THE EMPTY COUNTRYSIDE
In the past the decay of civilisation has been heralded by the decay of
the country-side. When the cities had sucked the life of the plains
and valleys dry, then came the end. It was thus with Israel. Out of
the villages and farms nestling in valleys the people were driven into
cities by the rapacity of men eager to be rich. This was the burden
that weighed on the prophets, 'Woe unto them that join house to house,
that lay field to field till there be no room.' When in the country
places there was no room for the common folk, then national decay
ensued in Israel. It was so also in Rome. The day came when one
magnate owned the 'territories of whole tribes' and left them 'to be
trampled under foot by herds or ravaged by wild beasts,' or garrisoned
them 'with slave {55} prisons or citizens held in bondage,' and Rome
sucked dry the rural life of Italy and of the lands washed by the
Mediterranean. Therewith paralysis seized the greatest of the
world-empires. In every age overgrown cities have proved themselves
the graveyards of civilisation. And the primary cause of the evils
which now threaten us is that we have made the countryside waste.
Counties and parishes have been depleted of life that cities might grow
more and more. It has been calculated that nine out of ten families in
England have migrated to the city in the last three generations. In
and around Glasgow half of the population of Scotland is concentrated.
Three-fourths of the whole population of Scotland has been massed in
the industrial belt of country that lies between the Forth and Clyde
estuaries, and which includes Edinburgh and Glasgow and the towns round
which are centred the iron and coal industries. We have driven our
manhood and womanhood out of the sunshine {56} and the clean air and
the silent spaces into the foetid, sunless closes of monstrous cities.
There the clanging of machinery leaves no place where the soul can be
still. And upon us has fallen the woe declared against those who
devastate the quiet places, adding field to field, until there is no
room for the poor.
I
The greatest tragedy of our day is that the English race which has
conquered the fourth of the world's area has lost its own land. In the
course of a hundred years the spoliation of well-nigh the whole nation
has been consummated. The villages and rural parishes of England which
once teemed with life are left to decay. The life and the wealth which
reared the parish churches of England--those monuments of vanished
piety and of forgotten arts--and which produced with skilled handicraft
the 'ornaments and church furniture, bells and candlesticks, crosses
and organs, and tapestry and banners,' have ebbed away, leaving behind
them only a {57} memory. The world can nowhere show a desolation such
as has overtaken rural England. Elsewhere, be it France or Germany,
Serbia or Bulgaria, the cottages are scattered over close-tilled land,
and the labour of man is rewarded by the earth yielding its increase.
But England presents the spectacle of decayed cottages, of vast spaces
'laid down to grass,' of stately houses with the silence of tree-shaded
parks round about them, and of a land which yields no longer food but
sport. 'As things go now,' writes an observer, 'we shall have empty
fields, except for a few shepherds and herdsmen in all the green of
England.' In his book, _The Condition of England_, Mr. C. F. G.
Masterman has presented a picture of rural decay which is steeped in
tears. 'A peasantry, unique in Europe in its complete divorce from the
land, lacking ownership of cottage or tiniest plot of ground, finds no
longer any attraction in the cheerless toil of the agricultural
labourer upon scant weekly wages'--thus Mr. Masterman. If {58} the
life-blood of a nation be derived from the clean countryside, then
'England is bleeding at the arteries, and it is her reddest blood which
is flowing away.'
It is to the Moloch of an industrial civilisation that this sacrifice
of life has been made. The desolation was wrought because men, in
their haste to become rich, were blind to the true values of labour.
They forgot that the primary work of man is to produce food, and that
upon the production of food the whole structure of the commonwealth
depends. Cities endure because, far beyond their ken, the land yields
wheat and fruit and supports wandering herds. All other work is
parasitic; that work alone is essential. But a perverted civilisation
sacrificed the primary to the parasitic, and poured its rewards into
the lap of the workers who added nothing to the world's true riches.
The road to success and honour lay only through the city. Formerly the
gentleman was he who tilled the ground; in our day the man who ploughs
and reaps {59} is deemed a boor. Clean hands and clean linen are now
the badges of a gentleman. The sense of the dignity of making the soil
yield its riches has vanished from among us. Everything is ordered
that the stream of life from the fields and the open sky into the
barracks of sooty, squalid cities may swell into an ever-increasing
river. We had only one ideal and that was cheap food. Other nations
carefully conserved the workers of the soil and protected them from a
competition that might deprive them of the reward of their labour.
During the last fifty years, while our population has rapidly
increased, our agricultural population has been diminished by a million
workers. A hundred years ago we had 9,000,000 acres producing wheat,
to-day we have only 1,800,000 wheat-growing acres. We have indeed
sacrificed our true life. In the whole of the British Empire, covering
a quarter of the globe, the total white population living on the land
is only 13,000,000, whilst that of Germany alone, working the land and
{60} living by it, has risen to 20,000,000. We had one watchword which
stirred our blood--the cheap loaf! The meaning of the watchword was
hid from us. For the cheap loaf meant cheap labour, and cheap labour
meant ever-increasing riches to the exploiters of toiling masses in the
lamp-lit cities. But the 'cheap loaf' meant for the country places
which yielded it, that the husbandman could not live by his labour.
