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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

BY

E. N. BENNETT, M.A.

LONDON
WILLIAMS & NORGATE

HENRY HOLT & Co., NEW YOR*
CANADA: WM. BRIGGS, TORONTO
INDIA : R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD.

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UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

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MODERN KNOWLEDGE

Editors :

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A, LL.D.

PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT, LL.D,
F.B.A.

PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., LL.D.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
(COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, U.S.A.)

NEW YORK.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PROBLEMS
OF VILLAGE LIFE

BY

E. N. BENNETT, M.A.

Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford,

and late M.P. for the Woodstock

Division of Oxfordshire

LONDON

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

THE following volumes of kindred interest have already
been published in the Home University Library : — •

VOL. 26.— AGRICULTURE. By PEOP. W. SOMERVTLLE.

VOL. 36.— CLIMATE AND WEATHER. By PROF.
H. N. DICKSON.

VOL. 59.— POLITICAL ECONOMY. By PROF. S. J.
CHAPMAN.

VOL. 72.— PLANT LIFE. By PROF. J. B. FARMER,
F.R.S.

VOL. 24.— THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY. By
PROF. D. H. MACGREGOR.

VOL. 33.— HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By PROF. A. F.
POLLARD.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PREFACE ...... 7

I THE STORY OP THE ENGLISH LAND . 13

II RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY ... 37

III THE RURAL EXODUS .... 59

IV RURAL EDUCATION ..... 95
V VILLAGE POLITICS 106

VI RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE . . . 120

VII HOMES AND WAGES .... 141

VIII SMALL HOLDINGS 163

IX CO-OPERATION AND CREDIT . . . 198

X SOME OTHER REMEDIES .... 206

BIBLIOGRAPHY. ..... 251

INDEX .... 255

PREFACE

IN the midst of the great industrial develop-
ments which followed the close of the
Napoleonic wars the claims of the rural
population were to a large extent overlooked.
So amazing was the realized and prospective
wealth of a " nation of shopkeepers " who
had made good their claim to control the trade
routes of the world that the eyes of the nation
were turned almost exclusively upon the towns
and seaports. In the present century again,
amid the ever-increasing volume of England's
trade and her abounding riches, accompanied
at the same time by a social unrest of unpre-
cedented force, the attention of our country
and those who guide its destiny is chiefly
centred upon urban interests and urban
demands. Trade rivals have menaced or
destroyed some of our monopolies, and our
earlier claim to be the workshop of the world
must nowadays necessarily submit to modifi-
cation ; but we have not yet as a nation learnt
the true value of our fertile fields and the
men who cultivate them. Agriculture, indeed,
7

8 PREFACE

shares with Sociology the character of being
perhaps the most backward of the applied
sciences. In many other directions the splendid
inventiveness of man has made giant strides —

&Tropo<; I
T6 (jiiXXov. AtSa (i6vov ysufyv oux

We have mastered the principles of aerial
flight and wireless telegraphy ; our sub-
marines navigate the depths of the sea ; we
can analyze and weigh the planets. But many
of the problems of poverty are still unsolved,
and agriculture, the earliest and most universal
of the sciences, makes but slow progress.
It even appears probable that many parts
of the globe's surface are cultivated with far
less success now than in earlier centuries. In
our own country no land drainage on scientific
lines appeared until 1835 ; and the formation
of artificial soils by mixture, discussed by
Columella and even earlier writers, is still in
its infancy as far as England is concerned.

The complaint, so often heard in country
districts, that the agricultural population
" does not count " is not without foundation.
Of the eleven chapters in Mr. Masterman's
admirable book The Condition of England,
only one deals with the sociology of the
countryside. " Nobody," said a farmer to

PREFACE 9

Mr. Rider Haggard, " cares twopence how
many quarters of wheat we produce." In a
still greater degree does the existence of the
poorer type of villager tend to be ignored.
The valuable information contained in Rural
England is derived almost entirely from
squires, farmers and land agents : how
seldom in these pages do we come across
conversations with farm labourers. Mr.
Wilson Fox's careful statistics of agricultural
wages would have been even more reliable
had they not been based so largely on returns
made by employers. At " Fat Stock Dinners "
and the like, the toast of " Agriculture "
always has reference to the prosperity of
landlords and farmers : and, in response, you
will hear employers and landagents regretting
the " good old days of agriculture," when
wheat was GO/- a quarter and the labourers
suffered cruelly from dear food and wretched
wages. It is a significant fact that the only
complete and scientific history of the English
agricultural labourer has been written by a
foreigner, Herr Hasbach. No apology, there-
fore, is needed by any writer who strives, in
however humble a fashion, to focus the atten-
tion of his fellow-citizens on the problems of
rural England.

Against one danger any author who deals

10 PREFACE

with our rural life must be on his guard. It
is by no means easy to discuss the social
conditions of the countryside without being
drawn, perhaps almost insensibly, into the
vortex of party politics. All existing accounts,
in fact, of rural life and economy have been in
a greater or lesser degree coloured by the
convictions and sentiments of the writer.
This is self-evident, for example, in the writings
of Cobbett, Young, and Joseph Arch. Those
who love the country and its neglected people
are bound to feel strongly, and, in face of our
heavy arrears of national duty to the village,
tend to grow impatient with further delays,
excuses and compromises. Nevertheless, the
writer of this little book will do his best to
prevent any personal sympathies from mini-
mising or obscuring the beneficent efforts
of political opponents working for a common
end. No Liberal can write with fuller know-
ledge, a more heartfelt sympathy for the poor
village labourer, or a more genuine desire
to improve British agriculture than Mr.
Christopher Tumor, a Conservative landlord,
or Mr. Jesse Collings, to whose clear and
interesting volume on " Land Reform " we
owe so much.

My grateful acknowledgments are due to
Mr. C. R. Buxton, who generously placed at

PREFACE 11

my disposal the manuscript of a book on
country life compiled by him some years ago,
but never published. I have not hesitated
to insert here and there some considerable
portions of this manuscript almost verbatim.
I wish also to thank the Editors of the Con-
temporary Review and the Nation for their
permission to reprint certain paragraphs from
articles formerly contributed to these journals
by myself.

These pages were already in the press when
the Report of the Land Enquiry Committee,
Vol. I., made its appearance ; I was therefore,
to my great regret, unable to avail myself of
the invaluable information presented by the
Committee.

E. N. B.

PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE
LIFE

CHAPTER I

THE STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND

THE conditions of rural life in England
are to a large extent unique. Nowhere in
Europe is so large a proportion of the popula-
tion permanently divorced from the land,
nowhere else is farming carried on by such
loose and careless methods or is the land so
much the " pleasure ground of the few "
rather than the " treasure house of the
many," nowhere else do you find a large
class of men existing on similar lines to those
of our agricultural labourers. The present
system, with all its attendant problems,
forms, perhaps, the clearest example of social
and political evolution met with in history.
So monotonous have been the annals of rural
England, so powerful the small minority of
its population, so helpless the large majority,
13

14 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

that the story of the English land is revealed
as little more than a register of obvious forces
which have been directed from the Norman
Conquest onwards to one definite end. The
leading features of village life to-day, the
hopelessness, the landlessness, are the direct
outcome of the Feudal System, the Enclosure
Acts, and the many Acts of regulation and
repression which a small fraction of the nation
have succeeded in placing upon the Statute
Book of the realm.

The manorial system of the Norman period
was based on the service of freemen and
villeins rendered to the lord in person or to
his bailiff. The land outside the lord's own
demesne was farmed by these tenants, who,
whether free or bondsmen, were liable for
forty days of military service whenever
summoned, and a variety of other dues in
the shape of tallage, fines, or manual labour.
The villein by blood, however, was " bound to
the soil," unable to leave the land without
his lord's permission, and exposed to a variety
of harassing and humiliating exactions if he
was unfortunate enough to serve a harsh
master. In the Colloquy of Aelfric, the plough-
man serf says : " I work hard, I go out at day-
break, driving the oxen to the field, and I
yoke them to the plough. Be it never so

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 15

stark winter I dare not linger at home for awe
of my lord. ... I have a boy driving
the oxen with a goad iron, who is hoarse with
cold and shouting . . . mighty hard
work it is, for I am not free." At the end of
the twelfth century the Canons of Osney could
procure a serf for £4 and a horse, or, in another
case, 20 shillings.

From several causes, including the Church's
disapproval of unqualified slavery, the bonds-
men gradually improved their position, and
by the middle of the fourteenth century an
economic change had come to pass which
radically altered the conditions of rural life.
The feudal services of the villein, bond or
free, had over large areas of England become
commuted for cash payment. In other words,
agricultural rent had established itself in
permanent shape, involving the theoretical
freedom of labour and freedom of contract.
Nevertheless, the fact that one of the demands
in Kett's rebellion (1549) was the abolition
of serfdom would seem to indicate that the
disappearance of the bondsman was a process
more gradual and protracted than is some-
times supposed.

The sudden stimulus towards better con-
ditions of life thus afforded to the dependent
classes was strongly accentuated by the

16 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

terrible visitation of the Black Death in
1348. As a signal example of the inscrutable
methods of Providence, a pestilence which
destroyed from one-third to one-half of the
population placed the labourer in a stronger
position than he had ever secured before, or
has ever secured since. The period which
followed has been called the Golden Age of the
English labourer. Never before or since was
his pay so good or his power of combination
so effective. Amid the widespread scarcity
of labourers, wages rose, until in 1375 twice
as much was paid for harvesting as was the
case before the Plague. The day labourer
in the fourteenth century received about a
quarter of the market price of the farm
produce : in the eighteenth, the proportion
which fell to his lot was, according to Young,
only one-tenth. A rising spirit of hope and
courage drew the survivors of the great
calamity together ; and the efficacy of their
combined efforts is apparent from the com-
plaints of the ruling classes and the enactment
of the " Statute of Labourers." In 1377 a
protest was made by manorial lords, " as well
as men of Holy Church," that " the villeins
. . . join themselves together in great
routs and agree by such confederacy that
every one shall aid them to resist their lords

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 17

with a strong hand : " and the re-enactment
of repressive measures against the combination
of workmen would appear to indicate that
difficulty was experienced in the execution of
such measures.

At first sight, it might seem paradoxical
that a period when the peasantry had reached
their high-water level of social betterment
should be marked by the greatest agrarian
revolt in English history — the peasant war
of 1381. Moreover, it was in the most
independent and most advanced part of rural
England, East Anglia, that the fiercest out-
bursts of popular violence took place. " It
has been noted," writes Professor Oman,
" that peasant revolts all over Europe were
wont to spring up not in the regions where the
serf was in the deepest oppression, but in
those in which he was comparatively well-
off, where he was strong enough to aspire to
greater liberty and to dream of getting it by
force." The great German rising of 1525
took place in districts where the burdens of
feudalism were least felt. It is noticeable, too,
that the most successful strike of recent years
in rural England occurred not amongst the
badly paid labourers of the South, but in a
district of Lancashire where the average
wages already reached the respectable figure

18 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

of some 22/- a week. The desire for comfort
and well-being becomes atrophied in time :
the desolate and oppressed gaze dimly on
such blessings " but not nigh, they behold
them, but not now." It is only when freedom
lies closer at hand that men will rush into the
fray to secure it. The rebellious peasants of
the fourteenth century were inspired by a
burning sense of social wrong and a zeal for
freedom which flashed like a bright meteor
trail across the sombre history of our English
land and was lost once more in the surrounding
gloom. The peasants, we are told by a con-
temporary, " affirmed themselves to be utterly
discharged of all manner of serfage."

Nor must it be forgotten that amid the
outward signs of betterment in this golden
age certain basic facts of social oppression re-
mained unshaken. A very large proportion
of the villeins were still deprived of the full
protection of the King's Courts : they were
forbidden to sell their land or leave it without
permission : unworthy and harassing dues
and services, though gradually yielding to the
force of custom, were still inscribed on the
Statute Book. In the days of the great
uprising the good " hedge-priest " Ball tells
how " in the Eastern counties dwell men in
four walls of wattled reeds and mud, and the

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 19

north-east wind from off the Fen whistles
through them : and poor they be to the
letter : and there him whom the lord spareth
the bailiff squeezeth, and him whom the bailiff
forgetteth the Easterling chapman sheareth :
yet these be stout men and valiant and your
very brethren." Solid advantages had, it is
true, been generally secured — freedom of
contract, better wages and the practice of
combination, but it was doubtless felt that
what had been largely conceded to the force
majeure of the Black Death and its results
might be reversed under changed conditions.
The peasant's advancement had been gained
through special circumstances ; he enjoyed
no permanent guarantee for its continuance.
The feudal system, no doubt, secured to the
peasant farmers some measure of real freedom,
but the latent possibility of evil inherent in
the system became terrible actualities when-
ever the strong arm of the English kings
was removed by civil strife. " No ghastlier
picture of a nation's misery," says Green,
" has ever been painted than that which closed
the English Chronicle, whose last accents
falter out amid the sorrows of the time," i.e.,
the end of the twelfth century.

The influence of the Church was not so
uniformly on the side of the authorities during

20 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

the earlier rebellions as in later periods of
agrarian unrest. In the sixteenth century
it was exceptional to find Churchmen like
Latimer and Bernard Gilpin, who courageously
denounced the despoiling of the rural poor,
but during the earlier revolts considerable
sympathy was extended to the peasants by
many of the parochial clergy. It is true that
monks like Thomas Walsingham and prelates
like the warlike Bishop of Norwich were openly
hostile to the rebels and followed the lines of
Luther's later advice, that the peasants should
be " strangled and stabbed as a man would
deal with a mad dog." Wyclif, moreover,
stood aloof from the poor villagers in their
struggle. But it is clear that many country
parsons threw in their lot with their parish-
ioners in the days of Tyler and Kett, and no
less than three of the principal leaders were
priests, John Wrawe, Straw, and John Ball.
The extant sermons of Ball are full of touching
faith and piety. " I have told you," said he,
" of fellowship and ye have hearkened what
the Holy Church is, whereby ye know that ye
are fellows of the saints in Heaven and the
poor men of Essex ; and as one day the saints
shall call you to the Heavenly Feast, so now
do the poor men call you to the battle."
Agrarian wars have occurred in the history

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 21

of nearly every European nation. In Ger-
many the peasantry fought against their
privileged and untaxed oppressors with brutal
savagery, and hundreds of ruined castles
serve to-day as memorials of the peasant
revolts of the sixteenth century. In this
case, as in England, the military skill and
discipline of the governing class proved too
strong for the bauern, whose risings were
stamped out by reprisals of almost incredible
ferocity. Nevertheless the German peasant
was never cowed by that long and systematic
misery which has been well described as the
Via Dolorosa of the English labourer : he
succeeded in maintaining through the cen-
turies some measure, at least, of independence.
The sudden frenzy of the French Jacquerie
in the fourteenth century, with its peasant
atrocities and terrible repression, was too
local and short lived to exert any real influ-
ence on the subsequent fortunes of the rural
population. The real agrarian revolt came
to pass at a later and far more favourable
time. When the long-suppressed fury of
the peasants was let loose the landed
aristocracy was hated by the urban as well
as the rural inhabitants. The inspiration
of American independence on the one hand
and the menace of foreign intervention on the

22 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

other knit the whole of France's democracy
together, and the wonderful successes achieved
by the raw troops of the Republic at Valmy
and Jemappes bestowed a security of tenure
and a civic status on the small owners of
France which they have never lost.

While their brethren in other lands gained
partial or complete successes the English
peasants failed utterly and completely. In
the three desperate risings of 1381, 1450 and
1549, they showed no lack indeed of courage
and enthusiasm, but their ill-equipped forces
were ultimately crushed by the royal levies or
imported mercenaries.1 Good men and true
like Tyler, Ball and Kett died in the midst of
manifest failure, seeing the promise of better
things from afar but not having attained unto
them. Contemporary chroniclers combined to
misrepresent and calumniate the peasants
and their leaders, and nowadays the children
of labourers in village schools are taught hi
current textbooks to ignore or condemn the
men who died in a vain attempt to secure
justice for the oppressed forefathers of the
hamlet. It is indeed a bitter piece of histori-
cal irony that the exploits of Elizabethan
buccaneers should be cherished while the very

1 The Norfolk labourers were slaughtered at Dussindale
by Italian infantry and " Alleman Horse."

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 23

names of Tyler, Kett, Wrawe, Cade, Straw,
Ball and Grindecobbe have either passed into
quasi-oblivion or are used as synonyms for
a reckless adventurer or a ruffian. For the
attitude of the governing classes towards the
peasants at this period no modern parallel
suggests itself except in the case of certain
mixed communities of Europeans and negroes.
The intermixture of hatred and dread which
sometimes animates a white populace in
relation to the blacks is reflected in the
vocabulary habitually employed by chroniclers
like Holingshed, Walsingham and Froissart
when they describe the brave villagers of
England.

The main causes of failure in the case of
these peasant risings were the absence of able
leaders and the lack of effective combination
between the disaffected areas of the country.
The removal of Kett's able leadership broke
down all further resistance in Norfolk, despite
several signal successes against the royal
forces. The peasants who were massed on
Blackheath were masters of the situation,
but there was nobody to step into the place
of Wat Tyler, their murdered leader. Never
once in the whole course of English history
did the monarch come forward to espouse the
j ust rights of the poor villagers. Only once did

24 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

a champion of the despoiled peasants emerge
from the ranks of the greater aristocracy
in the person of the Duke of Somerset, the
" Protector " of young King Edward VI.,
and his sympathy, with the oppressed subjects
of the king was undoubtedly his undoing.
One of the comments in the indictment which
brought him to the block was this : — " You
said that the Lords of Parliament were loth
to incline themselves to reformation of in-
closures and other things ; therefore the
people had good cause to reform the things
themselves." No writer of the period says
a good word for the brave peasants who
fought desperately with rude and inferior
weapons against the foreign mercenaries
whom the ruling classes imported for the
slaughter of their own countrymen.

The peasant rising had ended in failure, but
the times of stress and terror were not easily
forgotten by the classes whose authority had
been assailed. The general policy of these
classes from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century appears to have been one of distrust
and hostility towards the rural population.
The Law, the Church, and social influences
seemed to combine in order to crush out every
spark of independence and every hope of
advancement amongst our peasants. The

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 25

success of this conspiracy, one of the most
efficient engines of human oppression that
the world has seen, has left its mark only too
clearly on the English village of to-day. It
apparently transformed the whole character
of our countrymen. In earlier days of English
history the yeoman and the peasant, the men
who fought at Agincourt and Crecy, who
struggled desperately under Kett and Tyler,
were described by Froissart as " le plus
perilleux peuple qui soit au monde et plus
outrageux et orgueilleux." But in the later
centuries the glory of courage had, indeed,
departed from the English countryside. The
villagers were utterly cowed, fit ancestors of
the men who were described by a Prime
Minister of our own day as " afraid to call their
souls their own." Advantages once gained
were jealously preserved. By one enactment
after another the villager was robbed of his
Common rights, cheated of his wages, tied to
the soil, denied all education and deprived of
all hope. The harsh Act of Elizabeth's reign
which enabled Justices to fix the maximum
price of agricultural labour was tolerated by
a submissive people until 1812. The Law of
Parochial Settlement in 1662, which sought
to prevent the movement of the labourer
from parish to parish, fastened the chains of

26 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

oppression more firmly. Thorold Rogers calls
this measure " the worst Act of the worst
Parliament which ever sat " : but of all the
great writers who lived during the long period
covered by this measure, Adam Smith alone
condemns it unreservedly. " To remove a
man," he writes, " who has committed no
misdemeanour from the parish where he
chooses to reside is an evident violation of
national liberty and justice."

The same influences which used the strong
arm of the law in order to fix the labourer's
wages and curtail his personal liberty com-
bined in a continuous and successful effort to
deprive him of his rights in waste and common
land. The melancholy story of the Enclosure
Acts is too long and complex for any detailed
treatment in these pages. Much has been
written in defence or condemnation of this
policy and the controversy is not yet closed.

None of the writers, however, deny that,
quite apart from the question of economic
justification, the general result of the enclosure
policy was to reduce a very large number of
small farmers, rural workers and squatters
to the position of landless and dependent
labourers. The actual acreage of common
land, waste or cultivated, which passed into
private hands through the long series of

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 27

Enclosure Acts has been variously estimated.
Mr. Prothero puts it at 8| million acres, Mr.
Arthur Johnson at 7,308,806 acres, of which
6 1 millions were enclosed in the eighteenth
or nineteenth centuries, no less than one-
fifth of the total acreage of England 1

No doubt a case can be made out in defence
of these wholesale enclosures. The minute
subdivisions of common fields caused great
waste of time and effort, and the cultivation
was often careless and clumsy. The common
pasturage again was in many cases quite
inadequate and the squatters on the waste
land were sometimes worthless and improvi-
dent poachers. The existence of a large
tract like Otmoor in Oxfordshire, undrained,
uncultivated, and good for little except the
feeding of geese, represented a thoroughly
uneconomic use of land ; the general produc-
tiveness of the soil was certainly increased by
the cultivation of land hitherto used solely for
the poorest type of grazing or the provision
of bedding, peat or firewood. Nevertheless,
the fact remains that these enclosures were
made not so much in the public interest as for
the benefit of a comparatively small number
of persons, many of them already in possession
of large estates. The Rev. Arthur Johnson,
in his admirable book, The Disappearance of

28 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

the Small Landowner, declares that from the
seventeenth century onwards " the Houses
of Parliament, the central Executive, and
the local bodies of administration all
worked together towards a common end — the
advancement of the interests of a great com-
mercial and landowning aristocracy, . 4 i
contemptuous of any opposition . . . and
disregardful of any distress their conduct
might cause."

The great campaign of pillage was carefully
prepared by the very classes whose interests
were served — the landlords who wanted more
land and rent, the clergy who expected more
tithes, the farmers who required more grazing
land and disliked the independence of the
smallholder and squatter. It was discovered
that the peasant farmers were idle, vicious,
and thoroughly undesirable : and religious
cant was employed to prove that the " bounties
of Nature ought to be revealed by putting
God's land to its best use." *' The use of
common land by labourers," says the " Report
on Shropshire," 1794, " operates on the mind
as a sort of independence " : when the
commons are enclosed, " the labourers will
work every day in the year, their children will
be put out to labour early . . . and that
subordination of the lower orders of Society,

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 29

which in the present times is so much wanted,
would be thereby considerably secured."
Because the cottagers and squatters preferred
to work for themselves rather than others
they were described as " incorrigibly idle ; "
their dwellings were held to be " instead of
schools for virtue, most fruitful seminaries
of vice."

The economic results of the Enclosure
Acts pressed with pitiless severity upon the
poor. Whole villages disappeared ; the
cottager's fuel had gone ; in the absence of
his small corn crop he was compelled to buy
bread ; with the loss of his common rights he
lost the cow's milk for his children. The
despoiled cottagers struggled fitfully against
the encroachments, and the new fences were
in many parts of England torn down again
and again. But despite a certain amount of
sympathy from the middle classes and even
from the troops employed against them,1
the rioters — poor, badly organized, voteless —
could offer no effective resistance to the
legalised robbery of their rights and property.
Until 1801, there was no appeal from the

1 I find a curious story in an old book on the Otmoor
enclosures that the yeomanry who were employed to keep
order, put smock frocks over their tunics at night and
actually helped the rioters to demolish the fences !

30 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

decisions of the Enclosure Commissioners,
who were in practice selected by the Petitioner.
Even Young, an ardent advocate of enclosures,
declares that the details were generally fixed
by the landowners beforehand. " The small
proprietor has little or no weight in regulating
the clauses of the Act. The property of the
proprietors, especially the poor ones, is entirely
at the mercy of the Commissioners, for they
are vested with a despotic power known in
no other branch of business in this free
country."

The tendency to add field to field and to
increase the number of the large farms at the
cost of the small ones, has continued through
successive generations to the present day,
and will be noticed later on as one of the causes
which prompted the marked hostility of many
landowners and farmers towards the policy
of Small Holdings. With the disappearance
of many thousands of small farms there
disappeared also a class of men who had
proved a mighty asset to the national safety
and prosperity — the yeomanry of England,
the men who had destroyed the knights of
France in the days of Crecy and Agincourt.
The disappearance of this highly valuable
class of citizen has always aroused the amaze-
ment of foreign students of the English land

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 31

system. M. de Laveleye estimates that at
the close of the seventeenth century there
still remained 160,000 yeomen, forming with
their families no less than one-seventh of the
entire population. At the present moment
this once powerful class is represented by a
few scanty survivors in some of our more
remote counties like Westmoreland and
Somersetshire.

The most signal examples of the clearing
process came from Scotland. The absorption
of small farms and holdings, which has altered
the whole condition of land tenure in the
Highlands, had one remarkable feature.
It was carried out in the midst of a hardy
and independent race, which, in spite of the
bitter wrongs of earlier days, retains a
pathetic loyalty to the chieftains of the clans
whose ancestors acted with the most callous
disregard of their dependents' welfare. In the
great " Sutherland clearings " of 1814-1820
some 3,000 families were expelled from their
holdings and 800,000 acres of clan property
annexed to the ducal domain. Such clearings
have been excused on the grounds that the
land was fit for nothing but rough sheep-
grazing. But facts are too strong for apolo-
getic generalities of this kind. A writer in
the Economist (Jan. 2, 1886), quoted by M.

32 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

de Laveleye, says, " The feudal owners are
allowed to-day to act as freely as in the time
when William the Conqueror destroyed thirty-
six villages to make the New Forest. Two
millions of acres, comprising land of the
greatest fertility, are changed into a desert.
The natural pasture of Glen Tilt was the
richest in Perth, the deer forest of Ben Avieden
fed 15,000 sheep, and we have here only the
thirtieth part of the territory sacrificed or
rendered so unproductive that it might as
well have been swallowed up by the sea."

This process of absorption has been stereo-
typed in more recent days by the enormously
enhanced value of shooting and fishing rights
in the Highlands, and the eagerness of wealthy
sportsmen, some of them of foreign nationality,
to secure at almost any cost the cool solitudes
of northern Scotland for the preservation on
an immense scale of grouse and deer.

As Hasbach has pointed out, two great
movements in English history, the Reforma-
tion and the struggle for the supremacy of
Parliament, proved, by a sad paradox, full of
mischief for the villagers of our country. The
suppression of monasteries and the seizure
of monastic estates, one-fifth of the total
area of the cultivated land, deprived the poor
of the succour which had hitherto supported

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 33

them in sickness and destitution. On the
other hand, the triumph of Parliamentary
Government stereotyped for centuries a class
domination which wasted the lives and
earnings of the poor in reckless wars, deprived
them of their land, sapped their independence,
and denied them any share in the government
of their country. The laws, as a village
catechism of Devonshire puts it with brutal
candour, were established to " safeguard the
rights of property and control the vicious
poor."

Under the " Speenhamland " system of
" allowances " at the close of the eighteenth
century, the English labourer reached the
low-water mark in the sad history of his
organized degradation. The subsidizing of
cheap labour from the rates enabled the farmer
to pay sweated wages from the pockets of the
general public whether employers or not.
The agricultural labourer became a pauper
by law. Nevertheless the actual motive
which underlay this clumsy and vicious
system was a sound one. The conscience of
England was very slowly being aroused by the
hopeless poverty and demoralization of the
agricultural labourers and the general decay
of the countryside. Appalling misery was
inflicted on the poor by high protective

34 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

tariffs. In 1801 wheat rose to 128/6 a quarter,
and from 1805-1813 the average price was
100/4 ! Nor was it the labourers alone who
suffered, for the contemporary testimony
of Cobbett and others depicts not only the
deep penury of the poorer folk but the wide-
spread ruin and bankruptcy of the farmers,
the increase of derelict land, the decay of
agriculture ; the landowners alone flourished.
The nation seemed to realize at last that
something must be done, and the nineteenth
century was a period of palliative legislation
for the crying needs of the English village.
In 1812 the claim of the magistrates to fix
the rate of wages was abolished and twelve
years later the laws directed for five centuries
against the right of combination were finally
abolished.1 Nevertheless the old spirit of
repression was still in evidence amongst the
governing classes of the countryside. What-
ever sympathy was extended to the labourers
during the futile rising of 1830, a last feeble
echo of the Peasant Revolts, came apparently
from the towns. The rioters, described by

1 A statute of Edward VI. punished by fine of £10
or twenty days' imprisonment any combination of
labourers " concerning their work and wages," and at the
end of the eighteenth century labourers were liable
to severe penalties, including transportation, if they
combined to demand an advance of wages.

STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 35

the Times (Dec. 6th, 1830) as " industrious,
kind-hearted, but broken-hearted beings,
exasperated into madness by insufficient food
and clothing," were treated with a harshness
which eighty-three years afterwards is scarcely
conceivable. No life had been taken during
the " Swing Riots " : nevertheless, nine men
and boys were hung, at least 450 men and boys
were transported, and 400 suffered imprison-
ment in the local gaols. Here and there in
Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, and Berkshire I have
come across very old men and women who
still remembered the frenzy of horror and grief
produced in the villages by these appalling
penalties, for of those transported to Aus-
tralia and Van Dieman's land, only about one
in six returned.

The extension of the franchise in 1867 en-
couraged the labourers to make another effort
in the days of Joseph Arch and the Union.
Some advance in their miserable condition
was, it is true, secured, but the same lack of
cohesion and independence and sustained
effort — the outcome of the long centuries of
oppression and neglect — again prevented the
men from reaping the proper fruit of their just
discontent. By the end of the nineteenth
century the labourer had generally relapsed
into apathy and hopelessness. Deprived of

86 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

any real opportunity of securing an inde-
pendent livelihood, with nothing before them
except the miserable wages of a farm hand
and pauperism at the close, the landless
villagers turned their thoughts more and more
to the towns, and that rural exodus com-
menced which continues to this day and has
drained away the best and most active life
of our countrysides.

