TOWN AND COUNTRY LABOURERS

I

IN the June number of this Review Dr. Jessopp has given us in The Cry of the Villages' a most suggestive and sympathetic plea for the rearrangement of certain long-cherished ideas concerning the villager. He begins with a vivid description of the dweller in towns, and of the various provisions by which his station has been improved, and pleads for a like amelioration of the lot of the villager, with something more than a hint at the means that must be brought to his assistance if any security of material benefit is to be provided with honesty and determination.

To every word that Dr. Jessopp has said in this article I give an unqualified adherence, and if I venture to supplement his arguments for the great change which should be worked, it is because I think that one of the strongest has hardly been touched upon by him. That a remedy exists for the present state of things no person with knowledge of the subject and an unbiassed mind can honestly doubt. It is a big remedy, and many a sacrifice may be involved by its application, but the disease to which it has to be applied is a desperate one. The rural exodus is not to be stayed by small endeavours. If it is desirable and even necessary to stay it, which few will deny, a great upheaval of existing conditions must be faced with courage and a spirit of self-abnegation, even by those who cannot be convinced as yet that the remedy will in reality be better than the present state of disease. Agricultural capital and agricultural labour, which have been so long divorced, must come together again. The land for the labourer' has long been a political cry among a certain party, and to the rest of the community the very phrase has come to threaten vaguely a state of things as impossible as disastrous for the country. But in all probability the words are merely a bugbear with which we wilfully alarm ourselves. It is not to be denied that there have been periods in our later history when the experiment might have had elements of danger in it-not of permanent danger, but merely of temporary discomfort-but those periods are past. The great regenerating agent of our day has had his opportunity and is

doing his work well; it is through him-through the schoolmaster— that the change in our land system becomes possible and desirablean element of safety instead of danger.

The argument with which Dr. Jessopp might well have enforced the lesson he teaches in his paper is a very simple and obvious one, being drawn from the labourer himself. The public mind is in the habit of regarding the peasant as a creature irresponsible, degraded, untaught, and unteachable. He is very low down in the scale of created things; he is devoid of this and of that quality which could otherwise enable him to rise. He is, in fact (they think), only a remove or two from the beasts in the field, and is as incapable of material advancement or of sane judgment as they. They take as example the most loathsome specimen of humanity that they are acquainted with, and say: 'Imagine a fellow like that being thought fit to govern us!' They do not remember-perhaps they do not know that there was a time in our history, not very remote, when three-fourths of the rustic population were in a condition similar to that of their exemplar; three-fourths of the population, thanks to the legislation of those who should have known better, were indeed even as the beasts of the field; and of that number probably more than half have fought their way up, by their own efforts and by the help of the props grudgingly supplied to them, until we can point to them to-day, and re-echo the words of one who knows what he is talking about when he says: The labourer has put off his smock, never to put it on again.'

If in the short period of seventy years or so the rustic has done so much for himself, morally and mentally, as undoubtedly he has done, then surely the time has come to try larger measures of emancipation in him and for him. We will first look at him as he was in the early days of this century, and then judge how far already he has picked himself out of the miry places in which formerly he wallowed contentedly. And let us always remember that it was not the wallowing but the contentment therein which was the real degradation. The wallowing itself was not of his own making.

It is not difficult to know the state of our agricultural population at the date indicated, but it will simplify description to regard rural England in those days as a vast poorhouse. Through one cause or another, but chiefly through the stupidity of the ruling classes-the magistracy and the clerical element-the rustic had sunk into a condition frightful to contemplate. The country was appalled at the state of the whole rural labouring class. Legislators made laws rapidly, one after another, to correct the evil, and each succeeding Act served only to point out and to legalise some new slough of degradation into which the unfortunate peasant might plunge. Gilbert's Act, passed in 1782, had only begun the mischief, but there were many to carry on his work when the serious pauper

question had secured a firm grip of men's minds, and the labourer suffered fresh wrongs after each. The laws of settlement, the abominable roundsman system, the shocking apprentice assignments, the payment of wages in great part through the rates, the putting up to auction of a man's bodily powers, the turning of him into a beast of burden for draught purposes-all these gave the rustic another push forward on his via dolorosa. There was a poorhouse in nearly every parish, and each poorhouse was crammed with men and women, married and single, able and decrepit, old and young, living in many instances promiscuously together without discipline or classification. Those for whom there was no room in the poorhouse were paupers in their own homes, maintained principally out of the rates-by the law of the land supported by the ratepayers whether they chose to work or to be idle.. In many villages three-fourths of the population were thus paupers, encouraged to complete dependence, and-worst feature of all-quite content for the most part with their condition. As the married men were more liberally provided for than the single, a young labourer of tender age would marry gleefully and throw himself and his wife straightway upon the parish for support. As illegitimate children had a larger allowance than children born in wedlock, a woman of the lowest sort would refuse matrimony because it paid her better to be single. In all cases each new child that was born meant an extra allowance to the parents, and, under this stimulus given to human production, the rural population bore children without the smallest sense of responsibility or any prospect of provision for the future of their unfortunate offspring. The children themselves, reared in pauper homes and compelled to the round system from tender years, carried on the evils generated by the parents through the folly and shortsightedness of those who made the laws for them. It does not do to dwell long on the picture: the subject is so ghastly, the colouring so dark, the responsibility of our great-grandparents in the limning so enormous. Those who care for the study of it can learn every detail through the vivid descriptions given us by Eden, Fawcett, Nicholls, and a host of others, and more especially by the reports of the Parliamentary Commissions of 1817 and 1834. I prefer to pass over the subject very quickly, because it hurts me almost beyond endurance to dwell upon it.

