THE LOW 'PUBLIC' IDLERS
The wise old saw that good wine needs no bush does not hold true in the
case of the labourer; it would require a very large bush indeed to attract
him to the best of beer offered for sale under legitimate conditions. In
fact, he cares not a rap about good beer--that is, intrinsically good, a
genuine product of malt and hops. He would rather grumble at it, unless,
perchance, it was a gift; and even then would criticise it behind the
donor's back, holding the quart cup aslant so as to see the bottom in one
place, and get a better view of the liquor. The great breweries whose
names are household words in cities, and whose interest it is to maintain
a high standard of quality for the delectation of their million consumers,
do not exalt their garish painted advertisements in gilded letters as tall
as Tom Thumb over the doors of village alehouses. You might call for Bass
at Cairo, Bombay, Sydney, or San Francisco, and Bass would be forthcoming.
But if you knocked the trestle-table with the bottom of a tankard (the
correct way) in a rural public, as a signal to the cellar you might call
for Bass in vain.
When the agricultural labourer drops in on his way home from his work of a
winter evening--heralding his approach by casting down a couple of logs or
bundle of wood which he has been carrying with a thud outside the door--he
does not demand liquor of that character. When in harvest time, after
sundown--when the shadows forbid farther cutting with the fagging hook at
the tall wheat--he sits on the form without, under the elm tree, and feels
a whole pocketful of silver, flush of money like a gold-digger at a
fortunate rush, he does not indulge in Allsopp or Guinness. He hoarsely
orders a 'pot' of some local brewer's manufacture--a man who knows exactly
what he likes, and arranges to meet the hardy digestion of the mower and
the reaper. He prefers a rather dark beer with a certain twang faintly
suggestive of liquorice and tobacco, with a sense of 'body,' a thickness
in it, and which is no sooner swallowed than a clammy palate demands a
second gulp to wash away the relics of the first. Ugh! The second requires
a third swig, and still a fourth, and appetite increasing with that it
feeds on, the stream rushes down the brazen throat that burns for more.
Like the Northern demi-god who drank unwittingly at the ocean from a horn
and could not empty it, but nevertheless caused the ebb of the sea, so our
toper, if he cannot contain the cask, will bring it down to the third hoop
if time and credit will but serve. It would require a ganger's staff to
measure his capacity--in fact, the limit of the labourer's liquor-power,
especially in summer, has never yet been reached. A man will lie on his
back in the harvest field, under a hedge sweet with the June roses that
smile upon the hay, and never move or take his lips away till a gallon has
entered into his being, for it can hardly be said to be swallowed. Two
gallons a day is not an uncommon consumption with men who swing the scythe
or reaping-hook.
This of course is small beer; but the stuff called for at the low public
in the village, or by the road just outside, though indescribably nauseous
to a non-vitiated palate, is not 'small.' It is a heady liquid, which if
anyone drinks, not being accustomed to it, will leave its effects upon him
for hours afterwards. But this is what the labourer likes. He prefers
something that he can feel; something that, if sufficiently indulged in,
will make even his thick head spin and his temples ache next morning. Then
he has had the value of his money. So that really good ale would require a
very large bush indeed before it attracted his custom.
It is a marked feature of labouring life that the respectable inn of the
village at which the travelling farmer, or even persons higher in rank,
occasionally call, which has a decent stable, and whose liquors are of a
genuine character, is almost deserted by the men who seek the reeking tap
of the ill-favoured public which forms the clubhouse of all the vice of
the village. While the farmer or passing stranger, calling at the decent
house really for refreshment, drinks but a glass or two and departs, the
frequenters of the low place never quit their seats till the law compels
them, so that for sixpence spent in the one by men with cheque-books in
their pockets, five shillings are spent in the other by men who have not
got a loaf of bread at home for their half-starving children and pinched
wife. To an unprincipled landlord clearly this sort of custom is decidedly
preferable, and thus it is that these places are a real hardship to the
licensed victualler whose effort it is to keep an orderly house.
The influence of the low public upon the agricultural labourer's life is
incalculable--it is his club, almost his home. There he becomes
brutalised; there he spends his all; and if he awakes to the wretched
state of his own family at last, instead of remembering that it is his own
act, he turns round, accuses the farmer of starvation wages, shouts for
what is really Communism, and perhaps even in his sullen rage descends to
crime. Let us go with him into such a rural den.
