THE VILLAGE IN 1830
We have described the growing misery of the labourer, the increasing
rigours of the criminal law, and the insensibility of the upper
classes, due to the isolation of the poor. What kind of a community
was created by the Speenhamland system after it had been in force for
a generation? We have, fortunately, a very full picture given in a
Parliamentary Report that is generally regarded as one of the landmarks
of English history. We cannot do better than set out the main features
of the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834, and the several
effects they traced to this system.
The first effect is one that everybody could have anticipated: the
destruction of all motives for effort and ambition. Under this system
‘the most worthless were sure of _something_, while the prudent, the
industrious, and the sober, with all their care and pains, obtained
_only something_; and even that scanty pittance was doled out to
them by the overseer.’[399] All labourers were condemned to live on
the brink of starvation, for no effort of will or character could
improve their position. The effect on the imagination was well summed
up in a rhetorical question from a labourer who gave evidence to
a Commissioner. ‘When a man has his spirit broken what is he good
for?’[400] The Poor Law Commissioners looked at it from a different
point of view: ‘The labourer feels that the existing system, though
it generally gives him low wages, always gives him work. It gives
him also, strange as it may appear, what he values more, a sort of
independence. He need not bestir himself to seek work; he need not
study to please his master; he need not put any restraint upon his
temper; he need not ask relief as a favour. He has all a slave’s
security for subsistence, without his liability to punishment.... All
the other classes of society are exposed to the vicissitudes of hope
and fear; he alone has nothing to lose or to gain.’[401]
But it is understating the result of the system on individual
enterprise to say that it destroyed incentives to ambition; for in some
parishes it actually proscribed independence and punished the labourer
who owned some small property. Wages under these conditions were so
low that a man with a little property or a few savings could not keep
himself alive without help from the parish, but if a man was convicted
of possessing anything he was refused parish help. It was dangerous
even to look tidy or neat, ‘ragged clothes are kept by the poor, for
the express purpose of coming to the vestry in them.’[402] The Report
of the Commissioners on this subject recalls Rousseau’s description of
the French peasant with whom he stayed in the course of his travels,
who, when his suspicions had been soothed, and his hospitable instincts
had been warmed by friendly conversation, produced stores of food from
the secret place where they had been hidden to escape the eye of the
tax-collector. A man who had saved anything was ruined. A Mr. Hickson,
a Northampton manufacturer and landowner in Kent, gave an illustration
of this.
‘The case of a man who has worked for me will show the effect of the
parish system in preventing frugal habits. This is a hard-working,
industrious man, named William Williams. He is married, and had saved
some money, to the amount of about £70, and had two cows; he had also
a sow and ten pigs. He had got a cottage well furnished; he was a
member of a benefit club at Meopham, from which he received 8s. a week
when he was ill. He was beginning to learn to read and write, and sent
his children to the Sunday School. He had a legacy of about £46, but
he got his other money together by saving from his fair wages as a
waggoner. Some circumstances occurred which obliged me to part with
him. The consequence of this labouring man having been frugal and saved
money, and got the cows, was that no one would employ him, although
his superior character as a workman was well known in the parish. He
told me at the time I was obliged to part with him: “Whilst I have
these things I shall get no work; I must part with them all; I must be
reduced to a state of beggary before any one will employ me.” I was
compelled to part with him at Michaelmas; he has not yet got work, and
he has no chance of getting any until he has become a pauper; for until
then the paupers will be preferred to him. He cannot get work in his
own parish, and he will not be allowed to get any in other parishes.
Another instance of the same kind occurred amongst my workmen. Thomas
Hardy, the brother-in-law of the same man, was an excellent workman,
discharged under similar circumstances; he has a very industrious wife.
They have got two cows, a well-furnished cottage, and a pig and fowls.
Now he cannot get work, because he has property. The pauper will be
preferred to him, and he can qualify himself for it only by becoming a
pauper. If he attempts to get work elsewhere, he is told that they do
not want to fix him on the parish. Both these are fine young men, and
as excellent labourers as I could wish to have. The latter labouring
man mentioned another instance of a labouring man in another parish
(Henstead), who had once had more property than he, but was obliged to
consume it all, and is now working on the roads.’[403] This effect of
the Speenhamland arrangements was dwelt on in the evidence before the
Committee on Agricultural Labourers’ Wages in 1824. Labourers had to
give up their cottages in a Dorsetshire village because they could not
become pensioners if they possessed a cottage, and farmers would only
give employment to village pensioners. Thus these cottagers who had not
been evicted by enclosure were evicted by the Speenhamland system.
