SIR CHARLES TREV.P.AXAN ON rtiti DEVONSHIRE LABOURER. D ISCUSSIONS on the
condition of the British agricultural labourer are in danger of becoming monotonous, but no chance should be lost for preventing any feeling of that kind by showing the urgency of the question, and its title to a first place in political programmes. Even the driest topics, when the national mind is heated about them and they are the turning- points of elections, are susceptible of a minute discussion which, under other conditions, would be intolerable ; and no small effort should be directed to advance the Labourer ques- tion to this rank. It is an unspeakable reproach to England, lowering indefinitely her place in civilization and the influence of the national character, that, in a community so much richer per head than any which has yet existed or exists now in any part of the world, possessing, in other words, the most abundant means for the individual welfare of all who belong to it, there should yet be suffered to continue a residuum, a class poorer and more degraded than almost any class in other civilized countries, and seeming to be yet worse off by contrast with the wealth around. The frightful inequality is a proof that, 'with all the means we possess, our institutions, and social customs, and economic arrangements must be stamped somewhere by defect, since the failure in result is so conspicuous. The failure, it need not be added, indicates a real political danger, of which the sense of moral loss, affecting us in our external relations, and reacting on ourselves at home, is not the least part. The condition of the county population is a daily obstacle to the organization of the community as a homo- geneous democracy, is the immediate cause, therefore, of an unstable equilibrium, which is every way to be lamented, however much the admission of an ignorant class to the possession of political privileges may be dreaded as a greater evil. For these reasons, we are heartily disposed to welcome the three letters on the Devonshire labourer which Sir Charles Trevelyan has now seen occasion to contribute to the discussion.* The debates at the last meeting of the British Association will have done some good, if they have done nothing more than elicit these letters. Though somewhat strangely unimpassioned, consider- ing who the author is, being remarkable rather for the dry light they contain, and the admirable way in which the main • Three Letters on the Devonshire Labourer from Sir Charles TreVelyalt to the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. London; Bell and Deady. 1869. elements and facts of the case are sifted and combined, they may yet help in that process of heating the public mind which we believe to be desirable and necessary.
The peculiar merit of the letters is the felicitous manner in which they fall in with the modern tendency to apply the scientific method to social subjects—a method which commends- itself for many reasons to the practical English mind. Our- aversion to systematic remodelling, our fondness for curing particular evils and effecting particular objects by defi- nite means adjusted to the end, and no more, fits in excellently well with the scientific turn for considering masses of men as chemical substances, or materials for manu- facture, on which a certain adjustment of forces produces foreseeable effects, and on which certain other effects will be produced by altering the adjustment or introducing some new ingredient. We English, in a certain rough way, have- been practising social science all through our history without knowing it, and the conscious use of the method, with an increased sense of the pliability of the human mass, comes to- us naturally enough. Sir Charles Trevelyan, then, has looked at the subject in the purely modern spirit, asking dispassion- ately,—what is the measure and nature of the disease t and what are the sort of remedies which observatiot and experiment have shown to be applicable ? His statements in reply to the first question will be none the less effective because they are moderate. His points are that the disease is, comparatively local and partial, that bad as it is, it is becoming less acute, there having been a palpable improvement within his own recollection of fifty years, and that there is a social revolution tending to its removal. In all this there is. onlythe exact truth. The Devonshire labourer, and the southern labourer in general, is now happily an exception to the general prosperity of the labouring classes in this. country. The Northumbrian hind, as Sir Charles Trevelyan points out, has abundant food and clothing, ample education. for his children to give them a good start in life, and would hardly gain by emigration ; and what is true of Northum- berland is true still farther north. If we consider that- the agricultural population of the country is only about a. tenth part of the whole, that of this tenth only a portion is. inthe condition of the Devonshire labourer, we may have some notion of the error sometimes made in speaking of the latter as the type of our labouring masses. There is no doubt a town as well as a county residuum, but the conditions. are different, and there is nothing nearly so bad on the same scale as the rural labourer, with his insufficient food, his round of unintermitted toil, and his prospect of unavoidable pauperism. Then, as to the improvement even of the Devonshire labourer, it is plain that things are not at their worst. "When I was a boy," says Sir Charles Trevelyan, "the better sort of farmers alone wore broad-cloth, while the other country people were- clothed in fustian or corduroy, over which a coarse smock-frock was drawn on week-days. Now smock-frocks have disappeared (not, perhaps, in itself a desirable change), and men and boys of all classes wear broad-cloth. The smartness with which the young men are got up, with their billycock hats and neat cravats, marks a new spirit in the peasantry. Among the women, dingy stuff gowns, renewed at long intervals, have been replaced by cheap Manchester patterns, the flimsy vanity' of which has been exclaimed against, but I cannot think it a- bad sign that the female sex have something to spare for their prerogative of pleasing." The confidence with which this. wearing of broad-cloth instead of fustian, this smartness or the young men, and this evidence that the female sex have a little to spare for pleasing, are appealed to as signs of a very considerable advance in material well-being, is highly- characteristic of the modern spirit. The signs are only indirect, and would be consistent enough, in other circumstances, with no real improvement worth speaking of ; but what is known otherwise of the economic progress of the country leaves no- doubt of the interpretation. In some distant way, the poorest, labourer has gained by the accumulation of wealth during the last half-century, and by the general rise in the standard of living—the social revolution to which Sir Charles Trevelyan refers as still in progress. The misfortune is that there are- any so poor and degraded as to have benefited but little in proportion, whom the tide of new wealth has all but missed, and is only, as it were, beginning to unfix and carry for- ward on its flood. When we have made the most of the Devonshire labourer's broadcloth, and the fair sex's use of Manchester prints, we have still to acknowledge the hapless- ness of their fate.