CHAPTER II

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY

DESPITE the great variety of the conditions
which prevail in our rural districts, it is possible
to distinguish certain broad outlines and to
make certain generalizations ; and it is with
these that a book such as the present must
necessarily deal. Agricultural England is
very far, of course, from being homogeneous.
What is true of the dales of Yorkshire may not
be true of the downs of Wiltshire, Hampshire,
and Sussex ; and the student of the arable
districts of East Anglia may find himself
almost in a new world when he comes among
the stock and dairy farmers of the Western
counties. The agricultural labourer of the
North earns considerably higher wages than
his brother of the South, and shares, to some
extent, in the self-confident and independent
character of the artisans of great industrial
towns. The Southern labourer is the child
of an older civilization, more conservative,
more humble, more easily cowed, more
37

88 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

inarticulate ; and the habits engendered by
the feudal system are more deeply ingrained
in his mind. He plods slowly on in the
ways which his forefathers have trodden for
uncounted generations. In some localities
the position of the agricultural labourer is
improved through his proximity to well-paid
work in neighbouring mines, docks, factories,
etc.

But, however districts may vary, a single
type of society prevails in all of them. There
are, of course, dangers in that sharp definition
of classes which writers on social subjects are
tempted to adopt for the sake of simplicity
and emphasis. But those who will contrast
rural England with rural Italy, Germany, or
France, or who will consider the infinite and
bewildering gradations of our urban society,
will not quarrel with the customary division
of the country population into landowner,
tenant-farmer, and labourer. The three
classes overlap but slightly, and they form the
fundamental elements of the social structure.
The land agent, the minister of religion, the
country solicitor and doctor, the dealer in
farming requisites of one kind or another, the
publican, the carpenter or blacksmith, the
miller and the village shopkeeper — these only
exist to serve the needs of the three main

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 39

classes. Distinct industries of an essentially
rural character, such as malting, are not
numerous enough to claim separate treatment
in a survey such as this.

There is, indeed, one section, now increasing
with ominous rapidity, which deserves passing
mention. This is the class which ministers
exclusively to the pleasures of the rich, whether
by tending their horses, maintaining their
gardens and parks, or preserving the ever-
increasing stock of wild and hand-raised
game which occupies so prominent a place in
our rural economy.

Free Trade, with the vast improvements
in cheap and rapid transit, struck a heavy
blow at the fortunes of the landlord class.
Since the days of the Corn Laws rents have
fallen 50 per cent, and more, and the houses
built, the style of living instituted, and the
social habits acquired, in a period of great
prosperity, have in some cases become a serious
burden. Proprietors of land which is entailed,
heavily mortgaged, or charged with family
payments, are often in a peculiarly hard case.
Like the rest, they are suffering from the rapid
changes brought about by the alteration in
our fiscal system ; but the improvidence of
their predecessors has closed to them the
means of escape. The inflated prosperity of

40 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

the early nineteenth century placed the land-
lords in an artificial position, which could not
reasonably be secured to them in perpetuity.
If such wealth and such power could ever be
rightly confided to so minute a section of the
people, it could only be in return for some
great and outstanding service, such as the
feudal landlords rendered, before the seven-
teenth century, by bearing the whole burden
of the national defence. The change was
inevitable. But we cannot disguise from
ourselves the hardships which have accom-
panied it.

Much controversy rages round the merits
or demerits of our country landlords. There
are certain things which are alleged in defence
of their social ideal. They are expected to be,
and often are, dispensers of charity on a large
scale. They help to support churches and
schools, subsidise local societies, distribute
food and clothing. They man the magisterial
bench. They render laborious and unpaid
service on the local councils. Where they
have resources other than those derived from
their land itself, they put a considerable
amount of capital into the soil, often without
receiving or expecting a commercial return
for it. About one-fifth of the net agricultural
rent of England and Wales is, it is said,

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 41

interest on capital, and not, in the economist's
sense, rent at all. So far as the capital
expenditure is concerned, the landlord is
simply a partner in business with the tenant-
farmer. The large landlord, again, is fre-
quently able to grant remissions of rent, or to
wait for its payment, where a more necessitous
or more greedy type of owner might press
hardly on the tenant. The system of large
estates, whose business is transacted from a
central office by a highly-paid, though often
indifferently-trained agent, has some advan-
tages in continuity of management and the
wider outlook which comes of dealing with
large sums of money and large numbers of
men. Again, the relation of a large land-
owner to the tenants and labourers of his
estate, though frankly that of superior to
inferior, is generally of a friendly and a
personal nature.

There is, further, one institution whose
maintenance entirely depends on the country
landowner. Sport, apart from the farmer's
occasional rabbit-shoot, would die out if it
were not for the great houses. At present,
whatever may be said against these pursuits,
either on humanitarian or economic grounds,
they certainly fill an important place in the
tradition of the countryside. Hunting, in par-

42 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

ticular, provides a not inconsiderable section
of the people with interest and recreation.

In estimating the usefulness, on public
grounds, of the large landowners, many things
must be taken into account which do not,
perhaps, appear on the surface. The whole-
sale distribution in one form or another of
food, clothing, and entertainment, is a poor
substitute for prosperous industry, though
over large parts of the country it wins
unbounded admiration for those who practise
it. Thousands of our poor village folk seem
unable to conceive any greater virtue in their
superiors than open-handedness, and nothing
but satisfaction is felt on either side. None
the less, the need for all this charity might be
avoided by a wiser policy ; and its effect is
to make the agricultural labourers year by
year less capable of standing by themselves.
The establishment of friendly relations
between different classes is a gain. But, on
the part of those who profit materially by this
great system of charity, the friendly relation
is too often largely inspired by gratitude for
past gifts and the hope of advantages to come.

Such a social ideal reacts, naturally enough,
upon the business methods of those who live
under its influence. Unlike an ordinary
commercial enterprise, a great estate is not

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 43

conducted with the primary object of
" paying." There are certain obvious
advantages in this from the point of view of
the farming tenant in a bad season. But the
absence of economy and the absence of
business ideas mean that the land is not used
in the most profitable way. Any question of
improvement, whether in respect to housing,
farm buildings, waste ground or woodland, is
frequently regarded from other points of
view than those of economic management.
Much expense is incurred for which the land
itself, and the character of the farming, afford
no warrant. Complaints are often heard of
the impossibility of obtaining a commercial
return for capital spent in cottage building
and the like. The answer is supplied by what
has been said above. The money is seldom
spent on the same principles as those by which
ordinary business men guide their conduct.
In many instances the real return which is
aimed at, consciously or unconsciously, is
social standing, the dignity attaching to a
large estate, good shooting and fishing, the
absence of unsightliness, the amenities of
country-house life. It is precisely these
considerations which sometimes render large
estates an attractive investment in the eyes
of wealthy men, who regard the land not as

44 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

the raw material of sound business, but as the
delectable pleasure-ground of a fortunate
minority. This type of land-absorption
accentuates the evils of the countryside ;
it is a case, as Mr. Rider Haggard would say,
of the land being supported by men rather
than men by the land.

The system of large estates provides special
difficulties in the creation of small holdings.
The small holder breaks up the country into
minute divisions, and in some cases injures
it from the point of view of the scenery. He
gives a considerable amount of extra trouble
to the agent, who prefers to collect his rents
and to carry out his various dealings and
negotiations among a smaller number of
substantial tenants. More than all, and this
is a really serious difficulty, the small holder
has generally a rooted objection to any shoot-
ing or hunting on his piece of land. He is
particular about trifling losses. He com-
plains more loudly than the large farmer of
the damage done by hares and rabbits to
his small but closely-tended crops ; of the
turnips grazed by the sportsman's boots in
September ; of the gaps made in his fences,
and the deep hoof marks in his fields, where,
on the heavier soils, the water may stand for
days. He is not likely to be propitiated, like

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 45

the large farmer, by an occasional invitation
to a day's shooting ; and, as he does not hunt,
or even do a little dealing in hunters, he has
scant sympathy with those who find time for
such pursuits.

The highest types of farming cannot well
exist side by side with extensive game pre-
servation ; and the successful agriculturists
of France, Italy or Belgium regard with
amazement the general attitude of passive
resistance or willing acquiescence taken up
by our farmers towards the patrons of sport.
Terrible havoc is sometimes played with
young crops by rabbits issuing by night from
coverts over which the farmer has no control.
Pheasants pull up young corn to get at the
seed, and at times inflict cruel losses on small
holders in shooting neighbourhoods. In the
case of injury to crops, hedges, and poultry
by fox-hunting, the subscribers of some
hunts, it is true, pay many hundreds a year in
direct compensation to farmers, besides what
is spent on puppy shows and other functions,
which help to conciliate those who make a
living out of agriculture. These things and
an occasional invitation to a 1/6 luncheon
may satisfy the farmer ; but they imply a
considerable economic loss to the nation, both
in the actual injury done, and in the pro-

46 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

motion of the idea that the country is to be
treated as a playground.

It is difficult to obtain accurate figures,
but it is clear that an increasing quantity of
land is being kept partially or wholly for sport.
This is done by landlords who either can
afford to do without their rent and to incur
considerable expense in addition, or else find
that the sporting rent obtainable is as high as,
or even higher than, the agricultural. In the
latter case, they cannot be condemned from
the business man's point of view ; but, from
the point of view of the nation, the conse-
quences are obviously disastrous. Land which
might be used for productive purposes is
farmed but carelessly, or left altogether idle.
The economic resources of the country run to
waste, and gradually deteriorate. The general
results are deplorable enough in the case of
landowners who fill a definite position in the
social life of the country. But, as a matter
of fact, and more particularly in the south of
England, an increasing number of the owners
who make sport their main object are men
who have made their money in business, who
use their country houses as hunting or shooting
boxes, and who do not recognise, as attaching
to the privileged position of landowner, any
especial duty towards the local population.

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 47

The influence of the landlord, both for good
and for evil, is vastly increased by two things :
the great preponderance of his class upon the
local bench, and the fact that, as a general
rule, he alone among his rural neighbours
can afford to be a member of the County
Council. These things account for much of
the importance popularly attached to his
wishes and his example. The result is that
the services he renders in these capacities are
largely neutralised by the class and party
colour with which he invests the institutions
concerned. The local bench, which to the
countryman's mind represents, far more than
Quarter Sessions or Assizes, the machinery
of justice, is not regarded with the confidence
that is felt, let us say, in the lawyer-magis-
trates of the towns. If it is treated with
respect, it is the respect due to power rather
than impartiality. Similarly, the County
Council is not, and is not felt to be, a demo-
cratic or representative body : so long as it
is practically impossible for a labourer, or for
any but the largest farmers, to sit upon it,
it is not likely to become so.

One further fact remains to be noted. This
is the influence exercised by the landlord class
at elections. So great and widespread is the
power exercised by a landowner over the

48 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

fortunes of tenants and employes of every
kind that even his expressions of opinion,
unless counteracted by explicit declarations of
impartiality, affect large numbers of votes.
Some are strong enough to resist this influence ;
but a large number, who are not prepared to
sacrifice much for their convictions, and who
are destitute of the pride and independence
engendered by trades unionism and other
forms of combination, are inclined to take the
easier course. They abandon all attempt
to make up their minds for themselves on
reasonable grounds, or to maintain courage-
ously the opinions which they have formed.
This influence is reinforced by the personal
ties and the widespread charity to which
reference has been made. It is often exercised
with little consciousness of the pressure which
it involves. On the other hand, there are not
a few who, taking a strong line in politics, do
not hesitate to use to the utmost extent the
power which their position gives them of
influencing votes on non-political grounds.

In a word, the power wielded by the land-
lord class is immense in all spheres — the
social, in which they set the standard for all
classes ; the economic, in which they dictate
the methods of production ; the political, in
which they control the expression of opinion.

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 49

There was a time when their possession of such
power was normal and inevitable. So long
as all their interests were centred in their own
neighbourhood, and the country house was
not a mere place of retreat after the London
season ; so long as they shared with the clergy
the monopoly of education ; so long as they
were the only possible administrators of justice,
the only possible legislators, the only possible
leaders in social life and opinion ; so long as
rural society was too little developed to dis-
pense with autocratic government ; so long was
it natural that they should control the destinies
of the countryside. But, in so far as these
conditions have ceased to exist, the powers
and privileges of the English landlords have
lost any justification they ever possessed.
Privilege, however, dies hard in the midst of
so conservative a people as the English, and
the chains of Feudalism are still riveted
firmly upon our rural districts. Even under a
Liberal Government, the administration of
the Small Holdings Act, the dispensing of
justice, the control of our Territorial battalions
have all been committed into the hands of the
landowning class, to an extent which makes
the country voter sometimes ask himself
whether there is really much difference between
one Government and another. The stream

50 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

of feudal control flows on as steadily as ever —
Rusticus expected dum defluat amnis.

The same fiscal changes which so profoundly
affected the landowners made a considerable
difference, also, to those who actually farm the
soil. But it is a matter of controversy
whether the financial position of our tenant-
farmers is materially worse to-day than in the
period of protective duties. A fall hi prices
does not necessarily injure the farmer, pro-
vided the land still yields a living. Whether
it so injures him or not depends upon the
question whether his rent has been reduced
sufficiently to meet the new conditions. The
farming accounts presented to the Royal Com-
mission on Agricultural Depression would seem
to show that in many parts of the country,
great as has been the reduction in rents, it
ought to have been greater still. But on the
whole the rents demanded nowadays are
probably not very much in excess of what the
tenant-farmer can afford to pay while making
a moderate living for himself. And, in the
case of some more generous or more careless
landlords, the tenants might perhaps appear
to be rather under-rented than over-rented.

Much depends, again, on the extent to which
the farmers of England as a whole have
adapted themselves to the changes which

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 51

have occurred in the profit obtainable from
different crops or methods of farming. Corn-
growing and cattle-farming on a large scale
have become relatively less profitable, while
the supply of milk — an article unaffected
by foreign competition — has been immensely
developed during the last ten years. The
growing of potatoes and other vegetables on
small farms, poultry keeping, and fruit culture
have all received increased attention.

On the whole, except where farmers are
burdened by debts inherited from less pros-
perous years, or where they have started with
insufficient capital, they are making a fair
living, though they are not amassing fortunes.
Much depends upon the standard of living
to which farmers, like other people, are
practically compelled by the public opinion
of their class to conform. Many of the
complaints which are heard are in reality
founded on the difficulty which farmers
experience in maintaining a scale of personal
expenditure approaching that of the well-
to-do tradesman, solicitor, or bank manager
in the country town. Working farmers who
are content with a little — and particularly the
Scotch and West-country farmers, who have
so largely invaded the south and east of Eng-
land— are not doing badly. At any rate, when.

52 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

farms are to let there is seldom any lack of
applications. The farmers' grievance against
the burden of the rates has not been assuaged
by the fact that he alone in the community
has half his rates remitted by the State ; nor
does he adequately appreciate the fact that
the farmer who pays income-tax is a rare
phenomenon. Even a tenant paying as much
as £480 a year in rent is exempted from an
impost levied upon persons who live in far
less comfort than himself.

A more substantial grievance of the farmer
arises from the conditions of tenure under
which he holds his land. It has long been
recognised that the relations of the agricultural
landowner and his tenant cannot be left to
the stress of mere competition. But the
security hitherto given to the tenant is
exceedingly small, and when a farmer has no
fixity of tenure he is deprived of a powerful
motive for making the most of his farm.
Compensation is granted to an outgoing
tenant according to somewhat arbitrary
rules devised by the valuers, for certain
manures, feeding stuffs, repairs, etc. But
no recognition is given to the fact that
by continuous good farming, or the reverse,
a tenant may increase or diminish the value
of the farm to an extent which cannot

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 53

be measured by the mere value of such
" improvements " ; and, as matters stand,
there is no premium for the increase and no
penalty for the decrease. Nor is there, further,
any security against over-renting. The Agri-
cultural Holdings Act of 1906 brought much
needed relief in certain particulars. Before
its passing, a farmer might be and frequently
was put to considerable expense through being
evicted from his farm for some cause other
than bad farming or non-payment of rent ;
he could obtain no compensation for damage
by game unless it was provided for in his
lease ; and he was hampered by excessive
restrictions on freedom of cropping. But
some of the advantages secured by this Act
are in practice more apparent than real.

The unjust conditions under which tenant-
farmers suffer arouse no great amount of
open resentment ; partly because the farmers
know that their landlords have themselves
in some cases lost heavily and are generous
enough to sympathise with them, but perhaps
still more because they have few organizations
of their own through which they can express
and enforce their wishes. Deficient in the
power of combination, and easily led by social
inducements, they can seldom be drawn into
farmers' clubs, or Chambers of Agriculture,

54 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

except by the enterprise or public spirit of
members of the landlord class. As is only
natural, the men who found, finance, and
conduct these institutions, do all they can to
preach the identity of interest between owner
and tenant, concentrate attention on neutral
subjects, and divert it from questions of rent
or tenure. In the series of questions addressed
to Parliamentary candidates by Chambers
of Agriculture, a large number of points
are usually raised, ranging from religious
instruction in elementary schools down to
the worrying of sheep by stray dogs. Very
rarely does one find a question referring either
to rent or to tenure.

Though agriculture may, therefore, to some
extent be described as a " burdened industry,"
it cannot be said that farmers are failing to
make a living out of the soil or to secure a fair
return, which might, perhaps, be put at 10
or 12 per cent, on the average, from the capital
which they invest in their business. But this
does not by any means imply that the land
of England is being cultivated to the best
advantage. On the contrary, there is a wide-
spread opinion in almost every county that
the condition of the land is going back rather
than forward ; that in too many cases little
more is being done than scratching the

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 55

surface ; that the increased use of machinery
is very far from compensating for the skilful
labour which is brought to bear on the
capabilities of the soil in France, Denmark
or Belgium.

The prosperity of English farming is handi-
capped at the start by the fact that four
classes — landlords, clergy, tenant-farmers and
labourers — derive support from the soil.
This disadvantage is accentuated by the
absence of serious purpose in the pursuit of
agriculture. To go no further, it is notorious
that young Englishmen who, through idleness
or incapacity, are quite unfitted for any
ordinary career, are frequently regarded by
their parents as likely to succeed in agriculture.
" Being a pupil in Denmark," writes Mr.
A. W. Taylor, " does not mean that a young
man allows his father to pay a high premium
for him, and then lounges about on horseback
or on foot and shoots rabbits and shirks his
work, as too often happens in England.
Danish pupils do ordinary agricultural work,
cart manure, milk the cows, dig, plough, and
sow. In a word, they earn their wages by the
sweat of their brow like ordinary labourers.
All these things a Danish farm pupil does, even
if, as in a case which I know of, he happens
to be a member of the royal family."

56 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

What is the result of this business-like
attitude towards the farming industry ?
With a less fertile soil, a similar wage bill,
lower prices for produce, a worse climate
and Free Trade in foodstuffs, agriculture in
Denmark is infinitely more prosperous than
it is in England.

Over the greater part of England, farm-
houses are situated at a considerable distance
from one another, and this simple fact is
perhaps at the root of the peculiarities of
character which most observers agree in
attributing to the English farmer. His aim
is to be master in his own house, to manage
his affairs without interference from outside,
and to let no one know how he is doing it.
He is suspicious of others, and takes a pride
in maintaining towards all enquirers a close
and baffling reticence. Only on one subject
is he communicative, and that is the decay of
agriculture and the unjust advantages enjoyed
by the townsman, whose profits he imagines
to be on a vastly higher scale than his own.
He is individualistic to the core — a laudator
temporis acti, who sighs for the " good old
times " when wheat sold at 60/- a quarter
and labourers lived semi-bestial lives on 8/-
a week. The District Council and the Board
of Guardians provide the sphere in which he

RURAL ENGLAND OF TO-DAY 57

takes his part in local government. In the
hierarchy of office he thus occupies a middle
position between the landlord, who sits on the
County Council, and the labourer who cannot
drive to the market town, but who can trudge
to the meeting of the Parish Council in the
village schoolroom. The standard of living
which, as a general rule, he tries to maintain is
something between that of the gentry and that
of the "common people." In the Northern
and North Midland counties a somewhat
humbler mode of life prevails ; but the state-
ment is broadly true if an average be taken
over the whole country.

Two pleasant characteristics of the English
farmer are his open-handed hospitality and
his readiness, however deep-rooted his pre-
judices, to appreciate in a political opponent
that indefinable British quality connoted by
the phrase " good fellow " or " good sports-
man." Many of our tenant-farmers indulge
in a disproportionate outlay of time and
money during weekly visits to the neighbour-
ing town, when the corn-exchange and the
cattle market, the substantial " ordinary "
and the generous treating of friends afford
a welcome change from the monotonous
existence of a solitary farmstead.

In matters of food, clothing and furniture,

58 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

the farmer expects and enjoys substantial
comfort. A maid-servant in the house, a
piano in the parlour, a neat dogcart, a hunter
or two to be sold at a profit and now and then
to be ridden to hounds — these are things
which the much-abused soil of England is
expected to yield, and not infrequently does
yield, to those who superintend its culture.
The farmer's daughters are less and less
inclined to help in the work of the farm,
and turn more and more to pursuits which
yield a higher degree of social consideration.
Between the farmer's family and the agri-
cultural labourer's a sharp line is drawn.
To this distinction the farmer clings te-
naciously. Often he works with his men and
associates with them on terms of hearty good-
fellowship. But he thinks that they get more
than they deserve. The suggestion of a
minimum wage moves him to indignation.
He ridicules the idea of the labourer turning
farmer on his own account. His attitude,
indeed, closely resembles that of his landlord
towards himself. " Let us be friends if
possible. Let us stand in with each other
all we can, but you must know your place and
keep it."

CHAPTER III

THE RURAL EXODUS

IN dealing with the agricultural labourers
a warning against generalization is needed
most of all. More even than in the case of
the landowner and the farmer, we must
remember that many local varieties are
necessarily left unmentioned in a survey such
as this.

In discussions concerning the farm labourer
stress is sometimes laid on the admitted fact
that his condition has improved considerably
during the nineteenth century, and that in
consequence he is usually " quite contented,
if only he is left alone." These beliefs are
doubtless encouraged by the stolid endurance
and amazing patience of an almost inarticulate
class. But even granted that the labourer
is more prosperous than he was — granted that
milk and groceries and, at times, butcher's
meat are found nowadays on his table, it is
at any rate clear that these added comforts
69

60 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

and humble luxuries are not enough to induce
him to stay on the soil.

Politicians and sociologists of every school of
thought have since 1851 admitted the alarming
decrease in the numbers of our rural popu-
lation. A slight improvement has taken place
during the opening years of the twentieth cen-
tury, for actual diminution has been replaced
by a slight increase. If we take the " rural
districts " of the Census returns, we find a
positive addition to the population of 438,066
in ten years ; but side by side with this small
augmentation of actual inhabitants the urban
population has been added to at a much
higher rate, with the result that the actual
proportion of rural dwellers to the older
population has reached its lowest point of
21-9 per cent. Further, in the case of 581
rural parishes which showed considerable in-
crease of population, Mr. Seebohm Rowntree
discovered that only sixteen attribute the
growth to agricultural development. The
causes of the increase in the remaining 565
parishes are declared to be residential develop-
ments in the neighbourhood of towns, the
building of factories, the extension of collieries,
and other matters wholly disconnected with
agriculture. If, again, we take the numbers
of those in England and Wales actually

THE RURAL EXODUS 61

engaged in agriculture as labourers and
shepherds we are faced by the following
figures : —

1871 922,054

1881 830,452

1891 756,557

1901 609,105

(Figures for 1911 not yet available.)
The cultivated land of England and Wales
is worked by twenty-eight males per square
mile (Census of 1901). If we used our land
like that of Belgium with her seventy-two
workers per square mile, we should increase
our rural population by nearly two millions !
The most important of our national in-
dustries is being starved for want of adequate
workers, but for the nation as a whole the fact
possesses only a feeble interest. The sinister
significance of deserted villages and a failing
food supply is hidden from the eyes of our
urban population by politicians whose ac-
quaintance with the country is often derived
from week-end house-parties and rural golf
links. Transit by land and sea is so rapid and
cheap that as long as Danish butter can be
bought at I/- a lb., and Servian eggs at Id.
each, and New Zealand mutton at 6d., the
British householder takes little notice of the
fact that all these things and more also should

62 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

under normal conditions be produced on our
own farms. Students of sociology do, it is
true, point out in absolutely convincing
language the evil effects of urban over-
crowding due to the incessant influx from
country areas. Physiologists tell us that a
healthy family which migrates into a city
rapidly deteriorates in the changed environ-
ment, and rarely persists beyond the third
generation. Military students point out that
100 years ago some 75 per cent, of the British
army was recruited from our rural districts,
and refer with alarm to the well-known fact
that in 1900 out of 11,000 applicants for
enlistment at Manchester only 1000 reached
the standard required for the Regular Army.1
Farmers lament the departure of the most
active and intelligent young men. There are
whole stretches of territory in Great Britain
where alert youths of sound intelligence are
the exception rather than the rule. Mr.
Hueffer discovered from a careful investigation
that on eighteen farms covering an area of
eight square miles only five boys found
employment and all of them were below the
normal intelligence. In forty-six labourers'

1 A favourite argument in Germany for the Junker f
policy of protective duties on farm produce is the necessity
of getting sound young men for the Kaiser's army.

THE RURAL EXODUS 63

families he found only two youths still at
home, and his general conclusion is that in
general only about 5 per cent, of the boys
elect to stay in the parishes where they were
born. The migration of the village girls is still
more marked ; for economic and other reasons
they flock to " service " in towns and the young
men follow these playmates of their boyhood.
This phenomenon of rural depopulation is
not confined to Great Britain. The rural
inhabitants of countries so diverse as, to go no
further, Germany, Italy and the United States,
are gradually migrating to urban centres or
distant lands across the sea. In the New
England States there were a few years ago,
according to Mr. Pratt, no less than 26,000
derelict farms. The influence of the agrarian
party in Germany is enormous, nevertheless
there has been a steady diminution in the
rural population. In 1830, 80 per cent, of the
people worked in the country ; in 1895 the
proportion had sunk to 35-7 per cent. During
the last twenty years, while emigration from
Germany has diminished, increasing numbers
of men are attracted from the rural districts
by the vigorously developed industries of the
towns. More than one-fifth of the entire
population now live in towns of over 100,000
people. Italian statesmen complain that

64 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

their industrious peasantry is being constantly
drained by emigration to the Argentine and
the United States ; and even the barren
hinterland of Tripoli is held out as a refuge
from the intolerable conditions of village life
in the peninsula.

While the great majority of our labourers
who abandon the country districts find their
way into the towns, an increasing stream of
emigrants leave the villages for Canada,
Australia and the United States. According
to Mr. Rowntree the emigration figures for
adult agricultural labourers have risen from
9000 in 1906 to 33,000 in 1911 — which means
that " about one out of every forty agri-
culturists found his prospects in this country
so poor that he decided to quit the country
altogether."

The facts then of rural depopulation are
patent and undisputed : and the significance
of this " exodus " is especially serious amongst
ourselves. An insular nation, liable by the
fortunes of war to be cut off to a greater or
smaller degree from sea-borne food, seems
undismayed by the reflection that its available
supplies would not extend beyond two months,
and that long before that limit were reached
a state of almost unthinkable misery would
supervene in the crowded streets and slums of

THE RURAL EXODUS 65

our cities. The typical citizen of most
countries is the man who tills the soil : in the
most fertile country of the globe, he is of all
classes the most insignificant and the least
endowed with social or political influence.

The causes of the rural depopulation in
England are various and complex. The most
powerful of them is the poverty of the agri-
cultural labourer, who may be described in
summary as a poor man living in a poor home
on poor food. His wages have for forty years
been practically unchanged, while the cost of
living has actually increased in the last two
decades.

When everything is included in the estimate
which can be — harvest and hay money, allow-
ances for lambs and calves, grants of potatoes,
free cottages, and so on, the averages work
out as follows —

Ordinary labourers . . . . 17/6

Men in charge of horses . . 19/-

Cattle men 19/3

Shepherds 19/7

Sixty per cent, of our ordinary agricultural
labourers in England receive less than 18/- a
week, all included.

But there is one feature in the above
estimate of agricultural wages which is too

66 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

lightly regarded by the apologists for the
existing scale, viz., the inclusion of overtime
rates. Harvest money and hay money are
payments made for abnormal effort, and in
most cases long hours of overtime. If the
spokesman of a Farmers' Club or Chamber
of Agriculture points to an extra payment of
£2 — £7 for the harvest, he forgets to tell you
that under decent conditions of weather his
men will begin their work the moment the
dew is dried and continue it long after the sun
has set. Sometimes you will see harvesters
hard at work till ten or eleven o'clock in the
evening. If we leave overtime and special
" allowances " out of the calculation the
normal wages of the agricultural labourer in
England sink to a still more miserable level —

Ordinary labourers . . . . 14/9

Men in charge of horses . . 16/2

Cattle men . . . . . . 16/5

Shepherds . . . . . . 16/-

In the south midland, south-western and
eastern counties, the average wages of an
ordinary labourer do not exceed 13/6 a
week, and in Oxfordshire, the worst paid
county in England, sink to 13/- ! Even in
districts where the competition of factories,
mines, docks, etc., tends to raise agricultural

. THE RURAL EXODUS 67

wages, the average weekly rates of cash wages
for ordinary labourers never exceed 18/8,
nor, with all allowances included, 20/5 ! The
best paid labourer, the shepherd, secures,
including allowances, 23/6 in Cumberland and
Westmoreland, 20/9 in Yorkshire, Lancashire
and Cheshire, and everywhere else in England
under a sovereign.