It is not surprising that in the case of another man of independent
nature in Cambridgeshire, who had saved money and so could get no work,
we are told that the young men pointed at him, and called him a fool
for not spending his money at the public-house, ‘adding that then he
would get work.’[404] The statesmen who condemned the labourer to this
fate had rejected the proposal for a minimum wage, on the ground that
it would destroy emulation.
There was one slight alleviation of this vicious system, which the
Poor Law Commissioners considered in the very different light of
an aggravation. If society was to be reorganised on such a basis
as this, it was at any rate better that the men who were made to
live on public money should not be grateful to the ratepayers. The
Commissioners were pained by the insolence of the paupers. ‘The parish
money,’ said a Sussex labourer, ‘is now chucked to us like as to a
dog,’[405] but the labourers did not lick the hand that threw it. All
through the Report we read complaints of the ‘insolent, discontented,
surly pauper,’ who talks of ‘right’ and ‘income,’ and who will soon
fight for these supposed rights and income ‘unless some step is taken
to arrest his progress to open violence.’ The poor emphasised this
view by the terms they applied to their rate subsidies, which they
sometimes called ‘their reglars,’ sometimes ‘the county allowance,’
and sometimes ‘The Act of Parliament allowance.’ Old dusty rentbooks
of receipts and old dirty indentures of apprenticeship were handed
down from father to son with as much care as if they had been deeds of
freehold property, as documentary evidence to their right to a share
in the rates of a particular parish.[406] Of course there was not a
uniform administration, and the Commissioners reported that whilst in
some districts men were disqualified for relief if they had any wages,
in others there was no inquiry into circumstances, and non-necessitous
persons dipped like the rest into the till. In many cases only the
wages received during the last week or fortnight were taken into
account, and thus the allowance would be paid to some persons who at
particular periods received wages in excess of the scale. This accounts
for the fact stated by Thorold Rogers from his own experience that
there were labourers who actually saved considerable sums out of the
system.
The most obvious and immediate effect was the effect which had been
foreseen without misgiving in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The
married man was employed in preference to the bachelor, and his income
rose with the birth of each child. But there was one thing better
than to marry and have a family, and that was to marry a mother of
bastards, for bastards were more profitable than legitimate children,
since the parish guaranteed the contribution for which the putative
father was legally liable. It was easier to manage with a family than
with a single child. As one young woman of twenty-four with four
bastard children put it, ‘If she had one more she should be very
comfortable.’[407] Women with bastard children were thus very eligible
wives. The effect of the whole system on village morals was striking
and widespread, and a witness from a parish which was overwhelmed
with this sudden deluge of population said to the Commission, ‘the
eighteen-penny children will eat up this parish in ten years more,
unless some relief be afforded us.’[408] Before this period, if we are
to believe Cobbett, it had been rare for a woman to be with child at
the time of her marriage; in these days of demoralisation and distress
it became the habit.
The effects produced by this system on the recipients of relief were
all of them such as might have been anticipated, and in this respect
the Report of the Commissioners contained no surprises. It merely
illustrated the generalisations that had been made by all Poor Law
Reformers during the last fifteen years. But the discovery of the
extent of the corruption which the system had bred in local government
and administration was probably a revelation to most people. It
demoralised not only those who received but those who gave. A network
of tangled interests spread over local life, and employers and
tradesmen were faced with innumerable temptations and opportunities
for fraud. To take the case of the overseer first. Suppose him to be
a tradesman: he was liable to suffer in his custom if he refused to
relieve the friends, or it might be the workmen of his customers. It
would require a man of almost superhuman rigidity of principle to be
willing not only to lose time and money in serving a troublesome and
unprofitable office, but to lose custom as well.[409] From the resolve
not to lose custom he might gradually slip down to the determination to
reimburse himself for ‘the vexatious demands’ on his time, till a state
of affairs like that in Slaugham came about.
