The harvest labourer earns $10 a week everywhere in America.
His father was a poor farm labourer, and could not afford to send him to school long enough even to learn to read and write.
Perhaps Erysichthon may be explained as the personification of the labourer, who by the systematic cultivation and tilling of the soil endeavours to force the crops, instead of allowing them to mature unmolested as in the good old times.
The idea of the active capitalist having any duties towards his employes never seems to occur to him; the labourer is, in fact, merely an instrument in the hands of the capitalist, a pawn in the game he plays.
After his release Wakefield seemed disposed for a while to turn his attention to social questions at home, and produced a tract on the Punishment of Death, with a terribly graphic picture of the condemned sermon in Newgate, and another on incendiarism in the rural districts, with an equally powerful exhibition of the degraded condition of the agricultural labourer.