The economic facts of village life are to some
extent concealed from the public — or that
small portion of the public which evinces any
interest in the subject — by this unsatisfactory
system of allowances in kind, allotment
ground, rent-free cottages, and the like.
Such methods of augmenting inadequate
cash wages are thoroughly unsatisfactory, for
they virtually represent a system of doles
which tends to destroy the just independence
of the labourer, nor would they be tolerated
by any well-organized body of British work-
men. No reasonable student of rural economy
can avoid the conclusion that agricultural
wages are cruelly inadequate, or wonder at the
diminution of the rural population caused
by migration to our cities and colonies. One
simple calculation will impress even well-to-
do exponents of the doctrine of contentment
with the severity of life's struggle in many a
village home. Take an average family of

68 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

five, and allow each member of it one penny
for each of his or her three meals a day. This
is not an excessive demand — many animals
receive more than this — but it means 8/9 a
week for the family. An Oxfordshire house-
wife would, then, have some 4/- left for clothes,
boots, coals, oil, insurance money, and so on,
including, in many cases, 1/6 to 2/- for the
rent. The wives of our poor villagers show
real ability in the management of their humble
budgets, but all said and done, what room is
there for the joy or amenities of life in such an
environment ? " It's not living, sir," I have
often been told, " it's only pinching and
starving." Nor is there anything in the
character of farm-work which should neces-
sarily condemn it to so inadequate a recom-
pense. The current description of it as
*' unskilled " is most misleading, and even
were the term justified one may fairly ask why
a docker or a bricklayer's labourer should
receive so much more a week than an efficient
farm-hand. The latter understands plough-
ing, ditching and draining, the care of animals,
and the other tasks which make up the day's
work on a farm. This is very far from being
unskilled work, and requires infinitely greater
ability and experience than carrying mortar
up a ladder or wheeling boxes along a quay.

THE RURAL EXODUS 69

The cottage question in general, and the
tied-cottage grievance in particular, are
powerful factors in driving townwards the
population of our villages.

The basic facts of the housing problems are
these. A large proportion of our rural cottages
are, in the words of a Royal Commission's
Report, " vile and deplorable dwellings,"
built without any adequate regard for sani-
tation or the air supply necessary for healthy
sleep. It is impossible here to deal with the
cumulative and irresistible evidence which
proves the case ; it must suffice to quote
some facts which are typical of the housing
conditions of very many English villages.

A recent enquiry at Potterne, in Wiltshire,
revealed some shocking facts of overcrowding.
In some two-bedroomed cottages slept six
and seven adults, and nine to ten persons in
all ; in one case the two rooms were occupied
by two families and a young man lodger.
There were in this village twenty-nine one-
bedroomed cottages, in several of which five
or six persons were sleeping. The medical
officer of health reports that he was obliged
to accept 200 cubic feet per head of sleeping
accommodation as his standard, i.e., two-
thirds of the minimum space compulsory in
the case of common lodging-houses.

70 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

The casual visitor to our rural districts is
frequently led by the picturesque exteriors
of our country cottages to ignore the existence
of the damp and squalid accommodation
within. Mrs. Allingham's charming sketches
of " the cottage homes of England " must not
blind us to the fact that the general standard
of rural housing is disgracefully low. A lady
drew my attention in the Midlands to a
" beautiful old cottage." Beautiful it certainly
was, with its framework of dark oaken beams
among the white " roughcast," the red roses
trailing over the lintel, the thatched roof —

The lovely cottage in the guardian nook,

With its own dear brook,
Its own pasture, almost its own sky.

But inside there was no place in the one
small living room free from draughts, water
trickled through the worn-out thatch, the
floors were cold and damp. Upstairs were
two small bedrooms, where slept a man and
his wife, two sons and a grown-up daughter.
A very small proportion indeed of village
bedrooms contain a fireplace. Yet think
what it means to nurse a case of, say, pneu-
monia, in an unwarmed bedroom. Far more
attention is bestowed in some places on healthy
accommodation for horses and dogs than on

THE RURAL EXODUS 71

that required for the families of agricultural
labourers.

The sanitary arrangements are often
deplorable. In one case only three closets
were provided for forty-four cottages. In
another village I found the blood and other
liquid refuse from a butcher's yard flowing in
an open gutter within a foot of the cottage
door, and the Rural Authority refused to
interfere. Rheumatism and pleurisy are the
natural outcome of damp walls and floors,
and stuffy rooms provide a nidus for the germs
of consumption, which sometimes infect an
entire family in succession.

The whole theory of the vigorous health
enjoyed by our villagers is undermined by
stubborn facts of experience. The agricul-
tural labourer often, it is true, lives beyond
the normal span of life, but he rarely ends his
days as a hale and hearty old man. Constant
exposure to the cold and wet, his damp and
draughty home, his poor fare, all combine
against the labourer's constitution. Rheuma-
tism in various forms is widely prevalent, and
the stooping posture of the " Man with the
Hoe " soon becomes stereotyped. Other
diseases which more especially affect rural
workmen are bronchitis, pneumonia and heart
disease, and owing to disgracefully inadequate

72 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

sanitation and the use of polluted water in
surface wells typhoid is prevalent. Lunacy
is increasing markedly among the rural
population in some parts of the country.
This is no doubt partly owing to the fact
that emigration tends to eliminate the more
vigorous in mind and body and leave behind
the less healthy and efficient.

The trite belief in the healthiness of our
village children is equally contradicted by
experience. Statistics furnished by official
enquiries in certain counties reveal the
startling fact that from 60-70 per cent, of
the children are more or less unfit, and
the chief cause of their defective condition
is admittedly malnutrition. Mr. Seebohm
Rowntree's careful estimate of the minimum
requirements for the physical efficiency of a
family cannot be lightly brushed aside by the
idle chatter of well-to-do persons about
" chubby, well-dressed boys and girls."

Even of such cottages as exist — in too many
cases uncomfortable and insanitary — we do
not possess nearly enough for the needs of our
rural population. Old cottages decay until
they are abandoned, no more are built to take
their place, and so in many parishes there is a
positive dearth of dwelling-houses. Young
men and women who would like to marry and

THE RURAL EXODUS 73

settle down in their native villages are driven
to migrate because no home is available-
The Daily Mail of September 25, 1911, con-
tained an account of a respectable Chelmsford
labourer who had been driven to take shelter
in the workhouse because he could find no
house in his parish. The dearth of houses is
very marked in Essex, and long engagements,
sometimes extending to ten years, are often the
necessary prelude to marriage. The whole
social system of rural England seems to form
indeed, unconsciously as it were and unin-
tentionally, one vast conspiracy for expelling
the people from the country. More pheasants
are bred every year, more gamekeepers
employed, more motor-cars bring down the
week-end guests, while men and women drift
citywards, in order to find a shelter for
their heads.

There is another salient evil in our rural
housing. More and more the cottages have
become " tied " to the farms. Such dwellings
are occupied on the most precarious tenure,
and if a man displeases his master he runs the
grievous risk of losing not only his job but his
home. A young man, honest, sober and
industrious, came to me on one occasion hi
sore distress. He had, after tedious delays,
secured a small holding in a Midland parish,.

74 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

but his cottage had been bought by another
landlord, and was needed for the accommoda-
tion of a stranger who had secured employ-
ment on one of the landlord's farms. The
small holder had spent long hours of overtime
and a large portion of his slender capital on
his five acres, and now he was deprived of his
old home and quite unable to find any other
in the parish. The chief landowner refused
to build any more cottages, and my friend
endeavoured to secure an old railway carriage
as a dwelling-house on a corner of his holding,
failing which, he would be compelled to
surrender his bit of land and seek a living
elsewhere.

The moral results of rural overcrowding
have been alluded to elsewhere. Men and
women leave the country because, in the
absence of decent houses or any houses at all,
they have, in the Duke of Marlborough's
words, " nothing to stay for : " on the other
hand those who elect to remain are compelled
too often to live under conditions which are
dangerous to their moral and physical health.
" By a horrible paradox," says Mr. Chesterton,
" there is overcrowding even where there are
not enough people."

Legislative proposals have been put for-
ward in the past, and will doubtless be put

THE RURAL EXODUS 75

forward again, which would enable landowners
to obtain grants of public money in order to
build the necessary cottages on their estates.
As long however as the existing conditions
of our land system are allowed to continue,
nothing can be clearer than the responsibility
of those who possess the land of England to
see that their dependants are decently housed.
This duty cannot be lightly ignored by our
country landowners, whose aggregrate rent
amounts to some £37,000,000 a year for
England and Wales alone. It may be perfectly
true that cottages cannot be built to yield, say,
more than a bare 2| per cent, on the outlay,
but we must not forget that the cottage rents
are low simply because the wages are low.
There is a tacitly understood bargain between
employer and employed in the country
parishes — " we pay you low wages and you
shall have cottages at a low rent."

It would, however, be unjust to take for
granted that all the " vile and deplorable
dwellings " of the Housing Commissioners'
Report are the property of big landowners.
On the contrary, some of the worst of our rural
cottages belong to persons in far humbler walks
of life, whose scanty earnings are invested
in this type of property, and who suffer acutely
by the issue of official orders for extensive

76 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

repairs or compulsory closing. In some un-
happy cases a labourer has himself invested all
his savings in the purchase of the tumble-down
cottage in which his life has been largely spent.
The problem of housing reform is sorely
encumbered with the hard cases of the poor
proprietor.

Such in brief are the admitted evils of rural
housing. They have existed in our midst for
years, and while the national wealth advances,
and the prosperity of agriculture increases,
this social blot still remains on the surface of
our body politic. The evil gets worse if any-
thing as the years roll on, for the supply of new
houses does not keep pace with the disap-
pearance of the old ones. " The English
squire, the ruler of England," writes Mr.
Chesterton, " has made the one great mistake
of supposing that if you leave a thing alone
it goes on as before. If you leave a thing
alone it goes to the devil."

Side by side with economic causes, there are
other reasons for the pitiful decline in our
agricultural population. By painfully slow
steps the proletariat of England is being
educated, and from improved knowledge and
decreased religion is born that eager cry
for more pleasure, greater happiness. Cheap
trips in over-crowded trains, the huge attend-

THE RURAL EXODUS 77

ance at a Crystal Palace football match, music-
halls filled to overflowing, are phenomena
which may be laughed at or ignored by the
well-to-do classes, but they are nevertheless
full of social significance. They are the signs
and tokens of a popular Hedonism, a new
spirit in the people, half frivolous, half angry
— a determination that places the joie de
vivre amongst those monopolies of the rich
and comfortable which must be broken down.
Like all intellectual movements this demand
for some greater share in the pleasures of life
became insistent first in our towns, and has
now reached the villages. Old men and
women and young people of both sexes all
alike cry out against the dullness of village
life. The hours of labour are long ; the
distance from work, owing partly to the dearth
of cottages, is often very great. Though it is
customary to grant the better paid labourers
on Scotch farms four days' holiday in the year
without deduction of wages no such usage
exists in England ; and those who are charged
with the care of animals usually work seven
days a week. Even from " model villages,"
where wages may be high and houses excellent,
the young people depart to seek in fresh
scenes of urban or colonial life some greater
opportunities for pleasure. The sarcasm of

78 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

the late Lord Salisbury apropos of parish
councils — " give them a circus " — had a real
meaning to those who, like the writer, have
spent long years in remote English villages.
The experiences of my boyhood come back as
a veritable nightmare — the dull scenery, the
slush and mud of the roads, the absolutely
mechanical existence of the villagers, who
went to bed at eight o'clock to save oil and
candles, the careworn faces of the women,
the sullen endurance of their husbands, the
dreary respectability of the farmers. And
if this picture of village dullness imprinted
itself on the mind of a boy living in comfort,
the real significance of the scene for families
living on ll/- a week can be imagined.

There is so little to refine the mind or cheer
the soul in rural England. Music, for example,
has largely disappeared from our villages.
Puritanism proved too strong for such simple
pleasures. In 1597 and 1648 minstrels were
ordered to be branded, all ballad-singers were
liable to be arrested, and all organs and lutes
were to be destroyed. Cromwell's Third
Parliament decreed the arrest of all musicians
performing hi taverns. And so it came to
pass that even in the remoter parts of Great
Britain, Wales, Lancashire and the west of
Yorkshire, where the older traditions of

THE RURAL EXODUS 7&

Catholicism persisted, the folksongs and
madrigals of the countryside have for the most
part perished. Mr. Baring Gould and others
have successfully preserved some of these
local tunes and verses from Somersetshire and
Devon, and I have heard quaint lines sung
to unprinted melodies by old men in Oxford-
shire, which, words and tune alike, are nigh
unto vanishing away, for the young men and
maidens refuse to learn the old songs, and
when they sing at all use more or less obsolete
music-hall ditties from the towns. The
average concert in a country parish is an
artificial affair arranged by the " residents "
for the villagers, who accept the " good music 'v
of their " betters " more or less gratefully.

There is a commonplace argument employed,
and doubtless believed, by certain apologists
for the existing conditions of rural life, that
the poorer people are " sportsmen " at heart
and staunch defenders of covert shooting and
fox-hunting. Beaters are required for the
wood, gateopeners for the hunt, barley for
the horses, and what would village life be
without the occasional " meet " on the green ?
It is sad indeed that such an argument should
be possible ; for to maintain that a miserably-
housed and ill-paid labourer derives keen
satisfaction from seeing well-to-do residents

80 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

and strangers collected on horseback and in
motor cars and surrounded by all the embel-
lishments of wealth connected with the
most costly amusement in the world, is a con-
tention of about the same validity as the well-
known one that the fox enjoys being chased
and devoured. The joy of sport for those
who can afford it is undeniable ; few pleasures
to the writer's mind can compare with those
of shooting and fishing, but agricultural
labourers and village tradesmen are learning
to require something more solid than a
vicarious satisfaction derived from the sight
of other people's amusements. A fair pro-
portion of British farmers are genuinely keen
about field sports, and here and there you will
find individual labourers standing up for the
privileges of the " gentry," who occasionally
require them as beaters. But I know of few
sights more pathetic to those who long for
better things in rural England than the group
of extra men and boys sometimes collected
for the beating of our coverts — the least
efficient, the most hopeless of our poor folk.

Outdoor games do not naturally fall to the
lot of men and boys who have no half -holidays,
and not even a Bank holiday, nor, thanks to
the force of Protestant tradition, much chance
of using a portion of their Sundays for healthy

THE RURAL EXODUS 81

recreation of this kind. In organizing village
games, indoor or outdoor, I have always found
two main obstacles : the men are too tired
after their long hours of work 1 to indulge in
further exercise, physical or mental, and they
are usually too poor to pay even a small
subscription with regularity. Cricket teams
flourish in a fair number of our larger villages,
but they are usually supported and " run,"
both as regards money and men, by well-to-do
residents, and when matches are arranged,
leave to take part must, in many cases, be
secured either by the sacrifice of pay or by the
indulgence of a kindly master. A striking
feature of all outdoor sport and pastimes in the
normal English village to-day is the lack of
spontaneity amongst the poor themselves in
the way of organized effort.

The same difficulty besets the organization
of indoor amusements. It is, as a rule,
far easier to initiate " reading-rooms " or
" institutes " than to secure their continuance.
The underpaid and tired labourers may be
stirred into some show of interest and enthusi-
asm at first, but, without the constant stimulus

1 In the reign of Elizabeth the hours of an agricultural
labourer were fixed at 12, with 2£ allowed off for rest and
food, i.e., 9£ in all. The hours to-day are usually longer
than they were three centuries ago !

82 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

created by the well-to-do residents, the bare
room, the tea and coffee, the more or less
clerical atmosphere, the bagatelle board,
the newspapers and magazines, the few
volumes of " sound " fiction lose their charm,
and are unavailing as a counter-attraction
to the homely warmth and cheerful con-
viviality of the inn. In only a very small
percentage of our villages is any kind of club-
life possible apart from the public-house, and
the diatribes of well-to-do and well-meaning
members of city clubs against those who
frequent the village inn are often strongly
resented by even the steadiest and most sober
labourers, whose sole opportunity for social
good-fellowship is furnished by the bar
parlour. Regret it as we may the fact remains
that the one universal institution in rural
England devoted to recreation is the public-
house. Some of the sterner men avoid it
altogether, though they possess no alternative
resource. We have allowed a powerful and
dangerous trade the virtual monopoly not
only of rural drink-selling but of rural amuse-
ments ; and a strange alliance exists between
brewers and Temperance advocates to prevent
even the trial in England of a system of
public control and " counter attractions "
which has made Norway, once the most

THE RURAL EXODUS 83

drunken, now the most sober, country in
Europe. The crowd, the talk, the fun, the
gossip which is provided every evening at
a comparatively trifling cost — these things
represent to the average labourer the one
social institution which he can thoroughly
understand and appreciate. If we could
reproduce the image which in the labourer's
mind sums up his notion of enjoyment, we
should often find a picture of a narrow, half-
lighted room, cheerful companions round a
bright fire, a sanded floor and the gleam of a
pint of ale in a pewter mug. There is again
the economic difficulty of running village
clubs on the small subscription which the poor
folk can afford to pay. I have myself had
one disappointment after another with regard
to such clubs. In poor and depressed counties
like Suffolk, Berkshire, Dorsetshire and so on,
the men and boys gradually cease to attend,
they are fit for little except bed after their
long hours of work, and the reading-room
dies slowly of inanition. The poorly paid
English labourer, the social product of long
centuries of oppression and neglect, possesses
neither the time, money nor enthusiasm for
club life. The young men who still linger in
the villages look forward to the moment of
their departure or, at any rate, their abandon-

84 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

ment of field labour for the more lucrative work
on railways or in mines. I well remember in
a Yorkshire village the little group of young
men who would frequently walk a couple of
miles to watch the expresses dash through
the small station in the darkness. The inter-
changing lights of green and red and the roar
of the train appealed to them, and the luminous
smoke of the disappearing engine seemed
like a pillar of fire by night to guide these
poor village boys in their coming exodus.
How pathetic, too, is the presence of quite
small children at political meetings. It is
sometimes necessary to exclude children under
fifteen on such occasions, for the simple reason
that otherwise small boys and girls surge
through the door the moment it is opened and
fill all the best places. These urchins under-
stand scarcely a word of the speeches, but there
they sit for two hours, quiet and well-behaved,
their round eyes fixed on the speaker, and
their little hands ready to increase the volume
of rustic applause. The unintelligible meeting
in the sleepy hours is an event in their little
grey lives for which they " sit up ! " The
appearance of a political or " gospel " van is a
still bigger event for the more remote villages.
The men and women collect in little groups
almost out of earshot, then gradually, as the

THE RURAL EXODUS 85

sunset darkens the green, and their timidity
grows less, they close upon the van, while a
swarm of children cluster round the wheels
and shafts.

The economic difficulty of feeding an
average family on the average wages of an
agricultural labourer has already been men-
tioned. Nevertheless the legend persists
amongst well-fed people that the country
cottager has abundance of sound if plain
nourishment. On the contrary, Mr. Seebohm
Rowntree's estimate that adequate nutrition
and maintenance could not be provided for
a rural family of five for under £l Os. 6d. a
week * holds the field, and demonstrates
quite clearly that the wages received by the
vast majority of English agricultural labourers
are insufficient to maintain their families in
mental and physical efficiency. The out-
lay in any workhouse for the food alone of
a family of five — and that purchased in large
quantities at contract prices — would reach
some 8/- more than the average wages of a
labourer in the south of England ! A little
arithmetic with the domestic possibilities of
13/- to 15/- a week is indeed a useful cor-

1 Food 13s. 9dL, Fuel Is. 4d., Bent 2-»., Clothing 2s. 3d.
(6d. each adult, 5d. each child), Insurance 4d., Sundries
lOd.

rective to general statements that village
labourers and their families manage to live
well and healthily on their incomes.

Or will you praise the homely, healthy fare,
Plenteous and plain, that happy peasants share T
Oh ! trifle not with wants you cannot feel
Nor mock the misery of a stinted meal.

The common feature of the labourer's diet
is its depressing sameness and the absence
once more of initiative and enterprise.1 We
are struck by the meagre use made of vege-
tables, the almost complete absence of the
cheap and savoury soups which Continental
peasants prepare so deftly, the comparative
rarity of the fish which bulks so largely in the
dietary of our townsfolk. General criticism
directed against the " thriftlessness " of our
agricultural labourers' wives largely falls to
the ground in face of the mere fact that the
miserable wages " go round " at all, but when
a foreigner denies that our poorer housewives
know how to cook properly he is on surer
ground. The English race appears to have
little aptitude for clever cookery, and as long
as the better-off classes are content with chops

1 For careful and accurate examples of an agricultural
labourer's dietary collected from various counties, see
Mr. Seebohm Rowntree's latest book, How the Labourer
Lives.

THE RURAL EXODUS 87

and steaks, and the poorer folk with bacon,
bread-and-butter and tea, such articles will
form staple features of our public and private
catering. Even tea, a national beverage,
is too often, in the homes of well-to-do and poor
alike, a vile decoction, carelessly prepared and
positively deleterious to health. We are told
that County Council lectures on Cookery are
badly attended, and that our village matrons
obstinately refuse to learn fresh methods of
cookery even when these produce cheaper and
more savoury food. Inadequate grates, dear
coal, and the care of small children are factors
in the question which are frequently overlooked
by well-to-do critics of cottage cookery, never-
theless one must admit that the excessive
sale of tinned meats in country villages would
suggest a certain amount of culinary ignorance
and lack of initiative in the homes of the poor.
When a young villager finds himself, as a
bachelor, in a big city he can secure for a few
pence good and savoury food which forms a
signal contrast to the plain and monotonous
diet of his country home.

In sharp contrast to the grinding poverty
and dull monotony of the village, a vivid im-
pression of urban comforts and pleasures is
conveyed to the rustic mind by the visits from
time to time of country folk who have migrated

88 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

to the cities. The self-confidence, general
smartness and superior clothes of the visitors
form a powerful stimulus to the young men
and women of the village to try their luck also
in an area of better pay and bigger oppor-
tunities. Literature, art and social conven-
tions unite in regarding the " yokel " as the
" infima species " of citizenship, and few girls
once emancipated from village life will return
to marry and settle down in the parish of
their childhood. Suppose again that a boy
of eighteen has summoned up courage to
enlist. In a year he returns on furlough in
his smart tunic, with the startling information
that in addition to good food and warm
clothes he finds himself at the end of the week
with five shillings or more in his pocket to be
spent as he likes. These youthful soldiers
are the best recruiting officers for our rural
villages.

The inevitable replacement of human labour
by the use of machinery has furnished another
cause of the exodus from the country. The
advance in agricultural machinery has been
amazingly slow, for there is no striking
evidence of inventive ability about a reaper
or a drill, and even when such obvious con-
trivances were brought into being years
elapsed before they were widely used. Hence

THE RURAL EXODUS 8$

the displacement of labour by machines was
gradual, and its economic effects less heavily
felt in agricultural than in some other
great industries. In the Rural Report on
the Poor Laws in 1817, it is stated that a
considerable number of labourers have been
thrown out of employment in consequence
of the use of machines, but the Report of
1843 makes only one slight reference to the
subject. It was in the three decades 1851 —
1881 that the economic pressure from the new
machinery was most heavily felt, and we find
that in the last ten years of this period the
owners and operators of agricultural machinery
had risen in number from 2,160 to 4,260.
In the days of Joseph Arch's Union the
opposition of the labourers to the introduction
of new machinery appears again and again,
and one of the weapons employed against
the strikers was the proposal to limit the
demand for labour by an additional use of
machinery.

Another explanation for the disappearance
of young men from the country is to be found
in the unattractive character of the career
open to a class of men underpaid, overworked,
and for the most part absolutely cut off from
any share in the land they help to cultivate.
Young men in most other walks of life enjoy

90 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

prospects of promotion and increased pay.
The general prospect before the agricultural
labourer is, as a rule, singularly cheerless.
When a childhood of toil has been left behind
and the adult farm-hand receives the full
weekly wage, the economic high-water mark
is reached, and the only alteration in his
earnings will be an inevitable decrease when
a wife and children fall to his lot and in-
creasing age gradually lessens his value. The
monotonous toil, the meagre returns, the
hopeless outlook were easier to endure half
a century ago. Until the last few years no
less than 45 per cent, of our agricultural
labourers were in their old age condemned
either to outdoor " relief " or the virtual
imprisonment of a workhouse. The passing
of the Old-Age Pensions Acts, a beneficent
measure appreciated far more in the villages
than the towns, has doubtless saved many
country-folk from the pauperism which would
otherwise have proved their natural fate.
The normal career of an agricultural labourer
had hitherto been poverty and hard work
from the cradle to old age, with pauperism in
the evening of his days. But now a new
spirit of hopefulness has reached the younger
generation in our country parishes. Young
women leave one " situation " after another

THE RURAL EXODUS 91

in their reasonable desire to " better them-
selves." The " finery " and " smart clothes "
criticised by mistresses are merely sympto-
matic of the same tendency towards fuller and
more comfortable conditions of life. Young
labourers in the vigour of early manhood ask
themselves why they should serve a master
all their lives for 15/- a week, living in a " tied
cottage," and liable to a week's notice to quit.
Many of these men would gladly remain if a
small portion of the land around them could
ultimately find its way into their hands.
Without perhaps that passionate devotion to
the soil so vividly portrayed in La Terre, the
English villager nevertheless in most cases
leaves his fields and hedgerows with regret
and sometimes real sorrow. I have talked
with young men who declared with tears in
their eyes that if they could have secured
even five acres of land they would have gladly
remained in the village of their boyhood, but
stay there as labourers at 13/- a week they
would not. The " land hunger " in rural
England, although it seldom reaches the
proportions indicated in the speeches of
" single tax " enthusiasts, who seem to believe
that every villager is clamouring for a small
farm, is nevertheless a very real thing. De-
spite a long series of political deceptions and

§2 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

promises unfulfilled the labourers' interest
is still aroused by the cry of the land in any
Parliamentary contest. How well I remember
the autumn of 1908, when I held fifty meetings
in Oxfordshire to explain the Small Holdings
Act in the belief that now at length " land for
the labourer " meant something more than the
cruel delays and feeble achievements of the
Small Holdings Act. The village school-
rooms were filled with audiences as big as
those which came together at the General
Election, and labourers, young and old alike,
with their wives trudged through the dark
and muddy lanes to hear of an Act which
might help to make their lives better worth
living.

This golden opportunity of real land reform
has been lost, and the younger men are
emigrating in hundreds, exchanging the elusive
hopes of land in the country of their birth for
the certainties of Canada or Australia. The
returns of recent emigration are startling,
and according to Mr. Chiozza Money's careful
figures it would appear that this has almost
passed the limits of healthy expansion and
become a dangerous drain on our national
resources at home. No less than 33,000
persons have left our ports for the Colonies
during the year 1911, and complaints of scarce

THE RURAL EXODUS 98

labour due to emigration pour in from even
comparatively well paid counties like Kent.
Returns from only 88 of Devon's 461 parishes
show that in the past twelve months (1912-13)
no less than 2,114 have emigrated to Canada,
Australia and New Zealand. Most of the
emigrants are young men. The young villager,
conveyed by a " cheap trip " to London or
some other big city, gazes upon the wonderful
window-dressing of the Canadian and Aus-
tralian Agencies. The sheaves of heavily
eared wheat, the samples of fine fruit, the
models of well-built homes and waving
cornfields are all the visible signs of an
independence and prosperity easily within
the emigrant's reach, but beyond the
extremest hopes of a man who stays at
home.

There is one privilege denied to his fore-
fathers which the labourer possesses — he
can leave the land when he likes. And so it
comes to pass that with or without an articu-
late excuse he turns his back on the village.
He packs up his scanty goods, and silently,
without consultation, without murmuring,
he rises up and goes. And it is this which in
the course of time will bring salvation to him
and his class. The agricultural labourer is
indispensable; the nation cannot prosper

94 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

without him. And this the nation begins to
recognize. Still but dimly aware either of
its causes or its threatened results, English-
men are beginning to regard with vague and
undefined dread the peril of the Rural Exodus.

CHAPTER IV

RURAL EDUCATION

ONE of the most depressing features in the
rural life of England, as apart from that of
Wales and Scotland, is the general unpopu-
larity of education. The village heckler
who demands of a parliamentary candidate
whether he does not think that children should
leave school earlier in order to help towards
their upkeep is always sure of much sympathy
from Liberals and Tories alike. It is not
difficult to explain this dislike of elementary
education on the part of so many parents.
One reason is the absence of any general
enthusiasm for education in England : " the
last thing," says one of Bernard Shaw's
characters, " that an Englishman likes to be
called is intellectual." There are very few
Robert Elsmeres amongst our landed gentry ;
nor can you expect much enthusiasm for
" book-learning " amongst the labouring
population of our countrysides. From gener-
ation to generation the dependent poor have
95

96 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

been provided with an absolute minimum
of " education," or none at all.

It is indeed in many cases quite impossible
to inspire in village parents any genuine
appreciation of the benefits of education.
Here once more we see the low wages of our
labourers operating as a cause of social
mischief. Their life-struggle is so keen and
incessant that the inducement to secure an
additional shilling from child employment is
terribly strong. The poorer folk have not
yet followed the example of the well-to-do in
the matter of family limitation, and every new
baby represents a prospective drain on the
home resources for thirteen years. The practi-
cal value of a good education, visible enough in
the crowded competition of the city, is far less
evident to the eyes of rural parents who are
often barely able to read and write themselves.

Here and there you find poor folk who dimly
realize how the absence of " book-learning "
has handicapped their own career and robbed
them of any real chances of betterment. I
have often heard old men and women describe
pathetically enough their total lack of " school-
ing," and how even the love-letters of rustic
youths and maidens were written from
clumsy dictation at one end and deciphered at
the other by the parson or schoolmaster 1

RURAL EDUCATION 97

We have made some progress since the
" Forties," when public opinion actually
allowed children of six to be employed on
farms and so permanently debarred from any
school attendance whatever. It was highly
creditable to Joseph Arch and the other
leaders of the great Strike that they succeeded
in placing among the objects of the National
Union a demand for free and compulsory
education.

