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PBICE ONE SHILLING. 
 
 Liife 
 
 IN 
 
 Oar Villages 
 
 BY 
 
 THE SPECIAL COMMISSIONER OF THE 
 "DAILY NEWS." 
 
 ' , BEING 
 
 , - . ,. - 
 
 A Series of Letters written to that Paper in 
 the Autumn of 1891. 
 
 THIRD EDITION. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited 
 
 ' LONDON, PARIS <&:» MELBOURNE. 
 1891. 
 ' [all rights reserved.] 
 
LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
LIFE 
 
 Our Villages. 
 
 BY 
 
 THE SPECIAL COMMISSIONER OF THE 
 "DAILY NEWS." 
 
 BEING 
 
 A Series of Letters written to that Paper in 
 the Autumn of 1891. 
 
 THIRD EDITION. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited; 
 
 LONDON, PARIS # MELBOUJiNE. , i 
 1891. 
 [all eights reserved.] 
 
 >..' 
 
 -"> 
 
Co 
 THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P., 
 
 TO WHOM THE AGRICULTURAr, POPULATION 
 
 OK GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND 
 
 LOOK 
 
 WITH PROFOUND GRATITUDE AND CONFIDENT HOPE, 
 
 THESE LETTERS 
 
 ARE, BY PERMISSION, 
 
 MOST RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY 
 
 THE WRITER. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LETTER 
 
 I. — The Stampede into the Towns . 
 II. — The Cottage Homes of England 
 III. — Why they go to Town 
 IV. — An Essex Desert . 
 
 V. — A Model Village 
 
 VI. — A Wayside Parliament 
 VII. — How the Guardians didn't provide 
 
 Cottages ... . . 
 
 VIII. — Coal and Blankets 
 IX. — Large and Small Farms . . ' . 
 X. — Allotments and Alleviation 
 XI. — Publicans and Parsons 
 XII. — Ducal Land-Grabbers . 
 XIII. — A Model Village Club 
 XIV. — No "Harvest Home" .... 
 XV. — Moving Forwards or Backwards? 
 
 XVI. — Arcadia Realised 
 
 XVII. — The People and the Parsons 
 XVIII.— The Village Public-House . 
 XIX. — The Village Sunday 
 XX. — Death in the Village . 
 XXI. — Village House-Moving .... 
 
 XXII. — Conclusion 
 
 Appendix I. — Suggestions towards a Remedy . 
 Appendix II. — Correspondence , , , , 
 
 PAGE 
 
 9 
 
 H 
 
 20 
 
Life in Our Villages. 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 THE STAMPEDE INTO THE TOWNS. 
 
 August 14. 
 
 Beyond all dispute, the agricultural labourer is abandoning 
 the land he was born on and is making his way into the 
 towns. I have to-day driven and walked a good many 
 miles through parts of the county of Essex, which have 
 from time to time impressed me with a conviction that 
 Hodge must not merely be going into the towns, but be 
 actually gone. " Whom have you left then ? " asked one 
 Nonconformist minister of another who had for many years 
 been the pastor of a village congregation that had dwindled 
 and dwindled in the district I have been jogging through 
 to-day. " Old people and fools,'' was the bitter reply. 
 " You see very few young men about these parts nowadays,'' 
 said the landlady of a little inn into which I turned for some 
 bread and cheese to-day. " It's only the old folks as be 
 left. As soon as the young 'uns be able to do for theirselves, 
 they be off to better theirselves as they think. They go into 
 the towns and get into the police or the army, or on the line. 
 A good many go on the line.'' " You can't get men of any 
 sort," said an Essex farmer. " I've done all I can to keep 
 mine, and except the old men that I have had twenty or 
 thirty years — and one of 'em I've had five-and-thirty years 
 — I've got none. I began in the year forty-one, and I've 
 brought up over forty lads to the farming, and they no 
 sooner get to be eighteen, or from that to five-and-twenty, 
 
lO LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 than they're off. You can't keep them." " And your land no 
 doubt is suffering for want of labour ? " " Of course it is. 
 It isn't producing half what it might. How can it ? Why, 
 things are choked up with squitch and thistles, and I can't 
 clear them." 
 
 Yes, there is no doubt that Hodge is giving up farming 
 in these parts, but if you think you are going to get Hodge 
 himself to tell you why, you will very likely be greatly 
 mistaken. While to-day sitting over my bread and cheese 
 at the cross-legged table within the settee of the brick-floored 
 little public-house, a little old patriarch came in for his 
 mid-day glass of beer to drink with his bread and bacon. 
 He peeped, I thought, bashfully round the screen, and seeing 
 a stranger within, squatted down upon the seat outside close 
 to the door. " You needn't be afraid to come in, my lad," I 
 said, wishing to have a little chat with the old man. Perhaps 
 there was just a touch of the patronising in ray tone. If there 
 was, my priggishness was promptly rebuked. " Oh, I ain't 
 afeerd o' you, mate," said the old man. " No, no, of course 
 not." " It ain't the fust time I ha' set 'ere." " No, I expect 
 not." " Nor you ain't the fust man I ha' seen with a good 
 coat on his back." Clearly, the old man was troubled 
 with no bashfulness at the presence of a stranger, and I 
 went on trying as cunningly as I could to inveigle him 
 into some little self-revelation ; but it was a total failure. 
 He parried all my questions, assumed an air of the blankest 
 ignorance on matters with which he must have been per- 
 fectly familiar, and steadfastly refused to be pumped. But 
 when presently the landlady joined in with the observations 
 I have just recorded, he put in, I thought, very acutely. 
 " You see, sir," said the landlady, " if they settle on the land 
 they just make a living, and I think as, on the whole, they 
 be more happy and contented than a good many 'd think 
 for ; but you see there's nothing afore 'em. They never get 
 on. They don't get no higher wages. They get just enough 
 
THE STAMPEDE INTO THE TOWNS. II 
 
 to keep 'em ; but since prices ha' gone down so, the farmers 
 can't afford to give 'em more." "What prices ha' gone 
 down ? " demanded the old man. " Why, corn." " Well," 
 was the retort, " and ain't the price o' stock gone up ? Don't 
 a bullock fetch twice as much as it used to since I can 
 remember ? And don't a calf fetch twice as much, and ain't 
 the price o' 'osses double what they used to be ? They talks 
 about their wheat and their barley, -but they never says nothing 
 about the price o' bullocks." Clearly, the old man wasn't so 
 utterly incapable of observation as he would have had me think. 
 But the landlord, who now came to the front, said he was of 
 a contented mind, and had always been satisfied with his lot, 
 though to look at the old fellow, and by the tone of his 
 remarks, I should hardly have judged so. " That's what 
 they gets," he growled at one point, as he sliced off a lump 
 of fat bacon on his hunch of bread. " What they earns is 
 another thing." The old fellow was between seventy and 
 eighty years of age — seventy-seven, I think they said ; and 
 his day's work was eleven hours of hoeing, or nine hours with 
 allowances for meals. And every winter the old man spends 
 in the workhouse. " And does he find any fault with the 
 workhouse ? " I asked of the landlord, as we presently jogged 
 along in his light cart. " No ; he don't find no fault. He 
 takes it all quiet enough." At threescore years and fifteen 
 or thereabout, I suppose nine hours of hoeing leaves a man 
 little spirit even for grumbling; but here is an object-lesson 
 for all the sturdy young fellows from eighteen to twenty-five 
 — IIS. a week — on piecework — and nine hours' of hoeing 
 and the much-dreaded workhouse, and a pauper's grave at 
 the end of it all. What wonder if, as the landlady says, they 
 go into the town to " better themselves ? " 
 
 And it is the same with the young women. " We get no 
 women to work now," said the farmer I have already quoted. 
 " Some of the old ones '11 do a day now and again, but we 
 get no young women in the field now. They all go into the 
 
12 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 town to service. While ladies '11 give thirty or five-and-thirty 
 pounds for a cook, and sixteen and eighteen pounds for a 
 housemaid, of course we can't keep 'em here." "And no 
 doubt when the lasses go, the lads soon begin to follow ? " 
 " Of course they do." A Baptist minister gave me a striking 
 illustration of the influence of the young women in assisting 
 the draining of the country of its labourers. Before he came 
 into his present ministry, he was in charge of a church in a 
 village, where pillow-lace-making was a staple industry of the 
 people, and while it lasted they were thriving, and the church 
 was prosperous. But foreign competition, or something else, 
 ruined the lace-making. Things grew worse and worse, till 
 twelve hours of close working wouldn't pay twopence. Every 
 girl in the place who was good for anything at all — eighty 
 or ninety per cent. — flitted into the towns, and all the young 
 men followed. 
 
 " I don't think it's altogether wages," said a very able 
 observer, another Congregational minister of eight years' 
 standing in an Essex village. " The country, you see, is very 
 dull, and it is difficult to see how it can be made otherwise. 
 The people have to be up at five in the morning, and they 
 require to be in bed by seven or eight o'clock." This 
 gentleman's opinion was that their long day's work was too 
 exhausting to permit of any kind of social life in the evening. 
 He had tried to get up evening entertainments, and had 
 tried to start a library ; indeed, he did start one with two or 
 three hundred volumes, and for a short time it seemed to be 
 appreciated. But he couldn't keep up an interest in it, and 
 it had to be dropped. " The hours of labour are so long, 
 and the work is so heavy, that it leaves the people fit for 
 nothing in the way of mental improvement at the end of the 
 day ? " " It leaves them fit for nothing but bed." " Then, 
 apparently, if social life in the village is to be made brighter 
 and more attractive, some shortening of the hours of work 
 seems to be indispensable ? " " Yes ; but then, I confess, I 
 
THE STAMPEDE INTO THE TOWNS. 1 3 
 
 see a great difficulty. There has been some talk of the itnion 
 here, and I suppose it is coming." " Yes ; they say in 
 London that the great difficulty in the way of effective 
 union there is the disorganised agricultural labourer always 
 ready to pour in from the country to defeat gas-workers and 
 others in their efforts to improve their condition. And Tillett 
 and the rest of them say that the labourers must be organised, 
 and they are preparing to do it." " Well, when the move- 
 ment reaches here I shall find myself in a great difficulty. 
 There are one or two large farmers — men farming on a large 
 scale and with ample capital — who are doing well. But the 
 great majority of them round here have hardly a pound in 
 their pockets, and to give shorter hours and better pay at 
 their expense means just knocking them over. Even as it 
 is their land is not half cultivated, and they simply cannot 
 stand any further drain upon them. What is to be done it 
 is very difficult to say." "Your observation convinces you 
 that the large farmers have an advantage over the small 
 ones?" " A very decided advantage. They can keep horses 
 and men regularly employed by shifting them about from 
 place to place, and they can buy to greater advantage and 
 sell too. I'll give you an instance. I know two men at 
 this moment who buy oilcake of precisely the same kind. 
 One buys in large quantities for cash, and gets it ;^3 a ton 
 cheaper than the other, who cannot aflbrd to do so. I know 
 two other men who had hay to sell when the price was low. 
 One was obhged to sell, and got ;£% a load for it. The 
 other kept it for a time, and got ;^4. I know one farmer 
 who buys oats, when he wants them, first-hand. He goes 
 down to the docks, buys direct from the importer in con- 
 siderable quantities, and entirely saves the profit of the 
 middleman." " The small farmer, then, seems likely to go to 
 the wall ? " " He is bound to go to the wall," and it seems, 
 moreover, that the large farmer can do, in proportion, with 
 fewer men, can afford better machinery, and more of it. 
 
14 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 than the small man. According to all the testimony I have 
 met with down here, thus far, things are moving in some- 
 thing of a circle. The want of money and the scarcity of 
 labour are evolving the system of large farms, and the system 
 of large farming is tending to dispense more and more with 
 the need of labour. " Well, what is to be done ? " I inquired. 
 " I cannot undertake to suggest. What we seem to want 
 is a great statesman to come forward and take the matter 
 in hand." 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 THE COTTAGE HOMES OF ENGLAND. 
 
 August 15. 
 
 Starting from Chelmsford this morning, I have driven 
 some fifteen or twenty miles through the county of Essex. 
 If I had done merely this I should have brought back with 
 me the pleasantest possible impression of prosperous 
 villages and charming little homes, embowered in orchards 
 and flower-gardens, and tenanted by a comfortable and 
 contented peasantry, healthy, thriving, happy, and beyond 
 all comparison better off than the corresponding class in 
 our great towns. Knowing what I know of life in lower 
 London, I might well have regarded the constant draining 
 away of this population thither as due to the infatuation of 
 mere ignorance, doomed to speedy enlightenment by a 
 bitter experience, and certain to be followed by repentance. 
 Life here as we drive along looks so placid, so pleasant, so 
 easy, that, by comparison, the life of those who are crowding 
 our dock gates, or are pent up in gas factories, or slaving at 
 our great railway stations, conducting omnibuses, tramping 
 the dull streets at night as policemen, or going through the 
 drudgery of a city warehouse — such life seems a sort of 
 nightmare. 
 
 Here is a little place, just a few yards back from the 
 
THE COTTAGE HOMES OF ENGLAND. 15 
 
 highway, a semi-detached cottage. The windows full of 
 flowers look out across iields of waving corn, and pleasant 
 meadows, and dark-green woods. Its doorway is sheltered 
 by a porch that has been a mass of sweet-smelling honey- 
 suckle. Its forecourt garden is full of cloves and fuchsias, 
 geraniums, and sweet-peas, and under a canopy of old trees 
 and shrubs is a rustic seat where, when the labourer's work 
 is done, he may sit and smoke his pipe and watch the sun- 
 set, and see the evening primroses unfold, and enjoy 
 
 ' ' The gleam — 
 The shadow — and the peace supreme." 
 
 It is a house that would have inspired a Cowper or a 
 Wordsworth to break out in song, or a George Leslie to sit 
 down before it and paint. Here is another. A pebbled 
 pathway edged by mossy stones leads up to it through beds 
 of roses and petunias, nasturtiums and phloxes, interspersed 
 with currant-bushes and raspberry-canes. Its red-tiled roof 
 and crumbling chimney stack stand picturesquely out 
 against a background of plum and walnut, apple and pear 
 trees, and its latticed windows peep cosily out of a cluster of 
 vines. "Delightful little houses!" you exclaim as you 
 rattle past them. Photograph one of these places with the 
 weather-beaten old rustic smoking his pipe in the arbour, 
 and the old dame with her knitting at the door, and perhaps 
 a buxom lass feeding a coop of chickens, and you will have 
 the picture of a lowly home that it seems madness for the 
 young people to run away from for life in grimy Spital- 
 fields, or dreary Shadwell. Show such a picture as 
 this, and say that Ben Tillett and Tom Mann are coming 
 down here to commence an agitation among such people, 
 and Ben Tillett and Tom Mann will strike you at once as 
 demons of discord who richly deserve to be flung into the 
 nearest horsepond. Reform in the villages, indeed ! Let 
 the people alone, God made the country, and man made 
 the town. These Essex villagers have fresh air, and flowers 
 
1 6 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 and fruit in their season. They have all the delights of the 
 open country — green fields and shady woods, waving corn- 
 fields and laden orchards, and peace and quiet and Sunday 
 rest. If their wages are low, so are their expenses, and 
 though they get none of the excitements and stir of town 
 life, they know nothing of its struggle and strain either. 
 Let them alone. That is how it would naturally strike the 
 stranger who should spin along behind a good horse, as I 
 have been spinning to-day, through Writtle, Cooksmill 
 Green, Highwood, and the neighbourhood. 
 
 I have been doing a little more than this, however. 
 The Chelmsford and Maldon guardians, to their infinite 
 credit, and unlike many other Boards in Essex, have taken 
 an enlightened and thoroughly progressive view of their 
 duties as the sanitary authorities of their district. Instead 
 of appointing at a salary of fifteen or twenty pounds a year 
 a medical officer who is in practice for himself, and who is 
 expected to attend merely to such matters of health, or 
 rather of sickness, as the sanitary officer may call his atten- 
 tion to, they have taken the far more sensible and public- 
 spirited course of engaging the whole time and strength of 
 a thoroughly competent man. Dr. Thresh, a D.Sc, an 
 M.B., I suppose one of the youngest, and certainly one of 
 the ablest medical officers in the kingdom, devotes himself 
 entirely to travelling about the district, looking after matters 
 of water supply, drainage, the general sanitary condition of 
 house property, and all other matters bearing on the public 
 health. It was in company with Dr. Thresh that I made 
 my round to-day, and I was able thus to see not only the 
 outsides of these attractive little houses, but the insides 
 also and the people who live in them. 
 
 The first thing which struck me was the fact that 
 "absenteeism" and its evils are by no means peculiar 
 to Ireland. " In that row of houses," I was informed, 
 " some of the people have lived twenty or thirty years, and 
 
THE COTTAGE HOMES OF ENGLAND. 1/ 
 
 they have none of them ever seen their landlord." We step 
 down and look at one or two cottages. I cannot pretend 
 to say that I was greatly shocked at what I saw. But I 
 certainly ought to have been, and if I had peeped into the 
 same rooms up a court in Lambeth or Poplar I should have 
 been. But it was a delightful sumrner morning. The 
 cottage doors opened into thriving little garden plots, and it 
 was all so breezy and pleasant without that it really seemed 
 to matter very little what was within. But the cottages 
 were in a scandalous condition, and evidently the agent 
 could not have spent a penny piece upon them for many 
 years. Tumble-down, ramshackle, damp and draughty, any 
 landlord ought to have been heartily ashamed of drawing 
 rent for them. " This is how I manage to keep out the 
 damp, sir," said one woman cheerily from the interior of 
 her little low-raftered den, the floor of which was sunk 
 below the level of the yard. And as she spoke she turned 
 up two or three thicknesses of old rugs and carpets from 
 the brick floor beneath them. " The place is wretchedly 
 damp," observes the doctor as he makes a note or two, and 
 we move on. " The people suifer a good deal from 
 rheumatism and pleurisy, and that sort of thing, what with 
 their brick floors and their broken plaster walls and clay 
 soil." We rattle on past a village school with a score or 
 two of youngsters out in the playground in front. " Some 
 of those children," says my cicerone, " have to come three 
 miles to school, and in the winter time the cross roads are 
 swamps of mud. This road here," he continued, as he 
 pulled up at the end of a lane and dismounted, " was last 
 winter a foot or a foot and a half of liquid slush, and the 
 children had to get along here to school. No wonder they 
 got bronchitis and influenza. I want to go and see whether 
 the landlord has finished a well at one of these cottages 
 down here." No, the well was not finished, and the land- 
 lord would have to be touched up again ; but progress had 
 
 B 
 
1 8 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 been made, and soon these cottages would have a fair 
 supply of wholesome water. " Come and see where they 
 used to get their water for drinking and cooking," said the 
 doctor, leading the way down an unusually large garden 
 plot. I stepped down a bank, pulled the boughs aside, and 
 found a little stinking pond, into which the surface water 
 drained from the land around. It was all the water they 
 had had for drinking till the authorities insisted on a 
 well being sunk — a mere stagnant ditch. Another cottage 
 — indeed a whole row of cottages — were still drawing sup- 
 plies from a similar source — just a stagnant puddle under 
 some trees at the bottom of the garden. The woman in 
 whose garden was this water supply for herself and her 
 neighbours, complained bitterly of what they had to put up 
 with at times. The continuous rains of late had freshened 
 up the ditch and rendered the water comparatively 
 wholesome, but at times it was almost black and the stench 
 was dreadful. It made her sick. 
 
 The want of good water is one of the great troubles 
 of these villagers, but in the case of some of them 
 it is only one of many evils that make life a misery 
 and a burden. I mentioned just now a cottage whose 
 latticed windows peered out from a luxuriant grape-vine, 
 beneath a roof of picturesque red tiles. " I could get along 
 for water," said the tenant. " I can fetch that from the 
 well over yonder,'' he said, indicating a supply at some 
 distance across the fields, " and I wouldn't mind if 
 he'd jest put the windows in. I like th' ole place, and I 
 don't want to leave it." Outside and from the road the 
 cottage looked the picture of cosy comfort, but go up to it 
 and peep inside, and go round the back, and you will find 
 it is a filthy, dilapidated pig-sty sort of place, in a con- 
 dition utterly unfit for habitation. The latticed windows 
 are actually tumbling out, and some of them at the back 
 are really gone, and the holes are stopped up with sacking 
 
THE COTTAGE HOMES OF ENGLAND. 1 9 
 
 or pieces of board, while the reeking walls are all mouldy 
 and crumbling. But a place worse than this by far stood a 
 little way off on the same road. It was not one of the 
 most attractive of the cottages about there, but it stood in 
 an open and sunny position ; the luxuriant garden plot at 
 the back showed prettily through the open passage leading 
 from the front door, and the children playing about it gave 
 a homely, cheerful aspect to it. But such a house inside I 
 never saw in my life, though I think I have seen a good 
 many of the worst rooms in London. The poor woman 
 begged we would go up-stairs and look at the front bedroom. 
 She had had to move out of it, she said, for she was afraid 
 her bedstead would have tumbled through into the room 
 below. This was not in the least an exaggeration. I really 
 felt it unsafe to stand upon the floor. The walls were 
 cracked and broken. Throughout the house they were 
 patched with tarred sacking or bits of sheet-iron, the roof 
 was leaky, and rain was free to come in from above, and 
 all the winds of heaven had free course through broken 
 floors and ramshackle windows. And that unfortunate 
 family had had to shiver in that miserable ruin — condemned 
 twelve months ago — all through the last dreadful winter. 
 •' I was nearly perished to death, sir," said the poor woman, 
 " and they've been threatenin' to put the brokers in for the 
 rates. Can they do it, sir, for a place like this?" Why did 
 they stay there ? it will be asked. Well, the simple answer 
 is that they couldn't help it. Why they couldn't help it is 
 a question which I must leave to a future letter. " In a 
 ■locality where you can find somebody who will sell suitable 
 plots of ground for erecting cottages, and at a reasonable 
 price," says Dr. Thresh, as we drive along, " guardians can 
 erect cottages; but where you have to put compulsory 
 powers into operation, the legal expenses become so heavy 
 that you can't do it." "That is to say in the only 
 cases where the Act is required you find it is of no use ?" 
 
20 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 "Precisely so. It breaks down just where it is most needed." 
 Some further comments on our house-to-house visitation I 
 must leave for another letter. 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 WHY THEY GO TO TOWN. 
 
 August 1 8. 
 
 " Cherchez la femme,' said the Oriental philosopher when- 
 ever mischief arose. Inquiry into the causes of the influx of 
 agricultural labourers into the towns strongly supports the 
 wisdom of that Eastern potentate. I am fast arriving at a 
 conviction that the main source of the trouble is to be found in 
 the influence of the young women. In one of the cottages 
 we went into in the course of the round of visits I partly 
 described in my last letter, there were three bonny lasses 
 who seemed to have completely outgrown the parental 
 wigwam, which, notwithstanding its flowery picturesque 
 exterior, was a low-raftered, pokey little place with a general 
 air of sordid poverty. They had all three been out to 
 service, but were temporarily at "home." "You wouldn't 
 like to come back and settle down here ? " they were asked. 
 " No," was the emphatic reply. " You wouldn't catch us 
 settling down here." They flit out of the old nest into the 
 towns, these pretty decoy birds, and very likely with at least 
 three young swains looking wistfully after them. They 
 become familiar with quite a different world, get new ideas 
 of home life, acquire quite a different standard for men and 
 their wages. Presently they come home for a holiday, full 
 of tales of this higher life and the wonderful earnings of 
 smart young men of their acquaintance. There is the milk 
 man — who sees all the life of the busy streets, and spends 
 his pleasant days in serving pretty girls with milk and eggs, 
 and gets a pound a week for it. The groom was a villager 
 
IVffy THEY GO TO TOWN. 21 
 
 once, and not a bit smarter than young Hodge, and when he 
 came to town knew no more about horses. He now gets 
 what is equivalent to five-and-twenty or thirty shillings a 
 week, and has to drive out his master and see all the sights. 
 Dull work turnip-hoeing in the middle of a ten-acre field at 
 a maximum of eleven shillings a week after this. " One of 
 my servants is going to marry a labourer," said a gentleman. 
 " They have been waiting till he got his eleven shillings — 
 full man's wages that is. He has got that now, and he is 
 thinking of getting married. But the girl wants him to come 
 into the town, and it is certainly only natural. She sees 
 that my groom and gardener is getting twice a labourer's 
 wage, though he is no sharper or smarter than the other. 
 She doesn't care to go and settle down for hfe on eleven 
 shillings a week and no prospect of any rise. She doesn't 
 see why he shouldn't come into the town and get on a bit." 
 That, no doubt, is a very common case. "When they 
 begin to think about getting married," said this gentleman, 
 " is the time when they begin to be restless and begin to 
 think about getting away from the land " — from about 
 eighteen to five-and-twenty, that is, just the period of life 
 mentioned by the experienced farmer whose pessimistic 
 view of things I gave in my first letter. " It's the young 
 'uns as can go," said an old labourer in the rather doleful 
 tone of a man who had missed his opportunity. " It 's the 
 young 'uns as can go ; it 's o' no use for the old 'uns to think 
 about it." Many and many a long year's work had the old 
 man done. 
 
 " Oft did the harvest to his sickle yield. 
 
 His furrow oft the stubborn glebe had broke : 
 
 IIow jocund did he drive his team afield ! 
 
 How bowed the woods beneath his sturdy stroke ! " 
 
 But it was all over ; he could work no more, and now had, 
 I suppose, to depend upon the parish. He sat there quite 
 alone in the world. His sons had gone from him, and his 
 
22 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 wife had died two years ago. His breezy little room, with 
 the sunbeams pouring in upon its red-brick floor, looked 
 decidedly pleasant, and I couldn't help thinking how different 
 it might have been with the old fellow if one or two of his 
 sons could have been working on the land around, much of 
 which was so manifestly in need of their labour. It is 
 evidently a great grief to many of the old people that their 
 boys will run off to the towns. " I grieved more over my 
 boy as went away to London than I did over the four I'd 
 lost," said a pleasant-faced woman ; " I didn't eat a ha'porth 
 o' food for a fortnight." " But I daresay he likes to come 
 back and see the old home sometimes % " " Ah, that he do, 
 sir,"replied the woman, looking delighted at the thought. "He 
 comes down for a day or two whenever he can, and he says 
 'There's no place like home after all, mother.' Bless you, when 
 he was at home he'd ha' thought it shame to kiss his mother, 
 
 but " " Ah, and now when he comes back he'll do it, 
 
 eh ? " "I should jest think he would," laughed the rosy little 
 woman. " But it do improve 'em to go to London," said 
 another comely little matron, as she stood at her cottage 
 door and told us how her boys had got on, evidently divided 
 between her sentiment of pride in the lads and her grief at 
 parting with them. " Somehow they seem quite different 
 when they come home,'' she said. "And have all your boys 
 gone to London ? " " No, I got two at 'ome now." " And 
 why haven't they gone too ? " " One of 'em had a bad attack 
 of rheumatic fever, and can't go out, and the other has fits." 
 " That," it was remarked as we moved down the garden, 
 " gives you some idea of the sort of people who are being 
 left in many of these villages — just those who can't get away." 
 To a great extent this exodus from the fields to the towns 
 is an exodus of the spirited and ambitious young man in 
 quest of a more promising sphere. But it is by no means 
 entirely so. In a great many cottages we looked into, the 
 question was put as to why the sons had migrated, and the 
 
WHY THBY GO TO TOWN. 2$ 
 
 answers elicited seemed to show unmistakably that it was a 
 case of Hobson's choice. " Your son has left the neigh- 
 bourhood ? " was put again and again, and in a great many 
 instances the answer was in effect, " Yes, sir ; he had to go." 
 " How was that ? " " Well, where was he to find work ? " 
 " But aren't the farmers employing so many hands as they 
 used to do ? " " No, that they ain't, nothing like." " How 
 is it ? " " Because they ain't got the money, sir." With the 
 exception of a few large farmers, everybody who is cultivating 
 land at all seems to be doing it in the most economical 
 style possible, and it seems to be the rule now with the 
 greater number to turn their men adrift as soon as they have 
 got in their harvest. " We had at least a dozen men out of 
 work in my parish last winter,'' said a clergyman whom we 
 met on the road to-day. " I have not been sufficiently long 
 in the neighbourhood to be very familiar with affairs, but 
 wiih half an eye I could see as soon as I came here that all 
 the usual winter work of the farms was entirely untouched — 
 such as the clearing out of ditches and the trimming of 
 hedges. The men are discharged and the work is not done.'' 
 So far as I have seen the county of Essex, I should say 
 that with the average farmer this is almost the invariable 
 rule. Men are being turned off after harvest, and are com- 
 pelled to drift into the towns or the workhouse. They go 
 away in the winter, and when autumn comes round again 
 it is not surprising that farmers don't find them at their 
 beck and call. A large farmer whom I talked with to-day 
 apparently regarded this as the secret of the whole difficulty. 
 He himself kept his staff of men on steadily through the 
 winter, and had lost none of his hands. He is^ I should say, 
 a man of ample means, and can afford to farm well, and 
 though, like most other people about here, he did a little 
 grumble at the low price of corn, he evidently considered 
 himself fairly thriving. There were, he frankly admitted, 
 considerable advantages in farming on a large scale, and some 
 
24 UPB IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 of these advantages seemed to accrue to the village adjacent, 
 which was one of the few places I have been through from 
 which the labourers are not migrating, and which seems to 
 be in a fairly thriving state. Here, however, as in so many 
 other parts of the county of Essex, the water supply is a 
 source of difficulty. The villagers have wells, but unfor- 
 tunately they have also cesspools which often drain into 
 them, and typhoid fever is a frequent scourge here as a con- 
 sequence. They had formerly one good well to which they 
 could resort if they would, and be safe. The new railway 
 line, however, came along and cut off their supply and 
 appropriated the water, which the railway company now 
 pump up for their own purposes, and sell it to the villagers 
 through a public pump at a shilling a thousand gallons. 
 They have of course to pay this in the form of a rate, and then 
 they have to pay for its being brought to them or fetch it 
 themselves, often from a long distance. In their difficulty 
 the people, or their representatives, approached the owner 
 of a neighbouring estate for permission to make use of a 
 spring of good water bubbling up and running to waste. 
 Nobody ever heard of the spring being of a ha'porth of use 
 to anybody till it was wanted for villagers who were dying 
 with typhoid — I saw to-day a man who had just lost his wife 
 from typhoid for want of it — and who proposed to bring it 
 down to their homes in a pipe, and then the prohibitive 
 charge of fifty pounds a year was made. 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 AN ESSEX DESERT. 
 
 August 20. 
 
 Ii ought not to be, though apparently it is, necessary to 
 point out to the readers and correspondents of the Daily 
 News that when I quote a man's words I do not necessarily 
 
An ESSEX DESERT. 25 
 
 endorse his opinions or vouch for his statements. I am, I 
 see, supposed to have been misled with regard to the advan- 
 tages of large farming. I have certainly expressed no 
 opinion in favour of large farms. I have merely recorded 
 the opinions of intelligent local observers who take that view. 
 Without for the moment expressing an opinion one way or 
 the other, I may say as a mere matter of fact that I have met 
 with several people more or less competent to speak on the 
 point who have unhesitatingly asserted the advantages of 
 large farming. The last man I questioned on the point was 
 himself a large farmer, and he seemed to be in no doubt 
 about it. " It is worth your while to get the best machinery," 
 he said. " You can always find work for your horses and a 
 regular staff of men." That is the opinion of a practical 
 farmer of long experience. It is for the readers of the Daily 
 News to say what the opinion may be worth. I have heard 
 none to the contrary of this except in the case of those who 
 have insisted on the necessity for getting back to the good 
 old times, when the farmer turned up his shirtsleeves and 
 worked with his men in the fields, while his daughters milked 
 the cows and his wife made the butter and cheese. If I 
 thought that any word of mine could assist in bringing about 
 this, I can only declare that I should be delighted to say it. A 
 prosperous farmer among his men, pitchfork in hand, leading, 
 directing, stimulating those who will share his prosperity 
 with him, is a king among men. His lot is among the 
 brightest and the happiest on earth. By all means let his 
 daughters milk the cows — in a shed constructed on sanitary 
 principles, of course. The lasses will have the wholesome, 
 dignifying sense of a useful life, and when they have done 
 their dairy work, I hope they will dress themselves as prettily 
 as they know how, and have an evening at the piano, or help 
 in the village choral society, or manage the village library, or 
 attend a lecture. Hoorah ! for the good old times plus the 
 culture and education that we are nowadays coming to 
 
26 LIPE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 regard as quite consistent with solid work in the world, and 
 which we may rest assured must somehow work in with any 
 general scheme of things if that scheme is to be expected to 
 fall in with the march of human progress, and be permanent. 
 The old style of farmer— sordid, ignorant, opinionated, con- 
 temptuous of science and new-fangled notions, did for the old 
 times. But let it be laid down as an axiom that the future 
 has no place for him. He has to go the way of blunderbuses 
 and sedan chairs, and anything tending to reproduce him is 
 a tendency against all the forces of the times. 
 
 I repeat that I have again and again heard opinions to the 
 effect that, at all events in this part of the world, the small 
 farmers are going down ; and unquestionably the appearance 
 of the country I travelled through yesterday, say from Wick- 
 ford to Althorne and Southminster and thence back by road 
 to Chelmsford, bears out this view. A more dreary and 
 depressing stretch of badly farmed crops and land out of 
 cultivation, dilapidated cottages and deserted fields, it would 
 be difficult to find. " That field," said a worthy rector — a 
 downright good old Tory, who had nothing but scathing 
 denunciation for technical education, and who believed that 
 nothing could save us all from the dogs but getting back 
 with all speed to a tax on corn — " that field I have known 
 to grow five and six quarters of wheat to the acre. Now 
 look at it." Certainly such an expanse of seeding docks 
 I never saw. " Afore now," said a working-man later in 
 the day, "I have thrashed out corn as didn't yield more 
 than five or six sacks to the acre." I saw yesterday 
 hundreds upon hundreds of acres of wheat and barley that 
 could hardly yield much more. Thousands of acres I saw 
 yielding nothing at all, but just such vegetation as grows 
 upon land when it is abandoned. Such an expanse of 
 thistledown as stretched out before me at one point on my 
 drive from Althorne to Chelmsford I never saw in my life. 
 A good night's wind, I should think, might sow three or four 
 
AN ESSEX DESERT. 2/ 
 
 counties from that field, wliile everywhere the hedges and 
 ditches and roadside were choked with weeds.. Yet there 
 is no work for the villagers of Essex, and they are streaming 
 into the big towns because miles and mile of land — inferior, 
 no doubt, but whjch nevertheless might comfortably support 
 a large population if they could be got to work upon it under 
 such conditions as science could prescribe and capital secure 
 — cannot be made to yield first three or four profits for other 
 people. The land would support the actual workers on it, 
 but that is nothing at all. It must give the clergyman his 
 tithes, and the farmer his income, and the landowner his 
 rent, and the Lord of the Manor his dues. It will not do 
 that, however ; therefore let it go out of cultivation, and let 
 the people stream into the towns. Oh, the pity of it ! As 
 one flits along past their lowly homes, how near the people 
 seem to an ideal life of simplicity and purity, comfort and 
 contentment ! How near they seem, and yet, alas ! how 
 far. I have seen few more pitiable objects than an old 
 woman in a little hovel of a place — in a garden full of flowers 
 — without kith or kin in the village, only a friendly old 
 neighbour to look after her for charity occasionally, the 
 worries of a lifetime gathered in her wrinkled face, and on 
 her lips a desolate cry that it might soon please the good 
 God to take her rather than let her go into the workhouse. 
 But old people are left alone to grow decrepit in towns as 
 well as villages. Well, yes, they are, no doubt ; but here it 
 looks as though it would be so natural and easy for some of 
 the young ones to settle around, and they all seem to go 
 away — all but "the old people and fools." If there was a 
 sadder sight confronted me yesterday, it v/as that of another 
 old woman who looked comfortably off, and who, I was 
 informed, had actually furnished a cottage for her married 
 daughter — whose husband had left her — that she might live 
 next door to a semi-imbecile village ruffian who had under- 
 taken to support her. There are dark depths in some of 
 
28 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 these villages. I was driven through one in which I was 
 assured that till a few years ago marriage was quite the 
 exception ; and we called at one two-roomed cottage, in 
 which lived father and mother and a family of six, including 
 two grown-up sons. It was a case of overcrowding, and 
 pressure had been put upon them to reduce the number. 
 One of the sons had been turned out. " But," whispered a 
 neighbour, "they've took in a lodger." " It ain't a lodger," 
 said a nice-looking child of twelve or thereabouts, on inquiry 
 at the cottage; "It's Lizzie So-and-So." "And who is 
 Lizzie So-and-So ?" The child's face dropped significantly. 
 Evidently she was ashamed of it. " It's my brother's young 
 woman," she said. But how pretty some of the places 
 look ! The philosopher who should leave out as of no 
 account in considering the condition of the people, the 
 subtle charms of the poorest of these cottages, nestling amid 
 flowers and trees and gardens and green fields, would prove 
 himself as shallow as he who overlooks the benefits that 
 come of the friction and stir and stimulus of great populations 
 and life in cities. Shall we never be able to secure for the 
 benefit of the whole people some such combination of the 
 two — the peace and beauty of the country with the moral 
 and intellectual stimulus of the town, as at present is prac- 
 ticable only for the privileged few ? 
 
 "But the land," exclaims my Tory friend the rector, 
 " won't support the people, and it can't support the people 
 even if they had it for nothing." " Didn't you tell me it 
 liad yielded five and six quarters of wheat to the acre?" 
 " That was when it had been fifty or sixty years under 
 cultivation, and was in splendid condition. Look at it now. 
 '\\'hat can anybody do with that ? It would take years to 
 get that into paying condition again. Where's the capital 
 to come from?" "Have you no allotments about here?" 
 "My dear sir !" exclaims the rector, with all the emphasis 
 he could command, " it's the greatest humbug in the world 
 
AN ESSEX DESERT. 29 
 
 to believe that prosperity is going to be brought back by 
 giving these people allotments and small holdings." "Well, 
 but haven't you tried them here?" "Yes, we have, and 
 what good have they done, I should like to know ! " " But 
 what is the reason they have done no good ? Won't the 
 people work at them, or haven't they time, or what is it ? " 
 ■Pressed in this way, the good man was a little vague and 
 indefinite. I think his notions were rather mixed, and that 
 when he repudiated allotments so vigorously he really had 
 in mind small holdings for peasant farming — quite another 
 matter. But he certainly led me to believe that the allotment- 
 holders wouldn't work at them with sufficient interest and 
 vigour to make them good for anything. However, he pro- 
 posed to look round the neighbourhood, and we were soon 
 straddling over gates and stumping across fields telling or 
 poverty and neglect, and crops hardly worth gathering in. 
 A delightful old soul my friend the rector. How heartily 
 he abused the Government that did nothing but the dirty 
 work of the Liberals ! Just wouldn't he like to scarify the 
 " demoniac miscreants " who had framed that new Tithes 
 Act, that would so cruelly rob the poor clergymen, himself 
 among the number ! What a hearty dislike he had for " Joe 
 Chamberlain ! " And we wrangled and laughed, and dis- 
 cussed the universe at large and Essex in particular. Now 
 he would clap me on the shoulder in hearty assent, and the 
 next moment we tumbled apart to the political antipodes. 
 But there were the allotments. I was fairly taken aback. 
 I had expected to see them as barren and miserable-looking 
 as the rest of the cultivation in that part of the world, and 
 lo ! they stood there like an oasis in the desert. I think the 
 good rector could hardly have been round that way lately. 
 He made the most he could of a few weeds, and declared 
 the potato crop was all diseased. I flatly disputed it, and 
 would have it they were not diseased, but ripe and fit for 
 digging. We pulled up a root, and the rector tried to find 
 
30 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 some specks of disease about the handsome little tubers, but 
 couldn't find me one. With the doggedness inborn in the 
 out-and-out Tory, he wouldn't admit that he was wrong, but 
 the potatoes were certainly good, and every allotment was 
 as full as it could hold of cabbages and beans, potatoes and 
 carrots, onions and parsnips — all good valuable food produce 
 — while all around were thousands of acres producing nothing 
 but docks and thistles. It was the most luxuriant and 
 thriving object I had seen in a morning's travel, except the 
 cottage-gardens and the fruit-trees, which everywhere down 
 here look as though they will grow plums and pears and 
 apples, whether the Postmaster-General will give us a 
 parcel post that will bring them to our homes or not. The 
 allotments certainly looked thoroughly thriving, and paid 
 well even at the stiff rent of j£,2 an acre. And yet that 
 good man still, I have no doubt, believes that by no possi- 
 bility of social readjustment can those broad acres be made 
 to maintain more than the dozen or so of struggling and 
 despondent peasants still left in his parish. I ought to have 
 stated that the rector told me some of this land had just 
 been taken by a Scotchman ; and, since writing the above, 
 I have heard that large lettings have been effected in the 
 neighbourhood I have been describing. There seems to be 
 quite an invasion of some parts of Essex by Scotchmen, who 
 are coming down, I am told, in considerable numbers. I 
 was informed at one point that for sixteen miles the road 
 ran along land that had been taken by Scotchmen who were 
 going in for dairy farming, somewhat after the fashion of the 
 good old times. They will give no employment for Essex 
 hands, for they are bringing their families with them to help 
 in the work ; and I hear of bonnie lasses with short petticoats 
 and bare feet, and a general muscular development worth a 
 couple of the labourers left on the soil. I don't know 
 whether they have brought the pianos. The only house I 
 have seen occupied by a North Briton was a nice, stylish 
 
A MODEL VILLAGE. 3 1 
 
 little new brick farmhouse, which I was told was not 
 furnished much better than the labourers' cottages around. 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 A MODEL -VILLAGE. 
 
 August 22. 
 
 In my last letter I described a part of Essex in which the 
 land was poor, a vast proportion of it altogether out of 
 cultivation, where crops were of the scantiest, where the 
 cottages were bad, and almost everything wore a general 
 aspect of poverty and depression. To-day I have walked 
 for some hours through a locality in all respects different. 
 Many of the crops I saw were first-rate. There had been 
 room for more labour, but everything looked prosperous ; 
 and as to the cottages in the village of Stisted, which I 
 found at the end of my walk, between three and four miles 
 out from Braintree, they must be among the best labourers' 
 cottages in all England. They were put up by the late 
 squire, Mr. Onley Savill-Onley, to whose memory a hand- 
 some stained-glass window for the parish church is being 
 subscribed for, and who seems to have endeared himself to 
 everybody. The squire, I am told, was a man of cultiva- 
 tion, a clever landscape artist, and took great pride in 
 designing cottages, not only healthy and commodious, but 
 pretty and artistic. He was, by the account of the Rev. 
 Canon Cromwell, Rector of Stisted, in all respects a model 
 landowner — lived among his people, spent his money among 
 them, won their esteem and confidence, and generally acted 
 the part of an earthly Providence to them all to an extent 
 that one cannot but fear must have tended seriously to sap 
 independence of character in the village. Pensions have 
 been so freely granted to widows that they have accumulated 
 in Stisted in numbers sufificient to have deterred Mr. Weller, 
 
32 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 senior, from even venturing to drive his coach through the 
 spick-and-span Httle place. To add to the prosperity of the 
 village, allotment land has been let at twopence a rod, and 
 the farmers in the neighbourhood are men of capital, and 
 have habitually kept on their hands all the year round. It 
 the labourers under such circumstances are not to be kept 
 on the land it is difficult to see what is likely to keep them, 
 apart from some totally different economic system. They 
 have good and cheap cottages — £,\ a year is about the rent 
 — permanent work, cheap allotments without stint, while in 
 Canon Cromwell they have a large-hearted, liberal-minded 
 friend, earnest in every effort to provide education, rational 
 entertainment, and everything else that may be practicable 
 for them. 
 
