We have seen in the introduction how, simultaneously with the small
bourgeoisie and the modest independence of the former workers, the small
peasantry also was ruined when the former Union of industrial and
agricultural work was dissolved, the abandoned fields thrown together
into large farms, and the small peasants superseded by the overwhelming
competition of the large farmers. Instead of being landowners or
leaseholders, as they had been hitherto, they were now obliged to hire
themselves as labourers to the large farmers or the landlords. For a
time this position was endurable, though a deterioration in comparison
with their former one. The extension of industry kept pace with the
increase of population until the progress of manufacture began to assume
a slower pace, and the perpetual improvement of machinery made it
impossible for manufacture to absorb the whole surplus of the
agricultural population. From this time forward, the distress which had
hitherto existed only in the manufacturing districts, and then only at
times, appeared in the agricultural districts too. The twenty-five
years' struggle with France came to an end at about the same time; the
diminished production at the various seats of the wars, the shutting off
of imports, and the necessity of providing for the British army in Spain,
had given English agriculture an artificial prosperity, and had besides
withdrawn to the army vast numbers of workers from their ordinary
occupations. This check upon the import trade, the opportunity for
exportation, and the military demand for workers, now suddenly came to an
end; and the necessary consequence was what the English call agricultural
distress. The farmers had to sell their corn at low prices, and could,
therefore, pay only low wages. In 1815, in order to keep up prices, the
Corn Laws were passed, prohibiting the importation of corn so long as the
price of wheat continued less than 80 shillings per quarter. These
naturally ineffective laws were several times modified, but did not
succeed in ameliorating the distress in the agricultural districts. All
that they did was to change the disease, which, under free competition
from abroad, would have assumed an acute form, culminating in a series of
crises, into a chronic one which bore heavily but uniformly upon the farm
labourers.
For a time after the rise of the agricultural proletariat, the
patriarchal relation between master and man, which was being destroyed
for manufacture, developed here the same relation of the farmer to his
hands which still exists almost everywhere in Germany. So long as this
lasted, the poverty of the farm hands was less conspicuous; they shared
the fate of the farmer, and were discharged only in cases of the direst
necessity. But now all this is changed. The farm hands have become day
labourers almost everywhere, are employed only when needed by the
farmers, and, therefore, often have no work for weeks together,
especially in winter. In the patriarchal time, the hands and their
families lived on the farm, and their children grew up there, the farmer
trying to find occupation on the spot for the oncoming generation; day
labourers, then, were the exception, not the rule. Thus there was, on
every farm, a larger number of hands than were strictly necessary. It
became, therefore, the interest of the farmers to dissolve this relation,
drive the farm hand from the farm, and transform him into a day labourer.
This took place pretty generally towards the year 1830, and the
consequence was that the hitherto latent over-population was set free,
the rate of wages forced down, and the poor-rate enormously increased.
From this time the agricultural districts became the headquarters of
permanent, as the manufacturing districts had long been of periodic,
pauperism; and the modification of the Poor Law was the first measure
which the State was obliged to apply to the daily increasing
impoverishment of the country parishes. Moreover, the constant extension
of farming on a large scale, the introduction of threshing and other
machines, and the employment of women and children (which is now so
general that its effects have recently been investigated by a special
official commission), threw a large number of men out of employment. It
is manifest, therefore, that here, too, the system of industrial
production has made its entrance, by means of farming on a large scale,
by the abolition of the patriarchal relation, which is of the greatest
importance just here, by the introduction of machinery, steam, and the
labour of women and children. In so doing, it has swept the last and
most stationary portion of working humanity into the revolutionary
movement. But the longer agriculture had remained stationary, the
heavier now became the burden upon the worker, the more violently broke
forth the results of the disorganisation of the old social fabric. The
"over-population" came to light all at once, and could not, as in the
manufacturing districts, be absorbed by the needs of an increasing
production. New factories could always be built, if there were consumers
for their products, but new land could not be created. The cultivation
of waste common land was too daring a speculation for the bad times
following the conclusion of peace. The necessary consequence was that
the competition of the workers among each other reached the highest point
of intensity, and wages fell to the minimum. So long as the old Poor Law
