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.