is interesting to speculate as to the farther changes that may be looked
for in the years to come; indeed, it is more than merely interesting.
Educational enthusiasts are busy; legislators have their eye on
villages; throughout the leisured classes it is habitual to look upon
"the poor" as a sort of raw material, to be remodelled according to
leisured ideas of what is virtuous, or refined, or useful, or nice; and
nobody seems to reflect that the poor may be steadily, albeit
unconsciously, moving along a course of their own, in which they might
be helped a little, or hindered a little, by outsiders, but from which
they will not in the long run be turned aside. Yet such a movement, if
it is really proceeding, will obviously stultify the most
well-intentioned schemes that are not in accordance with it.
And, if I am not greatly mistaken, it is under way. That seems to me an
ill-grounded complacency which permits easy-going people to say lightly,
"Of course we want a few reforms," as if, once those reforms were
brought to pass, the labouring population would thereafter settle down
and change no more. In one respect, no doubt, there is little more to be
looked for. The changes so far observed have been thrust upon the people
from outside--changes in their material or social environment, followed
by mere negations on their part, in the abandonment of traditional
outlooks and ambitions; and of course in that negative direction the
movement must come to an end at last. But when there are no more old
habits to be given up, there is still plenty of scope for acquiring new
ones, and this is the possibility that has to be considered. What if,
quietly and out of sight--so quietly and inconspicuously as to be
unnoticed even by the people themselves--their English nature,
dissatisfied with negations, should have instinctively set to work in a
positive direction to discover a new outlook and new ambitions? What if
the merely mechanical change should have become transmuted into a vital
growth in the people's spirit--a growth which, having life in it, must
needs go on spontaneously by a process of self-unfolding? If that should
be the case, as I am persuaded that it is, then the era of change in the
village is by no means over; on the contrary, it is more likely that the
greatest changes are yet to come.
As the signs which should herald their approach will be those of
recovery from the mental and spiritual stagnation into which the village
has been plunged, and as we may regard that stagnation as the
starting-point from which any further advance will proceed, it is worth
while to fix it in our minds by a similitude. What has most obviously
happened to the village population resembles an eviction, when the
inmates of a cottage have been turned out upon the road-side with their
goods and chattels, and there they sit, watching the dismantling of
their home, and aware only of being moved against their will. It is a
genuine movement of them; yet it does not originate with them; and the
first effect of it upon them is stagnation. Unable to go on in their old
way, yet knowing no other way in which to go on, they merely wait
disconsolate.
The similitude really fits the case very well, in this village at least,
and probably in many others. Of the means whereby the people have been
thrust out from the peasant traditions in which they were at home I have
discussed only the chief one--namely, the enclosure of the common. That
was the cause which irresistibly compelled the villagers to quit their
old life; but of course there were other causes, less conspicuous here
than they have been elsewhere, yet operative here too. Free Trade,
whilst it made the new thrift possible, at the same time effectually
undermined many of the old modes of earning a living; and more
destructive still has been the gradual adoption of machinery for rural
work. We are shocked to think of the unenlightened peasants who broke
up machines in the riots of the eighteen-twenties, but we are only now
beginning to see fully what cruel havoc the victorious machines played
with the defeated peasants. Living men were "scrapped"; and not only
living men. What was really demolished in that struggle was the country
skill, the country lore, the country outlook; so that now, though we
have no smashed machinery, we have a people in whom the pride of life is
broken down: a shattered section of the community; a living engine whose
fly-wheel of tradition is in fragments, and will not revolve again. Let
us mark the finality of that destruction before going further. Whatever
prosperity may return to our country places, it will not be on the old
terms. The "few reforms," whether in the direction of import duties, or
small holdings, or "technical education" in ploughing or fruit-pruning
or forestry or sheep-shearing, can never in themselves be a substitute
for the lost peasant traditions, because they are not the same kind of
thing. For those traditions were no institutions set up and cherished by
outside authority. Associated though they were with industrial and
material well-being, they meant much more than that to country folk;
they lived in the popular tastes and habits, and they passed on
spontaneously from generation to generation, as a sort of rural
civilization. And you cannot create that sort of thing by Act of
Parliament, or by juggling with tariffs, or by school lessons. An
imitation of the shell of it might be set up; but the life of it is
gone, not to be restored. That is the truth of the matter. The old rural
outlook of England is dead; and the rural English, waiting for something
to take its place, for some new tradition to grow up amongst them, are
in a state of stagnation.
