TOPICS OF THE DAY.
DR. FRASER ON THE AGRICULTURAL LOCK-OUT.
SO low has the character of the Episcopal Order fallen in this country, that a Bishop who shows real pluck and spirit in defence of any cause other than Church property, Church etiquette, or Church ritual ; who can tell the country that, when a nation is in suffering, private benevolence is of little use ; and who dares, when the need arrives, stand be- tween the poor and the well-to-do, runs a serious risk of being misunderstood. Throughout Belgravia and May Fair, in scores of "stately homes" and "pleasant granges" over the country- sides, Dr. Fraser, Bishop of Manchester, was, we doubt not, denounced on Tuesday morning with an unction Rome can- not equal, and a plainness of speech to which she is much averse. What! a Bishop, and a Bishop of Manchester, to tell farmers that they are "mad" to organise lock-outs ; to remind us that, in Suffolk and Essex, there are thousands of agricul- tural labourers turned off ; to hint that a labourer needs to be a unionist ; to whisper, however gravely and soberly, of "a peasant war ;" to assert that a hind should have sixteen shillings a week ; to dream openly in the Times that, if not, "rents must fall,"—here is the end of the world at last ! Why, a Bishop, a Bishop of the English Church, ought to be thinking of Greek texts, not human sufferings ; to be preach- ing content, not energy ; to be, if not an advocate for horse- ponds, at all events a gentle ally of the rich, teaching the poor in smoothest tones that Heaven, and not Herefordshire, is the place for them to be happy in. It is monstrous! Mr. Disraeli was right, the rich say, when he said Manchester wanted an angel, not a Bishop ; but it is all our own fault, for allowing a Bishopric to be created in such a place, where its occupant was sure to be infected with modern ideas. You do not hear attacks on employers in nice, sleepy, Episcopal places like Wells. Dr. Fraser must be discountenanced, must be shown that he has stepped out of his functions, must have the Parable of the Penny a Day printed in gold letters and sent to him by post. Above all, he must have no promotion. It is true, Dr. Browne did tell his clergy in Ely that if things came to the worst, the Church must prove herself the Church of the poor, and not of the rich ; but he did it in a suave and proper manner, just as we say of ourselves that we are miserable sinners, and nobody who could be hurt attended to him. But a Bishop who can talk English, writing English like that in the Times, and saying those dreadful things about rents,—why, he might as well be a heretic, and should be sent to Sir R. Phillimore.
Of a truth, we have not seen such an instance of cool, disinterested daring as this Episcopal letter to the limes within the higher ranks of the Church for years, and are almost tempted to believe that a Bishop is not of necessity slightly epicene in his utterances ; that he may ultimately, by talking in English instead of a dialect, and reading the Sermon on the Mount as well as the Rubric, regain something of the moral authority his Order has pitched away. Nobody, except perhaps Christ, was asking Dr. Fraser to say a word for the poor people of Suffolk and Cambridge, who are not even in his diocese, who are led by men by no means all good, influenced by a paper just punished for libel, and ready actually to leave their parishes uncultivated rather than not have some of the harvest when it is reaped. Yet, considering that he might do some good to needy men, might obtain for the poor a hearing, might do somewhat to wipe away the stigma that outside the cities the Church is a mere branch of that more universal institution the Squirearchy of England, he has—it may be after reflection, it may be without reflection, for we know nothing of Dr. Fraser but his action—quietly pitched his almost inevit- able reversion of London into the sea. Bishops are excellent men, most excellent, but it is not every Bishop who, for the sake of men he probably never saw, will do a thing like that, or elevate the character of his Order at so heavy a price. We are glad to find such a one, and that all the more, because we are not quite sure that his inner thought on some points is the same as our own. Of the utter imprudence of the great lock-out which has thrown 4,000 labourers out of employ, and will, in the end, leave forty villages without cultivators in the Eastern Counties, we are as convinced as the Bishop ; but we cannot deny to the farmers the right of combination which we concede to the men, cannot allow, even for a moment, to either side the right of believing that they are at war, or can without guilt use any of the expedients of war. If the farmers cannot or will not pay more than they do, they have a right to dismiss their mew for asking so much, and to dismiss them in a body, just as the labourers have their right, by inland emigration, to dismiss the farmers. In declaring that they will not take Unionists the farmers are legally in their right, just as they would be in. their right if they rejected all applicants for labour with blue eyes, or as the labourers would be in their right if they refused en masse to serve any farmer who did not touch his hat to them. Both demands would be foolish—though we make of the latter foolishness a law in the Army—both would be useless interferences with human freedom, but both would be within legal right, and could not be fairly regarded as legal oppressions. The Bishop warns the country of agrarian danger, and he is right in warning it, but neither farmer nor labourer has a right to believe himself at war. If the farmer uses his posi- tion as Guardian to reduce wages, if as a house-owner he- ejects without notice, if as a member of the Association he slanders individuals, he is in the wrong ; and when that is practicable—that is, when a County Court is near enough —should be punished for the wrong. He has no right whatever, except to dismiss the man who will not take his pay. But then the labourer has no right to act illegally, either to coerce men who will take low wages, or to hold out menaces about ricks, which we are happy to believe are only menaces ; or if the farmer keeps his tongue under control, to be so astoundingly abusive as he sometimes is. His right is to refuse the low wage and sit quiet, or to quit the village for one where the rate of wage is higher. Suffering is a pallia- tion for a great deal, but it is not a justification for everything, and in no ordinary case is it a justification for breaking the law. If the labourers by their thrift have built a Society which can keep them, their right to sit still on their earnings' is as clear as that of any other capitalists ; if they have not, their right to depart is as clear as that of any shopkeeper who, not getting on well in his business, looks out for a more attractive situation. To menace the ricks is absurd as well as wicked on the labourers' part, just as to menace the horse- pond or the horsewhip is absurd and wicked on the farmers' part. Both sides are bound to fight out their difference within legal limits, and to remember that while the oppressor is con- demned by Scripture, so also is the thief. We admit that in such a struggle the labourer is fearfully overweighted, that the magistracy is against him, that the tenure of his house is against him, that his poverty is against him ; but so are these things against all other poor men in the struggle of life. There is nothing for it but extra exertion, extra patience, extra firmness in peaceful combination to depart, until the other party to. the contract gives way, or disappears before some one who can pay the additional wages required. The only legal injustices in the matter are those laws which refuse to the agricultural householder the political power granted to the urban house- holder, and which place all magisterial power in the hands of a class necessarily biassed towards the farmer ; but those laws are the fault of Parliament or of historic circumstances,. not of individual farmers.
We press what we may call the economic part of the question, because both farmers and labourers seem to us slightly mad upon the point,—the farmer asserting that it is. " unjust " to ask more than he can afford, the labourer asaert- ing that it is unjust to give him less than would make him comfortable. There is no injustice in either ease; the labourer having, if off the parish, a perfeat right to ask any sum he likes, and the farmer having a perfect right to refuse to give him more than he likes. The labourer is merely the seller, the farmer the buyer of labour, and labour not being a monopoly, neither has the smallest right to be out of temper because he cannot agree to the terms proffered to him. But on the expediency side of the question we entirely agree with the Bishop and the Times. If the farmers want to keep up the old semi-feudal order of things, in which alms and kindli- ness took the place of silver wages, they must avoid lock-outs, which can be justified only on the most rigid principles of economy, pushed as we have pushed them in this article, to their last extent. A lock-out is the extreme assertion of the law of free contract, which is precisely what the farmers do not want, for free contract enables the labourer to wander away till he gets the wages which satisfy him. It is a direct abolition of that old principle of " kindliness " on which the farmer relied, and when once attempted can at the very best leave nothing behind it but the principle of a suffi- cient silver wage, and no obligation on either side. It is a declaration of war, and of a war in which the farmers cannot win, from the nature of things. We put aside rick- burning and all such evil nonsense, as a plan that has been tried against machinery, and has utterly failed, and point , only to the governing fact of the case. There is no new supply of farm labour possible. Nobody voluntarily quits a city to become a farm labourer. Day by day the real labourer—the A.B. of the agricultural ship—drifts away to the city or the factory, and there is no one to replace him. A quarrel like this only intensifies the desire to go, and demonstrates the easiness of going. The world is competing with the British farmer, and so are the factory and the mine. A third-class railway-ticket, a long tramp, and a week of anxiety, and the ditcher on 10s. a week is secure of 16s., with a stone house and work for his family besides. How is the farmer to stand against that, or what is the good he hopes for from accelerating the process ? He says his labourer is a villain, an "ungrateful hound," and all that ; but he wants a labourer, and where is he to get him ? We ask the more reasonable of the Newmarket farmers if they really know of any human beings not born to it who are going to dig ditches for them for twelve hours a day and 13s. a week, with an extra wage in ," kindnesses,"— that is, alms ? There are no such people, and in " spiting " their labourers they are only cutting off their own noses. They may talk about machinery, and grass farms, and 80 on, but the resort to those expedients will extinguish them themselves first of all. Only capitalists can use machinery effectually, or manu- facture beef instead of bread, or even follow Mr. Clare Read's plan of paying a few men very highly and drilling them to their work by educated supervision. The ordinary farmers must get on quietly with the men they have got, or not get on at all, and of all mad expedients for getting on quietly, a lock- out is the maddest and most disastrous. If there are cheap men to be had the farmers do not need such desperate expedients, and if there are not they do not benefit by them.
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