Beware that you do not knock your head against the smoke-blackened beams
of the low ceiling, and do not put your elbow carelessly on the deal
table, stained with spilled ale, left uncleaned from last night, together
with little heaps of ashes, tapped out from pipes, and spots of grease
from the tallow candles. The old-fashioned settles which gave so cosy an
air in the olden time to the inn room, and which still linger in some of
the houses, are not here--merely forms and cheap chairs. A great pot hangs
over the fire, for the family cooking is done in the public apartment; but
do not ask to join in the meal, for though the food may be more savoury
than is dreamed of in your philosophy, the two-grained forks have not been
cleaned these many a day. Neither is the butcher's wooden skewer, just
extracted from the meat, an elegant toothpick if you are fastidious.
But these things are trifles when the dish is a plump pheasant, jugged
hare, brown partridges, or trout--perhaps not exactly in season--as the
chance may be; or a couple of boiled fowls, or a turkey, or some similar
toothsome morsel. Perhaps it is the gamey taste thus induced that enables
them to enjoy joints from the butcher which are downright tainted, for it
is characteristic of the place and people on the one hand to dine on the
very best, as above, and yet to higgle over a halfpenny a pound at the
shop. Nowhere else in all the parish, from the polished mahogany at the
squire's mansion to the ancient solid oaken table at the substantial
old-fashioned farmer's, can there be found such a constant supply of food
usually considered as almost the privilege of the rich. Bacon, it is true,
they eat of the coarsest kind; but with it eggs new laid and delicious. In
brief, it is the strangest hodge-podge of pheasant and bread and cheese,
asparagus and cabbage. But somehow, whatever is good, whatever is held in
estimation, makes its appearance in that grimy little back room on that
ragged, dirty table-cloth.
Who pays for these things? Are they paid for at all? There is no licensed
dealer in game in the village nor within many miles, and it seems passing
strange. But there are other things almost as curious. The wood pile in
the back yard is ever high and bulky; let the fire burn never so clear in
the frosty days there is always a regular supply of firewood. It is the
same with coal. Yet there is no copse attached to the place, nor is the
landlord ever seen chopping for himself, nor are the farmers in the habit
of receiving large orders for logs and faggots. By the power of some magic
spell all things drift hitherward. A magnet which will draw logs of timber
and faggots half across the parish, which will pull pheasants off their
perch, extract trout from the deep, and stay the swift hare in midst of
her career, is a power indeed to be envied. Had any enchanter of mediaeval
days so potent a charm?
Perhaps it is the engaging and attractive character of the landlord
himself. He is a tall, lanky man, usually seen in slippers, and trousers
too short for his limbs; he 'sloppets' about in his waistcoat and
shirt-sleeves, hands in pockets, and shoulders forward almost in a hump.
He hangs about the place, now bringing in a log, now carrying a bucket,
now spinning a mop, now slouching down the garden to feed the numerous
fowls that scratch around the stumps of cabbages. Anything, in short, but
work. Sometimes, however, he takes the trap and horse, and is supposed to
be gone on a dealing expedition. Sometimes it is only to carry a jar of
beer up to the men in the field, and to mouch a good armful of fresh-cut
clover for provender from the swathe. He sips gin the live-long day--weak
gin always--every hour from morn till a cruel Legislature compels the
closing of the shutters. He is never intoxicated--it is simply a habit, a
sort of fuel to feed the low cunning in which his soul delights. So far
from intoxication is he, that there is a fable of some hard knocks and ill
usage, and even of a thick head being beaten against the harder stones of
the courtyard behind, when the said thick head was helpless from much ale.
Such matters are hushed up in the dark places of the earth. So far from
intoxication is he, that he has the keenest eye to business.
There is a lone rick-yard up in the fields yonder to which the carters
come from the farm far away to fetch hay, and straw, and so forth. They
halt at the public, and are noticed to enjoy good living there, nor are
they asked for their score. A few trusses of hay, or bundles of straw, a
bushel of corn, or some such trifle is left behind merely out of
good-fellowship. Waggons come up laden with tons of coal for the farms
miles above, far from a railway station; three or four teams, perhaps, one
after the other. Just a knob or two can scarcely be missed, and a little
of the small in a sack-bag. The bundles of wood thrown down at the door by
the labourers as they enter are rarely picked up again; they disappear,
and the hearth at home is cold. The foxes are blamed for the geese and the
chickens, and the hunt execrated for not killing enough cubs, but Reynard
is not always guilty. Eggs and poultry vanish. The shepherds have ample
opportunities for disposing of a few spare lambs to a general dealer whose
trap is handy. Certainly, continuous gin does not chill the faculties.