Floods of oratory were poured forth; under the guise of philanthropy
the ideal of cheap food was held up in palpitating periods by
capitalists who reaped their sure reward in labour correspondingly
cheap, and the fields of England were steadily laid down to 'twitch and
thistle.' A generation wrought this desolation, unconscious of the
desolation that it wrought. The agricultural labourer became at last
obsessed by the watchword which wrought his ruin. Even Mr. Masterman
records with sympathy, if not with satisfaction, the attitude of the
farm labourer to the new 'fiscal reform.' {61} 'Oh dear!' is his
comment, 'we want no taxes on food.' We destroyed him, but we did it
so skilfully, and with so splendidly assumed an air of philanthropy,
that the worker on the land did not even recognise the instrument
wherewith we destroyed him. He has been the victim of political
factions--of politicians who have sacrificed the State to party. The
Conservatives not unnaturally made the monopoly in land a tenet of
their faith, and resisted every claim on the part of the poor to call
any portion of England, however small, their own; the Liberals made the
policy of Free Trade an inviolable doctrine, and though that policy
mainly enriched the capitalist, they assumed in its support the
semblance of enthusiasm for humanity, if not of the passion of
religion. But between the two, as between the upper and nether
millstone, the rural population of England has been ground to powder.
Not for the first time in history the desolation of a kingdom has been
wrought by time-serving politicians.
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And with the devastation which our national policy thus wrought in the
countryside there passed away, slowly but steadily, the ancient
landowners. These men had in their veins the life-blood of England;
they built up the Empire and sent forth their sons to be the
'frontiersmen of all the world.' Innumerable ties bound them to the
people. Squire and peasant were at one in love of the land, and each
knew that his welfare was bound up with that of the other. But the
lands had to be sold, and the new-rich came from the cities and
replaced the aristocracy of the countryside. They had no ties binding
them to the sons of the soil. They knew not the traditions to which
the landlord and tenant were loyal. They only sought to transplant a
bit of the city into the heart of the country. It was then that the
country folk awoke to the insecurity of their lives. At a word they
were sent forth homeless wanderers. The hint of a right to be
vindicated brought down unemployment and eviction on the head of {63}
England's freedmen. The cottager in the country could no longer call
his soul his own. In the city he could at least call his thoughts his
own, and he could give them utterance in stumbling words without
incurring the risk of being made homeless. No wonder the rural
labourer escaped for his life. The nation, as usual, awoke too late to
the realisation of its ebbing life. It began to make provision for the
people of England acquiring a moiety of the land of England. But it is
easy to turn a smiling land into a wilderness; to convert the
wilderness back into a garden is the baffling problem. 'To-day,'
writes Mr. Masterman, 'land is being slowly and laboriously offered to
the people, a generation after the people who once hungered for that
offer have flung themselves into the cities or beyond the sea.' Any
parvenu can sweep the population of a parish forth into Poplar and
Lambeth; it may well pass the wit of man to bring their children back
from Poplar and Lambeth to the land.
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II
To-day four-fifths of the population of England is crowded in cities,
and there they are left 'to soak and blacken soul and sense in city
slime.' In Scotland the same forces have been at work with the same
result. Parishes of soil as fertile as is in the world are to be found
in the occupation of half a dozen farmers, some of whom hold two or
more farms. Land which might hold hundreds of families, if the land
were available for the people as in France, is empty save for a handful
of farmers and their servants. Though great markets are at the door
waiting the produce of intensive cultivation, the small holder is
crowded out. Denmark pours into our cities the produce which the
monopoly in land prevents being supplied at home. Holland feeds us in
time of peace and our enemies in time of war. That the Danes and the
Dutch may have stores wherewith to feed our foes, the fields of England
are laid waste. {65} The only life now left in the country is the ebb
and flow of the overflow from the cities. Germany and Austria have
withstood a two years' blockade, because the land is there kept under
cultivation and yields the necessaries of life. Our enemies have not
been blind to a nation's true riches. Did we lose the command of the
sea for a few weeks, there would be no escape from destruction. For we
have sacrificed our bread supply to the production of Brummagem wares.
