CHIEFLY ABOUT THE LAND.
For three months an Englishman sits in sackcloth and ashes. The
matter-of-fact reviewer will tell me this is not so; and he is right and
so am I.
London is not a place to live in in winter; there is, unfortunately, no
place in England that is. People talk of the weather. They cannot help
themselves. In his old age Dr. Johnson wrote, ‘I am now reduced to think
and am at last content to talk of the weather.’ That was a sign that the
Doctor at last had fallen low. As Burney writes: ‘There was no
information for which Dr. Johnson was less grateful than for that which
concerned the weather.’ If any one of his intimate companions told him
it was hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or calm; he would stop them by
saying: ‘O-oh, O-oh! You are telling me of that of which none but men in
a mine or a dungeon can be ignorant. Let us bear with patience or enjoy
in quiet elementary changes either for the better or the worse, as they
are never secrets.’ Nevertheless, the state of the weather continues in
all circles an unfailing theme. Bad weather affects the spirits by
depressing them, fine raises them. We are attuned to every action of the
outer atmosphere. Our suicides in November are known all the world over.
It is scarcely possible to be cheerful on a dull, cold, raw, foggy day.
I wonder people who can afford to go away and have no pressing claims at
home do not rush off to the Riviera in search of its blue sky, its summer
suns, its wealth of flowers, its richer life for the delicate, or the
infirm or old.
‘We must get out of England,’ said Wentworth to his wife, one dull wintry
morn, when the raw cold seemed to fill every apartment in the house, and
the outlook into the busy street only revealed half-starved figures in
all their wretchedness. ‘We must get out of England, and the sooner the
better.’
‘Yes, I’ve long been thinking so; but the question is, where to go. We
have got to think of other people besides ourselves, and of other affairs
than our own. But with our tastes and habits we can live cheaply
anywhere, and I have no wish to go where we shall meet a lot of idle rich
people only seeking to guard themselves from the English winter and
spending life in frivolous indulgence. Let us take the question
seriously.’
‘That is just what I am trying to do,’ was the reply. ‘We are not too
old for a grand experiment.’
‘But are you prepared to give up journalism?’
‘Yes, I am. I see a new spirit abroad, one which I detest.’
But one thing remained to Wentworth of the teaching of his early years: a
love of Liberal principles; an enthusiasm for humanity; a deep yearning
for the mental and moral elevation of the people—ideas deeply cherished
in the Nonconformist families of the past generation. In every home the
struggle for reform, the hatred of slavery, the desire to give the Roman
Catholics fair play, the struggle for the repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts, the need of a national and unsectarian system of
education, were held to be objects of paramount importance, and were the
subjects of daily converse. In every rural village meetings were held at
the chapels in their favour, and if there were no great orators to attend
them, what was said at them sank into prepared soil, and bore a rich
harvest. It was in East Anglia as it was all over England. The
agitation went from one chapel to another. A line of communication was
thus established, wrote William Hazlitt, whose father was a Unitarian
minister in Shropshire, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty
is kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fires, unquenchable like the
fires in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, placed at different stations that
waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the
destruction of Troy. It was from such centres came the soldiers who were
to win the people’s victories in spite of the nominees of Tory lords and
rotten borough-mongers, of pensioners and place-men, of time-serving
priests and fawning courtiers who then ruled the land, and who fattened
on the taxes wrung from an unrepresented and oppressed and a
discontented—and a justly discontented—nation. Young hearts burned
within them as they listened to Liberal orators, or read the speeches of
such men as Henry Brougham or Dan O’Connell, or studied Liberal
newspapers; and they longed for the time when they, too, should gird on
the shield and buckler and do battle for the Right. In vain timid
ministers and aged deacons uttered warning voices and shook their heads
at the new spirit which was abroad, quoted Scripture about obeying them
that have rule over you, hinted at the danger to spirituality of life and
feeling by mixing in the rough warfare of the political world. As well
might they scream to the stormy blast. The current was too strong: they
had to swim with it or be drowned. It was a grand time of awakening.
The world has seen nothing like it since. To Wentworth it was a baptism,
the effect of which was never to pass away. Buxton, as usual, continued
his morning smoke.
