MR. GLADSTONE AND THE LABOURERS. T HERE was a good deal
more in Mr. Gladstone's speech of Friday week to the agricultural labourers than some of our Unionist friends appear to think. The aged orator was, it is true, unusually discursive ; some old reminiscences arose in his mind about the cost of food a long time ago, which have little to do with the matter in hand ; and, as usual during the last five years, Irish Home- rule suddenly cropped up in the speech, almost as irrele- vantly as King Charles used to appear in Mr. Dick's memorials. Home-rule, Mr. Gladstone declared, was the first and most pressing of Labour questions, because the population of Ireland are labourers, which is precisely what they are not. The Irish peasant takes no wages, he has already full access to the land, he has solved the cottage difficulty by housing himself in his own way, and the vital question for him is not the rate of wages, but the dura- bility of his tenure. He is already in practice, as he will pre- sently be in theory, not a servant of any kind, but a deeply mortgaged peasant-freeholder,—a totally different position. Whatever the merits or demerits of Home-rule, it is not a Labour question; and in saying that it was, and that it ought to have precedence, Mr. Gladstone only showed how completely it dominates his own mind. All that, however, though it may be open to comment, or even to ridicule, is not of the essence of the speech. As it proceeded, the old statesman gathered his forces together, and said several very definite things which it will be well for his opponents in Parliament to ponder, for they will be more important than it is for the moment the fashion to believe. In the first place, Mr. Gladstone is clear that he wants a Parish Council rather than a Dis- trict Council, with powers to arrange for allotments, for defending rights-of-way, for protecting ancient charities, and for dealing under supervision with the great question of expropriation for the villagers' benefit. There will be a fierce fight over that proposal. The Government resist it, and many outside observers, ourselves included, have sharply criticised it ; but it has more friends than towns- men are ready to acknowledge. Not only many Unionists, but a great many Tories, prefer the parish to the district as a unit of administration. They do not quite think, with Sir Rainald Knightley, that the "parish is the natural division of the soil," but they think that it is the historic division, and that under it has grown up a corporate feeling, feeble in towns and lost in London, but intensely strong in the counties, which is the best basis for representation. The pride of localism adheres to the parish, and not to any district ; and the pride of localism, though it may be pushed, like patriotism, to preposterous lengths, is, in the management of local affairs, a spring not only of energy but of self-denial. Greenhayes does not like to be taunted by Redhayes with being a nest of thieves. Many Tories believe, moreover, that the parish will in serious matters be much more con- servative than the district ; that it will always be more ready to hear the parson, and often be more reluctant to bully the squire than a "district," which personally knows neither. There are plenty of arguments on the other side, such as the rancour which is occasionally developed in villages, and the excessive difficulty which the smaller parishes will experience in . finding funds for any purpose whatever; but the Tory squires understand the traditional feeling for the parish, and will not be very hearty on the other side. We ourselves, though rather committed to the district proposal, have been greatly impressed by Mr. Fowle's strong arguments for the parish ; and, we may be sure that the land-owning Unionists will feel them more than we do. Mr. Gladstone's opinion, therefore, will be found to have high Parliamentary importance, and may even produce " crises " in Committee, and large modifica- tions of the impending Government measure.
