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Let father and your boys take charge of things at home, prepare for a crop, and make the crop, and you go to work for the best money-wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get; and, to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you, that, for every dollar you will, between this and the first of next May, get for your own labor, either in money or as your own indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar.
In one day Scott's high-heaped money-wages became fairy-money and nonentity; in one day the rich man and lord of land saw himself penniless, landless, a bankrupt among creditors. It was a hard trial. He met it proudly, bravely like a brave proud man of the world.
But while prices went up, money-wages did not rise in anything like the same proportion; labour being cheapened by the continuous displacement of the agricultural population, which was not attended by an equivalent increase of employment in the towns, and by the dissolution of the monasteries, which at the same time wiped out the sole existing system of poor-relief.
Had the Government been well informed of the relations subsisting between farmer and labourer in Ireland, they would have known that this arrangement could not have the desired effect, money-wages regularly paid being almost a thing unknown to our agricultural population at the time; whilst the Famine made money-wages, regularly paid, the first essential of existence.
We must not think of it as money-wages, but, all said and done, an allotted share of goods, marked out upon a card, comes pretty much to the same thing. The wages that the citizens receive must either be equal or not equal. That at least is plain logic.
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