The farmers are almost solidly opposed to
any extension of the school age, and many go
so far as to distrust education altogether.
Compulsory schooling is held by many to be
responsible for restlessness and the willingness
to listen to " agitators." Mr. Rider Haggard's
conversations with farmers and land agents
bring this point out very clearly : one of his
informants boldly advocated the passing of an
" Act to abolish education." " Over-educa-
tion of the labourers' children," is a phrase
constantly on the lips of rural employers.
The theory which underlies the fulminations
of these critics against the State's education
of its young citizens seems to be this, that in
the scheme of Providence provision is made
for various class-creations, and that a certain
number of rural children come into the world
predestined to a wage of 15/- a week by the

98 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

Almighty, who is understood to be more or
less in harmony and agreement with the
squires, farmers, clergy and the other
" quality " of the parish. It is the fore-
ordained career of these rustic infants to stay
in the village and work on the farms : the
shades of their prison have closed round them
from their birth : education is wasted on
the " man with the hoe : " education and
discontent go hand in hand.

This crude and selfish doctrine of over-
education is openly preached by persons who
begin to send their own children to school at
the age when the sons and daughters of the
poor are leaving it for good ! Well-to-do
parents whose thoughts are centred on the
advancement of their boys, who grasp the
importance of a good education in this con-
nection, who are constantly endeavouring to
better their own position in life — these same
people unite in wishing to deny the offspring
of the poor any substantial improvement in
their lot and regard laudable ambition in
the parents as undesirable and dangerous.

Another demand is frequently made in the
supposed interest of the rural population :
it is alleged not so much that education itself
is unnecessary or undesirable as that the
existing type of school ' training is quite

RURAL EDUCATION 99

unsuitable. This view has been ably main-
tained by that sincere friend of the poor
villagers, Mr. Jesse Ceilings. He goes so far
as to believe that " the direct tendency of
the (present) education is to create a distaste
for manual labour of all sorts — and a dis-
satisfaction with country life generally. By
it new ideas, totally dissociated from the
localities in which they live, are instilled in
the minds of the young, who believe that
such ideas can only be realized elsewhere."

Here again the argument rests on the
assumption that the village child is predes-
tined to live and die as a quasi-serf on low
wages. Well-to-do parents may select careers
for their children ; not so the agricultural
labourer. To make anything of him, the
villager, like Dr. Johnson's Scotchman, must
be caught young, and carefully instructed in
" Fruit-, flower-, and vegetable-growing ;
poultry and bee-keeping ; budding, pruning
and grafting ; cow and pig-keeping ; milking ;
rotation of garden crops ; nature and choice of
seeds ; structure, life and food of plants ;
action of birds and insects on crops ; use of
manures ; use of simple tools ; packing fruit,
vegetables and other produce for market." *

1 See Schedule to " Agricultural Education in Elemen-
tary Schools Bill," presented March 9, 1905.

100 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

This wonderful compendium of botany,
zoology and rural economy is to form the
intellectual nourishment of the village child
up to thirteen ; for " children engaged in
book-learning and literary mummery till they
are thirteen or fourteen years old " cannot
digest it. One can readily understand that
if even a fair portion of this agricultural
curriculum were mastered there would not be
much room left for much " book-learning "
of the normal type. " Literary mummery "
indeed ! What does the normal education of
our village children actually amount to ?

Here is the time-table of a thoroughly good
village school in the Midlands, which may be
taken as typical of the normal curriculum
provided in a country parish.

hrs. mins.

Arithmetic . . . . 3 40 a week

English 3 40 „

History 2 10 „

Geography . . . . 2 10 „
Nature Study (including

Botany) . . . . 2 0 „

Drawing . . 2 20 „

Hygiene 0 30 „

Gardening . . . . 2 0 ,,

Singing (both notations) 1 30 „

Repetition . . . . 1 10 „

RURAL EDUCATION 101

In addition to these subjects there are hours
devoted to reading, writing, spelling, religious
instruction, etc.

What more can one reasonably expect to be
crowded into five days a week ? If you largely
increase the hours allotted to gardening or
Nature Study in the above time-table, the
length of lessons in Arithmetic, English,
History and Geography — none too long at
present — must be cut down. If the various
subjects of Mr. Ceilings' Bill be included in
the day's work, the " literary " tuition must
sink to vanishing point !

Even these beggarly elements of the village
school — primitice juvenis miserce — are to be
jeopardised or diminished in order to secure
a specialised instruction which will produce a
skilled and intelligent workman on 15/- a
week ! Fancy the educational ideals of people
who advocate such " specialization " as this !
A principle which would be acknowledged as
absolutely vicious for the children of the rich,
before say, sixteen, is warmly advocated for
the children of the poor at five ! To abandon
the little we have secured for our people in the
way of general education — in order merely
to render our children more effective labourers
— would be a retrograde step unworthy of a
civilized community. These cries of the " over-

102 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

education of the masses," and the inferiority
of " literary " to " technical " instruction,
though advocated sometimes by persons of
absolute sincerity and goodwill, are really
based on class selfishness of the worst kind.
The spirit which underlies such proposals is
akin to that which preaches the need of
temperance laws for the Rand Kaffirs in order
to secure their regular attendance at work.
The child who has been reared on an " agri-
cultural education " tends to become astrictus
glebce, and from the necessary absence of more
general instruction a contented and dependent
parishioner.

But while the practical displacement of the
present primary education — for that is what is
involved in the adoption of such a scheme as
Mr. Jesse Ceilings' — cannot be justified, no
reasonable person could object to the adoption
in our country schools of lessons in gardening,
agricultural chemistry and the like : and as
a matter of fact simple and useful instruction
of this type is very frequently found in our
rural districts, more especially where a small
plot of land can be secured in the neighbour-
hood of the school. Claydon hi Bucking-
hamshire is an example of what can be
accomplished in this direction by a village
school, and my old friend, Mr. W. H. Piggott,

RURAL EDUCATION 103

the well-known schoolmaster of Bicester, regu-
larly led off his pupils to a neighbouring allot-
ment for lessons in elementary horticulture.
The knowledge of arithmetic is also an asset of
great practical value in the country. Old
labourers constantly tell you how in days of
old when they did piecework at so much an
acre, their employer frequently took advantage
of their ignorance to underpay them. Simple
book-keeping, again, is of the greatest possible
utility to a small holder.

The hostile critics of our present system
frequently point to the meagre results secured
by our primary education as an argument
hi favour of substituting more practical
instruction. We are reminded of the fact
that many young labourers and servant girls
of twenty-five can just manage to spell out a
newspaper paragraph or scrawl a mis-spelt
letter. But even if this be the case — and the
number of our illiterate voters decreases year
by year — there is nothing very surprising
about it. How much Latin or Greek is
remembered at the age of forty by the Uni-
versity pass-man who began his school life,
instead of ending it, at thirteen and continued
his studies of these languages till twenty-one ?
" This glib talk of over-educating the rural
children," writes my friend, Mr. Warren, a

104 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

well-known Oxfordshire schoolmaster, " comes
largely from ignorant or biassed people. The
education we give is not too much : on the
contrary it is too little. But there is one great
drawback and that is a limit of time. Sad
to say, many parents in the rural districts are
so situated that every shilling is of importance
to them, and, in consequence, the moment
their children can be legally removed they
take them from school : and what makes it
sadder still they leave their studies for ever.
The whole expense of education in such cases
is sometimes almost a dead loss. There should
be compulsory continuation schools until a
certain standard of education is reached."

Whatever criticism may be passed on our
educational system, the schoolmasters and
mistresses of our rural schools form a class of
which the community may well be proud.
Nevertheless the unfortunate absence amongst
the English of any real enthusiasm for educa-
tion has hitherto prevented us from doing
anything like full justice to the men and
women to whom is confided the momentous
responsibility of training our young citizens.
A village schoolmaster is often worse paid
than an artisan, and until recently no provision
existed for the payment of long-service pen-
sions. His social position in a country village

RURAL EDUCATION 105

is often rendered ambiguous and uncomfort-
able. He is frequently the best educated
man in the parish and yet wholly cut off from
the society of intellectual equals. The very
unapostolic tradition that clerical families
must be, in an especial sense, " gentlefolk "
usually prevents any real intimacy between
the School House and the Vicarage ; on the
other hand, while the farmers and tradesmen
are ready to extend the hand of fellowship,
these honest and kindly neighbours never pos-
sessed either the time or the money to equip
themselves with a mental training like that
of the schoolmaster. And so it comes to
pass that the master or mistress is almost
always to some extent an isolated being. Yet
despite all such drawbacks these zealous
servants of the State, generally underpaid and
often unappreciated, not only carry on their
normal employment, but frequently add to it
voluntary works of supererogation in the
way of night schools and other forms of extra
tuition.

VILLAGE POLITICS

THE political existence of our country villages
in any real sense began in 1884. Before the
extension of the franchise in this year rural
England had been represented by the votes of
a well-to-do minority of the inhabitants and
the suffrages of the non-resident plural voter.
The grant of the franchise to the labourer
appeared likely at first sight to produce a
complete change in the character of rural
representation in Parliament. The writer
remembers quite well the gloomy prophecies
uttered by his father, the strongly Tory Rector
of a Suffolk parish, to the effect that never
again would the agricultural counties return
a Conservative to Westminster. Such fears
have been completely falsified, and to-day
the poorest counties of southern and midland
England form a political stronghold of the
Conservative party.

There are various reasons for this fidelity
to Tory principles in rural districts. The
106

VILLAGE POLITICS 107

countryman, if unaffected by any special
inducements or menaces, tends naturally to
pursue the even tenour of his way in political
as well as social life. The whole history of
his harried and neglected class has produced
in his temperament a vein of caution and
suspicion and a mistrust of changes proposed
by his " betters."

Even amongst his own neighbours the
labourer preserves the same attitude of
cautious reserve. One of the minor difficulties
experienced in the administration of the Small
Holdings Act was caused by the labourers'
unwillingness even under the seal of official
silence to declare the amount of their savings
and resources. Before the advent of the rail-
way and the bicycle1 our English villages, in
the remoter districts, formed tiny communities,
which resembled the Greek II6Xei<; in their
mutual mistrust and aloofness. Such village
antagonisms are still met with here and there
in the country, based on nothing else save the
exclusive traditions of earlier centuries. The
natural corollary of such a mental attitude
is Conservatism, and side by side with this

1 A friend of mine on a recent visit to William Morris's
hamlet of Kelmscott was greatly impressed by the immense
improvement in the outlook and attitude of the younger
men, which he attributed very largely to the civilizing
use of bicycles.

108 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

is the fact that, as a general rule, the Tory
candidate is a man who lives in the county.
On the other hand a large proportion of the
Liberals who seek the suffrages of the rural
parishes are more or less strangers, and hi
many cases chosen with more apparent regard
to the fact that they can pay their own
expenses than that they are either resident in
the county or acquainted with its needs and
conditions. Local and personal sentiment are
not extinct even in men and women who
spend their lives in the depressing depths of
rural poverty, and many of our rural electors
consistently follow the lead of the squire at
election times, even when — as is not always
the case — they believe in the absolute secrecy
of the ballot. " The labourers' patient toil,"
says Mr. Phillips in the English Review,
" in itself unrewarded, is consummated in
the free step and gallant bearing of the squire,
who rides as straight as he shoots, and has a
neighbour's sympathy for all that grows in the
country." The force of these personal ties
is diminishing year by year. Not only is the
growth of independence inevitable from the
gradual spread of education and fuller contact
with the cities, but a new type of landlord has
appeared within the last fifty years. The
feudal loyalty which constrained a village to

VILLAGE POLITICS 109

acquiesce in the political lead of a landowner,
however stupid and selfish he might be, ceases
to be operative when the old-time owners of
the soil are replaced by wealthy merchants
and stockbrokers. The coveted title of
" squire " may be secured by a person who
runs an estate on the proceeds of beer or
umbrella frames, but the glory has departed
from the word in the minds of the rustics
whose rural lineage is not, like his own,
superficial and make-believe.

The possession of greater wealth is another
important asset of rural Conservatism. In
some parts of the country a candidate who is
poor suffers in comparison with his opponent,
not merely because he is less likely to subscribe
liberally to local funds, but simply by reason
of his comparative poverty. I have known
it thrown in the teeth of a candidate by
labourers living on 12/- to 13/- a week that
he rode to the meeting on a bicycle (in con-
trast to his opponent's motor-car). Another
hard-working candidate was assailed by the
cry that he was "too poor to marry and lived
in a small house." In an eastern county
a labourer remarked to a young, cultivated,
well-born politician of very limited means
who had given him a tip, " Lor,' sir, you ought
to have been a gentleman."

110 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

No Liberal can be thoroughly satisfied with
the conditions of rural England at present,
and it is equally clear that large tracts of rural
England are not satisfied with Liberalism. Bed-
fordshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Devon,
Leicester, and Norfolk are the only counties
where Liberalism is predominant. Not a
single Liberal is returned in any division of
Berkshire, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Hert-
fordshire, Huntingdon, Kent, Surrey, Sussex
or Westmorland. Many obvious explanations
are offered for this persistent refusal on the
part of so many country constituencies to
yield their wholehearted support to the cause
of Liberalism. Social influences are at work
in rural parishes which are altogether foreign
to our urban life. Persons are permitted to
exercise a control over the thoughts and actions
of the " lower orders " whose political efforts
would be quite futile in any industrial centre.
The control of village charities, the practical
monopoly, in some cases, of the house supply,
the degrading patronage too often associated
with private charity, the light of which is duly
suffered to shine in the local newspapers — all
these factors tell against the fortunes of rural
Liberalism. There are hundreds of villages
where a Liberal canvasser is told " they are
better left alone ; there are some Liberals

VILLAGE POLITICS 111

there, but they don't like a Liberal canvasser
to be seen on the doorstep." A lady canvasser
in Oxfordshire was informed " Oh, it's no good
your coming here, Miss, Mrs. K. (the Tory
Lady of the Manor) arranges our politics for
us."

But real and indubitable as the social pres-
sure is, something more is needed to explain the
comparative failure of Liberalism in country
parishes ; nor is this additional explanation
far to seek. First of all, the principles and
facts of Liberalism are not adequately taught
in our villages ; and secondly, Liberal Govern-
ments have from time to time produced a
large measure of irritation and angry dis-
appointment in the ranks of their avowed
supporters.

Most of the " quality," the " nobs " who
employ labour, the representatives of " educa-
tion," the clergymen who have been to
" college," in many cases the schoolmaster — all
these important persons quite naturally decry
Liberalism in general and Liberal candidates
in particular. And over vast areas of rural
England the villagers are unprovided with any
kind of Radical newspaper. The country
Press is very largely Tory, and the weekly
newspaper, the one literary luxury of the
labourer, the single journal that he and his

112 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

wife ever read, is in most cases strongly Con-
servative. What would have been the mental
history of, say, the members of the Reform
Club, if during the whole of their lives their
sole political pabulum had been derived from
the Daily Telegraph or the Observer ?

On the other hand, there has been a tendency
to overlook the agricultural districts when
Liberalism secures a Parliamentary majority.
What single measure, except the Old-Age
Pensions Act, can be pointed to as having
within recent memory stirred the enthusiasm
of our English villagers, or impressed them
with any deep-rooted belief that politicians
were working for their welfare, and prepared
to defend the cause of the most helpless and
most neglected toilers in the realm ? Home
Rule, Welsh Disestablishment, Redistribution,
Parish and District Councils, Education Bills
and the like have left men and women cold,
who were struggling to keep the household
together on 13/- a week. Temperance Reform
has too often presented itself in the light of
a " Local Veto," which would permit 200
persons in a country parish to absolutely cut
off the remaining 100 from their one and only
centre of social intercourse and good-fellow-
ship, the village inn. The country electors
have never made excessive demands. They

VILLAGE POLITICS 113

have never clamoured for any political panem
et drcenses impossible or difficult to provide.
All they asked for in 1906 was old-age pensions
and access to the land at a reasonable rent.
The first of the boons has come to stay, a
measure magnificent in the humanity of its
purpose and absolutely unique in the records
of modern legislation. Had the land policy
of the Liberal Party kept pace with Mr.
Lloyd George's great measure, the adherence
of the rural labourer — even allowing for that
unpleasant factor, political ingratitude — might
have been more firmly secured.

The Labour Party has hitherto made no
impression on the rural constituencies. Its
leaders are essentially urban in knowledge and
experience, and amid the crowded problems
of city life no room is found for any concen-
tration on the needs of the village. In theory,
of course, Labour politicians recognize that the
influx of labourers from the country tends to
diminish wages in the towns, and their sym-
pathies have always been extended towards
such palliative measures as have been framed
from time to time for the benefit of the farm-
labourer. After the middle of the nineteenth
century a marked decline took place in the
wages of the riverside labourers on the Thames;
this was due to the inrush of Irish peasants

114 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

evicted from their farms after the famine, and
the same economic process is still going on.
Occasionally, the Labour Party have sent
down one of their Members of Parliament
into an agricultural district, but the experi-
ment has not been attended with much success.
Mr. Pointer, M.P., arrived at Bicester, in Ox-
fordshire, some three years ago, in the very
centre of an agricultural district, but his
excellent speech was rendered inaudible by
every form of uproar, which ultimately took
the form of open violence. Undeterred by
this failure, Mr. Pointer tried again : but
again the effort ended in a complete fiasco.
Socialism is not yet understood in our villages
either by rich or poor, and the leaders of the
Labour Party have at present no time, amid
the calls of the industrial centres, to extend
their missionary work in thinly populated
rural areas. The ordinary leaders of village
politics, Liberal or Tory, have not got far in
their conception of the Socialist creed beyond
Punch's definition of it as " Atheism, free
love and death to King George V."

The labourer of the villages is essentially,
though well worth knowing, a hard man to
know. Long centuries of oppression and
neglect have left their mark on him, and unless
one has time and patience it is difficult to

VILLAGE POLITICS 115

pierce the atmosphere of quiet reserve with
which the villager surrounds himself. He is
rarely discourteous, and those who persevere
in their efforts to gain the friendship of the
cottagers are well rewarded. Some of the
best and happiest hours in the writer's life
have been spent in the humble dwellings of the
village poor. How often have I shared in the
kind hospitality of a cottage — the hot cup of
tea, the bread cut thin for my benefit, spread
sometimes with butter, sometimes with the
cheaper lard. My heart goes out to these
kindly friends — " si braves, si patients, mais
il rfy a pas de V argent " — as a Turkish officer
once said to me when pointing to his gallant
infantry. Nevertheless even those who have
been privileged to share the intimate friend-
ship of the village poor are quite unable
sometimes to determine that treasured secret,
the " way they vote." I know a late member
of Parliament who quite despaired of the
politics of a certain village. So convinced
was he that the people in it were hostile to
his opinions that he rarely visited it. Never-
theless, when a subscription list was started
on his behalf among the many hundreds of
signatures appended to it he saw the names
of practically every labourer in the suspected
hamlet.

116 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

Born only to endure,

The patient passive poor
Seem useful chiefly by their multitude ;

For they are men who keep

Their lives secret and deep ;
Alas, the poor are seldom understood.

To a very large extent then the English
labourer has been disappointed and dis-
illusioned in his political hopes. Before the
bestowal of the franchise politicians devoted
practically no attention whatever to the in-
articulate villages, and since the vote was
secured the help offered by members and
candidates has been largely lip-service. The
landlord and property influences in both the
historic parties, and still more so amongst the
permanent officials of Government Boards,
have frequently succeeded in neutralizing
the efficacy of reforms ostensibly directed
towards opening the land to the poor and
providing them with decent cottages. From
decade to decade the villagers have been duped
by cries like " Every labourer his own land-
lord " or the " Colonization of England."

The general interest shown in the local
government of the parish and county is, as a
rule, lamentably small. By a strange paradox
the advent of local government has stereo-
typed the hopeless dependence of the labourer
more fully than before. What part or lot

VILLAGE POLITICS 117

has the cottager in the County Council, upon
which, through the ingenious provision of
refusing travelling and out-of-pocket expenses,
it is practically impossible for a small farmer,
village tradesman or labourer to sit ? Doc-
trinaire politicians may point as they like to
the fact that the County Councils are elected
bodies ; they overlook the fact that these
rural parliaments are elected under social
conditions which rigidly limit the choice of
the voters, and in many cases secure the
return of an illiberal and unprogressive
majority. To take a single example, can
any worse dereliction of public duty be ad-
duced than the treatment accorded by the
County Councils of England to the Small
Holdings Act of 1892 — a policy of utter
neglect condemned by nobody more severely
than Mr. Jesse Collings ? If a tenant-farmer
ventures to stand for a County Council in
opposition to a landlord it is frequently
regarded in the district as almost a case of
Use majeste. The average labourer regards
the election and the work of the County
Council with apathy and indifference. If he
has failed to secure a small holding after four
years' weary waiting as an " approved candi-
date," he is told by one set of comforters that
he should see that Liberals are returned to the

118 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

County Council ; in most cases one might
just as well urge him to take a trip to the
Riviera.

The deliberations of the Rural District
Councils are even more remote from the
general life of the labouring classes. It is
scarcely an exaggeration to describe them as
" farmers' clubs," and the one central tradition
of such bodies is — with rare exceptions — to
keep the rates down and do as little as possible.
Nevertheless to these Councils are accorded the
administration of Acts of Parliament designed
for the benefit of the labourers. Urban
politicians, obsessed with the ideal of self-
government, propose to intrust far-reaching
proposals for better housing to Councils whose
record in many instances may fairly be de-
scribed as one of obstinate obstruction and
callous neglect.1 They fail to see that the
habits of self-government — once so vigorously
developed in the English village — have been
almost atrophied for want of use during
centuries of poverty and oppression. The
Parish Council is the only governing body in
which the labourers can play a part. Here

1 The Select Committee of the House of Commons
appointed to consider Mr. Mackarness' Housing Bill
in 1906 reported as follows : " It is clear that most
Rural District Councils have taken practically no
advantage of the Act (of 1890}."

VILLAGE POLITICS 119

and there the experience afforded by the work
of these Councils — particularly that connected
with the supply of allotments — has added
interest to the life of the village and con-
tributed to self-reliance and self-respect.
But their powers are too insignificant to draw
out real talent, to make it an object of ambition
to become a member, or to invest the elections
with the necessary atmosphere of popular
interest and enthusiasm.

CHAPTER VI

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE

RELIGIOUS faith has always died hard in the
village. Long after the constructive and de-
structive energies of the Church had triumphed
in the cities of the Roman Empire, the poor
pagani, or " villagers," preserved the dying
embers of the ancient faith. Even in the
twentieth century the former deities of the
corn crop and vintage are still invoked in
Christian Tuscany, while the traveller in the
Pyrenees may still hear the call of " lacche,
lacche," as the peasants winnow the corn with
the mystica vannus of the old-time god. The
mist of obscurity which settled on the
religious conditions of the English village
immediately after the Reformation has never
been, as yet, completely lifted : but enough
is known to make it clear that the change
in the theory and practice of the people's
religion was extremely gradual in many of
the more remote parishes.
120

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 121

There are therefore strong a priori reasons
why the religious life of our villages should
flourish and abound. Nevertheless, few in-
deed are there of those who have lived in the
country parishes, few even of those who have
ministered in the Churches and Chapels, who
will not deplore the decadence of religious
faith and practice in rural England.

Here and there are men and women of deep
piety, men and women whose first religious
impulse has come in most cases from the camp
meeting of the revivalist. These are the
successors of the early Methodists, who
gathered in their thousands on the open hill-
sides to drink in the gospel teachings of John
Wesley. Theirs is a religion which, narrow
and harsh in some respects, is yet an illumina-
tion. Their vision has transcended the out-
ward things of the moment, and embraced
the war of good and evil, the infinite mysteries
of sin and its redemption. These men and
women, however, are the exception. The
normal religious life of the rural world flows
in the two deeply cut channels of Church
and Chapel, channels whose courses have not
altered fundamentally since they were first
determined by the great controversies of the
seventeenth century. The division between
these is not confined to the sphere of religion ;

122 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

it extends to those of politics and even of
ethics. It is difficult to decide which phase
of religious activity exhibits the more vigorous
life. In East Anglia and the south-western
counties Nonconformity is the stronger ; but
Anglicanism is full of vigour in Lancashire,
while in Yorkshire there are valleys which
have scarcely heard of the Reformation.

The actual attendance at Church and
Chapel services varies greatly in different
localities. It has been stated on good
authority that not more than 25 per cent, of
London's millions ever enter a place of
worship. No such religious census has ever
been taken over any large area of rural
England, but in Oxfordshire, a purely agri-
cultural county, free from the unsettling
influences of large cities, I have attempted
to discover the normal number of Sunday
attendances at Church and Chapel, and find
these amount to between 25 — 35 per cent,
of the adult population. In proportion to
the number of its professed adherents, Non-
conformity appears to draw somewhat larger
congregations.1

1 Absence from Church or Chapel is often due to a deeply
rooted reluctance to appear in shabby or " odd " clothes.
In many rural parishes new clothes are practically un-
known. Second, third, and even fourth-hand suits

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 123

The farmers and well-to-do residents gener-
ally tend to be Churchpeople and regard their
presence in the Sunday congregation as
" setting an example " to the poorer villagers ;
there are certainly worse motives than this
for going to Church.

It is a commonplace of contemporary criti-
cism that in our urban centres the ancient sanc-
tions of religion are rapidly tending to lose
their efficacy. But in the air of the country
the flowers of faith fade more slowly. Amid
the unfailing regularity of haytime and harvest,
and the close connection between natural
phenomena and one's daily livelihood, Love
and Nature seem less at strife. The even
tenour of the rustic life is secure from the perils
and vicissitudes of the city, and fewer appal-
ling catastrophes occur to shock religious
confidence. The Harvest Festival, with its
semi-pagan offerings, forms an annual reminder
of man's dependence on the Creator which has
infinitely more significance to those who till
the soil than to the townspeople who find their
fruit and vegetables on costermongers' barrows.

and dresses from the towns are bought in the villages.
These are sometimes patched or ill-fitting, and the country-
man feels keenly the sting of ridicule on this score —
Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se
Quam quod ridicules homines facit.

124 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

Further, the clergyman is usually a far greater
personage in the eyes of rural than of urban
parishioners. He comes from " college," dines
occasionally with the squire, and, however free
personally from pride or snobbery, is always
regarded as belonging to a different class from
the vast majority of his flock.

The vitalising influence of the Oxford
Movement, though chiefly felt in the towns,
left its mark also on our rural parishes. The
improved discipline of the Anglican Church,
while stili a somewhat feeble instrument, has
at least helped to weed out many notorious
cases of worthless clergymen and that spiritual
caricature the " sporting parson," while
infinitely greater care is exercised in Church
patronage than was the case fifty years ago.
Services are brighter and more numerous, and
the connection between the Church and the
social and intellectual life of the parish becomes
daily more close. A general survey, however,
leaves the impression that religion in rural
England is more alive in the Nonconformist
chapel than in the Established church. The
emotionalism of the services, the popular
phraseology, the vigour of the preaching, the
sympathy between the members of each little
congregation — all these things are strong influ-
ences ; while the note of individualism in

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 125

Nonconformist doctrine finds an answering
chord in the rustic mind. The plainly built
little chapels which everywhere meet the eye
in our country parishes are outward and visible
tokens of the splendid spirit of independence
and self -sacrifice which animates the " Free
Churches." Many of these buildings are paid
for out of the depths of rural poverty. I have
myself frequently spoken in a village chapel,
the cost of which, £600, was gradually
gathered together by the unceasing effort and
amazing generosity of people whose average
income did not exceed £l per week. The
congregations know that the weekly ministra-
tions have to be provided at their own cost,
and would lapse if their efforts were relaxed.
The same spirit animates the detached com-
munities of Roman Catholics, who, like their
Nonconformist brethren, without ancient en-
dowments or rich congregations, succeed
in maintaining their services and their clergy
in a manner which puts to shame the wealthier
laity of the Established Church.

Nevertheless, signs of failure are only too-
evident in the work of all organized religion,
in our country districts. There is, it is true,
very little of the anti-religious spirit which
characterizes so large a proportion of the Con-
tinental peasantry. There is little, if any,.

126 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

active hostility towards Church or Chapel.
Nor, again, is any public approval accorded to
crude and abusive denunciations of religion.
The speakers who in Hyde Park hold up
religious faith in general, and Roman Catholi-
cism in particular, to contumely or ridicule
would not be appreciated in the average village.
The prevailing attitude of mind would appear
to be one of sheer indifference tinged less often
with bitterness than with a kindly toleration.
The force of tradition prevails even where
religious sympathies have disappeared. " I
want the little devils to be taught something
about God " was the criticism passed on
certain proposals in the Education Bill of 1908
by a labourer who never said a prayer or
entered a place of worship, and even life-
long Nonconformists will have their children
christened, their youths and maidens married
and their dead buried in accordance with the
^ancient rites of their forefathers' Church.

The ancient joys of rural life have vanished,
crushed out by Puritanism and poverty, and
free education and the newspaper have shown
the villagers how unhappy they are. The
face of a loving Deity is obscured by the
mists which have settled on lives of ceaseless
toil and miserable penury. One old man I
knew used to sit beside the tiny fireplace in his

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 127

cottage, his limbs twisted and gnarled by
rheumatism — a worn-out toiler who had
brought up a large family to the best of his
ability ; and often as he sat there gazing into
the feeble embers, a tear would roll down his
cheek, and he would exclaim, half to himself,
" I wonder what it all means." Neither the
parson's sermons nor the vigorous hymns of
the Methodist chapel could satisfy the be-
wildered mind of this village agnostic, and so
he and two-thirds of his neighbours stayed at
home, communing it may be with their own
simple souls and " wondering what it all
meant."

