THE RIGHT OF GLEANING.
ALMOST all the city delusions about the country are more or less poetic, and most of them are harmless, or were harmless till citizens, innocent of country facts, gained so exclusive a con- trol of governing opinion. There is not much injury done, for example, by the idea that crime is less frequent and less gross in the country than the town, for ridiculously false as that theory is, it does not prevent Quarter Sessions and Judges of Assize from
doing substantial justice in the meadow as well as in the square. A savage murderer is hung ; a brutal rural profligate, to whom rape seems an ardent method of courtship, gets his sentence of penal servitude, even though lanes are green and woods delicious and rippling waters suggestive of all virtuous thoughts. Crime is con- sidered natural under the smoke and exceptional in the pure air, but it is hated and punished pretty much the same whatever the surrounding circumstances. Nobody is hurt either when some citizen journalist declares that the natural occupation of women in the country is milking cows, and quotes pastoral verso to prove the idyllic beauty of that particularly disagreeable and dangerous occupation. As a matter of fact, in the more civilized of the purely agricultural districts of England women do not milk cows. They do in Ireland, we believe, and in out-of-the-way places in the North ; but in the richer districts of Southern Britain that pastoral habit is extinct, and cows are milked by big boys and old men, and any male servitors not oppressed with work. In the Eastern Counties, at all events, with their rich wealth of meadow, no woman touches an udder, and an order to nuilk the "mothers of the herd " would be answered by a respectable dairy- maid very much as an order to groom the carriage horses would be answered by a London upper nurse. There is no particular harm, however, in this town belief, and we should be loth to disturb it, but there is unfortunately harm in one
or two other superstitions of the same kind about country life. One of them, which, as it happens, turns up every year, and is terribly injurious, is called in London the "right of gleaning." There are people in London, and presumably in Manchester and other great towns, who believe that the Eighth Commandment is in some mysterious way suspended about corn ; that the wives of the labourers in any given parish have a clear right., moral and legal, to plunder the farmer of a portion of the produce of his fields ; that the maddest and wickedest saturnalia of the year, to which fairs are innocent and camp meetings pure, are institutions justifying any number of screaming leaders in their defence. The right of theft does not even in theory extend to the farmer's silver
spoons, or to his banker's balance, or even,—we have no idea why, —to his grain property when once stacked in his rickyard; but as far as regards the same grain when laid out in the field it is pre- scriptive, immutable, and divine, to be defended by quotations from Scripture and nineteenth-century versions of the story of
Boaz and Ruth, versions in which the entire meaning of that exquisitely poetical but surely not divine idyl is perverted into a justification of deliberate theft.
Mr. Roberts, farmer, of Cheshire, person to us utterly unknown, but presumably a decent agriculturist, and certainly a man of
average humanity, for he protested against a sentence of seven days' imprisonment in the case in which lie himself was prosecutor, objected last week to the practice called gleaning, probably for sufficient reasons. We do not know what Mr. Roberts, who in the teeth of all evidence may be a deliberate oppressor, had to advance, but we do know what philanthropic men acquainted with agriculture allege against the practice, and it is very much this. Gleaning is one of the customs which, though originally, it may be, harmless, or even an acknowledgment of certain rights in the soil and its produce, are now simply causes of demoralization. Like most other incidents of feudal society, it has become unreal, has lost its old compensations, and tends only
to keep up the degradation of the poor. The custom destroys, to
'begin with, the very imperfect ideas current in villages of the Eighth Commandment. Under the old system of reaping with the sickle, wielded entirely by men born and bred upon the laud, and paid in anything except money, a certain quantity of corn, usually ex- ceedingly small, was left upon the field, and as it cost more to pick up than it was worth, any woman or child born in the parish and entitled to parish rates was allowed to lighten those rates by carrying it away. Neither the scythe nor the reaping machine leave this corn, but the custom of gleaning has continued ; and as the women will not work for nothing, they come to an arrange- .
meat with their husbands or brothers, if they are the mowers, or with the Irishmen if they are employed, to leave wilfully a quantity of the corn. This quantity, especially when the healthy and sound practice of giving the harvest work to neighbours is observed, increases every year, till the amount wilfully left, that is, stolen, amounts often to five per cent. upon the total, a tax of a shilling in the pound illegally imposed upon the most important of our manufactures. No possible overseeing will prevent this offence.