 Such a combination of advantages must be very rare, 
 and yet from this model little village the young men are 
 streaming away into the towns or the colonies, just as they 
 appear to be in almost every other part I have visited, and 
 nobody seems to be able even to suggest a possible remedy. 
 The truth I am reluctantly driven to by my visit to Stisted, 
 more than by anything I have seen yet, is that this question 
 is one of wages, and wages alone, and that unless means can 
 be found of bringing up the standard of wages to a point 
 which every farmer in the kingdom would scout as utterly 
 preposterous, this shifting of the population cannot be 
 decidedly stopped, and can be retarded only in proportion 
 as that standard is approached. I was attracted in this 
 direction by a report in a local paper that the labourers at 
 Stisted and Pattiswick had refused to set about harvesting 
 till the farmers would come to their terms, and that virtu- 
 ally an agricultural strike was on foot. The men in this 
 neighbourhood get ten shillings a week during the winter 
 and during summer eleven. When harvest comes round 
 this arrangement is suspended, for it is the custom here for 
 them to form companies and to make bargains with their 
 
A MODEL VILLAGE. 33 
 
 masters to cut, bind, cart, and stack the crop at so much an 
 acre. Fifteen shillings an acre is an ordinary figure, when 
 the men find their own beer. Some masters prefer to pay 
 the whole in money, but the common arrangement is for the 
 farmer to pay twelve or twelve and sixpence an acre with a 
 certain allowance — not of beer, for the Truck Act forbids 
 that — hut of malt and hops, which the men brew into beer 
 for themselves. There is a small brewhouse in Stisted, 
 where the men, for a payment of eighteenpence or so, may 
 brew their beer, which they generally do in the night. It 
 is an obvious infringement of the Truck Act in spirit, if not 
 in letter. It ought to be stopped, and if need be the 
 amended Truck Act should be amended again. I am told 
 that some of the masters manage in this way to get rid of 
 the bad barley they cannot otherwise find a market for, and 
 those who are trying to promote temperance among 
 harvesters find it a difficulty and a discouragement. This 
 beer-making material is worth about thirty shillings, and 
 the men, one of them told me to-day, reckon to cut ten 
 or twelve acres of wheat per man, the whole earnings being 
 divided among the company. Suppose each man harvests 
 eleven acres, at twelve and sixpence, his share will be 
 between six and seven pounds for the harvest, to which must 
 be added the thirty shillings' worth of malt and hops. Of 
 course, if the crop is heavy, there is more work to the acre 
 than when it is hght, and the men and masters have to 
 haggle until they can come to terms about it. This year 
 there was a difference of a shilling or eighteenpence they 
 couldn't get over, and the men refused to go to work. Two 
 or three days appeared to have been wasted in this way, while 
 one after another the masters gave in, the largest and 
 probably the wealthiest holding out the longest. However, 
 terms were eventually agreed on, and when I reached the 
 locality nothing but the drenching showers prevented the 
 cutting of some very fine crops, 
 c 
 
34 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 I jumped over a bank into a field, where a party of 
 them were waiting, and had a long talk with the men, as 
 well as with several others I met in the course of my 
 walk, and their testimony was practically identical. It 
 was with them all a question of wages. It is the big shilling, 
 they told me. " But are there no other reasons why men 
 are leaving the country ? " I asked. " Do you dislike the 
 work, or don't you like living in a village ? " No ; it wasn't 
 that. They would stay in a village if the pay was right, 
 and they didn't mind the work, but there was too much of 
 it for the money. The masters had had them under their 
 heels far too long, and unless things were changed there 
 would be " ructions." If things weren't altered they would 
 all go. " When you go back to Lon'on," said one brawny 
 fellow, ensconced deep in a shock of wheat, " tell them iron- 
 mongers up there they needn't make no more o' them 
 things " — indicating the sickles — " we ain't a-goin' to use 
 'em." " But don't you think men are better off down here 
 at the pay you are getting than they would be in London at 
 a higher rate ? You know a man's expenses down here are 
 very much lighter than they are in London." " There ain't 
 much difference for single men," was the reply, " and there's 
 a lot o' difference in the pay." In the course of the 
 morning I talked with a respectable-looking working woman, 
 who afforded rather a telling illustration of this. " ^yell," I 
 began, " apd are the people leaving Stisted and going into 
 the towns, as they are doing in other parts ? " " No," said 
 the woman; " I don't know as they are — except the young 
 'uns; they keep going!" "Except the young ones! But 
 they are just the ones who ought to be staying to do the 
 work." " Yes," laughed the woman, "that's true enough; 
 but you see they likes to better themselves if they can. I 
 got a boy as has jest gone from here." "Ah, and why did 
 he leave ? " " Well, sir, he couldn't save nothing out of his 
 pay. All through the winter he got ten shillings a week, 
 
A MODEL VILLAGE. 35 
 
 and when he'd paid me for his board and lodging and had 
 dressed himself — he is a young fellow of two-and-twenty, 
 and dresses pretty well — there was nothing left. ' Mother,' 
 he says, ' I shall never be better off at this game. I'm 
 a-goin' to try my luck in London.' " " And did he find 
 work when he went to London ? " " Yes, he went over 
 somewhere down Penge way and got on at once with a 
 contractor or some't to drive a cart at a pound a week, but 
 he soon giv that up and got on to the railway. I ain't quite 
 sure what he gets there, but I know it's over a guinea." We 
 talked of working hours, and I asked the woman what the 
 people did with themselves in the winter evenings. " Some 
 on 'em goes to the reading-room up in the village. That 
 was where my boy used to go when he had had his tea and 
 washed. He'd go up there and read the paper." "Ah, 
 and I suppose it was there he picked up his idea of going 
 to London ? " " Oh, yes, sir. He see the advertisement 
 about the place he got in the paper." " And does he like 
 it ? Wouldn't he like to come back again ? " " No, sir ; it 
 suits him very well indeed. He's been down once or twice 
 and he looks hearty and well, and says he's very glad he 
 went." 
 
 " Yes," said Mr. Cromwell afterwards, " I know the lad 
 you are referring to. He and two friends of his used to 
 come up to' the rectory to educational classes. Those two 
 friends made up their minds to go out to Canada, where 
 they got employment immediately. I forget exactly what 
 pay they got, but something like five times what they were 
 getting here. And these young fellows have friends in the 
 village, and these things are known by everybody." Can 
 there be anything more natural than this exodus from the 
 villages ? Can there be anything more inevitable than the 
 virtual depopulation of our agricultural districts unless some 
 radical change can be effected ? Some of the farmers will 
 tell you that ten or eleven shillings a week is but the 
 
36 LIFE. IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 nominal wage, and that at times they earn considerably 
 more. There is some truth in it. A labourer's wife and 
 children will sometimes earn a little by picking stones off 
 the land. For a month or six weeks a woman m:iy earn as 
 much as eighteenpence or two shillings a day by pea- 
 picking ; so that the Tory rector may have been right when 
 he told me that a cottager and wife and children sometimes 
 had as much as a pound a week coming in. It is possible 
 they may have, just while the pea-picking lasts. But if you 
 tell this to the men they are instantly down on you with a 
 contra account. " They calls it eleven shillings a week," 
 said the men in the harvest field to-day, " but what about 
 the days o' pourin' rain when you can't get into the fields ? 
 Don't they stop yer pay for them ? " "I should think they 
 do ! " cried the fellow buried deep down in the corn shock. 
 "They'll say, 'hullo, here's a shower of rain. Go and send 
 them fellows home. Darn 'em ! They'll all be under the 
 hedge.' " " Ah," said another, " many's the time as I've 
 been home with five or six shillin's for my week's pay." Of 
 course there is a great difference in masters, and things vary 
 somewhat according to local circumstances, but in Essex, so 
 far as I have seen it, I don't think it would be far wrong to 
 put down the income of an able-bodied labourer at from 
 five to ten pounds at harvest, and for the rest of the year 
 ten or eleven shillings a week when in work. The best of 
 the young men among agricultural labourers find no difficulty 
 at all in getting employment in the towns. It is not they 
 who drift to the dock gates and the casual wards, but they 
 oust others who have to do so. Why should a young man 
 stay down in his village when he is practically certain of 
 finding employment at double wages, with all sorts of 
 indefinite possibilities in the towns ? As things are, he will 
 not stay. The whole conditions of his life will have to be 
 changed. The farmers down here can tell you why. As a 
 rule, with very few exceptions, they have always been against 
 
A WAYSIDE PARLIAMENT. 37 
 
 education. With very few exceptions, they are dead against 
 it now. If they speak candidly — as they will sometimes — 
 they tell you that this restlessness and shifting are 
 simply the results of education. And they are undoubtedly 
 right. Schools and newspapers and ballot boxes, and trade 
 unions, and penny postage, and cheap travelling are all 
 educating our peasantry. It is of no use to rely upon old 
 remedies now that you have got new men with new cravings, 
 new ideals, new sense of power and importance, and new 
 resolution to live a life a little more worth living. There is 
 no going back. " The proper remedy for the evils of 
 liberty," said Fox, " is more liberty." The proper remedy 
 for the evils of education is more education. Every agency 
 by which men can be made out of drudges and dolts and 
 mere beasts of burden must be kept in operation with 
 redoubled energy, and they must be got back to the land 
 which so sorely needs them under conditions affording some 
 of the stimulus of hope, some little scope for enterprise and 
 ambition. 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 A WAYSIDE PARLIAMENT. 
 
 August 27. 
 
 In my last letter I gave, I think, good reasons for believing 
 that the one great cause of the flocking of the agricultural 
 labourers into the towns is the poorness of their pay, and 
 the further I inquire the more certain it appears to me that 
 nothing will stop this disastrous influx but a very material 
 advance in wages, or something equivalent to it. I have 
 just been out eight or ten miles from Thurston Station on 
 the Great Eastern line, in Suffolk, where I was met on all 
 hands with pretty much the same story as in Essex — land 
 labour-starved, wages about eleven shilhngs a week, young 
 men going into the towns. At one point in the road I found 
 
38 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 a large gang of men who had just done dinner and were 
 snoozing or smoking their pipes, and I got into conversation 
 with them. They talked quite freely to me, and several of 
 the men very sensibly and intelligently. The impression 
 they gave me was pretty much the same as that I had 
 received from the other party of reapers I mentioned in a 
 previous letter, the impression of deep dissatisfaction with 
 existing conditions of life and a strong disposition to revolt 
 against them. Men had been going off the land, and they 
 would continue to do so, as fast as they could. Was it 
 likely, they wanted to know, that they were going to stay 
 there at ten or eleven shillings a week while they could get 
 thirty in town ? " Where do they get thirty shillings a 
 week?" I inquired. "At the breweries,'' said the man. 
 " Do you know anybody who did it ? " " Yes, a chap in our 
 village went to a brewery and got thirty shillings straight off." 
 'Apparently they all knew of somebody who had left the land 
 and "bettered themselves." 
 
 "Now, tell me," I said to them — I suppose there were 
 about twenty men there, a fairly representative gathering of 
 Suffolk labourers in the heart of the county — " now, tell me 
 what you think would be likely to keep the labourers on the 
 land ? What do you think would be satisfactory ? " One 
 man thought " twelve bob '' would do, but his modera- 
 tion was scouted. Others candidly voted for all they could 
 get. After a wrangle which, to an ear not accustomed to 
 Suffolk vernacular, was a little confusing, one solid-looking 
 man said he thought fifteen shillings a week would be fair 
 wages. " Give me fifteen shillings a week and a bit o' 
 ground," he said, " and I'll be content. You wouldn't ketch 
 me a-going into a town." Content, alas ! is but aWill-o'-the- 
 wisp, and it would be rash to predict that a general rise in 
 wages, even to that extent, would finally settle the difficulty. 
 But the suggestion of fifteen shillings a week and a bit of 
 ground seemed to be generally approved. " What do you 
 
A WAYSIDE PARLIAMENT. 39 
 
 mean by a bit of ground ? " I asked. " Well, say a quarter 
 of a acre." " But some of the men tell me that a day's 
 work on the land is quite enough, and that they don't care 
 for more of it when they have done that.'' " Well, I got a 
 quarter of a acre myself, and I finds I can do it very well." 
 " And what is it worth to you now, all the year round ? " 
 " Well, I reckons it's as good as two shillings a week on to 
 my wages." "Then fifteen shillings a week and a quarter 
 of an acre of ground would keep the men in the villages, you 
 think ? " Yes, that might do it, and nothing much short of 
 it would. What is the probability of any such remedy being 
 arrived at is a point upon which the readers of the Daily 
 News may be left to form their own opinions. Some of the 
 horse-keepers I have found getting fourteen or fifteen 
 shillings a week, and able to rent a bit of ground. But the 
 nearest approach to it by ordinary labourers in this locality 
 that I have heard of is in a village eight or nine miles out of 
 Bury St. Edmunds, where a short time before harvest began 
 the men struck for twelve shillings, and got it. How long 
 they will keep it is a matter that may perhaps be positively 
 decided shortly after the completion of harvest. These men 
 had been getting ten shillings a week. 
 
 My charioteer was an intelligent man who knew the 
 country all round, and his conversation was instructive. 
 He had no idea of my purpose beyond the intimation that I 
 was interested in the condition of the land and the labourers, 
 and he talked very freely. Yonder was a village where lots 
 of people went away last summer. Over there was another 
 where the farmers last week wanted thirty men to begin 
 harvest, and couldn't get them anywhere. Yes, there was no 
 doubt things were in a bad way. There was land at Stanton 
 that hadn't had a plough over it for five years, and Mr. 
 So-and-so somewhere else had got so many acres of turnips 
 you couldn't see for weeds. " I tell 'e what it is," said a 
 man who had come up driving a van while our discussion was 
 
40 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 going on on the roadside, and pulled up to take his part in 
 it, " the farmers ain't half doing the land." '■'■ No, that they 
 hain't," brokein another. "Why, there's five crops in that there 
 field. There's thistles and docks, and poppies and curloch 
 and squitch, besides the barley." "They don't do nothin' 
 to the land," resumed the man up in the van. "What they 
 mean to do is to get all they can out of it, and then when 
 it's got down till it's good for nothin', they'll chuck it up, 
 and then where are you ? " This man had a good deal to 
 say. He spoke like a capable, intelligent sort of person, 
 but with a certain rancour I couldn't help noticing. When 
 we moved on, my driver explained to me that that man had 
 been in the employ of one of the farmers in the neighbour- 
 hood, but had left on some ground or other, intending to get 
 employment with some other farmer. But he found it im- 
 possible. " If a man don't put up with whatever a master 
 likes to do, and leaves him, there's no chance of his getting 
 another job with any o' the others. They hang together," 
 he said. I don't, of course, know the details of the case of 
 this particular man, but I noticed that he was not driving a 
 farmer's vehicle, and the remarks of my driver entirely tallied 
 with what I had heard in other quarters. In many localities 
 there seems to be a sort of league among the masters against 
 the men, always ready to repress and punish any display of 
 independence. "The masters," said a picturesque yokel a 
 day or two ago, " ha' had we like that," striking a particularly 
 ludicrous attitude, and bringing down a ponderous hob- 
 nailed hoof on a clod of mould, supposed to represent the 
 neck of the labourer. " The masters ha' had we like that ; 
 and now we mean to ha' they." One mustn't, I suppose, 
 take too literally poor Hodge's rebellious expressions. My 
 driver, as we jogged along, gave me very droll accounts of 
 some of their attempts to get up strikes over the harvest 
 work. As I have previously explained, the gang of labourers 
 work together in getting in the crops, and before beginning 
 
A WAYSIDE PARLIAMENT. 4t 
 
 they have to arrange terms. For this purpose one of their 
 number is selected as "lord," and he has to conduct nego- 
 tiations, trusting, of course, to the moral support of the rest. 
 " Maybe there's ten of 'em, and they'll all on 'em swear like 
 fury as they won't do't under so much, and you'd think as 
 they'd rather die fust. They be all agoin' to have it and no 
 mistake. Well, they go to the master, and then p'r'aps 
 there's two on 'em '11 hold together and all the others '11 give 
 in without sayin' a word." The unlucky " lord '' in such a 
 case comes in for the brunt of the bullying -or "mobbing," 
 as they call it here — which it seems to be generally al- 
 lowed many farmers and bailiffs indulge in very freely on 
 the smallest provocation. 
 
 " Yes," said a Nonconformist minister who had been 
 working among the Suffolk labourers for seven or eight 
 years — " low wages is the first thing that makes these people 
 so anxious to get off the land." " They are going then from 
 here also ? " " Oh, yes, continually going. Only a week or 
 two ago I lost two of my young men." " Low wages the 
 first point. And what is the second ? " " The second — 
 indeed, I am not quite sure whether it ought not to be put first 
 — is independence." By this the speaker proceeds to explain 
 that he means that these young men, who are continually leav- 
 ing the villages, are largely actuated by the desire to get out of 
 that serf-like condition in which they find themselves, and 
 the abject subjection they are under to the farmer. " Unless 
 you have lived among them,'' said this minister, " you can 
 have no idea of the gulf that separates the two classes." The 
 tyrannical, domineering, nigger-driving sort of treatment the 
 men have to submit to I have heard about in many quarters. 
 " And there's another thing," said the man up in the waggon, 
 who, as I have explained, probably had specially good 
 reasons for knowing what he was talking about, " 'ere's many 
 o' the men got to live in the farmer's cottages ; they be on 
 his land. If you offend him it ain't on'y yer work as you 
 
42 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 loses. It's a clear kick out — work and house and neigh- 
 bourhood too. Very like there ain't another house to be 
 had for miles, but out you must go. Is that right ? Ought 
 a man to be dependent on a master like that ? " " No ; he 
 didn't oughter," was the clamorous response all round. 
 " O'course he didn't." It was this question of cottage 
 accommodation that I had mainly come out here to inquire 
 a little into. I have loitered so long on the way, however, 
 that I must leave the subject for another letter. It might 
 be supposed that as so many are continually evacuating the 
 villages that deficiencies in cottage accommodation must be 
 a difficulty rapidly solving itself. It does not appear to be so, 
 however. There are many of these villages in which there 
 can have been no cottage building for years. Some of the 
 houses become totally uninhabitable, and large numbers of 
 them are far too closely packed, and if by chance a house is 
 vacated there is a rush for it, while many of the people, as I 
 have shown to some extent in a previous letter, are compelled 
 to live in cottages that are a scandal and a disgrace to all 
 who are responsible for them. 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 HOW THE GUARDIANS DIDN't PROVIDE THE COTTAGES. 
 
 August 29. 
 
 Agitators are of course very dreadful people, but in 
 moving about among the rural population of Essex and 
 Suffolk one cannot help fervently wishing that he could let 
 a few agitators loose among them. There is a stir among 
 these dry bones, but oh ! for a few prophets to breathe 
 upon them and set them shaking mightily ! All sorts of 
 things are wrong. To a large extent the land is not half 
 cultivated. The people are not half paid, and consequently 
 many of them are badly fed and abominably housed and ill 
 
The guardians and the cottages. 43 
 
 supplied with water. Existence with them is a dull, dead- 
 alive, hopeless sort of drudgery, without interest, without 
 enjoyment, without any practical result except the mere 
 keeping of body and soul together, and the end of it all is 
 the workhouse, while the community at large is of course 
 the loser of all the added wealth the land might have been 
 made to yield. And yet you cannot talk with these people 
 for a quarter of an hour without being impressed with a 
 perception of the truth that all these evils might so easily 
 be remedied if you could but kindle and sustain the energy 
 and aspiration you clearly perceive within thera. Put into 
 these men just that same mainspring of legitimate and 
 healthy self-interest which keeps going so many busy wheels 
 all the world over, and at once you will fetch out of the soil 
 the wealth to give them plenty of food and good water and 
 comfortable houses and everything else they want to keep 
 them on the land in contentment and prosperity. Why 
 don't we turn our attention to the problem of fetching out 
 of the men and the land what is really in them instead of 
 vainly endeavouring to put things right on a wretched basis 
 of ten shillings a week, supplemented by poor-law doles and 
 rate-aided cottage building ? In the mass of agricultural 
 labourers we have got a great wealth-producing steam-engine. 
 Set that steam-engine going, and all that is requisite will be 
 produced. But instead of getting up steam we are shoving 
 behind — painfully labouring to push round the wheels. Of 
 course, if you are bent on getting your engine along, and 
 can't raise the steam, you must push behind ; but it is really 
 weary and disheartening business. My meaning will 
 become apparent, I think, to anyone who will listen to a 
 simple narrative of the attempt to get cottages for the poor 
 people of Ixworth. 
 
 Ixworth is a considerable village about four miles from 
 Bury St. Edmunds. Mr. W. F. H. Millington, whose 
 extremely able essay on the " Housing of the Poor " won 
 
44 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 the Warburton Prize at Owens College, Manchester, last 
 year, and who is resident here near the borders of Suffolk, 
 tells me that it is not conspicuously worse in its sanitary 
 condition than many other villages in this part of England ; 
 but it is fairly representative. I went over there a day or 
 two ago, meeting by the way market-day carriers' carts one 
 after the other laden with young counlry-women with their 
 boxes and bundles on their way to service in the towns. 
 Ixworth strikes the stranger as a pleasant and prosperous 
 village, and anyone driving through it would certainly have 
 no idea of overcrowding or ruinous homes or pestilential 
 fever dens suggested by the appearance of the place. Tory 
 guardians and Tory parsons, being of a caste altogether 
 separate from the cottagers, would never have found out 
 that anything was wrong in it. The Church living is a very 
 poor one, I am told, and in the past, right poorly it seems 
 to have been fiUed^if one may judge by results. About 
 two years ago, however, the Rev. F. D. Perrott, a liberal- 
 minded man of private means, took over the charge of the 
 parish, and set about trying to get in touch with the 
 cottagers. He found, I am told in other quarters — for Mr. 
 Perrott has left home in ill-health — that the Church had 
 scarcely anything to do with the people, and the people 
 scarcely anything to do with the Church. He soon got 
 things on a better footing, however, and succeeded in 
 forming the Ixworth Agricultural Labourers' Association. 
 The labourers were brought together for the discussion of 
 subjects bearing on their social welfare, and then, of course, 
 came out the facts of their home life. Up till then the 
 people had been hopeless and helpless, but now they began 
 to make their troubles known, and in the depth of last 
 winter men came in from villages miles away to meetings in 
 Ixworth. I have before me particulars of some of the 
 Ixworth cottages, got together by a house-to-house visitation 
 of a resident in the place, and they are shocking enough. 
 
THE GUARDIANS AND THE COTTAGES. 45 
 
 Numbers of houses have not so much as a back door, to say 
 nothing of garden plots. Numbers of them are reported 
 " not wind- and water-tight." " There is a row of houses in 
 this lane, the total number of inhabitants is forty-four, and 
 there are three closets for their use. In one house, con- 
 sisting of two rooms, there are ten in family. In this row 
 there are no back places at all." " Water comes into both 
 bedrooms," in the report on another house, " and walls and 
 roof are very bad." In another house "the wind and rain 
 come in, and the rats. The woman showed me a bed- 
 quilt covered with holes made by the rats." In another 
 case " Doors are very bad, and the walls tumbling down. 
 When it rains much, the water runs from the back kitchen 
 into the sitting-room, and forms a pool in the centre." " I 
 have asked several tenants to come forward and give 
 evidence, but they are afraid to do so. They have told me 
 they feared being turned out." Can anything be more 
 abject and pitiable than the condition of people condemned 
 to exist in such places, and afraid even to indulge in the 
 satisfaction of a grumble about them ? Dr. Thresh, whom 
 I have mentioned before as the medical officer for the joint 
 unions of Chelmsford and Maldon, was called in as a 
 specialist to report on the state of things. After giving 
 similar details, Dr. Thresh says : " These wretchedly small, 
 overcrowded houses not only affect the morals but the health 
 of the inhabitants. Rheumatism and chest affections are 
 caused by sleeping and living in such damp, draughty 
 dwellings. Infectious disease cannot be isolated, nor can 
 any case of illness be properly treated in them. Apart from 
 serious illness they are the cause of depression of vitality, 
 generally affecting the bodily vigour as well as the spirits, 
 and rendering the system unable to withstand the actual 
 onslaught of disease." 
 
 I myself visited several of the cottages, and some of the 
 people seemed quite scared by the few simple inquiries put 
 
46 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 to them, evidently regarding them as the preliminary to 
 their being cleared out. One woman told me she had been 
 on the look-out for months for another cottage, but the only 
 one she could find was four miles off. What was the good 
 of a cottage four miles off your work ? she wanted to know. 
 " If they turn me out I'll die on the roadside," she said. 
 " I wunt go into the work'us, I wunt, I wunt," she exclaimed, 
 fiercely striking a stick she held in her hand on the seat of 
 a chair beside her. While she spoke she stood beneath a 
 beam in her low ceiling that looked as though it only wanted 
 somebody to stumble in the room above to give way and 
 bury her and her children. In one room, not so bad but 
 that it probably could be repaired, I found, by the way, a 
 very interesting old man, whose reminiscences quite belied 
 the belief that the agricultural labourer is so much better off 
 now than he was a generation or two ago. He sat by his 
 broken fireplace shaking as if with the palsy. He had had 
 a sunstroke, he said. He was incapacitated for work, and 
 was dependent on the parish for his maintenance, after 
 seventy-two years' work upon the land. " I be seventy-six," 
 said the old man, " and I was set to work 'most as soon as I 
 could walk. There warn't no schoolin' much in them days." 
 " It is a pity that there wasn't," I put in. " Ah ! 'tis a pity. 
 If I'd on'y learned to read and write I could ha' done a 
 good deal better nor I ha' done. Why, even now,'' con- 
 tinued the old fellow, bristling up with an energy that his 
 seventy-two years of toil had not quite exhausted, "if I 
 could on'y write 1 could do some't or other." " Nonsense," 
 grunted the old dame on the other side of the fireplace, 
 "what could you do, I should like to know?" "Do!" 
 retorted the shaky old fellow, resenting this disparagement 
 of his capabilities. " Why, if I could write down names and 
 figures couldn't I go round wi' coal or some't ? " and he 
 looked as though, even now, it wouldn't take much to 
 persuade him to try for as much scholarship as would suffice 
 
THE GUARDIANS AND THE COTTAGES. 4/ 
 
 for the coal business. "They talk about labourers bein' sq 
 much better off nor they used to be," he said, in response 
 to a remark of mine. " Why, when I was a boy we used to 
 do t' thrashing wi' the flail, and we'd be at it in the barns 
 all the winter through. There was one-pun' notes in them 
 days, and many's the time when I was a boy o' fourteen and 
 worked wi' the flail wi' my feyther we'd taake home a one- 
 pun' note for our week's work. Why, if they were to pay 'e 
 a one-pun' note now they'd think as they were goin' to be 
 bust up." Perhaps the old ma,n's memory was at fault, but 
 on another point he was confirmed by his wife, and I think 
 he spoke the truth. " So you've really been at work seventy- 
 two years ? " I said. " Aye, that I hev, and for years I used 
 to walk eleven miles a day in goin' to and from my work. 
 The walkin' takes it out of e' wus nor the work.'' Nothing 
 is commoner than to find cases in which men walk two and 
 three miles to their work. 
 
 One of the cleanest and most beautifully kept little 
 homes ever seen in a village was one in which a delicate- 
 looking elderly woman said she was never well. She showed 
 me the brick floor and walls all reeking with moisture, and 
 she took me out at the back to see the source of a terrible 
 smell, which, when the wind was in a certain quarter, 
 rendered her cottage almost unbearable, and made her feel 
 sick and ill. It was the cesspool of an old closet, slightly 
 boarded over, and within ten or twelve feet of her back 
 door. She would give the world to get out of the house if 
 she could only find another. Like scores of others in the 
 village, however, she was condemned to live in this 
 pestilential place, where any day fever or cholera might 
 quite naturally break out. 
 
 All this clearly tends to hasten the influx into the towns. 
 The proper and radical remedy would of course be to 
 improve the earning power of the people. If by any 
 modification of our agricultural system we could bring 
 
48 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 science and capital to bear on these labour-starved fields of 
 Suffolk, and give the people such an interest in their 
 occupation as would really make them work, all the evils 
 would remedy themselves. No doubt we should require an 
 Act of Parliament for obtaining plots of ground by some 
 simple and inexpensive procedure. That is an urgent 
 necessity in any case. But we should want no Act of Parlia- 
 ment for putting up houses if the people could pay for them, 
 and if they can't pay for them there must be something 
 radically wrong. Why do not we fearlessly face this radical 
 wrong? Why doesn't that land support these people? 
 That is the question, but we do not squarely face it. We 
 shirk the question, and we pass Acts of Parliament for 
 shoving the engine along without getting up the steam. 
 Last year Parliament passed the Housing of the Working 
 Classes Act, on the whole an admirable measure, and under 
 our existing social circumstances very necessary. In the 
 towns it was especially desirable. But in these rural 
 districts the problem of housing the people is quite a 
 different one, and the provisions it contains for the providing 
 of agricultural labourers' cottages have at Ixworth so far 
 broken down, and will, I fear, prove a dismal failure. 
 
 First the " Rural Sanitary Authority " had to be prodded 
 on to action, that is to say, the Thingoe Board of Guardians 
 — every man of whom I am told, by the way, is a Tory — 
 had to be induced to do something for the poor at the 
 expense of the rates. Mainly, as it would seem, by the 
 alarming result of the Stowmarket election, they were got to 
 move in the matter. They applied to the County Council 
 for leave to put the Act in force. In accordance with the 
 provisions of the Act, the County Council appointed one of 
 their number, Lord Francis Hervey, M.P., to go to Ixworth 
 and hold a formal inquiry whether new cottages were 
 necessary, whether there was no probability of their being 
 provided without the operation of the Act, and whether, all 
 
THE GUARDIANS AND THE COTTAGES. 49 
 
 things considered, it would be financially prudent to under- 
 take the business. Well, this was all done. Mr. Theodore 
 Dodd represented the labourers, Mr. J. J. Spark was for the 
 Guardians, Mr. R. H. Wilson for the lord of the manor, and 
 Lord Francis Hervey made, by universal admission, an 
 excellent president of the court. Overwhelming evidence 
 was adduced ; the case was abundantly made out, and the 
 Council were ready to issue their certificate, and then — the 
 whole thing collapsed. It had been proposed to build, I 
 believe, a dozen poor cottages for people exposed to wind 
 and rain and foul stenches. Probably two-thirds of the cost 
 would have been represented by the rents the people would 
 pay. The other third would have had to come out of the 
 rates. At the last moment the Guardians were horrified to 
 find that this frightful expense, owing to their having omitted 
 to make an application to the Council to the contrary, would 
 have to be spread over the whole of their district instead of 
 being limited to the place immediately benefited. They 
 therefore begged that the Council would not grant their 
 certificate, and that they might not be permitted to put up 
 the cottages. They still pretend they want to do it, and 
 they are going to begin the business all over again , and I 
 hear that over this question of the incidence of the rate 
 there will be a dogged and determined fight. When they 
 have held their inquiry and settled about the rate, and the 
 Council have authorised them to proceed, then it will 
 become a question whether they had better proceed. If 
 they decide that they will, the landowners may refuse to let 
 them have the land at a reasonable rate, and they may have 
 to put in force compulsory powers, ruinously expensive and 
 provokingly dilatory. And all this because the people working 
 on the land for nine or ten hours a day can't fetch out of it 
 enough to pay for a decent roof over their heads, and enough 
 food to keep body and soul together. It is quite time that 
 the day of the democracy had begun to dawn upon us. 
 
so UPE IN OVR VILLAGES. 
 
 LETTER VIII. 
 
 COAL AND BLANKETS. 
 
 September I. 
 
 I HAVE to-day travelled for some hours through the by-ways 
 and villages of that part of Suffolk that borders on Norfolk. 
 The country is much of it very pretty. It is beautifully 
 wooded, here and there traversed by small streams, dotted 
 about by the most charming little cottage homes, with now 
 and then a pleasant rectory, a picturesque old church, a 
 lordly-looking mansion, an undulating park, or a richly- 
 laden orchard. From such a round as I have taken to-day, 
 one brings home with him a mental panorama made up of 
 almost everything that is peaceful and pleasant in rural life. 
 Here is a vicarage garden with a party at lawn tennis ; yonder 
 through that woody vista is a little company of harvesters ; 
 now you have a rosy-looking woman shaking down the 
 plums for a fair-haired child, and further on you see a 
 venerable-looking dame sitting by the open door amid 
 flowers and beehives. Peace and quiet, beauty and fruit- 
 fulness, prevail everywhere. The village shoemaker is 
 deliberately stitching away in a breezy little workshop, with 
 the scarlet blossoms of kidney beans glowing in at the open 
 door, and hollyhocks and rosy apples peering in at the 
 window, out of which the good man now and again gazes as 
 though in heart he is out with the reapers yonder in the 
 waving cornfield. We push our way through the stalwart, 
 standing corn down towards a cottage clad in grapevine 
 and half-buried in the brown rustling wheat, where stands 
 the village blacksmith, not under a spreading chestnut-tree, 
 but, better still, within the shadow of a well-laden pear-tree, 
 planted knee-deep in the corn on the margin of his own 
 cornfield. Sickle in hand, and with two or three young 
 men about him, the burly smith, with his cornsheaves and 
 his pear-tree and the cosy cottage just over the hedge there 
 
COAL And blankets. 51 
 
 all combine to make a picture such as, one cannot but 
 think, must often haunt the memory of the emigrants from 
 rural England into the docks and railway depots and ware- 
 houses of London. " A good deal more fresh air 'ere than 
 in Lon'on," says the blacksmith, as he mops round his 
 brow, wet with honest sweat, and looking with pride on the 
 splendid sheaves of corn he and his assistants have just 
 bound up. " Aye, aye ; they keeps on going off," and then 
 like everybody else the village blacksmith proceeds to 
 explain the depletion of the villages by s'posing they want 
 to better themselves, and suggesting as the only possible 
 means of preventing it the payment of better wages. There's 
 no doubt he thinks the farmers are very short-handed. He 
 laughingly mentions one man who has four hundred acres 
 of corn and has got four men to cut it — a hundred acres 
 apiece before them. 
 
 In this village of Barnham wages for a considerable pro- 
 portion of the men are slightly better than in any other 
 neighbourhood I have gone through. They are getting 
 twelve shillings a week — a fraction over twopence farthing 
 an hour it comes to — and seven pounds ten for the harvest. 
 One cannot but suspect, in moving about these rural 
 districts, that the wages received by the people really have 
 little or no relation either to what they earn or to what the 
 master can afford to pay. As Mr. H. L. Smith says, in his 
 paper on the " Migration of Labour," read at the National 
 Liberal Club last year, the rates of wage in rural districts 
 are largely customary, and every here and there it strikes 
 one very forcibly that if the people were strong enough to 
 form a good strong union among themselves the whole 
 situation would undergo a total change. In this village ot 
 Barnham the monarch of pretty nearly all he surveys is the 
 Duke of Grafton. He pays, as I have said, seven pounds 
 ten for the harvest. Why does- he pay that ? Is it a sum 
 based on any calculation of the quantity of corn to be cut, 
 
52 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 the number of hands to be employed, the chances of 
 weather, and so on ? I suppose there must have been some 
 sort of calculation some time or other, but, so far as I 
 am informed, such considerations enter very little into the 
 matter. It seems to be assumed that at harvest time an 
 agricultural labourer ought to earn from five to ten pounds 
 during the time within which the corn is fit for cutting and 
 carrying, and the Duke of Grafton chooses to pay seven 
 pounds ten for some weeks of incessant toil from sunrise till 
 sunset, and very often a spell of work by the hght of the 
 harvest moon. The Duke sits up at Euston Hall and offers 
 seven pounds ten, the men down in the fields want eight 
 pounds, and the agent runs backwards and forwards between 
 the negotiators. The harvest certainly is great, and the 
 labourers few, and if they only had the pluck to hold out 
 they would probably get ten pounds, but not one of them 
 dares to take the lead in insistance on a material advance 
 upon what is customary — though, by the way, I think I was 
 told that in previous years the payment had been seven 
 pounds — and they meekly give in and go to work. " If you 
 offend the Duke and his agent in these parts," said one, 
 "you may as well go to the devil at once." Not that, so far 
 as I can learn, the Duke of Grafton is open to much 
 criticism. His labourers are better off than those of most 
 landowners in the neighbourhood His cottages are good 
 and cheap, and the general conditions of life among his 
 people are unquestionably good. As John Bright would 
 have said, he is a very respectable Duke. 
 
 By the way, there is a very interesting little relic of the 
 regime of the last Duke of Grafton standing by the roadside 
 in Barnham. It is a little wooden Primitive Methodist 
 chapel on wheels ; at least, that is what it has been, though 
 it appears now to have been turned to some industrial pur- 
 pose, having been purchased, I am told, for the sum of five 
 pounds. I talked yesterday with a shrewd-eyed, ruddy- 
 
COAL AND BLANKETS. 53 
 
 faced, stubbly-chinned old villager, whose share in putting 
 up the little conventicle had cost him some years of exile 
 from the place. They wanted the Duke to let them have 
 a bit of land to put up a Primitive Methodist chapel, but he 
 refused them. So they built this wooden shanty, and put 
 it on wheels in one of their gardens. The agent remon. 
 strated, and tried to persuade my old friend here to take his 
 conventicle to one of the " free villages." But no, said the 
 sturdy peasant, all villages were free to worship God as they 
 thought proper, and he wouldn't budge. He found, alas ! 
 that the freedom was only theoretical, and in the end he lost 
 his employment, and had to clear out, leaving the little 
 schism shop behind him. Eventually, however, after some 
 years, he found his way back, and now looks a hale and 
 hearty old man, about whose brow one fancies there are 
 the marks of troublous times, softened, however, by an even- 
 tide of comfort and prosperity. I am told that the obduracy 
 of the Duke was ultimately overcome by the prayers of the 
 Primitives, who couldn't and wouldn't pray for the death of 
 the man who thwarted their evangelising efforts in the 
 villages, but were very earnest in their supplications to 
 Heaven that "every obstacle might be removed." The 
 Duke seems to have got an intimation of what was going on, 
 and thought it prudent to answer the prayer himself 
 
 In this village of Barnham the cottagers seem to be as 
 comfortable and prosperous as good management of the 
 property and considerate treatment can make them. They 
 have good cottages, gardens, allotments, good water, and, as 
 things go, good wages. Yet the population of the place has 
 shghtly gone down since the last census, and the universal 
 testimony is that " the young 'uns all go." An intelligent 
 villager — not a labourer, but a man of the working class — 
 gave very emphatic evidence to that effect. He was a 
 member of some Nonconformist Church — now freely 
 tolerated — in the village, and he said they found invariably 
 
54 UFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 that as soon as they got hold of a young man and set him 
 thinking a bit, he began to think of going. They lost all 
 their young men that way he said. No sooner does a young 
 man begin to think at all than he begins to think of getting 
 on, but as a Dissenter he instinctively feels that on a great 
 ducal estate all the powers that be will most certainly be 
 against him, and that all chance of any sort of advancement 
 will be prejudiced by his religion. It strikes one as curious 
 that all the farmers — even those who may reasonably be 
 presumed to have plenty of capital — seem inclined to pinch 
 and save in the matter of labour. I had mentioned to me 
 2,000 acres of land on which, upon the highest reckoning, 
 not more than seven men were regularly employed, and as 
 one spins along through miles of cornfields you see every 
 here and there unmistakable evidence of the labour-starving 
 of the land, and men will tell you of the reductions that 
 have been made within their recollection. When I drove 
 from Thetford through Barnham, Livermere, Troston, 
 Honington, and Euston into Thetford again, the day was 
 breezy and dry, and thousands of acres of corn stood ready 
 for cutting. With the men actually at work it looked as 
 though the harvest wouldn't be got in till Christmas. Here 
 and there reaping machines were going, and I hear that the 
 American reaping and binding machines are gaining ex- 
 tended use in some parts of the Eastern Counties. Every 
 innovation of this kind, of course, tends to the immediate 
 displacement of hands. 
 
 Some of the little glimpses one gets into life in the 
 remoter villages are really very curious. In one place a 
 woman incidentally alluded to the blankets that were lent 
 to the people. I was surprised that she should have the 
 loan of a blanket, for she seemed a respectable and spirited 
 little body, who might have been supposed above it. But 
 it appeared that everybody in the village had the loan of 
 a blanket. "But," I said, "are there no people in 
 
COAL AND BLANKETS. 55 
 
 the place who are unwilling to borrow bed-clothing?" 
 " No, sir ; everybody has 'em — unless it is the estate brick- 
 layer. I dunno' whether he has one. They seal 'em up 
 in the spring, and they unseal 'em in the autumn." " Seal 
 them up?" I said, in perplexity. "Yes, sir; I'll show you 
 mine," and the vivacious little woman whisked upstairs and 
 brought down a calico bag, the mouth of which was sewn 
 up with string, the ends being sealed with black wax. She 
 proceeded to explain that in the spring they all had to 
 trudge up to the rector's wife with their charity blanket 
 folded up in its bag to have it tied up and sealed. They 
 took their bags back home till October, when they again 
 went to the good lady to have their seals broken and the 
 blankets released for winter use. Every cottager in the 
 village had the loan of a blanket and seven hundredweight 
 of coal. There was a clothing club too, to which they all 
 contributed, but everybody who went to town to buy clothing 
 had to take the parcel from the shop straight away to the 
 parson's wife, who would minutely inspect them to see if 
 they were suitable for persons in their state of life. Here is 
 the clerical beneficent domination on the one hand, and on 
 the other there is the squire who owns all the cottages, and 
 whose agent requires them to mind their P's and Q's if they 
 want to remain. They pay their rent .yearly, but they all 
 sign an agreement that an eight days' notice to quit shall be 
 sufficient. They have to be very careful. Their children 
 mustn't wander from the pathway in the park, and dreadful 
 things would happen if they were known to bring home 
 a few dry sticks. 
 
 Now, I know nothing of the clergyman or his wife, or 
 of Lord De Saumarez, the owner of the property, and I have 
 not the least desire to represent them as oppressors or 
 tyrants. They may be the most amiable of their race. I 
 can quite conceive that the vicar's wife may be actuated by 
 the kindest and best of motives in going to the trouble of 
 
S6 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 minutely inspecting their purchases and sealing up their 
 blankets. It keeps them clean and ensures fair usage and 
 proper storage when they are not wanted. The woman 
 certainly had one point on which, evidently, her mind was 
 a good deal exercised. They used to have nine hundred- 
 weight of coal when the population was larger. But latterly 
 it had been only seven, and although the population of the 
 village had gone down recently and there were several 
 houses empty the coal still kept at seven hundredweight. 
 If there were fewer to have it, surely there ought to be more 
 to have. How it was she couldn't make out. Apparently 
 these things are all managed over their heads. But I dare 
 say it is all right. Nobody, of course, ever heard of charity 
 funds going to pay the organ-blower at church, or to wash 
 the choir surplices. The thing is inconceivable, and no 
 doubt some satisfactory explanation would have been forth- 
 coming if I had had the enterprise and the time to look 
 into the matter. But suppose that all these things are just 
 as they should be, can one conceive anything more pauperis- 
 ing and degrading than the kind of tutelage under which 
 these villagers live ? Can you wonder that young men of 
 spirit are eager to clear out of such an atmosphere of serf- 
 dom ? As to such " charity," a clean sweep ought to be 
 made of it. It is a mere relief to the wages list of the 
 employers. I am not quite sure, but I think I was told 
 that ten shillings a week was the rate of pay prevailing 
 here, and I was certainly informed that young men — " quite 
 grown chaps" — had been working for five and six shillings a 
 week, and eight shillings had been paid to a young man of 
 twenty. Only last weik two of them left the place. In the 
 next village all the houses and all the land, except one small 
 plot on which a chapel had just been built, belonged to one 
 man who has consolidated several farms, putting his 
 labourers into the farm houses and pulling down the 
 cottages. He and his labourers had entered into a compact 
 
LARGE AND SMALL FARMS. 57 
 
 for ten shillings a week from Michaelmas to Michael- 
 mas. The men had tried to get a revision of the bargain 
 recently, but without avail. " When a says a thing,'' 
 observed a buxom dame, "you can't move'n, and," she 
 added emphatically, " I like'n all the better for't." 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 LARGE AND SMALL FARMS. 
 
 September 3. 
 