How then can we best explain the com-
paratively feeble growth of religious faith
in a soil so well adapted for its welfare ? The
Established Church fails largely because its
clergy are chosen from the " classes." It was
one of Mr. Gladstone's least wise utterances
that the Establishment provided us with
the blessing of at any rate one gentleman
in every parish. Gentleman indeed 1 This
standard of " gentility " has formed one of
the main obstacles to the spiritual efficiency of
the Anglican Church. The general atmosphere
of many country rectories is one of paupertas
ambitiosa — the hat-touchings and curtseyings,
the wagonette driven by the gardener in

128 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

livery, the girls to have new frocks for the
county ball, the sons to be " educated as
gentlemen." Contrast with all this the social
equality, personal affection and real respect
which often mark the relations between a
French cur 6, with 1000 francs per annum, and
his parishioners.

Again the phrase " inferior clergy," once
indiscreetly used of the rural parsons by a
Church dignitary, has a meaning. The ablest
and most zealous young men naturally desire
to find their life-work in the environment of
the big towns and the big opportunities offered
therein. It is abundantly clear from the
current experience of any Oxford or Cambridge
" don " that the abler men at the Universities
do not as a rule take Holy Orders, and that
of the undergraduates who do become clergy-
men, the least efficient tend to occupy the
country livings.

Further — and this is the strongest reason for
the widespread unpopularity of the rural
clergy and the neglect of the Church's minis-
trations— the clergy have always identified
themselves with one political party — the
party which, more especially in rural districts,
stands for the defence of property, privileges
and social influence. Mr. Masterman's dictum
that no established Church had ever been

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 129

on the side of the poor is supported by ample
testimony from our country parishes.

The clergy, with rare and noble exceptions,
like Bishop Latimer and Bernard Gilpin,
threw in their lot with the wealthy and power-
ful men who through the Enclosures period
gradually robbed the peasants of their land.
In earlier centuries, while the poor farmers and
serfs were outraged, pillaged, branded, slaugh-
tered by foreign mercenaries, hung in batches
from steeples and gallows and atrociously
mutilated, the Church of Christ looked on,
almost in silence. When hundreds of men
and boys were banished for ever from England
under the cruel sentences of the " Swing Riots "
period the cathedral clergy at Winchester
refused to sign the great petition for a merciful
mitigation of these inhuman penalties. The
traditional memories of this cruel past dimly
persist in our villages of to-day, and were
exemplified afresh when Joseph Arch did his
best to instil some measure of hope in the
breasts of the labourers. This whole-hearted
reformer succeeded in raising wages by 2/- a
week, but he accomplished this in the teeth of
bitter opposition, not only from farmers and
landlords, but from the parochial clergy I
Later on measures like the Small Holdings Act,
the Old- Age Pensions Act, the Insurance Act

ISO PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

have, alas, been received by the vast majority
of the rural clergy with either open hostility
or sullen acquiescence.

How well I remember the case of one Robert
Clarke, a labourer in a remote Suffolk village.
This man — a clever and industrious workman —
had led a local strike in Arch's days, which had
been defeated by the importation of Irishmen.
For this offence he had never been forgiven.
He was refused regular employment by the
farmers, ignored by the parson, and universally
described by the " residents " of the village
as a " dangerous man." As a boy I used to
pay stealthy visits to this Clarke, who lived
alone in a tumbledown cottage, a broken man,
full of helpless resentment. He had striven
for some little advance beyond the miserable
pittance of 10/- a week, and for this crime
he was treated like a social leper. Our vil-
lages in the southern half of England are
full of these humble tragedies. Another

honest man, P , in a Midland village, guilty

of a similar offence to Clarke's, was refused
all employment on farms or even road-mend-
ing. He then tried to make some sort of
living by hawking fish, but bitter persecution
pursued him, and when he failed and gave up
the struggle and died, the village doctor
exclaimed to a friend of mine, " Well, they've

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 181

killed P at last ! " No clergyman de-
nounced the wicked treatment of this man : his
own parson was popularly known as the " Devil

of W " because of his savage treatment of

poor-law applicants. But the case is still
recorded in the neighbouring villages and
serves, like the painful stories of other poor
" village Hampdens," to alienate the English
labourers from the Church of their ancestors.

The rural clergy are usually generous and
kindly men, who subscribe to " charity "
a proportion of their small incomes which
would produce startling results were it applied
as a rule to lay offerings. Nevertheless, they
have in this matter thoroughly confused the
issues. It is not personal charity which the
neglected labourer primarily requires, but
social justice. The clergy are ready enough
to give alms, but they do not challenge the
vicious system of inadequate wages eked out
by charity. " The mistake of the best men,"
says Ruskin, " through generation after genera-
tion, has been the great one of thinking to help
the poor by almsgiving and by preaching of
patience and of hope and of every other means
emollient or consolatory except the one thing
which God orders for them, justice."

But the championship of such social justice
would place the rural clergy hi a " false

182 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

position " ; it would place them on the side
of Radicals and "agitators"; it would lose
them at one fell swoop the favour and support
of patrons and churchwardens, and so they
return to join the great army of kindly and
well-to-do people, the recipients of whose
bounty can never shake themselves clear of
the mire of doles in which they wallow.

There is another explanation of the Church's
failure. The evangelical Low Churchman is
found less and less in rural parishes. The High
Churchman — " moderate " or " advanced " —
reigns in his stead. The change has unques-
tionably been for the best as far as the
Church's spiritual life and activity are con-
cerned. Nevertheless, Anglicanism has never
been really understood by the people generally
or even by those who are specially attracted
by the beauty of its services or the devotion
of its priesthood. As far as the laity of the
National Church are concerned the Catholic
sense has been effectually stifled by the cen-
turies of dull Protestantism which succeeded
the " Great Pillage." The House of Commons
is thoroughly Erastian. I doubt, from per-
sonal experience, if more than a score of mem-
bers either understand or sympathise with the
theory and practice of Churchmanship which
inspires the bulk of our clergy. The Conserva-

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 188

live party are usually regarded as recognized
supporters of the Establishment. But when
grotesquely unjust Bills are brought forward
to evict and imprison the clergy by hundreds,
and replace the stone altar of Westminster
Abbey by a wooden structure, the attack is
led by the soi-disant champions of the Church
and repelled largely by the assistance of fair-
minded Gallios and reverent agnostics on the
Liberal and Labour benches. In our country
parishes a High Churchman is rarely under-
stood and frequently misrepresented. Many a
parish priest recites his daily matins and even-
song in an empty church. In other parishes
you will find the large church a quarter full
on Sunday morning while the rector walks
up the aisle behind a gilt cross and five little
boys in purple cassocks. There is real pathos
in this failure to be intelligible on the part of
the clergyman who from real conviction has
striven to invest his services with a measure
of beauty and diginity.

In summary then, we see that the Church
of England is in a position, so far as outward
circumstances are concerned, of infinitely
greater influence than the Nonconformist
bodies. It has a representative in every
parish, charged with the care of every soul
within its borders. Its ministers constitute

184 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

one-fcurth of the resident landowners of
England. It is supported by the richest
classes in the community. It has inherited
many a building which is not only a gem of
architecture, but is marked by tradition and
situation alike as the centre of the village.
Its political influence is incalculable. Some
of its clergy have used that influence — and
there are those who are using it to-day — to
promote the social as well as the religious
welfare of their people, to form a right public
opinion, and to hold up, against the suspicious
individualism of country life, the ideal of
fellowship in a great organization. And yet
the Church remains out of touch with the
spiritual needs of the labourer. Many of the
clergy have earned his respect, but few his
confidence. Few of them have taken his side
in the questions which touch him most closely.
To him they seem remote ; a part of the world
in which the landlord moves ; prominent in the
Conservative party ; dwellers in large houses.
He is glad, indeed, of the part they play at the
critical moments — at the christening, the
marriage, the burial ; it seems to him in the
nature of things that they should be at hand
to provide these offices. He thinks, too, that
a certain amount of Church attendance, while
it may do him some good, will certainly do

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 135

him no harm. But this is not because the
exquisite liturgies and ancient formularies
adequately voice his reverence, his aspirations,
or his fear. On the contrary, they are, to
hun, for the most part, incomprehensible.
Nor does the service as a whole atone for this
want of articulate expression. Lacking the
social glow of the Chapel, yet shrinking from
the powerful appeal of colour and movement
and sacred symbolism, it leaves him cold.

Nonconformity, too, finds its difficulties
in rural districts. It is true that (the Free
Churches no longer present themselves as the
special enemies of social pleasures. In face
of the age-spirit, clamouring more and more
for happiness and pleasure, the ancient
austerity of the Baptist and Methodist has to
a large extent broken down. The younger
generation of youthful Nonconformists discuss
recent plays and take part in subscription
dances. In one direction, however, modern
Nonconformity maintains consistently the
role of a crusade against popular sentiments,
and that is in its splendid and uncompromising
fight against the power of the Drink Traffic.
The real weaknesses of rural Nonconformity
arise from the financial power of an endowed
and established Church in competition with
its own meagre coffers, its inability to provide

186 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

a resident minister in every considerable
village, and, finally, the comparative failure
of the pastoral functions of its ministers.
For various reasons, good and bad, the Non-
conformist minister does not " visit " the
parishioners to the same extent as a vicar, who
in virtue of his established position can in
some cases demand and secure an entrSe to
the homes of Churchmen and Dissenters alike.
To what extent does the influence of religion
guide the rustic moralist in life or cheer him
in the hour of death ? Such questions are
hard to answer, but organized religion has
failed so signally to support the toiling labourer
in his struggles for betterment that the more
positive and definite teachings of the Churches
have lost the greater part of their efficacy in
moulding the conduct of the English villagers.
When a labourer complained that he had not
been treated with " common Christianity,"
" Christianity ! " said the farmer, " what has
that to do with it ? If you want Christianity
there's the Church for you." The general
acceptance of the doctrine of contentment
and due subserviency to his " betters " has
disappeared with the dame-school and the
smock frock. The poverty and discomfort of
the villages, to a large extent preventable, can
no longer find their compensation in " blank

cheques to be cashed on the other side of
Jordan." The old villager is as a rule without
any great desire to avoid the inevitable end.
Life has never been very sweet, and so death
loses half its bitterness : he is tired and willing
to sleep. The mental indifference to eschato-
logical possibilities which marked the closing
scenes of Bettesworth, the Surrey labourer, is
typical : dimly and dubiously he trusts the
larger hope : he is neither scared into the paths
of virtue by the threats of punishment nor
led thither by hopes of future recognition and
happiness.

In the country districts of Ireland the
Roman Catholic priests indubitably exercise
a powerful influence over conduct, and rural
Britain generally is free from crimes of out-
rage and violence. Economics and ethics are
largely connected. The soberest counties of
England, for example, like Oxfordshire and
Wiltshire, are also the worst paid. Never-
theless no fairminded critic of our social life
can avoid the conclusion that the standard of
sexual morality is extraordinarily low in many
parts of rural England. The Report of the
Poor Law Commissioners for 1834 contains
an appalling description of degradation, im-
morality and semi-barbarism produced by the
rate-aided relief of the period : and there are

188 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

villages in England to-day which are dis-
figured by some of the worst horrors of " La
Terre." Nevertheless, for the stains on the
life of our countryside, for the mental and
moral foulness, due to the gang-systems of
the past, to drink, to overcrowding, others
than the actual offenders must bear a large
share of responsibility before the judgment
seat of Heaven. Those who monopolized the
land, resisted education, set their faces like
flint against Temperance Reform, and refused
to build decent houses because they wanted
bigger interest than 2| per cent. — though
kennels and stables are built at a loss — men
and women who have talked of the rights of
property and forgotten its duties, it is these
who through the centuries have helped to put
stumbling blocks in the way of the poor
villagers and caused Christ's little ones to
offend.

Here and there, it is true, we come across
welcome signs of a change. A feeling is
slowly gaining ground among Churchmen that
the Church suffers from its almost exclusive
connection with one political party and is
humiliated by its alliance with wealthy
brewers. In many parts of England the
clergy must recognize that the people are
alienated from the National Church by that

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 139

obstinate opposition to reform with which the
clergy and wealthier laymen have been
associated. If an independent position were
taken up, if the Church could be recognized as
taking a line of its own on social questions, the
hopes and affections of the people would gather
round her in a way hitherto unknown. The
part played by the priesthood in the agri-
cultural revival of other countries, e.g., in
Ireland, Belgium and Italy, is well known.
Nevertheless it is doubtful if the great mass of
clerical and lay Conservatives will be sensibly
affected by the " forward policy " of the few.
A Church prominently identified with the well-
to-do classes cannot easily ally itself with a
policy of reform, bitterly opposed by many
of those on whose financial support it largely
depends, and this difficulty will be rendered
more pronounced when the inevitable dises-
tablishment and disendowment of the Church
of England comes to pass. Even within the
narrow compass of parochial differences and
disagreements complete independence is some-
times very difficult for an incumbent. The
well-known case of Canon Girdlestone is
typical, for a country clergyman who, in the
event of a quarrel, sides with the labourers
against the squire and the farmers, may find
his position rendered almost unendurable.

140 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

If the Anglican movement which has done
so much to restore Church life in our towns
and cities extends its influence more fully
over the country parishes the best solution
of Church difficulties in rural areas may
ultimately be provided by brotherhoods of
unmarried clergymen, working several parishes
from a common centre.

CHAPTER VII

HOMES AND WAGES

THE general conclusion drawn from a survey
of the preceding pages or indeed almost any
volume concerned with the subject must be
that, on the whole, rural life in England is
beset with many difficulties and disadvantages.
The picture of the English village which has
been drawn is on the whole a somewhat grey
and depressing one, as indeed all pictures must
be which portray the life of the great mass of
the people instead of the pleasures enjoyed by
a minute portion of them. Not only has
chronic discontent come to be regarded as the
peculiar attribute of English landlords, farmers
and labourers, but every political party in the
State acknowledges the existence of this rural
characteristic and employs it as a basis upon
which to build up schemes of reform. The
Nationalization schemes of the Labour Party,
the Protectionist policy of the Conservatives,
the Small Holdings legislation of the Liberals
— all alike take for granted the existence of
141

142 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

rural evils and the justification offered for
rural discontent. Scores of societies devote
time and money to the attempted solution of
rural problems, nor is this unselfish effort
entirely confined to-day to one political party.
One of the latest and sanest of these associa-
tions, the Land and Home Union, with a really
" advanced " policy of rural reform, is presided
over by a Conservative M.P., Lord Henry
Cavendish-Bentinck, has a Fabian for its
secretary, and Liberals on its executive.

The most fertile soil in the world is culti-
vated under social and economic conditions
which are positive hindrances to efficiency.
Vast tracts of land are devoted primarily to
the encouragement of sport : methods of
scientific agriculture, adopted in Europe with
signal success, are with us tabooed from
ignorance or prejudice : our supply of home-
grown food cannot sustain the population for
more than a few weeks. From time to time we
have our writing on the wall. In 1911 and
1912 two national experiences fell to our lot,
full of significance. A speech of the Foreign
Secretary proved that we had recently been
within measurable distance of war with a great
naval Power ; then came the coal strike
which, while its full force was broken by fore-
thought on the one side and mismanage-

HOMES AND WAGES 143

ment on the other, nevertheless — with all
our imports unimpeded — menaced thousands
of our poorer fellow-countrymen with semi-
starvation. If a disturbance of our internal
communications could produce results so
painful and disastrous, we may well stand
aghast at the possibilities inherent in any
serious naval interference with the importa-
tion of our normal food supplies. Few serious
students of rural life can avoid the conclusion
that all is not well with the land of England.
Some will maintain that under existing con-
ditions the improvement of our land system
is quite impossible — that land tenure, land-
lordism, the helplessness of the labourers, the
apathy of the farmers, rule out schemes of
adequate improvement, that it is useless to
put patches on the old garment : the entire
system of existing land tenure must be
changed before agriculture can fully come by
its own. Others put their trust with more or
less enthusiasm in less sweeping reforms to be
enforced by the strong arm of the legislature.
There is something truly pathetic in the
sequence of electioneering phrases which have
been employed, in] many cases with all sin-
cerity, to stimulate the jaded hopes and rouse
the enthusiasm of those who sojourn in our
English villages. There was once a time when

144 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

the cry of " three acres and a cow " had a
definite meaning and had not yet passed into
the limbo of political absurdities.

In the concluding chapters of this book we
propose to deal in summary with various
suggestions brought before the country as
remedies, more or less complete, for some or
all of the existing ills of country life.

Before, however, any consideration of future
reforms is undertaken, the impartial student
of country life must acknowledge the immense
value of two great and beneficent measures
which have become law within the last few
years. The economic position of the labourer
has been signally affected by the Old-Age
Pensions and National Insurance Acts.

The Old-Age Pension came as a veritable
blessing to the poor toilers of the village. Our
villagers hate the Poor Law, and nothing but
starvation will bring them to accept the shelter
of the workhouse. Until the State pension
was granted as the inalienable right of a poor
citizen, the menace of pauperism was always
present before the eyes of something like half
our old people in the rural parishes. One
indirect result has brought much happiness
to the parents of married sons and daughters ;
these old folk have been enabled in many
instances by their possession of 5/- a week to

HOMES AND WAGES 145

find a place at the fireside of their children,
who otherwise could not have borne the
additional expense, but are glad to receive
their parents under the changed conditions.
Where no such resource is open to the old
people, the loneliness of the surviving partner
is very pathetic. You will find an old man,
his limbs perhaps racked with rheumatism,
sitting quite alone beside the scanty fire, with
his pipe and an old copy of the Christian
World. His children are scattered far and
wide and can pay him only rare visits, and
some kind neighbouring woman may look in
from time to time to " tidy up."

The pension has thus benefited the young
villagers as well as their parents and grand-
parents. Outside exceptional cases of neglect
or ill-treatment the claims of parents on the
generosity and affection of their children are
rarely repudiated. Nevertheless, this support
of the older generation often imposed a severe
strain on the slender resources of a young
couple, whose every penny was required for
the maintenance of their own children. The
severity of this economic strain has now been
greatly relaxed.

National Insurance, though at first misunder-
stood and mistrusted by the labourer, will
probably establish itself firmly in the goodwill

146 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

of the village. To go no further, any measure
which frees the country cottage from doctors'
bills deserves the gratitude of the poor.
Formerly in cases of illness the payment of
even the humblest fees formed a crushing
burden on the slender exchequers of the
cottage. Three doctor's visits at 2/6, apart
altogether from loss of work, would bring many
families to the brink of temporary starvation
and destitution. So real was the dread of
these liabilities that the calling in of the
doctor was frequently delayed at the risk of
dangerous and even fatal results. In the case
of childbirth the extra expenses formed so
formidable an item that mothers frequently
incurred grave injury from a too early resump-
tion of home or field work. At present, a young
couple, with, say, a new baby every two years,
may find almost the whole of the contributions
returned for these special needs in addition to
the ordinary benefits of their insurance.

There are two obvious and primary items
in any scheme of rural reform — the erection
of decent cottages and an increase in wages.
But the landowner who earnestly desires to
see the labourers better housed is at once
faced with the fact that cottage building in
the country is, as a rule, unremunerative
business. No cottage constructed of stone,

HOMES AND WAGES 147

brick or concrete can well be built for a less
cost than £140, and the labourers' rent of
1/6 or 2/- a week yields on this outlay a per-
centage so small that cottage building passes
out of the category of business into that of
somewhat expensive philanthropy. In view
of rates, taxes and repairs, 5 per cent, is the
minimum return which will ordinarily be
required from capital advanced for building
purposes : and this means a demand of some
three to four shillings a week — a rent quite
beyond the present means of the agricultural
labourer. Here and there landowners erect
sporadic groups of sound and sanitary cottages,
but in almost every case the actu il return does
not exceed 2 per cent, or sinks to vanishing
point. It is therefore quite evident that the
solution of the problem cannot be left to the
generosity of a mere fraction of our landowners
who are rich enough to build cottages worth
five shillings a week and let them for two.
A novel proposal has been made by the Duke
of Marlborough and others, that as the land-
owner is thoroughly well acquainted with
rural needs and circumstances he should be
employed by the State and subsidized from the
national exchequer on the understanding that
he employs the money on cottage building.
It is difficult to imagine the adoption by any

148 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

Government of a plan so thoroughly out of
touch with the general spirit of modern
democracy. It is certainly true that our
landed gentry have in most cases an intimate
knowledge of village questions : anybody
who has served on a Parliamentary Committee
for some rural Bill realizes that Liberal and
Labour enthusiasts are sometimes handi-
capped in the pursuit of obviously just ideals
by a sad ignorance of rural conditions. Never-
theless the impartial student of English history,
while acknowledging that our landowners are
well acquainted with rural needs, may per-
tinently ask what these experts have done to
satisfy such needs ?

It is therefore the strong arm of the State
which must be stretched out to help our poor
folk in their need. In striking contrast to the
splendid work accomplished in Ireland, the
efforts made in England to meet the need for
good cottages have been extremely feeble.
The administration of such Housing Acts as
have been placed on the Statute Book has been
left to the permissive action of local authorities.
The result, not unexpected t>y, those who have
had experience of Rural District Councils
and the like, has been ludicrously inadequate.
The Act of 1890 resulted in the erection
of thirty-two cottages, and from the advent

HOMES AND WAGES 149

of the Housing Act of 1909 to April, 1913, the
total number is only 470 for the whole of Great
Britain ; at the same time this minute increase
in the number of houses has been more than
nullified, as far as actual accommodation is
concerned, by the closing of 5,486 insanitary
cottages ! The Housing and Town Planning
Act may to some extent meet the necessities
of urban reform, but it will accomplish
little towards solving the vexed question
of rural housing. Take for instance one of
the best examples of building under M/.
Burns' Act in the village of Chipperfield, near
King's Langley. Here, after repeated failures
and rebuffs, Mr. Aronson, a public-spirited
member of the Rural District Council, suc-
ceeded in getting the Act put into force. A
loan was sanctioned by the Local Government
Board and six excellent cottages erected at
the cost of £160 each. There were three
bedrooms, a large living-room and scullery,
and 15 poles of garden was attached to each
house. But the rent was 4/6 a week, an abso-
lutely prohibitive charge for an agricultural
labourer. The Act is useless in the case of the
people who especially need our help. Once
more the poor labourer is left in the lurch.
All that can be urged in support of such enter-
prize as this is that by the building of even

150 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

half-a-dozen houses at 4/6 a week the pressure
of overcrowding is relieved, and that while
the 3/6 people move up to the new and more
expensive houses, their cottages are occupied
by villagers hitherto paying only 2/-. This
of course sounds very well in theory, but the
stern fact remains that in the weekly budget
of the labourers' families in the badly-paid
counties there is really no margin whatever
from which to draw for any increase in the
re at of his dwelling.

The position of the labourer as a rent-payer
is based on no sound economic principles,
but is simply part and parcel of the whole
slipshod system of our rural life. In the past,
from motives sometimes ethical, sometimes
aesthetic, landowners have built groups of
superior cottages and let them at quite unre-
munerative rents. The existence of these
model cottages at purely artificial rents has
really proved a hindrance to the general
advancement of rural housing. " If the money
and energy devoted by generous landlords
to this unhappy policy," says Mr. Nettlefold,
" had been devoted to showing farmers and
other employers that it is sound business to
pay good wages, and see to it that they are
earned, and bad business to pay the smallest
possible wages, good might have resulted

HOMES AND WAGES 151

instead of harm." The provision of adequate
holdings would have enabled these tenants to
pay a proper rent and would have in the long
run borne better results for both owner and
occupier.

Public and private efforts having up to the
present signally failed to remove the deep
seated evils of rural housing some fresh attempt
will doubtless be made on the part of the
Government to grapple with these difficulties
by the employment of State loans or subsidies.

There are two methods of State aid which
are commonly advocated, the advance of
loans on generous terms of interest and repay-
ment, or the simple grant of a subsidy. There
are practical and economic objections which
may be brought against either proposal.
The effects of a loan-policy in England have
been signally disappointing. No such loans
can be secured except on the initiative of local
authorities, who as a rule are at best dilatory
and apathetic with regard to the housing
problem, and at worst bitterly hostile. And,
further, even if the cumbrous machinery is
put into motion and a loan obtained, the rents
which must be charged for the new cottages
are, as we have already seen, quite out of the
reach of the class whose needs are more
especially before our eyes.

152 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

The theoretical case against subsidies pure
and simple is still stronger. To put the
question quite simply, why should a workman
in Wandsworth be taxed in order to provide
a better cottage for a Dorset labourer ? On
what principle do you ask the vast majority
of our taxpayers — most of whom are poor
people — to pay further imposts in order to
better the condition of a mere fraction of the
population ? The stupid arguments about the
use of Norwegian granite and foreign leather
by the State are easily answered by pointing
out that a small body of Aberdeen quarrymen
or British leather makers have no real claim
to extract thousands of pounds out of the
national exchequer for their own especial
benefit.

The best reply to the formidable argument
against housing grants, is that circumstances
alter cases, and that abundant precedents
exist for the violation of a political theory
which from a strictly logical point of view is
unassailable. After all, taxes are levied by the
people on themselves, and if any party goes
to the poll with a clear pronouncement that
the evils of rural housing are so serious a
menace to our national not less than our local
welfare that the general revenues of the State
may well be drawn upon for special grants to

HOMES AND WAGES 155

heal a special malady in the body politic, and
the electorate supports this programme by their
votes, little more remains to be said. Some-
times majorities are willing to suffer. More-
over it is too late in the day for any political
party to denounce the policy of ad hoc subsidies
as such. If a declining population and the
removal of the small garrison produces a
depressing effect on the local trade of St.
Helena, the British taxpayer helps to make
good the loss. British taxes are drawn upon to
provide the salary of an agricultural lecturer
in the Barbadoes. More than £60,000
a year is bestowed upon Uganda, and other
subsidies are lavished freely on the mining
and cotton growing in Nigeria. Five millions
of British money were sunk in the railway to
Nairobi ; three millions have been advanced
to assist cotton-growers in the Sudan. Nor
need we travel so far. The history of our
financial relations with Ireland affords ample
precedent for the employment of the national
revenues for the benefit of a minority of the
population which is too poverty-stricken and
helpless to raise itself to a decent level of
existence. Nor is it probable that any serious
antagonism would be manifested towards a
scheme of subsidies for rural housing. The
relief afforded to the landowners and farmers

154 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

by the Agricultural Rating Act was, it is true,
keenly resented by a large section of the urban
population, but in this case it was held, rightly
or wrongly, that no valid claim had been made
out by those who claimed exemption from
half their rates at the expense of the general
community. The claims of the agricultural
labourer on the other hand are so unquestioned
and his grievances so well founded that grants-
in-aid in order to give him a decent cottage
would probably be accepted if not with general
enthusiasm at any rate without widespread
protest.

The system adopted in Ireland combines the
two policies of loan and subsidy, and perhaps
supplies the best possible method of employing
national funds for the carrying out of a
thorough reform in rural housing.

Money is advanced by the Land Commission
on generous terms — 3J per cent, to cover
interest and the repayment of the loan in
68 1 years. Under this beneficent legislation
more than 40,000 cottages have been built
or are in process of being built. The loans
advanced for these purposes amount by this
time to the huge total of £7,860,939, and as
the rents charged are very low, ranging from
6d. a week in some places to 2/- in the neigh-
bourhood of Dublin, the interest cannot be

HOMES AND WAGES 155

met except by a rebate, so to speak, of some
86 per cent, of the income due to the State.
In other words the national exchequer makes
an annual present to the people of Ireland of
£81,000. The changes effected by this bold
finance are wonderful : it is not an exaggera-
tion to say that the face of rural Ireland has
been transfigured. The neat, well-built, slate-
roofed homes which have taken the place of
Ireland's squalid hovels have given fresh hope
and encouragement to the agricultural popu-
lation and the exhausting flow of emigration
is at length checked.

Why then in the face of these manifold
blessings conferred on Ireland by wise and
humane laws, should the cry of the English
villager continue to be a vox clamantis in
deserto ? The three real obstacles to a satis-
factory scheme of rural housing have been,
the absence of adequate funds, the obstinate
hostility of local authorities and the unwilling-
ness of legislators to alienate the goodwill of
the propertied classes. But power must
inevitably pass from the hands of those who
admit such limitations. The opposition of
local councils who are not really representative
of the districts must be swept aside by central
authorities who " mean business." The solu-
tion of our rural housing problem is a matter

156 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

of vital urgency, for day by day the conditions
are becoming worse instead of better.

It is, however, useless to talk about good
cottages with an " economic rent," or advocate
an extension of the school-age, to men earning
from 12 /- to 15/- a week

What is at the root of their economic misery
— what is it that denudes our villages of the
young and active, that condemns those who
remain to dwell too often in damp and dilapi-
dated hovels, that allows the minds and souls of
our villagers as well as their limbs and muscles
to be controlled by their employers, that
crushes out their independence by a system
of degrading patronage ? The principal cause
of all these evils is simply the payment of low
wages. Can anybody deny the facts ? If we
exclude harvest and hay money — which is
almost invariably extra payment for long
stretches of overtime, and specially laborious
work — and various " allowances," differing
widely in kind and amount, according to local
custom, but in any case a vicious method of
giving wages — the average income of our
agricultural labourers stands at a very low
level. There is then one essential factor in
the betterment of the labourers' lot and that
is — higher wages. If the Government can
help the comparatively well-paid and highly-

HOMES AND WAGES 157

organized miners to secure better remunera-
tion, its strong arm may well be stretched out
to assist the sweated toilers of the country-
side. That agricultural labour may be fairly
described as " sweated " few could deny.

