THE LABOURER'S STEPPING-STONES. T HE cry " Back to the land
" has not as yet led to any appreciable result. Now and again a labour colony has been set up and has for a time shown some amount of success, but its founders have seldom had any permanent object in view, or regarded the experiment as much more than a means of tiding over a passing difficulty. There is no general desire on the part of the immigrants to return to the country which they have left. The gain of the change may be quite invisible to the outside observer, but those who have made it seem to look forward to bettering their new position rather than to recovering their old one. The city takes a firm hold of those who have once come into its hands. The trouble is that the cry itself was wrongly worded. It should have run, not " Back to the laud," but " Keep on the land." The experience of the countryman turned townsman should have been used to prevent others from following his example. A labourer who has thrown up his work and come to London may regret the step he has taken, and yet not be willing to run the risk of quarrelling with his bread-and-butter twice over. The true way of checking the agricultural exodus is to give the Israelites solid reasons for not crossing the Red Sea. Up till now we seem to have done little or nothing in this way. In the South, at any rate, we have everywhere been faced by the wages question. The labourer com- plains that he cannot live as he wishes to live on the weekly sum which the farmer pays him. The farmer complains that the work he gets in return is not worth a penny more than what he gives for it. This is a difficulty from which there appears to be no escape. Neither side is prepared to take the first step. The labourer will not do a pound's worth of work for fifteen shillings of money. The farmer will not offer the pound, and perhaps see no better return than he used to get for his fifteen shillings. If we allow our imagination to wander further afield and picture to ourselves a. new peasant proprietary, we come at once upon new obstacles. Where is the labourer to find the means of buying the holding he desires ? If he borrows the money from the State, he is not sure of being able to pay the interest on it and to keep himself and his family at the same time. Nor is the evidence in favour of small holdings so conclusive as to dispose Parliament—even the present Parliament— to enter upon an undertaking at once so vast and so speculative. We want to see a beginning made on a small scale and involving only a small outlay,—a beginning which shall keep the labourer what he is and yet furnish him with a prospect of gradually becoming what he is not. If we were to set up peasant proprietorship all over England, we should only have sacrificed the farmers to benefit the labourers. One distressed class would have been substituted for another. The same complaint would rise up from the agricultural counties, though it would come from different lips.
In the County Gentleman for July 7th there is to be found the first of a series of articles giving an account of an experiment made by a single landowner which promises to some extent to avoid these objections. Mr. H. B. M. Buchanan tells us that when he succeeded to his estate some eight years ago he found that his own success as a landowner depended, mediately or immediately, on the retention of the best labourers on the farms. If he could promise them no addition to the prospects which their labour offered them they would not stay in the country. They might be no better off in the towns, but at least they would have a chance of being better off. Mr. Buchanan's object was to give the labourers an interest in the land without drawing them away from their ordinary employment. In this way he secured two important things. The labourer had his customary wage, and so had the means of paying the rent of a holding of his own. The farmer did not lose his labourer, and so was better off than ho would have been if the drift towards the towns bad gone on without check. It is quite possible that if the supply of labour were equal to any demand likely to be made on it, the farmer might object to employing a man whose interest might be divided between his work and his holding. But the present agricultural situation hangs upon the fact that the supply of labour is not equal to the demand. Consequently the farmer will think twice before discharging any man whom he does not see his way to replacing. In this case, more- over, he knows that the man who does an evening's work on a holding of his own as well as a day's work on his employer's farm is diligent and has an interest in keeping his place. In three instances quoted by Mr. Buchanan the rent of the holding varied from 4s. 6d. to 10s. a week, and the employment of the tenant on a neighbouring farm made him easy as to the punctual payment of this sum. Much of the work on the holding is done by the tenant's family. Thus, in the case of a man who held four acres of grass-laud, the wife " milked the cows, made the butter, fed the animals, and took to market every week all the produce from the dairy, poultry, and garden that she had to sell." The husband went on working for his old master, so that the money brought home each week by the wife was all to the good, so much so, indeed, that after some years the tenant said that he wanted a larger holding. and must leave if he could not get one. Mr. Buchanan was able to meet him in this way, and he now holds twelve acres of grass and is the owner of " four cows, two calves or heifers, breeding sow, fattening pigs, a stock of poultry, and a pony and trap." Otherwise his position is unchanged. He still draws his weekly wage and helps his master by arrangement with his hay harvest in return for,an occasional day in which he is set free to " give a general clear up to the holding."
It is plain, of course, that this is only possible where the land is under grass, and there is no constant demand on the time of the labourer. Mr. Buchanan's experiments are all of this kind. His plan is to offer each tenant four or six acres of grass, the landlord building the necessary outbuildings for the stock and adding a lean-to dairy to the cottage. Hitherto these buildings have been of brick and tile ; but in Mr. Buchanan's opinion they would answer the purpose just as well if the sides had been of wood and the roofs of light matchboarding covered on the outside with corrugated iron. It must be admitted that this last promises ill for the picturesqueness of the countryside. There is a real field open to an inventor in the discovery of some means of making this useful but terrible material somewhat less forbidding than it now is. Mr. Buchanan's paper, as we have noted above, is not finished, but the instances he has given are enough to show the line 'of the experiment and the conditions which must be satisfied if it is to prosper. One great advantage is that no Act of Parliament need be waited for in order to carry on the plan. Any landlord who has grass-land to spare and some capital to spend has only to follow Mr. Buchanan's example. If he is fairly fortunate in his choice of labOurers, and if the farmers who employ them are intelligent enough to realise the advantage that the arrangement is calculated to secure them by keeping these labourers from throwing up their placei in order to migrate to the towns, the essentials of success seem to be within reach. When the scene of an experiment happens to be a long way from a town, it will probably be necessary to take a leaf out of Sir Horace Plunkett's book, and to make some co-operative arrangement for getting the produce to market.
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