the others say, Level up the labourers. I never could see how any levelling job could be done except by filling up the low-lying spots at the expense of the high ground. Levelling up means levelling down. The only question is where you are going to strike your line. It seems to me that before a man has any right to pose as a reformer he must do two things: first, he must learn the truth of things as they are, and look facts in the face; and secondly, he must learn how things were, and how they have come to be as they are. A politician ignorant of history is like a poet without love, and that, said one of our great ones, is a physical and metaphysical impossibility.' 6 Now the facts are these: We do things on a much larger scale than our forefathers. We have bigger ships, bigger houses, bigger shops, bigger dinners, bigger everything. The hand loom has made way for the spinning jenny, and the same thing runs through everything. You may regret that you can no longer find a second home in the snug' little hotel, where the landlord was an old friend of the family and the waiter called you Master Harry to the last. But the times are against you. Young men in trade-in business is the grand phrase now-who have served their time in an ironmonger's or a draper's'establishment,' who know what they are about and have some capital at command, tell you that a small shop does not pay, and that they cannot see the good of starting in a small way. They tell you there is no room for them. It is so in trade, it is so in commerce, it is so in manufactures. Is it to be wondered at that when at every street corner there were dogmatists who were for ever preaching, without any reservation, the doctrine that small undertakings were wasteful and small enterprises could not pay-is it to be wondered at, I say, that the gospel of bigness should have gained acceptance among the food manufacturers and the owners of the soil? The men of the streets, tired of making money faster than they could invest it, came down to the country and put their capital into the land; they sent their sons to Norfolk or the shires,' paid a bouncing premium to a practical agriculturist, had the dandy youths taught how to ride and to know the difference between a cow and a bullock. In three months the lad had learnt all about it, men and angels had no more that they could teach him, and, like the clean-shaven townsman in Horace whom a mischievous wag had turned into a land owner 6 Ex nitido fit rusticus, atque Sulcos et vineta crepat mera; From a gent he grew into a judge, And his talk was of tilths and of turnips! The agricultural pupils' lost no time in bidding for the farms. Landlords were in ecstasies; the old-fashioned farmers were aghast. Rents rose as if by magic. But the new men were resolute on one point: they would have no 'peddling little farms;' they would set to work in the grand style or not at all; they would have houses fit for a gentleman to live in and buildings with the latest improvements; and the bricklayers loved them, and the agents would not say them nay. Some few shrewd landlords shook their heads; some had not the heart to turn out tenants whose grandsires had lived on the same land time out of mind. Some could not find the ready money to follow in the steps of the wealthier proprietors, to pull down three old houses and build up one manorial new one. But there were districts in which a deplorable revolution began, and where it did go on extensively and recklessly much misery and much bitterness of heart followed. The new men did not mean to be harsh or unfair-they were not worse than other people-but they soon discovered that at the best their margin of profit could not be large; they had to get the utmost possible return from the land for which they were paying so highly, and in the inevitable course of events a great deal that was cruelly oppressive to the labourer and the smaller occupier followed as a consequence of the change that had come over British farming. Every scrap of the waste' was ploughed up or thrown into the adjoining fields. The roadside patches on which the poor man's donkey or the widow's geese had been wont to pick up a meagre sustenance were enclosed; the hedges were cut down which used to furnish Goody Blake's kindling and the fagots that came in to heat her oven; the furze bush vanished, and the short cuts across the fields for children trotting to school or for their parents' walking to church were stopped up. Everybody knew that the law was being broken, but who was to bell the cat? The old farmers had been slow to embroil themselves with their neighbours; but the new man, bristling with new ideas, wouldn't stand any nonsense, not he! What he paid for that he would have. So Goody Blake, and the donkey and the geese and the cow, had to make themselves scarce; and they did make themselves scarce accordingly, they and all that appertained to them. More corn was grown on the same breadth of land, more corn at less costat less cost, that is, of manual labour. There was not the employment there used to be, and the exodus from the villages began. Then came the bad times, not very suddenly-nay, rather very gradually. The enterprising young agriculturist, whose first lesson had been that a sheep is not born with a tail like a rabbit, and his next that some land would not pay for the ploughing, learnt many other things as the years went on; not the last was this: that there are as smart men on the Hill at Norwich or at Islington as can be found in Capel Court, and that even in Mark Lane the habitués get up very early in the morning, and by midday the worms are not plentiful. It was hard on a young fellow after he had been doing his little best and becoming much humbler in his tone-hard to find a letter on the breakfast table with a broad hint from the bankers; hard to discover too late that he had gone on too fast and that the beginning of the end had come. It was hard on the tenant farmer, and perhaps hard on his landlord too; both had been living in a fool's paradise. Each ought to have learnt his lesson-the one that under the conditions of our climate there must needs be a limit to the extent of land which can be farmed by a single occupier at a profit; the other that there is a limit to the rent that may safely be demanded, whether from the big man or the little one. But before the catastrophe arrived, and while it was drawing near, something else had been going on. As rents had been rising, through the insane competition which had begun, so had the belief become more and more prevalent that there was no investment like land. Land couldn't run away. Land would always fetch its price. Nothing like land, sir! There was a craze for buying land; every little outlying farm was snapped up and bought by country gentlemen, regardless of price. In the great centres of industry capitalists who had made their pile were consumed by a desire to walk over their own broad acres. They came, they saw, they purchased; and as there is nothing like leather, so when a wealthy new settler once found himself an owner of woods and fields he became bitten with the desire to have an ever larger stake in the country, and wherever there was land in the market there the buyers were to be found, eager, one and all, to increase their territory. . . . A change came o'er the spirit of their dream. First there was the revolt of the labourers. It