Why should this be so ? For forty years
the wages of agricultural labourers have been
practically stationary. The days of acute
agricultural depression are past, and it is
very unlikely that they will ever recur ; it is
difficult to suppose, for example, that wheat
can ever again drop to 26/- a quarter. As a
matter of fact farmers are at present doing
very well and have been prosperous for the
last six years. At the same time the cost of
living has indubitably increased, and the
purchasing power of the labourer's poor wages
is no longer what it was ten years ago. An
amazing increase has taken place in our
national riches, more is spent every year from
the advancing incomes of the wealthier classes
in luxury and display, and pari passu the
industrial population has gradually and pain-
fully succeeded in making good its claim to a
slightly larger share in the wealth which it
produces. The poor toiler of the country-side
is, however, left out in the cold. The means
which have helped his fellow-countrymen are
denied to him ; his poverty, his lack of mental

158 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

energy, the loneliness of his hamlet and
cottage — all these things tend to neutralize
the value of his citizenship and hamper any
collective effort for better wages.

The case for a legal minimum wage is indeed
stronger than would appear from the official
figures. It seems that the local returns of
wages in cash and kind were very largely
derived from landowners, land-agents and
farmers, who naturally tend to furnish as
high an estimate as possible of the wage bill.
In the case of Bedfordshire, e.g., Mr. Wilson
Fox's figures for the labourers' wages in the
Government returns are obviously much too
high. Mr. H. H. Mann has by most careful
tests shown that in 1899-1900 — and there has
been practically no change since — the average
earnings of the ordinary labourers were not
15/5 as Mr. Wilson Fox declares, but only
13/7| ! Further, no adequate allowance
appears to have been made by Mr. Wilson
Fox for that highly important item, wet
weather, and the sad losses of time occasioned
by this factor hi so variable a climate as our
own. " Hundreds of Northamptonshire and
Oxfordshire labourers," says Mr. George
Edwards, " go home at the week-end during
the winter months with only 8/- for the week."

Owing to the gradual rise in the cost of

HOMES AND WAGES 159

living during the last twelve years the economic
position of the labourer has grown worse.
While practically no change has occurred in
his wages — a rise of 3 per cent, at the outside
— the price of provisions has risen by 10-15 per
cent. The real wages are to-day lower than
they were in 1900.

A minimum wage for agricultural labourers
must be secured by legislation. The principle
of this has already been admitted by the
Government and has found practical expression
in the case of our miners, apart from the
changes effected in the case of certain sweated
industries under the Trades Boards Act.

It is indeed difficult to resist the claim of our
farm labourers in this matter, or to refuse them
in their poverty a privilege accorded to our
much better paid coal miners. At any rate,
it is no valid argument against such a policy
that it is impossible to fix one wage for the
labourers of, say, Norfolk and Durham.
Nobody has ever suggested this ; all that is
required is the fixing of the wages in different
parts of Great Britain by a Central Authority
in accordance with local conditions hi the
county or other administrative area. Mem-
bers of West End Clubs, lounging in arm-
chairs, tell you that agricultural wages are
fixed by the economic laws of supply and

160 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

demand. But no conceivable law of political
economy accounts for the fact that labourers
of Devonshire receive 17/9 a week and those
of Oxfordshire 14/11, all included. The whole
wage system in vast areas of rural England,
where no outside competition is met with
from neighbouring factories, mines, docks,
sea-fisheries, etc., is largely determined by
mere usage and local precedents. And it is
simply due to the lack of organization and
combination amongst our farm labourers that
these divergencies in payment and the wretched
wages themselves have persisted so long.

As a minimum wage for our agricultural
labourers is an absolutely necessary item in
any genuine scheme of rural reform, it may be
necessary to include in the programme the
establishment of Land Courts, which shall
determine the amount of the farmer's rent.
There are tenant-farmers here and there
who will acknowledge that agricultural wages
cannot continue on their present scale, but
they are prevented from putting their theories
into practice and augmenting the weekly
wages of their men by two considerations.
There is the economic reason that they cannot
afford such an increase in the weekly wage
bill, and the social reason that an insignificant
minority of farmers cannot change the

HOMES AND WAGES 161

normal rate of wages against the wishes
of the majority.

Whatever may be alleged to the contrary
by certain economists, the common-sense
view of agricultural rent is that it consists
of what remains over after the labourer has
secured decent conditions of life and a living
wage, and the farmer a fair return for his
energy and skill. We have hitherto in Eng-
land begun at the top instead of the bottom.
Our landlords have to a large extent arranged
their rent-rolls without adequate regard to
the question whether or not the subordinate
classes in the rural community could or could
not obtain a reasonable competency. Some
startling examples of this are, of course,
furnished from the experiences of the Corn
Laws period. When the price of wheat was
artificially raised by heavy taxation, when
at one time no wheat was permitted to enter
our ports until the home price reached 80/-
a quarter, when money was pouring into the
pockets of our landlords, and a large per-
centage of our great country mansions were
built — at this time farmers were continually
driven to bankruptcy by heavy rent burdens,
while thousands of our labourers lived in
misery on 8/- a week.

For the establishment of Rent Courts in

1

162 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

England we possess sound precedents in
Ireland and Scotland, nor is there any valid
reason against such a policy. At any rate, it
is clear that if anybody is to suffer pecuniarily
in the reconstruction of rural life, it shall not —
generally speaking — be, in the first instance,
the farmer, nor in any case the underpaid
labourer. The completion of the Land
Valuation will be a great help in the work of
establishing Rent Courts ; and on the basis
of a living wage for the labourers the amount
of rent to be demanded from the tenant will
be settled, not on haphazard caprice, but on
just and definite lines.

If the landlord complains, as he is sure to
do in many cases, that he cannot afford to
live under a system of reduced rents, the
remedy is obvious. Experience has taught
us that such outcries, even when sincerely
believed in, are usually unreal. How many
country houses have been closed since the
passing of the Budget, how many horses have
been sold (except to replace them by costly
motor-cars), how many footmen dismissed,
how many coverts denuded of their hand-
raised pheasants ? But if the landlord cannot
afford to retain his estates, let them be pur-
chased on the basis of the State Valuation by
the issue of National Bonds.

CHAPTER VIII

SMALL HOLDINGS

WITH the bestowal of the labourers' franchise
in 1884, it became quite clear that the country
districts could no longer be ignored by Parlia-
ment as they had been in the past. Hence
we find from this moment a series of measures,
the ostensible object of which was the pro-
vision of land and houses for the needs of the
rural population. An Act to enable '* charity "
lands to be used for allotments proved almost
a dead letter from the start. This was
followed, in 1887, by an Allotments Act, giving
compulsory powers of acquiring land to
Sanitary Authorities, in whose hands, how-
ever, they were of little avail ; in 1888, by the
Local Government Act which created County
Councils ; in 1890, by the Housing Act and
an improvement of the Allotments Act ; in
1892, by the Small Holdings Act ; and in 1894,
by the Local Government Act, creating Parish
and District Councils. All these measures
were symptoms of a new ideal, held some-
163

164 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

times consciously, more often unconsciously.
Such efforts were, in theory, designed to give
the labourer some interest in the land,
to attach him to his village ; but they were
for the most part timid and half-hearted
measures, some of which were apparently
devised as mere political window-dressing, and
were never intended to effect more than an
absolute minimum of change. The failure of
this earlier legislation was indeed notorious.
Thirty-two cottages were built under the Act
of 1890 ; that of 1892 secured 880 acres
in fifteen years !

Any real " colonization of England " by
the creation of a large number of small holdings
would not be the establishment of a wholly
new order, but rather the restoration, under
new forms, of an old one. To any one with a
sense of history, the transformation of rural
England into a country of large farms, worked
by proletarian labour, is a purely modern
movement. The old social economy of the
countryside, which survived intact until the
middle of the eighteenth century, was one of
small farms and communal agriculture. It
required, no doubt, considerable changes of
form to bring it into harmony with the new
circumstances of the national life. But what
we did was to break it down deliberately,

SMALL HOLDINGS 165

by legal enactment, without building up any
stable society in its place. Our present con-
dition is not, as some contend, the product of
merely economic forces : it is the product of
law, modified by economic forces. The
Enclosure Acts ; the law of Entail ; the law
of Intestate Succession ; the old Poor Law,
assisting the large farmer by grants in aid of
wages ; the Corn Laws, encouraging the
breaking up of commons ; the Game Laws,
promoting sport on a large scale — all played
their part in the long tragedy of destruction.
The central fact in the mind of any Land
Reformer must inevitably be that the monopo-
lization of our English land was brought
about entirely by a long series of legal enact-
ments : the central purpose, that wrongs
inflicted by law can be, and must be, remedied
by law. The advocate of a greater sub-
division of our soil for the benefit of a larger
number of persons, although he knows the
story of the English land and believes that
millions of acres have been filched from
the poorer folk by violence and chicanery,
is yet quite content to pay a fair price
for the repurchase of this land for public
purposes.

Few impartial students of rural life have
denied the existence of a very real desire to

166 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

secure small holdings, or the value of these
under favourable conditions. Nevertheless
the whole course of the movement is strewn
with the wreckage of failure. So deeply rooted
is our national veneration for vested interests,
even when these are founded on past wrong-
doing and present menace to the community :
so potent is the influence of our landed classes,
that no legislation has yet succeeded in making
any sensible impression on the land monopoly
of rural England.

The ignorance or indifference of our urban
populations as regards rural matters, the
open hostility of the farmers, the apathy or dis-
like of landowners and land-agents — all these
factors have been brought to bear against
the success of a small holdings policy. One
is constantly met in country districts by the
assertion that small-holders cannot succeed
in England, a verdict which seems paradoxical
enough in view of the facts of British
colonization. The same people who regard
our village poor as inherently incapable of
managing a bit of land are the first to extol
and even exaggerate the efficiency, and pros-
perity of this very class when it comes to
emigration. These same men, we are told, do
wonders in New Zealand or Australia. They
can earn a good living after stubbing up tree

SMALL HOLDINGS 16T

roots from farms of 160 acres in Canada, but
in England they do not possess enough
intelligence to look after five or ten acres !
To some members of our richer and more
comfortable classes the English poor appear
feeble and vicious except when, by transfer-
ence to the colonies, they are suddenly
metamorphosed into " Empire builders."
Colonials in dented hats and coloured shirts
are constantly presented to us by Mr. Rudyard
Kipling and his school as infinitely superior
beings to the inert and effeminate inhabitants
of these islands : as if, to go no further, the
hard life-struggle of an agricultural labourer
were not quite as " strenuous " as that of a
cowboy or rancher !

But quite apart from colonial analogies,
abundant proofs exist in England itself that
small holdings can and do succeed under
reasonable conditions. These conditions vary
considerably ; and sometimes afford good
prospects of success in spite of the absence of
good soil or a specially favoured climate.
One such factor, for example, is the proximity
of a market ; another, the existence of Common
rights ; a third, the possibility of obtaining
in the neighbourhood some kind of piece-
work, by which the small holder can
supplement the earnings of his farm. Some

168 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

examples may be cited of such varied types
of small holdings.

In 1895 the Lincolnshire Small Holdings
Association leased from Lord Lincolnshire a
farm of 250 acres on the fen lands in the south
of the county — a district rich in its soil but
flat and monotonous to the eye, and inter-
sected, not by hedges, but by the deep dykes
which serve to drain it. They let the land in
plots of from forty acres downwards to the
members of a Small Holdings Club, which had
previously been formed at Spalding among
labourers and others who were anxious to
have a piece of land of their own. The old
farmhouse was adapted to accommodate two
families. The farm buildings (an example
which has been followed with great advantage
in other places) were divided up into no less
than seven portions, the farmyard presenting
a star-shaped appearance with railings which
meet at the pond in the centre. The arable
land has needed no division ; but the grass
has been divided by post and wire fences.
This and other expenses necessitated by the
division of the land have been incurred by the
Association, and have been repaid by their
tenants in the form of a slight addition to
their rent. After nine years, the unpaid rents
amounted to £6 6s. only, out of a gross rental

SMALL HOLDINGS 169

from 202 tenants of £1,323. The most
conclusive evidence of the value of these
holdings is the constant demand for more
land. Concurrently with this experiment
there has been a considerable increase of small
farmers and allotment holders, tenants either
of Lord Lincolnshire or the Holland County
Council. The effect on population in nineteen
parishes round Spalding has been remarkable.
In 1881 it was 38,000 odd. In 1891 it had
decreased, like that of so many agricultural
districts, by 2,282. But from 1891 to 1901
it decreased only by 115.

This is an example of holdings which have
succeeded mainly through the fertility of the
fen lands on which they are situated. Other
examples could be given — that, for instance,
of the strawberry growers at Calstock, in
Cornwall, on the southern slope of the charm-
ing valley that runs down to Davenport — in
which success has been due to the suitability
of the situation for some special crop.

As instances of small holdings which owe
their success to their nearness to markets, we
may quote those in the neighbourhood of
Bath and those in the Dartford district of
Kent, which runs up almost into the south-
east corner of London ; those at Rew and
Winterslow ; and those of Verwood, in Dorset-

170 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

shire, where the small-holders are " squatters "
on moorland which they have themselves
reclaimed.

The small holdings in the neighbourhood
of the New Forest are a striking instance of
the advantage of common rights. These
holdings, on which a whole family can be
supported, average about twelve acres. This
acreage might not be sufficient to support the
family if the stock had to be kept upon it all
the summer. But as they can be then turned
out into the Forest, the holding can be used
for growing the feed which keeps them when
they are brought in for the winter.

The experiment at Winterslow illustrates
the importance of the supplementary earnings
which are made by labour off the farm. The
work in the woods and the industry of hurdle
making provide these small-holders with a
very useful adjunct of profit to their farms,
and this condition alone has probably been
enough to make the experiment a success.

And apart altogether from these special
factors of success, there is hardly a village in
which it will not pay some of the inhabitants,
such as tradesmen, publicans, carpenters or
blacksmiths, to have a small piece of land
within easy reach of their houses. Such
holdings, though they may not directly pro-

SMALL HOLDINGS 171

vide for a larger population, give the younger
generation a taste for country pursuits, and
often enable their possessors to retire from
business earlier than they would otherwise
do, making a partial living out of the soil and
leaving their places as retailers or workmen
to be filled by others.

The usefulness of such holdings, even on
light and comparatively poor land, is illus-
trated by the success of the Norfolk Small
Holdings Association, formed in 1900. Here
three farms, making a total of 338 acres, were
purchased and let to sixty tenants. There
are no special advantages in the way of soil,
climate, markets, common rights or outside
labour. But the land is conveniently situated
for those living in the villages. Norfolk is a
county in which the tradition of small farms
and the desire for the land have survived more
vigorously than in other parts of England.
The experiment has been highly successful.
The rents are promptly paid ; there is no
evidence of tendency to throw the land back
into large farms ; and, if the population is
not increasing, at any rate the exodus is being
stemmed.

The success of small holdings, where certain
conditions exist, has thus been proved beyond
the possibility of doubt. Object-lessons lie

172 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

scattered throughout the country, from York
to Cornwall, and from Kent to Shropshire.
In the rare cases where land divided into
small farms has reverted to large, not one of
the special factors was present which I have
noted as likely to ensure success. Yet these
factors have been shown to be no exceptional
combination of advantages, but so common that
there are probably but few parts of England
in which one or other of them does not exist.
The following extract from the Annual
Report by the Small Holdings Commissioners
(1912) is full of interest as showing what can
be accomplished by skill and industry on a
small holding of only seven acres.

" The land of the district is a loam, varying
in texture from a light, free-working soil, to
a_stronger soil on suitable clay for standard
fruit trees. The land tenanted was bare on
entry, and some of it was in poor condition.
The seven acres are cultivated now as
follows : —

2 acres under Fruit

2 „ „ Bulbs.

1 „ „ Wheat.

1 „ „ Oats.

£ „ „ Clover.

| „ Homestead.

Total 7 acres.

SMALL HOLDINGS 173

" The Home holding (in the village) covers
about half an acre of land. This is occupied
by various buildings, a flower garden, stack-
yard, poultry-run, and a vegetable garden, in
which several fruit trees are planted. The
house is a roomy old cottage. All the out-
buildings were erected by the tenant at his
own cost. They are timber-built and are
roofed with glass, wood, or corrugated iron.

"The tenant pays a rent, inclusive of rates,
of 10 guineas a year for the Home holding,
5 guineas an acre and rates for the land planted
with fruit trees, and 50/- an acre and the rates
for the bare land which he himself has planted
with fruit trees or bulbs. The total rent,
exclusive of rates paid for the seven acres and
the cottage, is £31 15s. 6d. a year.

" One horse — a strong cob — is kept. This
horse is able to plough and work the land,
take the trolley to the railway station, or the
light cart to the market. Hired team labour
is required, as a rule, only when the wheat
and oats are drilled. The whole of the bulb
land and part of the land under fruit is under
spade cultivation.

" The tenant and his married son are fully
occupied in cultivating the seven acres. An
extra man is employed occasionally. Other
members of the tenant's family assist at

174 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

busy times, especially at the fruit-picking and
bloom-gathering seasons.

" The tenant keeps pigs ; but, having no
grass land, a cow is not kept. If a paddock
were available, it would be very convenient
for the horse in summer, for a cow, and for the
poultry, which would pick up more insect
food and be healthier than in the confined
poultry-run. In the circumstances, half an
acre of arable land is reserved for clover, cut
green for horse food in the summer and partly
made into hay for winter supply. The oats
are grown for horse corn, while the oat straw
is cut into chaff. The oats not required are
sold. The wheat is sold, the straw being
carefully husbanded and used for bedding the
horse and pigs and for covering potatoes kept
through the winter.

" Sufficient yard manure is made for the
arable land. For special vegetable crops,
artificial manure is used in addition to the
yard manure.

" The tenant sells fat pigs but retains
sufficient for home consumption. Eggs are
also sold. Formerly home-grown wheat was
kept for domestic use, but the practice of
grinding wheat at the village mill has ceased.
Hence, the flour for home-baked bread is
bought. Substituting for the flour home-

SMALL HOLDINGS 175

grown wheat of a corresponding value, it will
be seen that the tenant is able to produce on
his holding practically all his requirements
for home consumption, viz., bread, bacon,
poultry, eggs, potatoes, fruit and green
vegetables, together with jams, pickles, and
bottled fruits. This is probably equivalent
to half the cost of living. If a cow were kept
butter and milk could be added to the list.

" The tenant grows for the market the
following fruits : — strawberries, black cur-
rants, gooseberries, raspberries (dwarf canes),
plums (Victoria), eating apples and cooking
apples.

" The bulbs comprise about twenty-five
varieties of the Narcissus group and several
kinds of tulips. Beginning twelve years ago
with a small stock in the garden, the tenant
has gradually accumulated a stock sufficient
to plant fully two acres of land. Purchases of
bulbs have been made from time to time, and
the stock may now be worth from £400 to
£500. No bulbs have been sold hitherto.
The varieties have been so selected that the
tenant can keep up, in a normal season, a
continuous supply of blooms for about ten
weeks, commencing at the end of January."

What a signal instance of the real value of
a small farm in the hands of a capable and

176 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

steady man, and despite the handicap of a
heavy rent ! Other striking examples of
successful small-holders are given by the
Commissioners, whose enquiries have resulted
in highly satisfactory reports as to the high
class cultivation of the holdings. Conclusive
testimony is also borne to the sterling integrity
of the average small-holder as regards the
payment of his rent. " On the whole, it
may be said that the small-holders have come
through the ordeal very creditably, and that
their record will compare favourably with that
of the general body of farmers."

Fresh implications for small holdings, which
in England average from thirteen to fourteen
acres, still continue, and, as we have seen,
thousands of applicants are still unsatisfied.
But as regards the land hunger for lesser plots
of ground, in the shape of allotments, the
demand has to a large extent been already
satisfied. That allotments may at times,
e.g., when pigs are kept, prove of real benefit
to the labourer, is unquestioned. On the
other hand, this means of adding to the
labourer's income is frequently precarious
and unsatisfactory. The care and cultiva-
tion of allotments at considerable distance
from a man's home is generally tedious and
difficult, while the rent charged for accommo-

SMALL HOLDINGS ITT

dation land near a town or village is often
exorbitant. Every one knows of allotment
holders who pay at the rate of £2 to £3 per
acre, while the farm land over the hedge
yields from 10/- to £1. Few allotments can
be adequately worked unless the holder gives
up several days a year from his ordinary
occupation in addition to a shocking amount
of overtime after the normal day's labour is
finished. The returns too are often exceed-
ingly meagre. Here are the statistics from
Mr. Mann of some allotments in Bedfordshire,
where the soil is fairly good, and potatoes are
considered the most profitable crop — each of
the two being one-eighth of an acre in
extent.

No. 1 (better land). Average crop, twenty-
seven bushels of potatoes at 2/-per bushel,
£2 14s.

£ s. d.

Rent 084

Manure 0 10 0

Seed 080

Digging land and potatoes 0 10 0

£164

Profit, £1 7s. 8d.= 6d. weekly!

11

178 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

No. 2 (inferior land). Fourteen bushels
at 2/- per bushel, £l 8s.

s. d.

Rent 32

Manure . . . . ..50

Seed 30

Digging land and potatoes . . 50

16 2

Profit, 11/10= 3d. a week!

The general atmosphere of hostility in which
the village applicant for a small holding
frequently finds himself is the outcome of
several deeply rooted prejudices. The land-
lord is, as a rule, far less opposed to the sub-
division of his land than the land agent or the
farmer. Nevertheless, as an ardent supporter
of the Conservative Party, he naturally tends
to regard Liberal measures with suspicion
and dislike, and in many cases he is sincerely
convinced that sooner or later his land will be
subjected to heavy and special forms of taxa-
tion or even taken from him by some obscure
processes of what he vaguely calls Radico-
Socialism. Further, the sporting squire
realizes that extensive game preservation
and intensive farming are incompatible, and
that in general any far-reaching extension of

SMALL HOLDINGS 179

small holdings in England would seriously
curtail the possibilities of sport on a large
scale. In the case of certain land required for
small holders at Piddington, in Oxfordshire,
one of the chief objections raised was that
sport would be interfered with by the creation
of the holdings.

" Up to last year," says a villager in Shrop-
shire, " we have had very few foxes in this

district, so few indeed that has given

twelve acres of land to be planted with gorse
— so we may expect plenty of foxes in the
future." Men wait in vain for land in Shrop-
shire, upon which they and their families
may live, but a breeding place for foxes is
willingly granted.

On the other hand, some of our great
landowners, less selfish or more foreseeing,
sympathise with the reasonable ambitions
of their humbler neighbours, or believe in the
business value of small holdings. The present
Duke of Marlborough, e.g., has openly acknow-
ledged his convictions that there are few
inducements to accept the existing conditions
of the countryside, and that a greater sub-
division of the soil is necessary if the rural
exodus is to be checked. As to the practical
side of the question, there is ample evidence
to show that, from the point of view of rent,

180 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

small-holders are usually willing to pay more
for their land than the larger farmers and pay
it with greater regularity and certainty.

Of far greater intensity than any antago-
nism of the land-owners is the general attitude
of the land agents, who, apart from the general
sentiments of their class, realize that their
work would be largely increased by any large
creation of small farms. It is naturally much
easier and more pleasant to deal with a com-
paratively few big farmers and collect a few
large rents than to be exposed to the griev-
ances and demands of a crowd of " small
men " and the trouble of extra book-keeping
involved in a large number of small rent-
payments.

The farmer, in addition to his innate con-
servat sm and a strong class-feeling in his
attitude towards the labourers, has special
and personal grievances against any large
policy of small holdings. His available
supply of labour is already sadly diminished
in many parts of the country by the gradual
depopulation of the villages, and will be still
further menaced by the conversion of his
regular employes into small farmers, who can
merely furnish him, from time to time, with
casual help. A keener distrust arises from
the fear that some of his farm will be taken

SMALL HOLDINGS 181

from him, as must necessarily be the case
unless the selection of land by small holdings
authorities be strictly confined to farms
rendered vacant by surrender or death.
Even if the demand for additional land
affects only a small fraction of a farmer's
acreage, he complains, and sometimes with
reason, that the area he is asked to give up
is the best portion of his land, the " eye " of
his farm. The applicant has, as a rule, a
keen appreciation of the difference between
good and bad land. He is not going, if he can
help it, to be put off with the worst fields,
" brashy " gravel-soil, heavy " three-horse "
clay, or the coarse turf of marshy land. The
only course is one of sweet reasonableness.
The farmer must realize that minorities must
needs suffer in promoting the common welfare
and that individualism is a declining force
in the modern world. The small -holder too
must submit to reasonable " give and take "
in his demands. Parliament has done some-
thing to meet the farmer's grievances by
granting him compensation for " compulsory
acquisitions " and " severance ; " and the
conflict of interests between the farmer and
the " approved applicant " would have been
greatly relieved had the County Council
made any serious endeavour to build cheap

182 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

houses on vacant farms suitable for small
holdings. In the absence of such houses
applicants cannot utilize land at any con-
siderable distance from the villages where
they already live.

Apart from the question of the adminis-
trative machinery for the creation of holdings
there exists a fundamental controversy as to
the conditions of tenure best suited to these
farmers : are they to hold the land as freehold
owners or as tenants of a public authority ?
This clear issue has unfortunately been
obscured to a large extent by considera-
tions of political partizanship. Ownership of
property in general and land in particular has
always been regarded as a valuable asset by
the Conservative party, whose supporters
have not hesitated to express their confident
belief that a vast increase in the number of
" peasant proprietors " would provide a stout
bulwark against the assaults of " revolu-
tionary " movements. " A war of classes
is being proclaimed," says Sir Gilbert Parker,
a vigorous advocate of ownership ; " a crusade
against property ... is being preached ;
people's minds are being turned from effort
to revenge — to Socialism." This dangerous
tendency is to be countered by the establish-
ment of numerous small owners, jealous

SMALL HOLDINGS 183

guardians of the rights of property and keen
advocates of protective legislation. The
Conservatives have ample justification for
their belief. We all realize the immense
influence exercised by the agrarian policy of
Germany's freeholders. A telegram from
Russia appears in the Times — " Everywhere
the peasants readily avail themselves of the
facilities for becoming freeholders. M.
Stolypin hopes thus to secure an army of
yeomen who shall form the main guard of a
constitutional realm." On the other hand,
some, at least, of those who warmly advocate
tenancy as the preferable solution are no
doubt led to that conclusion, in some measure,
by their social and political sympathies. In
the eyes of these reformers the day of indi-
vidualism is past, and the future welfare of
the commonwealth lies in the beneficent
application of State collectivism : amid the
political atmosphere of Old-Age Pensions,
Free Education, National Insurance and the
like, it would be a sheer anachronism to allow
the evil influence of private ownership to be
extended more widely than ever over the land
of England.

Outside the area of a priori sympathies and
political partizanship a case can well be made
out by each set of reformers. The " owner-

184 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

ship " school can point to the " magic of
property " and the incentive furnished by
independent control. In the eyes of these
enthusiasts, the labourer, once allowed to
own as well as till the soil, develops latent
powers of industry, patience, and efficiency.
** It is something," says Juvenal, " to have
made oneself master of a single lizard."

The advocates of the freehold are also
entitled to point out that at present the
small-holders in England under the Act of
1907 are in reality buying their land not for
themselves but for the Local Authority.
Not only the interest on the money advanced
by the State, but the sinking fund also is pro-
vided out of the small-holder's pocket, with the
result that at the end of the time period the
holding will become the absolute property,
not of h mself or his son, but of the County
Council. This has always been a hard saying
in the ears of our villagers, although the annual
burden of the sinking fund amounts to the
trifling sum of 4/9 per cent. As the Act allows
the sinking fund to be paid by the County
Councils, it is difficult to see why all these
bodies have not followed the example of
Glamorgan and a few other counties
in meeting this small additional burden
from public funds, in view of the valuable

SMALL HOLDINGS 185

land which will ultimately become public
property.

On the other hand, the advocates of tenancy
possess a formidable array of arguments
based not only on future contingencies, but
past experience. In reply to the undoubted
fact that present tenants are really purchasing
the land for the county and not for them-
selves, they point out that the very small
sum involved in this gradual purchase is not
an excessive acknowledgment for the use of
cheap public money by a small section of the
community ; and further that ultimately
the effect of public ownership will naturally
be the reduction of rents.

Further, inasmuch as all existing proposals
for ownership involve the necessity of a
money deposit — and it is difficult to see how
this could be dispensed with — the available
capital of the applicant would, it is maintained,
be more usefully employed in stocking his
small farm than in bringing about the ultimate
purchase of the holding fifty years hence for
a son or grandson. The tenant's security of
tenure is equally good with that of the pros-
pective owner, and he possesses the enormous
advantage of being able at any time to leave
his holding by reason of failure, change of plans
or any other vicissitude which may arise.

186 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

Legislative proposals of the future may,
of course, render the process of freehold
ownership more attractive for our small-
holders, but at present there can be no doubt
that the opinion of practical agriculturists is
overwhelmingly in favour of tenancy.1 The
history of our country too is full of warnings
against the re-establishment of the very
system of small ownership which failed so
signally hi the past. Some of the causes
which brought about the disappearance of the
ancient freeholders, e.g., the Enclosure Acts,
have, of course, ceased to be operative. But
the small owner is still exposed to special
risks of failure. These arise from the fact —
to use Mrs. Wilkin's words — that " land in
small lots is in demand at prices above its
purely agricultural value. The small free-
holder, helped on to a holding at agricultural
prices by State aid, is at the mercy of tempta-
tions to part with it owing to the enhanced
value offered by neighbouring landowners
with game preserves to be kept quiet, by town
gentlemen qualifying for the position of landed
gentry, by the retired tradesmen with money
to invest, by the week-ender on the look-out

1 Of 23,122 approved applicants for land under the
Small Holdings Act of 1907, only 2.7 per cent, desired to
purchase their holdings.

SMALL HOLDINGS 187

for his country cottage. It cannot be denied
that up till now either the temptation to
realize has proved irresistible (as is already
proving the case in Ireland), or, on the
holding coming into the market at the death
of the owner, it has been bought at a price
prohibitive to the small agriculturist."

