WALK WITH A RUSTIC.—FAMILY MEETING.—A RECOLLECTION OF THE
RHINE.—IGNORANCE AND DEGRADED CONDITION OF THE ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL
LABOURER.—HOW HE IS REGARDED BY HIS SUPERIORS.—THE PRINCIPLES OF
GOVERNMENT.—DUTIES OF THE GOVERNING.—EDUCATION.—SLAVERY.—THE DIET OF
LABOURERS.—DRINK.—BREAD.—BACON.—FRESH MEAT.
[Sidenote: _THE BACK PARISH._]
We were bound for Monmouth that night, and soon after sunset, having
one of the farm labourers for a guide, we struck across the fields
into another lane. About a mile from the farm-house, there was a short
turn, and at the angle—the lane narrow and deep as usual—was a small,
steep-roofed, stone building, with a few square and arched windows
here and there in it, and a perfectly plain cube of stone for a tower,
rising scarcely above the roof-tree, with an iron staff and vane on
one of its corners—“Saint some one’s parish church.” There was a small
graveyard, enclosed by a hedge around it; and in a corner of this,
but with three doors opening in its front upon the lane, was a long,
crooked, dilapidated old cottage. On one of the stone thresholds, a
dirty, peevish-looking woman was lounging, and before her, lying on the
ground in the middle of the lane, were several boys and girls playing
or quarrelling. They stopped as we came near, and rolling out of the
way, stared silently, and without the least expression of recognition,
at us, while we passed among them. As we went on, the woman said
something in a sharp voice, and our guide shouted in reply, without,
however, turning his head, “Stop thy maw—am going to Ameriky, aw tell
thee.” It was his “missis,” he said.
“Those were not your children that lay in the road?”
“Yaaz they be—foive of ’em.”
So we fell into a talk with him about his condition and prospects; but
before I describe it, let me relieve my page with a glimpse of rustic
character of another sort. It is one of the delightful memories of our
later ramble on the Rhine that writing of this incident recalls. A very
simple story, but illustrative in this connection of the difference
which the traveller every where finds between the English and the
German poor people.
We had been walking for some miles, late in a dusky evening, upon
a hilly road in the Rhine land, with an old peasant woman, who was
returning from market, carrying a heavy basket upon her head and two
others in her hands. She had declined to let us assist her in carrying
them, and though she had walked seven miles in the morning and now
nearly that again at night, she had overtaken us, and was going on at
a pace, that for any great distance we should have found severe. (Of
course, ladies, she wore the Bloomer skirt.) At a turn of the road we
saw the figure of a person standing still upon a little rising ground
before us, indistinct in the dusk, but soon evidently a young woman.
It is my child, said the woman, hastily setting down her baskets and
running forward, so that they met and embraced each other half way
up the hill. The young woman then came down to us, and, taking the
great basket on _her_ head, the two trudged on with rapid and animated
conversation, in kind tones asking and telling of their experiences of
the day, entirely absorbed with each other, and apparently forgetting
that we were with them, until, a mile or two further on, we came near
the village in which they lived.