So will his opinion about labourers' holdings, though for a very different reason. Mr. Gladstone proposed on Friday week a modification of the usual suggestionabout allotments and rural expropriation generally which may, if his party accept it—quite an uncertainty still—prove to be of the gravest importance. The usual suggestion of reasonable rural Radicals is, that the parish or the district should buy land of the squire at a price to be fixed by a jury or by the County Court, or by a jury with appeal to the County Court, and let it to the labourers "at agricultural rates." In prac- tice, that phrase is nonsense, for the expenses of conveyance, of drainage, of erecting sheds, and so on, would make the "agricultural rate" a clear loss, to be made up by rate- payers who do not want allotments. That will not be done ; but still, land so obtained could be let, say, at twice the large-farm rate, and would be sufficiently cheap then ; while the owner, though perhaps bitterly annoyed, would receive his money pretty fairly. Moreover, the outlay would be so large as to check all villagers not anxious to dig, and possibly to alarm them as to future rates, though no doubt, as they can leave, they may be a little wanting in foresight. Mr. Gladstone, however, who is most definite and peremptory as to the necessity of using compulsion, makes a much wider pro- posal,—namely, compulsory leases of land to the Parish Council, with the parish rates assigned as collateral security for the owner's rent. We will give his own words :—" Now, I own it is my opinion—you are practical men, and are better judges of it, perhaps, than I am—that the power of taking land upon lease for a sufficient time and with proper provisions for the termination of the lease would be a very valuable additional power. It would simplify the matter. It would avoid all difficulties as to the raising of considerable sums of money, and when once the Parish Council—the public authority, that is the best phrase—the public local authority is in practical possession of the land, you will see what they can do. They can regulate the rents, they can make provision not only against extravagance of rent, but for adequacy in the holding ; they can also make provision for a reasonable security in the tenure. That is a point upon which very likely many landlords would be jealous ; but having the local authority for their tenant, and having the security of the rates for what the local authority have to pay them, the local authority would have its hands free to regulate the concession of land in every way, in every condition that appertains to its security and its profitableness, and in every way which the best interests of the people might direct." That is a big change. It would wonderfully smooth the path of the Parish Council in the matter of finance, for there would be no loan to raise, and the rent would in good years be paid to the Council with regularity. The scheme, too, admits of indefinite enlargement, for small farms could be created in that way as well as allotments, and the parish might become a kind of owner in tenancy of itself. Moreover, both Council and labourer would be able to look on the matter in the light of an experiment, and would be much more tempted to try it than to plunge into arrange- ments which, whether they succeeded or failed, must stand. In seven years,' each of them will say, 'if we have mis- calculated, we can get out of this, and let the squire have his own again.' On the other hand, the squire will by no means admire this lightness, amounting perhaps to reck- lessness, in the treatment of the question ; nor will he like letting land to a Council on a short lease, to be parcelled into allotments or small farms. Evicting allottees is no joke when you have to live among them, and are not, like the Council, impersonal and without property that can be injured ; nor is over-cropped land, surrendered by allottees or little farmers because it does not pay them, likely to be in good condition. Moreover, in adopting this scheme, the reformers surrender the central thought of village reform, which is in the end to re-create the class of small free- holders, and they reduce the whole project to a mere scheme for securing to cottagers garden-ground, and substituting small farms for very large ones. There is material for endless debate in this suggestion ; and anyhow, in making it, Mr. Gladstone has offered an alternative plan which, whether it is accepted or rejected, is an alternative which statesmen can discuss, and which, in Mr. Gladstone's mind at all events, is consistent with the existing conditions of society. He likes it, for one reason, because, as he said, a Lord Tollemache of Helmingham can carry it out as well as a Parish Council, and survive it too, if the Council carry it out,—another point sure, when the Land question comes on in Parliament, not to be lost sight of by the great owners.
The speech of Friday week, in fact, though it gave in its discursiveness some indication of a failing power of con- centration, is another illustration of the truth we have been dinning into Unionist heads for the last five years, often to their extreme vexation. It is necessary to re- sist Mr. Gladstone, but it is of no use to belittle him. He has gone utterly wrong about Ireland, and is now so heated by what he thinks unreasonable resistance to his plan for solving the difficulties there, that he never forgets it for a moment, and is often tempted, rather than see it defeated, to make concessions to men, like the extreme friends of Disestablishment, with whom he has no manner of instinctive sympathy. Once or twice, too, he has turned his back upon himself, especially about boycot- ting, in a manner to make his best friends doubt whether, in his Irish alliance, he has not lost some of his ancient keenness of moral perception. Never- theless, for all that, he is the biggest man in his party, head and shoulders above them all, a man who intel- lectually is worthy to govern a State. It is not only that he can attract the electors as no other single person can —the peroration of this very speech is said to have thrilled the agricultural delegates—but he can actually construct schemes by which his own ideas, still often original, can either be carried out, or so far carried out that only their failure reveals that the ideas were themselves inaccurate. Of whom else in the party can that be said with confidence ? Mr. Gladstone remains, as he has always been, a great Parliamentary force, with whom, unhappily, Unionists have to reckon ; and to despise that force even to the extent of neglecting to study what he says, is always more or less to throw the fight away. This very speech, with all its ver- biage, and all its tedium, and all its wanderings, will at the great Election send thousands to the poll.
Previous page
