THE ARCH-AGITATORS.
THE favourite theory of the day,—and one, no doubt, which well justifies the interest it has excited by the new light it has cast upon many of the difficulties of physical and moral science—Mr. Darwin's theory of the hereditary accumulation of beneficial tendencies in every hard-pressed race of creatures, will be quite at fault in accounting for the oratorical faculty of those remarkable men whom the agricultural labourers have very wisely chosen to plead their cause in London. For generations on generations there has scarcely been, we suppose, any class of human beings in the West of Europe more completely destitute of the faculty of speech than the Eng- lish agricultural labourers. The inarticulateness of the rural labourer's mind has become quite a by-word in our literature. George Eliot, who, like Shakespeare, comes from the very county of Joseph Arch, the chief of the agitators, has painted the most graphic pictures of the slow incubation of their dull phlegmatic thoughts, and the convulsive efforts by which, when these thoughts see the light, they are shaped into something about half-way between shame-faced silence and intelligible speech ; and yet suddenly, without any gradual preparation for speech, in the very midst of one of these mute generations, there springs up a man who can not only speak, and speak well and moderately, and guard himself from being supposed to mean what he does not mean, and enforce with the most graphic illustration what he does mean, but who can awaken dormant powers of a like kind in others of his class, till the last link in this long procession of dumb generations of toilers suddenly finds itself eloquently interpreting its wants to the people amongst whom it has long lived in something like speechless apathy. The class of agricultural labourers has been so little able or willing to open its mouth, that the farmers and landlords might almost have supposed till now that to it the prophecy bad been applied, "I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb, and shalt not be to them a reprover." But now, as it would seem, the spell is broken ; they speak, and are no more dumb, and " are a sign "—and a very alarm- ing and unwelcome sign—to those amongst whom they have been living. Nobody could have been present at the great meeting of Tuesday night at Exeter Hall without being profoundly struck by the Social phenomenon to which we have referred. Mr. Ball, Mr. Mitchell, and Mr. Arch are all men of power as speakers, and all men of power of the same kind, sagaciou.s power. Of course, they all make blunders of grammar, interpolate and drop aspirates, and now and then use a word of which they do not rightly apprehend the meaning. That follows from their no-education and laborious, ex- hausting life. But it is astonishing with how much good sense these men manage to make the best of their defi- ciencies and the most of their natural gifts. They would have done better to appear in their every-day dresses instead of in broad-cloth, had they had any eye to oratorical effect. But if there were any ambition in their dress,—and probably it was much more due to respect for the public than to ambition,—it was the only sign of ambition these speakers showed. There was hardly a single stilted phrase or flutter of vanity in their unvarnished statements, and yet there were vigour, humour, and eloquence in all three of them. Their "action," especially Mr. Arch's, was as self-restrained, as natural, and graceful as Mr. Cobden's or the late Lord Derby's. The ease with which they spoke and rivetted their audience might have suggested that public speaking had been the occupa- tion of their lives. Of bashfulness there was not a sign, but their manliness was uniformly modest. What was most remarkable, was the absence of anything jerky or hesitating in their speeches. There was no absolute necessity in their case that they should be in the right in order that they might be justified in asking, like Mr. Brooke in " Middlemarch," a " blessing on their humming and hawing." And yet they took great care not to be in the wrong. Their moderation was so studied, their good-humour so cordial, and their eloquence, where it rose to eloquence, so perfectly free from a vindictive ring, that it was impossible not to feel that if the spirit of statesmanship was not stronger in them than the spirit of agitation, it was only because they had never felt the denunciatory passion swelling within them.
All the three agricultural labourers had a considerable amount of homely humour, though Mr. Mitchell was perhaps the humorist of the three. For instance, Mr. Ball, the representative of Lincolnshire, when explaining the difficulty of bringing up a family and keeping out of debt on from 13s. 6d. to 16s. a week, protested that in his oase at least the difficulty did not arise from drink, for he had been a total abstainer for many years, adding in an easy aside, by way of explanatory hint to his audience as to the manner of man he had been,—that this was "before I took a wife, mind you," —a touch which caused great amusement among the people, who perfectly understood that total abstinence out of pure masculine self-control, and total abstinence under the strongly auxiliary dispensation of female influence, are modes of conduct representing widely different degrees of resolute frugality. There was a grim humour, too, in the mode in which, after describ- ing the family life on 13s. 6d. a week,—growing lads break- fasting on bread steeped in hot water, dining on a bit of bread and a herring, and feeding altogether on 2d. a day, and the father not unfrequently coming home in the evening to find his household absolutely destitute both of bread and flour, as well as of all other food,—he asked " was this the Paradise the poor man ought to enjoy ? " was this what the newspapers were thinking of when they called the English people the happiest on the face of the earth ? But his humour was merged in some- thing higher when he pleaded that the labourers having been brought up in ignorance, the weight of which they felt, they had at least the right to ask education for their children ; that having been brought up in nakedness and hunger, they had, at least, the right to ask the means of decently clothing and feeding their children ; that having been shut out of society and left without an interest in the State, they had at least the right to secure their children against the same bitter fate. Mr. Mitchell was, as we have said, the humorist of the three speakers. His accent and air had something slightly Yankee in their tone, as though when he struck labour on the land he had emigrated for some years, and then returned to England to aid the movement,—which is not, however, we believe, the case, as we