■.I THE ii t%i i jiM ii ijiiM ii i ;> \vcck> I'.ir star[inc a braiK'h "i" a Labourer-' t'ni'On where wai;'cs are rally us. a week. He i- :i. i\v chairman ':>: ilie Pari>h Criuncil, p. 'Iter Heicham. To fi;i FJ-^ ;j-. THE LABOURER AND HIS HIRE 247 six acres of fruit and ploughed land, and rents a piece of the marsh. He keeps a horse, a couple of cows, some pigs and chickens, and does a fair amount of carting for his neigh- bours. It is not labourers only who have to endure a hfe spent under the patriarchal power exercised by the farmers. I have known of farmers' sons who felt the parental yoke so galling that they have emigrated, and some have even preferred to become shop-assistants in country towns rather than work on the farm. On the farm their hours of labour were interminable, and, unless completely out of sight of their father's eye, they might be called upon to do some piece of farm drudgery at any moment. At the present moment I know of a farmer's son who is working as a roadman rather than on his father's farm. He told me that work on that farm meant slavery without an hour of leisure. I know, too, of a farmer, an old man with a long grey beard, who rides his weU-groomed horse around his many broad acres daily, and is worth, I am told, £30,000. He keeps his three sons hoeing a field of turnips amidst a gang of labourers. You may hear that a farmer has put his sons into certain homesteads dotted about his own large fann, but it doe§ 248 TYRANNY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE not really mean that the sons are now master men. They are often merely paid hands. The sons are put there to prevent the farm being taken for small holdings. Each son in occupation is put down in the rate-books as a separate farmer, although the father secretly pays the whole amount of rent and rates, as well as takes the profits. In spite of all the forces of oppression, there is more hope of evolving a finer civilisation from cottage homes than from tenements around which factory chimneys daily belch forth their impurities. The fac- tory hand has little interest in performing the monotonous routine of his daily task. The agricultural labourer, on the other hand, is still wedded to the love of the earth. He still, in spite of task-masters, takes a pride in his work. This will largely account for the fact, so puzzling to cultured city minds, that a labourer will prefer to work for a hard master who can understand, and sometimes appreciate, his work, than for a refined, sym- pathetic townsman-employer who rarely glances at the man's work, and when he does cannot understand the difficulties with which the labourer has had to contend, or the skill with which he has executed the work. " I ain't satisfied with this bit 0' mowing THE LABOURER AND HIS HIRE 249 to-day," has a homeless,^ beer-drenched labourer sometimes said to me; "I believe I could a' done it better with a clasp-knife." And he would remain sullenly indignant with himself for the rest of the day because his work was not done well. What, however, rankles in the mind of the labourer, if he be a farm servant living in a farm-tied cottage, is being asked very often to work hours and hours overtime with- out any extra payment ; and when extra payment is given for overtime it rarely exceeds ^d. an hour, the price meted out to a sweated woman worker in big towns. I think I have established beyond a shadow of doubt that agricultural labour is a sweated industry ; that the labourer, his wife, and his children have to live upon means inade- quate to sustain them in either physical or mental efficiency. A bold stroke of statesmanship can alone save our countryside from being denuded of brain-stuff and manual labour. A few kind- hearted employers here and there, trying to raise wages, soon find to their cost that they rouse the animosity of the entire countryside, which seems suddenly to swarm with hostile farmers. A friend of mine some time ago raised the wages of the men on his farm in Norfolk 250 TYRANNY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE by only one shilling a week, and yet he was deliberately accused by an adjoining land- owner of " setting class against class," and the scowls with which he was accosted by his farming neighbours, on his way to play the organ in church, gave him a glimpse of the strange idea of Christian brotherhood possessed by those who spent their lives in buying and selling bullocks. It was only this year that Mr. F. J. C. Montagu, of Lindford HaU, Norfolk, on deciding to pay his married labourers 17s. per week, and his single labourers 15s., in place of the current wages of I2S. or 13s., evoked a hostile pro- test from the tenant farmers in the Eastern Daily Press. Without further legislation the agricul- tural labourer could be scheduled under the Trade Boards Act and a minimum wage instituted ; but in the formation of these Boards the area selected should be very large, for