 During my rambles in the Eastern Counties I have found 
 the general state of things — the condition of land and crops, 
 labourers' wages, hours of work, cottage accommodation, 
 facilities for getting allotments, and so on — all varying from 
 place to place. But two things I have found almost invari- 
 able. Wherever I have been, I have found, as I have 
 repeatedly said, that as a rule almost without exception 
 population has been dwindling, and small farms have been 
 consolidating into large ones. This increase in the scale of 
 farming operations I find to be quite as striking a feature 
 of the agricultural situation wherever I have been as the 
 decrease in the population, and, as I have shown, it is 
 indeed to a great extent the cause of that decrease. The 
 consolidation of farms is not, of course, always a voluntary 
 proceeding. In some instances I find it attributed to the 
 folly and infatuation of landowners. Only yesterday a 
 gentleman told me of a case within his own knowledge in 
 which a farmer was giving thirty shillings an acre for land. 
 At that rate it was impossible to get on. He went to. his 
 landlord, told him that his difficulties were such that it was 
 impossible he should continue to pay that rent. He offered 
 eighteen shillings as the utmost he could afford. The offer 
 was refused, the tenant left his farm, or at all events took 
 steps for securing another, and then apparently the landlord 
 
S8 UFR 'IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 discovered his mistake, and sent to say that he would accept 
 the eighteen shillings. But it was too late, and eventually 
 the land was let at twelve and sixpence. Several persons 
 have said to me that if landlords would be content to take 
 from small farmers rents as low as they are continually 
 having to take from large ones, the small man would not 
 have to give up. No doubt that is often the case ; but it is 
 safe to assume that, in a general way, landowners know their 
 own business best. Here and there the short-sighted folly 
 of an individual may drive out a small farmer, and hand over 
 his land to a large one ; but we may rest assured that 
 wide-spread movements — general changes such as this from 
 small farms to large ones — are not brought about by indi- 
 vidual folly, but by the operation of great economic forces. 
 To a very large extent at least it is the landowners who are 
 assuming occupation of land for their own farming. With 
 the price of wheat low, and seasons unfavourable, many 
 small farmers will tell you that during the past few seasons 
 they could do no good for themselves, even though they 
 were rent free. Small farms have been given up because 
 they could not be made to pay. Fresh tenants could not be 
 found for them, and landlords, rather than let them go to 
 ruin, have taken them into their own hands. In Essex and 
 Suffolk I have again and again shown that the migration of 
 labour into the towns has been very largely due to the 
 reduction of the staff of men consequent on such changes. 
 In a short incursion I have made into Southern and Central 
 Norfolk I have found just the same thing going on. " This 
 joining of one farm to another has been the curse of 
 Norfolk," said Mr. George Rix, a rather remarkable leader 
 of the agricultural labourers in the Eastern Counties. " It 
 has been the curse of Norfolk," he repeated. " It has made 
 a difference of a man to every hundred acres of land." It 
 has done here, in fact, pretty much what it has done every- 
 where else. It ha? reduced the number of hands employed, 
 
LARGE AND SMALL FARMS. 59 
 
 it has in some localities overstocked the labour market, and, 
 of course, has tended to keep down wages. From the 
 agricultural labourer's point of view, it has been an unmiti- 
 gated curse. The shopkeepers in the small towns have 
 complained bitterly of it too. They say that instead of four 
 or five households coming into a little town with their 
 orders for farm implements, and household necessaries, and 
 groceries and clothing, there is but one family, and that one 
 as often as not gets supplied from the big co-operative stores 
 in town. I have heard this again and again from shop- 
 keepers. At the same time there is, of course, general com- 
 plaint that instead of the rural population increasing and 
 growing more profitable, it is continually dribbling away. 
 
 At present, then — observe that I am only quoting current 
 opinions on the present phase of things- — this consohdation 
 of farming is extinction for the yeoman class, it is bad for 
 the agricultural labourer, it is bad for the provincial shop- 
 keeper, and it is bad for the community at large, not only 
 because it is, as things stand, against the interests of entire 
 classes of great importance, but because very commonly 
 this large scale farming fails to produce as much as the land 
 is capable of producing. A large farm wants an immense 
 amount of oversight. The farmer cannot see to it himself. 
 He has to trust to others, and he does not get good work 
 out of his men, and his land is not well tilled. Another 
 argument I have heard against extensive farming is that 
 stock is not bred upon such farms to anything like the 
 extent it should be. Animals at certain times require special 
 attention, which they do not get because they are not under 
 the master's eye. Losses are very frequent, and those who 
 farm on a large scale prefer the branches of the business 
 which are attended with fewer risks. I have already quoted 
 the opinions of those who speak favourably of extensive 
 operations. They say that as a man of capital — and in 
 niany cases with private resources quite apart from his land — 
 
6o LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 the big farmer can buy largely; he can get the best 
 machinery ; he can fully employ his horses and his men all 
 the year round, and if the market for his produce is bad, he 
 can wait till it improves. All this is universally admitted. 
 But even with all his advantages, it is contended that for the 
 large farmer himself the system is not entirely satisfactory, 
 while for everybody else concerned it is absolutely bad. 
 
 All this is seen more or less clearly, and there is an 
 intense and widespread feeling that something ought to be 
 done by way of remedy. All sorts of speculations and 
 suggestions are rife. Let us have technical education, say 
 some who appear to think that if Hodge could only be per- 
 suaded to do his turnip-hoeing on scientific principles, his 
 enjoyment of the work might make all the difference 
 between ten shillings in the country and five-and-twenty in 
 town. Certainly let us have technical education. Educate, 
 educate, educate, by all means in your power. It will all 
 help on towards the final solution of the question. But do 
 not let us be simple enough to suppose that that alone will 
 do it. By general consent it is the many-sided education ot 
 the rural districts that is emptying our fields and swelling the 
 huge population of our towns. The agricultural labourers 
 must have better cottages, say others. Of course they must. 
 For us, as a community, to rest content that either in town 
 or country people shall be penned up in such pig-sties as 
 many of them are forced to put up with, would be a foul 
 disgrace to us. We democrats must keep hammering away 
 at this question of the housing of the working classes with- 
 out pause or intermission, until every working-man's family 
 has a house that is fit to live in. But, as I have already 
 shown, young men are streaming away from villages in which 
 the cottages are beautiful, absolutely all that could be desired 
 for them, and allotments to boot. Cottage building will not 
 do it alone. Others say, let the law be altered that compels 
 the hapless fathers of families struggling to exist on eleven 
 
LARGE AND SMALL FARMS. 6 1 
 
 shillings a week to contribute a shilling or eighteenpence of 
 their week's earnings for the maintenance of their old fathers 
 and mothers. Aye — something is wrong here, too. It is 
 right and proper that a man should help his old parents 
 when they can no longer help themselves ; but it is pushing 
 a right principle to a brutal application when half-starved 
 peasants have lo or 15 per cent, of their scanty earnings 
 wrung out of them every week of their lives, to save the 
 pockets of ratepayers. Nor is the cash payment the whole 
 of the matter. Pitiful tales could be told of days of lost 
 labour and weary tramps over long miles, and of fruitless 
 appeals to Boards of Guardians to relieve poor wretches of 
 burdens they are not able to bear. Everywhere the labour- 
 ing poor speak bitterly of this demand upon them. " I 
 stuck to th' old man as long as I could," said a labourer, 
 "and I 'ould do it. Th' old 'un 'ad a seat by my fireside 
 and a bit o' some't to eat while I could gi't to'n. But when 
 he went into the 'ouse 'cause I couldn't afford to keep'n at 
 'ome and feed the young'ns, they didn't aughter a come 
 down on me for a shil'n a week, and I told 'em so." " You 
 went before the guardians ? '' "Yes, and I 'ad to walk five 
 mile through a drenching rain and five mile back over it, 
 and then they wouldn't let me off They said as I must 
 pay, and I wa'n't workin' above half time^ and they know'd 
 it." In the abstract principle the law is right ; the prac- 
 tical application of it by rural Boards of Guardians — largely, 
 of course, composed of rate-paying farmers — is often a cruel 
 wrong. There is urgent need for alteration here. But here 
 again I fear amendments are not likely to have any material 
 effect on the solution of the agricultural question. 
 
 Yet another suggestion is made in a letter which has 
 reached me from a gentleman who is strongly of opinion 
 that, " whatever the Liberal party may do in the future, 
 unless the curse of drink is stayed in some manner, you can 
 never do any permanent good for the people of the villages." 
 
62 LifiE IN oVR Villages. 
 
 I sincerely hope that the Liberal party will do whatever may 
 be thought wise and practicable to " stay the curse of 
 drink " in the villages, and the towns too. I cannot say 
 that in the course of these rambles I have come across 
 much evidence of it. In some of the villages there have 
 been no public-houses. I went through three in one after- 
 noon, in which my attention was called to the fact that there 
 was no public-house. I must not pretend to say that I take 
 this to be evidence that all the people were teetotallers. In 
 many parts they are given to brewing their own beer, and, 
 for cheapness at all events, they quite cut out the brewer 
 and the publican. They give, I am told, four and six 
 or five shillings for a bushel of malt, and a shilhng a pound 
 for hops, and out of this they brew eighteen gallons of beer, 
 for which at the public-house they would have to pay two- 
 pence-ha'penny a pint. But, apart from this, some of the 
 big landowners won't have a public-house on their estates, 
 and I was told more than once in answer to inquiries that 
 drunkenness was not very rife among the villages. How 
 could it be, I was asked, on village incomes ? Now let 
 me entreat the teetotal readers of the Daily News, whom I 
 already see in imagination sitting down as one man to pen 
 an indignant protest against my gross misrepresentation of 
 village life in this respect — let me entreat. them to observe 
 that I am not speaking of village life in general, but only of 
 so much of it as has come under my own observation. I 
 know that in other localities it may be different, and even 
 here there may be more of the evil of it than meets the 
 casual eye or the chance inquiry. I am fully alive to the 
 grave difficulty that is presented in the drinking habits of 
 the labouring class to every advance of social progress. We 
 must battle with this difficulty by every means in our power, 
 especially by means of intelligent recreation and opportu- 
 nities of social intercourse apart from the public-house. We 
 have got to battle with drink and all its evils, but do not let 
 
Allotments only an alleviation. 63 
 
 us delude ourselves with any idea that the putting down of 
 drink and making the people sober is a solution of the 
 agricultural problem by which we are now confronted. All 
 these points I have alluded to are worthy of the most 
 earnest consideration ; but something more will have to be 
 done, or the agricultural problem must remain unsolved. 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 ALLOTMENTS ONLY AN ALLEVIATION. 
 
 September 8. 
 The Allotments Act, I suppose we are all pretty well agreed, 
 has proved a wretched failure so far as any direct action 
 has gone ; but the attempts that have been made to put it 
 into force, and the discussion it has called forth, and the 
 attention it has been the means of directing to the subject 
 of allotments have not been without their effect, and if small 
 holdings could solve the agricultural problem it would, I 
 think, be in a fair way of solution. Public opinion has 
 done much, and in moving about the country I am struck 
 by the extent to which allotments are being provided. Dr. 
 Wallace suggested in a letter to the Daily News the other 
 day that I should make a point of inquiry of every labourer 
 I talked with whether, if he could get land of a good quality, 
 at a fair rent and on a practically permanent tenure, he could 
 not make a good living out of it. I have not acted on Dr. 
 Wallace's suggestion, for it has seemed to me unnecessary to 
 do so. Without any exception, so far as I can call to mind, 
 allotments not of the best quality let at anything but a fair 
 rent, and on a tenure terminable at the caprice of the land- 
 owner or his agent, have been taken with an avidity which 
 renders it quite needless to inquire whether labourers would 
 be glad to have land on the terms suggested. 
 
 I have seen a great many allotment grounds, but I do 
 
64 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 not remember coming across any instance of a plot unable 
 to find a tenant. I have seen some to-day on the Duke of 
 Marlborough's estate near Woodstock, not by any means 
 the best of land, let in plots up to two acres at a rental of 
 thirty-five shillings an acre. As allotment rents go that is 
 moderate ; yet an overseer informed me that the farm out 
 of which the plots had been taken was let at either thirteen 
 and six or fourteen and six, he was not quite sure which — 
 certainly not more than fourteen and six. They were all 
 readily taken at this, and the general opinion was that they 
 would pay very well, though none of the men I talked with 
 seemed very enthusiastic over them. "It's better nor no- 
 thin'," said one man. "It'll put a few taters in yer pot." 
 Very grim and sarcastic was the smile that puckered the old 
 fellow's face as he told me the rents the poor labourers had 
 to pay for their bits of plots as compared with the farm rents 
 around. He didn't know exactly what the farmers paid, 
 but he knew the allotment rent was some't over twice as much. 
 " They does a little charity and they doubles their income," 
 said he, with a sardonic grin. I talked with many persons 
 in this village on the subject of allotments, and I found 
 pretty much the same feeling everywhere. These bits of 
 ground were a very good thing, some assistance, but nothing 
 at all calculated to keep young men in the village. " They 
 ha' been goin'," said an inteUigent thatcher, " and they 'ool 
 go." The state of things in that village he thought was 
 scandalous. There wa'n't nigh cottages enough. People 
 were bound to stay where they were. There was nowhere 
 for 'em to move to, and they had to " pig in " just as they 
 could. " There's quite big families in the village," said one 
 woman, "and they on'y got one sleepin' room. It's no 
 business to be." 
 
 " It's pretty nigh time somebody came round and spoke 
 a bit for poor people," said one young married woman as 
 she stitched away with unflagging energy at a white glove 
 
ALLOTMENTS ONLY AN ALLEVIATION. 65 
 
 she was making. She was in one of a row of cottages with 
 their backs towards the public highway and their fronts 
 looking out over long strips of garden, beyond which were 
 the new allotments that had been taken possession of last 
 September, and were now full of a good crop of potatoes 
 and beans and wheat and barley. The little places looked 
 extremely pretty and pleasant with their vine-clad fronts and 
 clean-looking rough-stone paving, and picturesque old well 
 and smother of flowers, and chubby, rosy-cheeked children 
 playing about, the pictures of health and bucolic content. 
 " He don't look bad on bread and lard and fat bacon, do 
 'e ? " said a proud mother of a two-year-old cherub, who 
 had come up towards us gnawing a green kidney bean by 
 way of varying his somewhat monotonous diet. " No, he 
 really doesn't. Is that all he gets?" "Yes, sir; that's 
 about all." " Well, he won't starve while he can get plenty 
 of bread and lard and fat bacon. " " No, sir, that's true enough, 
 if us could on'y be sure o' getting enough on't.'' The little 
 places looked the very picture of peace, cleanliness, and 
 comfort, and yet the impression one brought away after ten 
 minutes' chat with the people was that they were constantly 
 engaged in a hard struggle for existence, and were worried 
 by a sense of the precariousness of their living. Just now 
 there was work for all, but it was the winter that was the 
 great dread, when the women very often had to keep 
 the men. Yes, there was a bit o' glovin' round about 
 there, and that helped 'em wonderful, and it was work 
 as they could do at home and look after the children. But 
 that ain't so good as it was. Prices had gone down a penny 
 and twopence a pair, and the Duchess of Marlborough had 
 set up a factory in Woodstock for makin' gloves by ma- 
 chinery. No doubt she meant it kind, but it had done 'em 
 a lot o' harm. They found a'ready as there ain't so much 
 work to be got, and prices was lower. They didn't Icnow 
 what'd come of it. The summer wages were twelve 
 
66 LIPE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 shillings, and some o' the men were very often out for three 
 months and goodness knows 'ow they lived. Twelve shil- 
 lings a week wasn't none too much. 
 
 I tried to get these women to give me some statement 
 of the way in which they spent their twelve shillings. "Now 
 just tell me," I said, " how people manage to live on twelve 
 shillings a week." " Oh, Lord ha' mussy ! I can't tell 'ow 
 they does it," said one of them. " I dunno myself 'ow the 
 money goes. There's seven of us — me and my husband 
 and five children, all too young to do anything but eat 
 'earty and kick out shoe leather." " Well, now, what do 
 you manage to do with twelve shillings ? " " Well, there's 
 two goes for rent to begin with, and five and threepence a 
 quarter for club money." "That is in case of sickness?" 
 " Yes, sir ; if my 'usband was sick he'd get ten shilling a 
 week and the doctor." "Well, that is about fivepence a 
 week, so that you have nine and sevenpence for feeding and 
 clothing the seven of you ? " " Yes, I s'pose that's it." 
 " And how does that go ? " " Blessed if I knows, sir. You 
 goes to shop with five shillins, and it don't seem to go 
 nowhere." " No, that it don't,'' chimes in another. " I 
 often says to myself ' I dunno 'ow the money goes.' " " Oh, 
 drat the money !" exclaims another in the innermost corner 
 of the room. " I wish there wa'n't none." It is a pleasant 
 little scene of rural life this. There is no pressing anxiety 
 as to the immediate future. The women now and then 
 sigh, it is true, but they jest and laugh at their troubles, as 
 we are all apt to do when our troubles are at a distance. 
 It is the high tide of the year's prosperity, or it would be if 
 the skies would only clear. And these villagers are among 
 the most fortunate of their class. Some of them have a 
 litrie supplementary industry to rely upon, and the summer 
 pay of the men is twelve shillings. I have just left an Ox- 
 fordshire village where the normal summer pay till two or 
 three weeks ago was ten shillings, and I have had indicated 
 
Allotments only An Alleviation. 6j 
 
 to me" villages in this part of the country where wretched 
 families have to subsist as best they can on nine shillings a 
 week all through the winter. What wonder if now and 
 again people die outright of cold and starvation. 
 
 Since beginning to write this, my attention has been 
 directed to a case that came before an Essex Coroner just 
 after the last bitter winter. A woman died, and her husband 
 was charged with " culpable neglect." Oh, the ghastliness 
 of some of our judicial jokes ! The poor fellow had struggled 
 and striven through the cruel winter, he and his wife and 
 family, on nine shillings a week with stoppages for wet days 
 and snowy days, and days when the ground was frozen hard 
 as the heart of the world around. It was proved that when 
 in full work he had but nine shillings, and sometimes he had 
 but two or three days' work a week. A short time before the 
 inquest he had been out of work for a month at a stretch. 
 The coroner said the man couldn't be charged with culpable 
 neglect. No ; clearly not. Poor fellow ! he had battled with 
 hunger and despair and misery, and had come bravely 
 through till towards the spring, when times would be better. 
 But the wife had grown thin and feeble. She had pined 
 and starved, and presently came what the doctor called 
 " accidental haemorrhage," syncope, and the children were 
 motherless. There must be an appalling amount of this 
 kind of thing coming within only a very short step of the 
 final catastrophe in some of these remote villages especially, 
 even where, in harvest time, all looks so peaceful and pleasant 
 and prosperous. As I have said, I have just left a village 
 where till recently ten shillings was the weekly wage. The 
 agricultural unionists have been round there, however, and 
 two or three weeks before the ordinary time of harvest the 
 masters consented to give twelve. " Do you think that will 
 stand good after harvest ? " I asked a man likely to know 
 a good deal of the masters as well as the men. " No," he 
 said, " I reckon it won't. As soon as harvest is over the 
 
68 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 farmers will get rid of all they can anyhow do without. 
 " Are all the men kept on here during the winter? " I asked 
 a labourer in one of the villages. " No ; not all on 'em in 
 the winter," he replied. " How many should you think are 
 out in the winter ? " The fellow took a puff or two at his 
 pipe and looked out across the garden. " I should say 
 there was a dozen or fifteen." " Married men ? " " Most on 
 'em." "And what do they do ? " '• God knows. Starves, 
 I s'pose." 
 
 When a man has got a piece of ground it seems pretty 
 clear he need not starve, even when he gets out of work in 
 the winter. " Thank God I be independent o' the farmer 
 this winter,'' said a labourer to an intelligent artisan with 
 whom I was talking yesterday ; " I get half an acre o' wheat, 
 half an acre o' barley, and a quarter of an acre of potatoes." 
 There was wheat for his bread and barley meal for his pig. 
 " With bread and bacon and potatoes I shan't starve, and 
 it'll go 'ard wi' me if I can't find a job or two as'll pay the 
 rent and a bit o' firin'." That looks like a solid, unquestion- 
 able advance in comfort and independence ; but it is the 
 special perplexity of a task such as mine — the task of moving 
 about the country and talking with everybody — that one 
 no sooner gets hold of a bit of firm and solid footing 
 than he is sure to meet somebody who pushes him off of 
 it. " My dear sir," exclaims a leading Liberal of lifelong 
 standing in this constituency of Mid-Oxford, repeating almost 
 word for word the opinion of the Essex Tory parson, " this 
 talk about affairs in the villages being put right by allotments 
 is the sheerest humbug." His contention is that the advan- 
 tage derived from the allotment, though real and substantial 
 enough, will prove only temporary, and that the man who 
 can make a Httle in this way will be able to work for rather 
 lower wages, and that sooner or later he will be bound to do 
 so. John Stuart Mill argued in the same way, as one of 
 the correspondents of the Daily News pointed out the other 
 
ALLOTMENTS ONLY AN ALLEVIATION. 6g 
 
 day. The force of this argument may, however, be some- 
 what modified by the fact that the population of the villages 
 is going down and labour becoming scarcer. On the other 
 hand, the demand for labour is growing less. Machinery is 
 still displacing men, and grass lands are extending. There 
 is a balance of arguments for and against, and I must leave 
 the readers of the Dai'fy News to say which side has the 
 preponderance. 
 
 I may have further opinions to quote on the subject of 
 allotments in another article. Meanwhile I may say that I 
 was very much struck by what I found in an Oxfordshire 
 village to which I had been directed as one of the poorest 
 and most ramshackle in the county. I strolled through 
 the place, and felt at first that I had been misdirected. I 
 leaned over a garden wall, and talked with an old man who 
 had just been digging up half a barrow-load of splendid 
 potatoes. They were " magnum boneys,'' said the old fellow, 
 and very nice taters, and he proudly held up one or two for 
 my inspection. I suppose the fine turn-out of potatoes put 
 the old man for the moment in an optimistic frame of mind, 
 for everything about that place seemed highly satisfactory. 
 The cottages weren't so bad and rents were very reasonable, 
 and they all had gardens and there were plenty of allotments 
 and work for those who could do it, and hardly anybody on 
 the rates and nobody had left the place so far as he knew. 
 Sons ? Yes, he had sons, but no, they weren't in the village. 
 One was in " Birnigham " and one was gone to Ameriky 
 and another to Australia, and I rather think he said another 
 had gone to Yorkshire. Why hadn't they settled in the 
 village ? Why, 'cause they could do better. The old man's 
 wife now came out to call him to dinner, and they both agreed 
 that it was a poor, beggarly place, and no good for nobody. 
 They didn't want their boys to settle there. " I don't want 
 my children to settle too close round me," said the little old 
 woman, whom I put down to be over seventy years of age. 
 
"JO LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 with a healthily bronzed face, wrinkled all over, but full of 
 vivacity. " I don't want 'em too close round me. I'd like 
 'em to be in Banbury or Oxford, where I could go and see 
 'em sometimes ; but drat 'em if they be close round 'e, they 
 al'ays runs to the granny, whatever's the matter. I like 'em 
 best a little way off, and it is a poor, beggarly place this. 
 But there, the Lord al'ays makes a way for them as wants to 
 do," and the dame chattered on, all the time seeming to 
 hurry her spouse away to his dinner. She had been up that 
 morning at six o'clock, had had a turn in the garden, and 
 swept round her house and run round the village with her 
 papers. Yes, she sold papers. She had got fourteen cus- 
 tomers, and she got a halfpenny a piece out of 'em, only she 
 had to pay two-pence for carriage. Bless the Lord, very 
 few people could do as she could at her age. I don't know 
 how many yards o' lace she hadn't made since the New 
 Year, and there were " arrands " to run, and one thing and 
 another. I was told afterwards that she was considerably 
 over seventy, and if anybody would offer her sixpence she 
 would think nothing of trudging away to Bicester, four miles 
 off and four miles back again, to execute any little com- 
 mission ; and it is, I am told, no unusual thing to see her 
 come in with a basket on each arm and another tied round 
 her waist. 
 
 Now these were the first people I spoke to in the village, 
 and I found that when the old folks united in pronouncing 
 it a beggarly place they were quite correct in some respects 
 at least. This was the village I have already alludtd to as 
 the place in which ten shillings a week had been the rate of 
 wages up till just before harvest — a shilling a week lower 
 than in any village I had found in Essex or Suffolk as the 
 summer pay. Yet in this village allotments are to be had 
 in abundance, and I am assured that the number of people 
 who are doing well with them and who have pigs in their 
 sties is quite exceptional. I ought to add, however, that the 
 
PUBLICANS AND PARSONS. 7 1 
 
 cottages, bright and pretty as they looked outside, were, 
 some of them, of the most beggarly description, and are 
 actually letting at threepence a week, or, with a bit of garden 
 and a chain-and-a-half of allotment ground, at fourpence- 
 ha'penny. These, it must be understood, are not the rents 
 to the labourers alone — the old man with the "magnum 
 boneys " had not worked for a farmer for five years, and paid 
 fourpence-ha'penny — so that low rents are not to be regarded 
 as equivalent to pay for labour. This village struck me as 
 affording a remarkable illustration of the tendency referred 
 to by the leading Liberal whom I have quoted— the tendency 
 for wages to keep down to bare subsistence. Here are the 
 cheapest cottages, and the most thriving allotments, and 
 the lowest wages I have found anywhere yet. In 1881 the 
 population of this village was about 360 souls ; now it is 
 325, and still dwindling. These are facts, whatever may be 
 the inferences from them. 
 
 LETTER XI. 
 
 PUBLICANS AND PARSONS. 
 
 Septe7?iber II. 
 It has been difficult to move through our English villages 
 during the past two or three weeks, and then to sit down 
 and write about them without gushing a little. Even the 
 stormy weather of this memorable summer, trying as it has 
 been for all who are concerned in harvesting, has in many 
 respects enhanced the loveliness of the village and its 
 surroundings. The drenching rains have kept the grass in 
 the fields, and the mosses and lichens on the cottage roofs 
 exceptionally brilliant, the roadways white and clean, the 
 orchards and woodlands fresh and verdant. Never can rosy 
 apples have looked rosier, or apricots sunnier, or plums 
 iucier, or flowers gayer than they do this year in^ their 
 
72 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 setting of lustrous foliage, quite free from dust, and as yet 
 scarcely touched by any indication that 
 
 " Winter comes to rule the varied year 
 Sullen and sad." 
 
 Even the lowering rain-clouds, that to the farmer have kept 
 rolling up behind the hills like demons of destruction, do 
 but add sublimity to the peaceful and pastoral scene, 
 and, combined with sudden bursts of sunshine, often lend 
 a breadth of effect and vividness of colour surpassingly 
 beautiful. Step for a moment into this little ancient church, 
 with its ivy-mantled tower and hoarse-ticking clock, its open 
 doorways overspread with nets to keep out the birds, its 
 massive stone walls with their queer little nooks and niches 
 telling of holy water and images of saints, its venerable font 
 and antiquated wrought- iron work, and worm-eaten old 
 seats. An appropriate place to wait out of a thunder shower 
 for a few minutes — to wait and muse how 
 
 " Out of the old fieldes, as men saithe, 
 Cometh al this new come fro yere to yere." 
 
 And now, while the last big drops of the storm are streaming 
 down slantwise through a dazzling flood of sunshine, step 
 out again under the roof of the liche gate, with the rain- 
 bespangled grass and the mossy gravestones at your back, 
 and before you on the other side of the way an orchard with 
 its ten thousand ruddy apples blazing like gems under the 
 pattering rain-drops. Over the top of the broken wall you 
 can see through beneath the tangled boughs of the shady 
 orchard into the sun-flooded meadow, where brown and 
 white cattle are grazing in groups of indescribable charm. 
 Away to the left the pretty cottages with their thatched roofs, 
 their steps of unhewn rock, their windows full of geraniums 
 and fuchsias, and their porches overgrown with autumn 
 roses and canariensis, are hobbling down the broken path- 
 way in a picturesque, irregular line, their red chimney-stacks 
 
PUBLICANS AND PARSONS. 73 
 
 gently streaming out into the trees above the soft, blue 
 smoke of the wood fires, on which busy matrons are 
 beginning to prepare the evening meal for father, whose 
 work has been stopped by the drenching downpour, and 
 who will presently be home. The rain is over now ; stroll 
 down the village and gossip with the people. There is 
 nothing very startling or sensational to be gleaned, but you 
 get some valuable side-lights on village life, and most of 
 the folks have something worth listening to. Here is a 
 venerable patriarch with a marvellous memory for what " I 
 says to he " and " he says to me says he " fifty years ago. 
 His father met with an accident when he was a young man, 
 and died in a day or two, leaving his wife to the care of the 
 parish. And the grey-headed old man tells you — as no 
 doubt he has been telling for many a year — how that the 
 next day was relieving day, and the guardians made an 
 order that he was to keep his mother as well as his own 
 family on his eight shillings a week. Indignation still 
 sparkles in the old man's eyes as he tells how he met 
 Muster Sumkins, and Muster Sumkins said as he was to 
 keep his mother. " I says to'n, I says I oon't keep my 
 mother. He says, ' You oon't ? ' and I says, ' No, I oon't, 
 for any on 'em,' I says, and I oon't neither. I'd ha' sell'd 
 my sticks, and gone to Ameriky." Here is another villager 
 who has withstood the powers that be, and, as he says, was 
 "bunked out o' the place " neck and crop, with seven young 
 children at his heels. Physically, the man is a splendid 
 specimen of the agricultural labourer, and tells his story 
 with evident satisfaction, though it doesn't seem to be 
 entirely to his credit. He had just lost his wife, and the 
 lady of the village wanted him to send some of his children 
 to school, but he wouldn't. " Why wouldn't you send your 
 children to school?" I inquired. "Cause I oodn't," said 
 the man, with a smile of dogged obstinacy. " I'd a mind to 
 do as I liked." Seemingly the lady was right in her wish, 
 
74 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 and the man was wrong in his refusal. But to evict him 
 from home and work and village in this fashion was just one 
 of those high-handed exercises of absolute power that do so 
 much to widen and deepen the chasm between the two 
 classes of the village. 
 
 At another place in the same neighbourhood I hear a 
 droll story, and yet another display of insubordination on 
 the part of a labourer. A fine stalwart fellow, with a shrewd, 
 intelligent face, stands at his cottage door in his shirt sleeves, 
 with his hands tucked down deep into the pockets of his 
 fustian trousers, and tells me of somebody or other who'll 
 have to go up to the hall to-morrow over some charity bread. 
 In a certain parish bread is given away to the cottagers 
 every Sunday after church. So many residents in the parish 
 take it in turns, and, till recently, the wife or children of 
 the men entitled to it could receive it. The churchwardens, 
 however, lately resolved that this should no longer be per- 
 mitted, and that the man who didn't personally come and 
 take his sermon should have no bread. The truant villagers 
 resented this, and one of them, who had lost his turn at the 
 loaves, went the following Sunday and helped himself, at 
 the same time dealing out to the good people at the church 
 some of his private opinions about them. My informant, 
 a Radical politician, was evidently in sympathy with the 
 insurrectionary villager, but he shrewdly suspected that he 
 would have to pay for his audacity. He'd just like to see 
 one o' the newspapers get hold o' that story. They'd make 
 sommit on't, he'd bet. The man would certainly have to 
 pa}', for they would make it out that he had been brawling 
 in church, and he would have nobody to defend him. 
 "What 'e wants," said the man, "is a good sharp lawyer to 
 tackle 'em for 'im. If 'e could only get Sir Charles Russell 
 to tak't up for'n he'd let 'em know. They'd soon put their 
 tails atween their legs when they sin 'e." I am afraid the 
 occasion is gone now, and that Sir Charles has lost a fine 
 
PUBLICANS AND PARSONS. 7S 
 
 opportunity of acquiring undying fame. Before the day 
 was out I was destined to hear a little more of this case. I 
 stopped at a village inn and called for a cup of tea. The 
 landlord refused it point blank, and I was immediately 
 invited by the company in the tap-room to " have a pull " 
 at their quart pots. As graciously as I could I declined the 
 beer, and insisted on the tea, and after some Uttle wrangling 
 I got my way. While the tea was brewing I studied village 
 life in the tap-room, and out of curiosity I brought forward 
 the charity bread. Oh for a phonograph that would repro- 
 duce for me just now the little tit-bits of dialogue that 
 ensued ! as the wizened little old man in the smock frock 
 and the wideawake told how as they did say as Joe 
 Stuggins, or whatever his name was, had in the height of 
 argument bobbed his nose again' the churchwarden's. It 
 was inexpressibly droll. In the course of the discussion it 
 was asserted and evidently believed by the men that in the 
 village in which they sat a hundred pounds had been left 
 for charity and had entirely vanished, and there were dark 
 allusions to money that had been paid to hush up some- 
 body's theft of brasses from the church. 
 
 The scene was amusing enough while one could shut 
 one's eyes to all but the humour of it ; but it had its painful 
 and unpleasant aspect from another point of view. It is of no 
 use crying down public-houses. We must have houses of 
 entertainment, and before I close this series of articles I 
 hope to be able to say something on the subject of what 
 they ought to be in the villages. This place I chanced to 
 go into affords a fair illustration of what they ought not 
 to be. I got my cup of tea; but suppose one of those 
 labouring men had preferred a cup of tea to a pot of beer, 
 what would have been his chance of getting it ? One of the 
 party when I went in was quite evidently drunk, but he 
 called for another quart, and the landlord brought it to him 
 without the least hesitation. What hope is there of 
 
yG LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 rendering our peasantry sober, and thrifty, and self- 
 respecting, with dens of this sort in their midst ? Where is 
 the parson of that old ivy-mantled church ? Why doesn't 
 he put his foot down and say this shall not be, and that a 
 landlord who turns a drunken man out into the village shall 
 have the rector of the parish to deal with before the 
 magistrates next licensing day ? What is the good of having 
 a " Christian gentleman " in every village if that gentleman 
 can't tackle a flagrant iniquity of this kind and by hook or 
 crook put an end to it ? 1 don't like to attack the clergy 
 indiscriminately. I can see, and I am sure that many of 
 the country clergy are men entitled to every respect, and are 
 doing an invaluable work in the dark corners of the land. 
 But as I move about and talk with the people I cannot shut 
 my eyes to the fact that half the evils of village life could 
 be remedied if the parsons were worth their salt. Half of 
 them seem to me to be mere nonentities, with no under- 
 standing of the people, no sympathy with them in their 
 hopes and fears, their struggles and sufferings, no sort of 
 fellow-feeling with them whatever. " Haven't you got a 
 clergyman here ? " I inquired of one woman in reply to her 
 plaintive and spiritless wish that somebody could look after 
 the poor a bit. " Yes, sir," was the reply, " we got one, but 
 we don't see much on 'im. I been here ten years and I 
 don't know as he ever been near my house." " He ain't 
 much good to us," said a bystander. " Oh, I dunno," said 
 another, anxious apparently to say what she could; " I never 
 'card as he done nobody no harm." Damning with faint 
 praise, this, with a vengeance. Few of the villages I have 
 been through have any place where men may go and talk 
 over the news together, and smoke their pipes and sing a 
 song without the necessity for beer drinking. I passed 
 through one village and talked with a Nonconformist local 
 preacher, who told me that an effort had been made to set 
 up something of the kind in that place, by the joint action 
 
DUCAL LAND-GRABBERS. fj 
 
 of three or four of the Dissenting bodies. They had built a 
 hall, and it was to have been a place for healthy recreation 
 and entertainment. But none of the good people seemed to 
 understand the necessity for anything but religious service, 
 and as it was not specially identified with the " cause " of 
 either sect, the scheme fell through. One of them has now 
 monopolised the use of the place, in which services are 
 occasionally held, but ordinarily it is shut up, while five or 
 six public-houses are in full blast — two of them I noticed 
 actually standing back to back. 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 
 DUCAL LAND-GRABBERS. 
 
 September 14. 
 
 I AM afraid the people of Woodstock have imbibed some- 
 thing of the discontented spirit that appears so very generally 
 to be animating the agricultural world around them, and 
 that they are not sufficiently thankful for the blessings they 
 are privileged to enjoy. Not unto every small town is it 
 given to have a great ducal landowner overshadowing it as 
 the Duke of Marlborough overshadows Woodstock, and one 
 would think that the inhabitants of this interesting old town 
 could not be too grateful for the happy fortune which has 
 given them one Providence above and another at Blenheim 
 Palace. Possibly there may be some of them who have a 
 due sense of their happy lot, but if there are I have not yet 
 met with them. I have been moving, I fear, in rather a bad 
 set, and they have been doing their best to prejudice me 
 against great landowners and the sort of influence they 
 exercise. Clearly there is a democratic ferment at work in 
 this part of the world, as in so many others, and after what 
 I have seen to-day I cannot help feeling that it is quite 
 time there was. Starting from Woodstock, I have had 
 
78 Ufe in oVr villages. 
 
 to-day a most interesting and instructive drive through 
 Bladon, Handborough, Combe, Kiddington, Glympton, 
 and Wootton. One or two of these villages are beautiful 
 little places — in some respects all one could reasonably 
 desire. Bladon, for one, just outside the wall of Blenheim 
 Park, is quite a little show place. It is nearly all owned by 
 the Duke of Marlborough, and though he and the vicar of 
 Woodstock are at loggerheads over a matter which I am not 
 concerned here to discuss, they have between them given 
 the people good cottages and gardens, a fine church, and 
 free schools, and many other things that must contribute 
 largely to their comfort and welfare. Kiddington and 
 Glympton — owned by different wealthy landlords — are also 
 quite model villages. But the democrats of Woodstock 
 seem even fiercer in their condemnation of these pet villages 
 than of such places as Handborough, where the conditions 
 of life are in many respects the very reverse of all that is to 
 be found in the others. Both Kiddington and Glympton 
 have within living memory been largely reduced by the 
 ruthless pulling down of cottages. At one time this was 
 done for the simple purpose of clearing out poor people, 
 who were not wanted for the profit and convenience of the 
 landowner, and who were likely to be a burden on the 
 rates. " Here are we, the great landowners, the only 
 people on earth of the slightest importance. We don't 
 want these cottagers; turn them out and pull down their 
 houses, and let them drag their wretched carcases to the 
 workhouse in the next parish, where we shall not be 
 responsible for their maintenance. What have we to do 
 with them ? " I don't know whether the present owners 
 have done this ; possibly not, for it is many years now since, 
 by the union of parishes, this sort of thing was checked. 
 But other motives have led to the demolition of cottages, 
 and a resident in the district told me of many small houses 
 he could remember to have been swept away. These 
 
DUCAL LAND-CRABBEkS. 79 
 
 places now apparently contain just about the number of 
 dwellings required for the estates — not the least reference 
 to the number of people the land could and would maintain, 
 but just what the squires choose to have there. I am 
 assured that it is literally true that if in one of these places 
 a young man wants to get married and settle down, it is of 
 no use merely to woo and to win the young woman. He 
 must induce the squire to consent also. " Where's So-and- 
 So?" "Oh, he's gone out of the neighbourhood. He 
 wanted to get married, and the squire wouldn't put up a 
 cottage and wouldn't hear of anybody taking in a lodger, so 
 he had to go." 
 
 In these villages atteinpts to introduce Nonconformist 
 ideas have been found to be quite hopeless. " In that 
 cottage yonder," said my guide, '' a man became a Non- 
 conformist and had the audacity to hold a prayer meeting 
 in his own room. He got notice to quit, and was turned 
 out of house and home and employment — not of course for 
 the prayer meeting ; oh dear no." A Liberal politician 
 here told me that in some election recently — County 
 Council, I think he said — there were eighty voters in one 
 such proprietary village, and he could only get one solitary 
 individual so much as to speak to him. " No, sir, excuse 
 me, I really can't. I "don't want to lose my coals at 
 Christmas." That is the sort of thing with which the 
 forces of progress have to contend, and it is not surprising 
 that there are many about here who regard "good land- 
 lords " with utter abhorrence. They are beneficent, but 
 their beneficence implies the forfeiture of every particle of 
 freedom, and the submission of the people to whatever may 
 be imposed upon them. I heard to-day of a poor widow 
 who shortly after her husband's death had a call by the 
 estate agent. He came on Sunday evening, and told her 
 she must get out of her cottage and shift into another. 
 Certain changes had been decided on, and she must make 
 
80 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 room for somebody else. The poor woman didn't want to 
 leave her home, and protested against it. Even if she went, 
 surely she was entitled to some notice. Yes, no doubt — 
 legally. For all that she must go, and at once ; if not she 
 must expect no more benefits. And, poor soul, she meekly 
 submitted and went — swept out like so much dirt before a 
 besom. " You have no idea what a condition of serfdom 
 the people are reduced to on some of these big estates," 
 said a resident here to me to-day. The squire owns the 
 cottage, he can give or withhold allotments, he is practically 
 the sole employer ; his wife and daughters give coal and 
 lend blankets, and look after the people when they are sick, 
 and the parson finds schooling and religion, and there is 
 no resisting any of them in anything. There is literally 
 nothing for the people to do but plod quietly on as they 
 are told, take what is given them, and be thankful. It is 
 all well intended, all beneficent and beautiful, but it is the 
 abnegation of all manhood, of everything like citizenship. 
 The power of the clergy, when they happen to be men 
 of independent means, is often a deadly blight upon 
 the freedom of the poor. Just combine this power 
 with that of the squire to turn out a man, with wife 
 and children, from his house and his village and his 
 employment, and add to this combined power the blandish- 
 ments of the Primrose dames, and you have a phalanx 
 which — though thank God it is even now being broken, 
 and shall one day utterly be put to rout— will yet give us 
 many a long day's hard tussle. 
 
 Deeply conscious as one cannot but be of the tremendous 
 weight under which the liberty and independence of spirit 
 of the agricultural poor are being crushed, it is with grim 
 and hearty satisfaction that one comes across here and there 
 manifestations of a little good English pugnacity — aye, even 
 hough the pugnacity may be not altogether in the right. I 
 could not help feeling this in the little village of Combe. 
 
DUCAL LAND-GRABBERS. 8 1 
 
 Combe is on the far side of Blenheim Park from Woodstock, 
 a benighted little place if its reputation counts for anything. 
 In driving into it from Woodstock you pass a ruinous old 
 structure, which I had pointed out as a stable put up by a 
 former Duke of Marlborough for the shelter of his horse 
 while he was paying his respects to Miss Glover in the 
 village. His workpeople were always long in arrear with 
 their wages, and they used to waylay his Grace near this 
 stable and dun him for money. " Oh, you shall be paid ; 
 you shall all be paid," he would say. " Ah, but when and 
 wheer, yer Grace ? " demanded the men. " I remembers 
 'em doing it many a time,'' said a countryman to me 
 yesterday. I suppose his Grace — let us be careful to give 
 the most noble duke his proper title — I suppose his Grace 
 found this unreasonable dunning of his starving labourers 
 troublesome and inconvenient. They were thorns and 
 brambles in his primrose path, and the lady was soon 
 transferred to Blenheim, and the villagers will tell you now 
 how Duchess Glover used to come dashing about Combe in 
 her carriage. A little further on in the village you have 
 another interesting little object in the shape of a Liliputian 
 Wesleyan chapel. I don't know how the bit of land upon 
 which it stands came to be available for the purpose, but I 
 was informed that it was the only bit in the place that could 
 be got, and, in order to make it do, one side of the building 
 had to be planted in a pond, and the consequence is that 
 it has always been damp and uncomfortable. A little 
 higher up is the church, and an intelligent native with 
 whom I strolled round pointed to one of the porches 
 as having been at one time the Sunday-school room. There 
 was no Dissent in the village at that time, and the parson's 
 deputy in the school was one of the gardeners at Blenheim. 
 The parson would look in and have a bit of chat about the 
 gardens and flowers up at the palace, and as soon as he was 
 gone old Jemmy Whatever-hisname-was would send one of 
 
 F 
 
82 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 the children over to " The Cock " for a pot of beer. " Many's 
 a time I've sin children goin' into Sunday school with a pot 
 of fourpenny," said my informant. Under this spiritually 
 minded and enlightened rkgime of the Church on the 
 one hand and the great landed proprietor on the other, 
 Combe seems to have been in the past a bye-word and a 
 scoffing to all the villagers around. Anything specially 
 simple-minded and stupid it has been the habit to put 
 down to " Silly Combe," and in the country around you 
 may hear how that one native of the place sat on the branch 
 of a tree while he sawed it off, forgetting that he would let 
 himself down ; how that another turned a horse out to graze 
 with the nose-bag on, and so forth. Practically, all the land 
 and all the houses belong to the Duke ; but it is far from 
 Blenheim Palace, and the management of it seems to be 
 left to agents, and they do or they dorft do just as it seems 
 good to them. 
 