‘Population, 740. Expenditure, £1706. The above large sum of money is
expended principally in orders on the village shops for flour, clothes,
butter, cheese, etc.: the tradesmen serve the office of overseer by
turns; the two last could neither read nor write.’[410]
If the overseer were a farmer there were temptations to pay part of
the wages of his own and his friends’ labourers out of parish money,
or to supply the workhouse with his own produce. The same temptations
beset the members of vestries, whether they were open or select.
‘Each vestryman, so far as he is an immediate employer of labour, is
interested in keeping down the rate of wages, and in throwing part of
their payment on others, and, above all, on the principal object of
parochial fraud, the tithe-owner: if he is the owner of cottages, he
endeavours to get their rent paid by the parish; if he keeps a shop, he
struggles to get allowance for his customers or debtors; if he deals
in articles used in the workhouse, he tries to increase the workhouse
consumption; if he is in humble circumstances, his own relations or
friends may be among the applicants.’[411] Mr. Drummond, a magistrate
for Hants and Surrey, said to the Committee on Labourers’ Wages in
1824, that part of the poor-rate expenditure was returned to farmers
and landowners in exorbitant cottage rents, and that the farmers always
opposed a poor man who wished to build himself a cottage on the waste.
In the case of what was known as the ‘labour rate’ system, the members
of one class combined together to impose the burden of maintaining the
poor on the shoulders of the other classes. By this system, instead of
the labourer’s wages being made up to a fixed amount by the parish,
each ratepayer was bound to employ, and to pay at a certain rate, a
certain number of labourers, whether he wanted them or not. The number
depended sometimes on his assessment to the poor rate, sometimes on the
amount of acres he occupied (of the use to which the land was put no
notice was taken, a sheep-walk counting for as much as arable fields):
when the occupiers of land had employed a fixed number of labourers,
the surplus labourers were divided amongst all the ratepayers according
to their rental. This plan was superficially fair, but as a matter of
fact it worked out to the advantage of the big farmers with much arable
land, and pressed hard on the small ones who cultivated their holdings
by their own and their children’s labour, and, in cases where they were
liable to the rate, on the tradesmen who had no employment at which
to set an agricultural labourer. After 1832 (2 and 3 William IV. c.
96) the agreement of three-fourths of the ratepayers to such a system
was binding on all, and the large farmers often banded together to
impose it on their fellow ratepayers by intimidation or other equally
unscrupulous means: thus at Kelvedon in Essex we read: ‘There was no
occasion in this parish, nor would it have been done but for a junto of
powerful landholders, putting down opposition by exempting a sufficient
number, to give themselves the means of a majority.’[412]
Landlords in some cases resorted to Machiavellian tactics in order to
escape their burdens.
‘Several instances have been mentioned to us, of parishes nearly
depopulated, in which almost all the labour is performed by persons
settled in the neighbouring villages or towns; drawing from them, as
allowance, the greater part of their subsistence.’[413] This method is
described more at length in the following passage:--
‘When a parish is in the hands of only one proprietor, or of
proprietors so few in number as to be able to act, and to compel their
tenants to act, in unison, and adjoins to parishes in which property is
much divided, they may pull down every cottage as it becomes vacant,
and prevent the building of new ones. By a small immediate outlay
they may enable and induce a considerable portion of those who have
settlements in their parish to obtain settlements in the adjoining
parishes: by hiring their labourers for periods less than a year, they
may prevent the acquisition of new settlements in their own. They may
thus depopulate their own estates, and cultivate them by means of the
surplus population of the surrounding district.’[414] A clergyman in
Reading[415] said that he had between ten and twenty families living in
his parish and working for the farmers in their original parish, whose
cottages had been pulled down over their heads. Occasionally a big
proprietor of parish A, in order to lessen the poor rates, would, with
unscrupulous ingenuity, take a farm in parish B, and there hire for the
year a batch of labourers from A: these at the end of their term he
would turn off on to the mercies of parish B which was now responsible
for them, whilst he sent for a fresh consignment from parish A.[416]
The Report of the Commission is a remarkable and searching picture
of the general demoralisation produced by the Speenhamland system,
and from that point of view it is most graphic and instructive. But
nobody who has followed the history of the agricultural labourer can
fail to be struck by its capital omission. The Commissioners, in their
simple analysis of that system, could not take their eyes off the
Speenhamland goblin, and instead of dealing with that system as a wrong
and disastrous answer to certain difficult questions, they treated the
