THE IDEAL FARMER.
WE should like to know why English ladies think it wrong of a French peasant to give up his life to minute saving and minute gains to the repression of every nobler thought and aspiration, and right of an English farmer to do the same thing, —nay, not only right, but so ideally right as to create a new hope for the future of his class. Lady Verney has recently published an exceedingly forcible account of the French peasantry in a Southern Department, which substantially amounts to this,—that the Frenchman is a sordid being, who devotes himself wholly to small accumulation, often without success, and in pursuit of gain overworks and enslaves all around him, especially his womenkind, neglects all opportuni- ties of culture, and is, in fact, a sort of animal. He is, therefore, held up as an argument against the division of the soil among small freeholders. Lady Catherine Milnes Gaskell, on the other hand, publishes this week, in the Nineteenth Century, a clever picture of a farmer whom she has discovered in Shropshire, and who makes his farm pay. To our thinking he is essentially the same man as the French- man, except that he has accumulated a capital, and now farms 400 acres, that his wife loves cleanliness, and that he himself reads the Bible to his dependants, with personal applications to the delinquents about him interjected among the texts. Mr. William Bilston,—the name is, of course, fictitious, though the sketch is too lifelike not to be that of a living person,— " commonly called Billy Bilston," has two sons and five daughters, and makes them all "do som'at about the farms." "' We're not an idle lot, we b'ain't,' the good lady has often said to me. We all does " som'ut." There's my daughter Polly, now, as minds the cows ; her was offered a first-rate nurse's place, but her said her didn't want it, because her said her never could take to the babies after the calves. Then there's Sal, a good girl. She helps me to make the butter. Reads her Bible regular Sundays, and is beautiful at cleaning down the furniture. They brass things,' said Mrs. Bilston, with pride, pointing to her brass warming-pan and fire-irons, she rnbbeth till they shine forth like gold ; and as to dirt and dust, they is heinous in her sight about the house. Then there's Lizzie ; her minds the poultry, takes out the geese on the green or drives the turkeys out stubbling times. She's real good with a "nosh" chicken, a-petting and a-minding of it as if her was its mother like." The girls are made to get up at four, and from that time till the mother puts out all candles at half-past nine, the labour for the women, as well as the men, is incessant, or broken only by very modest meals We's up at four o'clock ; for yer must be up be- times, the young poultry are soft, and can't bide long whiles without food. At quarter to four I steps out of my bed just sharp like, and sings out to the girls, and they slips forth from • bed as quick as ever they may, and we jumps on with our clothes and minds our beasts, whatever it may be that God has given us to look after. And then at seven o'clock Bilston and all or us have breakfast. We has home-made bread, and there's bread and milk for the gals ; and we always has a slip of bacon on Sun- days I churns regular three times a week, and the gals they get off to making the beds or scrubbing, or may be to the calves or to the poultry. There's always work for the willing. Then by twelve o'clock we're all in again ; and after the gals and the boys has a-made themselves tidy—for I can't do with no dirt about their hands and faces at meal-whiles—we sits down ; and we has most times broth, and rice or Elegy pudding, and winter times an apple tart, or, for a treat like, a jam roll ; and then there's a glass of eider for Bilston and the men, and there's milk for the gals. And after we've a-done—that's saying, when all's have eaten up clean and neat whatever father or myself have a-given them—we goes out, all but Polly, who clears away, and washes up and puts back all the pewter ; and then we minds the beasts again till four o'clock, when we wince in and has tea, which I keeps in the tea-caddy as my mother a-gave me when I married, and which I always keeps locked— for I won't have no trifling with the tea; and after tea we drives in the poultry to roost, and we stalls the calves and such-like nesh ' beasts for the night. And after that the gals come in, and they outs with their needle and thread; and to make the work go merry we sings such songs as I used to learn by times when I was a chit, such as Cherry Ripe," Little Boy Blue,' and Sally in our Alley;' and all the while we darn father's stockings, or make the boys new shirts, or may be the gals
make their own gowns—but I won't have no furbelows, nor bunching about behind nor before, as such-like folly only hinders their gait, and makes them vain with the frippery. Then there's often the sheets to mend, or the nnderlinen to put to rights. And I always keep they sweet with lavendy, as does a body good to smell and seems well and pleasant-like for aur one in bed. And at nine o'clock we all get to bed, and I goes round the rooms at the half-hour, for I won't stand no candles burning
after such whiles, for it be a danger to the house and a folly to themselves.'" Nothing is bought in the house that can possi- bly be done without; the servants were formerly so worked that Mrs. Bilston found they "upped on her for the smallest thing," and all life is regulated on the principle of getting out of the farm the last obtainable farthing, the highest commendation of a son being " that he minds his beasts and lets the gals alone." Of course, education is discouraged, Mrs. Bilston's views being very clearly defined :—" Reading and writing is sensible, as it is only right a lad or gal should be able to read their Bibles on Sundays, or write to father or mother, or maybe their sweetheart (provided it be a respectable party), and adding up money is right, but more is rediclas and harmful, as it makes such fix their minds on other things. What a body wants is pride in her work, and it is better for the like of me to brood over her cows and her poultry than to be thinking when her will get her work done and get off to the piany, or be letting her mind run on her clothes and such- like nonsense." As to politics, Mr. Bilston "don't side with any party," "ponies being very muddling ;" holds Lords and Commons about equally bad, but has a liking for the Queen, "for a good lady as has brought up a family God-fearingly, and reads her Bible regular on Sundays." That, says Lady Catherine, is the life which pays in the farmer, and the lady who describes it in eaeh neat, incisive touches, is " cheered " with the thought that "many lives like these, simple, earnest, and pions, are being led in the heart of England."
