BOOKS.

AGRICULTURAL DISTRICTS SIXTY YEARS AGO.*

WHILE we are in the midst of one of our periodical agricultural crises which landlords and farmers are never going to survive, but during which they seem to be able to dine and hunt and dance and drink very much as usual, the republication of Cobbett's Rural Rides is not inopportune. Cobbett's name deserves to be for ever remembered in this country, if only for this—that, while he was a Tory and a friend of the Government, he was the first person who dared to lift up his voice in the public Press, as long ago as 1809, against the practice of flogging in the Army, which was supported with such zeal and enthusiasm even in 1880 by our present enlightened Tory Party. Two years' imprisonment and a fine of £1,000 was the punishment inflicted on Cobbett for the heinons offence of denouncing the frightful torture of 500 lashes inflicted on the men of the Ely Militia for a mutinous outbreak with good cause. The immediate result was the abolition of flogging in the Army of the United States; but in England only a motion in the House of Commons to abolish it. Under our perfect Constitution, with the advantages it enjoys in the shape of royal and aristocratic patronage and power, it has taken just sixty years, or two generations, to reach the point of humanity and good-sense at which the "detest- able democracy" of America (of which Cobbett himself at that time was amongst the most bitter opponents) reached in one year. One good result, however, was produced in England, and that was the conversion of Cobbett from a Tory supporter of aristocratic oppression into a sturdy and stalwart advocate for Reform. To escape a second imprisonment, he fled to America, where he still published his paper, the Weekly Register. On his return to England, he settled down in Kensington, from whence he periodically set out on his "rural rides," or journeys on horse- back, through the home and southern counties and East Anglia. The immediate object of these journeys was to combine &holiday

with a search for authentic news as to agricultural prospects, on which Cobbett, having been a farm-labourer himself to begin with, and both in America and England an experimental farmer, was a great authority. These rides continued from 1821 to 1832;

and the observations he made, with his own reflections thereon, were duly chronicled in letters to the Political Register. To say that these letters are full of strong language, intolerant in- vectives, and what we now regard as stupid misapprehensions, is

merely to say that they were written by a strong Radical and a " self-made " man sixty years ago. But the vivid descriptions, the sound sense, and the shrewd criticism,- are Cobbett's dis- tinctive mark; and they are as fresh and, in many cases, as applicable now as they were when they were first penned. He has a righteous hatred of the system under which the " poor creatures " that he beholds in the rural districts of the South of England "pass their lives amidst flocks of sheep, but never does a morsel of mutton pass their lips ;" and he has a true appreciation of the cause of the chief part of the misery, which he sees is the " great and glorious war," with the huge debt and frightful system of taxation that it pro- duced. Bat, unfortunately, he abuses what he calls the Jews

and stock-jobbers and rag-merchants, e., bankers and bill-

brokers, or sellers of notes and bills and " paper credit," as the cause, instead of merely one of the effects, of the evil. He confounds the system of paper-money and stock-jobbing caused by the insane wars which created an insane expenditure and a national debt incurred for entirely unproductive purposes, with the legitimate banking business which transfers money from one industry to another as it is wanted, and the creation of Stock Exchange securities which represent productive expendi-

ture. The state of the country at the time was, however, enough to move the indignation of a man like Cobbett. Near Petersfield, in Hampshire, he— "Asked a man who was hedging on the side of the road how much he got a day. He said Is. 6d., and he told me that the allowed wages was 7d. a day for man, and a gallon loaf a week for the rest of his family ; that is to say, one pound and two and a quarter ounces of • Cobbett, Rural Rides. By the late William Cobbett, M.P. for Oldham. A New Edition, with Notes by Pitt Cobbett, Si= of Crofton, Hunts. London: Hurst and Tanner.

bread for each of them and nothing more and this in the part

of England where, I believe, they live better than in any other part of it. It is just sevenpence, less than one-half of what the meanest foot-soldier in the standing army receives, besides that the latter has clothing, candle, fire, and lodging into the bargain ! Well may we call our happy state of things the 'envy of surrounding nations and the admiration of the world.'"

When he goes near Lord Egremont's house at Petworth, and sees the Town Hall, and "another building, much more capacious and magnificent than the Town Hall, namely, the Bridewell, which from the modernness of its structure appears to be one of those wauste improvements, ma'am,' which dis- tinguish this enlightened age," he exclaims :—

"This place was not wanted when the labourer got twice as much instead of half as much as the common standing soldier. Here you see the true cause why the young labouring man is 'content' to exist upon 7d. a day for six days in the week, and nothing on Sunday. Oh, we are a most free and enlightened people; our happy constitution in Church and State has supplemented Popery and slavery ; but we go to a Bridewell unless we quietly exist and work upon 7d. a day."