system itself as the one and original source of all evils. They sighed
for the days when ‘the paupers were a small disreputable minority,
whose resentment was not to be feared, and whose favour was of no
value,’ and ‘all other classes were anxious to diminish the number of
applicants, and to reduce the expenses of their maintenance.’[417] They
did not realise that the governing class had not created a Frankenstein
monster for the mere pleasure of its creation; that they had not set
out to draw up an ideal constitution, as Rousseau had done for the
Poles. In 1795 there was a fear of revolution, and the upper classes
threw the Speenhamland system over the villages as a wet blanket
over sparks. The Commissioners merely isolated the consequences of
Speenhamland and treated them as if they were the entire problem, and
consequently, though their report served to extinguish that system, it
did nothing to rehabilitate the position of the labourer, or to restore
the rights and status he had lost. The new Poor Law was the only gift
of the Reformed Parliament to the agricultural labourer; it was an
improvement on the old, but only in the sense that the east wind is
better than the sirocco.
* * * * *
What would have happened if either of the other two remedies had been
adopted for the problem to which the Speenhamland system was applied,
it is impossible to say. But it is easy to see that the position of
the agricultural labourer, which could not have been worse, might have
been very much better, and that the nation, as apart from the landlords
and money-lords, would have come out of this whirlpool much stronger
and much richer. This was clear to one correspondent of the Poor Law
Commission, whose memorandum, printed in an Appendix,[418] is more
interesting and profound than any contribution to the subject made by
the Commissioners themselves. M. Chateauvieux set out an alternative
policy to Speenhamland, which, if the governing class of 1795 or the
governing class of 1834 had been enlightened enough to follow it, would
have set up a very different labouring class in the villages from the
helpless proletariat that was created by the enclosures.
‘Mais si au lieu d’opérer le partage des biens communaux,
l’administration de la commune s’était bornée à louer pour quelques
années des parcelles des terres qu’elle possède en vaine pâture, et
cela à très bas prix, aux journaliers domiciliés sur son territoire, il
en serait resulté:
‘(1) Que le capital de ces terres n’aurait point été aliéné et absorbé
dans la propriété particulière.
‘(2) Que ce capital aurait été néanmoins utilisé pour la reproduction.
‘(3) Qu’il aurait servi à l’amélioration du sort des pauvres qui
l’auraient défriché, de toute la différence entre le prix du loyer
qu’ils en auraient payé, et le montant du revenu qu’ils auraient
obtenu de sa recolte.
‘(4) Que la commune aurait encaissé le montant de ses loyers, et
aurait augmenté d’autant les moyens dont elle dispose pour le
soulagement de ces pauvres.’
M. Chateauvieux understood better than any of the Commissioners,
dominated as they were by the extreme individualist economy of the
time, the meaning of Bolingbroke’s maxim that a wise minister considers
his administration as a single day in the great year of Government; but
as a day that is affected by those which went before and must affect
those which are to come after. A Government of enclosing landowners
was perhaps not to be expected to understand all that the State was in
danger of losing in the reckless alienation of common property.
What of the prospects of the other remedy that was proposed? At first
sight it seems natural to argue that had Whitbread’s Minimum Wage Bill
become an Act of Parliament it would have remained a dead letter.
The administration depended on the magistrates and the magistrates
represented the rent-receiving and employing classes. A closer scrutiny
warrants a different conclusion. At the time that the Speenhamland
plan was adopted there were many magistrates in favour of setting a
minimum scale. The Suffolk magistrates, for example, put pressure on
the county members to vote for Whitbread’s Bill, and those members,
together with Grey and Sheridan, were its backers. The Parliamentary
support for the Bill was enough to show that it was not only in Suffolk
that it would have been adopted; there were men like Lechmere and
Whitbread scattered about the country, and though they were men of far
more enlightened views than the average J.P., they were not without
influence in their own neighbourhoods. It is pretty certain, therefore,
that if the Bill had been carried, it would have been administered in
some parts of the country. The public opinion in support of the Act
would have been powerfully reinforced by the pressure of the labourers,
and this would have meant a more considerable stimulus than might at
first be supposed, for the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners shows
that the pressure of the labourers was a very important factor in the
retention of the allowance system in parishes where the overseers
wished to abandon it, and if the labourers could coerce the local
authorities into continuing the Speenhamland system, they could have
coerced the magistrates into making an assessment of wages. The
labourers were able by a show of violence to raise wages and to reduce
prices temporarily, as is clear from the history of 1816 and 1830.