In looking for signs of new growth, it must be observed that not all
steps in the transition are equally significant. Amongst the
modifications of habit slowly proceeding in the village to-day, there
are some which should be regarded rather as a final relinquishment of
old ways than as a spontaneous forward movement into new ones. Thus,
although the people comply more and more willingly with the by-laws of
the sanitary authority, I could not say with conviction that this is
anything more than a compliance. As they grow less used to squalor, no
doubt they cannot bear its offensiveness so well as of old; but we may
not infer from this fact that any new and positive aspirations towards a
comelier home-life have been born in them. The improvement is only one
of those negative changes that have been thrust upon them from the
outside.
Nor can anything better be said of their increasing conformity to the
requirements of the new thrift. I think it true that the wages are spent
more prudently than of old. The sight of a drunken man begins to be
unusual; he who does not belong to a "club" is looked upon as an
improvident fool; but to imagine the people thus parsimonious for the
pleasure of it is to imagine a vain thing. Their occasional outbursts of
extravagance and generosity go to show that their innermost taste has
not found a suitable outlet in wage-earning economy. That miserly
"thrift" which is preached to them as the whole duty of "the Poor"--what
attractions can it have for their human nature? If men practise it, they
do so under the compulsion of anxiety, of fear. Their acquiescence may
seem like a change; yet as it springs from no germinating tastes or
desires or inner initiative, so it acquires no true momentum. Not in
that, nor in any other submissive adaptation to the needs of the passing
moment, shall we see where the villagers are really rousing out of
stagnation into a new mode of life.
On the other hand, where their vitality goes out, under no necessity,
but of its own accord, to do something new just for the sake of doing
it, there a true growth is proceeding; and there are signs that this is
happening. Especially one notes three main directions in which, as I
think, the village is astir--three directions, coinciding with three
kinds of opportunity. The opportunities are those afforded, first by the
Church and other agencies of a missionary kind; second, by newspapers;
and third, by political agitation. In each of these directions the
village instincts appear to be finding something that they want, and to
be moving towards it spontaneously--for they are under no compulsion to
move. The invitations from the Church, it is true, never cease; but no
villager is obliged to accept them against his will, any more than a
horse need drink water put before him.
1. In estimating the influence of the Church (Dissent has but a small
following here) it should be remembered that until some time after the
enclosure of the common the village held no place of worship of any
denomination. Moreover, the comparatively few inhabitants of that time
were free from interference by rich people or by resident employers.
They had the valley to themselves; they had always lived as they liked,
and been as rough as they liked; and there must have been memories
amongst them--quite recent memories then--of the lawless life of other
heath-dwellers, their near neighbours, in the wide waste hollows of
Hindhead. We may therefore surmise that when the church was built a
sprinkling at least of the villagers were none too well pleased. This
may partly explain the sullen hostility of which the clergy are still
the objects in certain quarters of the village, and which the Pharisaism
of some of their friends does much to keep alive. The same causes may
have something to do with the fact that the majority of the labouring
men appear to take no interest at all in religion.
Still, there are more than a few young men, and of the old village stock
too, who yield very readily to the influences of the Church. A family
tradition no doubt predisposes them to do so; for, be it said, not all
of the old villagers were irreligious. Echoes of a rustic Christianity,
gentle and resigned as that which the Vicar of Wakefield taught to his
flock, may be heard to-day in the talk of aged men and women here and
there; and though that piety has gone rather out of fashion, the taste
for something like it survives in these young men. The Church attracts
them; they approve its ideas of decorous life; it is a school of good
manners to them, if not of high thinking, with the result that they
begin to be quite a different sort of people from their fathers and
grandfathers. A pleasant suavity and gentleness marks their behaviour.
They are greatly self-respecting. Their tendency is to adopt and live up
to the middle-class code of respectability.
Neither by temperament nor by outlook are they equipped for the hardship
of real labouring life. These are the men, rather, who get the lighter
work required by the residential people in the villa gardens; or they
fill odd places in the town, where character is wanted more than
strength or skill. They fill them well, too, in very trustworthy and
industrious fashion. A few of them have learnt trades, and are saving
money, as bricklayers, carpenters, clerks even. It was from the ranks of
this group that a young man emerged, some years ago, as a speculating
builder. He put up three or four cottages, and then came to grief; but I
never heard that anybody but himself suffered loss by the collapse of
his venture. He has left the neighbourhood, and I mention him now only
to exhibit the middle-class tendencies of his kind. You will not find
any of these men going to a public-house. The "Institute" caters for
them, with its decorous amusements--billiards, dominoes, cribbage; but
they do not much affect the Institute Reading Room; indeed, I believe
them to be intellectually very docile to authority. Opinions they have,
on questions of the day, but not opinions formed by much effort of their
own. The need of the village, as they have felt it, is less for mental
than for ethical help. They desire something to guide their conduct and
their pastimes, and this leads them to respond to the invitation of the
Church and its allied influences.
