"OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US"
We have forgotten, else it would be impossible they should try to befool
us. We have forgotten the terrible years when England lay cold and
starving under the clutch of the landlords and their taxes on food.
Terror is soon forgotten, for otherwise life could not endure. Not
seventy years have gone since that clutch was loosened, but the iron
which entered into the souls of our fathers is no more remembered. How
many old labourers, old operatives, or miners are now left to recall the
wretchedness of that toiling and starving childhood before the corn-tax
was removed? Few are remaining now, and they speak little and will soon
be gone. The horror of it is scattered like the night, and we think no
more of it, nor imagine its reality. It seems very long ago, like
Waterloo or the coach to York--so long ago that we can almost hope it
was not true.
And yet our fathers have told us of it. They and their fathers lived
through it at its worst. Only six years have passed since Mrs. Cobden
Unwin collected the evidence of aged labourers up and down the country,
and issued their piteous memories in the book called _The Hungry
'Forties_. Ill-spelt, full of mistakes, the letters are stronger
documents than the historian's eloquence. In every detail of misery, one
letter agrees with the other. In one after another we read of the
quartern loaf ranging from 7_d_. to 11-1/2_d_., and heavy, sticky,
stringy bread at that; or we read of the bean porridge or grated potato
that was their chief food; or, if they were rather better off, they told
of oatmeal and a dash of red herring--one red herring among three people
was thought a luxury. And then there was the tea--sixpence an ounce, and
one ounce to last a family for a week, eked out with the scrapings of
burnt crusts to give the water a colour. One man told how his parents
went to eat raw snails in the fields. Another said the look of a
butcher's shop was all the meat they ever got. "A ungry belly makes a
man desprit," wrote one, but for poaching a pheasant the hungry man was
imprisoned fourteen years. Seven shillings to nine shillings a week was
the farm labourer's wage, and it took twenty-six shillings then to buy
the food that seven would buy now. What a vivid and heartrending picture
of cottage life under the landlord's tax is given in one old man's
memory of his childish hunger and his mother's pitiful self-denial! "We
was not allowed free speech," he writes, "so I would just pull mother's
face when at meals, and then she would say, 'Boy, I can't eat this
crust,' and O! the joy it would bring my little heart."
We have forgotten it. Wretched as is the daily life of a large part of
our working people--the only people who really count in a country's
prosperity--we can no longer realise what it was when wages were so low
and food so dear that the struggle with starvation never ceased. But in
those days there were men who saw and realised it. The poor die and
leave no record. Their labour is consumed, their bodies rot unnamed, and
their habitations are swept away. They do not tell their public secret,
and at the most their existence is recorded in the registers of the
parish, the workhouse, or the gaol. But from time to time men have
arisen with the heart to see and the gift of speech, and in the years
when the oppression of the landlords was at its worst a few such men
arose. We do not listen to them now, for no one cares to hear of misery.
And we do not listen, because most of them wrote in verse, and verse is
not liked unless it tells of love or beauty or the sticky pathos of
drawing-room songs. But it so happens that two of the first who saw and
spoke also sang of love and beauty with a power and sweetness that
compel us to listen still. And so, in turning their well-known pages, we
suddenly come upon things called "The Masque of Anarchy" or "The Age of
Bronze," and, with a moment's wonder what they are all about, we pass on
to "The Sensitive Plant," or "When We Two Parted." As we pass, we may
just glance at the verses and read:
"What is Freedom?--ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well--
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs....
'Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak--
They are dying whilst I speak."
Or, turning on, perhaps, in search of the "Ode to the West Wind," we
casually notice the song beginning:
"Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay you low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat--nay, drink your blood?"
And so to the conclusion:
"With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre."
Or else, in looking once more for that exquisite scene between Haidée
and Don Juan on the beach, we fall unawares upon these lines:
"Year after year they voted cent. per cent.,
Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions--why? for rent!
They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant
To die for England--why then live?--for rent!
* * * * *
And will they not repay the treasures lent?
No; down with everything, and up with rent!
Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent,
Being, end, aim, religion--rent, rent, rent!"
The men who uttered such lines were driven from their class, their
homes, and their country. They were despised and hated, like all who
protest against oppression and remind the smug world of uncomfortable
things. But they were great poets. One of them was our sweetest singer,
the other was, when he wrote, the most conspicuous figure in Europe, and
the most shattering force. Even England, which cares so little for her
greatest inheritance of passionate intellect, cannot yet forget them.
But others who sang the same terrible theme she has long forgotten, or
she keeps them only on the shelves of curious and dusty investigators.
Such men, I mean, as Ebenezer Elliot, Ebenezer Jones, Ernest Jones,
Thomas Cooper, William James Linton, and Gerald Massey, who so lately
died.
They were not high-born, nor were they shining poets like the twin stars
of freedom whom I have quoted. Little scholarship was theirs, little
perfection of song. Some had taught themselves their letters at the
forge, some in the depths of the mine, some sang their most daring lines
in prison cells where they were not allowed even to write down the
words. Nearly all knew poverty and hunger at first hand; nearly all were
persecuted for righteousness' sake. For maintaining the cause of the
poor and the helpless they were mocked and reviled; scorn was their
reward. The governing classes whose comfort they disturbed wished them
dead; so did the self-righteous classes whose conscience they ruffled.
That is the common fate of any man or woman who probes a loathsome evil,
too long skimmed over. The peculiarity of these men was that, when they
were driven to speak, they spoke in lines that flew on wings through the
country. Indignation made their verse, and the burning memory of the
wrongs they had seen gave it a power beyond its own expression. Which
shall we recall of those ghostly poems, once so quick with flame? Still,
at moments of deep distress or public wrong-doing, we may hear the echo
of the Corn-law Rhymer's anthem:
"When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy! when?
Not kings and lords, but nations!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!"
Or if we read his first little book of rhymes, that may be had for
twopence now, we shall find the pictures of the life that was lived
under Protection--the sort of life the landlords and their theorists
invite us to enact again. From his "Black Hole of Calcutta" we take the
lines:
"Bread-tax'd weaver, all can see
What that tax hath done for thee,
And thy children, vilely led,
Singing hymns for shameful bread,
Till the stones of every street
Know their little naked feet."