ladies' committee in connection with such a society. There are many
matters in which the ladies are better agents, and possess a special
knowledge. It may, perhaps, be thought rather an advanced idea; but
would not some instruction in cookery be extremely useful to the
agricultural girl just growing up into womanhood? The cooking she
learns at home is simply no cooking at all. It is hardly possible to
induce the elder women to change the habits of a lifetime, but the
girls, fast growing up, would be eager to learn. With the increase
of wages, the labourer has obtained a certain addition to his fare,
and can occasionally afford some of the cheaper pieces of butcher's
meat. But the women have no idea of utilizing these pieces in the
most economical and savoury ways. Plentiful as vegetables are at
times, they are only used in the coarsest manner. The ladies'
committee would also have important work before them in boarding out
the orphan children from the Union, and also in endeavouring to find
employment for the great girls who play about the village, getting
them into service, and so on. In the distribution of charities (if
charities there must be), ladies are far more efficient than men,
and they may exercise an influence in moral matters where no one
else could interfere. If there is any charity which deserves to be
assisted by this local society, it is the cheapening of coals in the
winter. Already in some villages the principal farmers combine to
purchase a good stock of coal at the beginning of winter, and as
they buy it in large quantities they get it somewhat cheaper. Their
teams and waggons haul it to the village, and in the dead of winter
it is retailed to the cottagers at less than cost price. This is a
most useful institution, and can hardly be called a charity. The
fact that this has been done is a proof that organization for
objects of local benefit is quite possible in rural parishes.
Landowners and resident gentlemen would naturally take an interest
in such proceedings, and may very properly be asked to subscribe;
but the actual execution of the plans decided on should be left in
the hands of tenant-farmers, who have a direct interest, and who
come into daily contact with the lower class. As a means of adding
to their funds, the society could give popular entertainments of
reading and singing, which have often been found effective in
raising money for the purchase of a new harmonium, and which, at the
same time, afford a harmless gratification. It would, perhaps, be
better if such a society were to keep itself distinct from any
project of church restoration, or even from the school question,
because it is most essential that they should be free from the
slightest suspicion of leaning towards any party. Their authority
must be based upon universal consent. They might perform a useful
task if they could induce the cottagers to insure their goods and
chattels, or in any way assist them to do so. Cottages are
exceptionably liable to conflagration, and after the place is burnt,
there is piteous weeping and wailing, and general begging to replace
the lost furniture and bedding. There is much to be done also in the
matter of savings. It seems to be pretty well demonstrated by the
history of benefit clubs and the calculations of actuaries, that the
agricultural labourer, out of his amount of wages, cannot put by a
sufficient monthly contribution to enable him to receive a pension
when he becomes old and infirm. But that is not the slightest reason
why he should not save small sums year by year, which, in course of
time, would amount to a nice little thing to fall back upon in case
of sickness or accident. There are many aged and deserving men who
have worked all their lives in one place and almost upon one farm,
and, at last, are reduced to the pitiful allowance of the parish,
occasionally supplemented by a friendly gift. These cases are very
painful to witness, and are felt to be wrong by the tenant-farmers.
But one person cannot entirely support them; and often it happens
that the man who would have done his best is dead--the old employer
for whom they worked so many years is gone before them to his rest.
If there were but a little organization such cases would not pass
unnoticed.
Certain it is that the tendency of the age, and the progress of
recent events, indicates the coming of a time when organization of
some kind in rural districts will be necessary. The labour-agitation
was a lesson of this kind. There are upheaving forces at work among
the agricultural lower class as well as in the lower class of towns;
a flow of fresh knowledge, and larger aspirations, which require
guidance and supervision, lest they run to riot and excess. An
organization of the character here indicated would meet the
difficulties of the future, and meet them in the best of ways; for
while possessing power to improve and to reform, it would have no
hated odour of compulsion. The suggestions here put forth are, of
course, all more or less tentative. They sketch an outline, the
filling up of which must fall upon practical men, and which must
depend greatly upon the circumstances of the locality.