existed, the workers received relief from the rates; wages naturally fell
still lower, because the farmers forced the largest possible number of
labourers to claim relief. The higher poor-rate, necessitated by the
surplus population, was only increased by this measure, and the new Poor
Law, of which we shall have more to say later, was now enacted as a
remedy. But this did not improve matters. Wages did not rise, the
surplus population could not be got rid of, and the cruelty of the new
law did but serve to embitter the people to the utmost. Even the poor-
rate, which diminished at first after the passage of the new law,
attained its old height after a few years. Its only effect was that
whereas previously three to four million half paupers had existed, a
million of total paupers now appeared, and the rest, still half paupers,
merely went without relief. The poverty in the agricultural districts
has increased every year. The people live in the greatest want, whole
families must struggle along with 6, 7, or 8 shillings a week, and at
times have nothing. Let us hear a description of this population given
by a Liberal member of Parliament as early as 1830. {264}
"An English agricultural labourer and an English pauper, these words
are synonymous. His father was a pauper and his mother's milk
contained no nourishment. From his earliest childhood he had bad
food, and only half enough to still his hunger, and even yet he
undergoes the pangs of unsatisfied hunger almost all the time that he
is not asleep. He is half clad, and has not more fire than barely
suffices to cook his scanty meal. And so cold and damp are always at
home with him, and leave him only in fine weather. He is married, but
he knows nothing of the joys of the husband and father. His wife and
children, hungry, rarely warm, often ill and helpless, always careworn
and hopeless like himself, are naturally grasping, selfish, and
troublesome, and so, to use his own expression, he hates the sight of
them, and enters his cot only because it offers him a trifle more
shelter from rain and wind than a hedge. He must support his family,
though he cannot do so, whence come beggary, deceit of all sorts,
ending in fully developed craftiness. If he were so inclined, he yet
has not the courage which makes of the more energetic of his class
wholesale poachers and smugglers. But he pilfers when occasion
offers, and teaches his children to lie and steal. His abject and
submissive demeanour towards his wealthy neighbours shows that they
treat him roughly and with suspicion; hence he fears and hates them,
but he never will injure them by force. He is depraved through and
through, too far gone to possess even the strength of despair. His
wretched existence is brief, rheumatism and asthma bring him to the
workhouse, where he will draw his last breath without a single
pleasant recollection, and will make room for another luckless wretch
to live and die as he has done."
Our author adds that besides this class of agricultural labourers, there
is still another, somewhat more energetic and better endowed physically,
mentally, and morally; those, namely, who live as wretchedly, but were
not born to this condition. These he represents as better in their
family life, but smugglers and poachers who get into frequent bloody
conflicts with the gamekeepers and revenue officers of the coast, become
more embittered against society during the prison life which they often
undergo, and so stand abreast of the first class in their hatred of the
property-holders. "And," he says, in closing, "this whole class is
called, by courtesy, the bold peasantry of England."
Down to the present time, this description applies to the greater portion
of the agricultural labourers of England. In June, 1844, the _Times_
sent a correspondent into the agricultural districts to report upon the
condition of this class, and the report which he furnished agreed wholly
with the foregoing. In certain districts wages were not more than six
shillings a week; not more, that is, that in many districts in Germany,
while the prices of all the necessaries of life are at least twice as
high. What sort of life these people lead may be imagined; their food
scanty and bad, their clothing ragged, their dwellings cramped and
desolate, small, wretched huts, with no comforts whatsoever; and, for
young people, lodging-houses, where men and women are scarcely separated,
and illegitimate intercourse thus provoked. One or two days without work
in the course of a month must inevitably plunge such people into the
direst want. Moreover, they cannot combine to raise wages, because they
are scattered, and if one alone refuses to work for low wages, there are
dozens out of work, or supported by the rates, who are thankful for the
most trifling offer, while to him who declines work, every other form of
relief than the hated workhouse is refused by the Poor Law guardians as
to a lazy vagabond; for the guardians are the very farmers from whom or
from whose neighbours and acquaintances alone he can get work. And not
from one or two special districts of England do such reports come. On
the contrary, the distress is general, equally great in the North and
South, the East and West. The condition of the labourers in Suffolk and
Norfolk corresponds with that of Devonshire, Hampshire, and Sussex. Wages
are as low in Dorsetshire and Oxfordshire as in Kent and Surrey,
Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire.
