the labourers seeking to be employed has become the accepted condition
of getting a living in the village, and it is to a great extent a new
condition. Previously there was little room for anything of the kind.
The old thrift lent itself to co-operation rather. I admit that I have
never heard of any system being brought into the activities of this
valley, such as I witnessed lately in another part of England, where the
small farmers, supplying an external market, and having no hired labour,
were helping one another to get their corn harvested, all being
solicitous for their neighbours' welfare, and giving, not selling, their
labour. Here the conditions hardly required such wholesale co-operation
as that; but in lesser matters both kindliness and economy would counsel
the people to be mutually helpful, and there is no reason to doubt that
the counsel was taken. Those who had donkey-carts would willingly bring
home turfs for those who had none, in return for help with their own
turf-cutting. The bread-ovens, I know, were at the disposal of others
besides the owners. At pig-killing, at thatching, at clearing out wells
(where, in fact, I have seen the thing going on), the people would put
themselves at one another's service. They still do so in cases where
there is no question of earning money for a living. And if the spirit of
friendly co-operation is alive now, when it can so rarely be put in
practice, one may readily suppose that it was fairly vigorous fifty
years ago.
But no spirit of co-operation may now prompt one wage-earner to ask, or
another to proffer, assistance in working for wages. As well might one
shopkeeper propose to wait on another's customers for him. Employers
would not have it; still less would those who are employed. A man may
be fainting at his job, but none dare help him. He would resent, he
would fear, the proposal. The job is, as it were, his property; as long
as he can stand and see he must hold it against all comers, because in
losing hold he loses his claim upon the world's supplies of the
necessaries of life.
In spite of all the latent good-will, therefore, and in spite of the
fact that the cottagers are all on the same social level, intimacies do
not thrive amongst them. If there was formerly any parochial sentiment
in the village, any sense of community of interest, it has all been
broken up by the exigencies of competitive wage-earning, and each family
stands by itself, aloof from all the others. The interests clash. Men
who might be helpful friends in other circumstances are in the position
of rival tradesmen competing for the patronage of customers. Not now may
their labour be a bond of friendship between them; it is a commodity
with a market value, to be sold in the market. Hence, just as in trade,
every man for himself is the rule with the villagers; just as in trade,
the misfortune of one is the opportunity of another. All the maxims of
competitive commerce apply fully to the vendor of his own labour. There
must be "no friendship in business"; the weakest must go to the wall.
Each man is an individualist fighting for his own hand; and to give as
little as he can for as much as he can get is good policy for him, with
precisely the same limitations as those that govern the trading of the
retail merchant, tormented with the conflicting necessities of
overcharging and underselling.
It follows that the villagers are a prey to jealousy and suspicion--not,
perhaps, when they meet at the public-house or on the road, but in the
presence of employers, when any question of employment arises. At such
times one would think that labouring men have no critics so unkindly as
their own neighbours and equals. It is true those who are in constant
work are commended; but if you ask about a man who is "on the market"
and open for any work that may be going, his rivals are unlikely to
answer generously. "So-and-So?... H'm!... He do's his best; but he don't
seem to get _through_, somehow." "Old Who-is-it? Asked _he_ to come and
help me, have ye? Well, you'll judge for yourself; but I don't hardly
fancy he'll suit." Or, again: "Well, we all knows how 'tis with
What's-his-name. I don't say but what he keeps on work right enough; but
he'll have to jump about smarter 'n what I've ever knowed 'n, if he's to
work 'long o' me." So, too often, and sometimes in crueller terms, I
have heard efficient labourers speak of their neighbours. Certainly it
is not all envy. An active man finds it penance to work with a slow one,
and worse than penance; for his own reputation may suffer, if his own
output of work should be diminished by the other's fault. That neighbour
of mine engaged at hop-drying doubtless had good grounds for
exasperation with the helper sent into the kiln, when he complained to
the master: "Call that a _man_ you sent me? If that's what you calls a
man, I'd sooner you let me send for my old woman! Blamed if she wouldn't
do better than that feller!" Detraction like this, no doubt, is often
justified; but when it becomes the rule, the only possible inference is
that an instinctive jealousy prompts men to it, in instinctive
self-preservation.
Yet there are depths of dishonour--depths not unknown amongst
employers--into which the village labourers will rarely condescend to
plunge, acute though the temptation may be. Not once have I met with an
instance of one man deliberately scheming to get another man's job away
from him. A labourer unable to keep up with his work will do almost
anything to avoid having a helper thrust upon him--he fears the
introduction of a possible rival into his preserve. But this is not the
same thing as pushing another man out; it has no resemblance to the
behaviour of the hustling capitalist, who opens his big business with
the definite intention of capturing trade away from little businesses.