But there has been in Scotland an additional element of tragedy in the
rural situation which has not been manifested in England, at least on
so large a scale. Whole parishes have in the Highlands during the last
century been laid waste by wholesale ruthless evictions. Behind the
processes which have made the glens and mountain slopes desolate of
men, and which have massed a million of human beings into a city of
restricted area such as Glasgow, piling them, family on the top of
family, in noisome tenements, there lies {66} perhaps the greatest
tragedy of the nineteenth century. And that tragedy is all the more
poignant in that it has been wrought in silence, none paying it any
heed. Glens filled with men have been transformed into desert places
filled with sheep or deer, and that at the will of one man, while
statesmen paid no heed and the world took no cognisance.[1] For were
not these things done beyond the Grampians? And what happened there
was of no consequence.
It is almost incredible that, during the last century, glens and
countrysides in Scotland were stripped bare of human beings by
wholesale eviction. The thought of these poor thatched houses burning
{67} and the people driven away to find refuge where they could--in the
slums of Glasgow or across the seas--is to our minds so intolerable
that many will deny such crimes were ever perpetrated. Yet they were
perpetrated. The hearthstones on which the peat fires unceasingly
burned, which for generations had never grown cold, were left to the
rain and the snow. Some parishes were laid wholly waste. In one such
parish which I know, out of which sixty-one officers bearing their
King's commission went forth to fight in the Napoleonic wars, there has
gone forth hardly one officer to-day. Where hundreds were found of old
in the day of need, a mere handful of ghillies or shepherds is found
to-day who can take up arms. For that parish which gave Scotland the
greatest family of preachers and leaders in religious and social
movements was laid ruthlessly waste, and the parish minister, who held
all the honours which his Church and country could bestow on him, was
left in his manse solitary {68} amid the wilderness which greed
created, to die of a broken heart. That most beautiful of islands--the
Isle of Skye--sent forth 21 generals, 48 colonels, 600 commissioned
officers, 10,000 soldiers to fight in the great wars for human freedom
against the Corsican; to-day the Isle of Skye can scarcely muster 1000
in the greatest crisis of human history. One parish in the western
sea-board which sent 200 men to fight for freedom in the Napoleonic
wars to-day could only muster six; for the parish fell into the hands
of a man who wanted a deer forest for the passing of his leisure hours.
These figures are but representative of what has happened all over the
British Isles. An old man, who was carried as a child in the corner of
a plaid out of his native glen when the cataclysm of eviction burst on
the unbelieving crofters and cottars, while cottage after cottage was
given to the flames, when asked what he remembered about it, answered:
'I can see yet the smoke rising to heaven; and I can hear {69} the
sound of weeping down the glen.' In my boyhood's days I heard an old
man speaking of the townships of his youth being laid waste, and he
said: 'I remember it as one remembers things seen in a dream.' There
are many books in which those who may desire can inform themselves of
the depths to which it is possible for greed and tyrannous power to
bring men who have no ideal but the gratification of their desires.
The cruelties and the wrongs perpetrated in the Scottish Highlands on a
loyal and law-abiding people can only be paralleled by the atrocities
of the slave traders in Africa. They would be unbelievable were it not
that the State suffered the same processes in a gradual and less
dramatic form to accomplish the same ends in England. The only
difference was that the Scottish evictor concentrated in one day of
sword and fire the desolating work which in England and in Lowland
Scotland was diffused over many years. Whether the result be that of a
day or of {70} a hundred years, the folly and the guilt are the same.
The same fate as overtook rural England and Scotland has in even more
fateful degree overtaken Ireland. The vast majority of the Irish are
now outwith their native isle. In the Ireland of to-day only the
derelicts are left. Throughout the length and breadth of the three
kingdoms, the country places in which strong men were reared have been
made desolate that cities in which men decay might extend and enlarge
their slums.
III
In this devastation of the country places the abnormal process of
eviction played but a small part compared with the normal processes
which worked steadily for the emptying of the country and for the
growth of the city. A blinded legislature sacrificed everything to the
growth of an industrial civilisation. What the ruling classes wanted
was the increased prosperity of Glasgow and Birmingham; it mattered
nothing though the {71} country-folk perished. They had, however, some
consideration for the countrysides. They caused schools to be built
everywhere at the expense of landlords and tenants. But in these
schools they caused nothing to be taught but the dates of battles and
the names of rivers. In them there was nothing taught of the wonder of
growing life, of the miracle of earth pouring food into the lap of men,
of the glory and beauty of the greening earth, or of the dignity of
breaking up the fallow ground. I say, nothing of worth was taught in
these schools--nothing, except what roused an unhealthy craving for the
life that could be lived with unsoiled hands! And for the support of
these schools one lady who owned a large estate in the west had to sell
her jewels that she might pay the school rate, and tenants parted with
their stock for the same end. For the State had decreed that the
country places should pay for the support of those processes which were
to work their own desolation. Landlords were {72} made bankrupt and
tenants ruined that bloated cities might grow more and more.