We confess, though we see the " simplicity " of such a life, and recognise the "earnestness" in money-getting, and can believe in the piety, though there is no evidence given of it beyond the regularity of a worship which may be most mat or may be only kept up as a kind of charm against misfortune, we fail entirely to be cheered. It seems to us a life identical with that of the French peasant, and the small American free- holder, yet lacking the independence of either, a life sordid, pow% and monotonous, in which all true ends of life are sacrificed to living, in which there is no care for intellectual advance, no interest in things outside the cabbage leaf, and no possibility of any straining towards a higher ideal. We should doubt if any human beings on the farm except its master are freer than the cattle, and should expect that some day or other rebellion againet such a destiny would take unexpectedly strong shapes. It as, in fact, true peasant life, less varied than is usual even with peasants, and that life, so far from seeming admirable to us,
seems the one serious argument against the subdivision of the land which, in the endless industry and pinching sordidness it enforces, lowers hopelessly the ideal of the whole community. Most Christian ministers would denounce each a life as utterly worldly, in spite of the Bible reading—which is an accident of the individual sketched, many such farmers being among the most God-forgetting of mankind, or capable of cursing Providence if the " beasts " do not prosper—and most social observers would declare that it tended to degrade itself almost more rapidly than any life that is lived. There is no salt in it, except when, as in the individual instance, there is piety ; and men bred under it, as all who know the country-side know, tend, if they are bad at all, to become the most hopeless of all specimens of humanity, mere animals to whom drink is a revelation.
It is a curious fact in the history of English opinion that this kind of arrangement of life, so constantly praised in farmers, is never praised in anybody else. To farm 400 acres well, and keep plenty of beasts, and be admittedly prosperous, a man must have 24,000, and make at least a rent for himself besides his interest—that is, must have from 2100 to 2500 a year clear. If such a farmer's brother, the shopkeeper, making that income, kept his daughters seventeen hours a day at house-work, with only intervals for meals, and refused them any education beyond reading and writing, and avoided company, and denounced culture and despised politics, he would be declared a bad sort of curmudgeon, and the clergyman would give him advice, and the neighbours would stir up his daughters to rebellion. If, again, his neighbour the country doctor, or curate, or attorney, maintained the same regime, he would be condemned as distinctly bad, as a man with no feeling for himself or his children, and would be forced to associate with men a little lower than himself in grade. No Dissent- ing minister would dare to live so, and the village shop- keeper equally prosperous who tried to do it would find himself unpopular with his neighbours, and would have his mouth full of lying excuses for his own avarice. It is only in the farmer that such a view of the wise conduct of life is held to be admirable or idyllic, and we should like to know why it is noble in him to send his daughters out to service, when it would be infamous in the clergyman with half his income? There is nothing in farm labour, within doors or without, which should make of it a substitute for cultivation, or should of itself so open the mind, that absorption in it should develop, not only all virtues, but many powers. Nor is the work of itself so noble that the mere doing of it should of itself be a sufficient and a fructuons scheme of existence. It is a most excellent and reputable trade, perhaps more useful to the community than any other trade ; but it is a trade still, and one pursued, when pursued with this fierce devotion, mainly in the hope of accu- mulating money. "What is there in it which should induce so many good people,—ladies meaning, as the author of this paper evidently does, nothing but kindliness, Members of Parliament meaning, as Mr. Abel Smith obviously did, when he said the same things in Hertfordshire, nothing but friendly counsel,—to think that if a farmer works like a slave, and enslaves all around him, and gives up all leisure and all opportunity of study, and all hope of intellectual advance, he has, mainly by such renunciation, performed the whole duty of man ? He has not; but has neglected half, and the best half. Is there not latent somewhere or other in the upper class—though they are by no means the only offenders in this respect, half the writers in England preaching that farmers are fools if their daughters do not feed cattle and make butter—a feeling that it is the baser kind of farmer, who neither reads nor lets his children read, and despises progress of all kinds, who can be best trusted to pay his rent, and vote as his landlord bids him Or is the true ex- planation another, an instinctive feeling that the cultivated will not farm ? That is the explanation of French peasants, who declare, as the result of their long experience, that the educated son is lost to farm-life ; that he will never take kindly to its monotony ; and that its needful sordidness will utterly disgust him. Whatever the explanation, there is the fact that the British farmer is the only man in whom the suppression of all tine life is considered idyllic, and praised by his social superiors to the skies.
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