 As I moved up the village past the old stable and the 
 Wesleyan Chapel and the parish church, I noticed the wall 
 of a cottage bulging outwards to a degree which I thought 
 looked quite dangerous. I examined the house further, and 
 it struck me that a good strong wind would be sufficient to 
 bring- the whole place down in a mass of crumbled ruin. I 
 was told that an old couple lived there, and I stepped into 
 the garden and spoke to the woman. The poor, miserable- 
 looking, old creature — I should say between seventy and 
 eighty years of age — was full of complaints that they would do 
 nothing to the place. She couldn't remember that they had 
 ever done anything. " Come and look round 'ere, sir," she 
 said ; and I made my way through what had been once a 
 thriving garden, full of raspberry-canes and standard fruit- 
 trees and strawberry-beds. The rafters were all broken 
 away, and were projecting over the eaves ; the thatched roof 
 had sunk in in the middle, and there was a hole through 
 which you might have dropped a wheelbarrow stopped up by 
 
DUCAL LAND-GRABBERS. 83 
 
 nothing but a few old rusty tea-trays, or something of the 
 kind, loosely thrown into it. The walls were cracked and 
 broken, and the window of the bedroom was lacking half its 
 glass. " How do you manage with that bedroom window ? " 
 I asked. " Oh, I got a bit o' board as I stop that up wi'," 
 said the woman. " I never remember as they put a bit o' 
 glass in the window, and I never lived nowhere else," she 
 added. There were two bedrooms ; the one with the hole 
 in the roof was totally uninhabitable. The water during all 
 this wet, squally season had Hterally poured in there, flooding 
 the place from top to bottom. The thatch over the smaller 
 bedroom was not so bad as in the other room, but it let the 
 rain in freely, and, as I have said, the window had only 
 about half its glass in, and the wind must have blustered 
 freely about every corner of that wretched hovel. Yet, up 
 there, under the driest corner of that ruinous roof, lay all 
 last winter a poor, bed-ridden old man said to be eighty-six 
 or eighty-seven years of age. If anybody wants to verify 
 this, he is there still, and the neighbours say that in the 
 night-time they sometimes hear him crying and moaning 
 piteously. The condition I have described must have been 
 pretty much the state of the place for years past, yet the 
 Duke of Marlborough's agent has, I am assured, been taking 
 three pounds a year rent for it, and, if he cannot be said to 
 have turned a deaf ear to all appeals to him, has again and 
 again met them with promises that have never been fulfilled. 
 As I have said, these people do or they leave undone just as 
 they think proper, and there is no public opinion which dares 
 express itself. But where's the parson ? Where's the one 
 Christian gentleman in the village who goes to the agent or, 
 if need be, to the duke, and says, " I am the friend of these 
 poor people. This is wrong, and it must be put right " ; 
 and when it isn't put right goes again and says, " This is 
 wrong, and if it isn't put right I'll raise the devil about your 
 ears ! " Where's the parson ? Why, not a hundred yards 
 
84 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 off. " What sort of a fellow is he ? " I asked an intelligent 
 old man in the village. " Oh," he said, with a smile, " he 
 never interferes wi' nobody, 'e don't." 
 
 Nor is atrocious neglect of this kind the only thing of 
 which this village has to complain. One would like, if one 
 could, to discuss these rural matters in cold blood and with 
 level judgment. But I confess that it has made my blood 
 boil to drive round about Blenheim Park, and see how the 
 labouring poor have been and are being defrauded of what 
 belongs to them. There has been common land enough 
 about some of these villages to make every family in them 
 comfortable and prosperous. It would have given them 
 room for cottages and gardens and allotments, or when, 
 by-and-by, we get local councils, it would have afforded the 
 means of some form of public co-operative husbandry which 
 would have made agricultural labourers only too eager to get 
 into the district instead of scuttling away from it as they are 
 doing. Every man will tell you of somebody who has gone 
 off to the railways or to the mines in Yorkshire, or to try his 
 luck in London. Here, as elsewhere, farms have been con- 
 solidated into large holdings, expenses have been cut down, 
 and machinery has supplanted labourers. " The corn at one 
 time," said a man, " used to give the labourer about here 
 nine and ten shillings an acre at harvest time ; but machinery 
 does the work now, and all the labourer has to do is to pick 
 up the sheaves that the machine has cut and bound, and 
 stand them up in shocks." He gets now about ninepence or 
 tenpence an acre. The winter wages for many of the 
 people, I hear, are nine shillings, with stoppages for wet 
 days. But still, if the common land could have been well 
 tilled for the common benefit, it would have made all the 
 difference between starvation and comfort in the winter- 
 time. But what has become of the common land ? Nearly 
 all of it belongs to the Duke of Marlborough. Here are 
 these men, whose park wall I have had variously estimated 
 
DUCAL LAND-GRABBERS. 8S 
 
 at from nine to fourteen miles in length, and with imnum- 
 bered thousands of acres, and whole villages of property 
 outside, have been generation after generation gobbling up 
 piece after piece of the common lands of the poor, and they 
 are doing it still. " Look there," said an influential Liberal of 
 Woodstock, " the Duke of Marlborough has no business 
 whatever with that land, but as Lord of the Manor he just 
 simply takes it, and nobody dares oppose him." The thing 
 looked plain as a pikestaff. There was the park wall bound- 
 ing the duke's private property. Between that wall and the 
 road was a space of waste land, common property. The 
 transfer from public to private ownership is begun by 
 sticking up a notice, " All persons depositing rubbish on 
 this land will be prosecuted. — Marlborough." A little 
 further on comes the next stage, and a low stone wall skirts the 
 road and shuts in the open land. It is now the duke's, and 
 if the people want it for allotments he has no objection to let 
 it them at five-and-twenty shillings an acre. Again and 
 again men said to me, " we are paying for our own land." 
 For a mile or so before you get into Combe the road runs 
 through some pasture land. . There is not a doubt, I think, 
 that that was all common land. Some of it is still un- 
 enclosed, but on both sides the road throughout the greater 
 part of it a double railing and a quick-set hedge have been 
 planted within the past year or two. All the people in 
 Combe believe it belongs to them, and a pleasant walk that 
 men have trodden from time out of mind has been taken 
 away. 
 
 One old man told me he remembered his grandfather 
 having a flock of sheep on that land, and it was all open and 
 common property. Another said he couldn't recollect it 
 being open, but the first he knew of it was that a farmer, 
 whose tomb he pointed out in the graveyard, had rented it 
 of the Duke at ten shillings an acre. One Sunday he re- 
 members the agent getting the people together down in a 
 
86 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 field yonder and telling them he was going to drain it and 
 otherwise improve it, and they could have it in plots at two 
 pounds an acre. " It was their own land," said the man ; 
 " however, they took it at two pounds, and had it for years, 
 and got it into good condition. Well, th' old dook died, 
 and the next dook took it away from 'em. I remember it 
 well." Up in the little old church there is a painted board 
 stuck up in front of the gallery, registering a solemn compact 
 that for one piece of this " common or waste land " the Duke 
 of Marlborough is to pay six guineas a year. Whether that 
 six guineas is still paid to the overseers for the benefit of the 
 parish I cannot say ; but it is unanswerable evidence as to 
 the original common rights in the land, and everybody in 
 Combe will tell you that in exchange for their rights of 
 cutting furze and turf on another piece of the same common 
 the Duke of the day solemnly pledged himself to send into 
 the village loads of faggots on certain days. The Duke of 
 Marlborough still, of course, holds that piece of land, but 
 never a stick of their firing do the poor people get. How 
 long will the common-sense and right feeling of the people 
 of England endure this sort of thing? Not very long, I 
 think, unless all the signs of the times are utterly misleading. 
 In just the same way the Duke of Marlborough has 
 acquired that piece of land at Combe by engaging to perform 
 public services that are no longer rendered — to say nothing 
 of a good deal more that they appear to have taken merely 
 by cool impudence — so were their manorial rights acquired 
 in exchange for duties that are no longer required of them. 
 These matters must be thoroughly overhauled, and the great 
 reforming party of this country must administer to these 
 great, lawless landowners of insatiable maw emetics powerful 
 enough to make them disgorge. On some system or other 
 the people must get back to the land, and there could hardly 
 be a better beginning than to begin with the lands that are 
 justly their own. Even here in this little obscure corner of 
 
A Model village club. 87 
 
 the rural world the people are beginning to put down the 
 foot, and when a little time ago another piece of their 
 common land was going to be appropriated to a purpose to 
 which they had given no consent, they doggedly refused 
 to permit it. " We ha' had enough of our land filched 
 away from we," they, said, "and we'll ha' no more on't." In 
 this case, to which I had intended to refer at length, but 
 which I must leave for another letter, they were, I think, 
 unfortunate and wrong ; but, notwithstanding that, the mere 
 fact of their resistance is a healthy sign of the times, and 
 such signs are multiplying on all hands. 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 
 A MODEL VILLAGE CLUB. 
 
 September 17. 
 I CLOSED my last letter by alluding to a point on which the 
 inhabitants of Combe had taken a firm stand against an 
 attempt to appropriate a piece of common ground to a 
 purpose to which they had not given consent — a gratifying 
 manifestation of spirit in one respect, though in another 
 unfortunate and mistaken. It will be well worth while to 
 give some account of this affair, because in one or two 
 respects it is interesting and instructive. The village in 
 summer is a pleasant litde place, with a triangular expanse 
 of greensward in the heart of it. It was a very small slice 
 from the edge of this village green that it was proposed to 
 take for the purpose of enlarging a little the plot of ground 
 required for a sort of village club. Few places could require 
 it more. Across Blenheim Park, Combe is, I suppose, 
 between two and three miles from Woodstock, but it is a 
 long drive round by road. It seems far out of the world, 
 and in the winter-time must be a depressingly dull, 
 sequestered little nook. It has an old church, a couple of 
 chapels, and several public-houses ; apart from these, any 
 
88 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 facilities for social intercourse were not only entirely lacking, 
 but, as the people were nearly all of them extremely poor, 
 and there were no leaders to set anything afoot, any such 
 facilities seemed quite hopeless. Some few years back, 
 however, a couple of ladies, mother and daughter, settled 
 here, and the younger. Miss Adela Brooke, planned the 
 institution I have referred to. I am giving now an account 
 of the matter in general terms. In some points of detail I 
 may be subject to correction, but substantially the affair may 
 be taken as I give it. This institution was to be wholly for 
 the public good. The scheme, I understand, was entirely 
 Miss Brooke's ; it was to be for the recreation and enjoy- 
 ment of the villagers — a public-house without the drink, one 
 reading-room for men and another for boys, a room for 
 games, to be used occasionally for a little music, or a lecture, 
 or such entertainment as might be found practicable ; there 
 would be a skittle-alley, a quoit-ground, and so forth. The 
 village could not possibly afford either to put it up or to 
 maintain it when it was up. The money would have to 
 come from Miss Brooke or her friends. Nothing could have 
 been more reasonable than for this lady to expect that the 
 people would have been delighted to give up a piece of 
 their common land to such a purpose ; " and," said one of 
 them to me yesterday, " if her had a gone the right way to 
 work her 'd ha' had it sure enough.'' It might, I am afraid, 
 have been by no means easy for this lady to have hit exactly 
 on the right way. Miss Brooke is a High Churchwoman 
 and a Conservative, and many of the villagers are Dissenters 
 and Radicals. For her to win their confidence in an enter- 
 prise of this sort would, no doubt, have been difficult, and, 
 do far as I can learn, she made no attempt to do so. She 
 adopted the good old Tory plan of setting about to do the 
 thing for the people over their heads, and without consulting 
 them, instead of proceeding on the democratic principle of 
 taking the people into her confidence and working with 
 
A MODEL VILLAGE CLUB. 89 
 
 them. The land, however, she could not get without the 
 consent of the copyholders — the villagers themselves. The 
 Duke of Marlborough, the Lord of the Manor, of course 
 gave his consent to this appropriation of the land, but the 
 proposal was brought before the court-leet, and a plain 
 question was put to the lawyer present. " Muster lawyer, 
 if us gives this land for the cafd, whos'n '11 it be ? " " It 
 will be Miss Brooke's." " And her can do as 'er likes wi' 
 it ? " " Yes, it will be hers to do as she likes with it, but 
 
 " " And her could sell it if 'er'd a mind ? " " Yes, no 
 
 doubt she could if ■ " " Then us won't gi' it. We ha' 
 
 had enough o' our land filched away from we, and we'll ha' 
 no more on't.'' It was in vain that it was urged that the 
 new institute was to be devoted to the popular good, and 
 that, as other people would have to find the money, the people 
 themselves might reasonably be expected to give what was 
 in their power. Insuperable and unreasonable distrust took 
 possession of the villagers, or some of them at any rate, and 
 on the other side, I fear, there was engendered a supreme 
 contempt for " ignorant Dissenters " and Radicals. The 
 work, however, went on ; appeals for funds were made, and 
 many of Miss Brooke's personal friends responded liberally. 
 Land was bought at a cost of a hundred pounds just on the 
 borders of the green, and right in the centre of the village 
 the new institute was put up, at a cost, I am told, of six or 
 seven hundred pounds. The breach, however, widened, 
 and before I had seen the new building I had heard a good 
 deal about it. Miles away from Combe I heard of a lady 
 who was begging in all directions for money to put up " a 
 kaffy or some't, and they do say as when the lease is out 
 er'U go and live there, and ha' it for 'er own house." 
 Another opinion was that the place would prove the ruin of 
 the village by encouraging gambling, and a Nonconformist 
 villager was strongly of opinion that young lads would be 
 drawn in there, and become so hopelessly abandoned to 
 
90 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGER. 
 
 bagatelle and draughts and that sort of thing that they never 
 would be got to chapel any more. So strongly had one 
 good man felt the impending doom of all that was good and 
 respectable in the place that when, in the early stages of the 
 business, Miss Brooke had put some posts tentatively on the 
 coveted bit of ground, he had gone by night and sawn them 
 down, and later on, I understand, other saviours of society 
 had gone during the hours of darkness and smashed in the 
 patent ventilators, thus spiting the unfortunate contractor 
 for the building, who, of course, had to renew them. 
 
 Well, I subsequently learned that the lease of the land 
 will run on for a good six hundred years or so, and when I 
 came to look at the place it was obvious at a glance that at 
 the end of that time it would not be easy to effect its con- 
 version to a convenient dwelling-house. It was I found, in 
 fact, a handsome and quite unique little village club — quite 
 an ideal little place — in red brick and red tiles and white 
 timber, all designed with a practical sagacity and forethought 
 and wise adaptation of means to ends altogether remarkable. 
 The room to be devoted to games had in it a nice bagatelle- 
 table, the gift of a gentleman in London, and on a small 
 platform at one end of the room was a brilliant-toned little 
 piano. On entertainment evenings the women of the 
 village will come here, if they choose, and get a little music, 
 or a little recitation, or a reading. There is a hatchway 
 opening into a well-appointed little kitchen, where tea and 
 coffee and other refreshments will be provided ; and there is 
 a reading-room and library, to be provided with papers and 
 periodicals and books, also communicating with the kitchen ; 
 while upstairs there is another room for the boys, who are 
 apt to interfere with the comfort of the men. There is a 
 covered skittle-alley for the younger men, and for the older 
 men "four points'' will be provided, while out on the lawn, 
 where members may sit, and smoke their pipes, and watch the 
 play, arrangements have been made for quoits. Everything 
 
A MODEL VILLAGE CLUB. 9 1 
 
 is built in excellent style, solid and substantial and durable. 
 " It is quite an ideal little village club," I couldn't help 
 remarking when I had been all over it, "a delightful little 
 place. There is only one possible point of criticism in con- 
 nection with it." "And what is that?" inquired Miss 
 Brooke, " I shall be glad^ to have any suggestions." " It 
 wants absolutely nothing but a democratic — a popular com- 
 mittee of management." "There will be a committee of 
 management." " I am glad to hear that." " But why, now, 
 do you wish to bring in politics into a matter of this sort ? " 
 " I am not using the word democratic in any political sense. 
 You have set up a beautiful little place for the people ; let it 
 be managed by the people, and it will do incalculable good." 
 Miss Brooke took my suggestion with the utmost amiability, 
 but I fear she will hardly act upon it. There will be a 
 committee, but, as I gathered, not a popular committee in 
 the sense of being a committee of the people who are 
 themselves to use the club. She herself not unnaturally 
 expresses her determination to be a " sleeping partner," and 
 seeing that, with some of the people on full wages in the 
 winter — when, of course, the place will be most in request — 
 making only nine or ten shillings a week, it will be impossible 
 for the club to be self-supporting, it is clearly desirable that 
 she should maintain her interest in the institution. But even 
 as a mere matter of education it would be wise to give the 
 villagers considerable latitude in the management of the club 
 set up for them. Miss Brooke fears that management by a 
 committee of labourers would result in all sorts of things she 
 does not approve of. 
 
 Miss Brooke, of course, not unnaturally feels that as she 
 has created the place for a definite purpose it cannot be 
 expected of her that she shall hand it over to those who 
 may possibly set about thwarting that purpose. At any 
 rate, she declares she will not do so, and I fear that she may 
 meet with a good deal of opposition and prejudice. I am 
 
92 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 dwelling on this because the difficulties besetting this 
 invaluable enterprise at Combe are likely to be found in the 
 way of similar efforts in hundreds of other similar places. 
 It is really rather depressing and discouraging to find that 
 in the villages we have not yet managed to lay down first 
 principles, and that many of the battles that have been 
 fought and won and almost forgotten in the towns seem to 
 be only just beginning in many of our rural districts. In 
 the great towns of the kingdom this question of recreation 
 has been tfireshed out, and all the most intelligent and 
 influential of our social reformers and leaders are absolutely 
 unanimous in their opinion that recreation is good for body 
 and mind. Clubs and institutes and polytechnics and 
 schools and colleges all over the land are acting on the 
 assumption that amusement is as desirable as work. In the 
 villages almost everywhere I have been I have found that 
 this belief in recreation has yet to be established. Miss 
 Brooke proposes to issue a financial statement, and to 
 appoint a committee of management. She has raised the 
 whole money except ;^8s still required to meet the expense 
 of building and equipment, and, if any word of mine shall 
 have tended to bring her assistance to this extent, it will be 
 a source of great satisfaction. To brighten the lives and 
 relieve the tedium, and to wage war upon the public-house 
 in the most effective of all ways, is work in which Liberals 
 and Conservatives, Churchmen and Nonconformists, may 
 cordially unite. 
 
 LETTER XIV. 
 
 NO " HARVEST HOME.'' 
 
 September 21. 
 It is pleasant to wake up in the morning and find yourself 
 able to peep out upon the broad, white roadway of a small 
 country town, with its fringes of trees and turf, and its quiet 
 
NO "harvest home!' 93 
 
 old-fashioned houses, and its beautiful, ancient church, and 
 to remember that you have planned a long day's ramble 
 amid cornfields and cottage-gardens, hamlets and villages, 
 and little country towns. Down in the hotel coffee-room 
 are three or four gentlemen who are discussing over their 
 eggs and coffee the thrilling tragedy they have attended the 
 night before at the travelling theatre, the proscenium of 
 which is blazing in gold and crimson out on the green 
 yonder — not of course that they could possibly be interested 
 in the thing as a histrionic performance, but, as they seem 
 anxious to assure each other, merely as a study of life. 
 They have patronised the side-door, and have figured among 
 the aristocrats in the orchestra stalls at the modest outlay of 
 fourpence apiece, and they all agree that they have had 
 excellent entertainment for their money. It is not only 
 bacon and cottages that are cheap in the country. 
 
 Talking of bacon, by the way, it is one of the signs of 
 the times that the village shopkeepers all with one accord 
 declare that they have hardly any sale for it, and that fat 
 bacon nowadays won't go at any price. In one village I 
 had the falling off in the sale accounted for by the fact that 
 most of the people had allotments and kept pigs, and so fed 
 their own bacon. In another place it seemed to be agreed that, 
 upon the whole, the labourers were rather better off of late. 
 There had been a slight improvement in wages, and the 
 people had been enabled to get enough fresh meat to put 
 them out of conceit with bacon. Even those who still ate 
 it had grown fastidious in their choice of it, and would have 
 none but the best. It must be nice and " streaky." In 
 Smithfield the meat salesmen will all tell you that a similar 
 change in the taste of townsfolk set in years ago, and has 
 for a long time constituted one of the difficulties of the meat 
 trade. People will not eat fat meat as they used to do. It 
 is curious to see the rural districts following in the wake of 
 the towns in a matter of this kind. I was told that in 
 
94 I-IPE. IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 one country town a provision dealer who had not been 
 sufficiently alive to this change found himself with four 
 hundred sides of bacon for which he could get no sale at 
 any price, and my informant believed that most of it had to 
 be buried. On the other hand, the proprietor of a country 
 inn who drove me for some miles through mid-Oxford told 
 me that most of the cottagers' pigs about his part had, he 
 believed, been eating their heads off lately. Feed had been 
 so dear that most of the pigs would have to go to the miller. 
 How quiet and clean and pretty the little country 
 station looks, with its gravel platform and white palings, 
 banked up with asters and petunias, phloxes and dahlias, 
 and its single line of rail meandering away yonder into the 
 grey morning mist. Rosy-faced lasses in their best clothes, 
 and with the most brilliant of nosegays for their friends in 
 the big town they are off to, are standing in little groups, 
 furtively eyeing the two stalwart young sportsmen with their 
 dogs and guns, or watching the curling white steam from 
 the approaching train as, like the giant released from his 
 bottle, it stretches upwards and spreads out over the stubble- 
 lands. And then the engine comes flashing and snorting 
 in, and all is bustle and confusion. I seat myself in the 
 train, and the cheery and obliging guard hands me in a 
 financial paper that he has found in a neighbouring 
 compartment. With one eye out of window and the other 
 on the paper, I sit for a while ensconced in a corner of the 
 carriage, ruminating on the perplexing fact that for Eiffel 
 Towers, for gold-mining, for cattle-ranches in South 
 America, for railways in mid-Africa, for cork-forests in the 
 middle of Spain, for waterworks in Bessarabia — for any 
 and every purpose under the sun, only let it be far enough 
 off — in Santa F^, or Topeka, or Riobamba — abundance of 
 capital appears to be always ready for the smallest 
 opportunity, while half the land one is rattling over is 
 manifestly starved for want of a little. " Farming over 
 
NO ''harvest home!' 95 
 
 much of the land round about here," said a gentleman of 
 long residence in mid-Oxon, " is very poor. No capital, no 
 capital." " In such-and-such a locality," said another 
 similarly well-informed witness, " there are so many acres of 
 land and hardly a sheep upon it. In another direction " — 
 giving names and places — " there are so many acres and no 
 sheep — four hundred acres here, five hundred acres yonder, 
 and very few sheep, if any." Said my driver yesterday, as 
 we rattled along towards Wychwood Forest, through a 
 purely agricultural district, " They are most of 'em hard up. 
 Bless your soul ! they sell everything — straw and hay and 
 stock — and I've known some of 'em run things so close for 
 ready money that they had to buy back a bit o' straw and 
 hay just to get along with. They can't make nothing out of 
 farming that way." " Why haven't they made more progress 
 with the harvest here ? " I asked of a woman who had kindly 
 invited me into her cottage to rest while waiting for a 
 conveyance. " I don't exactly know, sir,'' she replied. 
 " Not hands enough ? " " Yes, they have been pretty 
 middlin' off for hands. I wonders they ain't got more in. 
 But they stopped seven of the men as was a getting it in to 
 go and thrash some on't." One cannot be surprised that in 
 these days when, as a " Middlesex Farmer " recently said in 
 the Daily News, our agriculturists are practically in competi- 
 tion with all the world, their business carried on in this 
 hand-to-mouth fashion should be a failure. I had a long 
 conversation with a gentleman who apparently had a great 
 deal of knowledge of agricultural atfairs in his own locality — 
 or at all events of the affairs of those engaged in agriculture, 
 and I was fairly amazed at his statements. One after 
 another he named men who had at one time been reputed 
 to be worth three, five, ten, or fifteen thousand pounds, but 
 who had now given up altogether, or were struggling with 
 all sorts of disadvantages for want of money. The state- 
 ments were certainly startling, but I am bound to say that 
 
96 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 the appearance of the country he referred to, and through 
 which I have driven to-day, fully bears them out. The 
 land in many parts bears unmistakable evidence of neglect 
 and half-culture. The last farm I had my attention directed 
 to this evening was one to which a man had brought five 
 thousand pounds a few years ago, but from which he was 
 retiring a broken man. His land, I understood, had been 
 taken by another tenant, but at a much lower rental. 
 
 In thus bringing together a number of instances of 
 failure I am conscious that there is some danger of giving 
 an erroneous impression. Nobody contends, and I do not 
 wish for a moment to suggest, that farming generally is 
 going to the bad. No doubt, it is often far less of a failure 
 than it is made to appear. The much-respected Vicar of 
 Bampton made a remark which I thought both humorous 
 and suggestive. By the way, there is but one Vicar of 
 Bampton now. There used to be three, who took it in 
 turns to perform certain duties and to pocket certain 
 emoluments. This man would this year take the tithes and 
 the duties of the church at Bampton ; next year he would 
 have the rent of the glebe-land, and would do duty at a 
 village a little way out ; the third year he would minister at 
 a third church, and pick up such crumbs in the way of fees 
 and other odds and ends as fell in his way, coming back in 
 the fourth year to his starting-point again. "To quarrel 
 like the Vicars of Bampton " was at one time a proverbial 
 expression in this part of the world. This arrangement has 
 .ong been altered, and there seems little quarrelling now, 
 for the vicar and his Nonconformist neighbours seem to be 
 on the nicest terms with each other, and there is apparently 
 little to fall out about, unless it may be over the public- 
 houses. Bampton has about 1,350 people and fourteen 
 public-houses — rather rnore than one public-house for every 
 hundred people, men, women, and children. But, to get 
 back to the land, the vicar threw a humorous light on the 
 
NO " HARVEST home!' 97 
 
 subject when he said, I thought with just a touch of the 
 subacid in his humour — that in estimating the season he 
 found that there was a marked difference between those 
 who were farming his glebe land and other farmers around. 
 " Pretty fair," is the estimate of the farmers round Bampton, 
 or of many of them. " No doubt things might have been 
 worse." But the incumbent has 400 acres of glebe land, 
 and when he talks matters over with his tenants, with 
 especial reference of course to their bearing on rent, there 
 are dolefully long faces. Things never were worse, and 
 there seems not the slightest prospect of their ever being 
 better. We must not take literally the pessimism of the 
 farmers. But, by universal consent, times have been hard 
 and have severely tried the weaker of them. And now, by 
 consent equally general, a still further strain is to be put 
 upon them. " I can see,'' said a gentleman of great ex- 
 perience as a farmer on a considerable scale between 
 Bampton and Burford, "that there are going to be changes." 
 "The farmers will have to pay higher wages, you think?" 
 " Yes, I think so." He had himself lost none of his men, 
 and was on the best of terms with them. I had heard of 
 this gentleman before I reached his village, and understood 
 that he had been one of the kindest and most considerate 
 of masters. I was quite prepared to believe him therefore 
 when he said that he had done his best to promote the welfare 
 of his men. He paid them wages that have involved him 
 in some blame, and had provided them with allotments, 
 had carted their manure for them and their crops of potatoes, 
 and in many other ways had striven to maintain a good 
 feeling between himself and his men. But notwithstanding 
 it all, and though personally he was on the best terms with 
 his labourers, he appeared to be quite conscious that none 
 of them would be able to go on as they had been going, and 
 that great changes were impending. "There have been 
 great alterations of late years," I remarked ; " for instance, it 
 a 
 
98 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 Strikes me as significant that I have nowhere found any 
 survival of the old-fashioned ' harvest home.'" " No ; it is 
 quite gone. The Union killed that. There used to be the 
 sheep-shearing supper and- the hay-harvest supper, as well as 
 the harvest home in the autumn, but nobody thinks of such 
 a thing now. It is quite gone out." 
 
 I had been reminded of this by finding myself that 
 morning confronted by a picture in my hotel bedroom of 
 the bringing home of the last load. A sunburnt rustic with 
 a fiddle, and a boy by his side with a flageolet, led the way ; 
 then came the team, with a child striding the fore horse, and 
 other children with flags on the top of the load ; swains with 
 their pitchforks, and damsels with bundles of corn on their 
 heads and aprons full of flowers, came capering alongside; and 
 in the rear of all was the farmer, on his stout nag, looking jolly 
 and prosperous, and contented. Through the three or four 
 weeks of harvest, big, flat hampers would have been sent 
 down to those harvesters in the field from the farmer's 
 kitchen, and fine steaming joints and abundance of vege- 
 tables, and substantial plum-puddings would have put heart 
 into the men and the women and children helping to tie and 
 carry the sheaves, and the whole business would have 
 wound up with a jovial supper in some big barn, swept and 
 garnished for the occasion. All pretty and pleasant, but all 
 gone. I was, indeed, told of one farmer who still kept up 
 the old custom, and whose men are now being regaled with 
 good dinners, and who are to have a feast when it is all 
 over. He farms three hundred acres, and last year made five 
 hundred pounds net profit. But this is the only instance I 
 have met with. " The Union killed that " — upset the old 
 dependent, subservient, " patriarchal " sort of relationship, 
 which I suppose we are all of us given occasionally to deplore 
 as though it had been something purely beneficent and good, 
 but which was often enough quite consistent with seven 
 .shillifflgs a wesk for a man and his family, half of it paid in 
 
NO HARVEST HOME. gg 
 
 the patriarch's unsaleable corn, dealt out at a good stiff profit 
 on Protectionist prices. It was the old National Labourers' 
 Union that broke in upon that relationship, and set up in its 
 place something like two hostile camps. That Union to a 
 greater extent broke down, but you will find that all the 
 more intelligent of the men who are not thinking of leaving 
 the land still have ideas of it, and would be only too glad to 
 act upon the idea if their fellows, as one of them expressed 
 it to me yesterday, "was only men.'' The thing has by no 
 means died out. In the stony, picturesque little town of 
 Burford I found an intelligent young fellow — one of those 
 dreadful agitators — representing the Dockers' Union, down 
 there for the purpose of seeing what could be done to enrol 
 the labourers in an organisation that would prevent the great 
 capitalists in towns from sweeping the agricultural districts 
 whenever they may be confronted, by demands they are not 
 disposed to concede. As the labourers on the land diminish 
 in numbers they increase in individual strength for a tussle 
 with their masters, and strong and determined trade unionism 
 in the fields will certainly be a factor in the near future. 
 Every here and there one meets with trivial little facts that are 
 striking in their significance. In Burford I talked with a 
 very shrewd and experienced road-surveyor, who every year 
 requires large quantities of stone for the roads under his 
 charge. The depletion of the country of its labour — though 
 I think scarcely so great about here as in some localities I 
 have visited — has been such as to tell very perceptibly on 
 his business. Even in the winter-time he does not find it 
 anything like so easy as he used to do to get men to break 
 stones, and in the summe he very ofien cannot get them at 
 all. He has to get his road making material from a distance 
 ready broken. This is done by machinery, the use of which 
 for stone-breaking must thus be largely developed by the very 
 same influences that are depopulating our fields and filling our 
 casual wards. Round about there farmers have been at their 
 
lOO LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 wits' end for men, and have whipped in all they could get from 
 any quarter. The surveyor had sent in an order to a local 
 stonemason, but could not get his order executed because 
 the stonemason's men had gone harvesting. These men and 
 slaters and carpenters had been turning to with the sickle 
 and pitchfork around Burford. They would not of course 
 be the most efficient of harvesters, and they have to be well 
 paid. The consequence is that the farmers are turning their 
 thoughts more and more to machinery, and the advantages 
 and disadvantages of the American inventions for reaping 
 and binding are just now everywhere being anxiously dis- 
 cussed, and at many points they are being adopted. 
 
 Thus on all hands one perceives indications that town 
 and country are finding common interests, and that social 
 equality and the brotherhood of labour are asserting them- 
 selves, while art and science, and invention and education, 
 and the rise and fall of markets, and the vicissitudes of the 
 seasons, and the very failures and calamities of our farmers, 
 are all combining to produce changes, the ultimate issue of 
 which few among us appear able to conceive, but which we 
 may rest assured will go on whether we understand their 
 drift or not. 
 
 LETTER XV. 
 
 MOVING FORWARDS OR BACKWARDS ? 
 
 September 23. 
 
 I HAVE received several letters urging upon me the desirability 
 of giving details of the results of the allotments and small 
 holdings that have come under my observation. To tell the 
 truth, I have kept no very precise account of them. I set out 
 with the intention ol doing so, but I soon found it impracti- 
 cable — impracticable at any rate so far as any really useful 
 purpose could be served. It is of no use to record the fact 
 that a man gets out of a quarter of an acre of ground so 
 
MOVING FORWARDS OR BACKWARDS? lOI 
 
 many bushels of potatoes, so much wheat, so much barley, 
 and so forth, unless you can give a great many other facts 
 also — the cost of the seed and manure, the time the man 
 may have lost from his regular employment, the value of the 
 help he has had, and several other items, none of which a 
 farm labourer will ever be able to give you. One might of 
 course easily pile up facts and figures showing that a 
 labourer of merely average intelligence and industry can 
 make out of a plot of ground far more than the average 
 farmer gets out of his land, and if one were to take some of 
 these figures, he would be driven inevitably to the conclusion 
 that that way lies the solution of our agricultural problem. 
 
 Such figures are often, I fear, entirely fallacious. Yet I 
 have talked with many a man who, on the strength of such 
 calculations, seems to be consumed with a feverish hanker- 
 ing after such access to the land as will enable him to realise 
 some such result. In a remote Oxfordshire village I talked 
 with an intelligent, hard-working man, who seemed to be one 
 of these. Poor fellow ! I couldn't help feeling the greatest 
 sympathy with him. He was a strong, squarely built man 
 in the prime of life, but looked fagged and jaded. He had 
 three-quarters of an acre of land. " Three-quarters of an 
 acre,'' I said ; " there must be a deal of spade-work 
 in that." "Yes," he said, with something of a sigh, "it 
 robs a man of a good deal of his rest." "Yes, it do,'' 
 chimed in his wife, who stood by. " It's a shame that a 
 man should have to work so 'ard for a living.'' "You think 
 that a man who does a good day's work for his master ought 
 to be able to hve upon his earnings?" "Yes, sir, I do. 
 Why shouldn't he ? If he's a mind to do more, let 'im do 
 it; but 'e didn't ought to be obliged to do it." It was im- 
 possible to dispute the reasonableness of this. A man who 
 works from seven in the morning till five in the evening, 
 and pretty nearly all the hours on the clock during harvest, 
 ought to live in decency and comfort on his wages, and if 
 
162 LlFR IN OUR VtLLAGMS. 
 
 he chooses to work on his own ground after hours it should 
 be as a provision for rainy days or old age, or for little 
 indulgences and luxuries. " I'm sure 'e works harder nor 'e 
 ought to work," continued the woman, " and yet us can't 
 seem to get on. It's everlastin' slave and worry. Us never 
 gets no peace o' mind." Every line about the woman's 
 thin, pale face, and every tone of her voice, testified to the 
 genuineness of her complaining, and the force of her 
 eloquence was strongly enhanced by the grim visage of the 
 husband, who stood by with hands thrust deep down into 
 his pockets, and a hard, dogged sort of hopelessness about 
 his whole appearance. 
 
 I strolled with the man down the beautiful little village, 
 with its old church, and its rugged elms and broken stone 
 cross, its cottages capped with vivid sheets of moss, and 
 clad in ivy and clematis, and the gorgeous crimson of 
 Virginia creeper, or fragrant with ripe fruit — apricots, and 
 pears, and plums. What a little Arcadia it might be, and 
 how beautifully suggestive of peace and plenty came the 
 huge waggon-load of corn, tottering slowly along under the 
 russeting boughs of the trees skirting the little broken lane 
 winding round the churchyard wall. I drew the man out 
 and encouraged his confidence, feeling that the practical 
 experience of one labourer with three-quarters of an acre of 
 land must be in many ways representative of that of 
 labourers generally. He had had his little dream of 
 the prosperity and progress that were to be ensured if he 
 could only get a bit of land. Well, that bit of land had 
 been obtained, and undoubtedly some good had resulted. 
 Both man and wife had agreed that it had helped them 
 wonderfully through the winter. " I dunno what us'd ha' 
 done without it," said the woman. But much of his dream 
 hadn't been realised, and he seemed to be in despondency 
 and doubt whether it ever would. The work was exhausting 
 and hard — this cultivation of three-quarters of an acre in 
 
MOVING FORWARDS OR BACKWARDS? IO3 
 
 addition to his day's employment. But he didn't mind 
 that. He was used to hard work, and was wilHng to do it. 
 A few years ago he found himself giving way to drink, but 
 he cut it short off and had been eight years a teetotaller. 
 He thought he could do if anybody could, but his three 
 years had shown him the difficulties of allotment cultivation. 
 " You see," he said, " you can't be in two places at once, 
 and jest when the master wants 'e is jest the time when you 
 wants to be on your own ground." I noticed this morning 
 some rather dismal illustrations of this very fact while jogging 
 along a country road on a carrier's cart. There were long 
 stretches of allotments, with crops all choked up with weeds, 
 and tons of potatoes, that ought to have been up long ago, 
 still lying in the ground. The owners, of course, were all 
 harvesting. Last year this man was just getting up his 
 potatoes between the showers, when his master sent for him. 
 His crop was spoiling, and he thought he would finish his 
 job. For that very excusable act of insubordination he 
 found himself discharged, and for weeks last winter the poor 
 fellow was out of employment. " The farmers hates us to 
 have allotments," he said, " and that's 'ow they pays us out. 
 Let 'em go and get fat on their allotments, they says." 
 Once again I say. Where was the parson ? Did he learn 
 what had happened, and did he befriend these poor, 
 struggling people in their distress ? Did he go to the 
 farmer and rebuke him for his unreasonableness and his 
 cruelty, and point out his folly in thus embittering and exas- 
 perating the people by whose sweat and sinews he had to 
 hve ? Did he urge that the man had a fair excuse for not 
 coming the moment he was sent for, and that, since the man 
 was only a day-labourer, he had a perfect right to decline an 
 engagement for that day, if he thought proper ? Did he 
 endeavour to make the farmer understand what it must be 
 for a man who has been struggling to make headway against 
 poverty and anxiety to be thus flung back and compelled to 
 
I04 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 Stand idle and wretched, while all the ground he had gained 
 slipped from under his feet, and debt and difficulty accumu- 
 lated upon him ? If in a case of that kind he couldn't show 
 these poor cottagers a litde sympathy, if he couldn't go and 
 preach that farmer a straight and pointed little sermon about 
 justice and mercy and common-sense, what is he good for? 
 What does he do in that picturesque old church and pleasant 
 parsonage? I made some inquiries about the reverend 
 gentleman, but could find no trace of his influence with the 
 people outside his church, while within it his teaching 
 seemed to be largely calculated to set churchmen and 
 dissenters by the ears. 
 
 "What I should like," said the labourer, " 'ud be to 'ave 
 as much land as I could do. I could get twice as much out 
 of the land as the farmers do ; they don't 'alf do it. Give 
 me plenty o' land and I could do well." " Just as you are 
 now, without any capital ? " I queried ; and the man's face 
 dropped. " No," he said, looking thoughtfully down the 
 road. " I s'pose I should want a bit o' money to go on wi'." 
 Now I have given this man's experience because, roughly 
 speaking, it exactly coincides with the experience of all others 
 with whom I have talked on the subject. They are all 
 seemingly eager for a bit of land, all believe they could do 
 well if they could get it. All who try it under fairly good 
 conditions — tolerably good land, near their house, at a 
 reasonable rent — find an indisputable benefit in it. But 
 they soon find that the advantage has its drawbacks and 
 limitations. Said a man to me the other day — " I sometimes 
 think I likes the winter better nor summer. In winter, when 
 you done your work, you can go 'ome and rest and ha' 
 a bit o' comfort. But in the summer you has to do yer day's 
 work and then go out on the allotment." The young men 
 of course do not feel this ; but after a certain time of life 
 they do. " They talks a good deal about short hours and 
 Saturday half-holidays in the towns," said a shrewd old 
 
MOVING FORWARDS OR BACKWARDS? lOS 
 
 villager; "I don't see why people in the country sliouldn't 
 have 'em as well. When a man's done his day's work, why 
 ain't he to go 'ome and rest and do a bit as he likes, same as 
 people in towns ? " That is a feeling which we may depend 
 upon it will grow stronger as time goes on, but farm labourers 
 do not generally overwork themselves in the field, and the cul- 
 tivation of as much land as will supply them abundantly with 
 food for their own consumption is easy and pleasant. I find it 
 generally agreed that they can add about two shillings a week 
 to their income, and it is better than an addition of two 
 shillings in cash, because much of it comes in the form of food 
 for winter consumption. Practically, I may say there is no 
 difference of opinion about this. Of course, in some cases, 
 this two shillings a week will enable a man to save. He will 
 accumulate a little capital, and then he may very advan- 
 tageously, perhaps, take a little more ground, and in course 
 of time, by a compound accumulation of success, a sort of 
 geometric progression, he may develop into a small farmer. 
 I have met with many men who have done something of 
 this kind, and whatever there is in our land laws and land 
 tenures obstructing and hindering this should certainly be 
 swept away. Such men are invaluable. But, speaking 
 generally, the agricultural labourer cannot advantageously 
 do more than raise produce for his own consumption. This 
 is well within his own strength, and he is quite sure of his 
 market. The moment he steps out beyond this — has to 
 employ another man to help him, to interfere with his own 
 wage-earning, and to find a market for his produce — I am 
 speaking only of land tillage — he is out in the great com- 
 mercial world, subject to its vicissitudes and fluctuations, 
 needing capital and experience and business knowledge. 
 " Two acres of land ! " I said to a man early in these in- 
 quiries ; "how does he do it ? He can't dig this ? " " No ; 
 he gets it ploughed." " Whom does he get to do it?" "Oh, 
 there's a man over there brings his plough round, and ploughs 
 
I06 LIFE IN OUR-VILLAGES. 
 
 up allotments at so much a pole." "But I thought the 
 special advantage of this small husbandry was the thorough 
 work the man could put into it himself. I thought it was 
 his own spade that was to do so much." "Well, that's 
 how they does it." " And what do they grow ? " " Potatoes 
 and wheat and barley, and so on." " And what do they do 
 with the wheat ? " " Grinds it, some of it, and what they 
 don't grind they sells." " How do they thresh it?" " Oh, 
 the best way they can. Some on 'em pays a trifle to have it 
 threshed aud winnowed." "And how do they grind it?" 
 " They sends it to the mill. The miller comes round once 
 or twice a week and takes a bag o' wheat away, and brings 
 back a bag o' meal, and charges so much a peck for grind- 
 ing." " And each family make their own bread?" "Yes, 
 and do their own baking, or some of 'em take it to the 
 bakehouse." One listens to all this, and looks round upon 
 the country and sees tiny corn-fields no bigger than a London 
 back -garden multiplying by the thousand, and he begins to 
 rub his eyes, and to ask himself. Can this possibly be the 
 way forward, or are we slipping back into the thirteenth 
 century ? 
 
 LETTER XVL 
 
 ARCADIA REALISED. 
 
 September 25. 
 
 One of the most interesting and instructive scenes of rural 
 
 life in England may be found in the villages of Lockinge 
 
 and Ardington, on the estate of Lord Wantage, in Berkshire. 
 
