THE ECCLESIASTICAL DUTIES OF FARM LABOURERS.
46 THE zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up," saidKing David, and the text has recently received a new illustration. Mrs. Harrison, of Duffield. Wold, has demonstrated to the British public the store she sets by the privileges of Church
membership. Sir Balaam—plain good man—was content to send his family and wife regularly to the parish church, Mrs. Harrison goes a step further and sends her farm-labourers.
And if the unhappy hinds venture to play truant they learn to their dismay that family discipline is not to be trifled with. And if the unhappy hinds venture to play truant they learn to their dismay that family discipline is not to be trifled with. We say family discipline, because there really is no ground for
charginen this estimable lady with anything like intolerance. When Isaac Watson, her hired servant, had the temerity to
disobey her orders and spend the Sunday morning in his own ungodly devices, instead of in listening to the parson's sermon, it does not appear to have been his wickedness but his stubbornness at which the good woman took offence, not his neglect of his Maker but of her commands. There are, we believe, certain statutes of Elizabeth still in force by virtue of which every one of us is liable to a fine for not attending his parish church, but it was not to any of these enactments that Mrs. Harrison appealed for tho chastening of Isaac Watson's unsanctified disposition. She put it simply as a matter of contract. She had hired him for a year and he was bound to do as he was told,—she told him to go to church and he did
not go —and if there was law in Illyria he should smart for it. Accordingly poor Isaac was summoned before the magis- trates, convicted of disobedience under the third section of the 4th George IV., c. 34, and mulcted in a nominal fine and the costs of the hearing.
There is very good reason for thinking that this decision was illegal. The statute under which Isaac Watson was con- victed is the last of a series of acts by which magistrates are armed with summary powers for settling disputes between employers and their labourers. The principle which runs through them all is a salutary one and reasonable enough, for the ordinary process of the courts can never be swift enough to meet the necessities of the case. If a labourer dependent on his weekly wages cannot get his money, it is quite useless to send him even to the County Court, for even two or three weeks' delay would probably make his family chargeable to
the parish. On the other hand, if the labourer refuses to per- form his contract, deserts his master, for instance at harvest- time, or in the spring, when work is plentiful, after drawing his full wages all through the winter, it is quite idle to tell the employer that he may sue for damages. The man has not any property, and it is fair that he should pay for his dis- honesty with his person. But nevertheless the remedy is an anomalous one. Contracts made by artificers and farm labourers are the only contracts the breach of which is punished in this country by a summary criminal process—by imprisonment and hard labour. If a tradesman finds that he has made a bad bargain, or a country gentleman finds that the price of timber has risen since he sold his oaks, he may if he pleases break his engagements in defiance of all good faith, and the injured person can recover nothing but the difference between the contract price of the goods and the market price. We only punish mere commercial dishonesty in mechanics and farm-labourers. Of course the justification of this is that the loss and exposure consequent on the loss of a civil action are, on the whole, sufficient to make men keep their contracts when they have property ; but if they have none they must be punished criminally or enjoy perfect impunity. The pro- ceeding is anomalous, but necessity gives us no choice. Obviously, however, the statutes ought to be construed strictly. This is a kind of offence in which the law ought not to be strained so as to include either persons or derelictions of duty which are not clearly within the meaning of the Act. Now the third section of the Act under which the magistrates profess to have acted, the only section which has any application to the case, enacts that if any " servant in husbandry," artificer, " labourer, or other person," shall contract to serve any one, and shall fail to com- mence the service at the appointed time, or shall desert the service before its termination, " or be guilty of any other mis- conduct or misdemeanour in the execution thereof, or otherwise respecting the same," he shall be liable on conviction to im- prisonment with hard labour for a period not exceeding three months. Can a refusal to go to church be fairly considered to be misconduct in the execution of a contract to work on a farm or in a shop or manufactory ? If indeed Isaac Watson had been a domestic servant there might have been more colour for the decision, but it has been expressly decided in the case of " Kitchen and Shaw" by the Court of Queen's Bench that domestic servants are not within the meaning of the earlier statutes, and there is no pretence for saying that the 4th George IV. extends to any class of persons not aimed at by the earlier statutes. All we know about Isaac Watson is that he was engaged for a year, but even if he lived in his employer's house, as in old-fashioned places farm-labourers hired by the year still sometimes do, the case is not altered. Board and lodging are only part of his wages. A contract to serve as a