[Sidenote: _BREAD AND TOBACCO._]
Our guide was a man of about forty, having a wife and seven children;
neither he nor any of his family (he thought) could read or write,
and, except with regard to his occupation as agricultural labourer,
I scarcely ever saw a man of so limited information. He could tell
us, for instance, almost no more about the church which adjoined his
residence than if he had never seen it—not half so much as we could
discover for ourselves by a single glance at it. He had nothing to say
about the clergyman that officiated in it, and could tell us nothing
about the parish, except its name, and that it allowed him and five
other labourers to occupy the “almshouse” we had seen, rent free. He
couldn’t say how old he was, (he appeared about forty,) but he could
say, “like a book,” that God was what made the world, and that “Jesus
Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom he was chief”—of
the truth of which latter clause I much doubted, suspecting the arch
fiend would rank higher among his servants, the man whose idea of
duty and impulse of love had been satisfied with cramming this poor
soul with such shells of spiritual nourishment. He thought two of his
children knew the catechism and the creed; did not think they could
have learned it from a book; they might, but he never heard them read;
when he came home and had gotten his supper, he had a smoke and then
went to bed. His wages were seven shillings, sometimes had been eight,
a-week. None of his children earned any thing; his wife, it might be,
did somewhat in harvest-time. But take the year through, _one dollar
and sixty-eight_ cents a-week was all they earned to support themselves
and their large family. How could they live? “Why, indeed, it was
rather hard,” he said; “so hard, that sometimes, if we’d believe him,
it had been as much as he could do to keep himself in tobacco!” It
is an actual fact, that he mentioned this as if it was a vastly more
memorable hardship than that ofttimes he could get nothing more than
dry bread for his family to eat. It was a common thing that they had
nothing to eat but dry bread. He got the flour—_fine, white wheaten
flour_—from the master. They kept a hog, and had so much bacon as it
would make to provide them with meat for the year. They also had a
little potato patch, and he got cheese sometimes from the master. He
had tea, too, to his supper. The parish gave him his rent and he never
was called upon for tithes, taxes, or any such thing. In addition to
his wages, the master gave him, as he did all the labourers, three
quarts either of cider or beer a-day, sometimes one and sometimes the
other. He liked cider best—thought there was “more strength to it.”
Harvest-time they got six quarts, and sometimes, when the work was very
hard, he had had _ten quarts_.
[Sidenote: _THE PEASANTRY._]
He had heard of America and Australia as countries that poor folks
went to—he did not well know why, but supposed wages were higher, and
they could live cheaper. His master and other gentlemen had told him
about those places, and the labouring people talked about them among
themselves. They had talked to him about going there. (America and
Australia were all one—two names for the same place, for all that he
knew.) He thought his master or _the parish_ would provide him the
means of going, if he wanted them to. We advised him to emigrate then,
by all means, not so much for himself as for his children—the idea of
his bringing seven, or it might yet be a dozen, more beings into the
world to live such dumb-beast lives, was horrible to us. I told him
that in America his children could go to school, and learn to read and
write and to enjoy the revelation of God; and as they grew up they
would improve their position, and might be land-owners and farmers
themselves, as well off as his master; and he would have nothing to
pay, or at most but a trifle that he could gratefully spare, to have
them as well educated as the master’s son was being here; that where I
came from the farmers would be glad to give a man like him, who could
“plough and sow and reap and mow as well as any other in the parish,”
eighteen shillings a-week—
“And how much beer?”
“None at all!”
“None at all? ha, ha! _he’d_ not go then—you’d not catch him workin
withouten his drink. No, no! a man ’ould die off soon that gait.”
It was in vain that we offered fresh meat as an offset to the beer.
There was “strength,” he admitted, in beef, but it was wholly
incredible that a man could _work on it_. A workingman must have
_zider_ or beer—there was no use to argue against that. That “Jesus
Christ came into the world to save sinners,” and that “work without
beer is death,” was the alpha and omega of his faith.
The labourers in this part of England (Hereford, Monmouth, Gloucester,
and Wiltshire) were the most degraded, poor, stupid, brutal, and
licentious, that we saw in the kingdom. We were told that they were of
the purest Saxon blood, as was indeed indicated by the frequency of
blue eyes and light hair among them. But I did not see in Ireland or in
Germany or in France, nor did I ever see among our negroes or Indians,
or among the Chinese or Malays, men whose tastes were such mere
instincts, or whose purpose of life and whose mode of life was so low,
so like that of _domestic animals_ altogether, as these farm labourers.
I was greatly pained, mortified, ashamed of old mother England, in
acknowledging this; and the more so that I found so few Englishmen that
realized it, or who, realizing it, seemed to feel that any one but God,
with His laws of population and trade, was at all accountable for it.
Even a most intelligent and distinguished Radical, when I alluded to
this element as a part of the _character_ of the country, in replying
to certain very favourable comparisons he had been making of England
with other countries, said—“We are not used to regard that class in
forming a judgment of national character.” And yet I suppose that class
is larger in numbers than any other in the community of England. Many
have even dared to think that, in the mysterious decrees of Providence,
this balance of degradation and supine misery is essential to the
continuance of the greatness, prosperity, and elevated character of the
country—as if it were not indeed a part of the country.