THE IDLE EARTH
The bare fallows of a factory are of short duration, and occur at
lengthened intervals. There are the Saturday afternoons--four or
five hours' shorter time; there are the Sundays--fifty-two in
number; a day or two at Christmas, at Midsummer, at Easter.
Fifty-two Sundays, plus fifty-two half-days on Saturdays; eight days
more for _bona-fide_ holidays--in all, eighty-six days on which no
labour is done. This is as near as may be just one quarter of the
year spent in idleness. But how fallacious is such a calculation!
for overtime and night-work make up far more than this deficient
quarter; and therefore it may safely be said that man works the
whole year through, and has no bare fallow. But earth--idle
earth--on which man dwells, has a much easier time of it. It takes
nearly a third of the year out in downright leisure, doing nothing
but inchoating; a slow process indeed, and one which all the
agricultural army have of late tried to hasten, with very
indifferent success. Winter seed sown in the fall of the year does
not come to anything till the spring; spring seed is not reaped till
the autumn is at hand. But it will be argued that this land is not
idle, for during those months the seed is slowly growing--absorbing
its constituent parts from the atmosphere, the earth, the water;
going through astonishing metamorphoses; outdoing the most wonderful
laboratory experiments with its untaught, instinctive chemistry. All
true enough; and hitherto it has been assumed that the ultimate
product of these idle months is sufficient to repay the idleness;
that in the _coup_ of the week of reaping there is a dividend
recompensing the long, long days of development. Is it really so?
This is not altogether a question which a practical man used to City
formulas of profit and loss might ask. It is a question to which,
even at this hour, farmers themselves--most unpractical of men--are
requiring an answer. There is a cry arising throughout the country
that farms do not pay; that a man with a moderate 400 acres and a
moderate L1,000 of his own, with borrowed money added, cannot get a
reasonable remuneration from those acres. These say they would
sooner be hotel-keepers, tailors, grocers--anything but farmers.
These are men who have tried the task of subduing the stubborn
earth, which is no longer bountiful to her children. Much reason
exists in this cry, which is heard at the market ordinary, in the
lobby, at the club meetings--wherever agriculturists congregate, and
which will soon force itself out upon the public. It is like this.
Rents have risen. Five shillings per acre makes an enormous
difference, though nominally only an additional L100 on 400 acres.
But as in agricultural profits one must not reckon more than 8 per
cent., this 5s. per acre represents nearly another L1,000 which
must be invested in the business, and which must be made to return
interest to pay the additional rent. If that cannot be done, then it
represents a dead L100 per annum taken out of the agriculturist's
pocket.
Then--labour, the great agricultural _crux_. If the occupier pays
3s. per week more to seven men, that adds more than another L50 per
annum to his outgoings, to meet which you must somehow make your
acres represent another L500. Turnpikes fall in, and the roads are
repaired at the ratepayers' cost. Compulsory education--for it is
compulsory in reality, since it compels voluntary schools to be
built--comes next, and as generally the village committee mull
matters, and have to add a wing, and rebuild, and so forth, till
they get in debt, there grows up a rate which is a serious matter,
not by itself, but added to other things. Just as in great factories
they keep accounts in decimals because of the vast multitude of
little expenses which are in the aggregate serious--each decimal is
equivalent to a rusty nail or so--here on our farm threepence or
fourpence in the pound added to threepence or sixpence ditto for
voluntary Church-rate, puts an appreciable burden on the man's back.
The tightness, however, does not end here; the belt is squeezed
closer than this. No man had such long credit as the yeoman of yore
(thirty years ago is 'of yore' in our century). Butcher and baker,
grocer, tailor, draper, all gave him unlimited credit as to _time_.