If a can of ale is left in the outhouse at the back and happens to be
found by a few choice spirits at the hour when the vicar is just
commencing his sermon in church on Sunday, it is by the purest accident.
The turnip and swede greens left at the door, picked wholesale from the
farmers' fields; the potatoes produced from coat pockets by fingers which
have been sorting heaps at the farmstead; the apples which would have been
crushed under foot if the labourers had not considerately picked them
up--all these and scores of other matters scarce worth naming find their
way over that threshold. Perhaps the man is genial, his manners enticing,
his stories amusing, his jokes witty? Not at all. He is a silent fellow,
scarce opening his mouth except to curse the poor scrub of a maid servant,
or to abuse a man who has not paid his score. He slinks in and lights his
pipe, smokes it silently, and slinks out again. He is the octopus of the
hamlet, fastening on the cottage homes and sucking the life-blood from
them. He misses nothing, and nothing comes amiss to him.
His wife, perhaps, then, may be the centre of attraction? She is a short,
stout woman, whose cheeks as she walks wobble with fat, whose face is ever
dirty, and dress (at home) slatternly. But mayhap her heart is in the
right place, and when Hodge is missed from his accustomed seat by the fire
of an evening, when it is bruited abroad that he is down with illness,
hurriedly slips on her bonnet, and saying nothing, carries a basket of
good things to cheer the inner man? Or, when his wife is confined, perhaps
she brings some little delicacies, a breast of pheasant, a bottle of port
wine, and strengthens her with motherly counsel in the hour of her
travail. Is this so? Hodge's wife could tell you that the cottage door has
never been darkened by her presence: that she indeed would not acknowledge
her if passed by chance on the road. For the landlady sails forth to the
adjacent town in all the glory of those fine feathers that proverbially
make the fine bird.
It is a goodly spectacle to see her in rustling ample silk, in costly
sealskin, in a bonnet 'loud' but rich, shading a countenance that glows
ruddy red as a furnace. A gold chain encircles her portly neck, with a
gold watch thereto attached; gold rings upon her fingers, in one of which
sparkles a brilliant diamond; gold earrings, gold brooch, kid gloves
bursting from the fatness of the fingers they encase. The dingy trap and
limping rawboned hack which carry her to the outskirts of the town
scarcely harmonise with so much glory. But at the outskirts she alights,
and enters the street in full dignity. By some potent alchemy the sweat of
Hodge's brow has become condensed into that sparkling diamond, which is
disclosed when the glove is drawn off in the shops, to the admiration of
all beholders.
Or, if not the wife, perhaps it may be the daughter who is the magnet that
draws the very timber across the parish? She is not ill-looking, and might
pass muster in her best dress were it not for a squareness of build, like
the set of a man rather than the full curves associated with woman. She is
rarely seen in the house at all, and neither talks to the men nor the
women who enter. She sallies forth at night, and her friends are the
scampish among the sons of the lower class of tenant-farmers.
This is the family. How strange and yet how undeniable is it that such a
house should attract the men whose self-interest, one would imagine, would
lead them to shun it, and if they must spend their hard-won earnings, at
least to get a good article for their money! It proves that an appeal to
reason is not always the way to manage the working man. Such a low house
is always a nest of agitation: there the idle, drunken, and
ill-conditioned have their rendezvous, there evil is hatched, and from
there men take their first step on the road that leads to the gaol. The
place is often crowded at night--there is scarcely room to sit or stand,
the atmosphere is thick with smoke, and a hoarse roar of jarring voices
fills it, above which rises the stave of a song shouted in one unvarying
key from some corner. Money pours in apace--the draughts are deep, and
long, and frequent, the mugs are large, the thirst insatiate. The takings,
compared with the size and situation of the house, must be high, and yet,
with all this custom and profit, the landlord and his family still grovel.
And grovel they will in dirt, vice, low cunning, and iniquity--as the
serpent went on his belly in the dust--to the end of their days.