One especially barbaric cruelty against the working-class is embodied in
the Game Laws, which are more stringent than in any other country, while
the game is plentiful beyond all conception. The English peasant who,
according to the old English custom and tradition, sees in poaching only
a natural and noble expression of courage and daring, is stimulated still
further by the contrast between his own poverty and the _car tel est
notre plaisir_ of the lord, who preserves thousands of hares and game
birds for his private enjoyment. The labourer lays snares, or shoots
here and there a piece of game. It does not injure the landlord as a
matter of fact, for he has a vast superfluity, and it brings the poacher
a meal for himself and his starving family. But if he is caught he goes
to jail, and for a second offence receives at the least seven years'
transportation. From the severity of these laws arise the frequent
bloody conflicts with the gamekeepers, which lead to a number of murders
every year. Hence the post of gamekeeper is not only dangerous, but of ill-
repute and despised. Last year, in two cases, gamekeepers shot
themselves rather than continue their work. Such is the moderate price
at which the landed aristocracy purchases the noble sport of shooting;
but what does it matter to the lords of the soil? Whether one or two
more or less of the "surplus" live or die matters nothing, and even if in
consequence of the Game Laws half the surplus population could be put out
of the way, it would be all the better for the other half--according to
the philanthropy of the English landlords.
Although the conditions of life in the country, the isolated dwellings,
the stability of the surroundings and occupations, and consequently of
the thoughts, are decidedly unfavourable to all development, yet poverty
and want bear their fruits even here. The manufacturing and mining
proletariat emerged early from the first stage of resistance to our
social order, the direct rebellion of the individual by the perpetration
of crime; but the peasants are still in this stage at the present time.
Their favourite method of social warfare is incendiarism. In the winter
which followed the Revolution of July, in 1830-31, these incendiarisms
first became general. Disturbances had taken place, and the whole region
of Sussex and the adjacent counties has been brought into a state of
excitement in October, in consequence of an increase of the coastguard
(which made smuggling much more difficult and "ruined the coast"--in the
words of a farmer), changes in the Poor Law, low wages, and the
introduction of machinery. In the winter the farmers' hay and
corn-stacks were burnt in the fields, and the very barns and stables
under their windows. Nearly every night a couple of such fires blazed
up, and spread terror among the farmers and landlords. The offenders
were rarely discovered, and the workers attributed the incendiarism to a
mythical person whom they named "Swing." Men puzzled their brains to
discover who this Swing could be and whence this rage among the poor of
the country districts. Of the great motive power, Want, Oppression, only
a single person here and there thought, and certainly no one in the
agricultural districts. Since that year the incendiarisms have been
repeated every winter, with each recurring unemployed season of the
agricultural labourers. In the winter of 1843-44, they were once more
extraordinarily frequent. There lies before me a series of numbers of
the _Northern Star_ of that time, each one of which contains a report of
several incendiarisms, stating in each case its authority. The numbers
wanting in the following list I have not at hand; but they, too,
doubtless contain a number of cases. Moreover, such a sheet cannot
possibly ascertain all the cases which occur. November 25th, 1843, two
cases; several earlier ones are discussed. December 16th, in
Bedfordshire, general excitement for a fortnight past in consequence of
frequent incendiarisms, of which several take place every night. Two
great farmhouses burnt down within the last few days; in Cambridgeshire
four great farmhouses, Hertfordshire one, and besides these, fifteen
other incendiarisms in different districts. December 30th, in Norfolk
one, Suffolk two, Essex two, Cheshire one, Lancashire one, Derby,
Lincoln, and the South twelve. January 6th, 1844, in all ten. January
13th, seven. January 20th, four incendiarisms. From this time forward,
three or four incendiarisms per week are reported, and not as formerly
until the spring only, but far into July and August. And that crimes of
this sort are expected to increase in the approaching hard season of 1844-
45, the English papers already indicate.