As a rule, they got paid in the end; for a farmer is a fixture, and
does not have an address for his letters at one place and live in
another. But modern trade manners are different. The trader is
himself pressed. Competition galls his heel. He has to press upon
his customers, and in place of bills sent in for payment once a
year, and actual cash transfer in three, we have bills punctually
every quarter, and due notice of county court if cheques are not
sent at the half-year. So that the agriculturist wants more ready
cash; and as his returns come but once a year, he does not quite see
the fairness of having to swell other men's returns four times in
the same period. Still a step further, and a few words will suffice
to describe the increased cost of all the materials supplied by
these tradesmen. Take coals, for instance. This is a fact so patent
that it stares the world in the face. A farmer, too, nowadays has a
natural desire to live as other people in his station of life do. He
cannot reconcile himself to rafty bacon, cheese, radishes,
turnip-tops, homespun cloth, smock frocks. He cannot see why his
girls should milk the cows or wheel out manure from the yards any
more than the daughters of tradesmen; neither that his sons should
say 'Ay' and 'Noa,' and exhibit a total disregard of grammar and
ignorance of all social customs. The piano, he thinks, is quite as
much in its place in his cool parlour as in the stuffy so-called
drawing-room at his grocer's in the petty town hard by, where they
are so particular to distinguish the social ranks of 'professional
tradesmen' from common tradesmen. Here in all this, even supposing
it kept down to economical limits, there exists a considerable
margin of expenditure greater than in our forefathers' time. True,
wool is dearer, meat dearer; but to balance that put the increased
cost of artificial manure and artificial food--two things no farmer
formerly bought--and do not forget that the seasons rule all things,
and are quite as capricious as ever, and when there is a bad season
the loss is much greater than it used to be, just as the foundering
of an ironclad costs the nation more than the loss of a frigate.
Experience every day brings home more and more the fatal truth that
moderate farms do not pay, and there are even ominous whispers about
the 2,000 acres system. The agriculturist says that, work how he
may, he only gets 8 per cent. per annum; the tradesman, still more
the manufacturer, gets only 2 per cent. each time, but he turns his
money over twenty times a year, and so gets 40 per cent. per annum.
Eight per cent. is a large dividend on one transaction, but it is
very small for a whole year--a year, the one-thirtieth of a man's
whole earning period, if we take him to be in a business at
twenty-five, and to be in full work till fifty-five, a fair
allowance. Now, why is it that this cry arises that agriculture will
not pay? and why is it that the farmer only picks up 8 per cent.?
The answer is simple enough. It is because the earth is idle a third
of the year. So far as actual cash return is concerned, one might
say it was idle eleven out of the twelve months. But that is hardly
fair. Say a third of the year.
The earth does not continue yielding a crop day by day as the
machines do in the manufactory. The nearest approach to the
manufactory is the dairy, whose cows send out so much milk per diem;
but the cows go dry for their calves. Out of the tall chimney shaft
there floats a taller column of dark smoke hour after hour; the vast
engines puff and snort and labour perhaps the whole twenty-four
hours through; the drums hum round, the shafts revolve perpetually,
and each revolution is a penny gained. It may be only steel-pen
making--pens, common pens, which one treats as of no value and
wastes by dozens; but the iron-man thumps them out hour after hour,
and the thin stream of daily profit swells into a noble river of
gold at the end of the year. Even the pill people are fortunate in
this: it is said that every second a person dies in this huge world
of ours. Certain it is that every second somebody takes a pill; and
so the millions of globules disappear, and so the profit is nearer 8
per cent. per hour than 8 per cent. per annum. But this idle earth
takes a third of the year to mature its one single crop of pills;
and so the agriculturist with his slow returns cannot compete with
the quick returns of the tradesman and manufacturer. If he cannot
compete, he cannot long exist; such is the modern law of business.
As an illustration, take one large meadow on a dairy farm; trace its
history for one year, and see what an idle workshop this meadow is.
Call it twenty acres of first-class land at L2 15s. per acre, or L55
per annum. Remember that twenty acres is a large piece on which
some millions multiplied by millions of cubic feet of air play on a
month, and on which an incalculable amount of force in the shape of
sunlight is poured down in the summer. January sees this plot of a
dull, dirty green, unless hidden by snow; the dirty green is a
short, juiceless herbage. The ground is as hard as a brick with the
frost. We will not stay now to criticize the plan of carting out
manure at this period, or dwell on the great useless furrows. Look
carefully round the horizon of the twenty acres, and there is not an
animal in sight, not a single machine for making money, not a penny
being turned. The cows are all in the stalls. February comes, March
passes; the herbage grows slowly; but still no machines are
introduced, no pennies roll out at the gateways. The farmer may lean
on the gate and gaze over an empty workshop, twenty acres big, with
his hands in his pockets, except when he pulls out his purse to pay
the hedge-cutters who are clearing out the ditches, the women who
have been stone-picking, and the carters who took out the manure,
half of which stains the drains, while the volatile part mixes with
the atmosphere. This is highly profitable and gratifying. The man
walks home, hears his daughter playing the piano, picks up the
paper, sees himself described as a brutal tyrant to the labourer,
and ten minutes afterwards in walks the collector of the voluntary
rate for the village school, which educates the labourers' children.