farm-labourer is not a contract to go to church. Suppose Watson to have specially engaged to assist in the domestic work, then just so far as he is a domestic servant ho is not within the purview of the statute. Indeed it seems to be very doubtful whether even a domestic servant is bound to go to church at the master's order. Could a man, for instance, dismiss his cook without wages because she went for a walk instead of to the parish church ? No doubt a domestic servant is said by the old writers to be bound to obey the employer's reasonable orders, but surely that must be limited by the nature of the service she promised. The employer could not, for instance, order even a cook with a good voice to sing a song. But however this may be, we contend that in no case can Watson's conviction be supported. Even if a domestic servant is to be regarded as a member of the family, and therefore bound to obey all family regulations, these acts were never intended to apply to misconduct of that kind. Mere moral faults are hardly within the meaning of the Act. The object was to prevent labourers from contracting to work for a given time for a fixed wage, and then leaving their employer in the lurch as soon as they could get more. No doubt a man might be guilty of continued insolence, so as to make it clear that his object was to compel his master to dismiss him, and that, we think, would amount to misconduct in the perform- ance of his contract. But all that appears in this case is that Isaac Watson was told to go to church and did not go. So far as he may turn out to have been in the position of a domestic servant ho was not amenable to the penalties im- posed by the Act of 4th George IV. So far as he was a farm- labourer he had been guilty of no misconduct in the execution of his contract.
How far the magistrates sympathized with Mrs. Harrison we are not informed. The sentence, supposing them to have been right in their view of the law, was a very lenient one.
This may have been because they thought a fine quite suffi- cient punishment for the offence—about which there cannot be much doubt, or it may have been because they thought that the prosecution was ill-advised. In either case the fine ought to be remitted and the costs returned to the man. If the prosecutor really had no other object than to assert her power, and make her labourers understand that the orders of Mrs.
Harrison of Duffield Weld were in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil supreme, it was a piece of petty tyranny such as any Home Secretary should summarily defeat. If the object was to compel the reluctant hinds to be religious, and re- ligious after the fashion of their mistress, it was a piece of gross intolerance. It is not possible to make men religious by Act of Parliament. You cannot force religion on men's consciences by external violence. All you do is to set them against it, and turn indifference into active dislike. Religion in such case casts her pearls before swine, and they turn again and rend her. But at least in the old days statesmen in passing the penal laws were actuated to some extent by the idea that nonconformity to the State Church was a sort of disloyalty to the State. They moved openly to their end, and fined a man not so much for absenting himself from Church as for disobeying the law. If we have been compelled to abandon open coercion, certainly we should not resort to coercion by a legal trick, and if men ought not to be forced to the parish church out of obedience to the State it is pitiful that they should be forced there out of obedience to Mrs. Harrison. We do not doubt this respectable lady means well—fanatics always do. But if intercourse with a man who would not go to church was in- tolerable to her she could have dismissed him. If the view of the magistrates is a correct one, and Isaac Watson had been guilty of misconduct in reference to his contract of service, she had the power to do so. It is true perhaps, that as Isaac was hired by the year, that might have put her to some in- convenience and even loss; but no woman of piety would for a moment balance mere worldly gear against freedom from moral defilement by contact with the unrighteous. The Saints have often a strange logic, but even if it be lawful for them to try to force their servants to be religious surely they ought not to do so by perverting an Act of Parliament to a purpose of which its framers never dreamt. And if they ought, we are sure the Home Secretary ought to frustrate their devices.
But whatever may be our sympathy with Isaac Watson, it is as a precedent that the decision of the magistrates is to be regretted. Even if Sir George Grey will not remit the penalty a few shillings might easily be raised by subscription. But it is really a serious matter if an Act of Parliament is to be used for an object never contemplated by the Legislature and perfectly foreign to its object. The 4th George IV. was never intended to drive people to church. If it can be applied to such a purpose it ought to be amended. If, as we venture to think it cannot, if the decision of the magistrates was unsound, it will be a misfortune that the conviction should be allowed to go untested. Until its legality has been affirmed by a court of law there is hardly a case for legislation, for at present in this happy country magistrates need not be lawyers, and their decisions on a novel point are as likely to be wrong, as right, which must be a very consoling reflection for people- like Isaac Watson, who cannot afford to appeal.
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