What do my readers think of such a state of things in the quiet, idyllic
country districts of England? Is this social war, or is it not? Is it a
natural state of things which can last? Yet here the landlords and
farmers are as dull and stupefied, as blind to everything which does not
directly put money into their pockets, as the manufacturers and the
bourgeoisie in general in the manufacturing districts. If the latter
promise their employees salvation through the repeal of the Corn Laws,
the landlords and a great part of the farmers promise theirs Heaven upon
earth from the maintenance of the same laws. But in neither case do the
property-holders succeed in winning the workers to the support of their
pet hobby. Like the operatives, the agricultural labourers are
thoroughly indifferent to the repeal or non-repeal of the Corn Laws. Yet
the question is an important one for both. That is to say--by the repeal
of the Corn Laws, free competition, the present social economy is carried
to its extreme point; all further development within the present order
comes to an end, and the only possible step farther is a radical
transformation of the social order. {268} For the agricultural labourers
the question has, further, the following important bearing: Free
importation of corn involves (how, I cannot explain _here_) the
emancipation of the farmers from the landlords, their transformation into
Liberals. Towards this consummation the Anti-Corn Law League has already
largely contributed, and this is its only real service. When the farmers
become Liberals, _i.e_., conscious bourgeois, the agricultural labourers
will inevitably become Chartists and Socialists; the first change
involves the second. And that a new movement is already beginning among
the agricultural labourers is proved by a meeting which Earl Radnor, a
Liberal landlord, caused to be held in October, 1844, near Highworth,
where his estates lie, to pass resolutions against the Corn Laws. At
this meeting, the labourers, perfectly indifferent as to these laws,
demanded something wholly different, namely small holdings, at low rent,
for themselves, telling Earl Radnor all sorts of bitter truths to his
face. Thus the movement of the working-class is finding its way into the
remote, stationary, mentally dead agricultural districts; and, thanks to
the general distress, will soon be as firmly rooted and energetic as in
the manufacturing districts. {269} As to the religious state of the
agricultural labourers, they are, it is true, more pious than the
manufacturing operatives; but they, too, are greatly at odds with the
Church--for in these districts members of the Established Church almost
exclusively are to be found. A correspondent of the _Morning Chronicle_,
who, over the signature, "One who has whistled at the plough," reports
his tour through the agricultural districts, relates, among other things,
the following conversation with some labourers after service: "I asked
one of these people whether the preacher of the day was their own
clergyman. "Yes, blast him! He is our own parson, and begs the whole
time. He's been always a-begging as long as I've known him." (The
sermon had been upon a mission to the heathen.) "And as long as I've
known him too," added another; "and I never knew a parson but what was
begging for this or the other." "Yes," said a woman, who had just come
out of the church, "and look how wages are going down, and see the rich
vagabonds with whom the parsons eat and drink and hunt. So help me God,
we are more fit to starve in the workhouse than pay the parsons as go
among the heathen." "And why," said another, "don't they send the
parsons as drones every day in Salisbury Cathedral, for nobody but the
bare stones? Why don't _they_ go among the heathen?" "They don't go,"
said the old man whom I had first asked, "because they are rich, they
have all the land they need, they want the money in order to get rid of
the poor parsons. I know what they want. I know them too long for
that." "But, good friends," I asked, "you surely do not always come out
of the church with such bitter feelings towards the preacher? Why do you
go at all?" "What for do we go?" said the woman. "We must, if we do not
want to lose everything, work and all, we must." I learned later that
they had certain little privileges of fire-wood and potato land (which
they paid for!) on condition of going to church." After describing their
poverty and ignorance, the correspondent closes by saying: "And now I
boldly assert that the condition of these people, their poverty, their
hatred of the church, their external submission and inward bitterness
against the ecclesiastical dignitaries, is the rule among the country
parishes of England, and its opposite is the exception."
If the peasantry of England shows the consequences which a numerous
agricultural proletariat in connection with large farming involves for
the country districts, Wales illustrates the ruin of the small holders.
If the English country parishes reproduce the antagonism between
capitalist and proletarian, the state of the Welsh peasantry corresponds
to the progressive ruin of the small bourgeoisie in the towns. In Wales
are to be found, almost exclusively, small holders, who cannot with like
profit sell their products as cheaply as the larger, more favourably
situated English farmers, with whom, however, they are obliged to
compete. Moreover, in some places the quality of the land admits of the
raising of live stock only, which is but slightly profitable. Then, too,
these Welsh farmers, by reason of their separate nationality, which they
retain pertinaciously, are much more stationary than the English farmers.