It is not too much to suppose that they could have exercised enough
influence in 1795 to induce magistrates in many places to carry out a
law that was on the Statute Book. Further, it is not unreasonable to
suppose that agricultural labourers’ unions to enforce the execution of
the law would have escaped the monstrous Combination Law of 1799 and
1800, for even in 1808 the Glasgow and Lancashire cotton-weavers were
permitted openly to combine for the purpose of seeking a legal fixing
of wages.[419]
If assessment had once become the practice, the real struggle would
have arisen when the great prosperity of agriculture began to decline;
at the time, that is, when the Speenhamland system began to show those
symptoms of strain that we have described. Would the customary wage,
established under the more favourable conditions of 1795, have stood
against that pressure? Would the labourers have been able to keep up
wages, as critics of the Whitbread Bill had feared that they would?
In considering the answers to that question, we have to reckon with
a force that the debaters of 1795 could not have foreseen. In 1795
Cobbett was engaged in the politics and polemics of America, and if
any member of the House of Commons knew his name, he knew it as the
name of a fierce champion of English institutions, and a fierce enemy
of revolutionary ideas; a hero of the _Anti-Jacobin_ itself. In 1810
Cobbett was rapidly making himself the most powerful tribune that
the English poor have ever known. Cobbett’s faults are plain enough,
for they are all on the surface. His egotism sometimes seduced his
judgment; he had a strongly perverse element in his nature; his opinion
of any proposals not his own was apt to be petulant and peevish, and
it might perhaps be said of him that he generally had a wasp in his
bonnet. These qualities earned for him his title of the Contentious
Man. They would have been seriously disabling in a Cabinet Minister,
but they did not affect his power of collecting and mobilising and
leading the spasmodic forces of the poor.
Let us recall his career in order to understand what his influence
would have been if the labourers had won their customary wage in 1795,
and had been fighting to maintain it fifteen or twenty years later.
His adventures began early. When he was thirteen his imagination
was fired by stories the gardener at Farnham told him of the glories
of Kew. He ran away from home, and made so good an impression on the
Kew gardener that he was given work there. His last coppers on that
journey were spent in buying Swift’s _Tale of a Tub_. He returned home,
but his restless dreams drove him again into the world. He tried to
become a sailor, and ultimately became a soldier. He left the army,
where he had made his mark and received rapid promotion, in order to
expose a financial scandal in his regiment, but on discovering that
the interests involved in the countenance of military abuses were
far more powerful than he had supposed, he abandoned his attempt and
fled to France. A few months later he crossed to America, and settled
down to earn a living by teaching English to French refugees. This
peaceful occupation he relinquished for the congenial excitements
of polemical journalism, and he was soon the fiercest pamphleteer
on the side of the Federals, who took the part of England, in their
controversies with the Democrats, who took the part of the Revolution.
So far as the warfare of pamphlets went, Cobbett turned the scale. The
Democrats could not match his wit, his sarcasm, his graphic and pointed
invectives, his power of clever and sparkling analysis and ridicule.
This warfare occupied him for nearly ten years, and he returned to
England in time to have his windows broken for refusing to illuminate
his house in celebration of the Peace of Amiens. In 1802 he started the
_Political Register_. At that time he was still a Tory, but a closer
study of English life changed his opinions, and four years later he
threw himself into the Radical movement. The effect of his descent on
English politics can only be compared to the shock that was given to
the mind of Italy by the French methods of warfare, when Charles VIII.
led his armies into her plains to fight pitched battles without any
of the etiquette or polite conventions that had graced the combats of
the condottieri. He gave to the Reform agitation an uncompromising
reality and daring, and a movement which had become the dying echo of
a smothered struggle broke into storm and thunder. Hazlitt scarcely
exaggerated his dæmonic powers when he said of him that he formed a
fourth estate of himself.
