minimum of 18s. a week, Although I could command the services of as many Dorsetshire labourers as I desired to employ at half that price. The result showed that I was right in bringing high-priced competent men amongst low-priced inferior ones, for as soon as the Dorsetshire men knew what the north-country men were getting, and saw the character of the work executed by them, they applied all their energies in imitation. At first they drank more beer, thinking that by such means they could do more work. They soon saw their error, and it was both amusing, and instructive at the same time, to see how struck they were when they found that the northern men had for their dinners good meat and bread, while they were living on bread, tobacco, and miserable beer or cider. It was by very slow degrees that the Dorsetshire men realised the truth that butchers' meat was more strengthening than bad beer. Eventually, by the example afforded them, the "technical education" given them by the Northumberland men, and by the effect of improved food, the despised Dorsetshire men were enabled to earn as much as their teachers, and it was not long before I actually removed them into the north of England, to compete with Yorkshire men in the work they had learned; and the first place at which they were engaged was Swine, in Holderness, where there did not exist a public-house or a beer-shop in the village.
I have given these details, hoping they will serve two objects—by proving, first, the evil of beer and the good of beef; and next, the benefit of technical or practical teaching as a means by which the quality of labour may be improved, and the earnings of low-waged districts increased.
It this experience of mine fails to convey what I