A minister of the Gospel, of high repute in London, and whose sermons
are reprinted and often _repeated_ in America, from the words of
Christ, “the poor ye have always among you,” argued lately that all
legislation or co-operative benevolence that had the tendency and hope
of bringing about such a state of things that a large part of every
nation should be independent of the _charity_ of the other part, was
heretical and blasphemous. Closely allied to such ideas are the too
common notions of _rulers_ and _subjects_.
[Sidenote: _GOVERNMENT._]
In America we hold that a slave, a savage, a child, a maniac, and a
condemned criminal, are each and all _born_, equally with us, with
our President, or with the Queen of England, free and self-governing;
that they have the same natural rights with us; but that attached to
those natural rights were certain duties, and when we find them, from
whatever cause,—no matter whether the original cause be with them, or
our fathers, or us,—unable to perform those duties, we dispossess them
of their rights: we restrain, we confine, we master, and we _govern_
them. But in taking upon ourselves to govern them, we take duties
upon ourselves, and our first duty is that which is the first duty of
every man for himself—improvement, restoration, _regeneration_. By
every consideration of justice, by every noble instinct, we are bound
to make it our highest and chiefest object to restore them, not the
liberty first, but—the capacity for the liberty—for exercising the
duties of the liberty—which is their natural right. And so much of the
liberty as they are able to use to their own as well as our advantage,
we are bound constantly to allow them,—nay, more than they show
absolute evidence of their ability to use to advantage. We must not
wait till a child can walk alone before we put it on its legs; we must
not wait till it can swim before we let it go in the water. As faith
is necessary to self-improvement, _trust_ is necessary to education or
restoration of another: as necessary with the slave, the savage, the
maniac, the criminal, and the peasant—as necessary, and equally with
all necessary—as with the child.
Is not this our American doctrine in its only consistent extension?
We _govern_ in trust only for another, and a part of our trust is the
restoration of the _right_-ful owner by helping him towards that sound
and well-informed mind and intelligent judgment that makes him truly
free and independent.
This is the only _government_ that we of the free United States
of America, whether as fathers or children, statesmen or jurymen,
representatives or rabble, either claim or acknowledge. And it is of
this that all true Americans believe, “that is the best government that
governs the least.” Using government in its properly restricted sense,
as the authority and forcible direction of one over another, we hold
this to be as self-evident as that the life of free love is better than
the life of constrained legality, that the sentiment of mutual trust
is nobler than that of suspicion or of fear, that the new dispensation
of Christ is higher than the old one of Moses. What else there is than
this care over the weak and diseased in the public administration
of our affairs, is no more than associated labour—the employment of
certain common servants for the care of the commonwealth.
Education, then, with certain systematic exercise or discipline of the
governed, having reference to and connected with a gradual elevation to
equal freedom with the governing, we hold to be a very necessary part
of all rightful government. Where it is not, we say this is no true and
rightful government, but a despotism and a sin.
But we shall be at once asked: Is your fugitive law designed for such
purposes? Do your slaveholders govern the simple-minded Africans whom
they keep in restraint on these principles?
_So far as they do not, their claim is “heretical and blasphemous.”_
Let us never hesitate to acknowledge it—any where and every where
to acknowledge it—and before all people mourn over it. Let us, who
need not to bear the heavy burden and live in the dark cloud of this
responsibility, never, either in brotherly love, national vanity, or
subjection to insolence, fear to declare, that, in the misdirection of
power by our slaveholders, they are false to the basis of our Union and
blasphemous to the Father who, equally and with equal freedom, created
all men. Would that they might see, too, that while they continue to
manifest before the world, in their legislation upon it, no other
than mean, sordid, short-sighted, and barbarian purposes, they must
complain, threaten, expostulate, and compromise in vain. If we drive
back the truth of God, we must expect ever-recurring, irrestrainable,
irresistible _reaction_. The law of God in our hearts binds us in
fidelity to the _principles_ of the Constitution. They are not to
be found in “Abolitionism,” nor are they to be found—oh! remember
it, brothers, and forgive these few words—in _hopeless, dawnless,
unredeeming_ slavery.
