LABOURERS' COTTAGES.*
THE "Howard Medal" was founded in 1873 by the Statistical Society, to be awarded to the author of an essay on some question of social statistics in which John Howard was himself interested. Among the philanthropic interests and works of Howard was that of rebuilding cottages, and looking to the welfare of those who lived in them, in the little village of Cardington, three miles from Bedford, and where he lived on his patrimonial estate. A fit subject, therefore, for this medal was "The State of the Dwellings of the Poor in the Rural Districts of England, with special regard to the improvements that have taken place since the middle of the Eighteenth Century, and their Influenbe on the Health and Morals of their Inmates ;" and the volume before us, and entitled " The Peasants' Home, 1760-1875," is the prize essay for which the medal was awarded.
Within the limits prescribed in the above-quoted notice, Mr. Smith has fulfilled his task as completely as could be required or expected. He has given full and interesting details from the Agricultural Survey prepared by the old Board of Agriculture, of which Arthur Young was secretary, and whose reports on the condition of the labourers in the Eastern Counties is specially valuable : from the more recent Government Reports on the con- dition of the agricultural population : and from those of the numerous societies of recent years which have—some as their sole work, some as an important branch of it—examined the whole • The Howard Prize Essay, 1875. The Peasant's Home, 1710-1875. By Edward Smith, F.S.S. London: Edward Stanford. 1875.
subject, including the preparing and publishing so many plans for the actual building of cottages, that all the architectural pos- sibilities of this business may be said to be exhausted. From these and other sources Mr. Smith shows how much has been done by individuals and by societies during the last eighty years or more to improve the dwellings of the peasantry, and what beneficial results, moral as well as sanitary, have followed, and may be expected still to follow, every such improvement. All this he has done, and done well, and more was not required by the terms of his subject. But on the practical question, what is to be done in order to carry this improvement beyond the estates of the great landowners whose names he records, and who deserve to have them so recorded ; how to provide healthy and comfortable homes for that great body of agricultural labourers who are not, and never will be, working for rich and philan- thropic nobles or squires :—on this question he throws no light. He states the difficulty which he does not solve, when he gives such facts as that no good cottage can be built for less than £150, and with its garden will usually only let at £3 or £4 a year ; that " every new cottage is so much out of pocket ;" and that we even " hear of a case (mentioned by Mr. Charles Roundell before the Lords' Committee) in which £8,000 had been spent on one estate (in Suffolk) in additions to and repairs of cottages, with a result of an increase in the rental of only £817s." But he only suggests that Parliament must do something or other to meet the evil which still exists so widely : or in another place he writes
4 Still, generally speaking, the early steps in the improvement of the condition of the rural labourer must come from those above him. They must be undertaken from a principle of duty, and any view of general improvement which one may have in his mind, which is based upon a desire, first of all, to make it pay, is pretty certain to prove fallacious. That it will pay in the end is not to be doubted, not directly at so much per cent.; not on a principle of eye-service, either on the part of the benefactor or the benefited, but in the resulting moral elevation of both parties, producing eventually better work, better feelings, better worldly prospects, and better hopes for their native land."
Now, we have no disposition to make fun of a serious man, writing on one of the most serious subjects of our social and political life, but we shall never really understand the question, or get at any answer to it, unless we strip it of all those rhetorical phrases which disguise false economy with philanthropic sentiment, and which are only variations of that charity which Sydney Smith defined as the desire which A feels that B should relieve the dis- tress of C. If Mr. Smith, or any other philanthropic writer on the condition of the rural labourer, were deriving from a small estate an income only sufficient to maintain himself and his family, he would very readily perceive that it is no more his moral duty first to devote a large portion of that income to the improvement of the labourers' cottages, than it is that of the man who lives in a town on a like income derived from Consols to take care that all the small taxpayers who help to provide the resources which produce his dividends should be properly housed. The needs of the peasant are more visible than those of the town labourer in the same low social scale, but that is all. And whatever philanthro- pists may say, the only possible way of providing proper habita- tions for the whole peasantry is," to make it pay." The great land- owners who, out of their surplus revenues, have provided good cottages for the labourers on their estates, without requiring or obtaining more than a nominal interest for their money, have done a noble and a beneficent work, but it may be doubted whether it would be an unmixed good if the whole of England belonged to such great landowners ; and whether for good or for evil—we have no doubt but that it is for good—the future pro- spects of the peasantry, as of all other classes, are not in the direction of dependence and paternal government and care, but in that of an independence of which due cash payment for value received is a necessary part, though not the whole of the relation between employer and employed. A few years ago, Lord Napier startled the British public by saying that the landlords throughout the country should be called on to expend seventy millions sterling in rebuilding the rural cottages on their respective estates. His estimate of the sum required may have been too large, but the work certainly needs something so large that we must wait for a Communistic revolution before the landowners can be made to in- vest the requisite sum at a nominal interest ; and meanwhile, as practical men, we prefer to inquire whether the said investment can be made to pay. The question is at once complicated and simple, the knot is made up of many threads, but they can be disentangled, and laid side by aide, and this we propose to do.