After riding through Petworth Park, which "the gate- keeper told us was nine miles round, and is after all probably not a quarter part of what this nobleman possesses," he asks :— "And is it wrong that one man should possess so much ? By no means ; but in my opinion it is wrong that a system should exist which compels this man to have his estate taken away from him unless he throws the junior branches of his family for maintenance upon the public." This, however, is what he must do, says Cobbett, under the present taxing system ; and he quotes the case of Lord Egremont's brothers,—

" Now very old men, who have had from their infancy enormous incomes in sinecure places in the West Indies, while the property and labour of England have been taxed to main- tain these West Indies in a state of dependence upon England, and I cannot forget that the burdens of these sinecures are amongst the grievances of which the West Indians justly complain. True, the taxing system has taken from the family of Wyndham, during the lives of these two gentlemen, as much, and even more, than what that family has gained by those sinecures; but then let it be recollected that it is not the helpless people of England who have been the cause of this system. It is not the fault of those who receive 7d. a day. It is the fault of the family of Wyndham (i.e., Egremont) and such persons, and if they have chosen to suffer the Jews and jobbers to take away so large a part of their income, it is not fair for them to come to the people at large to make up for the loss. Thus it has gone on. The great masses of property have in general been able to take care of themselves, but the little masses have melted away like batter before the sun. The little gentry have not even had any

disposition to resist. They merit their fate most justly The country people really gain by the change; for the small gentry have been reduced by their miseries, so niggardly and so cruel, that it is quite a blessing in a village to see a rich Jew or jobber come to supplant them The stock-jobber goes from London with the cant of humanity on his lips, at any rate; whereas the half-broken squire takes not the least pains to disguise the hardness of his heart. It is impossible for any just man to regret the sweeping away of this base race of squires."

This lengthy quotation is a specimen of the vigorous stuff of which Cobbett's reflections on his rides consist, the truth and insight of which have been amply justified by events. The transfer of land from the old squires to the new traders, or the " big fry," has gone on with increasing rapidity ever since ; and the agricultural labourer has, to the extent Cobbett anticipated, but no more, benefited by the change. But equally as Cobbett anticipated, the distressful state of the "agricultural interest" has continued, or at least has been renewed from time to time, and will be likely to continue so long as there is any large class of persons who propose to live simply on the rent of a moderate landed estate without contributing to earn it. That it is much less severely felt now than it used to be is rather due to the fact that the squire is generally connected with, and derives part of his revenue from, a family engaged in some manufacturing or commercial industry, and

that if he is not, he places his sons out in the public service, than from any intrinsic improvement in the position of the mere rentier,living like a feudal baron in idleness and fox-hunting. Cobbett was clear-sighted enough to perceive that, as far as the farmers were concerned, protection was no assistance, and that a reduction of rent and the general improvement of the state of

the country was the only mode of relief for him. But it must not be supposed that Cobbett's reflections are solely, or even perhaps chiefly, political. He expresses views on the subject of the planting of trees and forestry in general which would gratify the hearts of Mr. Gladstone and Sir John Lubbock. He has a keen eye for every method of im- proving the position of the agricultural labourer, and intro- duced straw-plaiting, which had hitherto been almost entirely imported from Italy, as a means of employing his family, and

eking out his scanty income. He notes with satisfaction the growing practice of letting allotments to labourers, and sar- cistically remarks that the enclosure of commons and common- fields, which had deprived the labourer of his share in the land, had to be in effect reversed by the letting of allotments to him at a low rent, to keep him from starvation. He has also a true appreciation of the beauties of the country he passes through ; and his descriptions of Highclere, Lord Carnarvon's park, the Valley of the Avon, Southampton Water, and the New Forest are far more effective pieces of description than the more highly laboured picture 3 of professed word-painters. When, however, he insists on the former populousness of the English rural districts, and argues from the number of manor- houses and the size and number of the churches, that England was far more populous in the days of Edward III. or William the Conqueror than his own day, though he argues vigorously and with force for his proposition, he is utterly mistaken. His main argument is, that churches were not built for nobody ; they were not built without bands, still less were they repaired without hands. Where did the hands come from, if there were no more people in the rural districts than are now met with The argument proves too much. Even allowing for a population of double the present amount, the argument would not be fully satisfied; and we know past all question that, except in limited districts, no such population can have existed. Besides, if the argument is valid, it applies to the towns even more than to the country ; to London, and York, and Winchester more than to the Vale of Avon or the New Forest. But no one can suppose that any of these towns contained anything like their present population, or that Winchester Cathedral was ever filled by worshippers. The size of the buildings was due to the nature of the worship ; space had to be made for pro- cessions, for the heaps of clericals attached to the buildings, and for the crowds which assembled from the country on feast-days. That they were built at all in such numbers and such a size is rather an evidence of the amount of compulsory labour at the command of the lords of manors, therefore of the Church, and of the greater importance attached to ecclesiastical things in those days, than a proof of the size or prosperity of the popula- tion. If Cobbett had been able to read Mr. Thorold Rogers on Work and Wages, or Dr. Jessop on Arcadia in the Olden Time, he would not have supposed that the rural population was much larger in the fourteenth or the eleventh century than in the nineteenth ; indeed, Mr. Thorold Rogers has shown that their prosperity in the latter half of the fourteenth century was in great part due to the loss of population caused by the Black Death. Certainly, as regards the earlier period, while the greater part of them were serfs liable to forced labour and the whip, it is abundantly clear that if the population was larger it was certainly much less comfortable.