But the competition among themselves and with their English neighbours
(and the increased mortgages upon their land consequent upon this) has
reduced them to such a state that they can scarcely live at all; and
because they have not recognised the true cause of their wretched
condition, they attribute it to all sorts of small causes, such as high
tolls, etc, which do check the development of agriculture and commerce,
but are taken into account as standing charges by every one who takes a
holding, and are therefore really ultimately paid by the landlord. Here,
too, the new Poor Law is cordially hated by the tenants, who hover in
perpetual danger of coming under its sway. In 1843, the famous "Rebecca"
disturbances broke out among the Welsh peasantry; the men dressed in
women's clothing, blackened their faces, and fell in armed crowds upon
the toll-gates, destroyed them amidst great rejoicing and firing of guns,
demolished the toll-keepers' houses, wrote threatening letters in the
name of the imaginary "Rebecca," and once went so far as to storm the
workhouse of Carmarthen. Later, when the militia was called out and the
police strengthened, the peasants drew them off with wonderful skill upon
false scents, demolished toll-gates at one point while the militia, lured
by false signal bugles, was marching in some opposite direction; and
betook themselves finally, when the police was too thoroughly reinforced,
to single incendiarisms and attempts at murder. As usual, these greater
crimes were the end of the movement. Many withdrew from disapproval,
others from fear, and peace was restored of itself. The Government
appointed a commission to investigate the affair and its causes, and
there was an end of the matter. The poverty of the peasantry continues,
however, and will one day, since it cannot under existing circumstances
grow less, but must go on intensifying, produce more serious
manifestations than these humorous Rebecca masquerades.
If England illustrates the results of the system of farming on a large
scale and Wales on a small one, Ireland exhibits the consequences of
overdividing the soil. The great mass of the population of Ireland
consists of small tenants who occupy a sorry hut without partitions, and
a potato patch just large enough to supply them most scantily with
potatoes through the winter. In consequence of the great competition
which prevails among these small tenants, the rent has reached an unheard-
of height, double, treble, and quadruple that paid in England. For every
agricultural labourer seeks to become a tenant-farmer, and though the
division of land has gone so far, there still remain numbers of labourers
in competition for plots. Although in Great Britain 32,000,000 acres of
land are cultivated, and in Ireland but 14,000,000; although Great
Britain produces agricultural products to the value of 150,000,000
pounds, and Ireland of but 36,000,000 pounds, there are in Ireland 75,000
agricultural proletarians _more_ than in the neighbouring island. {272a}
How great the competition for land in Ireland must be is evident from
this extraordinary disproportion, especially when one reflects that the
labourers in Great Britain are living in the utmost distress. The
consequence of this competition is that it is impossible for the tenants
to live much better than the labourers, by reason of the high rents paid.
The Irish people is thus held in crushing poverty, from which it cannot
free itself under our present social conditions. These people live in
the most wretched clay huts, scarcely good enough for cattle-pens, have
scant food all winter long, or, as the report above quoted expresses it,
they have potatoes half enough thirty weeks in the year, and the rest of
the year nothing. When the time comes in the spring at which this
provision reaches its end, or can no longer be used because of its
sprouting, wife and children go forth to beg and tramp the country with
their kettle in their hands. Meanwhile the husband, after planting
potatoes for the next year, goes in search of work either in Ireland or
England, and returns at the potato harvest to his family. This is the
condition in which nine-tenths of the Irish country folks live. They are
poor as church mice, wear the most wretched rags, and stand upon the
lowest plane of intelligence possible in a half-civilised country.
According to the report quoted, there are, in a population of 8.5
millions, 585,000 heads of families in a state of total destitution; and
according to other authorities, cited by Sheriff Alison, {272b} there are
in Ireland 2,300,000 persons who could not live without public or private
assistance--or 27 per cent. of the whole population paupers!
The cause of this poverty lies in the existing social conditions,
especially in competition here found in the form of the subdivision of
the soil. Much effort has been spent in finding other causes. It has
been asserted that the relation of the tenant to the landlord who lets
his estate in large lots to tenants, who again have their sub-tenants,
and sub-sub-tenants, in turn, so that often ten middlemen come between
the landlord and the actual cultivator--it has been asserted that the
shameful law which gives the landlord the right of expropriating the
cultivator who may have paid his rent duly, if the first tenant fails to
pay the landlord, that this law is to blame for all this poverty. But
all this determines only the form in which the poverty manifests itself.