That is a course to which my impoverished neighbours will not stoop. The
nearest thing to it which I have known was the case of those men
mentioned in an earlier chapter, who applied for Bettesworth's work
during his last illness. They came, however, believing the place to be
vacant; and one and all, with a sincerity I never doubted, deprecated
the idea of desiring to take it away from him. In fact, the application
was distasteful to them. Nothing, I believe, would have prevailed upon
them to make it, short of that hunger for constant employment which many
of the men feel now, under their new competitive thrift. That they
should have been scrupulous at all was to their credit. All their
circumstances constrain the people to be selfish, secret about their
hopes, swift to be first in the field where a chance occurs. And it is
surprising how vigilant a lookout is kept, and how wide a district it
covers. By what routes the news of new employment travels I do not know,
but travel it does, fast and far. Men rise early and walk many miles to
be before others at some place where they have heard of work to be had;
and one gets the impression, sometimes, of a population silently but
keenly watching to see what opportunity of well-being may suddenly fall
to them, not in general, but individually.
Do what they will to be neighbourly, competition for the privilege of
earning wages separates them sooner or later. There were two men I knew
who maintained a sort of comradeship in work during several years, so
that one of them would not take a job unless there was room for the
other, and if either was paid off, the other left with him. They were
amongst the ablest labourers in the parish, used to working long hours
at high pressure, and indifferent to what they did, provided that the
pay was good. I heard of them from time to time--now at railway work,
now at harvesting, now helping where a bridge was being built, and so
on. It was the depression of the winter of 1908-09 that finally broke up
their comradeship. During those miserable months even these two were
unemployed, and went short of food at times; and now they are working
separately--competing one against the other, in fact.
XI
HUMILIATION
Still more than the relations of the villagers with their own kind their
relations with other sorts of people have suffered change under the new
thrift. To just that extent to which the early inhabitants of the valley
were peasants, they formed, as it were, a separate group, careless of
the outer world and its concerns. They could afford to ignore it, and to
be ignored by it. To them, so well suited with their own outlook and
customs, it was a matter of small importance, though all England should
have other views than theirs, and other manners. And the outer world, on
its side, was equally indifferent. It left the villagers to go their own
queer way, and recognized--as it does in the case of other separate
groups of folk, such as fishermen or costermongers--that what seemed
singular in them was probably justified by the singularity of their
circumstances. Nobody supposed that they were a wrong or a regrettable
type who ought to be "done good to" or reformed. They belonged to their
own set. They were English, of course; but they were outside the
ordinary classifications of English society.
Even towards those of them who went out of the valley to earn wages
this was still the attitude. They went out as peasants, and were
esteemed because they had the ability of peasants. In much the same way
as country folk on the Continent take their country produce into town
markets the men of this valley took, into the hop-grounds and fields of
the neighbouring valley, or into its old-fashioned streets and stable
yards, their toughness, their handiness, their intimate understanding of
country crafts; and, returning home in the evening, they slipped back
again into their natural peasant state, without any feeling of
disharmony from the day's employment.
There was no reason why it should be otherwise. Although, at work, they
had come into contact with people unlike themselves in some ways, the
contrast was not of such a kind that it disheartened or seemed to
disgrace them. At the time of the enclosure of the common, a notable
development, certainly, was beginning amongst the employing classes, but
it had not then proceeded far. Of course the day of the yeoman farmer
was almost done; and with it there had disappeared some of that equality
which permitted wage-earning men to be on such easy terms with their
masters as one hears old people describe. No longer, probably, would a
farmer take a nickname from his men, or suffer them to call his
daughters familiarly by their Christian names; and no longer did master
and man live on quite the same quality of food, or dress in the same
sort of clothes. Nevertheless the distinction between employers and
employed--between the lower middle-class and the working-class--was not
nearly so marked fifty years ago as it has since become. The farmers,
for their part, were still veritable country folk, inheritors themselves
of a set of rural traditions nearly akin to those of the peasant
squatters in this valley. And even the townsmen, who were the only
others who could give employment to these villagers, were extremely
countrified in character. In their little sleepy old town--not half its
present size, and the centre then of an agricultural and especially a
hop-growing district--people were intimately interested in country
things. No matter what a man's trade or profession--linen-draper, or
saddler, or baker, or lawyer, or banker--he found it worth while to
watch the harvests, and to know a great deal about cattle and sheep, and
more than a great deal about hops. Some of the tradesmen were, in fact,
growing wealthy as hop-planters; and one and all identified themselves
with the outdoor industries of the neighbourhood. And though some grew
rich, and changed their style of living, they did not change their
mental equipment, but continued (as I myself remember) more "provincial"
than many a farmer is nowadays. All their thoughts, all their ideas,
could be quite well expressed in the West Surrey and Hampshire dialect,
which the townspeople, like the village folk, continued to speak.
