A WORD TO AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS.
WE have received certain placards and handbills announcing a series of mass meetings on behalf of Farm-Labourers, which are to be held in the West of England during the present month. The placards are headed by a rough woodcut representing various incidents of agricultural life. There is an unbeautiful Ceres presenting a quartern loaf to a very stout farmer and a very thin labourer, with the injunction to "share fairly." There are a long array of fat cattle, bearing prizes ex- pressed in guineas and an equally long array of lean men, women, and children, bearing prizes expressed in shillings. There is the policeman arresting a husband who has taken a rabbit for his sick wife, and a distant view of the county gaol, with the inscription, "10,000 criminals made annually through
rabbits." There is the long ascent to the workhouse and the pauper's grave, and the only means of escaping from this fate, in the shape of an emigrant steamer bound for Canada, with the exhortation, "lest men, get ready." The handbills are similarly adorned, some with a cut of a skeleton ploughing, while a farmer, who is not at all a skeleton, looks on approvingly ; and others with a more obscure presentation of the farmer in the shape of an ass ridden by the labourer, the tax collector, and the landlord all at once, and kicking viciously at the agitator who is apparently trying to lift the labourer off his back. The literary matter is identical in the placards and the handbills. The meetings are for the "underpaid and half-starved land-drudges of Wilts and Somerset, who have had to keep their wives and bring up their families on Os. to 10s. per week, and live in hovels worse than stables." The "working folks of the West," the "Dis- senters of the West," the "Liberals of the West" are reminded that their interests and those of the labourers are identical, and are asked to consider" who are the greatest thieves, those who steal the commons from the people, or those who take the rabbits from the Commons ?" And then, by way of conclusion, comes the labourer's curse and the labourer's prayer. "To the State Church, Ichabod ! To the unpaid Magistrates, Tekel ! Woe to the unfaithful Charity Trustees ! Woe to the men who cause the heart of the widow to mourn, and the fatherless children to starve in the streets ! Wanted, for the farm labourers and other toilers, the franchise, school-board, peace, and plenty."
It would not be worth while to notice the faults of taste displayed in these handbills. They are probably designed, in the first instance, to secure the attendance of farm-labourers at the meetings, and for this purpose they are not ill conceived. They embody the grievances which are most present to the labourer's mind ; low wages, poor- living, the hardness of employers, the severity of magistrates, the loss of common grazing-grounds, the diversion of doles to other purposes, the prohibition to catch rabbits, the insufficiency of out-door relief, and the inevitable necessity of making choice between that and the workhouse. They further embody the labourer's ideas as to the causes to which his wretchedness is to be traced. The right of pasturing his pig or his goose on the common is con- fused in his uninformed imagination with a right to the coni- mon itself. The glebe which the parson selfishly enjoys, or the great tithes which have been appropriated by the squire, stand to him for the State Church. The Charity Trustees are credited by him with the command of funds which, if they were properly employed, would go far to remedy some at least of his many miseries. The demand for the franchise conveys little more to him perhaps than the demand for peace and plenty, but he is beginning to understand that to raise wages is a more complicated process than he at first thought, and he thinks that a vote will somehow help on its attainment. For the same reason he is coming to set a higher value on education, though the cry for School Boards is per- haps prompted by the wish to please the Dissen- ters of the West," rather than by any belief on the part of the authors of the placards that the labourer has deliberate preference for this mode of providing education. If, there- fore, there were no other errors than those of taste to be alleged against these appeals, they might fairly be passed over, in consideration of the practical cleverness with which they are adapted to their immediate object. The wise man chooses his tools in view of the work he wishes to do with them. The pickaxe is not as pretty an instrument as the lancet, but it is quite as useful in its proper place.