Sir Charles Trevelyan's remedies are, in a word, to assist the social revolution which is in progress, to remove the material and moral impediments which prevent the labourer from sharing in the generally better employment for labour. There are other things alluded to, such as the combination of landlords and farmers to pay wages in money, and so check the loss and waste and actual physical deterioration caused by the custom of part payment in cider ; but the main remedy relates to the great source of the evil, and is on a larger scale the adaptation of means to a certain end. The argument is, that if other labourers have improved by their labour becoming the object of a strong demand, the same result will follow from the same cause in the case of the Devonshire rustics. Only bring them into contact with the main stream, so that the demand can be effective upon them, and improvement will be the necessary consequence. The how in such a matter is, of course, all-important, but the suggestions here are equally practical. The rustic mind must itself be awakened by direct instruction to the knowledge of the demand in the outside world. Mere education, as ordinarily understood, will be of little use, the influences being such that school learning is easily forgotten ; the intelligence of the labourer must be appealed to in direct connection with his self-interest. The main part of the remedy, however, is organized emigration, the opening-up of communi- cation between emigrant-receiving countries and the community of Devonshire labourers. As Ireland has been acted on by a continuous self-sustaining stream of emigration, Devonshire may have its superfluous labourers removed by a like process. An artificial beginning is needed, in place of the famine which upheaved the Irish masses ; but once begun, the process may continue till the effect on Devonshire is complete. Sir Charles perhaps mixes up with this part of the matter something unscientific and of doubtful accuracy, as where he talks of pauperism and poor-rates growing of late with alarming rapidity, and of our trying in vain to recover the advanced point reached previously to the cotton famine and the financial collapse, and of the time thus having come for the old hive to throw off a fresh swarm. This is a very common way of talk- ing, though the truth is that pauperism, while of alarming mag- nitude, has not been growing with alarming rapidity, and that our depression consists simply in a temporary stand-still at the advanced point previously reached, and that emigration is not in general a suitable remedy at all for the classes which suffer. But with regard toDevonshire, which suffers from a chronic evil—the excess of unskilled labour—specially curable by emigration, he is certainly in the right. Probably, the most useful part of his letters will be the demonstration to farmers and-landlords of their own interest in the welfare of labourers. They pay now for inefficient labourers, who are a misery to themselves, as much, and not more, than they would pay to efficient labourers for the same work. Their superficial interest in maintaining low wages is not their real interest, and they may perfectly well join in measures, such as artificially-assisted emigration, of which a rise in wages is the direct and immediate object. We have followed the writer not without approval, but yet we should like something more than dry light and enlightened self-interest, and the skilful application of social-science maxims, in this, as in other large questions of political and social improvement. The manipulation of human masses, like a brute substance, by the skilful exhibition of moral chemicals which are warranted infallible, and which do act with no little certainty, is somewhat wanting to the dignity of human nature, and in reality is a most incomplete process of improvement. The only excuse for relying so much on it is the assumption that there are other larger agencies at work to which this task of clearing impediments, and artificially adding to or withdrawing from the conditions of living, is only contributory. It is not every race orpeople which would receive the good that almost any Euro- pean race maybe confidentlyreckoned on to receive from a sudden material improvement. There are moral and spiritual agencies operating on them, and something now in the blood, by which the material improvement becomes, on the average, a certain blessing. It would be as well if this fact were less seldom forgotten, and perhaps, too, the power of these agencies without some of the minor aids which are now so much thought of. With a little more faith and zeal, the elevation of the whole people in situ, paupers and Devonshire labourers included, might not be impossible. It may be doubted whether, with all our modern appliances, so much, or anything like so much, will be done for the degraded classes as was done two or three cen- turies ago for the Scotch peasantry by the discipline of the Reformation, though the Scotch peasants then, and long after, were poor and poorly fed, materially perhaps as impoverished as the Devonshire labourer of to-day.
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