 Lord Wantage owns somewhere about 22,000 acres of land 
 
 in this part of the country, comprising these two villages, 
 
 with their 800 inhabitants. He farms eight or ten thousand 
 
 acres himself, the consolidation of farms having gone on, 
 
 and still going on, here as in so many other parts of the 
 
 country. I went over yesterday, because two or three years 
 
ASCAblA REAUSEb. 107 
 
 back I understood that the owner of this vast estate was 
 going to crown and complete the remarkable httle social 
 system he has created here by admitting his people to a 
 share in the profits of his farming, and I wished to learn a 
 little about the result of it. In previous articles I have 
 already dwelt upon the undisputed advantages of farming 
 on a large scale with sufficient capital. Some at least of 
 these advantages were obvious enough before I had gone 
 far on to the estate. On scores of other farms I had seen 
 thousands of acres of over-ripe corn still exposed to the 
 caprices of this cold and rainy autumn. At Lockinge all 
 was gathered in and stacked safe and sound in splendid- 
 looking ricks ; much of the land was already under a heavy 
 manuring, and not a little of it was ploughed up. Abundant 
 capital, the finest appliances, and a full staff of men had 
 enabled Lord Wantage to take advantage of every hour of 
 fine weather. I understood that magnificent crops had been 
 gathered in in fine condition, and the owner of the estate 
 and his agent, Major Carter, both military men, were able 
 to betake themselves to the German manoeuvres, while small 
 farmers all around were still struggUng with their corn and 
 growling at the weather. The one disadvantage of such 
 extensive farming is the great difficulty and expense of 
 supervision. A large body of labouring men, spread over a 
 great area of land, cannot be kept going as they can be on 
 a small farm with the master himself working among them. 
 Many recorded co-operative experiments show, however, 
 that if you can manage to give the labourer a real interest in 
 the success of the farm this difficulty disappears. A little 
 book I have been reading while moving about the country, 
 written by the Rev. C. W. Stubbs, and entitled " The Land 
 and the Labourers," gives particulars of several interesting 
 experiments in co-operative farming. From one cause or 
 another they all of them failed. One of the most remark- 
 able of them collapsed solely in consequence of the bank- 
 
I08 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 ruptcy of the person who financed it, and who, " though a 
 high-minded and benevolent man, was disastrously given to 
 gambling.'' Nothing in these narratives is more striking 
 than the heartiness and vigour with which the most stolid 
 of farm labourers will work the moment they fairly realise 
 that they have a real personal interest in the enterprise. 
 It is no longer necessary to look after them ; they look after 
 each other, and the man who skulks and shirks will im- 
 mediately have his fellows down upon him. It struck me 
 when I first heard of Lord Wantage's profit-sharing scheme, 
 a couple of years back, that it would be a most notable 
 experiment, since it promised to combine all the advantages 
 of the large farm with the thoroughness and vigour of the 
 small. 
 
 In many other ways these villages of Ardington and 
 Lockinge are well worthy of a visit. Seen in the early 
 summer especially, as I saw them on a former occasion, they 
 strike one as quite a little rural paradise. The estate is 
 beautifully timbered ; the cottages, with their ornamental 
 eaves and pointed gables, their fanciful chimney-stacks and 
 pretty porches overgrown with ivy and roses, their grassy 
 slopes and lawns and shrubs and flower-beds, all present 
 innumerable points of view with which the artist would be 
 enraptured. Every villager has, or may have, his allotment. 
 There is an admirable reading-room and a public-house 
 in charge of a salaried manager who has no interest 
 whatever in pushing the sale of drink, but who is especially 
 required to provide good soup in winter, and tea and coffee 
 and other non-intoxicants at all times. There is a first-rate 
 co-operative store, with commodious premises, at which 
 the people can get all the necessaries of life — clothes, 
 grocery, bread, meat, and provisions, on profit-sharing terms. 
 The bakery is a beautiful little place, with patent ovens and 
 the newest machinery. In addition to all this, over a 
 hundred of the villagers are employed in municipal work- 
 
AKCADIA REALISED. 1 09 
 
 shops, SO to speak — shops fitted up with all kinds of the 
 latest machinery and the best appliances — saw-mills, 
 carpenters' shops, blacksmiths' shops, painters' shops, 
 wheelwright's shops — all for the building and repairing and 
 general maintenance of the property on the estate. There 
 are two churches and an excellent school. In short, it is a 
 little self-contained world in which nobody is idle, nobody 
 is in absolute want, in which there is no squalor or hunger, 
 while in the midst of it all is the great house of Lockinge, 
 the beautiful home of Lord and Lady Wantage, always 
 ready to play the part of benevolent friends to all who need 
 their help, and who, indeed, by all accounts, seem sincerely 
 desirous of promoting the happiness and well-being of their 
 people. The regular pay of the labourers on the estate is 
 not higher than elsewhere. I understood that it was a 
 shilling or so higher at one time, and that in consequence 
 Lord Wantage has the very cream of the labourers in that 
 part of the country, but that it was reduced to ten shillings 
 a week when the profit-sharing scheme was promulgated, 
 the expectation being that this reduction would be more 
 than counterbalanced by the dividend that would be 
 distributed when the farm accounts were made up. 
 
 Having said so much in favour of this delightful little 
 Berkshire colony, it seems ungracious to turn round and 
 declare that the whole thing is radically rotten and bad, and 
 that the whole system of things here is another illustration of 
 that " model " village life which is merely another name for 
 social and political death. Lord Wantage is not to be 
 attacked. He stands high in the esteem of all his neighbours 
 and friends — unless it may be some of the tradesmen in the 
 little town of Wantage, who are naturally angry with his 
 co-operative supply stores — and he has most laudably and 
 consistently carried his Conservative principles into action. 
 Materially, the result on the face of it is delightful, and as a 
 means of keeping the control and management of the people 
 
no LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 by the aristocracy nothing could possibly be better. But 
 for all the purposes of political life and social progress and 
 human development it is utterly bad. Lord Wantage has 
 done for the people, in the true spirit of benevolent Toryism, 
 what the people ought to be able to do for themselves — not 
 individually, of course, but collectively and unitedly, and by 
 their own sturdy, independent, and manly effort. I don't 
 know what Lord Wantage's personal wish may be with 
 regard to the voting power of his people, but I am sure that 
 those people themselves have no idea whatever that they 
 are free electors. " Any politicians here ? " I asked an old 
 man as I walked up the road with him through Lockinge. 
 " What's them ? " said the man, with a puzzled air. 
 " Politicians," I bawled, thinking the old man was a little 
 deaf or very stupid — " Politicians^you know what politicians 
 are." " Be 'em animals they goes out to shoot?" said the 
 old fellow, and then I saw the waggish twinkle of his eyes 
 that told me plainly enough he was only making a fool of 
 me. He knew very well what politicians were, but he 
 wasn't going to talk about such matters at Lockinge, and I 
 couldn't induce him to. All around I heard Ardington and 
 this village spoken of as a little political Dead Sea, in which 
 no public opinion ever was known to manifest itself No- 
 body would say that Lord Wantage was a man to exercise 
 any improper influence on his people ; but he is a strong 
 Tory, has been a member of a Tory Government, his agents 
 are Tories, and he owns all the land and all the houses, and 
 can give or take away employment. I could not find any- 
 body who knew of a political meeting having been held in 
 these places. I heard it rumoured that there was one man 
 who dared to avow himself a Liberal, but I couldn't find 
 him. " Oh, yes, sir," said a woman in the place, " they all 
 votes Lord Wantage's way, of course. It wouldn't do for 
 'em to go again 'im.'' I am assured that the admirable 
 little public-house in Ardington is to a great extent a failure, 
 
ARCADIA REALISED. Ill 
 
 because the men find that they are not free to talk there, 
 and that whatever they say is liable to be carried by the 
 birds to the agent's or bailiff's ears. The people are 
 managed and governed and controlled without the least 
 voice in their public and collective affairs, and, though they 
 undoubtedly have strong opinions on certain matters, they 
 dare not give expression to them. For instance, the people 
 have allotments for growing their own vegetables, but they 
 must not keep a pig. They have flower-gardens in front or 
 their cottages ; if they don't keep them in order the bailifi 
 will be down upon them. A labourer doesn't quite like his 
 cottage; there is no possibility of shifting without the 
 bailiff's consent and arrangement. " They daren't blow 
 their noses over at Ard'n'ton without the bailiff's leave," 
 said a labourer in the neighbourhood. The people control 
 nothing, have no part whatever in anything like public life, 
 nor any voice in matters directly affecting their own welfare. 
 In the management of the stores certain changes have 
 been made. At first, I believe, the customers had a five 
 per cent, dividend on their purchases — that is to say, a 
 person laying out ten pounds in the course of the year had 
 ten shillings as his share of profit on the trading. Then 
 they had a dividend of seven-and-a-half, and one year 
 they divided ten per cent. Lord Wantage makes certain 
 alterations involving greater cost of working, and the 
 dividend goes back to five per cent. Of course, he has a 
 perfect right to do so. He finds the capital, taking, I think, 
 only a very moderate interest as his share, and letting the 
 profit, whatever it may be, go to the people. They have no 
 right to complain, but they do complain in private ; and 
 since it is a matter affecting their own pockets, they have, 
 however unreasonably, a vague, grumbling sort of sense 
 that things are not managed quite as they should be. This 
 little central dep6t for the economical buying and distribu- 
 tion of all the necessaries of life on real co-operative lines 
 
112 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 is admirable so far as the mass of the people are concerned, 
 whatever individuals may think about it. It is based on the 
 sound economic principle of producing and distributing at 
 the lowest possible cost. But, to be completely satisfactory, 
 the people in these villages ought to subscribe their own 
 capital, as they would soon be able to do, if, as I thought 
 Lord Wantage was going to arrange for them, they could 
 only be got to work upon the land with a real, solid, 
 stimulating interest in the result of their work, just as they 
 have on their own allotment Let a man feel confidence in 
 the management, and be assured that if all goes fairly well 
 he will have a good substantial share of all the land can be 
 made to yield, and he will put his back into the business. 
 But I hear that the profit-sharing has resolved itself into a 
 mere bonus of two pounds at Michaelmas, and, indirectly, I 
 am given to understand that the people grumble that they 
 have got this bonus of two pounds a year instead of the 
 shilling a week in wages, and that Lord Wantage really 
 pockets twelve shillings a year. I ought in fairness to add, 
 however, that when this reduction of wages took place it 
 was general with the farmers all round, and that the 
 concession of the bonus, therefore, was a real one, since in 
 any case the reduction would have been made. You 
 cannot imagine a labourer working on a farm of eight or ten 
 thousand acres being in any degree influenced in his work 
 by such a profit-sharing scheme as this. For their village 
 stores the men ought to subscribe their own capital, pay 
 interest, if at all, into their own coffers, and pocket the 
 profit of the whole business. The management would, of 
 course, be in the hands of the people themselves, who 
 would elect their own ofificers and control their own affairs. 
 Whatever advantage there might be would be public 
 advantage, and it would all be consistent with everybody's 
 perfect freedom and independence. There need be no fear 
 of anybody, no cringing to agents, no concealment of 
 
ARCADIA RE A USED. 1 13 
 
 opinions — absolutely nothing inconsistent with free, 
 individual, manly Hfe and sturdy citizenship. There is 
 nothing Utopian, nothing impracticable in this — everybody 
 knows it is being done on all hands. In the little town of 
 Thetford the other day they invited me to go and see tlieir 
 co-operative stores, and they told me they had been so 
 successful that they had a surplus of capital they positively 
 didn't know what to do with. Where the limit of this sort 
 of collective action is to be drawn I don't know anybody 
 who has told us or who can tell us, and why the whole social 
 and industrial life at Lockinge and Ardington should not go 
 on upon the same system I can see no reason but the 
 difficulty of effecting the change and of fitting the people 
 for the fuller, freer, happier life it would open up to them. 
 
 As this article is of the nature of an attack on Lord 
 Wantage, I think it only right to append his reply to it, 
 addressed to the Editor of the Daily News : — 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF THE "DAILY NEWS." 
 
 Sir, — I fully believe that by your courtesy I shall find a 
 place in your columns for a few remarks on subjects con- 
 nected with the letters of your Commissioner concerning 
 village homes. The object he has in view is, as I under- 
 stand it, to gather together information with reference to the 
 management of landed properties, showing in what instances 
 certain practices have been found beneficial and worthy of 
 being more generally adopted, and where the reverse is the 
 case. Such a scheme impartially and intelligently carried 
 out cannot fail to be interesting and instructive, and deserv- 
 ing of support. It is not my desire or intention to enter into 
 any controversy ; but I feel it would be unfortunate if some 
 of the systems in operation on my estates, which your Com- 
 missioner describes, were to be discredited by erroneous 
 statements which would have the effect of discouraging their 
 adoption elsewhere. 
 
 H 
 
1 14 UPE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 A correspondent of yours who signs himself " Lockinge,'' 
 makes m iny and varied complaints on behalf of the labourers 
 of this district. Among these the allegation that the 
 " bonus " system has caused universal dissatisfaction among 
 the labourers on this estate can only have a misleading and 
 mischievous effect. In spite of what this correspondent 
 says, I strongly (after an experience of some years) recorn- 
 mend the system as an incentive to industry, and as con- 
 ducive to a widening of interest on the part of the labourers 
 in the prosperity of the farm on which they work. The 
 bonus is, as your Commissioner points out, given over and 
 above the regular wages paid to farm labourers on this estate, 
 which are in no way affected by it, and which rise and fall 
 according to the fluctuation of supply and demand. It is 
 not intended that the bonus system should be worked on 
 strictly profit-sharing principles, which at present involve 
 considerable practical working difficulties, but which further 
 experience may possibly overcome. But the amount of 
 bonus given is dependent on the profit realised. Certain 
 farms of mine, which till recently made no profit, and con- 
 sequently gave no bonus, have since last-year paid their way, 
 and have yielded a bonus, which I hope may be gradually 
 increased in amount as the farm profits improve. The 
 enforcement of sanitary regulations naturally falls upon the 
 landlord, whether he happens to hold town or country 
 property, and the insurance of healthy conditions by means 
 of estate rules must in some cases override other considera- 
 tions. The convenience of a pig-sty close to the cottage 
 backdoor is more than counterbalanced by the contamina- 
 tion of the neighbouring well. But it by no means follows 
 that, because a pig-sty is not allowed close to a cottage, 
 the cottager is forbidden to have one elsewhere. The 
 allotment is the most suitable place for a pig-sty, and on this 
 estate every man can, if he wishes, have one put up at cost 
 price, and removed at his convenience. Allotments should 
 
Arcadia realised. ii^ 
 
 where possible, be in near proximity to the village. Such is 
 the case on this estate, and the proof that they are not 
 " failures " is that the demand for them is such that none 
 are ever vacant. The management of the public-house is so 
 well and fully described by your Commissioner that I need 
 say no more about it, except to observe that the sole restric- 
 tions enforced are such as the law of the land imposes, 
 namely, those restricting the supply of liquor when men are 
 in a state of drunkenness. The co-operative stores estab- 
 lished in these villages distribute the whole of the profits 
 among their customers, being worked on what is known as 
 the Rochdale co-operative system. This mode of distribution 
 was adopted, after full consideration, in preference to 
 another plan, also on the Rochdale principle, which disposes 
 of the profits in the shape of dividends among the share- 
 holders. But when there are shareholders who take these 
 dividends, the money returned to the customers on their 
 purchases is to that extent diminished, and this considera- 
 tion has guided the managers of these stores in their adoption 
 of a system which is working very satisfactorily. 
 
 It has been said in your columns that it is easy to draw 
 pleasant pictures of the condition of the agricultural labourer 
 under the care of a beneficent landlord. But why assume 
 that such a condition can only be purchased at the expense 
 of freedom to think and act for himself? The fact that we 
 live in democratic days is no reason for disparaging and 
 discouraging the legitimate influence landlords may exercise 
 over their neighbours and tenants by helpful supervision 
 and by friendly interest in their affairs which ought not, and 
 which do not, interfere with the freedom of speech and 
 liberty of action which are the right of all alike, of labourers 
 as well as landlords. — I am. Sir, your obedient servant, 
 
 Wantage. 
 
 Lockinge House, Wantage, Berks, October 3. 
 
Il6 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 LETTER XVII. 
 
 THE PEOPLE AND THE PARSONS. 
 
 Sepleinber 29. 
 I HAVE again been making a circuit through a number of 
 villages under the guidance of another Radical Dissenter. 
 Some of the correspondents of the Daily News seem to 
 have been very angry with me because, as they suppose, I 
 have made Radical Dissenters my chief source of informa- 
 tion, and they are inclined to believe apparently that some 
 of my comments upon the clergy are to be accounted for by 
 the prompting and instigation of the guides I have chosen. 
 As a matter of fact, I can scarcely be said to have chosen 
 my guides at all. They have been chosen for me in most 
 cases by circumstances over which, as the phrase goes, I 
 had no control. I have gone down into a district with the 
 simple purpose of inquiring into the condition of our agri- 
 cultural population, and my first step has generally been, 
 when I have wanted guidance, to inquire right and left for 
 those who know most about the people. In one district I 
 had a consensus of opinion pointing to a chimney-sweep as 
 the man who had the most intimate knowledge of the 
 village labourers, and to the chimney-sweep I went — only to 
 find, by-the-way, that the good man had no opinion of 
 " them newspaper chaps," and would have nothing to do with 
 me. Alas, for the dignity of the fourth estate ! If I had 
 been assured that a village rector or a zealous young curate 
 had been manifesting a special interest in the homes and 
 lives and wages of the poor, I should certainly have com- 
 passed sea and land to get at him. I know one village 
 where, I am informed, a young curate of this character really 
 created a stir among the labourers around. The farmers 
 immediately raised such a disturbance about the rector's 
 ears that the young curate had to clear out bag and baggage. 
 
THE PEOPLE AND THE PARSONS. II/ 
 
 " Now let me understand," said a vicar to me last night, 
 " before I say anything, is my name to appear ? " " Cer- 
 tainly not if you object to it." " Well, I do object. You 
 see," continued the vicar, settUng himself back in his chair 
 more at his ease, " I am dependent on the rent of my glebe 
 for my living. It has already been reduced by two-thirds of 
 what it used to be, and if I offend the farmers the other 
 third will go. I have a wife and family to think about." It 
 was right candidly put, and if I further add that in one 
 parliamentary division I was in, in which there were a 
 hundred and twenty-seven parishes — all of them with one 
 clergyman and some of them \yith two or three — there were 
 only eight parsons to be reckoned on the popular side of 
 politics, it will, I trust, enable some of my angry critics to 
 understand why it has been that when I have wanted to get 
 at an actual knowledge of the people, I have had, as a rule, 
 to go, not to the parson of the parish, but to " rabid Dis- 
 senters." 
 
 I started from Steventon, a large and pleasant old village 
 a little way down beyond Didcot, on the Great Western 
 main line, in company with a Radical shoemaker, who I 
 had previously heard had been making himself such an un- 
 mitigated nuisance in his own locality that I felt sure there 
 must be grit in the fellow. He was, I found, a Wesleyan 
 "local preacher,'' a Sunday-school superintendent, a fighting 
 politician, a regular " firebrand " among the labouring people 
 about there. This turbulent and irrepressible shoemaker had 
 had the audacity to poke his nose into matters pertaining to 
 village charities and the management of common land let 
 out in allotments, and had been stirring up the people to the 
 assertion of their rights. For this outrageous conduct he 
 had actually incurred that enmity of the surrounding farmers 
 which the candid vicar dreaded, and his cobbling business 
 went. He had had two customers left till lately, but they 
 were labouring people, and they knew their master, a farmer. 
 
Il8 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 objected to their dealing with him, and they supposed they 
 must give him up. He is now trying to make a living out 
 of a bit of land, but fears they will get him out of the 
 place yet. And yet that man is an upright, conscientious, 
 philanthropic, and eminently useful labourer among the 
 villagers for miles round. Himself a poor man struggling 
 with difficulty, he had nothing to give them ; but he had 
 been fighting the poor men's battle, had walked miles every 
 Sunday to preach to them without fee or reward ; he 
 thoroughly understands the people, and is in entire sympathy 
 with them, and the consequence is that they trust him and 
 talk over their troubles with him. I found that everybody 
 knew him, and he knew everybody and all their circum- 
 stances. Himself a totally uneducated man, he has for years 
 been travelling the country all round as the advocate of the 
 free education which the Tory parsons were opposing with 
 all their powers. I am dwelling a little on these points 
 because this man is typical, and because these matters of the 
 established and the unestablished teachers and preachers are 
 vitally bound up with the life of the village. I am told that. 
 I have been hard on the parsons, and that I seem to have a 
 prejudice against them. I have no such prejudice. I declare 
 emphatically that I would ten times rather have it in my 
 power to speak in respectful and appreciative terms of a 
 village clergyman than be compelled to make him an object 
 of ridicule and disparagement. I do not forget that he may 
 have his own burden to bear, his own personal griefs and 
 anxieties ; and I am not altogether incapable of realising the 
 state of intellectual and moral isolation in which some of 
 them are placed, and which in some of these outposts of our 
 civilisation must put all that is best and strongest in a man 
 to the severest strain. Here and there I have had glimpses 
 into clerical life in our villages suggestive of much that 
 should entitle those concerned to sympathy and forbearance. 
 I don't wish to attack nien whose circumstances I do not 
 
THE PEOPLE AND THE PARSONS. II9 
 
 know and whose characters I may misjudge. But though as 
 
 men I would rather let them alone, as State functionaries and 
 
 office bearers they must be judged by their public utility ; 
 
 and I cannot be wrong in pointing out the mischiefs of a 
 
 system which puts into the position of teachers and guides 
 
 and guardians of our rural population men who may be very 
 
 excellent, but many of whom are utterly unfit for their duties. 
 
 Let me illustrate what I mean. I went last evening into 
 
 a certain little village which I had passed through the day 
 
 before. It was charmingly situated, and looked delightfully 
 
 pleasant and pretty ; but if you came to look a little narrowly 
 
 into its condition you could see poverty and decay written in 
 
 every feature of it. In point of wages, it was the poorest place 
 
 I have been into all along — all through the year, except just 
 
 at harvest time, nine shillings a week. I strolled about among 
 
 the cottagers and talked with them at their doors, and later 
 
 on in the evening I had quite a little gathering around me 
 
 under a tree spreading over the roadway, discussing their 
 
 troubles. There was nothing essentially different from what 
 
 I had met with in scores of other places, only there seemed 
 
 here rather more general depression. How did they live on 
 
 nine shillings ? They didn't live. It was a lingering death, 
 
 the people said. Bread and potatoes had been their food 
 
 all through the winter, and they hadn't had enough of that. 
 
 At least a dozen men in that place had been out of work 
 
 altogether in the winter-time. As to the cottages, I was 
 
 assured there were not three good ones in the place, and I 
 
 heard of the utmost wretchedness last winter. The wind 
 
 had blown them pretty nearly out of their beds, and the 
 
 snow had come in upon them. One poor woman, shortly 
 
 after her confinement, had had the stairs break under her, 
 
 and had badly injured her breast, and was ill for a long time. 
 
 And now winter was coming round again, and they seemed 
 
 to have had hardly any harvest. What with machines and 
 
 the wet weather and the stinting of labour, their earnings 
 
120 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 had been less this harvest than they had ever known before, 
 and how they were to pay their rent and clear off their 
 accounts with the shopkeeper, heaven only knew. It was a 
 dismal little conference altogether, but it was not quite all in 
 one tone either. From out of the darkness under that 
 spreading tree came one or two stern and resentful voices. 
 How was it all? There was plenty of land, and it used 
 to maintain a good many more people. Why shouldn't it 
 again ? Were people to starve and rot in dog-kennels 
 because the farmers couldn't or wouldn't employ them on 
 the land? Something would have to be done or there'd 
 be a row. 
 
 Well, there were the people full of grievances, embittered 
 by suffering and anxiety, chafing under a sense of injustice 
 and unmerited hardship. There were the people ; yonder 
 were their ramshackle houses that they couldn't pay for; and 
 all around, spread out beneath the solemn stars, were the 
 broad acres that would keep them in comfort and compe- 
 tency, ay, and if well tilled would keep the squire, the 
 parson, and the lord of the manor too. But now everything 
 was all wrong ; the village was dwindling away and rotting ; 
 the charities had gone astray ; wages had gone down ; the 
 people were in misery and anxiety and degradation. I 
 noticed that the women were given to swearing — a sure sign 
 of a wretched and demoralised village. There was no 
 reading-room, no sort of amusement, no meeting-place at all 
 but the church and the public-house. And what had the 
 parson to say about it all ? Even in such a wretched 
 place surely an earnest and well-qualified man might have 
 made himself heard and felt a little. Of course he knew all 
 about them ? Of course he was indignant that these unfor- 
 tunate people were so vilely housed and cruelly underpaid? 
 He was full of sympathy with them, no doubt, and if he 
 couldn't say all he would like, of course he could say enough 
 at least to let them all feel that he sided with them and 
 
THE PEOPLE AND THE PARSONS. 121 
 
 suffered with them ? Well, I called upon him, and he was 
 good enough to give me a little instruction in these things. 
 It was all, he explained, a matter of supply and demand. 
 These people were really making more than nine shillings 
 a week, and if they weren't there was nothing to compel 
 them to stay in that village. There was nothing to 
 prevent their going elsewhere And this was the good man 
 whom the Church of England had planted in the midst of a 
 population such as I found here, with the strict injunction 
 to address them twice a day on Sundays as " Dearly beloved 
 brethren," and to be 
 
 " In his duty prompt at every call, 
 To watch and weep and pray and feel for all." 
 
 I hope I was civil to the reverend gentleman, but I didn't 
 stay long. 
 
 I was the next day in a neighbouring village, where 
 wages were a shilling higher, and here, again, I had heard 
 the most distressing stories of the difficulty of living and 
 the discomforts of home life. Here, again, times were 
 harder than they used to be. Here was the same dreary old 
 story of land badly cultivated, of labourers thrown out of 
 employment, of cottages that had been pulled down, and 
 young men who had gone away. I was taken into the 
 houses and shown where the wind, whistling through the 
 crevices, had actually blown the paper off the walls, and one 
 woman told me how last winter she had had to knock her 
 neighbour up in the middle of the night to borrow some 
 sacks to cover up her children with because the rain had 
 saturated everything about them as they lay in their beds. 
 She pointed to a delicate-looking daughter who had been 
 brought to death's door, as the doctor said, from want of 
 the common necessaries of life, and she had the most 
 piteous tale to tell of illness and privation and suffering. 
 Another woman, less vehement, but hardly less full of 
 grievances, told how she had had a daughter lying at the 
 
122 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 point of death, and of her anguish when the doctor ordered 
 beef-tea and brandy, and she couldn't get it, and there was 
 not a friend in the village to whom she could run in her 
 extremity. This woman explained in the most intelligent 
 and circumstantial way how it was that they were 
 earning less this autumn than they have ever done before, 
 and I found that every indication I met with and all sorts of 
 testimony pointed to this as the general condition of the 
 labouring poor of the village. 
 
 Well, and what had the parson here to say about it 
 all ? I called upon him, too. A large and beautiful house, 
 a most courteous and polished gentleman; everything 
 suggested that he would be eminently fitted to take spiritual 
 and educational charge of this village. I had heard of his 
 refusal to make the rectory a relieving-office, and I knew of 
 one child at least running about the village unbaptised in 
 consequence of his refusing to respond to an appeal from a 
 sick-bed. But I did not feel altogether willing to endorse 
 some of the opinions I had heard expressed about matters 
 of this kind. It is shocking to see the extent to which the 
 people in many of our villages are degraded by weak and 
 injudicious alms-giving, and a firm stand of this sort is by 
 no means inconsistent with sympathy and earnest effort. 
 But I had seen a good many cottages, and I had listened 
 to a good many tales — discounting some of them, of course 
 — and I was convinced that in this village also earnings were 
 dreadfully low, cottages in a shocking condition, population 
 going down ; surely something must need putting right, and 
 the rector would have a decided opinion about it all. Well, 
 he had. He was decidedly of opinion that a man with 
 seven or eight children couldn't be said to have to live on 
 ten shillings a week, because two or three of them would be 
 sure to be earning something. He thought it would be 
 much nearer the mark to put down the wages at fifteen 
 shillings, and referred to the report of a Royal Commission 
 
THE PEOPLE AND THE PARSONS. 1 23 
 
 in years gone by which made out the income of labouring 
 men to be seventy pounds a year. I was assured that, 
 though poor, the people have a surplus for amusements. 
 They could go up to the Exhibition, and occasionally had a 
 day at the sea-side, and a cigar on Sundays. And a great 
 deal more to the same effect. In short, the rector, I found, 
 looked at the whole subject from the squire's and the 
 farmer's point of view, and I understood quite well how it 
 was that " somehow the parson and the people didn't seem 
 to hit it." I left that gentleman and made my way out of 
 the village, musing much on that room full of poor, rough, 
 ignorant fellows amidst whom I had stood last night. It 
 was the taproom of the public-house. One little paraffin- 
 lamp shed out a feeble light over the uncouth company, all 
 enveloped in a dense cloud of rank tobacco smoke. Old 
 men were there and boys, and one or two girls and a woman 
 or two. They were drinking, of course, but they were all 
 sober enough, and presently came a thumping of the grimy 
 wooden tables with the bottoms of the empty quart pots, 
 and somebody was going to oblige with a song. A square- 
 built, sturdy man stepped into the middle of the room, took 
 a draught of his beer, and broke forth in a husky, rugged 
 voice with "The Labouring Man." 
 " You Englishmen of each degree, one moment listen unto me, 
 To please you all I do intend, so listen to these lines I penned. 
 From day to day, you all may see, the poor are frowned on by degree, 
 But then you know they never can do without the labouring man." 
 Chorus — 
 
 "Old England ofttimes leads the van, 
 But not without the labouring man. 
 
 " The labouring man will plough the deep, till the ground and sow the 
 
 wheat. 
 He'll fight their battles when afar ; fear no danger nor a snare. 
 But they are looked upon like thieves by those who are kept at home 
 
 at ease ; 
 And every day throughout the land they try to starve the labouring 
 
 man," 
 
124 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 " Have you any sort of reading-room or any kind of evening 
 entertainment for the men in the village?" I asked the 
 rector, as I parted with him. " No," he replied ; '' we used 
 to have, but we have given it up." But the publican keeps 
 on. What a pity it is the publican won't do the giving up, 
 and the parson the keeping on ! 
 
 LETTER XVIII. 
 
 THE VILLAGE PUBLIC-HOUSE. 
 
 October 3. 
 
 The village public-house is an institution which will have 
 before long to receive a good deal more attention than it 
 has hitherto done. It is a subject upon which — if one may 
 judge by some of the letters that have reached me — it seems 
 to be extremely easy to lose one's head and to pour out any 
 amount of intemperate nonsense. There is, I suppose, no 
 question with any of us as to the evils of drink, and there 
 have been times in the course of my village exploration 
 when I have been sadly impressed with a sense of the 
 formidable obstacle the wretched habit of beer-drinking — as 
 a mere habit and not from any necessity — must present in 
 the way of all efforts at social amelioration in rural districts. 
 Again and again, with wearying monotony, I have been 
 assured that it is of little use to give the labourer better 
 wages, for it will only mean that there will be more money 
 for the public-house ; and again and again I have met with 
 facts that seem to give support to this doleful foreboding. 
 " Do you get a company such as this every night ? " 1 in- 
 quired of an intelligent young village publican. " No," he 
 replied, " it's mostly Fridays and Saturdays this year.'' "Not 
 much money about, I suppose ? " " No. You see it's a bad 
 harvest for them. With a good harvest there would be 
 
THE VILLAGE PUBLIC-HOUSE. 1 25 
 
 pretty good trade all the week." Said a village blacksmith, 
 " They don't very often get drunk ; but they would if they 
 could. How be they to get drunk out of ten shillings a 
 week, and a family to keep V I am very much afraid it 
 is deplorably true that if by any dead lift you could add 
 half-a-crown a week to the wages of every labourer in the 
 kingdom, one at least of the immediate effects would be to 
 pour in a stimulating shower of gold to every brewery in 
 the kingdom, and to afford the means for a good deal of 
 drunkenness. Only old fogies of a specially stupid type, 
 however, would think of arguing that therefore it is of no 
 use to endeavour to improve the position of the labourer. 
 He will certainly have to be better paid, and, like the 
 rest of us, he must be free to get drunk if he will. 
 He will have to find out for himself the mischief and 
 the misery of it, and it will be for moralists and philan- 
 thropists to help him to acquire habits of sobriety and self- 
 restraint. 
 
 How this can best be done is a problem which should 
 engage the serious attention of every Liberal in the kingdom 
 and every religious teacher in the villages. I have been 
 through some places, as I have before stated, in which 
 landowners have in their own high-handed fashion sought to 
 make their tenants and labourers sober by refusing to have a 
 public-house on their estates. Whether they have ac- 
 complished this object or not 1 have no means of judging. 
 But even if they have, it is not a method that will be likely to 
 commend itself to Liberals. It savours a good deal too much 
 of the autocratic and despotic. Whatever objection there 
 may be to making men sober by Act of Parliament, there is 
 certainly a far more valid objection to making them sober by 
 the act of a domineering squire. Whether the majority of 
 any community ought to be invested with the power of 
 putting down public-houses in their midst may be a question 
 fairly debatable ; whether such a power ought to be in the 
 
rat) Life in our viLLAohs. 
 
 hands of any one man in a village, be he who he may, seems 
 to me to be a question which no Liberal should hesitate for a 
 moment to answer by an emphatic negative ; and where, as 
 in many cases, the village inn is forbidden, and no meeting- 
 place of any kind is provided, it is an exercise of the 
 grossest tyranny. If public-houses of the present type are 
 to be shut up, most certainly something better should be 
 substituted; and if the conversion of the people to 
 temperance and sobriety could be effected without any sort 
 of coercion, and simply by gaining them over to higher 
 interests and better associations, I think we must all feel 
 that the 'social advance made would in every way be more 
 real and substantial. I am bound to say that the little 
 institution set up by Lord Wantage, to which I have already 
 referred, struck me with especial admiration. It was neither 
 more nor less than a comfortable little public-house, man- 
 aged, I take it, virtually on the Gothenburg system ; that is 
 to say, it was estabhshed merely for the public convenience, 
 and without any object of making money out of it. As I 
 explained, the manager of it has a fixed salary, and has no 
 inducement to push his business, and will be just as ready 
 to serve a customer with a plate of soup as a glass of beer. 
 The villagers may go there and smoke their pipes and chat, 
 and, if they please, may take nothing at all, and anything 
 approaching drunkenness would be discouraged. Of course, 
 this will not by any means satisfy all our more zealous 
 teetotal friends, but even they must admit that if all our 
 village publics could be advanced thus far in the pathway of 
 improvement, it would be a great thing. 
 
 Earnest teetotal advocates will naturally regard with 
 more approval the other village institution described in a 
 previous article, the pretty and attractive little place set up 
 by Miss Brooke in Coombe. This, it may be remembered, 
 is to be a sort of literary institute and lecture-room and 
 concert-hall and place of entertainment for the people of the 
 
THE VILLAGE publil-hovse.. 127 
 
 village, who may get here anything they want except intoxi- 
 cating drinks of any kind. Of course, it would be a great 
 thing for this village and the neighbourhood if all the people 
 would take kindly to this beautiful little social home thus 
 liberally provided for them ; and if by-and-by the managing 
 committee should be able to report that the attractions of 
 their new public-house have succeeded in entirely emptying 
 the old ones, and compelled them all to shut up, it would 
 be a matter of great encouragement to social reformers 
 throughout the land. I do not care to predict failure, but I 
 could not help noticing, as a significant fact, that Miss 
 Brooke had among her cordial well-wishers and sspporters 
 one of the four or five publicans of the place. The worthy 
 man, no doubt, wished to please the lady, and knew his 
 customers too well to be seriously alarmed at anything she 
 could do on tea and coffee and ginger-beer. The place is 
 admirably designed for the improvement of the people, and 
 ought to succeed, and, no doubt, will effect much good in 
 course of time ; but the people will require educating up to 
 it before many of them can be brought within the sphere of 
 its influence. 
 
 Another beautiful example of a village public-house, or 
 club, I visited a day or two ago at Gaydon, in Warwickshire. 
 This a gentleman resident there, an ardent philanthropist 
 and Radical reformer, has had the public spirit to put up at 
 a cost of about a thousand pounds. It is altogether a 
 beautiful little place, comprising a large and pleasant hall, a 
 pretty little octagonal committee-room, a refreshment-bar, 
 and a residence for the caretaker. The hall is of wood. 
 Externally it is of split larch, employed in rustic fashion ; 
 within this is a layer of felt and an inner boarding of stained 
 pine or something of the kind. The interior decoration is 
 simple and effective. There are maroon curtains at the 
 windows, artistic photographs on the walls, and a dado of 
 matting all round gives an appearance of comfort and finish. 
 
128 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 On the floor are tables and chairs in polished black wood ; 
 there are two handsome sideboards, and the ornamental 
 mantelpiece is of solid oak. At one end of the room is a 
 platform with a piano upon it, and over this platform is 
 the only inscription about the place ; it is in gold letters 
 on a red ground — " God and the People." Ordinarily 
 this hall serves as a reading-room, and is supplied with a 
 library of books and with magazines and papers. In 
 the winter-time it is too large to be quite cosy and 
 comfortable, and arrangements are made for screening 
 in a large floor-space round the fire with thick cur- 
 tains, the lighting being effected by bright-looking little 
 metal lamps with white opal shades. Now and again 
 concerts are given, by the aid of such talent as may be 
 available in the neighbourhood, and twice or three times in 
 the course of the winter evenings a village ball is held. It 
 is a village club to which members have to pay an entrance 
 fee of sixpence and a penny weekly subscription, the 
 management being vested in a committee of the members 
 themselves, with the donor of the building as chairman. 
 Under this committee the refreshment-bar is, of course, 
 managed, and they have found it, upon the whole, expedient 
 to sell both beer and tobacco. Mineral waters, too, are 
 supplied, but nothing else. I understand that tea and 
 coffee were tried, but there was little or no demand for 
 them The place, of course, is not used during the day-time, 
 the people being out at work, and it has been found that 
 after their work they go home to tea, and if they turn in 
 here for an hour or two in the evening they don't want 
 more tea, but prefer a glass of beer. The supply of it, 
 however, is strictly limited to three glasses. It is contended, 
 and I am bound to say I think with great force, that by 
 having no intoxicating drinks a large number of those whom 
 it is most desirable to get to a place of this kind will be 
 repelled. If they are inclined for a glass of beer they will 
 
THE VILLAGE PUBLIC-HOUSE. 1 29 
 
 certainly have it, and if they cannot get it at their reading- 
 room they will simply go to the village public. I think I 
 understood that at first fhe limit for beer was placed at two 
 glasses, but subsequently was altered to three ; but, notwith- 
 standing this, it is a most instructive and significant fact that 
 the consumption of beer per head of the members of the club 
 has steadily declined since the opening of the place. This is 
 a very interesting fact, but not, I think, at all a surprising one. 
 It is indeed exactly what might be expected. Men who 
 would fuddle indefinitely or as long as money held out in 
 the public-house, where everybody was drinking and where 
 there was no diversion but drink, would find themselves in 
 a place of this kind in a different moral atmosphere. There 
 would be other interests, there would be no idea of 
 having to drink " for the good of the house," there would 
 be sure to be some who would drink little or nothing, 
 and gradually and ijisensibly they would then be brought 
 to think less of the drink as essential to an evening's 
 pastime. This system certainly commends itself as a com- 
 promise between the unlimited sale of drink on the one 
 hand, and the entire prohibition of it on the other, and if in 
 every village such a place of public resort could be estab- 
 lished and maintained for a few years, the effect would be 
 incalculably good. Alas ! how is it to be done, or anything 
 approaching it ? Where is the philanthropist in every village 
 who will give ;^i,ooo — as has been done in Gaydon ; or 
 collect six or seven hundred, as has been done in Coombe ? 
 And if they are put up, who will maintain them ? The 
 Gaydon institution, I am told, costs about ^£,20 a year to 
 maintain. There are many to whom it is thought that the 
 entrance fee and weekly subscription are a bar ; and even 
 with them the expenses cannot be raised without the aid of 
 the liberal benefactor who has created the place, and who 
 has to contribute a yearly subscription of eight or ten 
 pounds. Yet some such social centre as this will have to 
 I 
 
130 upe in our villages. 
 
 be provided in every village if civilisation is to make much 
 headway among the people ; and the means of providing it, 
 and maintaining it, and managing it, will have to be regarded 
 as one of the problems for our local government councils 
 before the world is much older. 
 
 LETTER XIX. 
 
 THE VILLAGE SUNDAY. 
 
 October 6. 
 How does the village spend its Sunday? I yesterday de- 
 voted one of the most delightful of autumn days to a quiet 
 stroll from place to place in order to see. I had got into 
 Buckinghamshire by the south, and on Saturday evening 
 found myself in the pleasant little town of High Wycombe. 
 The good people of Wycombe are very proud of their place 
 and its busy factories, and of its development of late years. 
 I was told, I think, that they make a chair every four 
 minutes, that fifty thousand pounds a year is taken by the 
 Great Western at the little station here, and I had hints at 
 a quarter of a million of money's worth of business being 
 done every year in its staple industry. But yesterday all 
 was as peaceful as the morning sunshine. Its factories were 
 at rest ; its shops, of course, were closed ; no vehicle dis- 
 turbed the slumberous stillness of its streets, and as I passed 
 out in the direction of West Wycombe, quiet folk, in their 
 best clothes, and with something of the Sunday rest in their 
 faces, seemed to be streaming towards its churches and 
 chapels. Soon I leave Wycombe and its sunny streets and 
 tinkling church bells behind, and I am out in the open 
 country. 
 
 "Mute is the voice of rural labour, hushed 
 The ploughboy's whistle and the milkmaid's song.' 
 
THE VILLAGE SUNDAY. I3I 
 
 I, too, catch something of the restfulness of the day, and 
 I would fain for a few peaceful hours drop the troubles of 
 labour, and the price of allotments, and the shifting of the 
 people, and see a little of Hodge in his Sunday clothes, and 
 quietly observe the way in which he spends his one day of 
 rest. It is not, however, an easy matter to do this. I make 
 a casual inquiry of a woman — the first person I speak to — 
 as to an old church, and in two minutes I am once more 
 under the doleful douche of a sad story of trouble and 
 anxiety. They are going to have a sale in that neighbour- 
 hood next week. A big landowner is giving up farming, 
 and everything is to be sold off. She is very sorry for her 
 neighbours. The man has worked on that farm most of 
 his days, and now he is getting on in years he has got to 
 turn out with his wife and family and find a new home and 
 new work. He has been to one or two hiring fairs ; but 
 what 's the good ? Nobody will take on an old man like 
 him, especially now that the harvest is mostly over. What 
 a pathetic figure — a man who has laboured all his life and 
 lived honestly and respectably, now that his grey hairs and 
 bent form begin to tell of the coming on of age, standing 
 there in the market-place waiting for somebody to come 
 and save him from the dreaded workhouse ! All he wants 
 is a mere hovel and the privilege of working hard for ten or 
 eleven shillings a week, and these he can't get. He has to 
 stand mutely by while younger and stronger men are en- 
 gaged, and then go sorrowfully to the home from which he 
 must soon turn out into the bleak world. The woman I am 
 talking to has her own trouble also. Her husband is engaged 
 in the chair-making, like so many more in this part , but that 
 has been poor of late. It isn't like what it used to be. 
 Machinery, she thinks, accounts for this. Anyhow, her 
 husband' in years gone by spent sixty pounds in tools for 
 doing work all of which machines now do, and there are the 
 tools indoors all rusty and useless, and it is of no use trying 
 
132 UFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 to sell them, for it is the same with other people as it is with 
 them. She has written to a sister in Austraha asking her to 
 help them out to that part of the world. Things are getting 
 worse here. 
 
 I see only two other people in the course of a couple of 
 miles' walk, and they are labourers on the land. A cheery 
 greeting and an inevitable allusion to the weather and the 
 remainder of the harvest, and once more I am in for a 
 story of discontent and change. The farmers treat their 
 men like dogs, but, says one, he 'd put up with that if they 'd 
 pay them fairly ; but they won't, and he for one is going the 
 first chance he can get. Five times as much could be 
 fetched out of the land if it were only well done. But he 's 
 had enough of farming and is for the town. It is rather a 
 relief to shake off the two rustics and their grievances, and 
 turn up a green lane between hedges all alive with birds, 
 and bedizened with hips and haws and the scarlet berries of 
 " lords and ladies," and honeysuckle still flaunting its blos- 
 soms out in the sunshine. The birds, at all events, are 
 prosperous and happy, the long-drawn-out harvest having 
 enabled them to take their tithes at leisure, and they are 
 now busy gleaning along all the hedgerows where the laden 
 waggons have trailed their burdens, and left a part behind 
 them. The larks are carolling this morning as though it 
 were May instead of October, and the rooks here and there 
 are as blythe and as noisy as though they were busy nest- 
 building. 
 