April arrives; grass grows rapidly. May comes; grass is now long.
But still not one farthing has been made out of that twenty acres.
Five months have passed, and all this time the shafts in the
manufactories have been turning, and the quick coppers accumulating.
Now it is June, and the mower goes to work; then the haymakers, and
in a fortnight if the weather be good, a month if it be bad, the hay
is ricked. Say it cost L1 per acre to make the hay and rick
it--_i.e._, L20--and by this time half the rent is due, or L27 10s.
= total expenditure (without any profit as yet), L47 10s., exclusive
of stone-picking, ditch-cleaning, value of manure, etc. This by the
way. The five months' idleness is the point at present. June is now
gone. If the weather be showery the sharp-edged grass may spring up
in a fortnight to a respectable height; but if it be a dry
summer--and if it is not a dry summer the increased cost of
haymaking runs away with profit--then it may be fully a month before
there is anything worth biting. Say at the end of July (one more
idle month) twenty cows are turned in, and three horses. One cannot
estimate how long they may take to eat up the short grass, but
certain it is that the beginning of November will see that field
empty of cattle again; and fortunate indeed the agriculturist who
long before that has not had to 'fodder' (feed with hay) at least
once a day. Here, then, are five idle months in spring, one in
summer, two in winter; total, eight idle months. But, not to stretch
the case, let us allow that during a part of that time, though the
meadow is idle, its produce--the hay--is being eaten and converted
into milk, cheese and butter, or meat, which is quite correct; but,
even making this allowance, it may safely be said that the meadow is
absolutely idle for one-third of the year, or four months. That is
looking at the matter in a mere pounds, shillings, and pence light.
Now look at it in a broader, more national view. Does it not seem a
very serious matter that so large a piece of land should remain idle
for that length of time? It is a reproach to science that no method
of utilizing the meadow during that eight months has been
discovered. To go further, it is very hard to require of the
agriculturist that he should keep pace with a world whose maxims day
by day tend to centralize and concentrate themselves into the one
canon, Time is Money, when he cannot by any ingenuity get his
machinery to revolve more than once a year. In the old days the
farmer belonged to a distinct class, a very isolated and independent
class, little affected by the progress or retrogression of any other
class, and not at all by those waves of social change which sweep
over Europe. Now the farmer is in the same position as other
producers: the fall or rise of prices, the competition of foreign
lands, the waves of panic or monetary tightness, all tell upon him
quite as much as on the tradesman. So that the cry is gradually
rising that the idle earth will not pay.