there is no reason why the farmer of Norfolk and Suffolk should not pay as high wages as the farmers in Derbyshire and Northumberland. Indeed they ought to pay better wages, for the soU they till is some of the finest in England. The difference in wages lies solely in the proximity to mines and other industrial centres. The area governed by each Board must be large, too, to avoid THE LABOURER AND HIS HIRE 251 the parochial tyranny which, as I have shown, is constantly brought into play with regard to cottages and allotments. The Cotswold labourer, though afraid to meet the Cots- wold farmer, would not be afraid to bargain with the great sheep-farmers of the Downs. To effectually stem the tide of the rural exodus is not only a matter of giving high wages, important as this is ; it is not only a matter of a better supply of cottages, free of the t5n:anny of landlordism ; it is not only a question of obtaining access to land. The vital determinant is the human treatment of the labourer ; his social status. With this I will deal in my next and last chapter. CHAPTER XI THE REVOLT I HAVE shown the sinister way in wliich the tyranny of the countryside differs from that of the town. When the town worker shuts the factory gates behind him he walks the streets a free citizen. In the country it is de- plorably different. When the labourer shuts his employer's farm gate behind him, he leaves but to enter his employer's cottage as a tenant. His leisure hours are spent almost entirely under his employer's eye. On the allotments, in the pheasant-haunted lane, in the public-house, in the club-room, or in the Council-room, he is at all times under the eye of his employer or his employer's friends, and if he be in debt to the village grocer he remains chained to the land like an indentured slave. He has become the most patronised, the most tyrannised over of all the peasants of Europe. Cut off from daily contact with his fellows, the mind-destroying isolation of the labourer 252 The isolation of tfie rural worlcer. So large is the field sometimes in which he works entirely alone that he brings his dinner to the middle of the field near his work. To face page THE REVOLT 253 reduces him to a thrall. The farm work, that keeps the labourer from sunrise to sunset working alone in a field with nothing but crows to keep him company, may be necessary ; but there is no necessity to keep him chained to a house adjoining the byres and at a long distance from his fellows, whom he may see but once or twice a week, and whom his wife rarely sees at all. This isolation is the deadly blight that renders the labotirer so slow of speech, and limits his political as well as his social horizon. He is, I repeat, the worst used and the least bold peasant in Europe. It is futile to assert that the French peasant on his own land is poorer and works harder than the EngHsh agricultural labourer. Though the French peasant may be in the hands of money-lenders, and though the English small-holder may be robbed by market salesmen and railway companies, each possesses a dignity, a glimpse of freedom unvisioned by the agricultural labourer. Besides the raising of wages, the granting of access to the land, and the supply of cottages imcontrolled by their masters, the vital determinant to keep the younger genera- tion on the land is the raising of their social status and evolving a finer civilisation. Rural reformers are unfortunately of that 254 TYRANNY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE type so pointedly described by a distinguished modern writer as men " who feel that the cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is injustice to equals ; nay, it is treachery to comrades." The children of the agricultural labourer note that their father is despised by the gentry ; that he is buUied by the farmer ; that in the eye of the law he is a social out- cast ; that the vicar looks upon him as a kind of Lazarus waiting, cap in hand, outside the vicarage gates ; and that their mother is regarded as a person fit only to perform the most menial services, that are scorned by the servants of the rich. It is not sufficient that a labourer can become a Parish Councillor merely to stand up Uke a sheep before his master, a fellow- councillor in the village schoolroom. He must be able to meet him as man to man, without fear of losing both his home and his work. Does it ever occur to my town reader that for the agricultural labourer there are no holy days, no festivals ; and for the tender of beasts no Sabbath day, no one day of rest in all the three hundred and sixty- five? Not a bad record, think you, for thirsty devotees of Bacchus. Bacchus is their only THE REVOLT 255. God of Joy, but we would that they should follow Pan and have ears attuned to catch the sound of his fiutings amid the reeds, and the woods, and the wind-swept hills. We are becoming more alive to the fact that agriculture is not only the