Now Cobbett may be said to have spent twenty years of his life in the
effort to save the labourers from degradation and ruin. He was the only
man of his generation who regarded politics from this standpoint. This
motive is the key to his career. He saw in 1816 that the nation had to
choose between its sinecures, its extravagant army, its rulers’ mad
scheme of borrowing at a higher rate to extinguish debt, for which it
was paying interest at a low rate, its huge Civil List and privileged
establishments, the interests of the fund-holders and contractors
on the one hand, and its labourers on the other. In that conflict
of forces the labourer could not hold his own. Later, Cobbett saw
that there were other interests, the interests of landowners and of
tithe-holders, which the State would have to subordinate to national
claims if the labourer was to be saved. In that conflict, too, the
labourer was beaten. He was unrepresented in Parliament, whereas the
opposing interests were massed there. Cobbett wanted Parliamentary
Reform, not like the traditional Radicals as a philosophy of rights,
but as an avalanche of social power. Parliamentary Reform was never
an end to him, nor the means to anything short of the emancipation of
the labourer. In this, his main mission, Cobbett failed. The upper
classes winced under his ruthless manners, and they trembled before
his Berserker rage, but it is the sad truth of English history that
they beat him. Now if, instead of throwing himself against this world
of privilege and vested interests in the hopes of wringing a pittance
of justice for a sinking class, it had been his task to maintain a
position already held, he would have fought under very different
conditions. If, when prices began to fall, there had been a customary
wage in most English villages, the question would not have been whether
the ruling class was to maintain its privileges and surplus profits by
letting the labourer sink deeper into the morass, but whether it was
to maintain these privileges and profits by taking something openly
from him. It is easier to prevent a dog from stealing a bone than
to take the bone out of his mouth. Cobbett was not strong enough to
break the power of the governing class, but he might have been strong
enough to defend the customary rights of the labouring class. As it
was, the governing class was on the defensive at every point. The
rent receivers, the tithe owners, the mortgagers, the lenders to the
Government and the contractors all clung to their gains, and the food
allowance of the labourer slowly and steadily declined.
There was this great difference between the Speenhamland system and
a fixed standard of wages. The Speenhamland system after 1812 was
not applied so as to maintain an equilibrium between the income and
expenditure of the labourer: it was applied to maintain an equilibrium
between social forces. The scale fell not with the fall of prices to
the labourer, but with the fall of profits to the possessing classes.
The minimum was not the minimum on which the labourer could live, but
the minimum below which rebellion was certain. This was the way in
which wages found their own level. They gravitated lower and lower
with the growing weakness of the wage-earner. If Cobbett had been at
the head of a movement for preserving to the labourer a right bestowed
on him by Act of Parliament, either he would have succeeded, or the
disease would have come to a crisis in 1816, instead of taking the form
of a lingering and wasting illness. Either, that is, other classes
would have had to make the economies necessary to keep the labourers’
wages at the customary point, or the labourers would have made their
last throw before they had been desolated and weakened by another
fifteen years of famine.