One of the main obstacles with which the
small-holder is confronted in this country is
the great rise in the price of agricultural land,
which almost invariably accompanies any
demand for private land in the common
interest. By a grave omission in the Small
Holdings Act of 1907, no limit was placed on
the number of years' purchase when land is
acquired for public authority. The result
has been that the valuers, who, as a class, are
largely identified with the interests of property,
have in many cases awarded values which
have either rendered the acquisition of the
land impracticable for small holdings purposes
or heavily handicapped the small-holders by
unreasonable rent-charges. A farm of 153
acres was purchased by the County Council
of Shropshire. The price of this farm at
twenty-five years' purchase would have been
£30 and at thirty years' purchase £36 per
acre : the price allowed by the valuer was
£42 ! Another farm of 110 acres would, at

188 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

twenty-five years' purchase (a high estimate
in itself), have been bought for £28 15s. an
acre : the valuer fixed the price at £47 !
Over and over again, land let to a farmer
has, when used for small holdings, been let
for more than double the original rent. It is
true that in some cases the farmer's rent was
an average one for all his fields, good, bad and
indifferent, whereas the small-holders' plots
were taken from the good land only. But
when we have made all allowances for this
and for a certain enhancement in rent charged
for " accommodation land," the fact still
remains that small-holders have frequently
been exposed through the weakness of the Act
or the unsympathetic attitude of the central
or local administrators to rent-charges so
unreasonably high as to militate against their
success from the start.

It is difficult to see on what grounds the
advocates of the " freehold " solution find
encouragement from Continental analogies.
It is doubtless true that the majority of the
rural inhabitants of Europe own the soil
which they cultivate. Nevertheless the magic
of property has often lost its glamour under
the pressure of bad seasons and the money-
lender. In many parts of Norway it is
difficult to find a small farm which is free

SMALL HOLDINGS 189

from mortgage debts. M. Leconteur, the
French professor of Rural Economy, states
that three million proprietors of French soil
are on the pauper roll, and 600,000 so poor
that they are practically unable to bear any
form of taxation. According to Mr. Rowland
Prothero, one of our best informed writers on
agricultural topics, " the French peasant
proprietor is in general worse housed and
worse fed than the English labourer." Baron
Sournino declares that " in Italy, that portion
of the rural population that does not seek
exile, plunges deeper into misery day by day.'*
In Denmark, the small farmers have incurred
a grievous burden of mortgage debts to the
sum of £60,000,000 — no less than 55 per cent,
of the total value of their lands, houses, stock
and implements. Even in England itself
Mr. Wilson Fox reports that " the general
conditions of the small freeholders in the
East of Lincolnshire is that they are working
like slaves to earn interest for money-lenders.'
The record of the County Councils with
reference to housing demands is equally
unsatisfactory. There has been no genuine
effort to carry out the " housing " clauses of
the Act. The 1909 Report declares that
" very few of the applicants are willing to
move from their immediate neighbourhood."

190 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

One of the reasons at the root of this unwilling-
ness is the simple fact that the applicant has
little prospect of securing any other house if
he abandons his present dwelling. Over
3,000 applicants had asked for houses. In
Cheshire 109 applicants out of a total of 150
wished for cottages on their holdings ; in
Northumberland 166 out of 274, and so on.
What is the net result of this large demand ?
Not a single cottage was apparently built by
any County Council in 1908, and in 1909 the
grand total amounted to seventy-four, while
of these no fewer than thirty-five were built
on a single estate. The figures at the present
moment (1912 Report) stand as follows — 488
cottages actually built in five years. It is
true that no direct obligation, in this respect,
is imposed by the Act on the County Councils.
But what the figures and facts prove is that,
speaking generally, the County Councils carry
out the provisions of the Act in a dull and
grudging spirit, without a spark of real
enthusiasm or any ardent desire to render the
Act that widespread blessing which it might
become in more sympathetic hands.

Cabinet Ministers have referred to the
results of the Small Holdings Act as if they
were eminently satisfactory, and, no doubt,
an excellent case can be made out, if we are

SMALL HOLDINGS 191

content to contrast them with the miserable
outcome of the Act of 1892 — 880 acres in
fifteen years. But this line of argument is
not adequate for the reformer who means
business. The Act in question was of the
" shop-window " type : it was never seriously
intended to subdivide the soil of English
landlords, and it fulfilled its negative purpose
admirably. The acquisition of 155,000 acres
since the passing of the Act naturally provides
a forcible contrast to the puerilities of Tory
" Land Reform ; " but these statistics will,
in hundreds of English and Welsh villages, be
received without a vestige of enthusiasm. It
is, of course, no consolation to an Oxfordshire
or Berkshire labourer who has waited patiently
for years without any tangible result, if he
learns that much has been accomplished in
Cambridgeshire or Norfolk. The one bitter
fact for him is that since the initial meeting
when he was accepted as an " approved
applicant " he has been treated with con-
temptuous neglect. The figures recently
published speak for themselves. What sincere
reformer can be satisfied with such results
and prospects ? " Hopes," say the Com-
missioners, " have sometimes been encouraged
which have proved impossible of realisation."
What hopes, and why impossible ? After all

192 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

the enthusiastic meetings and speeches which
preceded the Small Holdings Act — speeches
by Ministers of the Crown and many of their
followers in both Houses of Parliament — the
rural population was most certainly entitled to
expect a great deal more than what has been
achieved by this measure. Our agricultural
labourers form one of the most neglected
classes of the community. From generation to
generation they have been neglected or misled
by empty promises. Their endurance has been
amazing. They have waited for the realization
of their simple ambitions, and preserved their
souls in patience, but Home Rule and Welsh
Disestablishment and other distant things
have intervened again and again between
these humble aspirants and the shifting
vision of better things to come. Then came
that annus mirdbilis, 1906, and the labourers
were roused from the political apathy which
had followed the enthusiasm of Joseph Arch's
days. " Old- Age Pensions " and " Access to
the Land " became the war cries of those
who felt their hearts touched by the pathetic
history of a Suffolk or Oxfordshire labourer,
and longed to see him freed from the petty
tyrannies and degrading patronage which too
often encompass his career from the cradle
to the grave. Old-Age Pensions, thank

SMALL HOLDINGS 198

God 1 have become an accomplished fact, and
the amount of happiness which can be con-
ferred by five shillings a week may indicate to
the political student the economic conditions
under which the recipients must have fought
their life-struggle of threescore years and
ten. If only our land legislation could have
kept pace with the Pensions Act ! But our
measure of land reform must, alas, to some
extent be regarded as a comparative failure.
It has done something ; in comparison with
former measures of the kind it has achieved
a very great deal ; but its results have hither-
to fallen far short of the level demanded by
reasonable enthusiasm and long delayed hopes.

Of the total number of 23,122 " approved
applicants " since the Act came into opera-
tion, only 12,192 have been actually placed
on the land by the County Councils in five
years ! Hundreds of the original applicants
" dropped off " the list from sheer weariness
and disgust ; at the end of 1911 there were
8,548 individuals and eight associations still
unsatisfied, and the number at the close of
1912 was practically the same (8,508).

Much was expected from the Small Holdings
Act of 1908. It was of course fairly recognized
that the non-inclusion of the County Councils
in the administration of the measure would

194 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

almost certainly have prevented the Bill from
becoming law, but the proviso that com-
pulsion could be applied in the case of County
Councils who failed in their duty helped to
reassure those who had worked for a genuine
instalment of rural reform. Such hopes
have proved illusory, and local Councils
have been allowed to thwart and delay the
administration of the Act or openly to defy the
Board of Agriculture. No county in England
is better adapted for the creation of small
holdings than Herefordshire. Nevertheless
not a single acre was acquired last year
(1912), and at present there exists an unsatis-
fied demand from ninety-eight applicants
for 2,906 acres. Such success as has been
achieved is due largely to the energy of a few
County Councils. Norfolk, Somerset, Cam-
bridge and Devon account for no less than
one-fifth of all the land acquired by the sixty-
three County Councils of England and Wales.
The progress officially claimed for the
Small Holdings Act is to some extent illusory,
for it appears that of the total number of
applicants in the first five years one-fifth have
been provided with land direct by private
landowners, in other words, by negotia-
tions which, however they may have been
encouraged or arranged by the Board of

SMALL HOLDINGS 195

Agriculture, have absolutely nothing to do
with the Act and leave the small-holder
entirely outside its safeguards and security.
Some interesting points arise with regard
to the quantity andjquality of the applicants
for small holdings. In 1908, the first year of
the Act's working, 23,285 men applied for
land, and of this number no fewer than
10,083 were rejected as unsuitable ! This
wholesale refusal of nearly 50 per cent, of the
applicants has not received the attention it
deserves. It is repeated in the figures for
1909, for out of 3,598 fresh applicants, 1,609
were refused a place on the " approved '*
list. A slight improvement occurs in 1912 :
nevertheless, two in five of the latest appli-
cants were refused. On what grounds were
these sweeping rejections made ? Nobody
would, of course, deny for a moment that
some of the applicants may have been
notoriously drunken, idle, or hopelessly
inefficient, and as such most justifiably
excluded from the benefits of the new law.
But pretexts of a wholly different order have
sufficed in some cases to bring about the
removal of a man's name from the list. Some-
times the very natural resentment displayed
by poor men against rough, inquisitorial
methods of gauging the amount of their

196 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

capital has furnished a ground for refusing to
entertain an application. The great majority,
however, of the refusals were no doubt based
on financial reasons. The applicant might be
an honest, sober, and industrious man, but
if he could not produce evidence of possess-
ing capital to the extent, say, of £5 an acre,
the County Council would decline to place his
name on their list. Nevertheless, the case
of poor but deserving applicants was expressly
provided for in the Act, which offered facilities
and encouragement to County Councils willing
to undertake the formation of " Land " and
" Credit " Banks. These banks have suc-
ceeded admirably on the Continent, and also
in Ireland. Yet not a single County Council
in England appears to have made any effort
to establish such a means of providing the
necessary capital for the poor men whose
applications have been ruthlessly rejected.
It is indeed pitiable that under an Act which
was intended to " colonise England " and
" lighten the gloom which had settled on so
many of our villages," nearly half the appli-
cants have been summarily denied any
succour, and have been driven back to the
" gloom " from which the Act was meant to
deliver them !

We must have a new and better Act. If

SMALL HOLDINGS 197

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's hopes and
prophecies are to be fulfilled — if the labourer
is to be given a real chance to emancipate
himself from the quasi-serfdom of his miser-
able wages and his tied cottage — if our young
men and women are to be kept in the country
villages, a much stronger measure of Land
Reform is needed than the Small Holdings
Act of 1907. The Scottish Act has shown us
the right way. In the case of any subsequent
law for the extension of small holdings in
England it is clear that County Councils
must be deprived of the work which they
refuse to perform adequately. Their duties
must be taken by a Commission, presided
over by some genuine reformer who will act
as well as talk — and composed of men whose
single purpose is to wipe off some of the long
arrears of political neglect, and make the life
of our English villages better worth living.

CHAPTER IX

CO-OPERATION AND CREDIT

EVERY student of rural life deplores the
lamentable absence of co-operation amongst
our farmers and small-holders. We still refuse
as a nation to treat agriculture on business
lines pure and simple. Exports have been
regarded as the tests of prosperity in the case
of our manufactures. Our farmers export
nothing ; the outstanding features in their
case is the ever-increasing volume of agri-
cultural imports. France, able in normal
years to feed her own people, has felt com-
pelled to organize her agriculture against the
competition of lands like the Argentine, with
better climates and unexhausted soils. The
use of refrigeration has given fresh impetus
to the trade in imported foodstuffs. Ocean
freights have become so low that frozen meat
can be brought from Australia for slightly over
|d. per Ib. Despite these facts co-operative
effort in rural England is either non-existent
or advancing at a snail's pace. Nevertheless,
198

CO-OPERATION AND CREDIT 199

since the failure of Lord Winchilsea's devoted
efforts, several organizations like the " Wilts
Farmers Limited," and the " East Anglian
Farmers Association," have met with very
considerable success, and it is to be hoped that
the efforts of the State may sooner or later
succeed in inducing our farmers generally to
adopt the practice of co-operation on a scale
worthy of our country. The main reasons
for the slow growth of the movement hitherto
have been the general lack of interest in
agricultural matters displayed by successive
Governments, the deep-seated conservatism
and individualism of the farming class, and,
finally, the jealous opposition of traders and
middlemen.

There is a special reason at the present time
for desiring to see the farmer enjoying the
benefits of co-operative organization. A higher
scale of labourers' wages must inevitably
be demanded before long, and this added
burden would be more easily borne by the
farmer if he was able to effect individual
economies in the purchase of his materials
and the sale of his produce.

The inherent dislike of co-operation is to
some extent responsible for the unfair treat-
ment which, hi the opinion of many farmers,
is accorded to their goods by the railway

200 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

companies. Far more favourable terms for
transit are usually enjoyed — so it is alleged —
by foreigners who send us their produce than
by our own farmers at home. But in answer
to such complaints the railway companies
point out that because the foreigners combine
to send us their foodstuffs in vast bulk, charges
for conveyance can be granted which are
clearly impossible in the case of individual
farmers in England, who obstinately hold aloof
from combination and the joint dispatch of
produce in mass. It is, we are told, out of the
question that ten cwts. of produce should be
carried at the same rate as that charged for
the conveyance of fifty tons. Moreover,
even on the showing of the farmers' own
friends, it seems clear that in some cases not
only the absence of co-operation, but the
absence of good management militates against
a lower scale of transit charges. Articles
like cheese or bacon when sent from Denmark
or America are so strongly packed that a
truck can be filled with the cases. English
goods of this character are sometimes dis-
patched to market in such fragile boxes that
not more than one or, at most, two layers can
be placed on the floor of a truck.

Closely allied with co-operation is credit.
Agriculture in England suffers from the

CO-OPERATION AND CREDIT 201

absence of adequate capital in the shape of
ready money available for special and tempor-
ary necessities. The writer, in the course of
a meeting held to explain the Small Holdings
Act, touched upon the question of the capital
required by an applicant, and was met by a cry
from several labourers present : " Oh, that's
all right, sir, many of us have got quite as
much capital as the farmers." Several of the
farm hands in this parish had managed by
almost phenomenal thrift to save from £50
to £100 ; and they were perfectly right in
suggesting that few farmers had, proportion-
ately to their responsibilities, an equal amount
of ready cash. Most County Councils demand
that a Small Holdings applicant shall possess
£5 per acre of the land required. How many
farmers taking up a farm of 200 acres could
lay their hands on £1000 ?

It is strange that while capital is freely
forthcoming for other branches of industry,
our greatest national industry of agriculture
has no adequate credit at its command. If
a British farmer requires a loan for the special
needs or development of his farm he is too
frequently driven, in the absence of mortgage
possibilities, to the exorbitant methods of the
private money-lender or the almost equally
unsatisfactory help of the persons who pur-

202 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

chase his produce. When Mr. Henry Wolff
proposed some years ago to establish a scheme
of co-operative supply and credit for the
farmers of Sussex he was informed by one of
the most experienced farmers in the county
— " You will never get these men to join you,
they are every one of them on their dealers'
books and cannot get off." The almost
invincible individualism of the English farmer
and curious mistrust of his neighbours which
he shares with his labourers renders the
establishment of agricultural banks on Con-
tinental lines a difficult task. The trader
glories in his credit. The larger is his credit,
the higher is his repute. The farmer looks
upon the use of credit almost as a disgrace. In
other words the farmer's finance is thoroughly
unbusinesslike. He rarely borrows until it is
too late, i.e., not in order to obviate loss, but
after the loss has taken place.

While the farmer finds it difficult to secure
adequate credit facilities, the case of the
small-holder is even worse. " The poor man,"
says an Italian writer, Guistino Fortunate,
" obtains no credit because he is poor, and he
remains poor because he has no credit."
Credit in England is still a virtual monopoly
of the well-to-do classes. To those who have
it it is given, and to these only. The County

CO-OPERATION AND CREDIT 203

Councils were assigned the duty of encouraging
the establishment of credit banks for small-
holders. After five years' working of the Act
not a single bank of the kind has been estab-
lished in England by the agency of the
Councils.

In her general neglect of agricultural credit
Great Britain stands almost alone in Europe.
Even backward countries like Turkey possess
a system of agricultural banks, the advances
of which to Albanian farmers have been
unjustly called in by the Servian conquerors
for their own use. The famous Raffeissen
system of credit banks based on co-operation
and mutual responsibility has since 1849 been
widely extended in Germany, Austria, Italy,
France, Poland, Roumania, etc. In Germany
alone there are 1,700 co-operative credit banks.
A number of agriculturists combine to form
the bank, and the security demanded for a loan
to any member is twofold, the borrower must
be a man of trustworthy character and his
enterprise must be of such a sound character
that there is a good prospect of his success
and his ability to repay the loan. It may be
thought that such abstract security as this is
unfitted to form the basis of a business under-
taking : but any fears on this score are com-
pletely dissipated by the facts of experience.

204 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

The banks have proved a signal success, a
reasonable return on the small capital involved
is secured, and a defaulter is a very rare
phenomenon.

There is surely no valid a priori argument
against the benefits of these banks amongst
ourselves. If sound character is found to be
the best possible security on the Continent it
can safely be relied on in England. It would
be humiliating to suppose that farmers and
peasants in other countries can be trusted,
while our own fellow-citizens cannot. Nor,
indeed, can this suspicion hold the field for a
moment in view of what has actually taken
place in Ireland, where co-operative credit
banks are working with excellent results ; in
view, too, of the indubitable integrity of our
English small-holders proved by the experience
of the Commissioners and County Councils.
Small as the progress of co-operative credit in
Great Britain is up to the date of writing, the
record of the forty-five societies already
established in England and Wales is encourag-
ing. But when one reflects that in Servia
there were, in 1906, including local branches,
no less than 750 of these banks, our national
backwardness in this useful and almost
essential enterprize is certainly remarkable.
We can only hope that the efforts of our Board

CO-OPERATION AND CREDIT 205

of Agriculture will be successful in under-
mining the general reluctance on the part of
our rural population to accept the principle
of personal credit and unlimited liability.

It is probable that two different kinds of
banks may be required in rural districts :
an agricultural bank, more properly so called,
for the farmers, depending on the assistance
rendered by existing Joint Stock banks in the
neighbourhood, and banks on Raffeissen lines
for the benefit of the labourer and small-holder.
In every case it is to be hoped that such
institutions large and small will not be en-
couraged to rely too much on the personal
support of neighbours, however well disposed
they may be. No taint of private patronage or
" charity" should be attached to any genuine
system of " people's banks ; " our country-
side has suffered too much already from these
influences, and though individualism dies hard
in rural England it must obviously yield before
the advance of the collectivist spirit which
more fully day by day inspires the life of our
towns and cities.

CHAPTER X

SOME OTHER REMEDIES

1. — Protection

FOR many years before Mr. Chamberlain's
historic crusade of 1903, the restoration of
protective duties on agricultural produce
imported into Great Britain had been proposed
by the advocates of " Fair Trade " as a
sovereign remedy for the evils of British
agriculture. In more recent years public
attention has been called to this policy through
a series of general elections, and there can be
little doubt that sooner or later when a
Conservative majority is placed in power by
the electorate some attempt will be made to
impose certa.'n taxes on the corn, meat and
dairy produce which reach our shores from
foreign and, perhaps, colonial ports.1

1 The Tariff Reform Commission proposes (apart from
duties on manufactured imports) 2s. a quarter on foreign
and Is. on colonial wheat ; " equivalent duties " on other
grain, both foreign and colonial ; Is. 3d. a cwt. on foreign
flour and meal, an average 5 per cent, on meat (bacon not

206

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 207

It may therefore be fairly held that the
imposition of tariffs on agricultural imports
is at present regarded by a considerable
minority of our British electors as a measure
of real value to the country in general and
our rural districts in particular. However
fantastic this opinion may appear to Free
Traders the stern fact remains that it is well
within the bounds of probability that some
future general election may result in a Parlia-
mentary majority pledged to a policy of food
taxes, and able to pass protective legislation
rapidly through the favourable co-operation
of the House of Lords.

It is necessary therefore to include the
policy of Tariff Reform amongst the serious
proposals which have been made for benefiting
and improving the conditions of rural life in
England, though within the limits of this
little volume this quaestio vexata can receive
only the most cursory and general treatment.

It is as futile for the Tariff Reformer to
deny that taxes on meat and corn are " food
taxes " designed to raise the price of these
articles in the home market as it would be
for the Free Trader to say that duties on

excepted), and 5 per cent, to 10 per cent, ad valorem
on other agricultural produce (the " preference " on all
to be arranged by negotiations with the Colonies).

such commodities will benefit nobody at all.
To begin with it is quite certain that Tariff
Reform would be of real advantage to our
landowners. The ordinary experience of
history shows us that in the days preceding
the abolition of duties on corn, our landed
proprietors reached a very high level of pros-
perity, and in fact the great majority of our
imposing country " Halls " were built at a
period when the price of corn was maintained
by high protective duties. Even since the
advent of Free Trade, while landowners have
in numerous cases shown generous considera-
tion to their tenants in years of depression,
rents have undoubtedly been raised when
agricultural prices improved. It is obvious
therefore that the general rise in the price of
wheat and other produce which would result
from the new duties would be the signal for
a general rise also in the farmer's rent.

The support of Tariff Reform therefore by
our landowners is quite natural and normal.
There is nothing worse or better in a vote the
squire records for a protectionist party than
in his labourer's vote for an old-age pension
party, if both electors are thinking solely and
simply of their own individual pockets. A
very brief acquaintance with practical politics
proves that large numbers of our voters in all

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 209

classes are actuated simply and solely by
" bread and butter " considerations. Where
the sincere Free Trader parts company from
the equally sincere Tariff Reformer is in his
conviction that the enhanced prosperity from
Protective duties of the few thousands who
own and farm the rural land of England is
manifestly inconsistent with the welfare of the
many millions in town and country who are
consumers and not producers of corn and
meat.

It is believed by the great majority of
British farmers that import duties on corn,
meat and dairy produce will, by raising the
price of these goods, increase their own
incomes. In short, the words " Tariff Reform
will benefit agriculture," mean that the
position of both landowners and farmers will
be bettered by the new system. There
cannot under normal conditions be two
widely divergent prices for the same article
in the same market, and the price of all
farm produce consumed by the population
will be more or less appreciably raised.
" Wheat," we are told, " cannot be grown
profitably at present prices ; give us Tariff
Reform and there will be no more conversion
of arable into grass land." It is therefore
disingenuous on the part of any contro-

210 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

versialist to conceal the patent fact that
the general purpose of farmers who support
Tariff Reform is to secure better prices for the
goods they sell.

We might, therefore, unreservedly associate
farmers with landowners as certain gainers
from a system of import duties, were it not
for the following facts. As mentioned above,
any considerable advance in the price of farm
produce tends sooner or later to a rise in the
tenants' rent. Again, the farmer must not
forget that he is not only a seller of agricultural
produce but also a buyer. Vast quantities
of barley, oilcake and other feeding-stuffs are
purchased by the tenant-farmer, and the
increased cost of these must be set against
the enhanced revenues from the sale of his
own produce. On this debit side, too, must
be placed the augmented cost of machinery,
saddlery, hardware, clothing, etc., which must
necessarily ensue from the average 10 per cent,
suggested as a tax on manufactured goods.
It is difficult in any case to see how our great
and increasing industry of dairy farming
could be benefited by protective duties, for
the nrlk trade, of course, does not suffer
from the competition of foreign imports.

It may, therefore, be doubted whether the
actual gains of the farmer from Tariff Reform

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 211

would be as great as is commonly assumed.
It seems probable that if he can resist the
landlord's very natural demand for higher
rent he would in many cases derive some more
or less substantial benefit from the new
fiscal system. Arguments, however, from the
analogy of foreign farmers are not altogether
reliable in this connection. Enormous influ-
ence is, it is true, exerted in Europe by the
" agrarian parties " in favour of food tariffs,
but we are apt to lose sight of the vital fact
that on the Continent the vast majority of
farmers are their own landlords, and the extra
profits flowing from tariffs remain in their
own pockets.

In any case the only absolute security for
increased gains by farmers under Tariff
Reform would be provided by the establish-
ment of Courts which would furnish some
check on the landlords' demands for increased
rent. Such Rent Courts find a precedent in
Ireland, and, quite apart from the Free Trade
controversy, are eminently desirable as long
as the land of England remains in private
hands.

But even if the large majority of our farmers
succeeded in improving their incomes through
Protection, the Free Trader, whatever may be
his personal sympathies with a class of men

212 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

whose industry is exposed to extraordinary
vicissitudes of depression and prosperity,
cannot withdraw his opposition to a policy of
Protection. Despite the fact that agriculture
is our greatest industry, the landlords and
farmers of the country form numerically a very
small class of the population, and even in rural
districts are vastly outnumbered by the
agricultural labourers and other workers who
live hi our villages and hamlets.

To take the latter class first. Would the
ordinary farm labourer be better off under a
fiscal system which, inter alia, raised the price
of agricultural produce ? The ordinary reply
of the more thoughtful exponents of Tariff
Reform would be that (a) the increased cost
of bread, meat, butter and so on would be
very small and (b) that the increased prosperity
of the farmer would mean increased wages for
the farm hand. But there is absolutely no
guarantee that low duties would not be raised.
The experience of other countries points
strongly in this direction, and in our own
midst influential agriculturists, even before
the establishment of a 2/- duty on wheat, are
declaring that nothing under 10/- or 15/- a
quarter would be of any practical use to the
farmer ! And what conceivable guarantee
can exist for higher wages under a system of

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 213

protective duties ? The promises held out are
doubtless quite sincere in many cases. Mr.
George Terrell, M.P., has recently declared
that the " wages of the agricultural labourer
could not continue " at their present figure
and that the one and only remedy for this lay
in the adoption of Tariff Reform. The farmer,
according to Mr. Terrell, would share in the
increased prosperity, and so be enabled to pay
his men better. This optimism has little
foundation. There is no necessary connection
between higher prices and higher wages unless
indeed the workers are strongly enough com-
bined to enforce their claims, and at present
our agricultural labourers are singularly
helpless from the very fact of their almost
complete lack of organized union. " Who,"
asked Lord Goschen in the House of Lords,
" will take the responsibility of saying, ' let
us put a tax on food, and I will guarantee
that your wages shall be raised ' ? I say that
this is a tremendous responsibility, and one
which I, for one, would be most reluctant to
undertake." Wages, of course, have little
to do with the question of import duties.
Depending as they do very largely on the
laws of supply and demand on the one hand
and the power of labour combinations on the
other, it is childish to point to the higher

214 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

wages of comparatively new and " unfilled "
countries like the United States and Canada
and New Zealand as proof positive that pro-
tective duties involve a better return for
labour. One might just as well argue that the
heavy tariffs existing in Russia or Italy are
the direct cause of the miserably poor wages
which prevail in those countries. Moreover
the memory of our own Corn Laws has not
vanished from the villages of England, and
the rustic politician points to the fact that
when wheat was selling at 60/- a quarter or
even more, his grandfather's wages stood at
7/- to 8/- a week. Between 1820 and 1837
no fewer than five Government Enquiries took
place on the subject of agricultural distress.
Farmers, we are told, were crushed beneath
burdensome rents and labourers' wages were
appallingly low. " The condition of the
farmer," said Mr. Chamberlain, " was never
so hopeless and the state of the labourer
never so abject as when corn was kept up at a
high value by a prohibitive protective duty
— when it was 64/- or even rose to 120/- a
quarter." It is of course said, and honestly
said, that no such treatment of British
labour would be possible in the twentieth
century. This dictum would be more con-
vincing were it a fact that any strong union

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 215

of agricultural labourers existed which could
support its just claims to an adequate share
in the hypothetical benefits of Tariff Reform.
No such combined effort on any adequate
scale is to be found at present, and the general
attitude of our farmers is hostile to the growth
of Trades Unionism among their farm hands.
I have often heard labourers asking a Tariff
Reform optimist why if higher prices mean
better wages, not a single farthing was added
to their weekly pittance when in 1909-10
wheat rose to 45/- a quarter and the loaf
to 6|d.

In any case the reversal of our existing
system of free food would be determined, not
by the agricultural population but by the
industrial voters in the towns. The adherents
of a Tariff Reform policy have been driven by
experience to realise the immense difficulty
of persuading the average urban elector to
submit to any imposts, however slight, on his
bread and meat. The artisan may naturally
ask why the overwhelming majority of our
working men and women should fasten upon
themselves an artificial increase in the cost of
living in order to swell the incomes of squires
and farmers in the rural districts. As it is,
he provides the extra taxation required to
make good half the farmers' rates and he may

216 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

sooner or later be invited to sanction the use of
imperial taxation, 75 per cent, of which accrues
from towns, in order to provide better accom-
modation than his own for distant villagers
in whom he has no personal interest. To
such a man, the additional burden of more
costly food would surely appear as mere
quixotic altruism. He is also quite unmoved
by the fervent appeals of great landowners who
demand from the urban populations " willing
sacrifices " for the benefit of flourishing
colonies, whose people are, man for man, far
better off than ourselves.

