The English Peasant. Richard Ford Heath
they were escorted by a regiment of Scotch Greys. At the sight of the gallows one exclaimed to the other, "That looks an awful thing." "Brother," said the eldest, "let us shake hands before we die." The younger refused at first to have the cap drawn over his eyes, saying he wished to see the people as he died. Poor heart, he knew well where there was sympathy, and expected strength from the sight.
Terrible fact! it was only by means of these lurid flames, these black corpses dangling in the wintry wind, these English slaves sent to the antipodal hell at Botany Bay, that the consciences of the well-to-do ruling classes could be brought to the conviction that there was something rotten in the social condition of the country and that the ground beneath their feet was volcanic.
The Times newspaper for December 27, 1830, commenting upon the Winchester trials, made the danger-signal scream in quite revolutionary accents.
"We do affirm that the actions of this pitiable class of men (the labourers), as a commentary on the treatment experienced by them at the hands of the upper and middling classes; the gentlemen, clergy (who ought to teach and instruct them), and the farmers who ought to pay and feed them, are disgraceful to the British name. The present population must be provided for in body and spirit on more liberal and Christian principles, or the whole mass of labourers will start into legions of a banditti—banditti less criminal than those who have made them so—than those who by a just but fearful retribution will soon become their victims."
The Parliamentary Commission appointed in 1833 to inquire into the operation of the Poor Laws, declared itself horrified at the results of its inquiries. "The condition of the rural labours in too many districts was," it affirmed, "brutal and wretched; their children during the day were struggling with the pigs for food, and at night were huddled down on damp straw under a roof of rotten thatch."
A reform conceived in the hard, inhuman spirit of modern science was the outcome. I once read of a hospital nurse who, disgusted with the dirty habits of some miserable patient, dragged the trembling wretch half-naked out of her bed and forced her into a cold bath. Such was the humanity of the New Poor Law.
The shivering labourers, accustomed to their dirty hovels, struggled long with grim famine before they would go into the Bastilles, as they named the new Workhouses. For this title there would have been no justification if honest families could have avoided their use, but that that was impossible is proved by the fact that the ordinary dietary of the workhouse fed the paupers twice as well as nine-tenths of English labourers could feed on the wages they obtained.
On a bleak winter's evening in January 1846, the Wiltshire labourers held a mass meeting in a cross-road near Goat-acre. Standing on a hurdle supported on stakes driven into the ground, the speakers read, by the flickering light of a candle or the glare of a lanthorn, their woe-begone statements. One who had come twenty miles told the story of his struggles to provide for a wife and six children out of eight shillings a week. At last he applied to the relieving officer, who gave him an order for one of his children to go into the workhouse. "Now, fellow-labourers, is not one child as dear to you as another? I could not part with ne'er a one. I said to my oldest girl, 'You are to go into the workhouse.' She did not like to go, and then I spoke to the others, and then I had the cries of my poor children, which were piercing to my heart, 'Don't send me, father! don't send me!'"
Here we see the main cause why English labourers called the workhouses Bastilles. They lacerated their bruised souls in the only spot where feeling was left; the law tore asunder husband and wife, parents and children.
So these miserable people preferred to starve in their horrible lairs, called cottages. If you think this phrase mere rhetoric, study the Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1864, and the Reports of the Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, 1867, and you will find that no phrase you can think of will be adequate to express the truth. Crazy, dilapidated hovels, shaking with every wind, vast numbers containing but one bedroom, in which parents and children, grown-up brothers and sisters, even grandparents and aunts and uncles, and occasionally lodgers, all pigged together, where a whole family had to be ill of fever and to lie in the same room with a corpse—rooms through the ceilings of which the water poured, where the walls reeked with damp, where fever lurked in the saturated floor, so that the very accent of the people seemed to have grown clammy—such were vast numbers of English cottages up to within the time that I began to study this subject, and, by numbers of pedestrian tours, to realise the truth with my own eyes. Charles Kingsley refers to these facts in his terrible ballad, "The Bad Squire," which I only refrain from quoting for want of room.
Every horror went on in such homes. The same loathsome crimes that startled us so in "The Bitter Cry" have been perpetrated in our English villages, and every now and then the newspapers have had to record some atrocious murder, or series of murders, committed in one of these slumbering hamlets.
Degraded by pauperism, harried by the game laws, brutalised by drink, maddened by starvation, are you surprised that such homes produced a state of mind only to be paralleled in an old-fashioned lunatic asylum, where people were kept in cages like raging beasts of prey? Some blessed angels have been at work all over the land restraining these poor devils, binding up their wounds, sitting at their bedsides, filling their minds with a hidden hope—a hope quite undefined, but for that reason the more vast and consoling. So you may enter these hovels, and find a resignation, a peace of mind, a trust in God absolutely sublime. It is the Spirit of Jesus Christ which we have driven to dwell in the nethermost hells of English society. But it is by such means He has preached to the spirits in prison—spirits from whom all hope has long fled—spirits lost to natural affection and all decency, foul-tongued and malicious, hating themselves and hating each other, apparently lost in this world and to all eternity.
Space fails me to speak of the innumerable miseries which rendered these miserable homes still more miserable—the toilsome journeys to the work, often many miles a day—the occupation of the mothers in the fields—the corruption of the young by the ganging system; all these causes assisted to destroy domestic affection—the one humanising influence left to the labourer amidst all his trials and temptations. When this was gone, there was nothing for him but drink, and this reacted on the home, and made its wretchedness still more wretched.
And thus the English labourer sank too often into a Caliban, whose sole enjoyment was to make night horrible as he rushed with whoops and yells from the village alehouse to terrify wife and cowering children. When the poor monster of the island of Lampedusa cries—
"Sometime am I
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues,
Do hiss me into madness! Lo, now, lo!
Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me,"
we seem to hear the poor hell-bound rustic blindly groaning in his anguish, but not so blind but that he feels his misery to be chiefly due to that wily enchanter to whom, notwithstanding his vile brutality, he is indispensable.
"We cannot miss him : he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices
That profit us."
XI.
The First Faint Streak of Dawn.
"Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked they saw that the stone was rolled away; for it was very great." From 1834 to 1872 is not a long time in such a history as we have been pursuing; but how great the change! Day had broken; the shadows were flying.
In 1834, the Dorsetshire labourers, among the gentlest and most down-trodden of their class, formed a Trades-Union. The Government caused six labouring men concerned in getting it up to be indicted at the Assizes at Dorchester, under an obsolete statute made to prevent mutiny in the Navy. They were found guilty of administering an oath which this statute made penal, and were sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. Notwithstanding a burst of popular indignation, these six labourers were transported to Van Dieman's land, the Government being so determined about it as to make preparations to sweep the streets