22 MAY 1920, Page 17

MR. JESSE COLLINGS.* Aar intelligent foreigner who wished to understand

our national character might do well to read the new life of Mr. Jesse Collings, partly from his own hand and partly by his friend Sir J. L. Green, with a touching preface by Mr. Austen Chamberlain. The simple story of this good old man is peculiarly English. Mr. Collings recalls the fact that his father was an honest Devon artisan and his grandfather " the finest all-round agricultural labourer in the parish." He relates in a matter of fact way how he became a shop assistant at fifteen, how at eighteen he found a similar post in Southampton at a salary of £25 a year, how he became a traveller for some Birmingham ironmongers in 1850, and how fourteen years later he took over the firm. He meant to succeed in business, and he did succeed by dint of hard work and self-denial, but he does not lay any stress on the fact. Like a true Englishman, as soon as he had a settled home at Exeter, and was earning enough to support his wife and himself, he looked about for some voluntary service that he might render to the community. He found his first opportunity in starting an industrial school for neglected boys. Then he opened a campaign in the local press in favour of the North in the American Civil War, and lectured on the evils of slavery. When he removed to Birmingham in 1884, he lost no time in plunging into municipal politics and then by a natural transition became involved in national politics. As long as England breeds men of this stamp, alike practical and unselfish, we need never despair of her future.

Mr. Collings's own account of his childhood at Littleham, near Exmouth, where he was born in 1831, is the most vivid part of the book. His father was a bricklayer, who by thrift and toil saved money and started as a small builder. Three of the sons followed the father's trade ; the fourth became a sailor and served afterwards in the Confederate ironclad ' Merrimac.' The author, the youngest of a family of eleven, tended the flower garden and did his mother's shopping. Looking back over eighty years, he assures us that food in the " hungry forties " was really not so dear as it became after the repeal of the Corn Laws. A loaf, weighing over four pounds, cost 714. before 1846, and in that year was 5d. Eggs were twenty a shilling, fowls from Is. to Is. 4d. each, and beef and mutton 5d. or 6d. a pound. Mr. Collings says very truly that the agricultural labourer of those days was suffering, not from high prices, but from very low wages. His life-long interest in allotments and small holdings is explained not merely by his ancestry, but also by his recollection of the fact that a four-acre holding, on which his father grew wheat, barley, and potatoes, and also kept pigs and fowls, supplied the family of thirteen with all the food that they needed, except beef and mutton, groceries and milk. When Mr. Collings, the prosperous Birmingham merchant, went down into the Warwick- shire villages and began to form a labourers' league in 1872, he may have been regarded, by those who did not know his origin, as a designing town politician. He was in truth seeking to improve the lamentable condition of the class from which

• Life of the Right Ron. Jesse Collings. Part I. Autobiography. Part IL by Sir John L. Green. London : Longman and Co. [lbs. act.] he sprang—the class which is the backbone of England. The labourers knew that he was sincere. Mr. Chamberlain tells us in his preface a by, election atteedote' to show that, though 'Mr. Collings in the House was ncr orator, " to a village audience he spoke the language that they understood, and his words were strangely moving." For years before Mr. -Collings sud- denly became famous, at the General Election of 1885, with, the cry of " Three acres -and a cow ! " he had been working with the late Joseph Arch -among the country labourers. The success of the Liberal Party at the polls was in no small degree due to his persistent efforts. The book helps us to understand the exceeding bitterness of the rural electors' disappointment when Mr. Gladstone, having gained a majority by their help, proceeded to shatter it for the sake of the Irish Nationalist vote. Mr. Gladstone's decision to propose Home Rule and to postpone land reform was, as we can all see now, a turning point in our political history. The Liberal Party -has never recovered from that fundamental error of judgment, which involved also, as the rural electors thought, a deliberate breach of faith. It is not surprising that Mr. Collings should have. cheerfully followed his friend, Mr. Chamberlain, into the other camp. He had had very little encouragement from the Liberal leaders in his advocacy of allotments and small holdings, which he began as soon as he entered the House in 1880. The agita- tion, which he carried on through the Rural League and which Sir J. L. Green, the late secretary of the League, describes in detail, never owed much to Liberal politicians, and attained Its aim at last after half a century in the Land Settlement (Facilities) Act of last year. Under this Act the tenant of a small holding under a County Cotuicil may, after six years, claim the right to become the owner, paying for the land by Instalments as the Irish peasants do. Thirty-five years ago Mr. Collings told the landowners that, in urging the revival of the yeoman fanner, he was strengthening the cause of property. " I want the property of all to be respected," he said, " the rights of the poor and humble as well as the rich and powerful. What is it in France that prevents com- munism and revolutionary and other doctrines from spreading outside Paris, Marseilles, and Lyons ? It is because the moment these doctrines leave the towns, they are preached to eight million proprietors and fall -upon deaf ears. But in England the proletariat—the wage-earning class—has reached a number that exists in no other country, whilst the property-owning class is small in number." His words were not heeded then. Nowadays there is no one who will not recognize their im- portance. The peasant-proprietors of France are keeping :the ship of State on an even keel. The peasant-proprietors of Russia are untouched by the Bolshevik madness and will in time re-establish order and peace in their unhappy country. Mr. Collings deserves credit too for his unwearied efforts to promote the Policy of the Plough. Only a few years before 1914 he was still being ridiculed by the superior persons who were quite sure first that there would not be a war, and secondly, that if war broke out Great Britain could never be short of food, so that it was not worth while either to oultivate more land or to arrange for national storehouses. The war has perhaps taught these false prophets a lesson.

Mr. Collings, whose autobiography unfortunately ends with the year 1879, recalls with pardonable pride his municipal work in Birmingham. He was first associated with Mr. Joseph Chamberlain in the National Education League of 1868, which was founded in Birmingham and which led to the passing of the Education Act of 1870 that niarks an epoch in our history. He entered the Town Council in 1868, when it was in " a sad state." The small progressive minority were helpless until Mr. Chamberlain entered the Council in 1869 and began to arouse the ratepayers to a sense of their duty. His term of office as Mayor from 1873 to 1876 saw Birmingham transformed. Mr. Collings himself served as Mayor in 1878-9. He tells us that, instead of giving entertainments to the wealthy citizens, he gave free classical concerts to twent3, thousand of the poorest people who were suffering at the time from lack of employment. His musical friends told him that the poor folk only oared for commonplace music. He persisted in selecting Handel and Haydn and other old masters and was rewarded with the approval of his humble guests. Mr. Collings is to be congratu- lated on this modest and pleasing record of a life of good work. It must be pleasant to him as a veteran social reformer to see the causes that he advocated long ago gradually riumphing.