On arable land it is perhaps even more striking. Take a wheat crop,
for instance. Without going into the cost and delay of the three
years of preparation under various courses for the crop, take the
field just before the wheat year begins. There it lies in November,
a vast brown patch, with a few rooks here and there hopping from one
great lump to another; but there is nothing on it--no machine
turning out materials to be again turned into money. On the
contrary, it is very probable that the agriculturist may be sowing
money on it, scarifying it with steam ploughing-engines, tearing up
the earth to a great depth in order that the air may penetrate and
the frost disintegrate the strong, hard lumps. He may have commenced
this expensive process as far back as the end of August, for it is
becoming more and more the custom to plough up directly after the
crop is removed. All November, December, January, and not a penny
from this broad patch, which may be of any size from fifteen to
ninety acres, lying perfectly idle. Sometimes, indeed, persons who
wish to save manure will grow mustard on it and plough it in, the
profit of which process is extremely dubious. At the latter end of
February or beginning of March, just as the season is early or late,
dry or wet, in goes the seed--another considerable expense. Then
April, May, June, July are all absorbed in the slow process of
growth--a necessary process, of course, but still terribly slow, and
not a penny of ready-money coming in. If the seed was sown in
October, as is usual on some soils, the effect is the same--the crop
does not arrive till next year's summer sun shines. In August the
reaper goes to work, but even then the corn has to be threshed and
sent to market before there is any return. Here is a whole year
spent in elaborating one single crop, which may, after all, be very
unprofitable if it is a good wheat year, and the very wheat over
which such time and trouble have been expended may be used to fat
beasts, or even to feed pigs. All this, however, and the great
expense of preparation, though serious matters enough in themselves,
are beside our immediate object. The length of time the land is
useless is the point. Making every possible allowance, it is not
less than one-third of the year--four months out of the twelve. For
all practical--_i.e._, monetary--purposes it is longer than that. No
wonder that agriculturists aware of this fact are so anxious to get
as much as possible out of their one crop--to make the one
revolution of their machinery turn them out as much money as
possible. If their workshop must be enforcedly idle for so long,
they desire that when in work there shall be full blast and double
tides. Let the one crop be as heavy as it can. Hence the agitation
for compensatory clauses, enabling the tenant to safely invest all
the capital he can procure in the soil. How else is he to meet the
increased cost of labour, of rent, of education, of domestic
materials; how else maintain his fair position in society? The
demand is reasonable enough; the one serious drawback is the
possibility that, even with this assistance, the idle earth will
refuse to move any faster.
We have had now the experience of many sewage-farms where the
culture is extremely 'high.' It has been found that these farms
answer admirably where the land is poor--say, sandy and porous--but
on fairly good soil the advantage is dubious, and almost limited to
growing a succession of rye-grass crops. After a season or two of
sewage soaking the soil becomes so soft that in the winter months it
is unapproachable. Neither carts nor any implements can be drawn
over it; and then in the spring the utmost care has to be exercised
to keep the liquid from touching the young plants, or they wither up
and die. Sewage on grass lands produces the most wonderful results
for two or three years, but after that the herbage comes so thick
and rank and 'strong' that cattle will not touch it; the landlord
begins to grumble, and complains that the land, which was to have
been improved, has been spoilt for a long time to come. Neither is
it certain that the employment of capital in other ways will lead to
a continuous increase of profit. There are examples before our eyes
where capital has been unsparingly employed, and upon very large
areas of land, with most disappointing results. In one such instance
five or six farms were thrown into one; straw, and manure, and every
aid lavishly used, till a fabulous number of sheep and other stock
was kept; but the experiment failed. Many of the farms were again
made separate holdings, and grass laid down in the place of glowing
cornfields. Then there is another instance, where a gentleman of
large means and a cultivated and business mind, called in the
assistance of the deep plough, and by dint of sheer subsoil
ploughing grew corn profitably several years in succession. But
after a while he began to pause, and to turn his attention to stock
and other aids. It is not for one moment contended that the use of
artificial manure, of the deep plough, of artificial food, and other
improvements will not increase the yield, and so the profit of the
agriculturist. It is obvious that they do so. The question is, Will
they do so to an extent sufficient to repay the outlay? And,
further, will they do so sufficiently to enable the agriculturist to
meet the ever-increasing weight which presses on him? It would seem
open to doubt. One thing appears to have been left quite out of
sight by those gentlemen who are so enthusiastic about compensation
for unexhausted improvements, and that is, if the landlord is to be
bound down so rigidly, and if the tenant really is going to make so
large a profit, most assuredly the rents will rise very
considerably. How then? Neither the sewage system, nor the deep
plough, nor the artificial manure has, as yet, succeeded in
overcoming the _vis inertiae_ of the idle earth. They cause an
increase in the yield of the one revolution of the agriculturist
machine per annum; but they do not cause the machine to revolve
twice or three times. Without a decrease in the length of this
enforced idleness any very great increase of profit does not seem
possible. What would any manufacturer think of a business in which
he was compelled to let his engines rest for a third of the year?
Would he be eager to sink his capital in such an enterprise?