Make the small tenant a landowner himself and what follows? The majority
could not live upon their holdings even if they had no rent to pay, and
any slight improvement which might take place would be lost again in a
few years in consequence of the rapid increase of population. The
children would then live to grow up under the improved conditions who now
die in consequence of poverty in early childhood. From another side
comes the assertion that the shameless oppression inflicted by the
English is the cause of the trouble. It is the cause of the somewhat
earlier appearance of this poverty, but not of the poverty itself. Or
the blame is laid on the Protestant Church forced upon a Catholic nation;
but divide among the Irish what the Church takes from them, and it does
not reach six shillings a head. Besides, tithes are a tax upon landed
property, not upon the tenant, though he may nominally pay them; now,
since the Commutation Bill of 1838, the landlord pays the tithes directly
and reckons so much higher rent, so that the tenant is none the better
off. And in the same way a hundred other causes of this poverty are
brought forward, all proving as little as these. This poverty is the
result of our social conditions; apart from these, causes may be found
for the manner in which it manifests itself, but not for the fact of its
existence. That poverty manifests itself in Ireland thus and not
otherwise, is owing to the character of the people, and to their
historical development. The Irish are a people related in their whole
character to the Latin nations, to the French, and especially to the
Italians. The bad features of their character we have already had
depicted by Carlyle. Let us now hear an Irishman, who at least comes
nearer to the truth than Carlyle, with his prejudice in favour of the
Teutonic character: {273}
"They are restless, yet indolent, clever and indiscreet, stormy,
impatient, and improvident; brave by instinct, generous without much
reflection, quick to revenge and forgive insults, to make and to
renounce friendships, gifted with genius prodigally, sparingly with
judgment."
With the Irish, feeling and passion predominate; reason must bow before
them. Their sensuous, excitable nature prevents reflection and quiet,
persevering activity from reaching development--such a nation is utterly
unfit for manufacture as now conducted. Hence they held fast to
agriculture, and remained upon the lowest plane even of that. With the
small subdivisions of land, which were not here artificially created, as
in France and on the Rhine, by the division of great estates, but have
existed from time immemorial, an improvement of the soil by the
investment of capital was not to be thought of; and it would, according
to Alison, require 120 million pounds sterling to bring the soil up to
the not very high state of fertility already attained in England. The
English immigration, which might have raised the standard of Irish
civilisation, has contented itself with the most brutal plundering of the
Irish people; and while the Irish, by their immigration into England,
have furnished England a leaven which will produce its own results in the
future, they have little for which to be thankful to the English
immigration.
The attempts of the Irish to save themselves from their present ruin, on
the one hand, take the form of crimes. These are the order of the day in
the agricultural districts, and are nearly always directed against the
most immediate enemies, the landlord's agents, or their obedient
servants, the Protestant intruders, whose large farms are made up of the
potato patches of hundreds of ejected families. Such crimes are
especially frequent in the South and West. On the other hand, the Irish
hope for relief by means of the agitation for the repeal of the
Legislative Union with England. From all the foregoing, it is clear that
the uneducated Irish must see in the English their worst enemies; and
their first hope of improvement in the conquest of national independence.
But quite as clear is it, too, that Irish distress cannot be removed by
any Act of Repeal. Such an Act would, however, at once lay bare the fact
that the cause of Irish misery, which now seems to come from abroad, is
really to be found at home. Meanwhile, it is an open question whether
the accomplishment of repeal will be necessary to make this clear to the
Irish. Hitherto, neither Chartism nor Socialism has had marked success
in Ireland.
I close my observations upon Ireland at this point the more readily, as
the Repeal Agitation of 1843 and O'Connell's trial have been the means of
making the Irish distress more and more known in Germany.
We have now followed the proletariat of the British Islands through all
branches of its activity, and found it everywhere living in want and
misery under totally inhuman conditions. We have seen discontent arise
with the rise of the proletariat, grow, develop, and organise; we have
seen open bloodless and bloody battles of the proletariat against the
bourgeoisie. We have investigated the principles according to which the
fate, the hopes, and fears of the proletariat are determined, and we have
found that there is no prospect of improvement in their condition.
We have had an opportunity, here and there, of observing the conduct of
the bourgeoisie towards the proletariat, and we have found that it
considers only itself, has only its own advantage in view. However, in
order not to be unjust, let us investigate its mode of action somewhat
more exactly.