‘Hear me,’ said Wentworth, as Rose rushed out of the room, declaring that
she knew all he had to say. Wentworth continued: ‘As long as I can
remember, the “condition of England question,” as Carlyle called it, or,
as we term it, in more sensational phraseology, “the bitter cry of the
outcast,” has afforded painful matter of reflection to the statesman, the
philanthropist, the philosopher, and the divine. It is always coming to
the front, and it will always be coming to the front, even if you hang
all the bad landlords and jerry-builders, get rid of the bloated
capitalist, and divide the estates of the aristocracy and the millions of
the capitalists among the poor of the East-end. The working classes are
not to be confounded with the men and women who herd like beasts in the
wretched dens of the east. Underneath the lowest of them there is a
conservative residuum whom it is impossible to get rid of, whose
condition it is appalling to contemplate. They are the men who won’t
work; who won’t go where work is to be had; who come to London when they
should never have left their country home; who sell their manhood for a
pot of beer: casuals who, born in a poor-house or a prison, children of
shame from the first, mostly spend their lives alternately tramping the
streets and in the workhouse or the gaol. As London increases in
population, so do they. We have seen such men offered fair work by
hundreds, but they prefer filth and laziness, with the chance of an
appeal to the humane. “Pull down the rookery,” and the rooks won’t fly
away. Burn all the fever and vice laden dens of the outcast, and there
he is still, a disgrace and shame—not so much, as sensational writers
pretend, to our civilization and religion as to our common manhood. Ever
since we have known anything of the churches—whether Established or
Free—it seems to us that they have aimed as much at the temporal as the
spiritual improvement of the outcast. We have yet to learn that it is a
disgrace to our civilization that it does not interfere with God’s law,
that the wrong-doer must pay for his wrong-doing, whatever that may
be—that if you lose your chance, another will take it—that it is too late
to go harvesting in winter; that the victory is to the strong, that he
that will not work shall not eat—those who forget this, who idle away the
precious moments, are soon sitting in the outer darkness of the outcast,
where there is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
‘It amuses us, or would, were not the subject so awful—for it may be
taken as a sober truth that outside the bottomless pit there is no such
utter damnation as is to be found among the outcast—to find clever
writers talking of the constant neglect of the last hundred years, and to
ponder over the remedies. It is now the fashion to recommend better
houses to be built at the expense of the community. If we were to get
free trade in land, more will be done to remove the congestion in our
great cities than by the erection of improved dwellings, which will
rather intensify the evil. The more society does for the outcast the
more will their number and their poverty alike increase. The remedy is
worse than the disease. Every halfpenny you give to the undeserving is
so much taken from the deserving. Every benefit you confer on the pauper
is at the expense of the honest, respectable poor, who have a prior
claim. Against State action the argument is still stronger. In the
first place, the State cannot deal honestly and fairly by the people.
What it does is ill done, and at double expense. The people who pay the
taxes are often as badly off as those for whose benefit they are spent.
A slight addition to the taxation of a wealthy peer or capitalist will
not deprive him of a single luxury, but it may send a small, struggling
tradesman into the _Gazette_. We are a nation of shopkeepers, and it is
easy to perceive that a time may come when our heavy taxation may cripple
us in our trade with foreign competitors, when they will supply the
markets, on which we have hitherto depended, when, in fact, we shall have
little left to us but our National Debt.’
‘Go on,’ said Buxton. ‘You are getting rather prosy, but if it relieves
your feelings, pray proceed.’
‘Well, then,’ said Wentworth, ‘I will. A gentleman sends me a scheme of
a cooperative home colony, which will give the settlers three good meals
a day, a house, a full suit of clothing every year, education for their
children, and an allotment of half an acre of land, which shall be
entirely at the disposal of the head of the family so long as he makes a
good use of it and renders proper service during the regular working
hours. For the purchase of fuel or tea and coffee, and such things as
cannot be grown in this climate, the director will sell in the public
market any surplus produce such as eggs, butter and poultry, far too much
of which we get from abroad. One-sixth of the harvest and other produce
will be sold to pay the salaries of director and foremen. A farm of
three hundred and forty acres in the Isle of Sheppey, for instance, can
be had if it be deemed desirable. If we get a population of five hundred
on it, fifty acres of wheat will supply the settlement with all the bread
that can be eaten there. If the cows were stall-fed, one hundred acres
of land would keep over a hundred head of cattle, and such a herd would
supply all the requisite milk, cheese, butter, beef and hides every year
in abundant quantities. Flax could be cultivated and linen woven. A
flock of sheep could be tended on the estate sufficient to yield five
pounds of wool every year per head of the population. There would be no
expense for manure, as the settlement would provide it all. Are you
weary?’ said Wentworth.
‘Not particularly. Pray proceed. But why not try it—why not begin a
scheme of the kind at once?’