And this immense evil was wrought through a mistaken spirit of charity and paternal benevolence. The labouring man's soul was killed by kindness.

It is far easier to realise the degradation of the country at that period than to imagine the possibility of its emerging in any measurable time from the evil condition to which it was given over. The law practically condemned the lowest class of the people to a state of moral misery from which their rescue might appear impossible. That virtue could still remain in them was incredible.

But gradually the change was worked; at first by reforms conceived in an inhuman spirit of severity, but submitted to, and at a later stage helped by the labourer himself, as he came to distinguish between good and evil. Little more than two generations have passed since the horrified Commissioners of 1834 sent up the report which was to rouse the country to a sense of its responsibility. And in those two generations great things have come to pass, and greater things still to come may be discerned by the eye of faith.

As a contrast to the picture given above, and to bear out my argument in this paper, I cannot do better than describe as it exists at present one of the thousands of villages which were given over in the early days of this century to degradation and despair. I do not take this particular hamlet as an example because it specially lends itself to the purpose, but merely because it is one of half a dozen that I know beyond the possibility of error. I could quote others which would more completely bear out my view, but I choose this one because twenty years ago it was still given over to all manner of vice; because ten years ago it was in servility and misery, with fully one half of the male population out of work throughout the winter; and because to-day, thanks to the influence of education, and a growing spirit of independence, it begins to see a gleam of daylight through the long tunnel of despairing wretchedness in which it has impotently groped.

There are in the village to which I am alluding thirty-three male heads of families :

a. The parson.

b. The beershop-keeper, who is also a small working farmer. c. Three working farmers.

d. Six labourers who own a little stock.

e. A labourer who could afford to buy stock if he would.

f. Twenty-one other labourers.

We will look first at the farmers. They are all steady, industrious men who employ but little labour outside their own families. Their holdings are very different in size, but not one of them amounts to a hundred acres. The men themselves come from a class just a little above the labourer, but they work as labourers, and get honest livings, and are respected as they should be. And, what is more, they are prosperous. Two of them, if I am not greatly mistaken, could buy their farms if they had the opportunity. This is the class of farmer that can make the land pay, and pay well. In section d we have six men of varying grades. they were all labourers, but the times are changing. moreover, there was not a pony nor a head of stock in the village except those owned by the farmers. Now each of these six men possesses something. One of them has saved money to buy a horse and cart, and set up a carrying business. A second has saved enough

Ten years ago Ten years ago,

to buy a pony and cart, and to begin as a baker. A third, also with a pony and cart, grows potatoes for sale, and does a little dealing and carting. These three have risen already above the labourer's grade. The other three are still labourers, and work for farmers outside the village; but one of them owns a horse and cart, the second a horse and cart and a couple of head of cattle, and the third a donkey and cart.

The man in section e is a road labourer who is said to have saved from 100l. to 2001.; that he possesses a considerable sum I have had ocular proof.

There is not a male pauper in the village.

In this latter picture of the peasant as he is we have a vivid contrast to that of the peasant as he was. It is plain that certain forces have been at work upon him, and that the result of those forces has been wholly beneficial so far as he is concerned. Education has been the main instrument, increased facility of communication a lesser one, and various others have contributed in a minor degree to work the change we see in him. Even to the ordinary judgment this change cannot be entirely meaningless. It is not for nothing that the peasant has lifted himself up from grovelling dependence to a measure of independence, from degradation to a partial self-respect, from a state of general sin and want to a certain limited moral and material well-being. These heights may be only relative, but they are sufficient to point the moral which it is desirable to teach. The mind of the rustic is growing, his soul is growing. His whole caste is rising. He is trying to do better than his fathers did; he is, in fact, doing better than they. Is he to come necessarily to a standstill for want of more room in which to expand?

What is to become of men such as those in sections d and e?

By infinite labour and saving they have become possessors of something. They have denied themselves the few pleasures of the rustic, they have eschewed the public-house, they have achieved a measure of independence. They have become tenants of land, though it is only of an acre or two apiece of allotment ground. They want more land—a little more at first, and then later, perhaps, much more. But they cannot get it. They have been liberally treated in the matter of allotment holdings, which are a fair size for such holdings, and their expansion is simply impossible. Then here we are to sit down and see seven men out of thirty-three-a good proportion, considering their limited opportunities and their miserable beginnings— making a hopeless fight for independence. These seven obviously are merely an illustration, and represent many thousands of their kind. There is hardly a village in England where a like struggle cannot be witnessed. Are we to be content to let these tens of thousands fight their battle with almost a certainty of being worsted in the fight? I say that it is at our peril if we do so. Here is Here is state of