Why do these places exist? Because in England justice is ever tempered
with mercy; sometimes with too much mercy. The resident squire and
magistrate knows the extent of the evil only too well. He sees it with his
own eyes in the village; he sees it brought before him on the bench; the
clergyman tells him of it, so do the gamekeeper and the policeman. His
tenants complain of it. He is perpetually reminded of it, and of what it
may ultimately mean as these places become the centres of communistic
propagandas. But though perfectly aware of the evil, to suppress it is
quite another matter.
First, you must find the power, and then, having the power, the question
arises, is it wise to exercise it? Though the men who frequent such dens
are often of the lowest type, or on their way to that condition, they are
not all of that character. Men of a hard-working and honest stamp go there
as well. All have their rights alike--rights and liberties which must be
held sacred even at some disadvantage. In short, the reprobate nature of
the place may be established, but while it is the chosen resort of the
people, or of a section of them, unless some great and manifest harm
arises it cannot be touched. The magistrate will willingly control it as
far as lies in his province, but unless directly instructed by the
Legislature he cannot go farther. The truth is, it lies with the labourer
himself. He is not obliged to visit there. A respectable inn may be found
in every village if he desires that wholesome conviviality which, when it
does not overstep certain bounds, forms a bond between man and man. Were
such low houses suddenly put down, what an outcry would be raised of
favouritism, tyranny, and so on! When the labourer turns against them
himself, he will speedily find powerful friends to assist in attaining the
object.
If ever a man deserved a good glass of beer it is the agricultural
labourer upon the conclusion of his day's work, exposed as he is to the
wear and tear of the elements. After following the slow plough along the
furrows through the mist; after tending the sheep on the hills where the
rain beats with furious energy; after grubbing up the tough roots of
trees, and splitting them with axe and wedge and mallet, a man may
naturally ask for refreshment. And it is equally natural that he should
desire to take it in the society of his fellows, with whom he can
associate freely and speak his mind unchecked. The glass of ale would not
hurt him; it is the insidious temptation proffered in certain quarters to
do evil for an extra quart. Nothing forms so strong a temptation as the
knowledge that a safe receiver is near at hand.
He must not be harshly judged because of the mere quantity he can take,
for a quart of ale to him is really no more than a glass of wine to the
'City' gentleman who lives delicately. He is to be pitied rather than
condemned, and aided out of the blunder rather than chastised. Punishment,
indeed, waits upon him only too doggedly, and overtakes him too quickly in
the shape of sorrows and privations at home. The evil lies not in the ale,
but in the character of the man that sold him the ale, and who is, at the
same time, the worst enemy of the legitimately-trading innkeeper. No one,
indeed, has better cause than the labourer to exclaim, 'Save me from my
friends!' To do the bulk of the labourers bare justice it must be stated
that there is a certain bluff honesty and frankness among them, a rude
candour, which entitles them to considerable respect as a body. There are
also men here and there whose strength of character would certainty have
obtained favourable acknowledgment had their lot been cast in a higher
rank of life. But, at the same time, the labourer is not always so
innocent and free from guile--so lamblike as it suits the purpose of some
to proclaim, in order that his rural simplicity may secure sympathy. There
are very queer black sheep in the flock, and it rather unfortunately
happens that these, in more ways than one, force themselves, sometimes
most unpleasantly, upon the notice of the tenant-farmer and the landlord.
A specimen or two may easily be selected from that circle of choice
manhood whose head-quarters are at the low 'public.' A tall, well-built
man stands forward, and at the first glance a stranger might take him for
a favourable example. He holds himself more upright than most of his
class, he is not ill-looking, and a marked air of deference towards those
who address him conveys rather a pleasing impression. He can read fairly
well and sign his name. This man, who is still young, began life as
carter's lad, in which occupation he had not been long engaged before the
horse-hair carefully accumulated as a perquisite disappeared. Whipcord and
similar small articles next vanished, and finally a handsome new whip.
This last, not being so easily disposed of, was traced to his possession
and procured him a sound thrashing. Some short time afterwards a carthorse
was found in the fields stabbed in several places, though, fortunately,
not severely. Having already the bad name that hangs the dog, he was
strongly suspected of this dastardly act in revenge for the thrashing from
the carter, and threat of dismissal from the employer. No evidence,
however, could be procured, and though he was sent about his business he
escaped punishment. As he grew older he fell in with a tribe of
semi-gipsies, and wandered in their company for a year or two, learning
their petty pilfering tricks. He then returned to agriculture labour, and,
notwithstanding the ill-flavour that clung about his doings, found no
difficulty in obtaining employment.