‘All we have to do is to get the people back to the land. By the
establishment of such home colonies work will be offered in rural
districts to men and women who would otherwise be driven into our great
cities to increase the pauperism which threatens our whole social
edifice. The scheme, if carried out, will encourage habits of industry
and thrift—unlike the work given in our workhouses, which demoralizes and
degrades the recipients; it will help the societies instituted to
distribute charity, as it will offer strong men and women healthy labour
rather than doles, which they are ashamed to accept, which they do not
ask for, and which, when taken, have a tendency to break down that spirit
of independence and self-reliance which lies at the foundation of all
decent manhood; and lastly, and this is an immense benefit, it would
prevent land now in cultivation from becoming a desert. It seems to me
this of itself is no common recommendation of the plan, when farmers are
giving up farming, and their farms either allowed to run to waste or
farmed by the landlords at a heavy loss. Our great Free Traders never
dreamt of this when they got Parliament and the people to destroy
Protection, yet such are the facts we have to face.’
‘And yet there are people who believe in Cobden still,’ said Buxton.
‘I knew him well,’ said Wentworth, ‘and a better man never lived. He was
right in the main, though his enthusiasm led him astray, and no wonder.
Let me, in the language of Goldsmith remind you—
‘“How wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land.”’
Buxton laughed when Wentworth had finished his rhapsody. Buxton was
given to laughter. He was not a man who took life very seriously.
Perhaps he would have done better had he done so as far as his own
personal interests were concerned. As Swift said of Arbuthnot, it might
be said of him, that he knew his art better than his trade.
‘Wait a moment,’ he said, as he rushed out of the room to his own den,
whence he returned with an old faded handbill, which was as follows:
SPENCE’S PLAN
for Parochial Partnerships in the Land
is the only effectual remedy for the
distress and oppressions of the people.
The Landholders are not Proprietors-in-Chief;
they are but the _Stewards_ of the Public,
for the LAND IS THE PEOPLE’S FARM.
The expenses of the Government do not cause the
misery that
surrounds us, but the enormous exactings of those
_Unjust Stewards_,
Landed monopoly is indeed equally contrary
to the benign
Spirit of Christianity, and destructive of
the Independence and Morality of Mankind.
‘The Profit of the Earth is for all.’
Yet how deplorably destitute are the great mass of the
People!
Nor is it possible for their situations to
be radically amended but
by the establishment of a system
founded on the immutable bases of
Nature and Justice.
Experience demonstrates its necessity, and the
Rights of Manhood
require it for their presentation.
To obtain this important object by extending the knowledge of the
above system, the Society of Spencean Philanthropies has been
established. Further information of its principles may be obtained
by attending any of its sectional meetings, where subjects are
discussed calculated to enlighten the human understanding; and where,
also, the regulations of the society may be procured, containing a
complete development of the Spencean system. Every individual is
admitted free of expense who will conduct himself with decorum.
‘I never heard of Spence,’ said Wentworth.
‘Of course not,’ said Buxton. ‘In these days of boasted progress we know
nothing of what has been. Radicals always ignore the past. You really
need a little enlightenment. Shall I enlighten you?’
‘By all means.’
‘It was in 1775 Mr. Spence began his public career. Like most original
thinkers, he commenced in the country. His political opinions were first
pronounced in the form of a lecture read before the Newcastle
Philosophical Society in 1775, and printed immediately afterwards, from
which time, he says, he went on continually publishing them in some shape
or other. They are fully explained in his “Constitution of Spensonia: a
Country in Fairy Land Situated Somewhere between Utopia and Oceana.”
According to his scheme, the land belongs to the people, and individuals
should rent the land from their respective parishes, the rent
constituting the national revenue, and the surplus, after all expenses
were paid, was to be divided equally amongst all the parishioners. The
larger estates were to be let for one-and-twenty years, and at the
expiration of that term relet by public auction, the smaller ones by the
year, and the larger ones sub-divided according to the increase of
population. The legislative power was to be vested in an annual
Parliament elected by universal suffrage, women voting as well as men.
The executive was to be in the hands of a council of twenty-five, half of
which was to be renewed annually. Every fifth day there was to be a
Sabbatical rest, not a Sabbath, for no provision was made for public
worship, and in the new world no mention was to be made of parsons,
though the constitution was to be proclaimed in a more or less religious
form. At the end of the pamphlet, as it was published, was an epilogue,
intimating the flight of poverty and misery from this lower world, and
there was an appeal:
‘“Let us all join heart and hand
Through every town and city,
Of every age and every sex,
Young men and maidens pretty,
To haste this golden age’s reign
On every hill and valley,
Then Paradise shall greet our eyes
Through every street and alley.”’