 And now my path winds away into the beech woods for 
 which the neighbourhood of Wycombe is famous, and which 
 have given facilities for the special industry of the place. 
 What a glorious scene of peace and beauty ! A dazzling 
 flood of sunshine steeps the tree-tops that rustle against the 
 deep blue, lights them into amber and gold, smites their grey 
 trunks into columns of silver, and dapples the russet carpet 
 of leaves with flecks of quivering light. On my left the 
 
THE VILLAGE SUNDAY. 1 33 
 
 wooded hillside stretches upwards against the sun, and 
 down an opening avenue comes a broad torrent of sunshine 
 sweeping along a pathway all vivid moss and dainty hare- 
 bells, and yellowing ferns, with here and there a belated 
 foxglove, and myriads of tiny cobwebs still wet with dew, 
 and shining like frosted silver. My footfall is in the softest 
 of moss, and only the dreamy hum of insects and the gentlest 
 rustle in the tree-tops break the Sabbath stillness of those 
 pompous and majestic aisles. But listen ! I am nearing 
 the verge of the wood. Yonder is a soft curl of smoke, and 
 through the trees the village green gleams out under the 
 blue, and from the further side comes a droning of some 
 musical instrument under the hand of an inexpert player. 
 It is the Sunday-school harmonium doing its best to give 
 out a tune, and presently a company of sweet young voices 
 come swelling across the greensward in a bright and spirited 
 hymn. How entirely right and natural and fitting comes 
 the sound of praise and adoration in those solemn avenues. 
 Standing there under the quivering canopy of autumn 
 foliage one cannot but feel that life is beautiful if it is only 
 simple and healthy and free from pressing care ; and when 
 the little ones come trooping out in their Sunday finery and 
 bright little faces, and hand in hand quietly disperse over 
 the green, or stroll into the shadow of the beech woods, or 
 away down the village, one feels that it is a thousand pities 
 that children should ever be brought up in the stony streets 
 of towns. What matters that some of their bits of finery 
 are threadbare, and that some of their shoes turn up at the 
 toe because they are two inches too long, and may probably 
 belong to their mothers? Who cares about their boots 
 ■when their faces look so pleasant and happy as they jog off 
 with the turf beneath and the sun above, home to the 
 dinners, which at this time of year are sure to be plentiful, 
 though frugal enough ? Outside the chapel railing are two 
 or three of the men of the village smoking meditative pipes 
 
134 l-lP^ IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 and watching the pretty groups of children. I and they 
 are soon chatting things over, and how can we help coming 
 again on to the old ground ? It is wages and work and 
 homes and life in the winter, and the farmers and their 
 doings. Quite unasked for by me, and altogether inci- 
 dentally, I am told how all the land about there is in the 
 hands of four or five farmers ; and an intelligent operative 
 who works in Wycombe but lives out there tells me how 
 within his recollection one after another five farms have 
 been taken into one, and so it has been all the way round. 
 He ridicules the idea of farming not paying. The fact is, 
 lots of people are farming who never ought to have had 
 anything to do with it. If it doesn't pay, why are all these 
 farms snapped up by big men as soon as they are given up 
 by incompetent little ones ? I make some inquiries about 
 the habits of the people, and am assured that if there is any 
 drunkenness in the village it is on the part of those who 
 come out there from other places — people who come out 
 pleasure-taking in the summer time. The villagers them- 
 selves don't get drunk. Service there in the morning? 
 No, there is now only Sunday-school for the children. 
 There 's service afternoon and evening. The greater part oi 
 the people go ; but there is no church within two miles, and 
 some of them don't go anywhere. Yes, that man 's off to 
 preach at the next village, and there are friendly greetings 
 as the preacher in black clothes and a clerical wideawake 
 and the beaming face of one who has had a good dinner 
 bustles across the green and disappears down the slope like 
 a ship going out to sea. We discuss a little the sweet- 
 smelling stocks and the great clumps of scarlet dahlias and 
 the luxuriant verbenas, and then I move on, but am soon 
 again in conversation with four men, seated like so many 
 crows on the top of a fence, each burly fellow with a short 
 clay pipe in his mouth. They have had dinner, and now 
 they are doing a siesta on the top rail, while the children 
 
THE VILLAGE SUNDAY. 1 35 
 
 play about them in and out of the cottage-doors close at 
 hand. Yes, it was pleasant enough then ; but I should try 
 it in the winter, when there was no fire in the grate and 
 nothing in the cupboard. And so on, all over again. There 
 was the man at the end tliere, with six children, and the 
 biggest not older than that boy of ten or eleven there, and, 
 taking it throughout last year, they didn't average eight 
 shillings a week. There were eight of 'em, and a shiUing 
 apiece ! And that's how people Hved. "Ah," broke in a 
 rugged, gaunt-looking fellow, taking out his short pipe from 
 his mouth, "and t' other day when a colt kicked my boy's 
 brains out and I went to the parish to ask 'em to bury 'im, 
 they told me as I ought to have money enough to do it 
 myself" Up here in this delightful borderland between 
 Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire there were just the same 
 stories as I have found almost everywhere else, and these 
 men seemed quite eager to discuss things. Nowhere there 
 about their homes could they get a bit of allotment. 
 One of them had been down in the direction of Marlow, 
 and he declared — I don't know how truly — that some of the 
 people down there had got bits of ground at a shilling a 
 pole, or eight pounds an acre. But up round their cottages 
 they couldn't get it at any price. The most intelligent of 
 the partv was a man who had lived some years in Newcastle. 
 He had seen shiploads of coffins come in ready made from 
 foreign parts, and doors and window-sashes and chairs: 
 That was the reason trade had been so bad all round 
 there, because things that ought to be made at home were 
 made abroad and imported. He was for putting a tax on 
 ready-made imports, while admitting raw material free. I 
 am afraid this man's view is typical of that of a large number 
 of countrymen, who sit on fences on Sunday afternoons and 
 brood over their troubles and the causes of them. No 
 ripple of the late proceedings at Newcastle had apparently 
 reached this little colony. 
 
136 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 Away again through the lanes and highways, past or- 
 chards and broad expanses of stubble, and by wayside 
 grass plots where the gipsies are encamped— looking so 
 delightfully picturesque in the distance, and so disgustingly 
 dirty and degraded close at hand — and I presently turn in 
 for a bit of lunch into a village inn, where I find the land- 
 lord's face somehow curiously familiar. He is a countryman 
 who years ago went to London, got enrolled in the City 
 Police, where he served up till a year or two back, and 
 has now settled here with a pension of something over a 
 pound a week. Put this object-lesson against the other poor 
 man whom I have described as sticking to his plough, and 
 now when his best days are over with the winter and the 
 workhouse staring him in the face, and we have a good 
 illustration of what is continually drawing away Hodge from 
 the land. Out again and along the gleaming white road, 
 past the open cottage doors where babies in their best bibs 
 and tuckers are seated on the mat, while father sits on guard 
 just outside with his pipe. Doors are open back and front, 
 and one can see through across the red-brick floor into the 
 garden behind, still gay with dahlias and geraniums, Michael- 
 mas daisies and marigolds, with here and there a well-laden 
 apple-tree. Rest — in perfect rest and quiet — that is the 
 best way to express the manner in which all the villagers 
 seem to be spending the beautiful autumn Sunday. Mother 
 in her Sunday clothes sits just inside the house or out in the 
 little front garden, and father is leading the youngest little 
 toddler up and down the road holding to one of his fingers. 
 Here and there a book or a newspaper may be seen in hand, 
 and as the bells tinkle out for afternoon church or chapel the 
 harmonium begins again to drone out upon the breeze, 
 fathers and mothers and children saunter quietly out over 
 the green with books under their arms, past the flocks of 
 grey geese that strut and cackle as boldly as though Michael- 
 mas had quite gone, and as though the big shining holly- 
 
THE VILLAGE SUNDAY. 1 37 
 
 trees were not already furbishing up their berries for Christ- 
 mas. Not a wheel in the roadway disturbs the quiet ; old 
 horses and skittish ponies put their velvet noses over the 
 glistening blackberry-bushes and sniff at the passer-by as 
 though they know it is the day of rest, and can afford a 
 little impudence ; and sunburnt young rustics, in black coats 
 and with flowers in their button-holes, are wooing buxom 
 lasses by the roadside. How lovely the country is as the 
 sun sinks and the shadows lengthen. Look at that little 
 hamlet there, nestling in the hollow, with the furze bushes 
 scrambling about the broken slopes. The whole place 
 looks to have grown there as naturally as the fungus growth 
 about an old tree trunk, and out beyond it the russeting 
 woods stretch away to the blue hills. And presently comes 
 the journey's end, and Stokenchurch, just within the boun- 
 daries of Oxfordshire, is reached in time for a cup of tea 
 and a stroll into the queer little church before service be- 
 gins. The bell ropes hang down from the odd little slated 
 tower into the nave below, and while I am looking round 
 and the sexton is trimming the oil lamps, the discordant old 
 bells ding-dong-ding their call to worship, and a large con- 
 gregation — as large, at least, as the church will hold — comes 
 streaming from all quarters, while the Salvation Army and 
 two or three chapels are also gathering their people together. 
 I have gone out of the church for a short time, and when I 
 return the vicar and choir are moving up to the nave, and a 
 processional hymn is being sung heartily by the whole con- 
 gregation. I have observed the notice board in the porch of 
 the church, and I have been struck by the signs of vigorous 
 church life in this out-of-the-way village— mothers' meetings 
 and Dorcas meetings, and guilds and societies and bands of 
 hope, and many other movements are indicated here, and 
 I am not surprised at the bright and hearty way in which 
 the service goes, though some of it is not to my own taste. 
 But what a prig one must be if because he couldn't admire 
 
138 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 the way in which the vicar intones the prayers, he failed to 
 recognise the evident earnestness and kindly feeling and 
 practical good sense of his sermon. He talked about help- 
 ing one another, and a right cheery, stirring, and helpful 
 sermon it was. And then he got out of the pulpit, and — as 
 he had done all through the service — sat down to the organ 
 and led his people in their singing of two hymns, in which 
 everybody sang. The vicar here seems to be greatly liked. 
 But what about the drink on Sunday ? Well, I am de- 
 scribing what comes under my own observation, and to-day 
 I have seen nothing of its evils. I have had my cup of tea 
 at an inn at which I was assured they did the best business, 
 and I was curious to see what would be going on there in 
 the evening. I came out of church, therefore, and betook 
 myself to the tap-room to await the vehicle that was pre- 
 sently coming for me. There were four or five people 
 quietly smoking their pipes and with their mugs of beer 
 before them ; but they were chatting in the most orderly 
 and peaceful way, and if I may judge of them by what 
 occurred at another village inn at which I presently arrived 
 for the night, they would in an hour or so finish their chat 
 and their beer, and go quietly home, and before ten o'clock 
 the village would have come to the close of an autumn 
 Sunday, so beautiful in its peace and pleasantness, and 
 invigorating restfulness, that it couldn't but intensify one's 
 feeling of regret that this rural population here, as every- 
 where else, dwindles year by year. 
 
139 
 LETTER XX. 
 
 DEATH IN THE VILLAGE. 
 
 October 9. 
 More rustic cottages, more flowery gardens, more laden 
 orchards, and grassy slopes and smiling meadows and 
 bubbling springs and carolling larks, and blue skies and 
 playful breezes. Surely life in yonder little place is healthy 
 and happy and prosperous ! How charmingly it is situated 
 on that swelling hill ! How beautiful its handsome church 
 beams down in the brilliant afternoon sun from its slight 
 eminence amid the trees ! How prettily the neighbouring 
 rectory peeps out in its garb of dark-green ivy and crimson 
 Virginia creeper from amid its shrubs and tall trees and 
 trimly kept turf ! Away yonder towards the setting sun is 
 some of the finest pasture land in England, and though the 
 River Thame has overflowed its banks and flashes along 
 now a great swelling flood across the verdant meadows, it 
 does but give life and added beauty to the scene. What 
 could be prettier or pleasanter, more peaceful, more 
 smilingly contented ? 
 
 Alas ! alas ! look at that churchyard. There are three 
 little newly-made graves side by side, and dotted about the 
 ground are three or four others, and up yonder in the chapel 
 graveyard at the top of the village are two or three more. 
 And in ever so many of those picturesque cottages are 
 hapless Uttle mortals smitten for death and lying feverishly 
 tossing there in an atmosphere foul and pest-laden, for all 
 the health-giving breezes that are gambolling about the 
 mossy roofs and tossing the hollyhocks and Michaelmas 
 daisies outside. The rector's children have been hurried 
 off, and so have the curate's, for the village is smitten with a 
 virulent plague, and already a dozen deaths have darkened 
 the homes here, and In all probabihty many more must 
 
I40 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 follow. Two hospital nurses have been brought down by 
 Baron Rothschild, whose estate is in the neighbourhood, 
 and who has another village, to which the outbreak may 
 easily spread, close to his gates. But one of them has been 
 stricken down with the disease, and the other seemed in 
 such peril of it that both have had to be withdrawn. As I 
 set out from Aylesbury this afternoon, however, two others 
 were there only awaiting the medical officer's orders to go 
 and step into the deadly breach and bravely grapple with 
 the dread malady. Ever since the spring there have been 
 symptoms of virulent blood poisoning among the villagers, 
 old and young, and at length diphtheria broke out in its 
 worst form. The rector, the Rev. P. L. Cautley, whom 
 many will know and greatly respect as formerly the Vicar of 
 Southwold, has been here only a short time, and is only 
 just recovering from a serious illness, and I found him 
 to-day still feeble and suffering and full of anxiety. He may 
 well be so. I went through the village in company with 
 the gentleman who has been acting as curate during the 
 rector's illness, the Rev. P. H. Case, and I found really a 
 very painful state of things. In one cottage a woman, who 
 looked herself almost too ill and exhausted to stand, and 
 the hard, dry, stony look of whose eyes told a terrible tale 
 of anguish and suffering, came out of a little stifling den of 
 a room adjoining her living room, and told us that one 
 child was lying dead in there and another one ill. There 
 was another child about, and the watchfulness and care 
 necessary to keep this other little one out of harm's way 
 evidently bore heavily on the poor woman's heart. How is 
 it possible for these people to isolate cases of infectious 
 illness in such houses as theirs? A large proportion of 
 the cottages in this village are ruinous and filthy and ought 
 to be swept away. Some of them have no sort of ventila- 
 tion in their bed-rooms. Windows are fixtures, and will 
 not open, and some of the bed-rooms that have these 
 
DEATH IN THE VILLAGE. I4I 
 
 fixed windows have no fire-places, so that when three or 
 four or five people go to bed in them they soon become 
 insupportably foul. I went into one room in which there 
 was only one bed, and in this I was assured had Iain a 
 woman who had been confined only a fortnight, and she had 
 had with her in bed the baby and two other children, one 
 of them ill with diphtheria. A month ago, she told us with 
 quivering lip, she had four children. The only one left was 
 the newly-born child. Three had been taken. Of course 
 the people themselves are excessively foolish — almost as 
 foolish as we all were about matters of infection a generation 
 ago. Even where isolation is practicable they cannot be 
 made to understand the necessity for it, and those of them 
 who might be supposed to know better seem capable of 
 great folly. One of the children belonging to the Baptist 
 Sunday-school died, and they actually brought down some 
 of the other children to the infected cottage, and if it hadn't 
 been peremptorily forbidden would have had them carry the 
 coffin out to the grave. In this village of Quainton there 
 are probably five or six hundred people. Looking round 
 the place I should say a good half of them are housed in 
 ill-constructed ramshackle cottages, utterly unsatisfactory in 
 times of health. When sickness of an infectious or con- 
 tagious character breaks out, the wonder is that it doesn't 
 sweep the village. Ay, and worse than that. The fact is 
 we are all so linked together, town and village, in one way 
 and another, and every year becoming more so, that it is 
 difficult to assign any limit to an outbreak of this kind. To 
 say nothing of the commercial interests between London 
 and this particular district, I was informed by a highly-placed 
 ofificial on the railway here that something like fifty children 
 had this summer been sent down into this very village for 
 their summer holiday from London. One of the fifty — so 
 at least I was credibly informed— was on Monday last 
 carried back to town in a coffin hermetically sealed. I give 
 
142 LlPE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 these statements as [ received them, and they appear to me 
 to be probably true ; but circumstances did not permit of 
 my verifying them. If they are true, there must certainly 
 have been the grossest carelessness somewhere, for this 
 village has been known to be in a suspicious and unhealthy 
 condition since the spring. Quite certainly one little victim 
 was sent home to London in his coffin ; whether he was one 
 of the visitors sent down for a holiday I cannot say 
 positively, nor do I feel confident about the number, but 
 there were unquestionably some there this summer, and an 
 attempt has been made to attribute to these little strangers 
 the outbreak of diphtheria. The responsibility foi it, how- 
 ever, cannot be shirked in this way. 
 
 The fact is this village of five or six hundred people is in 
 a scandalously filthy condition. The cottages are old and 
 badly constructed, and some of them are packed together in 
 a way suggestive of London slums. Numbers of these ought 
 to be pulled down, and their materials carted out into an 
 open space and burnt. They are said to be alive with 
 vermin ; and the description I had of the condition of some 
 of the poor children when they came to be laid out for 
 burial is too sad to be given here. The village seems to 
 have a good water supply from the springs on the hill 
 behind it ; but even this seems to want some scientific 
 attention. I was struck by the number of cases in which 
 women to whom I spoke were suffering from goitre. I am 
 informed that it is extremely common in the village, and 
 that it is probably attributable to something in the nature of 
 the water supply. It is now, I understand, under analysis. 
 But whatever may be said of the water, there can be no 
 doubt that the site of the village is literally saturated with 
 sewage. The position of the place on the hillside would 
 render it the easiest thing in the world to drain it most 
 effectually, and with good water and efficient drainage, and 
 comfortable cottages, Quainton might be, and ought to be, 
 
b&ATH IN THE VILLAGE. 143 
 
 one of the prettiest and healthiest villages in the kingdom, 
 as one day, with a good village council to look after its own 
 affairs, it undoubtedly will be. At present the place can 
 scarcely be said to have any drainage at all. There is some- 
 thing in the nature of a drain running down through the 
 place, but it was probably never intended for anything but 
 surface water ; into this, however, the house drains seem to 
 have been conducted, and I suspect that if it were opened 
 it would be found in many points to be a festering mass of 
 sewage enough to poison an army. The people say that the 
 smell from this straggling drain has all the summer been 
 dreadful, and the first case of diphtheria broke out in a 
 house under which this pestilential little channel passed, 
 while the others, one after the other, have been dotted along 
 its course. The outpourings from it stagnate down on the 
 lower fringe of the village. 
 
 Who is responsible for this state of things, and for 
 the deaths that have resulted from it, and will result 
 from it? The Aylesbury Board of Guardians, unhesitat- 
 ingly. Guardians, forsooth ! Of whom or of what have 
 they been the guardians ? Why, of the pockets of the 
 farmers and squires of their own class. Have they taken 
 any reasonable interest in these five or six hundred 
 unhappy villagers committed to their guardianship ? 
 I have a positive assurance that when some time ago a 
 letter was sent to them calUng attention to the dreadful 
 state of some of these cottages they didn't so much as read 
 it. I am credibly informed that they have some sort of a 
 standing order by which all such letters are not to be read 
 at the Board but to be taken as read, and passed over to 
 their district sanitary inspector - to the ofificer, that is, whose 
 action — or inaction — may very likely be impugned. But 
 whac about the Board's medical officer ? Well, they have a 
 medical ofificer, a clever, and, I hear, a very popular young 
 practitioner of Aylesbury. On the death of his predecessor 
 
144 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 a few months ago he took to his large practice and succeeded 
 to his official post. He would do, there cannot be the least 
 reason to doubt, all that a medical man in extensive private 
 practice can do, and all that can reasonably be expected for 
 the emoluments of his office. He seems to be now working 
 with great zeal and energy and no little anxiety to grapple 
 with the legacy of mischief left him in Quainton. But the 
 rational and satisfactory course is, as I pointed out early in 
 this series of articles, such as the combined boards of 
 Chelmsford and Maldon have adopted. They have appointed 
 a thoroughly well-qualified man to the charge of the sanitary 
 condition of their districts, giving him such a salary as will 
 enable him to devote his whole time and attention to his 
 duties. Quite apart from the direct action of such an 
 officer, his educational influence with the people is immense. 
 They say these people in Quainton are stupid and ignorant. 
 Why, of course they are. How can modern ideas of in- 
 fection, of germs and molecules, and the diffusion of gases, 
 and that kind of knowledge, percolate down to these poor 
 cottagers ? Nothing struck me more forcibly when I was 
 the other day going a round from house to house with Dr. 
 Thresh, of Chelmsford, than the instruction he was giving 
 and the intelligence he was awakening on the importance of 
 pure water and fresh air, and careful drainage, and such 
 matters. It is just what these people want — someone con- 
 tinually moving about among them pointing out what is 
 wrong, and explaining why it is wrong, and authoritatively 
 insisting on its being put right for the sake of the com- 
 munity if not for themselves. Most of these boards of 
 guardians are wretched failures for every purpose but that 
 of protecting themselves against any increase of rates, and it 
 is quite time that at least many of their functions were handed 
 over to popularly-elected councils. Another illustration of 
 the need of such bodies to deal with purely local affairs was 
 afforded in the course of the efforts that were yesterday 
 
DEATH IN THE VILLAGE. I45 
 
 being made to obtain some sort of hospital to which these 
 poor suffering children might be removed, and the plague 
 be stayed by isolation. The village school had, of course, 
 been broken up, and the schoolroom could have been con- 
 verted into a convenient and comfortable hospital ward. 
 Application was made to the Education Department, and 
 after I forget how many days of deadly delay, there came 
 the curt reply to the effect that my Lords of the Privy 
 Council had no power to grant the permission. It was 
 feared at Quainton that if the schoolroom were taken for the 
 purpose without permission, they might permanently lose 
 their grant or be compelled to put up another school, and 
 when I left them yesterday they were anxiously endeavouring 
 to elicit by letter and telegram from " My Lords " in White- 
 hall a statement as to whether they would by-and-by con- 
 sent that the room should again be used as a school if care 
 were taken properly to disinfect it. With a village council, 
 this purely local matter could have been settled in an hour, 
 and probably would have been settled weeks ago and many 
 a life saved. The village schoolmistress, Mrs. Reeves, 
 made heroic efforts to nurse the stricken children before the 
 arrival of the nurses ; and Mrs. Cautley, the vicar's wife, has 
 had an extremely hard and anxious time. The most unselfish 
 and ungrudging assistance has also been given by the local 
 squire. Captain Pigott, and Mrs. Pigott. Infinite trouble 
 and expense and worry, besides suffering and death, brought 
 into many a poor home ; and all might have been avoided 
 if, when the people complained that they were being choked 
 with foul smells, and their complaints were forwarded to 
 their precious guardians, those guardians had paid as much 
 attention as they would have done if they had had a hint 
 that some poor hungry wretch had been snaring their 
 rabbits. We want village councils badly, and we'll have 
 them, too, before the world is much older. 
 
146 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 LETTER XXI. 
 
 VILLAGE HOUSE-MOVING. 
 
 October 15. 
 
 This series of articles must shortly be closed. It is not 
 that the subject is by any means exhausted. There are two 
 or three considerations which render it unadvisable to 
 prolong it much further, else there are many other points in 
 connection with village life that might be touched on. I 
 am not sure, for instance, that it might not be well worth 
 while to inquire a little more closely than I have been able 
 to do into the possible effect of a further development of 
 our postal system in ameliorating village life. There seem 
 to me to be many ways in which some of that huge profit 
 made by the Post Office every year might be advantageously 
 employed in bringing town and country into closer touch 
 with each other. Then again there is a wide subject for 
 inquiry presented in the provision made for the medical 
 needs of the village. I have heard some piteous stories of 
 the difficulty of getting the doctor in times of extremity and 
 even in cases of ordinary sickness. I know one poor fellow 
 who lay on a bed of sickness and suffering for ten days 
 before they could get a doctor to see him, all this time his 
 family around him being on the brink of starvation. Country 
 doctors, as a body, seem to me to be among the most heroic 
 and self-sacrificing of men. Many of them could scarcely 
 lead the lives they do if they were not actuated by a great 
 pity for human sorrows, at least as much as by any hope of 
 payment. If they are willing to sacrifice time and strength 
 and comfort in attendance on patients from whom there is 
 scarcely even a remote chance of ever getting a shiUing, all 
 honour to them. But I do not know what right we have to 
 blame them if they are not willing. Why should doctors be 
 expected to work for nothing any more than lawyers or 
 
VILLAGE HOUSE-MOVING. 1 47 
 
 tradesmen ? It will of course be said that for the poor of 
 our villages there is the parish doctor. A great deal might 
 be said about this. In one of the most wretched places I 
 have met with I found a poor woman lying at death's door 
 from a most agonising malady, for which the parish doctor 
 was visiting her once a week. It was true, probably, that 
 nothing could be done for her ; but who doesn't know the 
 relief and satisfaction of having a call from the doctor, even 
 though the case may be hopeless ? This ooor creature lay 
 in pitiable suffering, her husband out of health and out of 
 work, and she would have been without nurse, as well as 
 doctor, but for the charity of another almost as poor as 
 herself, who, in much anxiety for the family of children she 
 herself had left at home, was, when I called, hobbling about 
 the cottage on a crutch, ministering as well as she could to 
 the comfort of the dying woman and her children. But it 
 is by no means to be assumed that the parish doctor is 
 always available even once a week. What may be the rule 
 with Poor Law Guardians generally I do not know, but I 
 was assured in one village that a man who had not less th?n 
 ten shillings a week, and more than five children to support 
 out of it, was not deemed to be entitled to the parish doctor. 
 He must pay for his own medical attendance ; and a 
 respectable mother of a family I talked with seemed half 
 crazy with anxiety over a bill of two pounds for medical 
 attendance that had thus been incurred, and for which the 
 doctor had warned her he could only give her a month's 
 credit. She had four or five children. Her husband had 
 regular work at ten shillings a week, and might have done 
 pretty well only that the arbitrary and inconsiderate treat- 
 ment of his employer had prevented him working a little 
 extra at harvest time this year. 
 
 Another phase of rural life has presented itself to me 
 during the past week or so. You cannot go far along 
 country roads just now without meeting waggons piled up 
 
148 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 with the goods and chattels of farm hands changing quarters. 
 They are carters and shepherds mainly who are exchanging 
 one master for another. They have been to some Michael- 
 iiias hiring fair, and have got fresh places, and here they are 
 jogging about the country with their tables and chairs, and 
 beds and boxes, and wives and children heaped up on the 
 new master's waggon. I don't know whether it is another 
 indication of agrarian unrest and unsettlement, but I am 
 told that this autumn there is a very unusual number of such 
 changes. Carters and shepherds are among the rather 
 better paid of farm hands, and in some districts I hear that 
 masters have been trying to lower their wages, while the 
 men themselves have not only resisted any such attempts, 
 but have been demanding some improvement, and in some 
 localities I hear that they have been successful. In some 
 parts of Oxfordshire, for instance, where the unionist emis- 
 saries have been stirring up the people, I hear that there 
 has been a decided advance. It is about there that I found 
 the greatest number of removals. Some of these little 
 family cavalcades, with their pots and kettles, and cradles 
 and hen coops, have looked forlorn and desolate enough — 
 more so, perhaps, than they really were. One unlucky 
 wight in the neighbourhood I was in yesterday had had a 
 dire disaster. He had stuffed the family wardrobe and all 
 the bed linen into a sack, and as they had gone bumping 
 and jolting along the country roads it had somehow tumbled 
 off, and they had lost it all. Search and inquiries were 
 alike fruitless, and he had been going all round the neigh- 
 bourhood trying to buy postage stamps enough to send on 
 for an advertisement in a local paper. The postal au- 
 thorities, by the way, had fixed up a letter box conveniently 
 enough, but had ingeniously made no provision for the sale 
 of stamps except at the post office, which had evidently 
 been located for the special convenience of the squire and 
 the clergyman, right at the far end of the village. This was 
 
VILLAGE HOUSE-MOVING. 1 49 
 
 a Minsler Lovel, the scene of Feargus O'Connor's famous 
 experiment in land settlement, and I was assured that many 
 of the people for whom the wall box had been fixed, if they 
 wanted stamps, found it most convenient to go down into Wit- 
 ney, somewhere about three miles off. Such removals as I 
 have been describing are of course common enough in town as 
 well as country. Neither in town nor country, however, is any 
 exceptional disturbance of the kind a healthy or satisfactory 
 sign of the times. It means pohtical disfranchisement, 
 social uprooting, a certain demoralisation, and a good deal 
 of discomfort. These people whom one meets about the 
 country roads just now are, almost all of them, occupants 
 of their employers' houses, and are liable any week to be 
 turned out neck and crop from home and employment if they 
 do not please their masters. Beyond the power themselves to 
 turn out and find another place, and jog off as these people 
 are doing now, they have absolutely no independence in 
 any shape or form. One man told me that not only did 
 his master insist on his being up by a certain time in the 
 morning, but did his best to compel him to go to bed at a 
 certain time at night. Another said that he and his master 
 had fallen out because his — the labourer's — wife seemed 
 likely to be affecting the next census returns to an extent 
 the farmer didn't approve of. As an intelligent country 
 woman said to me, in reference to these waggon loads of 
 furniture : How can people take any pleasure in their 
 homes, or their gardens, or their employment, when they 
 are always liable to be turned out at a week's notice ? It is 
 of no use to offer them allotments and security in their tenure 
 of them unless they can also have some security in the 
 occupancy of their homes. But, then again, what is the use 
 of security in their homes unless they have some sort of cer- 
 tainty about employment ? 
 
 And, talking of homes, I am reminded how very inade- 
 . quately I have been able to convey the truth as to large 
 
i^O LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 numbers of them. Last week I was in one of the pleasantest 
 and prettiest villages I ever saw. Its gardens and trees and 
 babbling brook, spanned by little bridges, its open green- 
 sward stretching up the hillside, and its creeper-covered 
 cottages together formed a sweet little picture ; while the 
 church and the parsonage at the hill foot was suggestive of 
 intelligent oversight and friendly care for the people. Yet 
 those people were wretchedly poor. As to the cottages, 
 some of them I was shown by the people occupying them 
 were ruinous to the last degree. They were saturated by 
 rain, the winds blew through and through them, and one at 
 least was in such a perilous condition that the lad who had 
 to sleep in the back bedroom didn't like going to bed there. 
 He couldn't keep warm, and he was afraid the roof would 
 fall in upon him. One hole in the thatch the woman had 
 stopped by thrusting in a great bundle of old clothes and 
 rags, but the rain poured in, and the winds whistled through 
 the cracks in its walls, its timbers looked to be parting, and 
 how in the world it can have stood — if indeed it has stood 
 — through the gale of the past few hours, I am sure I do 
 not understand. Why, then, hasn't the sanitary authority 
 condemned the structure ? Well, the sanitary authority, 
 such as it is, has condemned it. But what is the good ? 
 There is not another house of any kind that this respectable 
 working-man's family can creep into. If there were, they 
 would only be too eager to get into it without any 
 " authority." One gets sick of talking about these rural 
 boards and all their ways and works. The whole business 
 of sanitary management and medical supervision is a hideous 
 farce. I showed in my last article how one of these precious 
 boards dealt with a letter calling attention to a state ot 
 things that ought to have had instant attention, and how at 
 least a dozen deaths have resulted from their inaction. 
 Here is another " Sanitary Authority " under which this 
 pretty village and its tumble-down cottages are placed. 
 
VILLAGE HOUSE-MOVING. Ijl 
 
 They have a district twelve miles broad and fifteen miles 
 long, and comprising twenty-nine villages. To look after 
 this great rural district the Local Board of Guardians pay a 
 medical officer forty pounds a year ! And they themselves 
 devote every month half-an-hour to sanitary matters — just 
 six hours a year ! If, in seeking to be elected to the office 
 of Guardian, they had any sense of the responsibility they 
 were incurring, or any humanitarian intention whatever, how 
 could they trifle in this ridiculous fashion ? 
 
 Another word or two as to the drink question. I set 
 out with the expectation of finding that drink played a very 
 prominent part in the social affairs of the village. I had no 
 sooner begun this series of articles than I got letter after 
 letter giving some very painful evidences of it. I have been 
 very agreeably surprised to find practically none. Let me 
 again remind the readers of the Daily News, many of whom 
 I know feel very strongly on this subject, that I am referring 
 simply and solely to those parts of the country through 
 which I have been moving, and that I am speaking only of 
 what has come under my own observation. Judging by 
 that, it is certainly difficult to entertain any reasonable doubt 
 that the temperance propaganda has in many ways, direct 
 and indirect, been more successful than is commonly 
 supposed, and that combined with the general rise in intel- 
 ligence and education, which is invariably allowed to be the 
 main cause of the exodus from the country to the town, it 
 has really effected a great change in the habits of our 
 peasantry. Take one simple fact. I have now for over two 
 months been moving continuously through the rural parts of 
 Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Buck- 
 inghamshire. It has been during harvest time, when the 
 people have a little more money in their pockets than at 
 other times of the year, and in a great many cases I have 
 mingled with the company in the bars and taprooms of 
 village inns and beerhouses. Yet I have seen only one 
 
152 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 solitary case of drunkenness among them. That they drink 
 far too much to be good for them, and that they injure and 
 impoverish themselves and their families, is only too ap- 
 parent, but they do not get drunk as they did. On Sunday 
 evenings I certainly expected to find the public-houses in 
 the villages full and noisy. I am bound to say — and I am 
 heartily glad to be able to believe it — that the village drink 
 trade presents many indications of rapid decay. In Stoken- 
 church I was told by the men idling on the village green on 
 Sunday evening that there were seventeen or eighteen 
 hundred people in the parish and sixteen public-houses, but 
 I heard on all hands that they were none of them doing the 
 business they did, and a good many of them might as well 
 shut up. On the Sunday evening I was there I did not see 
 or hear the least indication of drunkenness. I did not, it 
 is true, stay there till closing time, but I drove on to 
 another village, where also the supply of public-houses was 
 ridiculously out of proportion to any possible need ; there 
 was equal quiet and good order. In the taproom of the inn 
 I stayed at for the night they were sitting enveloped in the 
 usual cloud of smoke discussing the size of their potatoes 
 and the temperature of the previous night, and when closing 
 time came they quietly bade each other good-night, and in 
 ten minutes the whole place seemed to be asleep. 
 
 Talking of closing time, I was very forcibly reminded of 
 the foolish people who are so apt to prate about the impos- 
 sibility of making people sober by Act of Parliament, one 
 night when in the midst of a laughing, swearing, guzzling, 
 chorus-singing company of perhaps thirty or forty men. 
 There was not one of them giving any sign of drunkenness, 
 but filthy-looking pots of beer— for one of which I was 
 compelled to pay, on penalty of having to pledge the com- 
 pany in the vile stuff they had three or four of them been 
 slobbering into — pots of beer kept looming through the 
 smoke in so rapid a series that it seemed impossible that 
 
CONCLUDING LETTER. I 53 
 
 it could go on much longer without such signs, when the 
 landlord put his head in and said, "Closing time, please." 
 I had forgotten the earlier hour of. the closing for the 
 country, and could not doubt that by eleven o'clock that 
 taproom must have become a pandemonium, and half the 
 company must have gone reeling home. But ten o'clock 
 had come, and the blessed Act of Parhament put a stopper 
 on lho,se quart pots . and bade the company clear out. 
 There wasn't a word of objection — not a murmur. It was 
 merely that bedtime had come. They finished their song, 
 swallowed off their beer, bade each other good- night, and 
 in a quarter of an hour the whole place was as still as 
 death. I went to bed that night musing on the practicability 
 of still further curtailing the hours of sale. Ten o'clock is 
 at least an hour later in the villages than eleven is in London; 
 and, if the publics could be closed at nine, which is fully 
 late for going to bed when villagers are at home, another 
 important step would have been taken in the moral and 
 material elevation of the people. I am reminded by the 
 singing of the Salvationists under the window of the room 
 in which I am writing, that wherever I have been I have 
 found these people strenuously battling against drink and 
 degradation, and I am strongly inclined to attribute to them 
 and their efforts much of the improvement to which I have 
 been testifying. 
 
 LETTER XXIL 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 October 19. 
 After two months of continuous movement about the 
 country, the one dominant, all-significant fact appears to me 
 to be the evolution of large farming. Of this tendency I 
 could have given any number of illustrations only that it 
 seemed unnecessary to keep on accumulating evidence as 
 
154 i-IPP- IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 to a fact which nobody seems to dispute. Of course the 
 agglomeration of small farms into large ones is not universally 
 the case. Here and there I have come across localities 
 where there seemed to be some tendency the other way. 
 But I can confidently say that wherever I have been such 
 cases are quite the exception, and that the general movement 
 is from small farms to large ones. 
 
 How is this to be regarded? Is it an outcome of the 
 times likely to be permanent, or is it merely a passing 
 phase of agriculture, due to temporary causes which two or 
 three good seasons and certain changes in our land laws 
 may remove ? In studying this question of the land and 
 the labourer, it surely must be important to come to a right 
 decision on this point. If some modification of law and a 
 general reduction of rents, and perhaps a little better luck 
 in the seasons, may be expected to break up these large 
 farms again and re-establish the middle-class farmer in 
 prosperity, then possibly the labour question may right 
 itself If rents go down and capital is made more secure, 
 and farms multiply, labour may be in greater demand, wages 
 will tend to rise ; and, with lower rents and better markets, 
 higher wages would be easily given, while some amendment 
 in the Acts relating to cottages and allotments may do all 
 that is really requisite in promoting the comfort and 
 prosperity of the agricultural working-man. If, on the other 
 hand, this large-scale farming is not due merely to temporary 
 causes, but is really attributable to the operation of those 
 same economic forces which are producing gigantic businesses 
 in every other department of commerce, then it may be — 
 indeed it must be — that under existing circumstances this 
 depopulation of the land will go on and accelerate, and it 
 we mean to check it, nothing short of a total change of our 
 agricultural system will avail us. Modifications of laws and 
 reductions of rent may for a time stave off the necessity for 
 such a change, but cannot finally avert it. What are the 
 
CONCLUDING LETTER. 155 
 
 probabilities of the future ? " You must remember," said a 
 shrewd country solicitor to me the other day, " that these 
 big farmers, although they are at some disadvantage as 
 compared with smaller men, can do with a profit that a 
 small farmer couldn't live upon. Many of them don't do 
 with their land as well as they might do, but they get 
 something out of it, and if they can farm on a sufficiently 
 large scale they can make an income." The large agricul- 
 turists are doing, in fact, exactly what the large houses of 
 business in all the towns of the kingdom are doing — doing 
 a " cutting trade," making small profits on a large turnover. 
 Turn to almost any trade you please in London, and you 
 will be told that profits are not what they were ; that if you 
 want to make the same income you made a few years ago 
 you must do three or four times as much business. Great 
 concerns are the order of the day everywhere. A small man 
 is rapidly finding his position becoming more and more 
 difficult, and in business circles nobody appears to have the 
 slightest expectation that these great concerns will ever again 
 give place to small ones. You will be told in the City that 
 this is due to the stress of increased competition, and that 
 is just what I am everywhere told in the country. A few 
 years ago the farmers were so thriving that the margin of 
 cultivation was extended. Incomes could be made out of 
 very inferior land. But our agriculturists are in competition 
 with all the world, and profits are not what they were. 
 Nobody, so far as I am aware, predicts that this stress of 
 competition is hkely to slacken ; on the contrary, the general 
 apprehension is that as communication opens up and trading 
 facilities develop it will become constantly keener. There 
 will be fluctuations of course, and farming is peculiarly liable 
 to them ; but the general drift of things will tend to reduce 
 profits, to make everything cheaper and cheaper for the 
 consumer. Farmers will require the benefit of the best laws 
 and ample capital, and the best methods. But competition 
 
IS^ LIl'E IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 will go on and profits will go down, and operations will be 
 larger and larger. So, at least, I hear it contended. 
 
 Now, if that is really the fact, it will be just as well to 
 recognise it, and not to waste our time in endeavouring to 
 put back the tide with our mops. In those sleepy hollows 
 in which I have been roaming, one cannot help occasionally 
 doing a little day-dreaming. I have been specially inclined to 
 it sometimes when lingering about the old churches with their 
 crumbling walls and ivy-mantled towers and slumbering grave- 
 yards — 
 
 " Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap." 
 
 Again and again, from some such resting-place, I have found 
 myself looking out over the harvest fields, pondering on the 
 marvellous social and industrial developments that have 
 taken place since those old churches first gathered the 
 peasantry into their quaint shadows. One looks back on 
 those primitive folk in their total isolation from foreign 
 lands, with their small clearings, their simple husbandry, 
 their rude implements, their ignorance of science, and their 
 crops scantier and punier than we are very well able to 
 realise. The centuries have crept on ; the light of science 
 has been kindled, and hasburnt brighter and clearer. The 
 whirr and the rattle of mechanism have risen higher and 
 higher, and one's thoughts wander away yonder to the land 
 of the setting sun, where so much of our corn is now grown. 
 At harvest tide it is no longer the local peasantry who are 
 called into action, but great cavalcades of men and horses 
 and machinery sweep over the vast yellow plains, clearing 
 all before them like great flights of devouring locusts. 
 Everything is done by machinery — ploughing, sowing, reap- 
 ing, binding, carrying, threshing, grinding, or storing in 
 granaries — all is a matter of mechanism. Musing on this 
 farthest development of agricultural enterprise, and looking 
 backward and forward and all around — reflecting on the 
 momentous fact that in our own country farming seems to 
 
CONCLUDING LETTER. I 57 
 
 be moving on towards something of the same gigantic scale 
 — listening to the whirr of the very same machines rising 
 higher and higher from our own fields, and krjowing that 
 every year men are obliged to move off into the towns to 
 make way for them, one can only stand silent and awe- 
 stricken under the sweep of forces as calm as the midnight 
 stars, as irresistible as the tide, and as regards all our preju- 
 dices and prepossessions, as pitiless as the tempest. Look- 
 ing backward and forward and around, one would fain hope 
 that the gradual unfoldings of our social system may show 
 us how we may bring science and mechanical invention to 
 bear, not for the accumulation of useless wealth in the hands 
 of the few, but for the good of the many and for the eman- 
 cipation of all the toiling sons of men. Who knows, I 
 have sometimes thought, but that that way lies our path, and 
 that these perplexing changes and movements are but the 
 loosenings of the old and the worn out in the grasp of 
 
 that— 
 
 " Divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough hew them how we will." 
 
 But, after all, there is the undoubted fact that large 
 farming is not in all respects advantageous farming. Acre 
 for acre, as at present conducted, it will not produce from 
 the land what the allotment-holder and the very small 
 farmer can fetch out of it, while it has the utterly disastrous 
 effect of driving our rural population into the slums of the 
 towns. In truth, neither the very large farm nor the very 
 small one is altogether satisfactory, while the medium-sized 
 farm — apparently having some of the disadvantages of both, 
 and not all tlie advantages of either — is disappearing. The 
 ideal system would be one which combined the large capital, 
 the fine machinei7, the scientific methods and business-like 
 management of the great farmers, with the thoroughness 
 and personal devotion of the small ones. It would, in fact, 
 be a large farm under the best possible management, in 
 
IS8 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 which everybody upon it took a personal interest and had a 
 personal share. There are many who believe that co- 
 operation in some form or other, and that alone, will fulfil 
 these conditions. I have talked with a great many who are 
 looking in this direction for a solution of the agricultural 
 problem. On the other hand co-operative farming is held 
 by some to be impracticable. It is certainly true that the 
 result of the one extensive experiment of which I have any 
 direct knowledge, appears on the face of it to support this 
 view. I went down into a midland county the other day to 
 inquire a little into the circumstances under which a bold 
 and promising enterprise of the kind had failed. The net 
 result of the experiment had been the loss of some thousands 
 of pounds, and what seemed to be a demonstration of the 
 futility of such schemes. For one or two reasons I cannot 
 give particulars of this enterprise. If I could, I think I 
 could show that it really demonstrated nothing of the kind. 
 One or two conditions absolutely essential to success were 
 altogether wanting, and failure under the circumstances 
 must have resulted under any system. 
 