understand that he became an English stonemason after leaving, as early as 19, the work of the plough. In fact, it would seem that the Yankee manner and humour will develops itself on this side of the Atlantic no less than the other, wherever you get the sturdy independence of self- respect combined with that smack of the land that flavours the character with strong natural homeliness. His descrip- tion of the Somersetshire " tea-kettle broth " on which the labourers breakfast, and the cheese made from milk "after skimmin' of it three times and then blowin' of it with the bellows ;" of the cider which they had as a " perquisite," the third and last rinsing of the apple-vats, and of which fifteen per cent. was pure water,—was more than satirical, it was like a bit out of Dickens's description of the food dispensed at Dotbe- boys' Hall, though given with less scornful bitterness. But Mr. Arch was undoubtedly the orator of the three, though hardly possessed perhaps of more weight of character than his colleagues. The type of his face reminded the pre- sent writer not a little of Cobden's, and certainly had in it Cobden's tenacity of purpose, his intelligent, outward-looking eye, and the same mixture of sensitiveness and yet narrowness of expression,—an expression of practical acuteness and affec- tionateness, mingled with a blankness of look when the bright eye was not caught and the mobile lines of the mouth were not in motion, which used to be somewhat disappointing to strangers, in spite of its evident power, and which always contrasted strongly with the imaginative fire and passion in Mr. Bright's. Joseph Arch has a countenance of the same kind,—expressing a certain narrow and almost quaint simplicity of character, with great acuteness and force of pur- pose, and yet suggesting blankness of mind when at rest, —characteristics probably illustrated in his horror of vaccination for his children,—his refusal to permit which has cost him both trouble and heavy fines,—and again, in his equally steady though more enlightened refusal to sign a petition on behalf of the Corn laws in his early youth, for which also he was persecuted. With strong practical sense he began his speech by asking how the labourers could go to the dearest market without the means to go, especially when a wife and family, probably not quite out of debt, must be left at home ; and from beginning to end of his speech there was present the clear notion that migration or emigration was essential as the alternative through which alone a higher general rate of wages could be brought about, the Union fund being necessary to give the labourer the practical means of availing himself of this alternative. No doubt he thought that better wages would mean better labour, and that a good deal better labour might be advantageously employed even at the present rents, without any fall of rents or throwing of land out of cultivation, by dint of better intelligence ; but he never seemed to lose sight for a moment of the alternative of emigration as the only lever with which he could work. He showed both temper and humour in speaking of the Bishop of Gloucester, whom he benignantly regarded as " a good man to a certain extent, though blinded by prejudice," a judgment which he justified by reminding his audience that Dr. Ellicott had proposed, contrary to his own doctrines, " to baptize him an adult." The only trace of an attempt to get rather beyond his natural flight of eloquence was when he denounced the per- petrators of some cruel eviction dictated solely by a hatred of Unionism as " carnivorous vultures " swooping on their prey,— a phrase containing both a bad image and a superfluous adjec- tive, vultures being usually carnivorous. He was very careful and wise in expressing his sympathy with the farmers, though he may have been mistaken in regarding the pressure for higher wages as at all likely in the end to diminish the rents of the landlords. It only could do so by throwing land out of cultivation, and that is hardly likely to be the result of more intelligent and hearty labour. It is quite possible that the landlords will be more benefited by the movement than either the farmers or the labourers. Mr. Arch's speech was the speech of a man who thoroughly knew his business,—being anxiously moderate, and full of sympathy with the farmer, though he did pity the "poor brainless heads " which could not see their own interests,—and betraying very little trace of bitterness even for the landlord.
We must say that when, after Mr. Arch sat down, we heard the Archbishop of Westminster's clear, bell-like voice raised so boldly on behalf of the cause of the Agricultural Labourers' Union, and heard him deal with the question. not, of course, on economical, but on moral grounds, though without, as far as we can judge, any of that disregard of Political Economy which the Times imputes to him, we did feel a certain shame that not a single minister of either the National or Nonconformist Churches was there to take up the cause, and that the only reference to the Church of the nation,—except, indeed, Mr. Hughes's very just tribute to the noble efforts of Canon Gir- dlestone,—was the reference to the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol's horse-pond speech. No doubt the Bishop of Manchester has taken the right side in this matter, as he always does in most matters; but why has the Archbishop of Canterbury been silent? why has not the Church spoken out as she well might in the labourers' cause ? There was no fear of bad Political Economy in asserting that the wages received by the labourer in most of the English counties are not adequate for the mere decencies of life, and that the Church is bound to help the laboarer in ' some way to extricate himself from a life which is a life of
moral degradation. The Roman Catholic Church under- stands its relation to the poor and needy better than our own. Are we to leave the world to suppose that this is because it is itself poor,—because it is a voluntary Church without official authority, and without national tribute ? We venture to say that the English Church has never missed a greater oppor- tunity of reaching the hearts of the people than when it left Archbishop Manning to plead the cause of these poor labourers alone. They no longer need the alliance,—for Mr. Arch is already in a position that promises, if he keeps his head, to resemble that of Mr. Cobden ; but the Church needs their alliance. And if it falls beneath the attacks of 'the Nonconformists,—as we trust it may not,—it will be because it did not know the signs of the times, and seize what may prove to be the last signal opportunity of winning the hearts of the great village populations.
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