THE FUTURE OF HODGE.
T"gradual desertion of the country for the town by all agricultural labourers is not half enough discussed. The process goes on endlessly, and at a gradually accelerated rate, and will before long profoundly affect all English habits and modes of life. The towns draw and the countryside repels. In Essex, Surrey, and indeed all the home counties, and in every district within which there is a prosperous town, however small, the villages, so far as rural labourers are concerned, are becoming literally depopulated. There are no men left in them under fifty who can do any manner of field work. In hundreds of others, though a few labourers remain, they are the residuum of the population, the strong, the bright, and the energetic having all wandered away. They are taught from childhood by their mothers that there are no "prospects " for them if t',ev " take to the land," they find for themselves that the tale is true, and as they reach manhood they &part. They prefer any occupation in any town, put up with any inconvenience to be in the streets, and often deliberately lower their way of life, especially in regard to crowding. The whole influence of the younger women is thrown in the same direction. As Dr. Jessopp recently pointed out, they will not stop in the villages themselves, and they tell their suitors, even those they favour most, that before the " yes " can be thought of, they must get " something to do better than the farm." The effect of general education, now at last begin- ning to tell heavily, adds to the effect of the women's teaching. The lad who has passed the standards does not like carting muck, dreads exposure to bad weather, and positively hates the monotony of ordinary field work. He does not hate the country. He will become a village artisan—smith, wheelwright, mason, or carpenter—with the greatest pleasure ; but he goes to field work only to keep alive. There is another drain going on too. England is amazingly prosperous. Every year hundreds of men who have made money settle down in country houses, each of them wants an establishment—gardeners, grooms, keepers, and house-servants—they pav 60 per cent. more than the farmers can, and they pay pay the whole year, and the villagers compete eagerly for their employ. The total result is that farm labour, partly from valid and partly from imaginary causes, is falling into such discredit that it will soon, except in out-of-the-way places, be un- procurable, and, as we know to have already happened in Cambridgeshire, farms will be thrown up owing to a sheer impossibility of working them. " What can we do," say the farmers, " when men ain't to be had ? " Moreover, this is no temporary strain. The most experienced em- ployers are the least hopeful, and a few of them who have read things " say that the feeling of distaste for work on the land, which once so greatly helped to sustain and extend slavery and serfage, is again perceptible, that it is becoming in the eyes of those who follow it an un- dignified as well as a profitless pursuit, and that it will be given up as domestic service has been by American men.
Is there a remedy without some great social change ? It may be taken as certain that a. great rise in wages, an average "lift" of, say, ten shillings a week, which would make farm labour pecuniarily attractive, will never be obtained. Prices may, probably will, rise a little for cereals, which recently were cultivated at a loss, but every such rise brings in new supplies from countries where the bulk of the people must sell their produce or starve ; stock-raising grows less profitable with the increased importation of foreign stock and frozen meat ; and what- ever the fluctuations of small profits, a dead rise of 50 per cent. in farm wages cannot be and will not be paid. Better cottages, which attract, cost every year more to build, and £200 spent on a ploughman's cottage means 20 per cent. added to his wage ; shorter hours are not asked for or much valued; and the panaceas of the hour, allotments, though excellent things, exhaust the labourer's strength, and are not sufficiently attractive to keep him in the village. The Parish Councils, which were to make village life so lively, do not increase its amenity, much less its standard of wages ; and as for the schools, every boy they send out is a boy who intends to do something better than hedger and ditcher's work. " He'll tramp sooner," he says, which is a deeper depth even than enlist- ing used to be.
Where, then, is the remedy ?—for one must be found. We all exist by favour of the ploughman, and England cannot be allowed to go out of cultivation because her population are acquiring a distaste for turning the soil. We fear greatly that the only remedy is division of the soil, either into peasant-proprietorships or farms so minute that a family can work them. We record the opinion with reluctance, for we dislike exceedingly the special defects of peasants,—their tendency to a sordid narrowness both of life and thought, their invincible conservatism, their envious dislike of a many-graded society, and their incurable and most disastrous antipathy to trees, which is lowering the rainfall through much of Southern Europe. But where is an alternative to be found ? It is easy to say that small tenancies do not attract and are in reality unprofitable, but the economic history of the world tells a different tale. The peasant puts an amount of sweat into the soil which the labourer will not, works at his own time, reaps what he has sown, and is, though a careworn, an independent man. Better far earn an artisan's wages than own ten acres anywhere except in the vinelands ; but the owner has never been induced to think so, and goes on stolidly plant- ing, and reaping, and hating. He does not drift to the town, and he is wroth when his son drifts. That feeling, partly justified by the facts, partly rooted in immemorial tradition, is the defence of agricul- ture all over the world except in England, and it will be its defence here also. Allotments are mere palliatives ; it is a social change which must come, and which in the end the Legislature will forward, first, by rendering the sale of a patch of land as easy as the sale of a watch ; secondly, by becoming the general gombeen man,—that is, using its credit for the advantage of the tiller of the soil; and thirdly, by assisting, as Mr. Chamberlain's Housing Bill proposes to do, the erection of the needful cottages. Science will find us a substitute before long for the excessively costly material we now use for cottages, which can only be put together by highly skilled and highly paid labour, and then the process will be swift. We dislike it cordially, but the spectacle of forty millions of industrious people living in a huge workshop for which they refuse even to attempt to raise food, is one which the world never saw, and which we do not believe can last. There is something, too, unnatural about it. After all, food is the first necessity ; if all the ploughmen struck, wealth would not keep us alive, and in the end the ploughman and the digger must be drawn back to the soil. The Eunuch-King of Persia who bade his soldiers spare the peasants, for without them it was useless to conquer, was wiser than many of our citizens, who think that the only contemptible human being is the man who raises food, and will scatter wealth over the pavement, where nothing grows, and leave the ugly arable, on which mankind is dependent, to shift for itself.
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