Unfortunately there are graver errors than those of taste apparent in these placards, errors which have the threefold vice of misleading the Labourers themselves, of raising up needless enmities against them, and of embittering the enmities already in existence. Some of the charges made or implied in these handbills are not true, others are not true in the sense in which they are employed, others are true, but do not sustain the inference which it is intended should be drawn from them. When these various kinds of accusation are mingled together, the whole is certain to be judged by the demerits of the weakest parts. Such general truths as there are in these handbills will be lost sight of, in the indignation excited by the discovery of the particular falsehoods. Many persons who have been half- convinced that as the franchise cannot be long withheld from the Labourers it would be better to give it to them promptly, will be led to feel that men who are so prejudiced and unreasonable in their judgments about their own affairs must be kept without a vote at any cost. The better class of farmers, who admit that there is much in the condition of the labourer that needs mending, will come to think that men who are so wrong-headed in their complaints are really beyond the reach of improvement, and must remain the drudges that they have always been. Farmers of a lower order, who see their own condition painted in fancy colours, will easily persuade themselves that the picture of the labourers' condition is equally untrue to nature. In every way, the battle which the labourers have to fight will be made harder by such representations as are contained in these fly- sheets. Friends will be alienated and enemies will be en- couraged. We do not ourselves hold that the fact that the labourers resort to these unworthy weapons is any argument against giving them votes. The use of Parliamentary modes of warfare must follow, not precede, admission to the Parliamentary arena. If the authors of these placards were trying to impress a Member of the House of Commons, they would use very dif- ferent language. They write in this way because they know that there are neither Members nor candidates among those whom they address. There was a time when the artisans were to the full as wild in their denunciations of capitalists as the labourers now are in their denunciations of farmers. They have ceased to be so of late years, because the knowledge that they had only to impress their views upon Parliament to ensure their recognition, led them instinctively to state their complaints in terms which Parliament would listen to. The violence of these handbills is but the utterance natural to an unrepresented class. But though our own estimate of the labourers' claim to the fran- chise is not altered, it is perfectly certain that the estimate formed of it by many other persons will be very sensibly altered. 'You have been trying,' it will be said, 4 to persuade us that these agricultural labourers are as quiet and inoffensive as the pre- sent possessors of the franchise. Now that we see them closer, they turn out to be a set of incendiary fanatics, who shrink from no falsehood, provided it is sensational, and who live in a political world which is altogether of their own conceiving. Let them at least give some evidence of their power to see facts as they are, before you give them the opportunity of try- ing to make facts what they would have them.' There is a prima fade force about this reasoning which will certainly have weight with many of those to whom it is addressed. It can be answered by other reasoning, but it is a great and need- less injury to the labourers' cause that it should have to be answered at all.
It is not only the violence of these handbills that leads us to speak of them in this way. They are still more to be lamented by reason of the ignorance which they imply, and to which they are meant to appeal. It does not follow because the wages of farm-labourers might be raised without the farmer being ruined, that the farmers' present profits are too large. The probability is, that in a country where land is valued much more as a short-cut to political influence and social position than as a mere investment, there might be a very considerable fall in rents, without touching the point at which it would cease to be worth a man's while to go on letting his land. There is a good deal of unintentional truth in the woodcut of the farmer who has to bear on his single back the landlord, the labourer, and the tax-collector. Again, the workhouse, which is given so prominent a place at the head of the placard, is really the only practicable alternative to that disastrous system of out-door relief which has at once enabled and compelled the farmer to keep wages low. If the labourers knew their own interests, it is out-door, not in-door relief that they would attack. Granting the truth of all that can be said against the preservation of ground-game, it is not the labourer who is forbidden to eat rabbits, but the farmer, who is compelled to provide food for them, who is the real sufferer by their presence, and would be the real gainer by their destruction. The abuse of enclosures is a perfectly fair ground of complaint against Parliament, and against the landowners who have persuaded Parliament to sanction their appro- priations, but the labourers' theory of Commons is equally incompatible with their maintenance as public property, while it would probably add less to the produce of the country. There is much mismanagement of charitable endowments, but those who wish to put them to uses from which the labourers would derive real benefit, usually find their most obstinate opponents in the labourers themselves. Probably the authors of these handbills know, or shrewdly suspect this, and only ignore it because it is pleasanter to speak smooth things to the labourers than to tell them the plain truth. They may de- pend upon it that, in the long-run, no cause is ever furthered by such expedients. If they wish to put off the extension of the county franchise to the most distant possible day, they need do nothing more than persevere in the policy which they seem too often to have adopted. That policy is as short-sighted in their own interest as it is in that of the labourers. Those who are now impressed by it will discover before long that it is a policy which leads to nothing, and though its authors will not be the only sufferers by its adoption, they will assuredly be among the earliest and the most helpless.
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