I have an impression, too, that indirectly, through their example,
others are affected by those influences who do not so consciously yield
to them; at any rate a softening of manners seems to be in progress in
the village. It is not much, perhaps; it is certainly very indefinite,
and no doubt there are other causes helping to further it; but, such as
it is, the chief credit for it is due to the lead given by the Church.
Indeed, no other agency has done anything at all in the way of proposing
to the people an art of living, a civilization, to replace that of the
old rustic days.
2. With few exceptions the newspapers--chiefly weeklies, but here and
there a daily--which come into the villagers' hands are of the "yellow
press" kind; but for once a good effect may be attributed to them. It
resembles that which, in a smaller way, springs from the opportunities
of travelling afforded by railways. Just as few of our people now are
wholly restricted in their ideas of the world to this valley and the
horizons visible from its sides, but the most of them, in excursion
holidays at least, have seen a little of the extent and variety of
England, so, thanks to the cheap press, ideas and information about the
whole world are finding their way into the cottages of the valley; and
at the present stage it is not greatly important that the information is
less trustworthy than it might be. The main thing is that the village
mind should stretch itself, and look beyond the village; and this is
certainly happening. The mere material of thought, the quantity of
subjects in which curiosity may take an interest, is immeasurably
greater than it was even twenty years ago; and, if but sleepily as yet,
still the curiosity of the villagers begins to wake up. However superior
you may think yourself, you must not now approach any of the younger
labouring men in the assumption that they have not heard of the subject
you speak of. The coal-heaver, whose poverty of ideas I described
farther back, was talking to me (after that chapter was written) about
the life of coal-miners. He told of the poor wages they get for their
dangerous work; he discoursed of mining royalties, and explained some
points as to freightage and railway charges; and he was drifting towards
the subject of Trades Unions when our short walk home together came to
an end. Of course in this case the man's calling had given a direction
to his curiosity; but there are many subjects upon which the whole
village may be supposed to be getting ideas. Shackleton and the South
Pole are probably household words in most of the cottages; it may be
taken for granted that the wonders of flying machines are being eagerly
watched; it must not be taken for granted at all that the villagers are
ignorant about disease germs, and the causes of consumption, and the
spreading of plague by rats. Long after the King's visit to India, ideas
of Indian scenes will linger in the valley; and presently, when the
Panama Canal nears completion, and pictures of it begin to be given in
the papers, there will hardly be a labourer but is more or less familiar
with the main features of the work, and is more or less aware of its
immense political and commercial importance.
Thus the field of vision opens out vastly, ideas coming into it in
enough variety and abundance to begin throwing side-lights upon one
another and to illumine the whole village outlook upon life. And while
the field widens, the people are winning their way to a greater power of
surveying it intelligently; for one must notice how the newspapers,
besides giving information, encourage an acceptance of non-parochial
views. The reader of them is taken into the public confidence. Instead
of a narrow village tradition, national opinions are at his disposal,
and he is helped to see, as it were from the outside, the general aspect
of questions which, but for the papers, he would only know by his
individual experience from the inside. To give one illustration: the
labourer out of work understands now more than his own particular
misfortunes from that cause. He is discovering that unemployment is a
world-wide evil, which spreads like an infectious disease, and may be
treated accordingly. It is no small change to note, for in such ways,
all unawares, the people fall into the momentous habit of thinking about
abstract ideas which would have been beyond the range of their
forefathers' intellectual power; and with the ideas, their sentiments
gain in dignity, because the newspapers, with whatever ulterior purpose,
still make their appeal to high motives of justice, or public spirit, or
public duty. Fed on this fare, a national or standardized sentiment is
growing amongst the villagers, in place of the local prejudices which,
in earlier times, varied from valley to valley and allowed the people of
one village occasionally to look upon those in the next as their natural
enemies.
3. Once or twice before I have mentioned, as characteristic of the
peasant outlook, the fatalism which allowed the poor to accept their
position as part of the unalterable scheme of the universe, and I
associated the attitude with their general failure to think in terms of
cause and effect. It would seem that this settled state of mind is
slowly giving way under the political excitement of the last ten years.
I cannot say, as yet, that anything worthy to be called hope has dawned
upon the cottagers; but an inclination to look into things for
themselves is discernible.
