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FARM OR RAILWAY.
It is often said that we can never have contentment among farm labourers in England because the men are continually contrasting themselves with the industrial workers, especially the railwaymen in their neighbourhood, and so made conscious of their social and economic inferiority. Contrariwise in Cornwall it was particularly insisted that these farm workers regarded themselves as not less well off than the railwaymen, to say no more. They paid no rent, they grew much of their own food, and they nursed the independent spirit and dignity of character which mark the man who is a producer. England differs most from Denmark in this : that over there only some 9 per cent. of the workers on the land are what we call labourers. The bulk are smallholders, even if they may do some work for others. Cornwall has a good many labourers, but well over 70 per cent. of the farmers are tech- aically smallholders, that is, farm not more than fifty acres, and they form a community in which the sharp and rather brutal distinction between labourer and farmer is in some degree refined away. This fact gives the county a solidarity of sentiment that is scarcely to be paralleled in the east or the Midlands, except in such favoured patches as South Lincolnshire or parts of Bedford.
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