It is rare in agriculture for a man to be asked much about his character,
unless he is to be put into a position of some trust. In trades and
factories--on railways, too--an applicant for employment is not only
questioned, but has to produce evidence as to his immediate antecedents at
least. But the custom in farming prescribes no such checks; if the farmer
requires a man, the applicant is put on to work at once, if he looks at
all likely. This is especially the case in times of pressure, as when
there is a great deal of hoeing to be done, in harvest, and when extra
hands are wanted to assist in feeding the threshing machine. Then the
first that comes along the road is received, and scarcely a question
asked. The custom operates well enough in one way, since a man is nearly
sure of procuring employment, and encounters no obstacles; on the other
hand, there is less encouragement to preserve a good character. So the
fellow mentioned quickly got work when he applied for it, and went on
pretty steadily for a period. He then married, and speedily discovered the
true use of women--i.e. to work for idle men. The moment he learnt that he
could subsist upon her labour he ceased to make any effort, and passed his
time lounging about.
The wife, though neither handsome nor clever, was a hard-working person,
and supported herself and idle husband by taking in washing. Indignation
has often been expressed at the moral code of savages, which permits the
man to lie in his hammock while the woman cultivates the maize; but,
excepting the difference in the colour of the skin, the substitution of
dirty white for coppery redness, there is really no distinction. Probably
washing is of the two harder work than hoeing maize. The fellow 'hung
about,' and doubtless occasionally put in practice the tricks he had
acquired from his nomad friends.
The only time he worked was in the height of the harvest, when high wages
are paid. But then his money went in drink, and drink often caused him to
neglect the labour he had undertaken, at an important juncture when time
was of consequence. On one such occasion the employer lost his temper and
gave him a piece of his mind, ending by a threat of proceedings for breach
of contract. A night or two afterwards the farmer's rick-yard was ablaze,
and a few months later the incendiary found himself commencing a term of
penal servitude. There he was obliged to work, began to walk upright, and
acquired that peculiarly marked air of deference which at first contrasts
rather pleasantly with the somewhat gruff address of most labourers.
During his absence the wife almost prospered, having plenty of employment
and many kind friends. He signalised his return by administering a
thrashing--just to re-assert his authority--which, however, the poor woman
received with equanimity, remarking that it was only his way. He
recommenced his lounging life, working occasionally when money was to be
easily earned--for the convict stain does not prevent a man getting
agricultural employment--and spending the money in liquor. When tolerably
sober he is, in a sense, harmless; if intoxicated, his companions give him
the road to himself.
Now there is nothing exceptionally characteristic of the agricultural
labourer in the career of such a man. Members of other classes of the
working community are often sent to penal servitude, and sometimes men of
education and social position. But it is characteristic of agricultural
life that a man with the stigma of penal servitude can return and
encounter no overpowering prejudice against him. There are work and wages,
for him if he likes to take them. No one throws his former guilt in his
face. He may not be offered a place of confidence, nor be trusted with
money, as the upper labourers--carters for instance--sometimes are. But
the means of subsistence are open to him, and he will not be driven by the
memory of one crime to commit another.
There is no school of crime in the country. Children are not brought up
from the earliest age to beg and steal, to utter loquacious falsehood, or
entrap the benevolent with sham suffering. Hoary thieves do not keep
academies for the instruction of little fingers in the art of theft. The
science of burglary is unstudied. Though farmhouses are often situate in
the most lonely places a case of burglary rarely occurs, and if it does,
is still more rarely traced to a local resident. In such houses there is
sometimes a good deal of old silver plate, accumulated in the course of
generations--a fact that must be perfectly well known to the labouring
class, through the women indoor-servants. Yet such attempts are quite
exceptional. So, too, are robberies from the person with violence. Serious
crime is, indeed, comparatively scarce. The cases that come before the
Petty Sessions are, for the most part, drunkenness, quarreling, neglect or
absenteeism from work, affiliation, petty theft, and so on.