was the Nemesis that was sure to come, and which some few foresaw in time. It was the Nemesis upon those who had been captivated by the jingle of certain maxims—I use the word advisedly -maxims of the political economists which they had not taken the trouble to understand. It was the Nemesis upon the half-taught, who mistake rules for principles and who never can be brought to see that in physical or social science, as in morals and religion, truths in tendency will not bear being driven to extremities, and become mere falsehoods if stated without reserves. Shape your course of conduct by any formula, taking no account of the personal equation and-Woe to you! Thus the landlords and tenants having become saturated with the notion that the one thing needful to ensure large profits from agriculture was to lessen the cost of production to economise labour-they got astride of this favourite hobby-horse of the doctrinaries, and they rode like Centaurs. Here and there a voice cried out, Ware the brute that's rushing his fences!' The rider cared never a doit for warning. A hobby is a thing to ride and spare not. Alack! even a hobby may be ridden to death, and notably so when it does not go on all fours! There was a famine in the land. It was a famine of agricultural hands. The labourers went in for their innings. They have played their innings badly, if you please; but the large farmers were bowled out with mere elementary 'ground hops.' Then came the bad seasons. What need to dwell on them? And then came the low prices of produce; and now, after more than a decade of disasters, the wiseacres of Grub Street and the conclave of infallibles, who cannot err on matters agricultural because they are free from all the prejudices which are inseparable from owning or tilling the land, are once more to the fore. What is it to be this time? A hundred schemes are in the air. England's necessity is the miracle monger's opportunity. Go to, ye crass Boeotians of the shires, do we not grow our orchids? Look to us and learn how ye can grow your barley. Listen and learn, ye sons of the soil. We of the desk can show you how most can be made of the land. We all start with assumptions, but how if they be not true? Three assumptions have been made by the miracle mongers, for each of which they demand unhesitating acquiescence. Every one of those assumptions, to say the least, deserves to be examined. First, it is assumed tacitly or expressly that the agricultural interest of this country is paralysed and the outlook black as night; secondly, that the land of the country is getting into fewer and fewer hands; thirdly, that the agricultural labourer is the only man in the community who has no career. The conclusion that follows from these premises, which have obtained too general acceptance, is that the time has come for a revolution in the land laws, for a revision of the antiquated notions of the rights of property, for resorting to expedients which must needs be remedial because they shall be so magnificently drastic. Let us take these popular assumptions seriatim. I. It is noteworthy that the most curiously foolish and false things have been said about the land and its cultivation by those who go furthest afield for their information, and who have pretended to deal from the widest generalisation. Perhaps in no area of the same extent upon the face of the globe are the conditions of soil and climate, the anomalies of tenure, the methods of tillage, the complex relations existing between owner and occupier, the financial position of landlords and tenants, and the hundred and one local peculiarities which more or less perplex enquirers, so numerous and so varied as in this island of Great Britain. Men write about the evils of primogeniture as if there were no such thing existing as borough English or gavelkind.' They talk about the crops' as if there were no such things grown among us as barley or oats; they Ten years ago I received a notice from the steward of a certain manor twelve miles from Bow bells informing me that I had never been admitted to half an acre of land in a small copyhold estate of which my father had died possessed. All the rest of the estate had fallen to my brother long ago by our father's intestacy. This half-acre, however, had been proved to be below breck, and by the custom of the manor land below breck descended to the youngest son unless otherwise disposed of by will. Can any one tell me what below breck means? solemnly warn us to cultivate more vegetables, as if they believed farmers planted their potatoes in flower-pots and tied the haulm to a stick with red tape. You might as wisely construct a harmonious theory of British agriculture from observations made in Russia and Spain as by tabulating scraps of information picked up in Devonshire and Norfolk, in Cumberland and the Isle of Ely. The soil, the temper of the peasantry, the ways of going on, as we say in Arcady, differ almost as widely in different counties of England as they do in the separate valleys of the Alps, where a man may breakfast in French, lunch in German, dine in Italian and awake next morning, as once the present writer did, to find a heavy-eyed creature standing by his bedside with a big bottle in one hand and a horn cup in the other, and courteously asking in classical Latin 'Domine, visne schnaps?' Beyond all doubt the growers of wheat and the growers of wool have suffered very heavily of late, and suffered everywhere; the wool growers perhaps the heavier of the two, but wheat and wool are not everything. Thousands, and if you will tens of thousands, of acres have fallen out of cultivation, but they are acres which ought never to have been brought under the plough, and it will take a generation for them to recover from the consequences of being ignorantly broken up instead of being left as they were. Rents in large districts have gone down to the vanishing point. Had they not been raised to a figure which could only be paid at the cost of exhausting the fertility of the land for years? Northamptonshire is not England any more than Norfolk is Wales, and however much witty archdeacons may lament the deterioration in the quality, the dairy counties still make much cheese and somehow live. If we grant that the days have gone by when farmers could make fortunes, have they not gone by when shipowners and cotton spinners make fortunes? We have not yet arrived, nor are we likely to arrive, at a general bankruptcy even in the corn-growing districts, though for ambitious agriculturists it may seem a dismal and humiliating position to be doing no more than making two ends meet. But whereas our grandfathers talked of making a livelihood we talk of making a fortune, as if that were the last a man ought to aim at, and with us too the fortune is always to be made, never saved. Reports of Royal Commissioners bewilder at least as much as they inform. They are the helplessly silly and fatuous who cry loudest, 'Something must be done!' No, not something, but the right thing or nothing. Better nothing than the wrong thing, even though you have to wait for the right thing for a generation and in the meantime eat the bread of tears. When a man cannot stand upon his feet you don't order him to stand upon his head because something must be done. Is it from the agriculturist's point of view Clear to any one whose brain ain't far gone in a phthisis |