THE FUTURE OF THE FARM LABOURERS. T HE condition of the
agricultural labourer may yet become, and speedily, the cardinal point of English internal politics. The idea that it must be improved, and that it can be improved from without, is taking hold of the country, and squires who scent in the air a coming change are grow- ing as sensitive or as angry as if their creed were in danger. The unreasonable irritation created by Mr. Bright's recent speech, which is still reverberating through the provincial press, suggests a lurking distrust, and there are causes at -work which may very soon give the discussion practical form and end. The passion for emigration is not confined to Ireland. It is nearly as strong in North Wales, it is spread- ing on the Welsh border, and there is nothing whatever to prevent its extension throughout all districts where wages average less than twelve shillings a week. Education has removed much of the old fear of travel ; America is no longer a land unknown, even in middle England; and the temptation of saving five shillings a day becomes every year more poignant. Should agricultural emigration become an English habit, an occurrence indefinitely probable if the demand in the Northern States continues, or should the habit of "striking" in masses ever spread from the artisans down to the ploughmen, the condition of the labourer must be im- proved, or English society be radically modified, and the object of thinkers should be to settle the mode of improve- ment rather than abuse Mr. Bright. He may be, and we believe is, utterly wrong in his remedy, as wrong as those who accuse him of cherishing " agrarian " projects; but he has laid his finger on the sorest spot in all English social economy. The condition of the English " labourer," using that word in its conventional sense, is a thoroughly bad one. That he is, as a rule, worse off than the Belgian, Lombard, or French peasant, those who know those populations are by no means ready to grant. He is protected by a legally fixed minimum of wages—for that is the first result of the poor law—which they arc without, and though he cannot rise so high as a successful Norman peasant, he never sinks so low as the same peasant when two bad years have steeped him in debt. But he is in comparison with other classes much worse off, and as comfort is mainly matter of comparison, he has more in- ducements to avail himself of any chance of escape. For an Englishman, i.e., a native of an excessively prosperous country, he is badly fed, badly housed, badly provided for in old age, and shut out too completely from all chance of rising in life. If he is to be prevented from swarming towards the towns, as be now does, till every agricultural county is declining in population, or, indeed, kept in England at all, these things must be remedied, and the initiative of remedy must be taken by the propertied class. If they refuse, out of mere hatred of change or a jealousy lest change should go farther than they approve, they will not, indeed, endanger their properties, but they will lose the labour which alone renders those properties valuable. The fear of " insurrection " is simply absurd, for in England alone among European coun- tries physical force, a clear numerical superiority in fists, is on the side of order. Setting all principles aside, the English agrieulturists could not dictate to the well-to-do plus the town populations. But the fear of emigration or of strikes covering counties is not absurd, and it is worth the while of landlords to consider for once whether it is not possible to let the labourer share in the advance of society. Mr. Bright so far merely states what all moderate men more or less acknow- ledge, it is only as to the remedy that the divergence be- gins. He says it is to be found in an imitation of the Con- tinent. Let the peasant, he says, own the land, which under the existing system he has no power of doing. That advice may be as sound as he thinks, or as mistaken as we believe it to be, but it is folly to say that it is chimerical. The English Liberals could, if they chose, pass laws to-morrow, which would not interfere with property, yet in fifty years would place most of the soil in the hands of those who till it. The real protection of the existing system lies not in the law of primogeniture, which only arrests accidental and exceptional breakings-up, but in the conveyancing laws, which it is quite possible, supposing opinion mature, to abolish in a session. Suppose the registration idea, for instance, were carried straight out, and the law recognized only the registered owner of land without looking to trusts, as the Bank now does with Consols. The beneficiary under a will or settlement would have his full remedy against his trustees, as he has now in regard to personal property, but land would at once become as saleable as a watch. The power of settlement would, in fact, end, for the registered owner could grant a good title, and the object with which settlements are made would be completely baffled. A mortgage would be a simple debt, unless the mortgagee became registered owner, and the temptation of every landlord in difficulties would be to pare away his estate in slices. The land would fall patch by patch to people who intended to cultivate it, and who intending to unite the profits of landlord, tenant, and labourer, could give acre by acre a price no " gentleman " would afford. That is the actual process in Belgium, where land in patches is often sold at sixty years' purchase to men who regard it as the only mode of investment. The possibility of taking that course in legis- lation is quite clear, and Mr. Bright in advocating it does not step out of the range of constitutional discus- sion. He does not even, so far as appears, go the length of all Continental rulers, and abolish the power of bequeathal, though that project is no more "revolution- ary" than any other compulsory law of distribution, than, for instance, the old law of entail, which equally interfered with the testator's control. To say that if opinion leaned that way opinion would be immoral is absurd, the real point for discussion being whether it is ex- pedient to educate opinion to take any such direction.