The fact speaks well for the rural population; it speaks very badly for
such characters as the one that has been described. If he will not turn
into the path of honest labour, that is his own fault. The injury he does
is this, that he encourages others to be idle. Labouring men quit the
field under the influence of temporary thirst, or that desire for a few
minutes' change which is not in itself blameworthy. They enter the low
'public,' call for their quart, and intend to leave again immediately. But
the lazy fellow in the corner opens conversation, is asked to drink, more
is called for, there is a toss-up to decide who shall pay, in which the
idle adept, of course, escapes, and so the thing goes on. Such a man
becomes a cause of idleness, and a nuisance to the farmers.
Another individual is a huge, raw-boned, double-jointed giant of a man,
whose muscular strength must be enormous, but whose weakness is beer. He
is a good workman, and of a civil, obliging disposition. He will commence,
for instance, making drains for a farmer with the greatest energy, and in
the best of tempers. A drain requires some little skill. The farmer visits
the work day by day, and notes with approval that it is being done well.
But about the third or fourth day the clever workman, whose immense
strength makes the employment mere child's play to him, civilly asks for a
small advance of money. Now the farmer has no objection to that, but hands
it to him with some misgiving. Next morning no labourer is to be seen. The
day passes, and the next. Then a lad brings the intelligence that his
parent is just recovering from a heavy drinking bout and will be back
soon. There is the history of forty years!
The same incident is repeated once or twice a month all the year round.
Now it is a drain, now hedge-cutting, now hoeing, now haymaking, and now
reaping. Three or four days' work excellently performed; then a bed in a
ditch and empty pockets. The man's really vast strength carries him
through the prostration, and the knocks and bangs and tumbles received in
a helpless state. But what a life! The worst of it is the man is not a
reprobate--not a hang-dog, lounging rascal, but perfectly honest, willing
to oblige, harmless and inoffensive even when intoxicated, and skilful at
his labour. What is to be done with him? What is the farmer to do who has
only such men to rely on--perhaps in many cases--without this fellow's
honesty and good temper--qualities which constantly give him a lift? It is
simply an epitome of the difficulties too commonly met with in the
field--bright sunshine, good weather, ripe crops, and men half
unconscious, or quite, snoring under a hedge! There is no encouragement to
the tenant to pay high wages in experiences like this.
A third example is a rakish-looking lad just rising into manhood. Such
young men are very much in demand and he would not have the slightest
difficulty in obtaining employment, yet he is constantly out of work. When
a boy he began by summoning the carter where he was engaged for cuffing
him, charging the man with an assault. It turned out to be a trumpery
case, and the Bench advised his parents to make him return and fulfil his
contract. His parents thought differently of it. They had become imbued
with an inordinate sense of their own importance. They had a high idea of
the rights of labour; Jack, in short, was a good deal better than his
master, and must be treated with distinguished respect. The doctrines of
the Union countenanced the deduction; so the boy did not return. Another
place was found for him.
In the course of a few months he came again before the Bench. The
complaint was now one of wrongful dismissal, and a claim for a one pound
bonus, which by the agreement was to have been paid at the end of the year
if his conduct proved satisfactory. It was shown that his conduct had been
the reverse of satisfactory; that he refused to obey orders, that he
'cheeked' the carters, that he ran away home for a day or two, and was
encouraged in these goings on by the father. The magistrates, always on
the side of peace, endeavoured to procure a reconciliation, the farmer
even paid down the bonus, but it was of no use. The lad did not return.
With little variations the same game has continued ever since. Now it is
he that complains, now it is his new master; but any way there is always a
summons, and his face is as familiar in the court as that of the chairman.
His case is typical. What is a farmer to do who has to deal with a rising
generation full of this spirit?
Then there are the regular workhouse families, who are perpetually
applying for parochial relief. From the eldest down to the youngest member
they seem to have no stamina; they fall ill when all others are well, as
if afflicted with a species of paralysis that affects body, mind, and
moral sense at once. If the phrase may be used without irreverence, there
is no health in them. The slightest difficulty is sufficient to send an
apparently strong, hale man whining to the workhouse. He localises his
complaint in his foot, or his arm, or his shoulder; but, in truth, he does
not know himself what is the matter with him. The real illness is weakness
of calibre--a looseness of fibre. Many a labourer has an aching limb from
rheumatism, and goes to plough all the same; many a poor cottage woman
suffers from that prevalent agony, and bravely gets through her task, and
keeps her cottage tidy. But these people cannot do it--they positively
cannot. The summer brings them pain, the winter brings pain, their whole
life is one long appeal _ad misericordiam_.