most ancient but also the most learned of crafts. It contains worlds of undiscovered country in which our greatest modern scientists are continually delving. Within our immediate reach is a rustic civilisation, finer than any ever imagined by writers on agricultural reform; and its first lessons should be given in the elementary school, where the children should be taught at an early date the greatness of their fathers' calling, and the divinity of their mothers' work. Among the finer intelligences of my ac- quaintance are two men who are both the sons of agricultural labourers. They possess in a high degree that gallantry of mind which carries them far in the world of culture ; and yet both of them are the sons of fathers and of mothers who have laboured in the fields, hoeing the turnips that have sometimes been their only meal. At work from early childhood, for two or three brief years only do the farmer's 256 TYRANNY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE boy and the servant girl ever enter into the gaiety of life. It is only in his adolescent days that the country swain can afford to break out into bucolic dandyism. It is only when the lass is about to leave service to become his wife that she can lightly tread, amid a froth of cheap lace, to the primrose land. Almost before the sound of the wedding bells dies away, he wears sackcloth on his shoulders, and ties his steaming corduroys around with string; and as for her, she is rarely seen abroad save to taste the tepid joys of a Mothers' Meeting. Muddy roads, the lack of public conveyances, scandalous shoe-leather, the arduous duties of maternity and the increasing domestic drudgery keep her effectually incarcerated. At thirty she is an old woman — the age when the Park Lane matron is blazoning into a gorgeous womanhood. At forty, toothless, she has fully experienced the keen, heroic edge of life, and becomes exhausted by physical weariness. Her one hope is that her children may not live the life that she and her husband have had to live. The Holy Grail may be found in every labourer's cot, but Sir Galahads, richly caparisoned, daily ride past to enter the gilded gates of the Park. To uplift those who remain entrapped THE REVOLT 257 within this Slough of Despond, to infuse them with some sense of social sohdarity, it may yet be that burgesses, living in the larger freedom of our towns, will ride forth as St. George, to free their fellow-countrymen, to rescue maidens and little children languishing for want of good food, and to slay the dragons that keep them immured within dens of disease. Probably the symbols of brotherhood borne aloft by the flower of our chivalry will be the banners of working men, members of the great Freemasonry, the Trade Union of our towns. At their last great Congress in September 1912 the craftsmen of the towns at last declared their resolve to march to the aid of the craftsmen of the fields. Some day, too, perhaps a gaunt army wiU rise up, some with smocks and some with sackcloth flung over their tattered shirts and steaming corduroys, armed with bill- hooks and pitchforks, followed by haggard, fierce-eyed women, and little children with faces filled \vith wonderment and fear at the Great Adventure. On all their hps will be the words of the one revolutionary book with which they are familiar. They will cry aloud to the Lord of Battles to put down the mighty from their seat and exalt those of low degree. 258 TYRANNY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE Their entrance upon London, the citadel of the possessing classes, the site of the council-chamber which decides whether their hire shall be worthy of their labour — which decides whether they shaU Uve in rat-riddled hovels or healthy homes — would surely open the eyes of those who have so long remained blind to the writing on the walls of the Temple of Humanity. The miners suspended the work of the country, arrested the futilities of parUamen- tarians, and made them not only hsten but also act. Why should not the labourers ? Their sons had been boiled in the factory pot and were being educated at colleges where the history of their struggles for freedom is taught ; sons who, instead of seeking social advancement for themselves, had come back to the village to tell them the gospel of good news of how freedom might be won: how the land that had been stolen from them by Enclosure Acts might be restored if they chose, by the magic of the pen wielded in the great council-chamber. Vision, then, some four miUion strong of them, surging along the great arteries which have so long drained the life-blood of the nation, thronging the great North Road, pouring in from the West Country along the Bath Road, swarming along the Romford THE REVOLT 259 Road, marching along the old Roman Road which still strikes like an arrow from the sea to the heart of the Empire : all these streaming hosts converging towards Trafalgar Square. Callous