And so we hold that party in England, which regard their labouring
class as a permanent providential _institution_, not to be improved in
every way, educated, fitted to take an equal share with all Englishmen
in the government of the commonwealth of England, to be blasphemers,
tyrants, and insolent rebels to humanity. (Many of them as good-souled
men as the world contains, nevertheless.)
I have before said, and I repeat it with confidence, that I believe
this party to be the weaker one in England. I must believe that the
love of justice, freedom, and consistency, is stronger with Englishmen
than the bonds of custom, self-conceit, and blind idolatry of human
arrangement, under however sacred names it has come to them.
But our British friends will ask: Would it be practicable to give these
poor toiling semi-brutes any—the smallest—exercise of that governmental
power, which, so far as they be not wholly brutes, is their right?
Yes, we American farmers would judge, yes: there are offices to be
performed for the commonwealth of each parish or neighbourhood, of the
requirements of which they are, or soon would make themselves, fit
judges. If there are not, then make such offices. Who is a kind, firm,
and closely scrutinizing master; who is a judicious and successful
farmer; who is an honest dealer with them; who is a skilful ploughman,
a good thatcher, a good hedge-trimmer, in the mile or two about them,
they always have formed a judgment.
[Sidenote: _FOOD AND DRINK._]
With regard to the habits of drinking and the customary diet of
those by whose labour England is mainly supplied with food, I fear
my statements may be incredible to Americans; I therefore quote from
authority that should be better informed.
A correspondent of the Agricultural Gazette mentions, that in
Herefordshire and Worcestershire the allowance of cider given to
labourers, in addition to wages, is “one to _ten gallons_ a-day.” He
observes that, of course, men cannot work without some drink, but
that they often drink more than is probably of any advantage to them,
and suggests that an allowance of money be given instead of cider, and
the labourers be made to buy their drink. In this way, he thinks, they
would not be likely to drink more than they needed, and it would be an
economical operation for both parties. In Normandy, the cider district
of France, three gallons a-day is the usual allowance of labourers.
“The usual allowance given in Herefordshire by masters, is three
quarts a-day; and in harvest-time many labourers drink in a day ten
or twelve quarts of a liquor that in a stranger’s mouth would be
mistaken for vinegar.”—_Johnson and Errington on the Apple._
“Bacon, when they can get it, is the staff of the labourers’ dinner.”
“The frugal housewife provides a large lot of potatoes, and while she
indulges herself with her younger ones only with salt, cuts off the
small rasher and toasts it over the plates of the father and elder
sons, as being the _bread-winners_; and _this is all they want_.”—_“A
Rector and Conservative” in the Times._
“After doing up his horses he takes breakfast, which is made of
flour, with a little butter, and water “from the tea-kettle” poured
over it. He takes with him to the field a piece of bread and (if he
has not a young family and can afford it) cheese, to eat at midday.
He returns home in the afternoon to a few potatoes, and possibly a
little bacon, though only those who are better off can afford this.
The supper very often consists of bread and water.”—_“The Times
Commissioner,” in Wiltshire_, 1851.
It would be unjust not to add, that in a large part of England the
labourers are much more comfortable than these statements might
indicate. I am also convinced that the condition of the labourer
generally is _improving_, and that he is now in a much less famishing
condition than ten years ago. The main stay of the labourer’s stomach
is fine, white wheaten bread, of the best possible quality, such as it
would be a luxury to get any where else in the world, and such as many
a New England farmer never tasted, and, even if his wife were able to
make it, would think an extravagance to be ordinarily upon his table.
No doubt a coarser bread would be more wholesome, but it is one of
the strongest prejudices of the English peasant, that brown bread is
not fit for human beings. In Scotland and Ireland, and in some hilly
districts of England, only, wheat bread is displaced by more wholesome
and economical preparations from oatmeal.
[Sidenote: _FRESH MEAT._]
With regard to fresh meat, a farmer once said to me, “They will
hardly taste it all their lives, except, it may be, once a-year, at a
fair, when they’ll go to the cook-shops and stuff themselves with all
they’ll hold of it; and if you could see them, you’d say they did not
know what it was or what was to be done with it—cutting it into great
mouthfuls and gobbling it down without any chewing, like as a fowl does
barleycorns, till it chokes him.”