The disease seems to spread with the multiplication of the family: the
sons have it, and the sons' sons after them, so much so that even to bear
the name is sufficient to stamp the owner as a miserable helpless being.
All human wretchedness is, of course, to be deeply commiserated, and yet
it is exasperating to see one man still doing his best under real trouble,
and another eating contentedly the bread of idleness when there seems
nothing wrong except a total lack of energy. The old men go to the
workhouse, the young men go, the women and the children; if they are out
one month the next sees their return. These again are but broken reeds to
rely upon. The golden harvest might rot upon the ground for all their
gathering, the grass wither and die as it stands, without the touch of the
scythe, the very waggons and carts fall to pieces in the sheds. There is
no work to be got out of them.
The village, too, has its rookery, though not quite in the same sense as
the city. Traced to its beginning, it is generally found to have
originated upon a waste piece of ground, where some squatters settled and
built their cabins. These, by the growth of better houses around, and the
rise of property, have now become of some value, not so much for the
materials as the site. To the original hovels additions have been made by
degrees, and fresh huts squeezed in till every inch of space is as closely
occupied as in a back court of the metropolis. Within the cottages are low
pitched, dirty, narrow, and contracted, without proper conveniences, or
even a yard or court.
The social condition of the inhabitants is unpleasant to contemplate. The
young men, as they grow up, arrive at an exaggerated idea of the value of
their parents' property--the cottage of three rooms--and bitter
animosities arise between them. One is accused of having had his share out
in money; another has got into trouble and had his fine paid for him; the
eldest was probably born before wedlock; so there are plenty of materials
for recrimination. Then one, or even two of them bring home a wife, or at
least a woman, and three families live beneath a single roof--with results
it is easy to imagine, both as regards bickering and immorality. They have
no wish to quit the place and enter cottages with better accommodation:
they might rent others of the farmers, but they prefer to be independent,
and, besides, will not move lest they should lose their rights. Very
likely a few lodgers are taken in to add to the confusion. As regularly as
clockwork cross summonses are taken out before the Bench, and then the
women on either side reveal an unequalled power of abuse and loquacity,
leaving a decided impression that it is six to one and half a dozen to the
other.
These rookeries do not furnish forth burglars and accomplished
pickpockets, like those of cities, but they do send out a gang of lazy,
scamping fellows and coarse women, who are almost useless. If their
employer does not please them--if he points out that a waste of time has
taken place, or that something has been neglected--off they go, for,
having a hole to creep into, they do not care an atom whether they lose a
job or not. The available hands, therefore, upon whom the farmers can
count are always very much below the sum total of the able-bodied
population. There must be deducted the idle men and women, the drunkards,
the never satisfied, as the lad who sued every master; the workhouse
families, the rookery families, and those who every harvest leave the
place, and wander a great distance in search of exceptionally high wages.
When all these are subtracted, the residue remaining is often insufficient
to do the work of the farms in a proper manner. It is got through somehow
by scratch-packs, so to say--men picked up from the roads, aged men who
cannot do much, but whose energy puts the younger fellows to shame, lads
paid far beyond the value of the work they actually accomplish.
Work done in this way is, of course, incomplete and unsatisfactory, and
the fact supplies one of the reasons why farmers seem disinclined to pay
high wages. It is not because they object to pay well for hard work, but
because they cannot get the hard work. There is consequently a growing
reliance upon floating labour--upon the men and women who tramp round
every season--rather than on the resident population. Even in the absence
of any outward agitation--of a strike or open movement in that
direction--the farmer has considerable difficulties to contend with in
procuring labour. He has still further difficulties in managing it when he
has got it. Most labourers have their own peculiar way of finishing a job;
and however much that style of doing it may run counter to the farmer's
idea of the matter in hand, he has to let the man proceed after his own
fashion. If he corrected, or showed the man what he wanted, he would run
the risk of not getting it done at all. There is no one so thoroughly
obstinate as an ignorant labourer full of his own consequence. Giving,
then, full credit to those men whose honest endeavours to fulfil their
duty have already been acknowledged, it is a complete delusion to suppose
that all are equally manly.