clubmen and cold officials become suddenly warm with the flush of fear or of sympathy as these mighty lines are joined by fresh armies of those who once left the countryside to seek the freedom of the mines, the great metal roads, and the docks. These have had their day of disillusion- ment. Filled with high hopes of freedom, they found that they had to fight Hke ravening wolves at the dock-gates for their daily bread, had to stand idle at the pit-mouth or on the great metal roadway, waiting for their just reward. And now they come to swell the ranks of their brothers. The women too are there— the mothers of our Imperial race. With eyes filled with the burning shame of having to suckle babes that die through lack of nourishment, they sweep down upon the nation's council house at Westminster. Surely such a sight would stir the nation to its depths and make its manhood go down on its knees to crave their pardon for years of neglect. Nothing would be compar- able to it. The great marching of the women 26o TYRANNY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE of Paris upon Versailles would pale before it. Visitors to London from the uttermost ends of the earth would gaze wide-eyed from their hotel windows, aghast at the spectacle of the richest Empire of the twentieth century athrob with the fever of an oppressed race. They would witness the mighty host of the producers of the staff of Ufe, boUing in the cauldron of revolt. They would be brought face to face with the world's supreme craftsmen — the givers of their daily bread. From the dawn of artistic expression the Sower has been the symbol of the Immortal One. On this fecund earth of ours he is the supreme, incomparable craftsman. In his superb gesture art is immortalised. He is the only artist who is indispensable. He is the Resurrection and the Life, and yet we crucify him daily. We imprison him in cells rank with fungoid growth ; we feed him with the refuse of the earth : him who scatters the largesse of the golden grain. We put upon him menial labour ; we rob him of holy days ; we keep him with bent back to his task ; and we drug his mind with doctored alcohol. We make of him a social outcast, and show his children that we despise him. We spit upon him in the market place, and in his old age incarcerate him in a barrack, THE REVOLT 261 and leave him there until the time comes for him to meet his Creator in whose image he was made. That will then be our Day of Judgment. Before the great arraignment, what have we to say ? PSINTBD BY HAZELL, WATSON ANB VINEY, U>., LONDON AND AYLESBURYi SIX CENTURIES OF WORK AND WAGES THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LABOUR By JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS Eleventh Edition. Demy 8vo, cloth. 10J6 Net IT is hardly necessary to dwell on the import- ance of this book, which has passed through ten editions, and is recognised as a standard work by all students of history and economics. The first part is a sketch of early English society in town and country down to the latter half of the thirteenth century ; the remainder deals par- ticularly with the history of labour and wages down to the nineteenth century, and touches also on the general history of agriculture and on the poHtical development of England. The book is invaluable to all students of the social and economic evolution of the country, and contains a vast amount of minute information on wages and prices. Obtainable at all Booksellers T. FISHER UNWIN, 1 Adelphi Terrace, London. THE DECLINE OF ARISTOCRACY By ARTHUR PONSONBY, M.P. Demy 8vo, cloth. 7/6 Net THIS volume deals with the decline in the political power of the aristocracy consequent on the rise of democracy. The author analyses the leading charac- teristics of the upper class and the social ascendancy which they still retain. He compares the present-day aristocrat unfavourably with his predecessors in the past, whose manners and influence he describes. Several chapters are devoted to a consideration of the early training of the sons of gentlemen in this class, and the public-school system comes in for criticism. Although abuse is frequently levelled at the class in question, a serious analysis of their present position has not hitherto been attempted. " If members of the rich and ennobled classes could be induced to read his homily, they would learn Something to their advantage. . . . It is a timely and useful book. ... Its analysis of causes is just and searching. We should like especially to see this book in the hands of public-school masters and University teachers." — Westminster Gazette. ' ' The book contains not a few home truths cleverly expressed, which those whom they chiefly concern would do well to take to heart. . . . This volume contains much that is suggestive and valuable, especially as to the education of the leisured classes." — Times. At all Booksellers T. FISHER UNWIN, 1 Adelphi Terrace, London.