The women are mad for the corn, and if they cannot prevail in any other way they will offer bribes which the over- seers will no more resist than the reapers will. Naturally the farmers object,—as we almost venture te -cilieve, if the news- vendors' wives claimed every twentieth copy of the Telegraph without purchase, the proprietors of that journal would object,— and the squires and clergy join in the objection for other reasons. Did the writer of that astonishing article about "Roberts v. Jones," and Boaz and Ruth, and pastoral arrangements general]y, which appeared in the Telegraph of Tuesday, ever see a village returning from a successful foray after illicit corn ? We have, and we appeal to any country clergyman in England if we exaggerate when we say the foray is utterly demoralizing ; that women go out decent, respectable, douce mothers of families, and trig girls whom others than agriculturists might admire, and return half-mad, Bacchante- like viragos, their arms full, their bosoms exposed, their petticoats over their heads, their mouths choked with songs Mr. Swinburue dare not print. It is a mad, bad festival of licence, dreaded by every good clergyman, every decent mother in Israel, three times as much as an ordinary fair. Its effect, moreover, is not confined to the women. Nothing that corrupts them leaves men unscathed, but apart from that the system teaches and protects the practice of theft, which is eke vice of our rural districts. How is a man to be taught that his neighbour's corn, or fruit, or rabbits are not his, when for one month in every year he is deliberately instructed by the metropolitan press that in protecting his property their owner commits s crime? What is the wonder that in Essex or Suffolk a man who presumes to protect peaches which cost him a shilling apiece by sending a thief to the petty sessions is hooted till his life is a misery to him, till, in despair of obtaining justice, he cuts his fruit trees down, or takes the law into his own band? Well, Mr. Roberts, of Cheshire, being unable to afford the pillage, being also, it may be, a little scandalized at consequences of that pillage at which we have only dared to hint vaguely, proclaims that he " will not have it," and, finding custom almost invincible by protests, makes, as he says, "au example." He prosecutes a woman. That is, of course, very horrible ; but as the persons who take corn are invariably women, and as women are not allowed to steal any property except corn,—copies of the Telegraph, for instance,—and as the law is the same for one sex as the other, we do not, we confess, see the heinousness of not selecting a man for prosecution. The Bench, knowing what " gleaning " means, con- demned her to seven days' imprisonment, about the one-hundred- and-tenth part of what she would have received for taking copies of the Telegraph ; and this brute Roberts, for whom in London writers cannot invent terms hard enough, steps forward to plead for a mitigation, and the sentence is reduced to a fine of five shillings. Five shillings is much to a working woman, we quite believe that a wretched custom had given her the idea that she bad a right to take corn, and if the proprietors of the Telegraph paid her fine,—as we imagine, from a remark at the close of the article,—they did a kindly and a thoughtful act: But our sense of that does not blind us to the fact that the woman had no right whatever to Mr. Roberts' property, that Mr. John- son's exclamation, "We shall have all the newspapers in England down on us," struck at the very root of law and order—which are maintained by magistrates executing the law as passed by Parlia- ment, and not as passed by newspapers,—and that the attack on Mr. Roberts is a direct attempt to excite popular prejudice in favour of a custom of theft.
But we shall be asked, are the labourers to have none of the grain their labour produces ? Not one grain in that way, not one straw by theft. If there be one class to whom we have a right to speak sternly, it is the agricultural labourers in whose behalf we have so often defied our own constituents, the Liberal section of the gentlemen of England. They are not paid half enough ; if they form Trades' Unions, county by county, they will have our earnest support ; if they strike en masse for decent wages, they will find in us friends willing to compel the squires to listen patiently to their complaint. But we have no patience with this recom- mendation of systematic theft as a remedy for social evils. Grant, what we fully admit, that the labourer has nothing like a fair share of the produce of his toil, is that a reason for making up the deficiency out of his employer's spoons ? And if not out of his spoons, why out of his corn ? Grant, what we should deny, that Mr. Roberts is harsh in refusing an old privi- lege, is that a reason why the law should be inoperative to guard the clearest of his rights, a right so thoroughly acknow- ledged, that had the same woman touched the same corn once piled in stack, she would have been awarded penal servitude with the consent of all mankind? The labourer is badly off, God knows ! but in this matter of harvest gathering he has fair play. If he wants seven pounds instead of six be must have it. If he says, what in certain districts is true, that he needs certain shocks of corn more than their equivalent in money, he can put them
into the agreement, which in harvest time he imposes upon the farmer quite as much as the farmer for the rest of the year imposes an agree- ment upon him. We wish the labourer had a third of the crop he grows for his own use, but we would rather hang him than see him steal it with impunity, and gleaning is now neither more nor less than an unpunished and specially demoralizing form of theft. Ruth's example would not justify that, if Ruth had stolen, and the writers who quote her as an example for thieves forget always that Boaz was owner, that Boaz's permission was needful before she could glean as she would. At this moment, as then, gleaning is a privilege in the Oriental world, and now, as then, Boaz must give the order before the "young men" ought to "let fall some of the handfuls of purpose for her, and leave them, that she may glean them."
Previous page
