It happened that I was in Hungary at the harvest time, and in the course of my journey through the country I have several times seen these gangs of men and women going to their work at daybreak. In this part of the country the strangest costumes are worn by the peasant people, and the women especially, with their bright kerchiefs over their heads, their short skirts and high boots, when they were not barefoot, were quite as picturesque as anything I had read had led me to expect. The labourers go to work at early dawn, because during the harvest season the field hands work sometimes as much as fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and then throw themselves down to rest for the night on a truss of straw or under a single blanket. After the harvest is over they return again to their villages. Working in this way in troups of wandering labourers, there was no room for any permanent human relationships between themselves and their employers; such relationships, for example, as exist, in spite of the differences of race and colour, between every white planter in the South and his Negro tenants. On the other hand, the labourers, working and living together in the way I have described, come to have a strong sense of their common interest, all the stronger, perhaps, because they are looked down upon by the rest of the population, and particularly by the small landowners with whom they were associated up to the time of their emancipation, in 1848. About 1890 a series of bad harvests--coming on the heels of other changes which, for a number of years, had made their lives steadily harder--helped to increase the discontent of the farm hands. Thus it was that when, about this time, the Socialists turned their attention to the agricultural population of Hungary, they found the people prepared to listen to their doctrines. What made Socialism the more popular among the lowest farming classes was the fact that it not only promised to teach the farm labourers how they might increase their wages, but declared that the state was going to take the land out of the hands of the large landowners and divide it among the people who cultivated it. What made the situation the more difficult was the fact that the agricultural labourers, as soon as they were thoroughly organized, had the landowners, during the harvest time, at a peculiar disadvantage, because when work in the fields stopped, the standing grain ripened and spoiled and the landowner was ruined.