The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
pretty idea of the kind of men who in the seventeenth century had the fate of the agricultural labourer in their hands. "Jack," said a gentleman of very high quality, when after the debate in the House of Lords, King William was voted on the vacant throne; "Jack," says he, "God damn ye; Jack, go home to your lady, and tell her we have got a Protestant King and Queen; and go and make a bonfire as big as a house, and bid the butler make ye all drunk, ye dog."
To ask legislators of this sort to listen to proposals like those of Mr. Locke, even though they had King William's support, was casting pearls before swine. So nothing came of the idea, borrowed from the original Elizabethan legislation, of founding working schools where the children of those unable to maintain their families could be fed and employed instead of money for the purpose being directly given to the heads of those families.
A similar fate at first befell Sir Humphrey Mackworth's scheme for setting up workhouses, perhaps owing to Defoe's clever pamphlet entitled, "Giving Alms no Charity" However, in 1723, Parliament determined to try the workhouse system and by 9 Geo. I., c. 7, it was enacted that relief should only be given on condition of entering a workhouse; i.e., that an Englishman who fell into poverty should only be relieved on condition of surrendering what has been trumpeted forth as the birthright of every native of this country.
It was soon seen that to make this system effectual, the workhouse must be more miserable and the diet poorer than that to which the labouring class were accustomed. Workhouses were accordingly managed by contract, and ere long they became one of those horrors, the frequent end of institutions founded on one principle and worked on another. Crabbe, whose profound sympathy for the poor and photographic pictures of their misery will render his fame immortal, thus describes the Village Workhouse in 1783. He is speaking of the final fate of worn-out agricultural labourers—
"Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor.
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day—
There children dwell who know no parents' care:
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there!
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
Rejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood's fears:
The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
The moping idiot, and the madman gay."
In the very year of the appearance of Crabbe's most touching poem of the Village, Mr. Pitt brought in a bill repealing the 9 Geo. I., c. 7, which prohibited relief to any not entering a workhouse, on the ground that this provision was "inconvenient and oppressive, inasmuch as it often prevented an industrious person from receiving such relief as is best suited to their peculiar case, and held out conditions of relief injurious to the comfort and domestic situation and happiness of such poor persons."
That the Act, known as 33 Geo. III., c. 23, proved one of the most disastrous bits of legislation ever perpetrated, was not so much the fault of its promoters as of that fatal English blindness to harmony, which does not see that you cannot bind together the Spirit of Christianity and the Practice of the World, that you cannot found an institution on the ground of human brotherhood and then work it in the spirit of competitive commerce.
In 1796 Mr. Pitt made a remarkable speech on the Poor Laws, in which, after referring to the great abuses of the System, he laid down the principles essential to a good Poor Law. One of the most important was—Relief according to number of children.
The following year Mr. Pitt brought in a bill in which he proposed to realise this principle. This bill and its failure—for it was withdrawn at the manifest repugnance of the House of Commons to make it law—show two things: first, that Mr. Pitt understood the meaning of the French Revolution better than his supporters; second, that they understood the condition to which the Agricultural Poor were reduced better than he did.
English Statesmen had had time to understand the great storm which had raged across the Channel, and had comprehended that it resulted from the mass of people suddenly discovering that they had been cheated, robbed, and trampled under foot for ages, in order that a small section of the community might live in pride and luxury; and knowing that the same conditions existed here, they were in terror lest the like should occur in England. We know from Lord Stanhope that in 1794, Pitt believed himself surrounded by thousands of bandits, and that he might wake one morning and find London in flames.
The truth, however, about the Revolution had not reached the majority of his supporters, and their nerves being less sensitive, they judged the state of the country more correctly. As to the agricultural labourers, they knew them to be what we see them depicted in the drawings of Morland, and in the writings of Crabbe, Blomfield, and Clare; an artless, patient, gregarious herd, who went on plodding from day to day, hopeless and aimless, with no other relief than an occasional burst of frantic merriment, of which horse-play and hard drinking were the chief features. Freed from all anxiety concerning the future, mostly ignorant of any higher good than the satisfaction of their senses, there was nothing to fear from such a people.
However, the soul of the Agricultural Poor was not quite dead. It fluttered still in the breasts of a few sufferers, and came out as such deep vague sorrows do in verse.
Blomfield and Clare, these poets of the people, have throughout the same undertone of melancholy, arising from the conviction that they belonged to a class which is day by day falling into a deeper, more abject state of poverty or crime. When the former, as he reflected on the distance the increasing wealth made between different ranks, cries out—
"Has Wealth done this ?—then Wealth's a foe to me;
Foe to our rights; that leaves a pow'rful few
The paths of emulation to pursue:—
For emulation stoops to us no more:
The hope of humble industry is o'er"—
we have, as it were, a throb from a slumbering volcano.
And the conviction that the sleeper might awake seems to have been the result of Mr. Pitt's bill, for though dropped, its main proposition, the making up out of the rates of the deficiency of a labourer's income, came to be the general practice throughout the country. This suggested the necessity of a scale, and the amount a labourer ought to have was fixed, from time to time, by the price of the quartern loaf, which might vary from 6d. to 2s.[5]
By this system it was admitted that every man in the country had a right to an adequate maintenance, whether he was idle or industrious, honest or dishonest; and that he ought to receive public aid in proportion to the number of his family. English people are frightened at the word Socialism. Who ever conceived a worse type of Socialism than this?
When the Parliamentary Commission of 1833 inquired into the effect of this system, they could not find words strong enough to paint their dismay. They found the poor's rates in 1830 had reached an annual amount of six to seven millions sterling; that in some parts of the country, nearly all the labourers were paupers; that the rascally idler was better off than the honest and laborious; the latter, one after the other, being driven to the conviction that the man who worked hard was a fool; they found, however, that employers liked the system, because it enabled them to give low wages, knowing the deficiency would be made up by the parish.
Never, perhaps, in history has there been a state of things so ridiculously immoral.
X.
Descending into Hell.
In that remarkable parable—where Jesus Christ sets forth the judgment of the nations—He gives but one test of righteousness, and that test turns on the absolute identification of Himself with the poor and needy. "Forasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it