness of misery and despair settled upon the masses below. The commissioners proceed: 'A reference to the evidence of most of the witnesses will show that the agricultural labourer of Ireland continues to suffer the greatest privations and hardships; that he continues to depend upon casual and precarious employment for subsistence; that he is still badly housed, badly fed, badly ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... but it was anticipated that the honesty of the goods turned out would ultimately make such enterprises pay, even in a commercial world. Then, for the people employed and their families, there would be places of recreation and instruction, supplied by the Guild, and intended to give the agricultural labourer or mill-hand, trained from infancy in Guild schools, some insight into Literature, Science and Art—and tastes which his easy position would leave ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... long advocated by the seer Carlyle? Only the crassest ignorance and the listlessness born of misery and want prevent the able-bodied pauper, the frozen-out mechanic, or the weary and ill-clad, the over-worked and under-fed agricultural labourer, from quitting the scenes of his purgatory, and from finding, scattered over earth's surface, spots where he may enjoy a comparative paradise, heightened by the memory of privations endured in the wretched hole which he pleases to call his home. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... he ate his supper; "the sheik himself does not seem to be a bad fellow; and at any rate I owe him my life for his obstinacy in sticking to me, instead of handing me over to the Mahdi's people. His wife is evidently disposed to be kind, and my work will be no harder than an agricultural labourer's, at any rate as long as we stay here. This is an out-of-the-way sort of place, and if it does not lie on the route between any two places, is not likely to be much visited. It certainly looks as if the sheik regarded it as his private property, which ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... noticed that the hands of the man who was threatening her with violence were not those of an agricultural labourer, because they were small and white. On the strength of this clue, the police arrested a little tailor in the village, and she courageously identified him in court, though every possible pressure was brought on her not to do so. He was sentenced to several years' imprisonment, ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... the remotest degree to hear this. The only fact she knew about the lower classes was that they were disgustingly extravagant and spent every penny they earned. The woman across the Green who did her washing had six children and a husband who was an agricultural labourer and earned eighteen and sixpence a week. These eight lived in three rooms and "if you please" they actually bought a gramophone! Mabel instanced it for years after she first heard it. The idea of that class of person spending money on anything ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... khaki-coloured plains I recollect dotted with roving herds of cattle. The picturesque and half-savage Gaucho, who lived entirely on meat, and would have scorned to have walked even a hundred yards on foot, has been replaced by the Italian agricultural labourer, who lives on polenta and macaroni, and will cheerfully trudge any distance to his work. The great solitudes have gone, for with tillage there must be roads now, and villages, and together with the solitudes the wonderful teeming ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... of Ruskin College, led him to the conclusion 'that there is less pleasantness or happiness in work the nearer it approaches the fully organized Great Industry'. The only workman who spoke enthusiastically of his work was an agricultural labourer who 'was very emphatic with regard to the pleasure to be obtained from agricultural work'. Professor Taussig, on the other hand, selects four agricultural occupations, ditching, delving, sowing, and reaping, ...
— Progress and History • Various |