Meanwhile, the work required by these employers ran, as yet, very much
on antiquated lines. Perhaps it was that the use of machinery had
received a setback, twenty years earlier, by the "Swing Riots," of which
a few memories still survive; at any rate haymaking, harvesting,
threshing--all the old tasks, indeed--were still done by hand; thatch
had not gone out of use for barns and stables; nor, for house-roofs, had
imported slates quite taken the place of locally made tiles. The truth
is, the town, in its more complex way, had not itself passed far beyond
the primitive stage of dependence on local resources and local skill. It
is really surprising how few were the materials, or even the finished
goods, imported into it at that time. Clothing stuffs and metals were
the chief of them. Of course the grocers (not "provision merchants"
then) did their small trade in sugar and coffee, and tea and spices;
there was a tinware shop, an ironmonger's, a wine-merchant's; and all
these necessarily were supplied from outside. But, on the other hand, no
foreign meat or flour, or hay or straw or timber, found their way into
the town, and comparatively few manufactured products from other parts
of England. Carpenters still used the oak and ash and elm of the
neighbourhood, sawn out for them by local sawyers: the wheelwright,
because iron was costly, mounted his cartwheels on huge axles fashioned
by himself out of the hardest beech; the smith, shoeing horses or
putting tyres on wheels, first made the necessary nails for himself,
hammering them out on his own anvil. So, too, with many other things.
Boots, brushes, earthenware, butter and lard, candles, bricks--they were
all of local make; cheese was brought back from Weyhill Fair in the
waggons which had carried down the hops; in short, to an extent hard to
realize, the town was independent of commerce as we know it now, and
looked to the farms and forests and the claypits and coppices of the
neighbourhood for its supplies. A leisurely yet steady traffic in rural
produce therefore passed along its streets, because it was the
life-centre, the heart, of its own countryside; and the village
labourer, going in and out upon his town tasks, or even working all day
in some secluded yard behind the street, still found a sort of
homeliness in the materials he handled, and was in touch with the ideas
and purposes of his employer.
Owing to these same circumstances, the wage-earners of that day enjoyed
what their descendants would consider a most blissful freedom from
anxiety. On the one side, the demand for labour was fairly steady. It
was the demand of a community not rapidly growing in numbers, nor yet
subject to crazes and sudden changes of a fashion--a community
patiently, nay, cheerfully, conservative in its ambitions, not given to
rash speculation, but contented to go plodding on in its time-honoured
and modest well-being. What the townsfolk wanted one year they wanted
the next, and so onwards with but quiet progress. And as the demand for
labour was thus steady, so on the other side was the supply of it. A
dissatisfied employer could not advertise, then, in a London daily
paper, and get scores of men applying to him for work at a day's notice;
nor, indeed, would strangers have been able to do the work in many
cases, so curiously was its character determined by local conditions.
Besides, town opinion, still prejudiced by memories of the old Poor Law,
would have viewed with extreme disfavour, had such an experiment ever
been tried, the importation of men and families whose coming must surely
result in pauperism for somebody, and in a consequent charge upon the
rates.
So, putting together the leading factors--namely, a steady demand for
countrified labour, a steady supply of it, and an employing class full
of country ideas--we get a rough idea of the conditions of wage-earning
in the neighbourhood, when the folk of this valley, fenced out from
their common, were forced to look to wage-earning as their sole means of
living. That the conditions were ideal it would be foolish to suppose;
but that, for villagers at least, they had certain advantages over
present conditions is not to be denied. Especially we may note two
unpleasing features of modern wage-earning which had not then made their
appearance.
In the first place, the work itself was interesting to do, was almost
worth doing for its own sake, when it still called for much old-world
skill and knowledge, and when the praises of the master were the
praises of an expert who well knew what he was talking about. On these
terms, it was no mean pleasure that the able labouring men had in their
labour. They took a pride in it--as you may soon discern if you will
listen to the older men talking. I have heard them boast, as of a
triumph, of the fine flattering surprise of some master, when he had
come to look at their day's work, and found it more forward, or better
done, than he had dared to hope. The words he said are treasured up with
delight, and repeated with enthusiasm, after many years.
As for the other point, it has already been touched upon. Harsh the
employers might be--more callous by far, I believe, than they are now;
but in their general outlook they were not, as yet, so very far removed
from the men who worked for them. Their ideas of good and bad were such
as the peasant labourer from this valley could understand; and master
and man were not greatly out of touch in the matter of civilization. It
made a vast difference to the labourer's comfort. He might be hectored,
bullied, cheated even, but he hardly felt himself degraded too. It was
not a being out of another sphere that oppressed him; not one who
despised him, not one whose motives were strange and mysterious. The
cruellest oppression was inhuman rather than unhuman--the act, after
all, only of a more powerful, not of a more dazzling, personage--so that
it produced in him no humiliating sense of belonging to an inferior
order of creation. And, of course, oppression was exceptional. Employers
were obliged to get on comfortably with their work-people, by the
conditions governing the supply of labour. I have in my mind several
cases mentioned to me by people long ago dead, in which men for various
faults (drunkenness in one instance, theft in another) were dismissed
from their employment again and again, yet as often reinstated, because
the master found it easier to put up with their faults than to do
without their skill. It may be inferred, therefore, that ordinary men
got along fairly well with their masters in the ordinary course.
