The great and all-present evil of the rural districts is this--you have
too many people for the work to be done, and you, the landed
proprietors, are alone responsible for this state of things; and to
speak honestly, I believe many of you know it. I have been charged with
saying out-of-doors that this House is a club of land-owners legislating
for land-owners. If I had not said it, the public must long ago have
found out that fact. My honorable friend the member for Stockport on one
occasion proposed that before you passed a law to raise the price of
bread, you should consider how far you had the power to raise the rates
of wages. What did you say to that? You said that the laborers did not
understand political economy, or they would not apply to Parliament to
raise wages; that Parliament could not raise wages. And yet the very
next thing you did was to pass a law to raise the price of produce of
your own land, at the expense of the very class whose wages you
confessed your inability to increase.
What is the condition of the county of Suffolk? Is it not notorious that
the rents are as high as they were fifty years ago, and probably much
higher? But the return for the farmer's capital is much lower, and the
condition of the laborer is very much worse. The farmers are subject to
the law of competition, and rents are thereby raised from time to time
so as to keep their profits down to the lowest point, and the laborers
by the competition amongst them are reduced to the point below which
life cannot be maintained. Your tenants and laborers are being devoured
by this excessive competition, whilst you, their magnanimous landlords,
shelter yourselves from all competition by the Corn Law yourselves have
passed, and make the competition of all other classes serve still more
to swell your rentals. It was for this object the Corn Law was passed,
and yet in the face of your countrymen you dare to call it a law for the
protection of native industry....
Again, a rural police is kept up by the gentry; the farmers say for the
sole use of watching game and frightening poachers, for which formerly
they had to pay watchers. Is this true, or is it not? I say, then, you
care everything for the rights--and for something beyond the rights--of
your own property, but you are oblivious to its duties. How many lives
have been sacrificed during the past year to the childish infatuation of
preserving game? The noble lord, the member for North Lancashire, could
tell of a gamekeeper killed in an affray on his father's estate in that
county. For the offense one man was hanged, and four men are now on
their way to penal colonies. Six families are thus deprived of husband
and father, that this wretched system of game-preserving may be
continued in a country densely peopled as this is. The Marquis of
Normanby's gamekeeper has been murdered also, and the poacher who shot
him only escaped death by the intervention of the Home Secretary. At
Godalming, in Surrey, a gamekeeper has been murdered; and at Buckhill,
in Buckinghamshire, a person has recently been killed in a poaching
affray. This insane system is the cause of a fearful loss of life; it
tends to the ruin of your tenantry, and is the fruitful cause of the
demoralization of the peasantry. But you are caring for the rights of
property; for its most obvious duties you have no concern. With such a
policy, what can you expect but that which is now passing before you?
It is the remark of a beautiful writer that "to have known nothing but
misery is the most portentous condition under which human nature can
start on its course." Has your agricultural laborer ever known anything
but misery? He is born in a miserable hovel, which in mockery is termed
a house or a home; he is reared in penury: he passes a life of hopeless
and unrequited toil, and the jail or the union house is before him as
the only asylum on this side of the pauper's grave. Is this the result
of your protection to native industry? Have you cared for the laborer
till, from a home of comfort, he has but a hovel for shelter? and have
you cherished him into starvation and rags? I tell you what your boasted
protection is--it is a protection of native idleness at the expense of
the impoverishment of native industry.