‘Ah,’ said Wentworth, ‘I see there is nothing new under the sun.’
‘But the taxes?’ said Buxton. He continued: ‘This scheme was published
long before the French Revolution broke out. Up in the north there had
risen a solitary and original thinker who advocated female voting,
universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, and had got hold of the
idea—which has led many of our modern apostles to fame and fortune—that
the land lay at the root of the Condition of England question, that all
private property in land must be destroyed, and that it must be done at
once.
‘Spence, then, was, to use the cant of the present day, a Progressist.
To him belongs the honour of having first presented the land question in
all its bearings to the general public. What was his reward?—a
Government prosecution with a fine of £20 and a year’s imprisonment at
Shrewsbury. Well might a nobleman, as Wilberforce tells us, show him the
picture of crucified Christ, and bid him mark the end of a Reformer.
‘One cause of Spence’s failure is obvious—he tried to do too much. “When
I began to study,” says he, “I found everything erected on certain
unalterable principles. I found every art and science a perfect whole.
Nothing was in anarchy but language and politics. But both of these I
reduced to order; the one by a new alphabet, the other by a new
constitution.” Of what he called his natural or philosophical
orthography we know but little, save that one of his works was printed in
it. Had he aimed at less he would have accomplished more. He was no
vulgar demagogue; that trade was not a paying one when Spence proclaimed
himself “the unpaid advocate of the disinherited seed of Adam.” “This,
gentlemen,” he exclaimed when on his trial—he was too poor to retain
attorney or counsel for his defence—“this, gentlemen, is the Rights of
Man; and upon this Book of Nature have I built my commonwealth, and the
Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” He added, as well he might:
“I solemnly avow that what I have written and published has been done
with as good a conscience and as much philanthropy as ever possessed the
heart of any prophet-philosopher or apostle that ever existed.”
‘It was all in vain. The Government of the day feared the result of his
teaching. Had he set up for a philosopher and clothed his ideas in
mystic language, perhaps he might have been overlooked; but he published
what he called “Pig’s Meat” for the people, and that made him dangerous.
He had no friends and became an easy prey. He was poor, he stood alone,
and was generally held to be little better than a lunatic; even the
professed friends of liberty kept aloof from him. Well might be exclaim,
as he did before his judges, “Perhaps, my lords, I have entertained too
high an opinion of human nature, for I do not find mankind very grateful
clients.” After his trial and imprisonment Spence became an itinerant
vendor of books and pamphlets, chiefly his own works, which he carried
about in a vehicle constructed for the purpose. He died somewhere about
1812, while Britons were hard at work on sea and in every land in Europe
setting right public matters according to their fashion—paying foreigners
to fight for their own independence, singing all the while that they
never would be slaves.’
‘We are wiser now,’ said Wentworth.
‘Perhaps,’ was the cynical reply. ‘You are everlastingly talking,’ he
continued, ‘of an outcast London; but, after all, it is on outcast London
that the chief blame of its misery lies. Let us have an Act for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and at once, in outcast London, where
boys and girls become fathers and mothers before they are out of their
teens, and when they have no chance of earning a living, and know not and
care not for the little ones they bring into the world. In respectable
London a man does not marry till he fancies he can keep a wife. In
outcast London it is the reverse. In such a case population represents
the thoughtlessness of the nation. In many cases it represents the most
brutal selfishness. Men and women can’t complain if they reap what they
have sown; but have not we a right to say a word on behalf of the
children? For men and women to bring up their children in the way in
which it is done in outcast London is a crime. To bring a baby into the
world to lead a diseased and wretched life where it can never get a
mouthful of wholesome food, a ray of sunlight, a particle of fresh air,
to curse a young life that God meant to be so full of bliss, is a crime
so awful that we can see no fitting punishment. To improve outcast
London the first thing is to stop the supply. There is no remedy if
reckless pauperism is to be allowed to grow rampant in our midst.
‘One word more,’ said Wentworth. ‘Suppose we think more of the decent
poor, and less of the outcast. Suppose we give the respectable working
man as much sympathy as we give his good-for-nothing brother. Suppose we
take the sober operative as much by the hand as we do the inebriate.
Suppose we act on the idea that industry is honourable, and that the men
who live by it are men to be honoured; that the world with all its
blessings is for the worker, whether he tills the soil or ploughs the
deep, whether he builds the loftiest viaduct or burrows in the deepest
mine.’