The change, such as it is, was begun--or, let us say, the ground was
prepared for its beginning--by the distress of unemployment which
followed the South African War; for then was bred that great discontent
which came to the surface at last in the General Election of 1906. I
well remember how, on the day when the Liberal victory in this division
was made known, the labouring men, standing about with nothing to do,
gladdened at the prospects of the relief which they supposed must at
once follow, and how their hungry eyes sparkled with excitement. "Time
there _was_ a change," one of them said to me, "with so many o' we poor
chaps out o' work." Then, as the months went by, and things worsened
rather than bettered, reaction set in. "'Twas bad enough under the
Conservatives, but 'tis ten times worse under the Liberals." That was
the opinion I heard expressed, often enough to suggest that it was
passing into a by-word. So, to all appearance, the old apathy was
falling upon the people, as no doubt it had often done before after a
momentary gleam of hope, confirming them in the belief that, whatever
happened, it would not, as they said, "make much odds to the likes o'
we."
This time, however, a new factor in the situation had been introduced,
which tended to keep alive in village minds the possibility that
Poverty, instead of being the act of God, was an effect of causes which
might be removed. The gospel of "Tariff Reform" promised so much as to
make it worth the people's while to pay a little attention to politics.
Men who had never before in their lives tried to follow a logical
argument began at last to store up in their memory reasons and figures
in support of the fascinating doctrine, and if they were puzzle-headed
over it, they were not more so than their leaders. Besides, in their
case merely to have begun is much. Look at the situation. During six or
seven years, there has been before the village a vision of better times
to be realized by political action, and by support of a programme or a
policy, and the interest which the people have taken in it marks a
definite step forwards from the lethargy of stagnation in which they had
previously been sunk. True, this particular vision seems fading now.
Just when it ought to have been growing clearer and nearer, if it was to
justify itself, it becomes dim and remote, and my neighbours, I fancy,
are reverting to their customary attitude of aloofness from party
politics; but I should be much surprised to find that it is quite in
the old spirit. For the old spirit was one of indifference; it rested in
the persuasion that politicians of either side were only seeking their
own ends, and that the game was a rich man's game, in which the poor
were not meant to share. That, however, is hardly the persuasion now. If
the labourers hold aloof, keeping their own counsel, it is no longer as
outsiders, but as interested watchers, ready to take part strongly
whenever a programme shall be put before them that deserves their help.
I have suggested that the tendency of those who are influenced by the
Church is towards a middle-class outlook, and that their interest
centres in developments of taste and conduct rather than of intellect
and opinion. Nothing so definite can be said as to the effects of
newspaper reading and political excitement; nevertheless, I am conscious
of effects everywhere present. The labourers whose interests turn in
this direction seem to be treading in the footsteps of the skilled
artisans in the town, towards ambitions not in all respects identical
with those of the middle-classes. Of course the unskilled labourer
earning eighteen shillings a week has not equal opportunities with the
man who earns thirty-six; he cannot buy the newspapers and occasional
books to which the other treats himself and his children, and in general
he is less well informed. But the same grave and circumspect talk goes
down with the one as with the other; to both the same topics are
interesting.
And for me the probability of a development for our village labourers
similar to that of the town artisans is heightened, by recollection of
what artisans themselves were like, say a quarter of a century ago. I
knew a few of these very well. As craftsmen they were as able as those
of to-day; but their crafts had not taught them to think. While they
worked by rule of thumb, outside their work they were as full of
prejudices, and as unable to grasp reasons, as any of my village
neighbours. The most of them, in fact, had been born in villages near
the town, and retained a good deal of the rural outlook. Their gardens,
and the harvest--yes, and odd scraps of very ancient folk-lore which
they still believed--occupied an important place in their attention.
They had quite the old attitude towards their employers; quite the old
stubborn distrust of innovations in their work. When, however, you turn
to their successors, you find a difference. I will not say that they are
less able than their predecessors, or less trustworthy; but they have
broken away from all that old simplicity of mind; they are thinking for
themselves, and informing themselves, with an unresting and unhasting
interest, about what the rest of the world knows. It fills me with
shame, when I consider my own so much better opportunities, to find how
much these hard-working men have learnt, and with what cool tenacity
they think. Where they are most wanting is in enthusiasm and the hopes
that breed it; or say, in belief that the world may yet change for the
better--though here, too, political excitement is doing its fateful
work. I find them very jealous for their children to do well: free
education has not sapped their sense of parental responsibility, but has
inspired them with ambitions, though not for themselves. For themselves
they are conscious of a want of that book-learned culture which the
practice of their skilled crafts cannot bestow, and this makes them
suspicious of those who have it and diffident in conversation with them.
But underneath this reticence and willingness to hear dwells a quiet
scepticism which has no docility in it, and is not to be persuaded out
of its way by any eloquence or any emotion. Missionary influences, like
those of church and chapel, make but little impression on these
quiet-eyed men. The tendency is towards a scientific rather than an
aesthetic outlook.