 Yesterday I was at Chipping Norton, where I had un- 
 derstood the co-operative society had been engaged in 
 farming arable land for the supply of their own business. 
 This I find has been going on for six years, and the last 
 report upon the farm is " This department shows very satis- 
 factory results for 1890." It is true that it is on quite a 
 small scale — only 112 acres — and it has not yet been deemed 
 expedient to devote the profits to dividend, but there is the 
 principle successfully applied, and I was assured that there 
 would certainly be considerable advantage in working the 
 concern on more extensive proportions. This society is, of 
 course, but a small one in a small country town, only it 
 happens to be one of the very few that have tried farming. 
 In combination with it the members of the society are sup- 
 plied with provisions and grocery, ironm.ongery, boots and 
 
CONCLUDING LETTER. 1 59 
 
 shoes, bread, meat, and coals, and there is also a building 
 department to enable members to build or purchase houses. 
 Now, imagine a scheme of this sort developed to the pro- 
 portions of Lord Wantage's estate in Berkshire. Imagine 
 those two villages I described the other day with their 
 beautiful little homes and pleasant gardens, the finely tim- 
 bered park, the schools, and workshops, and reading-rooms, 
 and stores, and the great farm lands all around — every bit 
 owned by the people and worked by the people for the sole 
 benefit of the people, who elect their own officers and share 
 all the profits. Think of every man in such an agricultural 
 and industrial community absolutely fearless of everything 
 but public opinion and the law he lives under, cringing to 
 nobody, dependent on nobody, working for himself and the 
 public good, hailing with hearty satisfaction every new 
 machine, every advance of science, every economy in 
 method, since these things no longer tend to throw him out 
 of employment and keep down earnings, but rather to pro- 
 mote his wealth and lessen his toil. 
 
 My function in this series of articles has been mainly to 
 record facts, leaving the significance of them to the readers 
 of the Daily News. I should, however, be doing this with 
 little discretion or intelligence if in moving about the 
 country I failed to note the ideas and speculations I find 
 occupying the minds and stirring the hearts of many of the 
 most thoughtful and far-seeing of those I have met. There 
 are many who find in this collective action a most fascinating 
 conception of the method by which the people will by-and- 
 by be got back on to the land under the most favourable 
 conditions, and under the strongest possible incentive to 
 effort. Nothing has struck me more impressively than the 
 evidence I have met with, that even where the exactly op- 
 posite method is adopted, and men are put down into small 
 holdings to work in total independence of each other, one 
 of the very first fruits of their experience, where the men 
 
l60 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 are fairly intelligent or under intelligent guidance, is a co- 
 operative movement. I was in a neighbourhood the other 
 day where almost everybody seemed to have a plot of ground 
 for corn-growing. The whole landscape seemed dotted 
 about with Liliputian ricks that you might almost have 
 played leap-frog over. It looked quite ridiculous. " Can 
 this pettifogging little business possibly be in the line of 
 progress?" I asked myself, " or,'' as I have asked before, 
 " are we really going back to the thirteenth century ? " 
 "You see," said in effect a gentleman in the neighbourhood 
 with whom I afterwards talked, a philanthropist who had 
 himself done much to promote this small culture, " You see, 
 these men are in this way learning to co-operate." They 
 had in fact been discovering that tlieir isolated efforts were 
 made under all sorts of disadvantages, and they were form- 
 ing committees among themselves for the hiring of a plough 
 and a threshing-machine, and a cart for manure and so forth. 
 It would obviously be quite in the line of natural and pro- 
 bable development if by-and-by these men should club 
 together to buy a co-operative plough, to build a co-operative 
 barn, or to set up a co-operative cart to take the produce 
 home or send it to market. Already, I was informed, the 
 collective idea had made such advances in that neighbour- 
 hood that three villages were between them spending 
 ^17,000 a year at their stores ; and here in addition is the 
 germ of co-operative farming. 
 
 Let this sort of thing go on and what would be more 
 reasonable than that the local Council, which very shortly 
 these people will take part in electing, should acquire the 
 ownership of the land they are renting, and be entrusted 
 with the management of the ploughs and carts and threshing- 
 machines and barns for the common use ? What is more 
 likely than that, by-and-by, the Council should decide to lay 
 down a free tramway connecting the village with the nearest 
 town, thus mitigating that sense of isolation which renders 
 
CONCLUDING LETTER. l6l 
 
 village life distasteful to many, while promoting general 
 prosperity and giving to the whole community the benefit 
 of produce such as, to my certain knowledge, is now lying in 
 numbers of villages quite out of the reach of our markets ? 
 Whether the cultivators of the soil should still continue, each 
 working on his own little plot, subject to such general rules 
 as might be found necessary for the good of the community, 
 or whether it would be better to work as an organised whole 
 and on a grand scale, would be a detail that time and 
 experience might determine. Very possibly it might be 
 found that some crops — such as the great staples of food — 
 would be more advantageously cultivated on a large scale ; 
 while some vegetables, and fruits and flowers generally 
 would be best grown on a smaller system. There really 
 seems no inherent improbability that by this pathway of 
 joint harmonious working — not necessarily beginning in 
 the very elementary way just described, because it is not all 
 men who need such rudimentary lessons, but in some such 
 pathway of joint harmonious working — we may arrive at the 
 ideal village life, prosperous, intelligent, healthy, free, and as 
 happy as life can well be in a world like this. As for those 
 who croak about the character of the people, and pretend to 
 believe that this, that, and the other desirable thing cannot 
 be attained because the " labouring man " is so lazy and so 
 drunken, so ungrateful, so ignorant, so short-sighted — out 
 upon them ! What can be expected of people who know 
 little but penury and privation and hardship, and almost 
 entire exclusion from the many influences that have placed 
 these superior croakers themselves so high above all human 
 frailties and foibles ? I have no patience with people who, 
 as the Vicar of Ixworth says, appear to regard the " labourer " 
 as of a different order of being. Character, of course, is a 
 fundamental matter, and all who are labouring to elevate 
 and purify and dignify home life, to let in light and know- 
 ledge, and make men sober and self-restraining, are working 
 
1 62 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 at the very foundations on which the social fabric of the 
 future must be based. To do this is the great work of 
 the Church, and the school, and the platform, and the 
 printing-press. To prate as though it cannot be done is to 
 betray, not merely a want of faith in God or man, but a want 
 of common-sense. 
 
 I have now come to the end of the task I undertook, 
 though I have not visited all the localities I had marked 
 down. I have drawn some dark pictures of village life, but 
 in looking backward on my two months' ramble, it is not 
 the darkness that has most impressed itself upon me, but 
 the peace and beauty and fruitfulness of it all. My wan- 
 derings have deepened my love for the land I live in ; have 
 heightened my respect for the lowly virtues of its people ; and 
 — because I see the first tremors of a mighty movement 
 upwards and onwards — I have tenfold firmer faith in a 
 glorious future. 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 Some deductions from, and reflections and suggestions upon, 
 the correspondence on this subject. 
 
 The present relationship of landlord and tenant has failed to produce, 
 or to continue to produce, as a whole, owners who contribute to the 
 success of the farming industry in the manner they should do, tenants 
 with enterprise and confidence to make the best of the land, and 
 labourers content with their lot. 
 
 The ownership of land is a dignified source from which to draw an 
 income to spend in town and in the luxuries of life and in travel. A 
 due proportion of the rents is not spent in that constant and careful 
 development of the land which is necessary if farming is not, alone, to 
 stand still among the constantly-improving industries and ever-multi- 
 plying competition of the times ; nor are rents now spent to the extent 
 they used to be in the maintenance of the owner and his family upon 
 the estate. 
 
 Family settlements are largely to blame. How great a proportion 
 of the land is owned for life only, and heavily charged with family pro- 
 visions, so that the life-owner cannot afford to do other than extract all 
 he can during his all too short tenure ! Hence the owner does not con- 
 tribute his share of the capital of the farm in the shape of buildings 
 fitted for scientific farming, and of improvements the fruits of which are 
 to wait for. Facilities for land transfer and simplification of titles are 
 all very well and desirable, and landowners naturally do not object to 
 add to the value of their property at the expense of the lawyers' fees. 
 But it is clearly not near the root of the evil. And facility of transfer 
 will be equally impossible and useless unless the power of settlement 
 is once for all entirely put an end to, so that life-estates and com- 
 plicated titles may be impossible. The present much-vaunted powers of 
 sale by tenants-for-life do not help the free working of natural cause 
 and effect with regard to the dispersion of estates. The suggested 
 abolition of tithes and the relief of local taxation from imperial sources 
 are both steps in an absolutely wrong direction. They add to the 
 
1 64 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 rental value of the land at the cost of the tenant as a certain contributor 
 to the imperial taxes, and as a possible supporter of the Church. 
 
 The tenant lacks enterprise and confidence to farm in a manner to 
 pay. He holds too tenaciously to producing the low-priced commodity 
 of corn, instead of constantly seeking crops of higher intrinsic value, 
 such as the best fruits, vegetables, poultry and dairy produce, live 
 stock of the highest quality. Crops of higher value entail improved 
 appliances, greater cost in labour, and much and minute care. From 
 these the farmer shrinks — from lack of capital, lack of experience or 
 knowledge virith regard to them, and lack of a satisfactory law of tenant- 
 right. 
 
 It is said that large farms, scientifically cultivated, pay ; and the 
 order and promptitude on Lord Wantage's farm in hand is instanced. 
 But it must be recollected that few who have the very large capital 
 requisite for so extensive an undertaking care to embark it in farming ; 
 and though we admire the way in which such owners manage their 
 land, we know little of the financial results ; and farming on such a 
 scale, except under some co-operative or social scheme, seems altogether 
 beside the question. 
 
 Medium-sized farms are at a discount. The farm which pays, and 
 which attracts the right kind of tenant, is that of about sixty acres, on 
 which a man and his family take part in the work. But in these days 
 of scientific dairy-farming such farmers are under some disadvantages 
 in the manufacture of butter and cheese, and in the carriage of milk to 
 station or market. These disadvantages disappear before local co- 
 operative cheese and butter factories. Such works might fitly be 
 carried out by the parish under Parish Councils (as local authorities 
 supply gas and water), the profits being divided between those using 
 them, after payment of the low interest at which the parish could 
 borrow the necessary capital, and of the working expenses. And by a 
 little co-operation of the simplest kind between farmers, a great saving 
 could be effected in carrying milk and other produce to station or the 
 neighbouring town or factory. In numerous villages may be seen, any 
 day, half a dozen carts, each carrying a fraction of a load of milk, when 
 one good common-property waggon could collect and carry the whole 
 at a tithe of the cost to each farmer. 
 
 Fruit and vegetable culture should be taught in the village schools. 
 
 The training necessary for the acquisition of any knowledge is an 
 
 education. The acquisition of practical knowledge is surely as much 
 
 cultivation of the mental powers as the acquisition of a smattering of 
 
 nowledge beyond that which is rudimentaiy, and it is more congenial 
 
 nd profitable to the country boy and girl. The State gives the start 
 
APPENDIX. 165 
 
 in education ; the average boy would learn reading, writing, and arith- 
 metic, and acquire some slight knowledge of history and geography, 
 and would acquire thoroughly the practical knowledge which would be 
 of such use to him in life. What the clever boy acquires is simply the 
 foundation of future learning, the lever by which the world of know- 
 ledge and his future are opened. 
 
 What the labourer wants is higher wages and, most especially, more 
 constant employment. Consider the loss involved in fitful employ- 
 ment — even suppose wages, when earned, to be fairly high, quite as 
 high as the farmer under present circumstances can afford. The farmer 
 is at the cost of a high wage for the work performed, but to the 
 labourer the advantage of the wage is minimised by the fact that it is 
 only occasional. 
 
 The value of allotments insufficient for a livelihood is doubtful. 
 If a labourer has constant employment, he has neither the time nor the 
 inclination for the work necessary to cultivate an allotment. And, 
 except under favourable circumstances as to market, there is no sale for 
 much of the produce he would raise ; whilst for him to raise corn on a 
 small scale at the usual prices of flour ill repays his labour. His work 
 on his allotment frequently coincides with the period of his most con- 
 stant and profitable employment by the farmer ; and there is always the 
 danger that, if he eke out a subsistence by aid of his allotment, he 
 simply earns a higher wage by double toil. That he should have 
 garden ground to his cottage, on which to raise vegetables and fruit for 
 his family, goes without saying. Such he can manage without infring- 
 ing upon his time and wage-earning powers. 
 
 At present everyone is intent on growing something to sell to some- 
 one else. If a few were to think of growing what their own families, or 
 even their own district, required, there would be some saving in the 
 destructive cost of transit. You will be given American cheese and 
 Dutch eggs at an inn in a remote rural district — not because they can- 
 not be produced cheaper on the spot, but because every farmer in the 
 district is striving to produce something by which he can benefit the 
 railway companies, and has no time or thought for the production of 
 what is consumed in his house or at his door. 
 
 But how to provide the garden, the small fruit-farm, the small dairy 
 and general farm (every general farm should of course include fruit- 
 trees) with protection to the cultivator for his improvements ? Not by 
 purchase. That consumes in a low-paying investment the capital the 
 farmer requires for his work. But while the landowner must receive 
 every consideration for his vested interests so far as they are not detri- 
 mental to the general welfare, the cultivator must have land at a fair 
 
l66 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 rent, have ample security of tenure, liberty of cultivation and of sale foi 
 his improvements. It is ,to the aid of a local authority we must look, 
 and a properly representative local authority. Let the Parish Council 
 have power to acquire at a fair rent suitable land — say, (a) For a cow 
 pasture, in which it will let gaits ; {b\ for garden plots and the erection 
 of cottages ; (c) for small fruit and poultry farms, of a sire sufficient, 
 when highly cultivated, to maintain a family ; {d) for small mixed 
 farms. Give the authority power to take such lands at agricultural 
 prices, with a discount on account of the safety of the rent and the 
 reduction of cost of stewardship. Let a statement be drawn up of the 
 condition of the land and buildings, and let all improvements upon that 
 condition and in buildings, roads, fruit-trees, &c., belong to the local 
 authority. Provide a tribunal (the County Court) to determine the 
 rent and condition, and settle the statement when not agreed upon. 
 The local authority sub-lets without profit other than the necessary ex- 
 penses. It plants, builds, and improves, charging interest ; or the tenant 
 does the planting, building, and improving, or some of them, and has 
 of course free sale of his tenant-rights. Let the local authority have 
 power to establish centrally in the parish such of the following as 
 may meet the particular local requirements : — («) A butter and cheese 
 factory ; (y) a factory for making fruit cans and packages for fruit, 
 vegetable, and dairy produce ; (g) a jam or fruit canning factory ; {h) 
 a threshing and grist mill ; («') a public bath and washhouse ; (/) 
 reading, refreshment, and amusement rooms ; {k) workrooms for 
 local industries. Give the local authority I he care of the sanitation, the 
 roads, the commons, the schools. 
 
 In a village with such of these institutions as were suitable to its 
 soil and situation, every appliance for small culture might be produced 
 on the spot ; the villagers would almost maintain, and maintain well, 
 their families from their own land — they, or their neighbours, producing 
 flour, oatmeal, beans, fruit, vegetables, milk, butter and cheese, poultry 
 and eggs, beef and mutton ; they would pack and send off for sale 
 to the luxurious tovrasman the most perfect samples of their productions 
 at high prices ; and they would carry on such industries as the locality 
 was fitted for. 
 
 Although the great landlord-and-peasant idea, carried out with good- 
 sense and good -feeling, as it is in very many — nay, most — instances to- 
 day, is in some respects excellent, picturesque, and pleasant to con- 
 template, it is not congenial with the spirit of the times, nor is it a 
 stimulant of the only kind of real improvement — ^self-improvement. 
 With an intelligent interest in his work, with his local parliament, his 
 free library, with his club-rooms for social intercourse and under his 
 
APPENDIX. 167 
 
 own management, with his recreation ground, with cricket and football, 
 with constant employment for his labour in the requirements of the high 
 cultivation around him, the dweller in Arcady would no longer seek the 
 delusive advantages of a town life. 
 
 But with every effort the result will be disappointing unless we can 
 have lower railway rates. I believe one of the greatest boons the 
 country could have would be the adaption of the penny-post system to 
 the carriage of inland goods^-uniform low rates, irrespective of dis- 
 tance. The result would be to bring the market to the land of 
 the producer, the commodity to the door of the consumer; all land 
 would produce that for which it was most fitted, and the value of 
 land close to and remote from the large towns would approximate. 
 And I believe this could be done without loss to the railway 
 companies ; for instead of seeing, as at present, goods trains capable of 
 carrying two or three hundred tons running with forty or fifty, at the 
 same cost to the company, we should see the trains laden to their 
 utmost capacity — a fact that would recompense the companies for the 
 greatly-reduced rates. 
 
 And again, cultivators must constantly seek to produce the highest 
 qualities of fruit, butter, and cheese — qualities which will command 
 higher prices than foreign produce. How frequent in the market 
 reports of the Daily News is that of "Fruit cheap, but the better 
 qualities command a high price " ! Consider the high percentage of 
 difference between the prices of the best and of common fruit — three 
 or four hundred per cent. — and the importance of producing the best 
 qualities is seen at once. The difference between the prices of common 
 fruit and dairy produce and of the best affords a margin of profit 
 which will account for failure or success. 
 
 A. H. JACKSON. 
 
 Eastbourne, Oct. 15, 1891. 
 
APPENDIX II 
 
 CORRESPONDENCE. 
 
 Many letters of special value and interest have necessarily been omitted. 
 From the great mass of correspondetue it has been foitiid practicable 
 to give only a selection. 
 
 Sir, — I have carefully read the interesting accounts of your Special 
 Commissioner of "Life in Our Villages." Perhaps a few lines from 
 this part of the kingdom may not be uninteresting to your readers. I 
 am a farmer in South Leicestershire, occupying a small daily farm. 
 Living in the heart of the Midlands, we have many industries around 
 us— colHeries, ironworks, and various kinds of factories. The wage 
 paid to our agricultural labourers is considerably higher than in the 
 more southern p.arts. I pay my waggoner 19s. per week, my cowman 
 i8s., labourers l6s. and 17s. all the year round, exclusive of overtime 
 in harvest. A lad who lives in the house has fy los. per annum and 
 his board. The hours of work are from half-past five morning to six 
 at night. These wages would be considered excessive in some counties, 
 but I am quite sure that for good wages men will give good honest 
 work, and I can say that my men take as much interest in and are as 
 anxious about my stock and crops as I am myself. I always discuss 
 any important work to be done on the farm freely with them, and often 
 profit by their sound experience. I do find that they are ever to the 
 minute with regard to time — freely rising at any hour of the night, or 
 sitting up all night sometimes with a sick animal, &c. I always try to treat 
 them with the same courtesy and respect as they do me. I think my 
 neighbours pay rather less than I do for the winter months and more 
 for the summer, often setting piecework, which I do not approve of. 
 My cowman also hires a pasture field of aliout four acres in the village, 
 and keeps two cows and some pigs. He has also a large garden. The 
 waggoner also has -i very good garden, with a large and productive 
 orchard. I believe they are content and happy. Now I come to the 
 younger generation. Although our villages are not deserted to anything 
 like the same extent to which they appear to be in the south and east, 
 yet the pick of our young men do go off to other employments which 
 offer higher wages and many advantages which we have not in the 
 country, especially society and free libraries, and they also escape the 
 patronage and attention of the parson (meant in all good-will) and the 
 parson's wife, and the weariness of attending services at church which 
 they do not understand. The old country parson is gone. The 
 Dissenting chapels do not attract as they once did. Perhaps this 
 migration has its advantages, bringing fresh blood and vigour and 
 muscles into the towns. I am convinced that by paying wages on 
 which a man can live and bring up a family respectably, farmers will 
 always obtain all the help they require. Farmers complain that times 
 
CORRESPONDENCE. 1 69 
 
 are bad, and that they cannot afford more wages. Times are bad, very 
 bad, but why are wages always to be attacked? What about rents? 
 Are those who toil not nor spin to bear no share of the bad times 
 except a paltry return of 10 per cent. ? Are those who have borne the 
 heat of the day alone to be the sufferers, and their hard lot made still 
 harder? But landlords cannot afford to reduce rents; in numberless 
 cases they are receiving not more than 2 or 3 per cent, on the money 
 invested. Well, those men have speculated in land. Some speculate 
 in brewery shares. They must take the consequences of having paid 
 too much. But few landlords are in this case. I know a village not 
 many miles from here where the average rent 70 years ago was 20s. per 
 acre. It is now 45s. per acre. Why do farmers persistently and 
 stubbornly support that party in the State which never yet as a parly 
 did anything for them, or anybody else, unless compelled, except 
 themselves? — the party which upholds the Game Laws, and is now 
 doing its best to make the Ground Game Act a nullity ? Why do they 
 not (recognising the red herring of a duty on wheat), shoulder to 
 shoulder with their workpeople, send up representatives who will 
 uphold agriculture, reform the land laws, and establish where necessary 
 land courts with power lo fix fair rents, with fixity of tenure, &c. ? The 
 time was when they did so, and the farmers who fought at Naseby 
 and Marston Moor "never were beaten," and I am pioud to trace my 
 descent from one of these. — Yours, &c., 
 
 A LEICESTERSHIRE FARMER. 
 
 Sir, — I trust you will pardon me for wishing to join in the 
 interesting correspondence which is now going on in respect to the 
 life of our labouring population, because I have been a Tory member 
 of Parliament, and therefore opposed to many of the views expressed in 
 your journal on other subjects. When the late Lord Tollemache was 
 living he honoured me with his acquaintance, and we were in very 
 frequent correspondence ; and in the autumn of 1885 we issued, above 
 our joint signature, some rules for a suggested land scheme, which was 
 published at the time in most of the newspapers, and I have very 
 little doubt that it appeared in yours. The words were as follows : — 
 
 Land Scheme Association. 
 We, the undersigned, intend to take the following steps, or similar 
 steps, according to special requirements : 
 
 1. To offer to any agricultural labourer residing on our estates in a 
 dairy district, land sufficient to keep a cow, or, in an arable district, 
 half an acre attached like a garden to his cottage. 
 
 2. All agricultural labourers when once admitted to a cottage on 
 the recommendation of a neighbouring farmer, will become at once the 
 tenant of the landlord, and not of the farmer. 
 
 3. The number of .'mail farms and buildings on our estates shall be 
 double the number of farms above 100 acres, provided tenants can 
 be procured for them. 
 
170 LIPE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 4 In future all applicants for small farms and holdings under 
 30 acres must show that they have some additional occupation from 
 which to derive profits besides farming, to support them and their 
 families. 
 
 5. Any respectable person with sufficient means can have on our 
 estates half an acre on a lease of 99 years, or for ever, as a site for 
 a good and comfortable house, to which will be added, if required, land 
 at a rack rent. 
 
 6. With respect to farms above 100 acres all respectable tenants 
 will, on application, be given a lease of 20 years, on condition that 
 they will secure to the landlord a good system of husbandry, and 
 to the tenant a comfortable and convenient farmhouse, with suitable 
 buildings attached. 
 
 .7- The foregoing rules to be carried oat on our respective estates 
 without any unnecessary loss of time. 
 
 (Signed) Tollemache of Helmingham. 
 W. J. Harris. 
 
 A special note follows in Lord Tollemache's handwriting, but which 
 was not then published, as follows : "A year's notice should be given 
 to the owners of land to enable them to commence managing their 
 estates so that they may escape altogether from the compulsory powers." 
 I have many letters from Lord Tollemache showing the deep regret he 
 experienced at the landowners of England not responding to the appeal, 
 but it is only right that I should add that he was not altogether without 
 encouragement from one or two of the very largest landowners {I hardly 
 feel at liberty to mention the names). Lord Tollemache's success is 
 well known, and if any of your correspondents wish to see the measure 
 of my success, they have only to purchase a copy of the "Land Agents' 
 Record," under date July 18 last. To sum up the results very briefly : 
 when I came into possession of this estate 20 years ago, the population 
 was about 240, now it is over 430. Most of the parishes around have 
 either stood still or decreased in population. Twenty years ago a large 
 part of the parish was moorland, now the cultivation is extending in all 
 directions, and there is hardly any land that remains unused for farming 
 purposes except that which has been planted with fir-trees. No very 
 great outlay has been incurred. New cottages have been built in 
 a plain but substantial manner, and the old cottages have been 
 strengthened and repaired, while cow-houses and pig-styes have been 
 put up as the tenants have required them, and a moderate rate of 
 interest has been charged on the outlay. The well-understood agree- 
 ment between my small tenants and myself has been that I shall never 
 raise their rents so long as they live, unless the rates and taxes — which 
 I pay for them — are raised, and then only to that extent. They could 
 all have leases if they wished it, but they have none of them gone to the 
 expense. The rent is about what it would be valued at by a land 
 surveyor acquainted with the capabilities of the district, and if the im- 
 provements made are of a substantial nature I give assistance — such, for 
 
COkRESfONDBNCS,. 171 
 
 instance, as in draining, where I give tlie pipes. Tlie village public- 
 house, vrhich used to be a great nuisance, has been turned into a 
 farmhouse, and there is not a single labourer in this parish who has 
 been seen the worse for drink for many years. I consider that I have 
 gained by my policy. The larger farmers can always get labourers to 
 come and help them when they have extra work in hand, and I am by 
 my policy manufacturing "true Conservatives." Not those who wish 
 to vote against the progress that you advocate, but those who are fairly 
 satisBed with their lot, and who have no wish to see a general upheaval 
 of society. If landowners generally would understand that their true 
 policy is to use every effort to satisfy the thrifty and industriously 
 inclined people they would save themselves from attacks which must 
 unsettle the security of their investments. They are either great 
 benefactors or the reverse. No one has so much power of doing good 
 as they have, and many of them do a great deal of good. Let them 
 study what Lord Tollemache did, and what he advised others to do, 
 and a drastic policy may be averted. If not, I, for one, shall not 
 object to see a drastic policy adopted if it be honestly applied. — Yours 
 faithfully, WILLIAM J. HARRIS. 
 
 Halwill Manor, Beaiuorthy. 
 
 Sir, — I have read with' great interest the accounts by your Com- 
 missioner and the letters of various correspondents anent life in our 
 villages. It seems to me quite evident, according to these sources of 
 information, that the youth of the villages are drifting fast to the large 
 towns, with a view to, and because they really do, obtain better wages 
 and chances of improving their position generally. It also seems clear 
 that it is chiefly owing to this cause that the country is suffering 
 through lack of sufficient labour for its proper cultivation. It is no less 
 apparent that all efforts at present directed with a view to prevent this 
 general exodus by granting allotments and providing instruction and 
 amusement for the people, in order to make the country life more attrac- 
 tive, have hitherto failed in their object, and tend to increase rather than 
 diminish the steady flow townwards. Now all this is (at least, as far as 
 we can see at present) unalterable, and appears to be regulated by the 
 law of supply and demand. For there is a demand for strong and 
 intelligent young men to engage in various occupations in the towns, 
 and the town is able and willing to pay well for the labour of the 
 country. Moreover, the latter do not go to swell the great army of 
 clerks and those of kindred occupations, but, as your Commissioner 
 states, the employment they obtain is generally partly of a manual or 
 mechanical character — such as taking round carts of milk or grocery, 
 and work on the railway. Taking these facts into consideration, it 
 seems hard to try and prevent Hodge from getting a good wage in re- 
 turn for good work. No, some other plan must be tried to procure 
 labour for cultivation. I suppose there is no back-flow from the over- 
 populated town into the country. The unemployed in large centres, 
 though they would welcome an escape from the crowding and smoke 
 into the purer air and larger space of the country, yet, perhaps, have 
 
172 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 neither the knowledge nor the requisite strength for manual outdoor 
 labour. In my opinion it is here that the waste goes on, and yet it is 
 difficult to see a way of bringing the workers on to the land again. It 
 remains to be seen whether General Booth's scheme, which has been so 
 largely supported, will meet with the expected success. There is, how- 
 ever, a certain class, like the others, composed of youths, who would be 
 able, and many of whom are specially trained, for an outdoor life. I 
 refer to ihe boys in the industrial homes and in institutions such as Dr. 
 Barnardo's. Instead of sending off by the shipload to other shores such 
 useful material on which so much of the money of the country has been 
 spent, why, may I ask, should they not be taught and encouraged to 
 cultivate the soil of Old England, and be placed in a position to 
 become patriotic Englishmen, with the true interests of their country at 
 heart ? We have already seen, when abroad, how well they repay the 
 trouble spent in their training. Perhaps it would be said that land in 
 England would be too dear for them to have much of their own. But 
 they could begin with small holdings, and gradually grow to be the 
 small farmers, who would work their land themselves, and with their 
 habits of economy would not waste their profits in needless expenditure. 
 They might keep pigs, rabbits, and poultry, and by this means we 
 should not be obliged to purchase such large quantities of eggs and 
 rabbits from France and Belgium, where they are produced, not on 
 the large farms, but by the industry of the small but independent land- 
 holder. Thanking you by anticipation, and hoping you will pardon my 
 trespassing so much on your space, I am yours truly, P. B. \V. 
 
 Hereford. 
 
 Sir, — The problem " How to retain country men on farm lands " 
 is hardly to be settled by a smart article, nor likely to be accomplished 
 by tenant farmers. Here, in the West of England, a slight improve- 
 ment in the conditions under which farm workfolks live would keep a 
 full supply of "hands" on the land. Any number of workmen could 
 be retained if the men could get half-a-crown or three shillings a day 
 all the year round, and could get cottages to live in by paying rent for 
 them. That is to say, cottages not under the control of their employers, 
 but so held that the tenancy might be continuous, though the men 
 should change masters. I have lived in Somerset for nearly forty years, 
 and have never known a crop injured for want of workfolk where there 
 was a fair proportion of cottage homes held independently of the 
 employers. The demand among country workmen is for homes with 
 gardens, from which they cannot be evicted at the will of their em- 
 ployers. Wages would rise but to a very moderate extent, because the 
 number of workmen would increase, and competition check extravagant 
 demands. The low rate of wages on farms, which surprises town- 
 trained economists, is made endurable in the country by many ameliorat- 
 ing influences. House-rent is very low, potatoes and other garden 
 stuffs are to be had for the growing. Coal clubs and clothing clubs are 
 helpful ; strong rough clothes are sufficient in the sweet air ; while 
 the clergy, the farmers, and fellow workfolk are kindly and helpful in 
 
CORRESPONDENCE. 1/3 
 
 illness or misfortune to an extent impossible in towns. A trace of feudal 
 serfdom often hangs around the isolated hamlets ; but, thanks to fifty 
 years of steady growth in Liberal principles, it is like ivy round an old 
 ruin, an added grace, and not much in the way. — Yours faithfully, 
 Pylle. JOHN HIGGINS. 
 
 Sir, — As a country man in a rural district I am delighted with the 
 letters of your Commissioner. They show a quick grasp of the subject 
 at issue, and all he says could be said of my county, Beds. I do hope 
 he will favour us with a visit. He will find in nearly every village 
 (except on or near the M.R.) a decrease in the population, which may 
 be accounted for in two or three ways, viz., failure in the staple work — 
 straw-plaiting — the better wages paid in the towns, and the increased 
 facilities of obtaining employment in the towns when a situation is lost. 
 Formerly, when the straw work "went well," it mattered little to the 
 labourer whether the day was wet or not, as he could earn as much at 
 home by plaiting, and he and his family could in the evenings con- 
 siderably add to his wages. Now the case is quite altered. It is now 
 a rarity to see a man plaiting. The Canton plait being made of rice 
 straw, and a better colour and cheaper than the home-made material, 
 it has driven the latter out of the market. A Conservative candidate 
 during a contest in "South Beds" some years ago promised the 
 villagers when addressing them that he would go in for taxing the 
 Canton plaits. But when he went to Luton, where the plaits are made 
 into hats and bonnets, his friends, the Tory manufacturers, soon told 
 him that he had made a mistake, and nothing more was heard of taxing 
 Canton plaits. The wages given here are I2s. per week and loss of 
 wet time, with often five or six whole weeks unemployed in the winter. 
 Cattle men, who work nearly half the Sunday, get one or two shillings 
 more per week. There are a few farmers who keep a quantity of cows, 
 and who send their milk to London ; these give their men 14s. or 155. 
 per week, Sunday work included. During harvest £\ per week is the 
 wages paid men working from four or five o'clock until eight p.m. 
 Some men have to walk two miles to and from work. How can we 
 improve the lot of these men, who, 1 contend, are as clever at their 
 work as many an artisan at his ? The man that can plough, drill, 
 mow, thatch, thresh corn, or drain, ought to have an income of more 
 than I2S. per week. We can improve their lot by giving them an 
 opportunity of working for themselves on the land that the farmers say 
 does not pay. I heard a farmer say at a public meeting not six months 
 ago that the question was not what percentage on the outlay did the 
 land pay, for it did not pay anything ; and this farmer holds about 700 
 acres of land. The wonder is why on earth they don't give it up and 
 let the men have a try. Some of your correspondents seem to think 
 that a reduction of rent would enable the farmer to give more wages. 
 Well, sir, on one of my rounds the landlord gave back 50 per cent., 
 but, from all I could learn, not an extra labourer was employed, nor an 
 additional shilling given to the labourer. What is required is not a 
 reduction in rent but a part of the labour bill borne by the landlord, 
 
174 l-'P^ ^^ C)f/^ VILLAGES. 
 
 who would thus see what number of labourers were employed on his 
 estate, and would also improve his farms. I consider it would be 
 beneficial to the agricultural labourers greatly to add to the number of 
 small holders, as this would also tend to raise the wages on the farms. 
 But for men wholly employed on the farm a good garden attached to 
 his cottage is better than half an acre a mile away. — I am, Sir, 
 
 "A SOUTH BEDS MAN." 
 
 Sir, — I have watched with much interest the correspondence on 
 village life in your paper, and the efforts some have made to prove 
 that farming is unprofitable. When I was a boy in receipt of is. 6d. a 
 week, and my widowed mother made an effort to keep house on a few 
 shillings a week, with bread at nd. the four-pound loaf, the dinner 
 of the agricultural labourer and his family was often yellow swedes 
 with a little salt. Then it was the same cry, "Farming don't pay." 
 When I became a young man and courted a nice girl, my master said 
 farming did not pay ; at wheat only fetching 70s. a quarter he could not 
 afford above los. a week ; so I said, "My sweetheart is too nice a girl 
 to keep in a hovel on los. a week, so I must seek a warmer clime, for 
 English charity is too cold for me to thrive on." It is the same old 
 tale — "Farming don't pay." I have had three years of voluntary 
 inspection of the agricultural districts, and am certain farming can pay. 
 Farmers have not yet learned their business. Let farming become a 
 scientific profession. Farmers are driving away all the best men and 
 women out of the village. Landlords, the cry is against you now. 
 Farmers say the rents are too high. They are not. Raise the rents. 
 If a house becomes dilapidated, the owner is compelled to pull it down 
 or else make it tenantable ; if the latter, he raises the rent. If land 
 becomes impoverished, the owner ought to be compelled to make it into 
 good heart or sell it ; it ought not to lie idle in a little country teeming 
 with millions of people requiring food to eat. Raise the rent, but make 
 the farm worth the money first. Then let it to a man that understands 
 his business ; for a good farm deserves a good farmer, and a good 
 farmer requires good men, not drones and fools ; and a good man will 
 want a good wife, and a good home for her. Therefore see that the 
 cottage accommodation is ample for the farm ; and if the best men are 
 to be kept from leaving the villages, there must be something done to 
 keep them on the land. Many of the cottages I have inspected are a 
 disgrace to a civilised country. In the county of Bucks 10,000,000 
 fruit-trees could be planted without injury to the permanent pastures or 
 cornfields — I can prove this — and the profit on these ought to pay the 
 rent of all the farms.— Respectfully yours, GEORGE GINGER. 
 
 Buckinghaniihire Labour Bureau, Aylesbury, 
 September 12. 
 
 Sir, — As one who has been until lately a country parson in 
 Dorsetshire, I have taken the deepest interest in your timely and 
 
CORRESPONDENCE. 1 75 
 
 accurate articles on " Life in Our Villages.'' The great evil of the 
 agricultural labourer's life is that it is a life without hope. Between 
 the labourer and the classes above him a great gulf is fixed. In old age 
 he can only look forward to the workhouse. To remedy this sad state 
 of things nothing is more necessary than more small holdings, which 
 men with small capital could take, and become, in a certain measure, 
 independent. Let me give two cases which lately came under my 
 notice in the same village. Not long ago a young man came to me to 
 arrange about his wedding. He had put off marriage until he was 
 about thirty, and had always lived with his parents and been of a saving 
 disposition. He told me that on his marriage he intended to inve."^! his 
 savings, about £^00, in taking a small beer-house with a few acres of 
 land attached to it. I expressed regret at this. He answered, "Well, 
 it is the only way I can get a bit of land," and I had to acknowledge 
 that his plea was true. Another case. An agricultural labourer some 
 years ago was given a little heifer in lieu of wages owed him by a serai- 
 bankrupt farmer. The heifer for some time was fed by his wife at the 
 wayside. It became a cow, and, in due time, the parent of other cows. 
 The labourer took a field. Now he is a small holder. He cultivates 
 about 20 acres of land under every possible disadvantage. It is 
 situated in the next parish to that in which his own cottage stands. He 
 pays a very high rent for it. He has to go more than a mile twice a 
 day with his pony-cart to milk his cows. He has no proper buildings ; 
 but he makes his little bit of land pay. He is far more independent than 
 the ordinary labourer, and has no reason to fear the workhouse in his 
 old age. The question of "Life in Our Villages " will not be solved 
 by small holdings, but they will go some way towards it. Small 
 holdings will also in an indirect way have a beneficial effect on the 
 physique of the labouring population. They will make it possible for 
 the poor to get milk readily and cheaply for their children. The small 
 holders will sell milk in small quantities. It is too much trouble for 
 the large farmers to do so. Ordinarily, the children of the rural poor 
 are brought up without milk from the time they are weaned. The 
 effect on the growth and health of the children is very bad. Again, the 
 agricultural labourers need union. They are the most disunited of all 
 the battalions of the great army of labour. They are helpless in the 
 hands of their employers. More and more, I regret to say, it is 
 becoming the custom to turn men off during winter, on the plea that 
 there is no work for them to do. If the rent is to be paid, the labour 
 bill must be kept down. I have come home from an afternoon's 
 visiting, during which I have again and again come across instances 
 of the breadwinner being thrown out of work for six or eight weeks in 
 the midst of a bitter winter, and have marvelled at the heroic patience 
 of the agricultural labourer. He suffers in silence. If he was violent, 
 pohticians would at once recognise that something must be done. A 
 strong agricultural labourers' union, a multiplication of small holdings, 
 and something in the shape of a national pension fund for old age, 
 would transform the hard and dreary lot of the rural labourer. — 
 I am, &c., . W. S. SWAYNE. 
 
176 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 Sir, — In common with many thousands of your readers whose early 
 associations were "truly rural," I have followed the correspondence 
 which has appeared in your columns lately with considerable interest. 
 My old friend Hodge appears to me in some danger now of being 
 over-coddled. Time was when his "friends were few.'' A couple of 
 decades back the Daily News stood out very conspicuously as the 
 champion of his cause, and I could almost fancy that the same gifted 
 pen that is now portraying his vicissitudes in Essex lifted the veil then, 
 to the astonishment of those who wondered what the agitator Joseph 
 Arch was about. A good many things have happened since then, and 
 the most important, as far as the labourer is concerned, has been the 
 opening-up to him of a new world in the shape of the British Colonies. 
 The whilom English village encumbrance has become the eagerly-sought- 
 for-and-aniply-remunerated necessity of the Canadian and Australian 
 farmer. It has been my great felicity to see the men who were treated 
 as criminals by their besotted British employers for daring to question 
 the adequacy of an eighteenpence a day wage, receiving from their New 
 Zealand masters seven and eight shillings for a two hours shorter day's 
 work. I am unable any longer to pity men whom I have thus seen so 
 amply rem.unerated when they have had the pluck to avail themselves 
 of the circumstances of life. There is not a British colony at this 
 moment that would not gladly welcome any number of good field- 
 workers. Why, then, should I be called upon to waste my sympathy on 
 such valued members of society ? If any of them are still underpaid, it 
 is surely their own fault. I have never seen a poor farm labourer abroad. 
 He is ever master of the position. Hundreds of the Berkshire, Oxford- 
 shire, Wiltshire, and Warwiclcshire men, whose severe hardships your 
 Correspondent of 1872-3 so graphically narrated, are to-day pros- 
 perous colonial farmers, and there is nothing to hinder hundreds more 
 from becoming such. I therefore venture to enter a protest against 
 any longer regarding Hodge as an object of pity. If we have any pity 
 to spare, let it be displayed towards the unfortunate London clerks and 
 other genteel fraternity whom no one wants and whom every colony 
 spurns from its door. I shrewdly suspect that it is the British farmer 
 rather than his labourer who is to-day " up a tree." The low price of 
 produce generally, while it has spelt ruin to the master, has meant a 
 twenty-five per cent, increase of the purchasing power of the labourer's 
 wage. I am glad to find that Mr. George Loosley, who knows rural 
 life as well as most men, endorses this view of the labourers' present 
 case. " They work shorter hours, have more money, and are very 
 independent," he told us lately in his letter. I hope, however, he is 
 incorrect in saying that " the average agricultural labourer is less trusty 
 and efficient " than he used to be. I am afraid this is only a stingy 
 employer's estimate of the case. Certainly the higher colonial wage 
 and shorter hours of work have no such result. One of the most 
 striking revelations of my extensive travels during the last decade has 
 been the vast improvement in the morale of the workmen consequent 
 on their improved circumstances. The sloiiching, obsequious, shuffling 
 fellow of the English village I have met in New Zealand transformed 
 into a smart, self-reliant, energetic citizen, full of "go," and not 
 
CORRESPONDENCE. 177 
 
 wanting in political enthusiasm. The conclusion of the whole matter, 
 therefore, appears to me to be somewhat thus : there must be no more 
 coddling of the farm labourer. If he cannot stand up, let him fall 
 down. If, with the world before him, he elects to vegetate in such 
 vile quarters as your Correspondent has described, Jet him do so. No 
 maudlin sympathy can permanently help those who will not help them- 
 selves.— I am, &c., ARTHUR CLAYDEN. 
 
 Sir, — There seems to be much doubt as to the efficacy of the allot- 
 ment system, even if it were thoroughly carried out, as a means of 
 retaining labourers in the country. 1 believe myself in allotments as a 
 temporary stopgap, but to that extent only. They are a help if certain 
 conditions of convenience, fair rent and so forth are present ; but much 
 more is needed. To put the matter into a nutshell — it is the prospects 
 (or the absence of them) of the labourer that present the difficulty. 
 The skilful, energetic worker in any other line "gets on," his prospects 
 improve, he has something to look forward to. The labourer has 
 nothing of the kind. Be he as skilful and industrious as he may, he is 
 only worth the more to his employer ; his own wages remain the same. 
 It is the prospect of reaping some increasing rtward for industry 
 and skill, as life goes on, that is the attraction in the towns. Can the 
 labourer be given some such hope in his own particular business ? 
 Certainly ; if he can be given access to the land on fair terms, and with 
 security that he will be allowed to reap all the fruits of his own 
 industry thereon. There are in my own parish men who afford 
 examples of this. They rent land on which their predecessors (generally 
 their fathers or other relations) had "squatted" before the enclosure of 
 the commons. The excellent cottages (in comparison with many others 
 about the place) in which they live, the fruitful, well-drained gardens 
 which they cultivate, are the product of their own and their predecessors' 
 spare labour through many years. They pay rent to the parish ; .rent 
 which even now is double that of the average rent of the whole parish. 
 I say "even now" because I had a hard fight soon after my arrival 
 in the parish against a proposed large increase of the rentals of these 
 plots, and succeeded in preventing it. I need not enter into details, 
 but the fight was obstinate. I only succeeded by adopting the " Plan 
 of Campaign." The point is: Do these men leave the place? No, 
 sir, they don't. They stick like limpets to their base, and it would 
 take a good deal to move them now. Where there is one such holding 
 there ought to be fifty. Yet these men have no real security — only 
 such security as the common-sense and justice of the parish officials 
 may give them. Notice they are tenants, not freeholders. The great 
 objection to a peasant proprietary is the constant temptation to mortgage 
 the land. By means of these expensive mortgages the petty local 
 money-lender gets hold of plot after plot, he grows into a landowner and 
 his son into a squire— perhaps a defender of the Church and a Primrose 
 " knight," or whatever they call themselves. If parish councils are to 
 be any good you must aboHsh the property vote. It is that which has 
 L 
 
178 LIFE m OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 rendered the vestry a nullity as a means of expressing the popular will. 
 There is a great deal more to be said and done. The Liberals must 
 take it in hand in downright earnest. For myself, I am sick of half- 
 measures and counsels of expediency. We want village councils, with 
 one man one vote ; we want village co-operative stores, in which every 
 villager should be a shareholder, so that the poor man need not pay 
 more than anyone else for his tea and sugar ; we want an improved 
 system of houses of public refreshment and amuseiiient, under parochial 
 management, and served by salaried officials, the profits going towards 
 public improvements ; we want a good system of intermediate schools 
 to which our cleverest boys can go free of expense to their parents ; 
 we want technical education in every parish ; we want — oh ! lots of 
 things ; and more power to the elbows of the men who will try to 
 get them for us ! — Your obedient servant, 
 
 ARNOLD D. TAYLOR. 
 Churchstanton Rectory, Honiton, August ■^^Y. 
 