There is another respect in which the minimum wage policy would have
profoundly altered the character of village society. It would have
given the village labourers a bond of union before they had lost the
memories and the habits of their more independent life; it would have
made them an organised force, something like the organised forces that
have built up a standard of life for industrial workmen. An important
passage in Fielding’s _Tom Jones_ shows that there was material for
such combination in the commoners of the old village. Fielding is
talking of his borrowings from the classics and he defends himself
with this analogy: ‘The ancients may be considered as a rich common,
where every person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath
a free right to batten his muse: or, to place it in a clearer light,
we moderns are to the ancients what the poor are to the rich. By the
poor here I mean that large and venerable body which in English we
call the mob. Now whoever hath had the honour to be admitted to any
degree of intimacy with this mob must well know, that it is one of
their established maxims to plunder and pillage their rich neighbours
without any reluctance: and that this is held to be neither sin nor
crime among them. And so constantly do they abide and act by this
maxim, that in every parish almost in the kingdom there is a kind of
confederacy ever carrying on against a certain person of opulence
called the squire whose property is considered as free booty by all
his poor neighbours; who, as they conclude that there is no manner
of guilt in such depredations, look upon it as a point of honour and
moral obligation to conceal and to preserve each other from punishment
on all such occasions. In like manner are the ancients such as Homer,
Virgil, Horace, Cicero and the rest to be esteemed among us writers as
so many wealthy squires from whom we, the poor of Parnassus, claim an
immemorial custom of taking whatever we can come at.’[420]
It would not have been possible to create a great labourers’ union
before the Combination Laws were repealed in 1824, but if the labourers
had been organised to defend their standard wage, they would have
established a tradition of permanent association in each village. The
want of this was their fatal weakness. All the circumstances make the
spirit of combination falter in the country. In towns men are face to
face with the brutal realities of their lives, unsoftened by any of
the assuaging influences of brook and glade and valley. Men and women
who work in the fields breathe something of the resignation and peace
of Nature; they bear trouble and wrong with a dangerous patience.
Discontent moves, but it moves slowly, and whereas storms blow up in
the towns, they beat up in the country. That is one reason why the
history of the anguish of the English agricultural labourer so rarely
breaks into violence. Castlereagh’s Select Committee in 1817 rejoiced
in the discovery that ‘notwithstanding the alarming progress which has
been made in extending disaffection, its success has been confined
to the principal manufacturing districts, and that scarcely any of
the agricultural population have lent themselves to these violent
projects.’ There is a Russian saying that the peasant must ‘be boiled
in the factory pot’ before a revolution can succeed. And if it is
difficult in the nature of things to make rural labourers as formidable
to their masters as industrial workers, there is another reason why
the English labourer rebelled so reluctantly and so tardily against
what Sir Spencer Walpole called, in the true spirit of a classical
politician, ‘his inevitable and hereditary lot.’ Village society was
constantly losing its best and bravest blood. Bamford’s description
of the poacher who nearly killed a gamekeeper’s understrapper in a
quarrel in a public-house, and then hearing from Dr. Healey that
his man was only stunned, promised the doctor that if there was but
one single hare on Lord Suffield’s estates, that hare should be in
the doctor’s stew-pot next Sunday, reminds us of the loss a village
suffered when its poachers were snapped up by a game-preserving bench,
and tossed to the other side of the world. During the years between
Waterloo and the Reform Bill the governing class was decimating the
village populations on the principle of the Greek tyrant who flicked
off the heads of the tallest blades in his field; the Game Laws,
summary jurisdiction, special commissions, drove men of spirit and
enterprise, the natural leaders of their fellows, from the villages
where they might have troubled the peace of their masters. The village
Hampdens of that generation sleep on the shores of Botany Bay. Those
who blame the supine character of the English labourer forget that his
race, before it had quite lost the memories and the habits of the days
of its independence and its share in the commons, was passed through
this sieve. The scenes we shall describe in the next chapter show that
the labourers were capable of great mutual fidelity when once they
were driven into rebellion. If they had had a right to defend and a
comradeship to foster from the first, Cobbett, who spent his superb
strength in a magnificent onslaught on the governing class, might have
made of the race whose wrongs he pitied as his own, an army no less
resolute and disciplined than the army O’Connell made of the broken
peasants of the West.
FOOTNOTES:
[399] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 243.
[400] _Ibid._, p. 84.
[401] _Ibid._, pp. 56-7.
[402] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 244.
[403] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, pp. 78-9.
[404] _Ibid._, p. 80.
[405] _Ibid._, p. 291.
[406] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 94.
[407] _Ibid._, p. 172.
[408] _Ibid._, p. 66.
[409] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, pp. 98-104.
[410] _Ibid._, p. 100.
[411] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 108.
[412] _Ibid._, p. 210.
[413] Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834, p. 73.
[414] _Ibid._, p. 157.
[415] _Ibid._, p. 158.
[416] _Ibid._, p. 161.
[417] _Ibid._, p. 130.
[418] Appendix F, No. 3, to 1st Report of Commissioners.
[419] See Webb’s _History of Trade Unionism_, p. 59.
[420] _Tom Jones_, Bk. XII. chap. i.