Every development of the great national machinery designed for the
intellectual illumination of the people has wrought more and more
desolation in the country places. The last of these has been the
worst. In Scotland the parish school since the days of Knox was the
centre of intellectual activity, and the parish schoolmasters were able
to send their scholars straight to the University. But the pundits at
last decreed that this must cease. Secondary education was banished
from the parish schools. The teachers who formerly had scope for, and
joy in, the higher spheres of teaching were consigned one and all to
the withered fields of elementary education. All the secondary
teaching was concentrated in the towns where central schools were
established, to which promising children who desired such training were
collected.
The result has been disastrous. The light of higher education in each
rural {73} parish has been quenched. The secondary education has been
concentrated in towns, and only a few parents could face the additional
burden of providing lodgings for their children. The pundits made no
provision for the proper accommodation for boys and girls at the most
critical period of their lives. No hostels were built for them. In
insanitary villages they were left to whatever provision decayed houses
could provide for them. In these schools religious and moral training
was banned. After school hours boys and girls, removed from the
salutary influences of their homes, were left to the social joys of the
street corners. The main industry of many of these towns was that of
the hotel and public-house. The result has been that a large
proportion of boys and girls who in the shelter of their homes would
have grown into a worthy and useful citizenship have been utterly
ruined. The system was devised that the few might be pushed up the
ladder into the region of the higher {74} knowledge, leaving all record
of God and moral duty behind with their elementary textbooks; and no
provision whatever was made to safeguard them, in the course of the
giddy ascent, from toppling over and falling into the mud. And the
great system, instead of elevating, crashed them into the mire. And
this devastating process still goes on. The rising generation in the
country places in Scotland are made unfit for country life by a false
education, and, through its neglect of their higher needs, many of them
are ruined. A nation that spends five millions a day on war would not
in its education system provide for the social and moral needs of its
sons and daughters. It sacrificed everything to the brain. And the
result has been desolation in many a family in Scotland in lonely glens
and by the sea. Our education machinery has, in truth, been
Prussianised, and in the process the soul has been grievously wounded.
The class that provided the ministers of religion in wide stretches of
Scotland, provides {75} them no more. A generation of boys left to the
moral influences of the street corners, undisciplined and disregarded,
can provide the nation with clerks and not with leaders in the sphere
of the soul.
IV
There is no sign that the nation is waking to the misery wrought by the
bureaucrats. All the cry is for a further march along the same road.
The Government have in these last days appointed two Commissions on
Education, the one to 'inquire into the position occupied by natural
science,' and the other 'into the position occupied by the study of
modern languages,' in the educational system, and they are to consider
the matter, the one in relation to the 'interests of the trades,
industries, and professions' dependent on science, and the other in
relation to the 'interests of commerce and public service.' In this
there is no hint that what the nation mostly needs is the development
of character, the re-enforcement of soul. We are to investigate with
{76} our eye on commerce; the material gain is still our goal. The
Germanised minds have won their first victory. The future path of our
development is to be the path of the Teuton, and we are to tread it
like him, sacrificing our souls to Mammon. For the sake of commerce we
must go on pushing our boys faster up the ladder, heedless of debris of
moral wreckage at its foot!
A still more depressing symptom is the policy already adumbrated by the
Government to mitigate the devastation wrought in the country places.
Our armies now number millions, but the Government introduces a bill to
settle a few hundred soldiers on the land! Millions of acres lie
waste, but the Government proposes to deal with a few thousand acres
here and there. The needs of the future require an exodus from the
Egypt of the slums and from the slavery of that industrialism which
adds nothing to the world's true riches, and the re-establishment of
the people in their true heritage, the land. But the Government {77}
proposes to reinstate a handful. There is no sign that the politician
has as yet realised that agriculture is the noblest of industries, a
nation's true wealth. And there is no realisation of the only method
by which this can be done. It is the magic of ownership that alone
will restore to the people the joy in the land. The rent system is
doomed to failure. In the words 'my own' there is a glamour which
turns even sand into gold. When to the masses that have been despoiled
there is again restored the privilege of designating a little portion
of the land of their fathers, their own, then, and only then, will the
country places once more waken to life, and the desolation of
generations be at last removed. A nation for which millions have been
found ready to die must surely provide for the living such social
conditions as will enable them to live joyous and clean lives. In
kingdoms teeming with riches, no heart must be starved of beauty, no
life starved of bread, and no soul starved of God.
[1] A hundred years ago there were 5 deer forests in Scotland, now
there are 200. Since 1891 the acreage in Scotland under deer and
devoted to sport increased from over 2 1/2 millions of acres to over 3 1/2
millions of acres. This process of increasing the area devoted to
sport has gone on even since the war began. This land, to the extent
of two millions of acres, can be reclaimed for human use. Scotland has
talked of afforestation for a generation--and done nothing! During the
last twenty-five years, while the politicians pursued their game, the
people of Scotland lost an additional million of acres so far as food
production is concerned!
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