Mr. Bright, caring mainly, he says, for the well-being of the people, argues that it is ; we, caring mainly, we know, for the well-being of the people, argue that it is not. His pro- posal is neither " agrarian," nor revolutionary," nor " incen- diary," nor impossible of execution; but it is, we believe, most unwise. His object, to raise the labourer, is not only righteous, but is one which must be fulfilled, and that quicker than most landlords aro accustomed to dream ; but his mode of effecting the object would first destroy all the value of English life, and then defeat itself. It would abolish English society, with its scope for every variety of excellence, and especially those excellencies which spring of long continued culture, refinement, and inde- pendence, in favour of a single class, which could not, being one, constitute a society at all. That class, moreover, holding the land, would be driven, like every other class in the same position, to choose between cultivation by societies,—a radical bouleversement of English ideas as well as English habits —or the petite culture, with its intervals of prosperity and long periods of failing struggle against the exhaustion inevitable in every soil save that of tropical deltas. That struggle could only end in one of two results, either a poverty like that of Ireland, unrelieved by a poor law, which five millions of holders would be certain to shake from their shoulders, or a suspension, as in France, of numerical in- crease, and consequently of England's first function on earth— that of peopling the wilderness. The people, left to them- selves as petty proprietors upon rigidly limited plots, would probably be worse housed than at present, for no man builds so badly as the poverty-stricken owner; just as badly edu- cated, for education implies leisure ; and we fear with even less chance of rising, if that be possible, than the existing labourer. The petite culture has had no long trial in Europe, but it has lasted three thousand years in India, and any number of generations in China, with no other result than to stereotype civilization without securing the compensation of universal physical comfort. That is poor workmanship which begins by breaking up the old tools. This English society of ours, with all its faults, and they are many and cruel, has, on the whole, advanced more rapidly than any other society, has shown less tendency to fixity, less inclination to settle down on its lees in Chinese self-satisfaction. We must continue, if pro- gress is not to be interrupted indefinitely, or stopped for ever, to use that instrument; and we believe this approaching danger may be met through it as successfully as for eight centuries every other has been. The present disgraceful lull in movement is merely temporary—will not outlast the lives of two or three very old men. When it is over,' the next great movement, the war against pau- perism, must commence, and the propertied class will be in that as in every other innovation useful leaders, giving not motive force but direction to otherwise wasted energy. That condition of the labourer which equally alarms Mr. Bright and ourselves can be remedied without an attempt to imitate a course of legislation which in India produced the men we saw at Cawnpore, in China breeds the men who are asking for foreign rule as a relief from their own, in France places all mental cultivation under the heel of the peasant, in Belgium leaves one-fourth of the population dependent on alms, and in Holland causes, amidst one of the richest of communities, an annual increase in the numbers dependent for food on the State. With the law of settlement fully abolished, so that labour may drift to its market, all cottages rebuilt in order to form a cheap addition to wages, assurance funds for old age guaranteed by the State, education made universal, farm wages brought up to the level of every other description of healthy trade, the safety of savings guaranteed by the nation—the only reform yet carried through—and partnership laws directed to favour, instead of preventing, the combination of small capitals, the English labouring class may become what the English middle class already is, the freest and most comfort- able on the face of the earth. There is no reason whatever, in the existing order of society, why, with leases long enough to admit of the free deposit of capital on the soil, the Eng- lish village should not be a collection of decent houses, in- habited by men free of all compression save the necessity of labour, earning full meals every day, fearing neither sickness nor old age, owning by co-operation all the local shops and forges, and consequently placing out every shilling saved at interest such as shopkeepers receive. Then, as now, the owners will be the leaders towards still further progress, which they have the leisure to study as well as the means to risk; then, as now, the rental will form the reservoir of wealth on which to draw in a succession of bad years, and then, as now, we trust, Mr. Brights will be found to lay bare every social evil, so that gentler physicians may cure them without the " actual cautery." In other words, we shall have the life of the American village, plus a refined and cultivated class, and minus that self-satisfaction which the American Brights have so seldom, like our English one, the manliness to assail.
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