JOSEPH ARCH.* ONE cannot help wishing that this book were

more of an auto- biography, and less of a polemic against Mr. Arch's adver-

saries, political and social. Angry invective against land- owners, farmers, and parsons—a parson is almost hostia humani generis to Mr. Arch—is neither pleasant nor profitable. It would be too much, perhaps, to expect magnanimity from a man who has fought such a battle, and won it. For Mr. Arch has won his battle. The Agricultural Union, indeed,

has gone to pieces, and it is easy to see that its fate has been a bitter disappointment to its founder. Even the parsons are less odious to him than the domestic enemies or rivals who brought the Union to ruin. But the disappearance of a society which in the nature of things could hardly have con- tinued to exist, for it covered too wide a field to allow of really harmonious action, did not injure Mr. Arch's cause.

His own position, M.P. for North-Western Norfolk, sym- bolises his success. His energetic action hastened, by we know not how many years, the enfranchisement of the agri- cultural labourer. And a class that is enfranchised is practically safe from oppression. As a matter of fact, it is to the rural voter that the most important legislation of this Parliament and the last has been addressed. He is, it is true,

apathetic and ignorant to an extraordinary degree ; if he rouses himself to observe and to act he may make a formid-

able change in the position of parties. And one thing is certain to stir him, even the faintest hint of a return to Protection. His greatest miseries were endured when wheat was at its highest price ; if he is now comparatively at ease, it is not because his wages are materially increased, but be- cause he has to spend, not two-thirds or more as of old, but one-third or less of his wages on bread. Thus consciously, or unconsciously, he has become the guardian of Free-trade.

Mr. Arch was born at a time when agriculture was pros- perous, or should have been if prices are a guide. Between 1826 (the year of his birth) and 1835, when he began to earn wages, wheat stood at an average price of 57s., barley at 318, and oats at 21s. But in this prosperity the labourer had no

share. The picture that Mr. Arch draws of his condition is one which there are many still living to verify in every detail :—

"The food we could get was of very poor quality, and there was far too little of it. Meat was rarely, if ever, to be seen on the labourer's table ; the price was too high for his pocket,—a big pocket it was, but with very little in it ; next to nothing most days, and sometimes nothing at all ! In many a household even a morsel of bacon was considered a luxury. Flour was so dear that the cottage loaf was mostly of barley. Tea ran to six and seven shillings a pound, sugar would be eightpence a pound, and the price of other provisions was in proportion. If fresh meat in still scarcer than it should be in the labourer's cottage to-day, he can at any rate get good wheaten bread and plenty of potatoes ; but in the twenties and thirties he had neither wheaten bread nor a plentiful supply of potatoes to fullback on. In the country districts generally potatoes were exceedingly scarce. In our own neighbourhood there were none to speak of; only one man near us grew them, and he hoarded them up. With corn at a prohibi- tive price, with fresh meat hardly ever within their reach, with what potatoes there were hoarded up and not for their buying—you see, that potato-hoarder was only following the wicked exatuple of the corn-owners !—what, in the name of necessity, were the people to do ? They could not grow potatoes ; they had no allotments then, they had no hope of them, and the bulk of the labourers had no gardens."

• Joseph Arch: the Story of his Life. Told by Himself, and edited, with a Prilsoa, by the Countess of Waraick. London ; Hutchinson sad Co. 112s.) In the matter of gardens the Barford labourers (Barford, in Warwickshire, was Mr. Arch's birthplace) must have been peculiarly unfortunate. There were few parishes in which the "bulk of the labourers had no gardens."

We say that this description can be verified, but Mr. Arch's recollections cannot be always implicitly trusted. It is pos- sible, indeed, that a tyrannical "parson's wife issued a decree that the labourers should sit on one side of the church and their wives on the other," but it is extremely unlikely. In many country churches the ancient custom of dividing the sexes has survived, modified, of course, by the system of pews or allotted seats. That a rector's wife should introduce it seems very strange, especially as the allotment of seats is a function which belongs to the churchwardens. Mr. Arch has, indeed, vague notions of church arrangements. What does he mean when he says that the squire and other local magnates

sat in the centre of the aisle ? A little before he tells us that the rector's wife—and she, to judge of her action, was a mag- nate indeed—had her pew in the chancel (p. 17). He gives 1835 as the date of the Repeal of the Corn-laws (p. 10). He speaks o f reading " Gladstone's and Bright's speeches" in 1844 as if the two were then on the same aide. He seems to date back compulsory education to somewhere in the "sixties." " The Act said to me, 'You must get your boy educated," and on the strength of this he breaks through a rule which made it necessary to get a ticket for every child that was admitted to the school. But what was the Act that said

"‘‘ You must " ? Of the school, as it was in his own childhood, Mr. Arch speaks with praise. It was, he says, "a parson's

school "—he kindly hopes that all such may be soon swept away—but a good one. As he remembers there were no ." grants " in those days, the nickname of "parson's school" is not altogether a reproach.

Joseph Arch bad from his early days, partly, it would seem, by inheritance, the reformer's temper. He was a "village Hampden," not a universally popular character, but often eminently useful. And circumstances helped him by giving him the pou sto. The family dwelling was freehold, bought by his grandfather for 230. He began by making his mark in his own line. "When I was between twelve and thirteen I could drive a pair of horses and plough my own piece."