The ordinary farm labourer's position is this :—He earns some 14s. or 15s. a week, with some perquisites in summer and some deductions in winter; and out of this he pays ls. 6d. or 2s. for the rent of a cottage and garden, which he will prefer not to rent from his master, if he can get another sufficiently good and suffi- ciently near his work. Wages and rents follow an average standard, and though one man is better off than another in these respects, the average cottage will have a garden worth 10s. a year, and the house itself, by the test of demand and supply, be worth £3 or £4 a year. No one builds a new house, whether a cottage, a villa, or a mansion, without the intention of getting proper interest for his money, either in actual rental or in some ad- vantage to himself or others which he takes as an equivalent for rental ; but there are plenty of houses already in existence all over the country, and of every class, which can only command a rental which is far from representing fair interest on the original outlay, but which is all that can now be got, and which it is better to take than to shut up or pull down the house in question. In almost every country parish there are labourers' cottages of this kind. They have been farm-houses when farming was carried on in a more primitive manner and on a smaller scale than now ; or they have been built for the workmen of a•colliery or a mill or some other industry which has gone elsewhere ; or they may have been built by little freeholders or squatters by the roadside, with odds and ends of time and material, of which no account was ever kept. And by a general higgling and adjustment of aver- ages, of which the individual labourer can tell you nothing but that ls. 6d. or 2s. a week is the " usual " and " fair " rent for a cottage and garden, he has hitherto usually got a habitation more or less such as he requires. But the tendency of all such cottages is to get worse, since any substantial repair will more than swallow up the whole rent, and the tendency of the labourer is to be less content to live in a hovel; and so the demand for better cottages increases, and the supply from the existing stock diminishes. The demand, though weak as yet, is one which must increase as the labourer becomes educated, and so raised in his social condition and requirements, and which every wise and good man desires to stimulate and promote as an essential part of that education. And in this, as in other cases of demand and supply, the demand may be stimulated—we may almost say created—by the supply. If the landlords simply let things alone, the next generation of labourers will demand both better cottages and wages, such as will enable them to pay adequate rents for them. But it is better that by a wise antici- pation of such demand, it should come sooner, and not in the form of a more or less violent crisis.
After all the painstaking and ingenious—and in individual cases, successful—attempts to devise modes of building cottages which, in paying £4 a year, shall yield a decent interest on the . investment, the broad fact remains that a cottage of the plainest kind, of good materials, but absolutely without any ornament except those straight lines of roofs, and walls which tell the experienced eye that there are good square rooms inside, will in almost every case cost at least £150 ; and after allowing for insurance, rates, taxes, and provision for repairs, a yearly rental of £8 at least is neces- sary to make the investment reasonable as an investment. The good cottage is an absolute necessity. The labourer will soon insist on having it, and if we can hasten the time by offering him the cottage before he asks for it, so much the better. But who is to pay for it ? It is plain that the labourer who gets for is. 6d. a week a cottage worth 3s. gets the difference as an addi- tion to his wages. These may be nominally 15s., but they are in reality 16s. 6d., paid to him by some one ; and this some one, as regards the is. 6d. of unexacted rent, is the person from whom the labourer holds the cottage ; the landowner or squire, if he lets the cottage direct, or the farmer, if the cottage is included among the houses and other buildings of the farm he occupies. And in the latter case no less than in the former, the loss of the difference between the adequate and the actual rent (which we have assumed to be ls. 6d. a week) falls eventually on the landowner, unless he has—in letting the farm—put the cottages at their full commercial value in his estimate of the total rent. To let a cottage commercially worth £8 a year to a farm-tenant for £4 is exactly the same thing as to let him a field worth £8 for £4. To whatever amount a landowner provides cottages for farm labourers--directly or indirectly—at less than the full commercial rent, he to that extent makes an abatement from the nominal rent of the farm so provided for. It may be that this rent is so high, that the farmer could not pay it unless he got the abatement in some other, if not in this shape. But it is certain that every labourer who obtains a cottage at less than its commercial rent is to that extent paid an addition to his wages in kind, and that if the addition is made, not by his em-
ployer, but by his employer's landlord, the latter abates that employer's rent to his landlord to the same amount.
On those estates, therefore, which are not owned by great nobles, or men who might be nobles if they would, but by small proprietors with no means for showing princely philanthropy, the cottages must be built to pay. There are plenty of farmers who have the sense to agree to pay their landlords 7f per cent., in addition to their old rents, on the necessary outlay for cow- houses and other like improvements ; and there are a few who are equally ready to pay the same interest on the cost of cottages, to be attached to their farms. There would be more of the latter— more not less than of those who will pay for cow-houses—if they knew their own interest, and instead of looking on the labourers with distrust, as is too common, they made their homes so com- fortable that the men should feel that it would be a real loss to them to lose their masters,—to say nothing of the higher rela- tions of mutual sympathy which would soon grow in such a soil. But as it is, the landlords should take the opportunity of every reletting of a farm, or revision of an old rental, to insist on pro- viding an adequate number of cottages for the farm, and at an adequate rent, which it will be always possible to make a part of the total rental thus newly fixed, though it may be impossible to get it accepted as an avowed addition to an old rental. Such re- lettings and revisions are going on every day. They are becoming more frequent, as the old relations of careless landlords and in- dolent and ignorant tenants are dying out ; and it is by availing themselves of these in the way we have stated that this question of labourers' cottages can and must be met, if it is not to be left to a future calamitous crisis. The custom of settlement (popularly called entail), with the consequent right of reversioners, prevents landowners from borrowing money for cottage-building on as favourable terms as can be obtained by the town building com- panies ; but still money can be borrowed through the Land Im- provement Companies, or directly under the sanction of the Inclosure Commission, on such terms as makes an adequate provision of cottages possible on every estate on the conditions we have described.
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