This state of things, however, has gradually passed away. As I shall
show in another chapter, the labourer may now take but little interest
and but little pride in his work; but the change in that direction is
not more pronounced than is the change in the relations between the
villagers and the employing classes. It is a cruel evil that the folk of
the valley have suffered there. No longer are they a group whose
peculiarities are respected while their qualities are esteemed. In their
intercourse with the outer world they have become, as it were, degraded,
humiliated; and when they go out of the valley to earn wages, it is to
take the position of an inferior and almost servile race. The reason is
that the employing class, as a whole, has moved on, leaving the
labourers where they were, until now a great gulf divides them. Merely
in relative wealth, if that were all, the difference has widened
enormously. Seventy or eighty years ago, I have heard say, the
shopkeeper in the town who had as much as a hundred pounds put by was
thought a rich man. There are now many artisans there whose savings
exceed that figure, while the property of the townsmen who employ labour
is, of course, valued often in thousands. The labouring people alone
remain without savings, as poor as their grandfathers when the common
was first enclosed.
But it is a question of civilization far more than of wealth that now
divides the employing classes from the employed. The former have
discarded much of their provincialism; they are astir with ambitions and
ideas at which the old town would have stood aghast. In beliefs and in
tastes they are a new people. They have new kinds of knowledge; almost
one may say that they use their brains in new ways; and the result is
that between them and the village labourer mutual understanding has
broken down. How far the separation has gone is betrayed in the fact
that the countrified speech, common to village and town fifty years ago,
has become a subject of derision to the town-people, forgetful of their
own ancestry. So, in field and street and shop, the two kinds of folk
meet face to face, not with an outlook, and hardly with a speech, which
both can appreciate, but like distinct races, the one dominant, the
other subject.
And, all but inevitably, the breach is daily widened by the conditions
on which the new civilization of the employing class is based. For, with
all its good features, it is rather a barbaric civilization, in this
sense--that it is more a matter of fineness in possessions than in
personal qualities. It cannot be maintained without a costly apparatus
of dress and furniture, and of drudges to do the dirty work; and
consequently it demands success in that competitive thrift which gives a
good money-income. Without that the employers are nowhere. They are
themselves driven very hard; they must make things pay; to secure the
means of civilization for themselves, they must get them out of the
labourer with his eighteen shillings a week. In vain, therefore, are
they persuaded by their newest ideas to see in him an Englishman as good
as themselves: they may assent to the principle, but in practice it is
as imperative as ever to make him a profitable drudge. Accordingly,
those relations of mutual approval which were not uncommon of old
between master and man cannot now be maintained. If it is impossible for
the village folk to understand the town folk, it is equally impossible
for the town folk to understand the village folk. They cannot afford to
understand. The peasant outlook is out of date--a cast-off thing; and
for cleaving to it the labourer is despised. If he could be civilized,
and yet be made to "pay," that is what would best suit the
middle-classes; and that is really the impossible object at which they
aim, when they try to "do him good." They want to make him more like
themselves, and yet keep him in his place of dependence and humiliation.
It must be said that amongst a section of the employers there is no
desire to "do good" even on these terms. While the labouring people, on
their side, betray little or no class feeling of hostility towards
employers, the converse is not true, but jealousy, suspicion, some
fear--the elements of bitter class-war, in fact--frequently mark the
attitude of middle-class people towards the labouring class. It seems to
be forgotten that the men are English. One hears them spoken of as an
alien and objectionable race, worth nothing but to be made to work. The
unemployment which began to beggar so many of my village neighbours
after the South African War was actually welcomed by numerous employers
in this district. "It will do the men good," people said to me; "it will
teach them their place. They were getting too independent." The election
of 1906, when the Conservative member for the division was unseated,
brought out a large crop of similarly malevolent expressions. "Look at
the class of people who have the vote," said a disgusted villa lady,
with her nose in the air. "Only the low, ignorant people wear those
colours," another lady assured her little boy, whose eyes preferred
"those colours" to the favours in his own buttonhole. More pointed was
the overheard remark of a well-to-do employer, irritated by the election
crowds in the town: "As my wife says, it was bad enough before. The
children of the lower classes used, as it was, to take the inside of the
pavement, and we had to walk on the kerb. But now we shall be driven out
into the road."