Later on he took to hedge-cutting, which he had seen practised in a new way, and became a well-known proficient at that and at mowing. Jobs of those kinds of work took him over a wide range of country in the Midlands and Wales ; he saw others of his own class, found that they were equally discontented with the order of things, and resolved to work for a change.

He bad the prudence to wait till the occasion came ; he had by that time thought the question out and was ready with his plan. In two chapters, "The Call Comes" and "Forming the Union," he tells the story of how the work was begun. The day of its inception dwells in his mind, as well it might. It was February 7th, 1872, so that he had passed the age of Mahomet before his mission came. He tells us that it was a wet morning, describes the work that he was on when the messengers from a neighbouring village came to invite him to speak at their meeting, and describes the clothes that he wore that evening "as he tramped along the wet and muddy road" :—

" When I reached Wellesbourne, lo, and behold, it was as lively as a swarm of bees in June. We settled that I should address the meeting under the old chestnut tree; and I expected to find some thirty or forty of the principal men there. What then was my surprise to see not a few tens but many hundreds of labourers assembled ; there were nearly two thousand of them. The news that I was going to speak that night had been spread about ; and so the men had come in from all the villages round within a radius of ten miles. Not a circular had been sent out nor a hand- bill printed, but from cottage to cottage, and from farm to farm, the word had been passed on ; and here were the labourers gathered together in their hundreds. Wellesbourne village was there, every man in it; and they had come from Moreton and Locksley and Charlecote and Hampton Lucy, and from Barford, to hear what I had to say to them. By this time the night had fallen pitch dark ; but the men got bean poles and hung lanterns on them, and we could see well enough. It was an extraordinary sight, and I shall never forget it, not to my dying day. I mounted an old pig-stool, and in the flickering light of the lanterns I saw the earnest upturned Ltces of these poor brothers of mine—faces gaunt with hunger and pinched with want—all looking towards me and ready to listen to the words, that would fall from my lips. These white slaves of England stood there with the darkness all about them, like the Children of Israel waiting for some one to lead them out of the land of Egypt. I determined that, if they made a mistake and took the wrong turning, it would not be my

fault, so I stood on my pig-stool and spoke out straight and strong for Union."

The after history of the movement is less interesting and less satisfactory. Its leader had to contend with adverse influences, which in the end prevailed. Bat, as has been seen, it accomplished what he had aimed at, though not in his own way. But a league of all the workers on the land which should regulate the scale of wages throughout England was from the first an impossibility.

Mr. Arch has chapters on " Emigration " (he visited Canada and the United States in 1873), on "The Land and the Labourers," and on "The Causes of Agricultural De-- pression." His language is not always as clear as could be wished, and his figures, now and then, nothing less than

amazing. He complains, for instance, that an average of 25 10s. only per acre is "spent on the land,"—employed, that is, as

the farmer's capital. It should, he thinks, following herein Mr. Mechi, who, by the way, did not make his farming a money success, be not less than 210. "If this were to be done," he goes on, "the soil of England would take 50,000,000 more labourers to cultivate it." Fifty million labourers—we will not press the word "more "—would receive, at 245 per annum (not an extravagant wage, Mr. Arch will allow), £225,000,000, or more than 28 per acre of the cultivable area. Rent and tithe would, we presume, be abolished, but there would still be rates and taxes, and the cost of seed, manure, machinery, and the team. Interest, too, would be wanted on the capital. These items would bring up the cost to at least £12 per acre. Did ever man talk so wildly on a subject, on which he claims to be an expert, to men whom he undertakes to teach and to lead ? Of course, it is possible that 50,000,000 is a misprint for 5,000,000, but unless it is,

which we have no right to assume, the suggestion is absolute nonsense.

Mr. Arch's last chapter is entitled "At the End of the Day," and we gladly recognise in it something of the mitis sapientia which befits one whose working day is drawing to an end :— "As I sit here in my little cottage at Barford and review the past, it seems at one minute a long look back ; at another it seems but yesterday that my grandmother sat in the chair I am sitting in now—a chair which is over a hundred years old—and I stood by her, a little chap of six. And there is the old eight-day clock which my father bought in Leamington more than fifty years ago. He, I have heard him tell, carried home the case over his shoulder, and my mother trudged at his side with the works in her market basket. I can see my good mother cutting the barley bread for us, with tears in her eyes because there is so little of it for the children who are so hungry. I can see my father step in at the door, come home from his work for a bite and sup of whatever is going. I can see myself tramping off in my little smock-frock, clapper in hand, to scare away the birds ; then jumping the clods at sixpence a day; and so on, right away on to the great year of 1872, when I held that first meeting under the Wellesbourne chestnut tree on the February evening which saw the birth of the Agricultural Labourers' Union. I know that it was the hand of the Lord of Hosts which led me that day ; that the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth raised me up to do this particular thing ; that in the counsel of His Wisdom He singled me out, and set me on my feet in His sight, and breathed of the breath of His Spirit into me, and sent me forth as a messenger of the Lord God of Battles. So I girded up my loins and went forth. It was from the Lord God of Battles I came, that there might one day be peace in the land. Only through warfare could we attain to freedom and peace and prosperity ; only through the storm and stress of battle could we reach the haven where we would be. I was but a humble instrument in the Lord's hands, and now my work is over, my warfare is accomplished."

What Lady Warwick has done for the book she edits we, of course, do not know. That she has allowed more than one

strange error to pass, we have seen. Possibly her position has made it difficult to perform the function of a critic. It might have been better if Mr. Arch had submitted his auto- biography to a clear-headed, broad-minded man of his own class.