 Sir, — I, in common with thousands of others, am extremely glad at 
 the prominence you are giving to "Life in Our Villages " in your 
 valuable columns. The district where this is written is a model for the 
 system of small holdings and allotments, having several hundred acres 
 unenclosed and in plots varying from one rood to two acres, each plot 
 a separate freehold or copyhold property, the plough furrow being the 
 boundary in each case, which gives great facilities for a poor man to 
 acquire small lots either as owner or tenant. Many of our farm 
 labourers occupy one to three acres, and keep one cow and feed two or 
 three pigs, they and their families doing the necessary hand labour 
 at times when it does not interfere with their ordinary employment, 
 except an occasional day in harvest. I don't know one man in ten in 
 this and the adjoining parish of Belton that is now farming from thirty 
 to one hundred acres that either they or their fathers have not been 
 farm servants or farm labourers in their early life, and all, or nearly all, 
 rising step by step through this system of small holdings, commencing 
 with one, or at most a few acres, and gradually adding to or exchang- 
 ing their holdings as their means increased. There are in the district 
 a number of men holding from ten to twenty acres who, in addition to 
 cow and pig, keep one horse, and for the heavy part of the work on 
 their land two will yoke together, which effectually gets over the 
 difficulty of one-horse farming. This parish contains near 6,000 acres, 
 occupied as follows : — Only two occupying over 200 acres ; from 100 to 
 200, twelve ; from 50 acres to 100, fourteen ; from 20 acres to 50, 
 thirty-one ; from 10 acres to 20, forty ; from 2 acres to 10, one hundred 
 and fifteen ; and from 2 roods to 2 acres there are eighty occupiers. A 
 fair question to ask would be : Under such a system of small holdmgs 
 would as large an amount of food be raised as on an equal quantity of 
 land in large farms ? I have no hesitation in saying that there is a larger 
 amount of grain, at least an equal amount of beef, a much larger 
 quantity of pork or bacon and vegetables, but a smaller quantity of 
 
Correspondence. i70 
 
 mutton, very small holdings not being adapted to sheep-walks. Some 
 two years ago I was summoned to give evidence before a Committee of 
 the ijouse of Commons, under the chairmanship of Mr. J. Chamberlain, 
 sitting to inquire into this question of small holdings, and to ascertain 
 whether there was any general desire for its extension. From the 
 cross-questioning by Mr. Chaplin and some others I concluded that the 
 Tory members of the Committee were dead against any compulsory 
 clause, whilst such men as Mr. Halley Stewart and Sir Walter Foster 
 were the men who were anxious for powers to place the land in a great 
 many more hands than any voluntary system is likely to accomplish. 
 Before leaving home to attend the Committee I called together at least 
 a dozen men that I knew had been in possession of from one to two 
 acres each for a few years only, and after some conversation with them, 
 I suggested that they should strengthen my hands by signing a paper 
 expressing their experience, as given me then, to which they gave a 
 ready consent. It was to this effect : that before having their allot- 
 ments they had a great dread of a long frost in each winter as they 
 came round, feeling that a few weeks out of work would mean either 
 heinsj thrown on the parish for support, or they and their families 
 would be on the verge of starvation. But since they had had the land 
 they had grown a half-acre each of wheat, barley, and potatoes, which 
 had given them bread, bacon, and potatoes for the winter, and in some 
 cases for the greater part of the year, at but little cost, they having done 
 the work required when not otherwise employed. And now, they said 
 with one voice, we can face the severest winter without any fear of 
 either hunger or of being pauperised. — Yours, &c., 
 
 Epworth, Doncaster. J. STANDRING. 
 
 Sir, — After forty years' experience in agriculture, allow me to say 
 that under existing circumstances farming can be made to pay only on 
 very large occupations of one thousand acres and upwards, and on 
 small tenancies of thirty to forty acres. Medium-sized farms of two to 
 five hundred acres are surely doomed, by the fact of not being able to 
 compete successfully with the larger and smaller occupiers in the im- 
 portant matter of labour. Obviously the small farmer does not need 
 much extra help, and on very large farms the use of the best modern 
 machinery materially economises the labour account, and the land is 
 also efficiently cultivated.— Yours faithfully, BREVITY. 
 
 Brighton. 
 
 Sir, — Will you allow an ignorant man, a man from the dung-hill, to 
 make a few remarks upon the great question which your correspondent 
 has so ably put before the public during the last few days ? I know 
 something about the cultivation of the land ; for years I worked at the 
 roughest work done on the land, cleaning out, pig-sties, turning manure, 
 •digging ; and to-day, after twenty years of laborious work, I occupy 
 the land I worked on and employ fifty hands. And, sir, if I had to 
 
l8o LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 start life again as poor as I was twenty years ago, with only 5s. in my 
 pocket, I would choose the land. If I had to start afresh to-morrow with 
 a balance of £\,<xy:> at my banker's, I would choose the land. Nothing 
 is so grateful for care and intelligent management as the land. Look 
 upon the cultivation of the land as men look upon any other business 
 or profession, put into it the same intelligence and determination, and 
 I have not the least doubt the same favourable results will follow. 
 Many of the present occupiers of the land are ignorant of their work ; 
 they do not grow the right thing, and if ihey discovered the right thing 
 they do not know how to grow it. Farmers (if they hoe), and also 
 market gardeners, hoe to kill the weeds, and if there are no weeds they 
 do not hoe. They are ignorant of the need of hoeing and why they 
 should hoe. They are too slovenly, untidy, wanting in trimness, 
 thoroughness ; and yet, sir, they are not altogether to blame. They 
 are the product of a bad and vicious system. If the land is to be 
 cultivated profitably and the villagers are to be prosperous and contented, 
 the present occupiers of the land must be got rid of; there is no other 
 remedy. The intelligent and enterprising man avoids the land, and it 
 has been handed over to the incompetent. How could any industry com- 
 pete with the foreigner if all the best men were driven out of it ? If a 
 man takes land to cultivate he wants security. When I asked an agent 
 to give me a lease and compensation for necessary buildings and im- 
 provements, he simply laughed at me and said, " We do not want such 
 tenants as you are ; we should never get rid of you ; you would spend 
 so much on the land, we could never buy you out." Just so, sir, and 
 that is why the land is a failure, they do not want intelligent and in- 
 dependent tenants. An Act of Parliament is wanted that will enable a 
 man to buy land as simply as he would buy anything else ; he should 
 not have to run the risk of a heavy lawyer's bill, and perhaps a long 
 delay before he takes possession, the only cost should be the cost of a 
 stamp for the benefit of the revenue ; this would bring about a revolu- 
 tion in our land, and the revolution would be gradual. Thriftless land- 
 owners would soon be rid of their land, and other landowners would 
 soon find it an advantage to part with their land, and thrifty labourers 
 and small occupiers would soon become owners, and the revolution 
 would be complete. Men of intelligence, men of will, would soon dis- 
 cover that the cultivation of land was profitable ; it is profitable now, 
 where the men are the right men. A remark was made to me the other 
 day that Mr. Smithvi'asa good and successful farmer. I replied, "Yes, 
 he was a clock-maker till he was thirty years of age.'' "So-and-so is 
 a good farmer." "Yes, he was a draper up to ihirty-five." These 
 two men brought business ability into their work. They had not the 
 prejudice of the farmer, and what they did they did with all their might. 
 If, sir, it pays men living in Russia and America to grow food to send 
 into our markets, surely it will pay men at home to grow the same 
 thing. We have become so used to foreign produce that we think there 
 is nothing strange in having it ; but, sir, it shows on our part in- 
 competency and ignorance. Why buy eggs from abroad? Why buy 
 apples ? No country is better suited to growing them than ours. 
 
 Allow me to give one illustration to show the stupidity of many^ 
 
CORRESPONDENCE. 1 8 1 
 
 English growers. A London herb dealer wanted twenty to thirty tons 
 of marjoram to dry, also other herbs. He says to the English grower : 
 " Will you cut these herbs off close to the ground, and not pull them 
 up by the roots, and dry the herbs for me ? " The grower says : " No, 
 our way is to bunch them up for the London market with the roots ; if 
 that does not suit, you can go without." Our London man is a man of 
 business, and will not be played with, so he goes to Germany, and the 
 German gives him what he wants, and the bottled herbs and packet 
 herbs the grocer and green-grocer supply mainly come from Germany. 
 I could give endless illustrations of the ignorance and stupidity of the 
 English grower, also his prejudice against properly packing fruit ; but 
 I have done. Allow me to thank you for bringing public attention to 
 so important a matter. There are men in England with brains and 
 energy to restore to England that prosperity in her agricultural dis- 
 tricts which she so much needs if our Parliament has only the wisdom 
 to spend a little time in framing an Act that will give security to the 
 occupier. — I am, Sir, yours respectfully, HODGE. 
 
 The Rev. J. Denny Gedge, Methwold Vicarage, Norfolk, observes : — 
 "The explanations of the exodus of the labourer with which your Com- 
 missioner has been plied are most of them but subsidiary causes ; and. 
 Liberal though I am, I am constrained to own that the Toiy Vicar held 
 up to ridicule in your Saturday's issue has, instinctively if unphilo- 
 sophically, come nearest to the right explanation, unpleasant as it may 
 be to some of us to have to confe.^s this. Increased information is the 
 main cause of the trouble. For the chief trial of country life is its 
 monotony. The Vicar is right — they have lost that blessed ignorance 
 which enabled them to be happy in their condition, and much that was 
 available and satisfied their forefathers is too coarse and rude for them. 
 There are not wanting in every village those of a nobler and sweeter 
 disposition who have turned their increased information to the account 
 of personal culture and considerable refinement; but such tempers are 
 equally rare in all classes, and the greater number, especially of the 
 young, have, as a knowledge of human nature should have led us to 
 expect, simply become unsettled, and crave after a variety of experience 
 and interest such as the country can never afford. For those whom 
 necessity or prudent acquiescence retains in the country charity should 
 teach us to provide all the recreation possible. It is simply terrible, 
 when, as in my own place, ground cannot be had even for cricket and 
 other suitable sports. Every village should have its cricket ground, its 
 fives-court, and its apparatus for athletics ; every village schoolmaster 
 should be capable to train for a cantata ; and no better gifts than that 
 of a piano for the village platform, or of instruments for a village band, 
 can be made to a village by its wealthier neighbours. It is sad indeed 
 when almost the only excitement, even for the young, is tobe found in the 
 society of the village alehouse. Dancing should be encouraged and, if 
 possible, taught in every schoolroom. Nothing refines more the relations 
 of the sexes under proper management. One will always welcome the 
 
102 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 political meetings of either party, which are always largely attended, 
 and find most considerate and patient hearers in our labourers, unless 
 the speakers insult them by turning firm, conscientious, and reasonable 
 argument to rude invective, which, I am glad to say, is largely con- 
 demned from whatever side it comes. Everything in the way of whole- 
 some sport and interest is to be encouraged. In Imperial days Rome 
 had to work her fa,rms by slave colonies, and the working of our farms 
 has become difficult because we no longer have either ignorance or 
 serfdom. Enormous is the difficulty that lies on the country landlord, 
 still more on the impoverished clergyman, who can rarely escape his 
 surroundings, to find variety sufficient to satisfy the craving interests of 
 to-day, e.specially in the case of the young. For the elder man many 
 of us hope that some relief will be found when, through village councils 
 and suchlike, he has to do the work that has hitherto been dune for 
 him ; in which case, after a little period of disturbance, I, for one, do 
 not fear but that the labourer, once settled in his harness, and face to 
 face with realities, will show the same good business sense and modera- 
 tion in office as other Englishmen, and take a pride in being sensible. " 
 
 SlR,^ — Every Liberal is indebted to you for the admirable articles and 
 correspondence in your columns on this question. The exodus ol the rural 
 population is a fact which everyone professes to deplore. The causes 
 which produce the evil have been at work for centuries, and only by a 
 variety of remedies will a cure be obtained. The result to be secured 
 is the re-peopling of our countiy districts, and this can only be done by 
 making it worth the while of the people to live there. This you will 
 not do unless it is possible for a labourer to make up his income to £,\ 
 a week. An ordinary allotment will not do this. South of the River 
 Trent, it is doubtful if the income of the labourer averages I2s. a week 
 throughout the year, and it is a total mistake to suppose that the 
 extension of large farms, with improved machinery, will be any help to 
 him. The valuable letter of your correspondent " A Leicestershire 
 Farmer " conclusively shows how much more likely small farmers 
 are than large to pay good wages, from the fact that they work amongst 
 their men, and, nothing being wasted, they have a much larger surplus 
 out of which wages can be paid. 
 
 What is wanted is that farms should be cultivated by labourers in 
 the prime of life, looking forward by means of hard work and thrift to 
 occupying small holdings on their own account as they get older. They 
 cannot get the means of doing this unless in addition to their work they 
 hfive an acre of land and upwards at a fair rent and with security of 
 tenure — in fact, roughly speaking, the three F's of Ulster fame. The 
 advocates of large farms will tell you that this system will prevent their 
 getting labourers. What it will doubtless do will be to secure for the 
 labourers the alternative of either getting work all the year round and a 
 livelihood of £i a week, or of spending their time partly on their own 
 land and partly on the farmer's. I venture to say it will be better for 
 bplh fafmer inid labourer wh?n this is the case. Everyone is familiar 
 
CORRESPONDENCE, 1 83 
 
 with the complaint of farmers that labourers do not work now as they 
 used to. Other employers, I believe, do not make similar complaints. 
 The fact is a man does not see why he should for twelve shillings a 
 week be giving as much hard work as he can get £\ for if he sold it in 
 the town market. Where the inen are well paid you can secure a good 
 day's work without great grumbling. 
 
 Far-reaching reforms will be needed to bring this state of things 
 about. The power of preventing the sale of land by settlement must 
 be abolished. Village Councils, with one man one vote, will have to 
 he created, with compulsory powers for hiring land for allotments 
 subject to the approval of a supervising authority, and, if needs be, for 
 afterwards providing land for the purpose of small holdings. A good 
 system of allotments followed by the abolition of the Law of 
 Settlement, together with a system of land transfer based on the 
 example of our Colonies,, would speedily provide an outlet for the 
 energies and hopes of the working people of our rural districts. The 
 .;South Division of Worcestershire, where I am fighting the Liberal 
 battle, would furnish numbers of instances where men have made good 
 progress by means of small cultivation, but where, owing to our land 
 laws, their further progress is impossible. So long as the prejudices of 
 the few are allowed to prevail over the interests of the majority, and 
 the House of Lords and the great landowners and the lawyers are 
 permitted to uphold our present ridiculous semi-feudal land system, 
 our villages will be deserted and poverty-stricken. There is nothing 
 which the good of our countrymen more imperatively calls for than the 
 sweeping away of our present land system and the building up of a 
 more righteous and popular law in its place. This work the Liberal 
 party must strenuously enter upon or forfeit the confidence of the rural 
 population.— Yours, &c., FREDERICK IMPEY, 
 
 Hon. Sec. Allotments and Small Holdings Association. 
 
 Longbridge, Worcestershire, Sept. 4. 
 
 "A Solicitor" says : — " The changes I advocate are these : i, Dis- 
 establishment and disendowment of the Church ; 2, Abolition of the 
 law of primogeniture, with the consequent abolition of the distinction 
 between real and personal property, and the vesting of all property in 
 the executors or administrators of a deceased owner for the benefit of 
 all his family. This would require that the representatives of a 
 deceased ovraer should have absolute power conferred by statute to sell 
 land and houses, just as executors may now sell leaseholds ; 3, Aboli- 
 tion of entail and the right to settle land and houses — that is, the 
 present law relating to settlement of estates. Nearly all the landed 
 property of the great landowners is tied down by settlement, and it is 
 possible to settle property by one instrument for a hundred years, and 
 so keep it out of the market. Until a hundred years ago a man had 
 power to settle his property in perpetuity ; but at the end of last 
 century an Act was passed forbidding a settlement of property for more 
 than a ' life in being and twenty-one years beyond. ' By the operation 
 
184 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 of this law a man may by his will settle his property on his eldest son 
 for life, and afterwards until his eldest son's eldest son attains 21. 
 Suppose the testator's eldest son be only a year old, and lives to 80 or 
 90, the property is tied up and kept out of the market for nearly a 
 century. This power of settlement, so far as relates to land and houses, 
 should be abplished, and with the abolition should be enacted a power 
 for all trustees of all settlements (whether they be wills or deeds) to 
 sell the real estate without the consent of any Court. 4, Enfranchise- 
 ment of Leaseholds. — The power to purchase the freehold should be 
 conferred upon every leaseholder for 21 years and upwards. Consider, 
 sir, what would result if the half of London which consists of lease- 
 holds all tied down by settlements executed by the great landowners 
 of London for the aggrandisement of their families were set free 
 from the present restraints. The throwing of so much property into 
 the market would be such an enormous increase of business for * all 
 sorts and conditions of men ' that London pauperism would be sensibly 
 diminished. The half of London has been built by tradesmen and 
 other business men, whose families have lost all their outlay because 
 the houses built by them have fallen into the ownership of their land- 
 lords, who have never spent a sixpence either in building or improving 
 the properly, or in rates and taxes, and this landlord class has been 
 enriched to an untold degree at the expense of the general community." 
 
 Sir, — Our land laws are bad enough, but to make them out worse 
 than they are is surely to put an obstacle in the way of their amendment. 
 One cannot help suspecting that there is in " A Solicitor's " mind some 
 notion of an indissoluble relation between the abolition of primogeniture 
 and the compulsory division of property amongst the family — the 
 establishment of the legitime of the French law. Of course there is 
 no such connection ; primogeniture will soon be swept away along with 
 a good many other anomalies, but rather because it is an anomaly than 
 because of any special importance in itself, or any good its abolition is 
 likely to confer. How much land in the country does your corre- 
 spondent suppose the succession is unprovided for by will or settlement, 
 for it is to such land alone that the law of primogeniture, which is 
 entirely a law of intestate succession, can apply. The very prevalence 
 of settlements serves to minimise the chance of the law applying. As 
 to compulsory division, that may or may not lie in the future, but 
 its time is not yet. And the abolition of primogeniture will not have 
 for its consequence "the aboliiion of tie distinction between real and 
 personal property," nor is it desirable that it should. The tendency of 
 modern legislation has been to emphasise this distinction in one 
 respect at any rate, viz., to secure that publicity in dealings with land 
 which it was the object of our earliest conveyance — the feoffment with 
 livery of seisin — to secure, and which the niinia suhtilitas of our 
 medijival lawyers successfully evaded. Registration of title and regis- 
 tration of transfers of land, the desire for securing publicity at the 
 present day have, for reasons too many and too intricate to discuss 
 
'correspondence. 185 
 
 here, not been very successful, but everything points to their being 
 made compulsory as the next step towards simplifying and cheapen- 
 ing dealings with land. Possibly it may be necessary to make the 
 step a bold one, and here I would make a suggestion. For 
 centuries it was possible by levying a fine to bar all claims not put 
 forward within five years, and the fine was frequently resorted to 
 by landowners as a means of sirengthening their title. Why should not 
 some such short term of prescription be set to all claims after the com- 
 pilation of the new Domesday Book which a compulsory Act would 
 necessitate ? Such a provision would, there is little doubt, turn away 
 the wralh of the landowners, which at present stands in the way of 
 enforced registration. "A Solicitor," taking up "the abolition of 
 entail, and the right to settle land and houses," goes on to speak of 
 settlements " tying up " land and " keeping estates out of the market " 
 for a hundred years, accompanying these statements with some historical 
 information which is at least curious, if not peculiar. At what time 
 could a man settle his property in perpetuity, and how will " A 
 Solicitor " cite in Court or out of it the statute which abolished 
 this power ? Is it for nothing that we read of the common law rule 
 against the abeyance of freeholds, and was it vain imagining that 
 moved Lord Nottingham long before 1700 to declare that though 
 the tiltimum quod sit was not then plainly determined, it would soon be 
 found out if men should set their wits to contrive that which the 
 law had so long laboured against. So far from the rule against 
 perpetuities being a restriction new-hatched by a statute of last century, 
 it has taken shape from a series of judicial decisions, closing with 
 the great case of Cadell v. Palmer in 1833 ; and, be it noted, the 
 course of those decisions was in the direction not of tightening but 
 of relaxing the rule. However, "A Solicitor" is right in this — 
 that the rule as it now stands forbids a settlement for more than a 
 life or lives in being, and 21 years afterwards. But to say that this may 
 keep the land out of the market for a century is simply to state the 
 thing which is not. Let us for a moment consider what is the 
 usual form of settlement. A. purchases the fee simple of land, and so 
 becomes, as we may say here, the absolute owner. He has a family, and 
 proposes to make a settlement. It is, I am assured on the authority of 
 the conveyancers, quite an unusual thing for the settlor to " make 
 an eldest son," as it is called ; in general he conveys the land in 
 fee simple to trustees to pay out of the rents and profits portions to 
 the children, with sometimes, but not so often as is supposed, a rather 
 larger share to sons than daughters. In such a case there is nothing 
 whatever to prevent the trustees selling the land or leasing it, or 
 otherwise dealing with it as might a bonus paterfamilias. If it 
 be an eldest son settlement, then the settlor and bis son become 
 tenants for life in succession, and the eldest son of such eldest son 
 is named tenant in tail. This, it is true, ties up the property in 
 one sense, but hardly in the sense which is likely to be understood 
 by those who read "A Solicitor's" letter. By the Settled Estates 
 Acts the tenant for life can at any time sell the property as freely 
 as if he were absolute owner, and the proceeds then become subject 
 
1 86 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 to the trusts of the settlement. And as soon as any tenant in tail 
 comes of age every limitation of the settlement taking effect after 
 the estate tail may be destroyed by a deed executed by the tenant 
 in tail with the consent of the tenant for life. Surely then this is 
 a very different thing from keeping land out of the market for a 
 century. 
 
 I have entered at this length into the questions raised by your 
 correspondent's letter, not out of hostility to land reform, but because 
 of a very keen appreciation of the rule that if a man would do a thing, 
 it is necessary that he should first find exactly what he has to do. There 
 are sufficient difficulties in the road without our friends stepping in and 
 setting up bogies in our way. Such action can only discredit the cause. 
 The law of settlement, I admit, is in a bad way, and much will have to 
 be done to simplify it — very much before an effective registration of 
 title is practicable. The estate tail will, of course, disappear, though, as 
 I have pointed out, and as one hoped most people understood, entail 
 does not mean the perpetual tying up of land . Settlements are objec- 
 tionable because they are complicated, and hence make dealings with 
 land expensive. To consider them directly responsible for high rents 
 and bad landlords is a mistake. True, no doubt, it is that land is 
 hampered with portions and charges of one kind and another ; but is 
 there any likelihood of improvement under a system of family division 
 which would substitute a large number of small landlords for a small 
 number of large ones ? What experience we have does not encourage 
 us. It is the feeling that little is to be gained for the man who 
 works the soil by merely breaking up large estates that has driven 
 so many of us to think that in the nationalisation of the land alone 
 shall we find any great amelioration of the condition of the labourer. 
 Une word in regard to leasehold enfranchisement. Do not let us be 
 carried away by any sentimental regard for the urban leaseholder. 
 He is not in the beginning of things a particularly depressed person, 
 and for my own part 1 see no more reason for giving him any un- 
 earned increment there may be than for putting it into the pocket 
 of his landlord. The great curse which our leasehold system has 
 brought upon us is the jerry-built house, and the remembrance that 
 this system is in no small degree responsible for the state of things 
 revealed by every inquiry into the housing of the poor should be our 
 principal reason for placing leasehold enfranchisement among the 
 first articles of the Liberal creed. — Yours very truly. 
 
 Temple, September \% E COLL. REG. 
 
 Sir, — The prices paid by the labourers at the village shops are 
 higher than many would imagine. The labourer gets lower wages than 
 the artisan, but pays far higher for his groceries than anyone in the 
 towns. In the village the labourer has no choice of shops, and he must 
 give 2s. a lb. for inferior tea, g^d. for bad cheese, or go without. The 
 town shopkeepers are forced to supply good things reasonably or their 
 shops would be forsaken for one of the many others. The village shop- 
 keeper is able to demand almost any price he likes ; he knows the 
 
CORRESPONDENCE. 1 87 
 
 people are -at his mercy, and the most they can do is to grumble at the 
 prices. It is an injustice that a family living on 1 2s. a week should pay 
 more for everything than I do, but it is a fact that they do. I am able to 
 buy in larger quantities from the nearest town ; they have barely enough 
 money to buy a week's supply, and cannot afford to pay train fares to 
 the towns. A few days ago, a woman better off than most of her 
 neighbours told me that by going to a town ten miles away and buying 
 enough for a month she can pay her ticket and save is. a week on what 
 she would give for the same things at the village shop. The really poor 
 cannot afford a month's supply, simply because the money is not there 
 to buy with, and therefore are forced to buy from a shop which would 
 be forsaken in a town. Much can be done to help the poor in our 
 villages by starting co-operative societies or keeping a few things to sell 
 them one's self. I believe we save them a good deal by our little 
 " store, " by selling tea, cheese, candles, soap, oil, calicoes, shirtings, 
 flannels. Salvation Army matches, and so on. We buy in . large 
 quantities, sell at a slight profit, but considerably lower than the shop. 
 The profits are divided in proportion to the amount spent. Some 
 receive as much as 5s. or 6s. back, and at the same time are buying 
 really good tea at is. 4d., instead of paying 2s. for bad with no profit. 
 One of the worst evils of village life is the high prices the labourer must 
 pay. " High prices and poor stuff" is the general rule. 
 
 Odsey, near Roy ston, September 12. A RADICAL WOMAN. 
 
 Sir, — I read your articles on Village Life as they appear to my 
 labourers, and we discuss the various questions raised. The result of 
 our talk seems to be that the deplorable state of agriculture in Essex 
 may also be seen here in Oxfordshire on the numerous farms which of 
 late years have been neglected from want of capital or otherwise ; that 
 the condition of the small farmer was never worse, but that the con- 
 dition of the labouring man was never better than it is at present. The 
 more people that go to the towns the better for those who are left 
 behind. The only drawback is the distant view of the workhouse, for 
 however great wages the labourer may receive, he puts by not a single 
 farthing for old age. This prospect, however, might easily be averted 
 if the enormous sum of money raised by the poor law in the village was 
 kept in the village, instead of being sent away, who knows where ? I 
 believe, however, that the workhouse contains no one from this village. 
 The only remedy I can think of in order to keep all the land in cultiva- 
 tion is for joint-stock companies to find capital and work the neglected 
 farms, and utilise capital which might otherwise go to such places as 
 Chili and the Argentine Republic. I have during the past two years 
 taken to farming for amusement, certainly not for profit ; and take great 
 interest in agriculture. The rector your correspondent mentions ought 
 to know that an allotment is of the greatest value to the labourer, and 
 amply repays the labour expended on it. I have turned the fifth part 
 of an acre of my farm to garden ground. This repays me 10 per cent., 
 whilst the rest of my farm pays nothing. — Yours, &c., 
 
 AN OXFORDSHIRE LANDLORD, 
 
1 88 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 Sir, — Your correspondent "ARadical Woman," in calling attention 
 to the high prices charged at the little shops in remote country villages, 
 has indicated one of the reasons why a proper provision of allotment 
 ground is so important to the agiicultural labourer's well-being. From 
 the small population resident within a walking distance, if the rural 
 shopkeeper is to obtain a reasonable livelihood he must charge a large 
 percentage of profit on the small quantities he is able to sell. A fair- 
 sized allotment will enable the labourer to obtain all the flour, potatoes, 
 and bacon required for use in his family at no further outlay than the 
 rent of the land, for as the great difiicully felt by the country worker is 
 the want of continuous employment, much of the time spent on the 
 allotment would otherwise be wasted in enforced idleness, and conse- 
 quently can hardly be said to have any money value to him. Not only 
 is the whole of the retailer's profit saved on the food so produced, but 
 a much more wholesome and nourishing quality obtained. This of 
 course is only the case where the people have energy enough to bake at 
 home, as upon this baking at home much of the serviceableness of large 
 allotments depends. A supply of wheat straw is generally considered 
 requisite for obtaining a proper provision of manure, while the bran 
 and sharps left in making the wheat into flour serve to feed the pigs ; 
 but as wheat does not pay tb grow on a small scale except when con- 
 sumed by the grower, wherever this is not the jiraclice then we hear 
 great complaints of the deterioration of allotment land from want of 
 manure. Moreover, the bread made from English wheat flour is of a 
 quality much more suited to rearing a healthy family than that sold by 
 the ordinary baker. Seeing that large allotments enable the labourer 
 him.self to produce the larger part of the food required in his household, 
 as these become general we may hope to see his dependence upon the 
 village shopkeeper at an early date much lessened. — Yours truly, 
 Birmingham, Sept. l6. C. D. STURGE. 
 
 Sir, — I have read with much interest the graphic and incisive 
 letlers of your Commissioner, and have followed him mentally through 
 many of the villages which he has described. Yet he "makes (he poor 
 crushed worm to turn " with some of his assertions about the clergy. 
 Poverty is, as a rule, what we pay for belonging to the order, and how, 
 it may well be asked, can we with our scanty incomes build model 
 cottages and increase the wages of the labourer ? By some mysterious 
 process of reasoning which has taken deep root and ineradicable hold 
 of the public mind, we are credited with "having plenty to get and 
 little to do," as Serjeant Buzfuz observed 1o Sam Weller in the cele- 
 brated trial of " Bardell v. Pickwick." Let me say a few words in 
 self-defence of myself and my order. I have been more than 35 years 
 in the ministry, and was for many years a Liberal in politics, but al- 
 ways carefully abstained from in any way, either in public or private, 
 influencing my people. I am now neutral, and do not intend to vote 
 either one way or the other at the coming election. For the last nine- 
 teen years my lot has been cast in a small remote village in Suffolk, 
 
CORRESPONDENCE. 1 89 
 
 where there are no gentry either in the parish or neighbourhood, not 
 even a retired tradesman, and wliere the position of a clergyman is 
 positively nothing. The benefice may perhaps be 150/. in net value. 
 I have given away all that I could, never charged even one sixpence 
 for burials, marriages, or churchings, and allowed gravestones to be 
 erected in the churchyard without fee. Sometimes I have taken off my 
 coat or hat and given them away ; sometimes taken a share of my 
 dinner to some poor person, subscribed to schools, clubs, and helped 
 those who were in arrears with their rent. I have gone in and out 
 among the people, nnd regarded all, whether Churchmen or Dissenters, 
 as my friends and parishioners. This is no more than what is done by 
 many clergymen in many parishes in England. Surely, sir, it is hard 
 for us to be informed that " we are not worth our salt," and the more 
 particularly as many of us have endured for many years thankless toil 
 and may almost say, "What more could have been done to my vine- 
 yard ?" In many instances, very little " salt" falls to our lot. Sydney 
 Smith speaks of the poor clergyman endeavouring to preserve the heart 
 of a gentleman, the spirit of a Christian, and the kindness of a pastor. 
 He needs, verily, to pose in these characters, and he may say with 
 Horace — 
 
 " Virtute me involvo, probamque 
 Pauperiem sine dote quaero " 
 — I am, &C., 
 
 PRESBYTER OXONIENSIS SEXAGENAKIUS. 
 
 Sir, — In his delightful article last Friday, your .Special Commissioner 
 writes as follpws : "Away to the left, the pretty cottages with their 
 thatched roofs, their steps of unhewn rock, their windows full of 
 geraniums anrl fuchsias, and their porches overgrown with autumn 
 roses and canariensis, are hobbling down the broken pathway in a 
 picturesque irregular line, their red chimney-stacks gently streaming 
 out into the trees above the soft blue smoke of the wood fires." 
 Compare this charming picture of an old English village — many of 
 which still exist in every part of our country — with the modern cottages 
 built by the farmer or speculator to pay five or seven per cent, interest. 
 These are usually square brick boxes, built by contract in pairs or rows, 
 and roofed with cold blue slates. The bricks are soft and porous, and 
 the walls thin, so that these houses are cold and damp in winter, while 
 to save timber and slates in the roof the eaves project only a few inches, 
 giving an aspect of bareness and meanness that is absolutely oppressive. 
 Such houses as these, which are spreading over the country by 
 thousands yearly, destroy the charm of many a rural landscape ; and so 
 long as we act on the erroneous principle of providing dwellings for the 
 people instead of allowing them to build for themselves in the manner 
 most convenient for themselves, these ugly, inconvenient, and unhealthy 
 productions of the jerry-builder will continue to increase. 
 
 In order to find the true remedy for this evil let us ask ourselves. 
 Why are the old cottages so invariably picturesque, so harmonious with 
 the surrounding landscape in form and colour as to be a constant 
 
190 LIPE IM OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 delight to the artist and lover of nature? The answer, I believe, is, 
 because they were the natural product of the time and locality, being 
 built by the very people who were to live in them, with materials found 
 in the district, and in the style which experience had shown to be at 
 once the most convenient and the most economical. The first owners 
 of these old cottages, the men who built them, were either freeholders 
 or copyholders, or those who had obtained land on lease for several 
 lives, and they were actually erected in part by the men themselves, 
 with the assistance of their neighbours, the village carpenter and 
 mason. The materials were obtained either from their own land or 
 from the moors, wastes, and woodlands, which were then open for the 
 use of all the inhabitants of the manor. The walls were of rough 
 stone or of brick, or timber-framed with rough-hewn wood in the upper 
 storey, forming those charming wood-framed houses of Surrey, Sussex, 
 Hereford, and some other counties. In Dorset and Devon the walls 
 were often of clay mixed with straw, called " cobble," and this makes 
 a far warmer, drier, and altogether more desirable dwelHng than the 
 modern brick, as many of the old cottages, which have lasted for 
 centuries, prove. The roof, framed with rough posts, and with poles 
 for rafters, has a slight irregularity of outline very pleasing to the eye 
 when compared with the rigid .straightness, flatness, and angularity of 
 roofs built with machine-cut timber; while the thick covering of thatch, 
 broken by the small rounded dormer windows and with the broadly- 
 overhanging eaves, is not only far warmer in winter and cooler in 
 summer than any tiled or slated roof, but has the inestimable advantage 
 to the labourer that he can repair it himself without having to pay a 
 skilled mechanic. 
 
 Of course, so long as our labourers and country mechanics have no 
 land they can build no houses ; but if we so arrange that every labourer, 
 young or old, can obtain an acre or two of land on a permanent tenure, 
 the cottage problem, which so much disturbs our legislators and philan- 
 thropists, will solve itself far better than they can solve it by legislative 
 action. It will prove as easy as the three-acres-and-a-cow problem. A 
 friend of mine was once talking to a labourer, and, having heard it 
 stated over and over again that even if the labourer had the land he 
 would in most cases have no money to buy the cow, he asked this man 
 how he supposed it could be done, and received this answer, accom- 
 panied by a smile at the questioner's ignorance of such a very simple 
 matter — " Why, sir, we usually gets a calf, and her grows into a cow." 
 Just in the same way the labourer will get a house. He will first build 
 a hut or cabin of the nidest description, and this by continual additions 
 will grow into a comfortable cottage. An unmarried labourer could 
 put up a hut with walls of turf or clay and roof of sods or heather- 
 thatch, which would shelter him till he got his land into cultivation and 
 could invest his profits in materials to add to or build his cottage. Your 
 correspondent "Agricola," who has lived for twenty years and saved 
 money on a two-acre holding, shows how this may be done even while 
 paying a high rent. The result of this system of letting the people 
 provide their own houses would be that we should have, as of old, 
 individuality and variety in our rural cottages, with that harmony and 
 
CORRESPONDENCE. I9I 
 
 picturesqueness which results from the use of local materials jind hand- 
 work in place of machine-work. We should have stone, or brick, or 
 clay, or timber walls, thatched or tiled or stone-slabbed roofs, one- 
 storey or two-storey houses, porches or verandahs, fantastic gables and 
 chimneys, and those pleasing irregularities which result either from 
 individual taste or the growth of a small house into a larger one by 
 repeated additions ; the whole set in a groundwork of shrubs and fruit- 
 trees, and a foreground of vegetables and flowers. 
 
 The man who had built such a cottage for his permanent home 
 would love it as we all love our o«'n handiwork, and would spend 
 much of his time and savings in adding to its convenience, comfort, and 
 beauty. With such houses of their own, and with their garden and 
 orchard, their cow, pigs, and poultry to attend to, the labourer would 
 have constant interest and occupation at home, the public-house would 
 remain empty, and the great drink question would perhaps cease to be 
 so serious as it is now. Everyone admires the cottages of past 
 centuries, and regrets their rapid disappearance. If we give our 
 labourers and village residents of all kinds a secure tenure of land 
 suitable to their respective needs, there seems no reason why they 
 should not build for themselves as cosily and picturesquely as did their 
 ancestors. There are many and cogent reasons why we should do this 
 as speedily as possible. By this means alone we shall be able to re- 
 populate the rural districts and relieve the terrible pressure of competi- 
 tion in our towns. By this means also we may hope to destroy that 
 deadly curse of poverty, the increasing amount of which may be estimated 
 by the terrible statement of the Registrar-General that the deaths which 
 occur in English workhouses have steadily increased from 5 '6 per cent, 
 of the total deaths in 1875 to 6-9 of the total in 1888. By this great 
 reform we shall give our workers the best incentive to sobriety and 
 industry — the sure prospect of a homestead of their own in which they 
 may hve in comfort and security, relieved from the dread of ending 
 their days in the workhouse. This, too, will enable our cottagers to 
 grow for their own use, or for sale, abundance of bacon, butter, 
 poultry, eggs, and fruit, in the place of the many millions, worth of these 
 articles we now import from abroad. And, lastly, this will perhaps 
 save us from the crowning disgrace of covering our beautiful land with 
 the very ugliest of houses for our labourers' use, and of thus destroying, 
 for some generations to come, much of the picturesque charm of rural 
 England.— Yours, &c., ALFRED R. WALLACE. 
 
 Parkstone, Dorset. 
 
 Sir, — If the Liberals really wish to ameliorate the lot of our labourers 
 and not merely to catch a few votes at the next general election by 
 vague and vain promises, the first thing to be done is to break down 
 the combination of squire and parson. Until this is done, village 
 councils and all other proposals of a like nature are mere foolishness. 
 The parson and the squire may be the best men alive, but their 
 beneficent tyranny is apt to treat the labourer "Uke a horse or mule 
 which hath no understanding, whose mouth must be held with bit 
 
192 LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES. 
 
 and bridle." This was an ideal of the past, when it was thought 
 that the masses were sent into the world to supply the needs of a 
 favoured few. Nowadays, all this is changed. Hodge is beginning 
 to find out his importance, and at the same time he Is beginning 
 to discover his own misery. Very soon he will have to learn two more 
 things — freedom and responsibility ; but I venture to say he will 
 never know what these words mean till the baneful influence of 
 the squire" and parson is minimised. Let all Liberals face the great 
 problem of Disestablishment and Disendowment. 
 
 I am a minister of the Establislied Churcli, but I own wilh regret 
 that in our Church the power of the purse is greater than the jjower of 
 the Cross. Vast as are the revenues of the Church, they have to 
 be supplemented by private resources just as vast, for one of the 
 surest means to episcopal favour is the possession of a long purse 
 and good banking account, and much of this enormous power is 
 used ill the country for the subjugation of poor Hodge. If the 
 agricultural labourers want to live like men and not like domestic 
 animals without either freedom or responsibility, they must repudiate 
 clerical tyranny and claim a just share in the administration of their 
 own Church. By means of disestablishment and disendowment the 
 revenues of the Church would be more equitably used, the power of the 
 Bishops lessened, and the power of the laity increased. If the villagers 
 wanted a parson, they could have the man of their choice, and 
 throughout the length and breadth of the land we should find ministers 
 in sympathy with the people, and devoted to their social and moral 
 welfare. If the Liberals are wise, they will put Disestablishment 
 on their agenda paper at once. It will not only get rid of a mass 
 of corruption and thinly veiled simony, it will do more than anything 
 else lo make a man of Hodge, and instead of a broken-down, miserable 
 slave, we shall have a free and independent labourer with plenty of 
 work and plenty of hope. Whenever the Liberals let us see that they 
 seriously mean to take in hand this great and necessary reform they 
 will have the help and sympathy of many A CURATE. 
 
 Mr. Josiah Godden, of Woodstock, writes : — " Cobden once said the 
 English people in their dislike of change were almost Chinese, and 
 it would seem so on this very question of Life in Our Villages. Fifty 
 years ago Feargus O'Connor, and twenty years ago Joseph Arch 
 told this same story, and yet it has again to be told and enforced 
 with all the power and influence of the Daily News. The bottom 
 word of the whole matter is land nationalisation. Yes, sir, this is a big 
 word, and alarms by its strangeness, but it will be familiar enough 
 to the people of England before long. You cannot, try how you will, 
 get to a final settlement of this matter unless you give to every occupier of 
 land absolute security, so that he may not be subject to the caprice, 
 passion, or greed of any individual, but rest upon the solid basis of 
 national right and power." 
 
 Printed nv Cassell & Company, Limited, La Belle Sauvage, London, E.C. 
 20.1291 
 
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 Dumb Friends. 
 
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 Picture Album of All Sorts. With 
 
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 throughout 
 
Selections from Cassell ^ Company's Publications, 
 
 "Wanted— a King" Series. Illustrated. 3s. 6d. each. 
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 '""" """ '--^ ■ - Faith's Father. 
 
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 Jeff and Leff. 
 
 Tom. Morris's Error, 
 
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 Roses from Thorns. 
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 Red Feather: a Tale of the 
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 Edward S. Ellis. 
 
 Seeking a City. 
 
 Rhoda's Reward; or. "If 
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 Fritters. By Sarah Pitt. 
 
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 Tom Heriot. 
 
 Throiigh Peril to Fortune. 
 
 Aunt Tabitha's Waifs. 
 
 In Mischief Again. 
 
 School Girls. 
 
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 Three Homes. 
 
 In Quest of G-oldj or. Under 
 
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 Martin Leigh's Log. 
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 Vignettes from the Annals 
 
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 ■Working to Win. 
 Perils Afloat and Brigands 
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 A Ramble Round France. 
 All the Russias. 
 Chats about Germ.any. 
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 Peeps into China. 
 
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 Books for the Little Ones. 
 
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 The Pilgrim's Progress. 2a. 6d. 
 
 Truth will Out. 
 
 Soldier and Patriot (George Wash- 
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 The Young Man in the Battle of 
 Life. By the Rev. Dr. Laiidels. 
 
 At the South Pole. 
 
 My Diary. With 12 Coloured Plates 
 
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 The Sunday Scrap Book. With 
 
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 The Old Fairy Tales. With Original 
 
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 Is.ed. 
 
 Cassell & Company's Complete Catalogue will be sent post 
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 CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited, Lud^ate HUl^ London, 
 
Volume? guitaHe M Village Ui\tm§. 
 
 Cassell's National Library. 
 
 Edited by Prof. H. MORLET. 
 
 Paper covers, 3d. ; or in cloth, 6d. 
 
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 Those interested in the fort?iation of VILLAGE LIBRARIES 
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