A more subtle reason frequently underlies
the opposition shown by urban employers to
protective duties on food-stuffs. Starting
with the axiom that low wages are essential
for commercial success, they realise that, in
the event of an artificial raising of the price of
food commodities, an irresistible demand will
be made by organized Labour for a corre-
sponding increase of wages — a serious handi-
cap on industry. Food taxes may, it is true,
be endured by the industrial populations of
European countries whose citizenship is still
incomplete, or of new countries where the
general prosperity is so great that the burden
of higher food prices is comparatively less
noticeable. But the fundamental antagonism

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 217

is still there. " Voila le terrible ! " cries the
farmer Houdequin, in La Terre, " D'un c6te"
nous autres les paysans, qui avons besoin de
vendre nos grains a un prix remunerateur.
De 1'autre, 1'industrie, qui pousse a la baisse,
pour diminuer les salaires. C'est la guerre
acharne"e . . . 911 ne peut pas finir. . .
Si le paysan vend bien son b!6 1'ouvrier meurt
de faim ; si 1'ouvrier mange, c'est le paysan
qui creve. . . . Alors, quoi ? Je ne sais
pas, devorons-nous les uns les autres ! " The
urban population of Germany are only
prevented from sweeping away protective
food-taxes by the existing distribution of
Parliamentary constituencies, which assigns a
grotesquely unfair share of political power to
the agrarian districts. And it is significant
that the great and wealthy United States is
ridding herself of many protective imposts
on food as well as manufactured articles, at a
moment when our English Tariff Reformers
are struggling to reimpose similar duties, long
since discarded 1

2. — Trades Unionism

Amongst the regularly employed workmen
in the kingdom the agricultural labourer has
been for centuries by common consent the
most neglected. Parliamentary help is rarely

218 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

forthcoming in its fulness for those who
cannot help themselves, and the agricultural
labourer has for generations been more or less
inarticulate.

For the most part he does not generalise
from his experience even in private and
individual conversation. Still less does he
put into words, or urge upon the public by way
of agitation, his views or his desires. Genera-
tions of dependence have left him timid and
taciturn. His instinct of combination is
weak. And, except for the one tremendous
effort of the early seventies which is associated
with the name of Joseph Arch, he has never on
any large scale organized himself into any
society or union designed to represent his class.
Thus even his vote has been of comparatively
little use to him. This inability to organize
is the main cause of his weakness. Standing
alone, accepting no help from his fellows, and
sharing in his turn no feeling of solidarity with
them, he is at the mercy of every passing
influence which is brought to bear on him.
The landowners, who loom largest of all in
his imagination, lull his discontent and sap his
independence by dispensing material comforts,
and send him to the polling stations to support
their nominees for Parish, District or County
Council, or for Parliament. In too many

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 219

cases the ministers of religion draw him to
church or chapel, if at all, by means of social
and other attractions. Shopkeepers and
publicans get him into their power by the use
of credit. Farmers denounce his inefficiency,
while they dread his disappearance. He, for
his part, can make little or no attempt to stand
up against the influences that are brought to
bear upon him from all sides.

The labourer's individualism, his failure to
combine with his fellows for the common
good, is an almost inevitable outcome of his
age-long environment. The broad vista of
the open fields, the long distances, the solitary
work, the sense of lonely remoteness when he
is " left to darkness and himself " — all such
influences tend to soothe discontent and
deaden suffering. A sense of helplessness is
engendered by the social surroundings of the
village and his crippling povery ; and so he
endures his lot with that amazing patience
which is his mental heritage from centuries of
neglect and oppression.

The spirit of combination which animated
the labourer of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries was gradually crushed out by the
enactment and re-enactment of prohibitive
laws, and not even the triumphant advance
of Trades Unionism in other departments of

220 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

industrial life has availed to stir the energies
of our poor village folk. At a time like the
present when on every side the sounds of
healthy discontent are surging around us with
immense benefit to the national well-being of
our workers, the voice of the agricultural
labourer is almost silent ; nevertheless the
ancient fires, rekindled in the Swing Riots and
the brief but wonderful success of Joseph
Arch, are not wholly extinguished.

The difficulties of effective combination in
rural districts are no doubt serious ; and they
have been to some extent accentuated by the
compulsory contributions of the excellent
Insurance Act, for no Union can be main-
tained under a weekly contribution of 2d.
Nevertheless, a new organization is slowly
rising from the ashes of Joseph Arch's Union,
and will make itself felt in the coming years.
And why not ? Everywhere else to-day we
find a spirit of unrest amongst the workers of
England, on the whole restrained and digni-
fied, yet definite and determined. The strikes
of seamen, railwaymen, miners, dockers,
tailors, and so on, are all outward and visible
signs of that new spirit which must, and
ought to follow the better education and
wider enfranchisement of a nation's workers.
Lawyers, doctors, and parsons have long ago

fixed their minimum fees, nor is anybody who
gets up at a Church Congress and pleads for
£300 a year as the reasonable income of a
beneficed clergyman described in the Guardian
as an " agitator." In short, masters fix the
price of their commodities, and the workers
will fix the price of their labour. Now, then,
is the acceptable time to extend helping hands
to the poor toilers in our fields. Who will
deny the justice of their cause ?

It is among the sturdy labourers of Norfolk,
a race of men famous in English history for
their love of freedom, that the old spirit of
combination has been chiefly preserved. The
centre of the new movement toward Trades
Unionism is the hamlet of Hempton, near
Fakenham. Here in a single room two men
are working daily for the cause, Mr. George
Edwards, C.C., and Mr. H. R. Walker, the
two secretaries of the National Agricultural
Labourers' and Rural Workers' Union. The
former, who began life once as a labourer at
six years of age, was a colleague of Joseph Arch
in the great village movement of the seventies ;
and it is largely by his unselfish energy and
enthusiasm that the dying embers of Unionism
have been preserved from extinction. The
amount of work accomplished by these two
secretaries is amazingly great. Their labours

222 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

do not end with the close of office hours, for
they frequently, after a hasty meal, hurry
away on their bicycles to a village green in
some remote parish. Not even Sunday is
free, for camp meetings at 2.30 and 6 are held
regularly on that day in the summer months.
The Union of 1872 was inspired by that
religious spirit which has through the centuries
formed a feature of every attempt on the part
of our English peasants to secure redress for
their ills. On the other hand, the revived
Union has learned from the story of Joseph
Arch's success and failure the need for caution
and financial solvency.

The general objects of this rural Union, far
too little known to the public, have been
summarized as follows : —

1. To improve the social and moral condi-
tions of its members.

2. To establish a central fund for the pur-
pose of securing proper representation in
the Imperial Parliament and on all local
authorities and a better distribution of land,
by assisting to provide allotments, small
holdings, improved housing accommodation
and better conditions of living.

3. To secure proper legal advice when
necessary and to shield members from in-
justice.

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 228

4. To relieve members out of work through
disputes and lock-outs when sanctioned by the
Executive Committee or the General Council
of the Union.

The membership of the revived Union has
steadily increased, and most urgent appeals
for the establishment of fresh branches have
been received from Oxfordshire, Wiltshire,
Northamptonshire and other counties, appeals
which cannot be met at present from lack of
means. The branches, it is true, when once
organized, are self-supporting, but for the
necessary expenses of organization it is un-
reasonable to draw on the funds accumulated
from the scanty earnings of the existing
members. I have described the constitution
of the new Union in some detail, because it is
scarcely known to the general public and still
more because it promises to become a very
real and beneficent factor in the regeneration
of rural life. The members of the Union are
recruited from the ranks of the best and
steadiest labourers, and experienced agricul-
turists have declared that they preferred to
have Union men on their farms because they
could usually rely on their sobriety and
industry. Until the Union secures a material
increase in its numbers any attempt at a strike
will always be attended with considerable

224 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

risk. The numerical weakness of the new
Union has hitherto prevented any widespread
recognition of its existence and purpose, while
the facile provision of " free labourers " forms
a serious menace to the success of any local
effort to secure better terms by force. It is
well known that a number of " blackleg "
labourers are " retained " by a farmers'
association in order to be moved quickly to
the scene of a strike or lock-out, and it was
precisely the presence of these hired outsiders
from Cambridgeshire which brought about
the failure of a strike at St. Faith's in Norfolk
in 1911.

Nevertheless it seems clear that in any
widely-developed and well-organized strike of
our village labourers the general sympathy
of the public would be accorded to the men,
and there can be little doubt that if the
numbers and resources of the Union largely
increase and the demands for better condi-
tions of life are not secured by legislation or
concession the prevailing discontent of the
agricultural labourers will sooner or later
bring about a general strike at harvest time,
which would almost inevitably result in the
defeat of the employers.

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 225

8. — Rating and Taxation of Land Values

A new remedy for rural evils has lately
been pushed to the front. The rating and
taxation of land values has descended like
some deus ex machina to dispel the mists which
have so long settled on rural prosperity. One
gathers from the speeches of its exponents
that the rating of land on its unimproved
value is to benefit the labourer, the small
holder, the farmer, and even the landlord
simultaneously ! It is, one fears, too good
to be true, unless indeed it be taken for
granted that in some vague and benevolent
fashion the hypothetical millions to be raised
from urban land values are to be partly applied
to the relief of rural burdens. Such a doctrine
might be rendered popular in the country
districts, but the British farmer, who enjoys
the unique privilege of having half his rates
paid for him, must indeed be an optimist if he
believes that the town populations will consent
to furnish any further help on these lines.

When you ask our " land-taxers " about the
precise benefits which will accrue to a rural
parish from their financial proposals, you are
usually met with such phrases as " land will
be forced into the market," " land at present
neglected in the interests of sport or pleasure

226 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

will be put to its best use," " owners will be
compelled by heavier rates to sell their estates,
and small holders will thus secure the land they
desire." Those of us who want to get tangible
and definite blessings — more money in the
labourer's hand on Friday night, a decent
cottage for himself and his family, a fair rent
for the farmers, public ownership of land —
we are weary of phrases largely based on mis-
leading analogies from British Colonies, and
to a large extent put forward by persons pos-
sessing little real knowledge of English village
life. One would imagine from some " single-
tax " speeches that everybody in the country
is clamouring for a small holding, and that a
8d. rate on the bare value of a pheasant
covert will transform it into allotments.

Nobody questions the sincerity of the
" Land Values " politician, or his ability in
some cases to rouse the enthusiasm of urban
ratepayers ; nor are we concerned with the
policy as applied to urban site values. Nor,
again, are we discussing the goodness or bad-
ness of the existing Budget taxes on Land
Values. The present impost of |d. in the £
on undeveloped land may appear to some as
taxation pour rire, and no convincing reason
may exist for leaving four-fifths of the incre-
ment value in private pockets. The only

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 227

question for the moment however is whether
a method which may be of advantage to urban
ratepayers will do us any good in the rural
parishes. It is not possible to enter here into
all the detailed arguments for and against the
position of the taxers and raters of land values.
But there is one basic fact which must not be
overlooked. The Census of Production for
1908, the last agricultural return we possess,
makes it quite evident that the amount of
unused land in the country is nothing like
so large as might be assumed from the normal
" land values " speech. The land actually
used for agricultural purposes appears to be
47,795,223 acres. There remain, therefore,
in the whole of Great Britain some 9,000,000
acres of non-agricultural land. But as this
includes all land built upon, railways, lakes
and rivers, and holdings of one acre and less,
it will be seen that the residuum of land unused
for any productive purpose is not a very large
one. As far as agriculture is concerned, some
of the 12,800,000 acres of mountain and heath
now devoted to rough grazing with a present
output of 10/- to 12/- per acre, and some, too,
of the 2,781,963 acres of woodland with an
output of 6/- might, under the pressure of
heavier rates, be placed upon the market or
rendered more productive ; but this antici-

228 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

pation is not enough to justify wild prophecies
of cheaper land, extensive house-building, and
better wages.

As regards the arithmetic of " land values "
rating as applied to country districts, it is
difficult to obtain any precise or authoritative
statements about the actual amount of the
proposed rate or tax. It may, of course,
be urged that until the value of the land is
ascertained by the Government Commissioner
definite figures as to the amount of the rate
are impossible. But an estimate of site
value is not so difficult a matter as some
would have us believe, and the generally
accepted total of 3,000 millions as the site
value of the land in the United Kingdom is,
perhaps, not very wide of the mark. If this
value is to provide the " sole basis " for
rating (as stated in a resolution passed at a
recent Land Values Conference) a rate of 8d.
in the £ is required to meet the 100 millions
represented by existing local rates plus Govern-
ment grants in aid. Sometimes a lower rate
of 3d. is suggested, at other times a penny
rate.

Some examples are here given of the manner
in which such rating would operate in the
case of agricultural land, the instances being
taken from a number of bona-fide returns.

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 229

+++++ 1 +++ 1 1 1+ 1 1 ++++ 1 1

3 .

'3 ®

a

3

Rateable
value.

Propert

ription

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1
"f

I 3

230 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

Is this, then, the golden remedy for low
wages and bad houses ? Who is going to pay
the vastly increased imposts on rural farm-
lands ? If the farmer is to shoulder the new
burdens, how can he afford the better wages
urgently needed for his labourers ? If the
landlords pay the rates without foisting them
upon the tenant (a most improbable con-
tingency), how are they to accept less rent,
which in many cases they must do if the
labourers are to have decent wages ? And
what has happened to the coverts ? Will
any man who can afford to hunt or shoot shut
up his woods because of an increased tax of
£11 14s. 8d. on 327 acres — about the cost of
rearing a couple of dozen pheasants ? If on
the other hand, the 3d. or Id. rates are levied
the sporting landlord in the above instance
actually pays less under the new than under
the old system — a strange reductio ad
absurdum ! Notice in any case that the
burdens on the farms, market gardens, and
allotments are increased. No, our villages
need something better, more definite, more
tangible than any mere alteration in our
rating system. The labourers are tired of
waiting, and they are not going to allow
practical reforms to be side-tracked by such
nebulous remedies as the " forcing of the land

SOME OTHER^ REMEDIES 231

into the market " and hypothetical remissions
of existing taxation. Railway men and
miners were not diverted from their successful
pursuit of better wages and better conditions
by any shifting visions of a land-tax mil-
lennium. " Cut your cackle and give us more
wages — it's the rivets we're after," says a
working man in Seems So. The members of
the Agricultural Labourers Union know what
they need. They demand a living wage and
a decent cottage, and greater facility in the
acquisition of small holdings at a reasonable
rent. They do not include in their programme
the rating of " unimproved land " values in
rural districts.

4. — Land Nationalization

The most drastic remedy offered for rural
ills is that of Land Nationalization. This
proposal has received the stamp of approval
not only from professed Socialists but also
from a considerable body of our more advanced
Radicals both inside and outside the House
of Commons. The Land Nationalizer will
argue that his policy alone is really adequate
to cope with the evil conditions of agricultural
England. According to him the entire system
of private land-ownership embodies so many
defects that measures such as Rent Courts

232 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

or Small Holdings Acts can merely serve as
palliatives. The unhealthy growth of greed,
monopoly and social arrogance on the one
side, and on the other dependence and poverty
in varying degrees, is so deeply rooted in the
past that complete eradication is necessary.
The Squire's rule, which individual caprice
could always employ as an engine of cruelty
and oppression, has from the increased
appropriation of the soil by wealthy outsiders
gradually lost any good influences it ever
possessed. The whole system of individual
ownership in the country's soil must be
destroyed.

The two main methods suggested for
securing State ownership of the soil are (a)
the direct purchase of estates at a fair and
reasonable price, or (b) the conversion of
privately-owned land into State property by
means of a gradually increasing tax, up to
20/- in the £, on the " unimproved value "
of the land.

The second of these proposals has already
been noticed in dealing with the rating of
land values. As regards the first of them,
which in general appeals to the national
sense of fair play and has some kind of pre-
cedent in the great Conservative measure of
Irish Land-Purchase, the actual price of the

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 233

State-acquired land may be either paid in
ordinary and perpetual Government bonds, or
in annuities terminable after a certain period.
In the former case it has been doubted whether
on the whole the benefit secured to the com-
munity would be worth the trouble and irri-
tation occasioned by its acquisition. In
other words, could the State make the land
pay more than sufficient to meet the payment
of interest on its land-bonds ? To nationalize
land, minerals or railways in the early days of
a young country is an obvious and lucrative
policy, but the case assumes a very different
complexion when a similar attempt is made
in the case of a country like Great Britain,
where vast enterprises and resources have for
many generations been permitted to exist as
the property of individual citizens. Never-
theless it may be the case that even under the
liability of providing a fair return for vested
interests the public ownership of an English
soil would well repay the bold statesmanship
which succeeded in carrying such a policy to
a successful issue. The economic waste of our
agricultural resources, which at present strikes
every thoughtful foreigner, would necessarily
be impossible under State ownership directly
controlled by public opinion. No one can
rejoice more sincerely than the present writer

234 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

in the pleasures of shooting or fishing, but
every sportsman must acknowledge that first-
class sport and scientific farming are not easily
compatible, and that no progressive nation
can permanently permit the best and most
complete use of the nation's land to be
subordinated to the interests of a handful of
the population. Scientific methods, there-
fore, and the cultivation of vast tracts of
land which are at present partly or wholly
neglected for the benefit of sportsmen would
without doubt increase the output of our
fertile soil, and a substantial margin of profit
would accrue from the national management
of the nation's acres. In any case the entire
increment in the value of English land which,
apart from any vast and unexpected catas-
trophe in the national welfare, is certain to
continue, would fall into the national coffers.
The difference between the acquisition of the
whole increment value and that of one-fifth
as at present would be so vast that here again
it would appear that the nationalization of
the land by direct purchase would pay well on
a strictly business footing.1 Such a result

1 The Official Valuation of the land now proceeding
(1912) will provide a just basis for national purchase.
The increment in the value of our land is a constant
factor in our history : from 1692 to 1884 the value of our

would, of course, be more certainly and
speedily brought about if payment were made
to the dispossessed landowner by annuities,
which would automatically cease after, say,
the lapse of a century. The opposition to this
latter proposal would be diminished from the
fact that it is difficult to feel much personal
interest in the future of invisible and prob-
lematic great-grandchildren ; but this argu-
ment cuts both ways, for the taxpayer of
to-day may equally argue that it is unfair
that he should burden himself with the pay-
ment of annuities which will bestow the
freehold of the English land on unborn
generations in the far-off future. Even the
mediaeval benefactors and founders of our
ancient colleges and almshouses were pro-
viding for their contemporaries, nor was
their generosity chilled by the prospect of a
century's postponement of any realized
benefit.

It may, however, be urged against those who
advocate purchase by terminable annuities
that even if the confiscation is postponed in
this case it nevertheless takes place. How-
land increased eighteen-fold ; between 1842 and 1881 it
doubled itself. This estimate covers rural as well as urban
values; if we take the latter alone the extent of the
increment is still more striking.

236 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

ever unjustifiable may have been the method
by which private ownership was originally
established it is nowadays a grotesquely
unfair thing to draw a sharp line of demarca-
tion between landed and other property, and
to declare or insinuate that the present owners
of land have little moral right to it. No
fair analogue exists between the tied-house
property of brewers and the land possessed
by men whose legal title to it has never been
questioned. The Drink Traffic is admittedly
one of serious menace to the national welfare
which must be controlled in the public
interest, nor had the claim of the brewers to a
freehold in the State-granted licences ever
been legally admitted until the Act of 1904.

The proposal therefore to grant a com-
pensation time-limit of fourteen or twenty-one
years to the Trade cannot be regarded as a
parallel to a precedent for the cessation of land
annuities after a period of 70-100 years.
If however the nation saw fit to reject the
idea of terminable annuities, the entire land
of Great Britain could be secured for the State
by the straightforward issue of land bonds
bearing interest at 4 per cent, on the selling
price of the land acquired. A clear and
assured 4 per cent, would be welcome to most
landlords, especially those who own rural

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 237

acres. The interest on these securities would
be amply met by the increment on land values
and the rent payable to the State by the
tenant. And further a systematic redemption
at par would, it is calculated, extinguish the
land bond altogether in sixty-seven years,
thus leaving the State not only with a con-
siderable and increasing balance to the good
each year, which could be used for the
reduction of existing taxes or other national
objects, but would hand over to our successors
the entire possession of then* country's land
to be used for their country's good.

The overwhelming advantages of public
landownership may be summarized as follows.
Land would be accessible to all suitable appli-
cants apart from all question of the personal
favouritism of individual landlords. The
State would have no greater interest in the
political or religious views of its tenant-farmers
than in those of its policemen or postmen.
Full security of tenure would be enjoyed and
public opinion would soon demand not only
decent wages for our labourer but Fair Rent
Courts to determine that the farmer should
receive a reasonable and adequate return for
his outlay and industry. Public opinion
would further insist that the national land
should be put to the best purposes, and no

238 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

land would, as now to so large an extent, be
unreasonably withheld from use, with the
speculative object of subsequently securing a
much higher price. Housing on a large scale
would be infinitely more feasible if the popu-
lations of our towns themselves possessed the
required sites for more and better houses.

For the same reason schemes of afforestation
and land reclamation could be carried through
without any hindrance from those which at
present hamper such enterprise. Finally the
large reserves increasing year by year would
sooner or later be adequate not only to pay
interest and redeem bonds but to be applied
to the reduction of existing imposts or to fresh
schemes of public utility.

There is of course one strong a priori argu-
ment which can be alleged against all schemes
of land-nationalization. The national owner-
ship of the means of production and distribu-
tion is in its essence a Socialist proposal, and as
such vigorously opposed by no inconsiderable
section of the public. So carefully has this
antipathy to Socialism been fostered from
various motives, good and bad, that the mere
description of any measure by the term
" Socialistic " is apparently enough to damn it
altogether in the eyes of many Englishmen. It
is simply amazing that so large a section of our

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 239

fellow-countrymen should be quite ignorant
of the meaning of current political terms. I
well remember a group of educated men and
women laughing heartily at a definition of a
" Protestant " given by a Spanish peasant as
a man who " shut himself up in a room with a
Crucifix and flogged it." But there is less
excuse for the current failure on the part of
well-to-do men and women in our clubs
and drawing-rooms to even understand the
elementary meaning of such a political theory
as Socialism.

Persons who protest against land-national-
ization on the grounds that it is novel and
" Socialistic," seem oblivious to the fact that
even at present and through the agency of
successive Governments of both parties they
are living to a large extent in a Socialist
environment. The English State sends our
letters, telephones, telegrams, educates and,
in some cases, feeds the nation's children,
pensions off our old citizens and insures our
workers against sickness and unemployment.
In the eyes, therefore, of thoughtful citizens
who rejoice in the beneficent exercise of the
State management already experienced there
can be no sound a priori reason against the
collective ownership and control of the
nation's land or the nation's railways. The

240 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

principle has been definitely acknowledged
and accepted in cases of the acquisition of land
by municipalities, and further in the powers
conferred upon County Councils in the Small
Holdings Act of 1908 to acquire by purchase
such land as they require with a view to its
permanent retention by the public authority
as the inalienable property of the community.
The later phase of land legislation of Ireland,
though it employed the mechanism of State
purchase, had little in common with the ideal
of land nationalization, for the farms and
holdings which were secured were not retained
by the public authorities, but handed over to
individual occupiers through the gradual
repayment by easy stages of the purchase
money and its interest.

Other arguments ordinarily advanced in
defence of the existing condition of land tenure
are as follows. The entire structure of rural
life would, it is alleged, be subverted by the
disappearance of the landlord. The happy
relations hitherto prevailing between the Hall,
the farm, the Rectory and the cottage would
necessarily disappear in a cataclysm which
robbed such feudal conditions of all real
meaning by converting the land into the
property of the community. It is constantly
maintained too that the farmer would be far

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 241

worse off as a tenant of State land, for in times
of exceptional stress and difficulty he can
usually reckon on generous treatment at the
hands of a sympathetic landlord, whereas the
State could not afford to make reductions and
allow abatements in the rent due to the public
exchequer. And apart from the farmers,
what would happen to the whole kindly system
of individual charity which flourishes in our
village communities ? The spirit of Noblesse
oblige attaching to the ownership of the soil is
the source of a welcome stream of effort and
outlay which goes far to render village life
delectable. The soup-kitchen, the reading-
room, the clothing club would run a grave
risk of collapse if the squire no longer walked
over his own land. A clergyman in Oxford-
shire recommended a landowner politician to
the suffrages of his flock on the ground that the
candidate was " a jolly good friend to the
parish." This friendship would be seriously
undermined if the landlord in question, though
his bank balance remained intact, became
nevertheless a trespasser on the fields he
formerly owned.

Other arguments against schemes of public
land-ownership are felt not less keenly than
those mentioned above though they are
seldom alluded to coram populo. The sever-

242 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

ance of our landed gentry from the private
ownership of their estates would at one blow
deprive them of all the social and political
influence which now attaches to the possession
of land in this country. The initial control
exercised in some cases over the political
attitude of tenants and labourers, the claims
put forward on the ground of a special " stake
in the country," the social futility of people
" belonging to the county " when the county
no longer belongs to them — such considera-
tions, however trivial they may appear in the
eyes of a detached student of economics or
urban politician, will stimulate the land-
owners of England in their last and unavailing
resistance to democratic progress. Nor must
one overlook the enormous extent and influ-
ence of sport in rural life in England. Against
any sudden assault on the private ownership
of land a solid wall of prejudice would be
erected by appeals to the sport-loving instincts
of our countrymen. The importance of hunt-
ing and shooting in the eyes of some country
residents is amazing : in some cases they
absorb the main energies of a man's life-
time and provide almost the entire material
for the record of his career. The desire to
secure good sport frequently acts as the
strongest safeguard against the sale of agricul-

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 243

tural estates, which for various reasons may
have ceased to be financially or socially
attractive to the owners. Nor are such appre-
hensions on behalf of country sport confined
to the landowners. A very considerable
number of our English farmers are genuine
lovers of sport, who occasionally ride to hounds
and frequently " walk up " their rabbits, or
sometimes enjoy by permission or invitation
a shoot over the turnips and stubble or a day
round through the coverts. Vast sums of
money are spent on country sport. The
words " Up goes a guinea, off goes a penny,
down comes half-a-crown " are not a wholly
inaccurate summary of the finance of first-
class pheasant or grouse shooting. Some-
thing like a million sterling must be spent on
the upkeep of the 176 packs of foxhounds in
England alone, apart from the vast sums
expended on wages and fodder. In the face
of even so moderate a demand as the
valuation of English land impassioned
appeals were made to the farmers to resist
insidious attempts to destroy English sport
and the circulation of money caused by
such sport in rural districts. What would
happen when a Government boldly declared
for State purchase on a large scale of our
rural estates ?

244 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

Let nobody, therefore, underrate the diffi-
culties which confront the efforts of those who
seek to secure the nation's land for the nation's
use. We have seen the power of resistance
which can be offered by the vested interests
of the Drink Trade ; these are as nothing to
the fight which will be put up by the land-
owners of the country when the inevitable
conflict comes to pass.

One thing is certain. In any great scheme
of land acquisition by the State a large expen-
diture would be required not merely for actual
purchase but for improvement. There would
have to be a general " cleaning up " of our
farm land, and just as the Scottish landowners
of the eighteenth century followed the best
contemporary methods of Dutch agriculturists
England might be well advised to enlist the
help of Continental experts in the task of
making British agriculture what it ought to be.
The Danish farmer who, with an inferior soil
and climate, is to-day producing more bushels
of wheat per acre than ourselves, stands
amazed at the careless and slipshod methods
employed in many agricultural districts.1

» In Denmark there are Government officials called
Konsulente," who not only bring to the farmer's know-
ledge the best and latest scientific methods, but assist
him to utilize these in practice

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 245

The useless hedges, the ditches choked with
rubbish and weeds, the rudimentary draining,
the shocking waste of good manure and the
prevailing filth of many farm yards, the
inadequate and dilapidated buildings, the
encouragement of vermin and the breeding
of foxes — all such defects show only too plainly
how amazingly slow under existing conditions
has been the progress of British agriculture.

There are, of course, exceptions in the case
of such general criticisms. Scientific farming
makes headway here and there, though sorely
hampered by the insecurity of tenure — for
the yearly tenancy is typical of English farm-
ing and almost peculiar to it in Europe — and
the lack of capital and credit.

The most astonishing results have been
achieved by the use of chemical manures.
Professor Long has received testimony from
Wiltshire, Hampshire and the Midland counties
as to the vast increase in value due to
the judicious application of these manures.
One farmer writes " On land, about 100 acres,
growing coarse herbage, which neither horses,
cattle nor sheep would eat, I have now a
beautiful plant of clover. Formerly worth
2/6 an acre, it is now worth 20/-." In the case
of a high chalk hill in Hampshire we learn
that " On one piece of ninety acres, almost

246 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

worthless, the effect is wonderful, and can
be seen for miles ; the results in feeding
stock are most marked, not only in the
increase of growth, but in the quality of the
grass."

The fiscal difficulties in the way of extensive
land purchase by the State would disappear if
British Cabinets seriously applied themselves
to the task. But for this purpose a radical
change must take place in our political outlook.
We must realize that in no direction could the
nation find a better use for its spare wealth than
in buying the land of our own country. In
seven years, 1906-1913, over a hundred
millions of national debt has been paid off.
Had we employed all or even a portion of this
immense sum to secure vast tracts of national
land at a fair and reasonable price, fixed by
the Government's valuation, we should have
benefited posterity to a far greater extent
than by a mere reduction of the interest to be
paid by future generations. The develop-
ment of our soil on a basis of solid business,
freed altogether from the fatal interference
of " sport " or else deriving a handsome return
from its privileged continuance within care-
fully maintained limits — such a policy would
help to banish unemployment, render our
population less dependent on sea-borne food,

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 247

and give an impetus to the home markets
almost inconceivable under the existing
conditions of agricultural lethargy. In the
United Kingdom between sixteen and seven-
teen million acres of land lie idle. An area
larger than the cultivated acreage of Den-
mark, Belgium and Holland is wholly unused,
most of which is capable of useful cultivation.
If the taxpayer accepts the principle of invest-
ments in the Suez Canal, in Sudan cotton, in
Uganda Rail ways, or the vast expenditure of the
South African war, he need have no theoretical
misgivings about the wise and productive out-
lay of the nation's money on the sound security
of the nation's land. Rural Reform will have
advanced far beyond the timid essays of the
past when the wholesale purchase of agri-
cultural land appears as a permanent feature
in our annual Budgets.

I am writing these concluding paragraphs
on a hillside in Buckinghamshire, surrounded
by those delights of an English landscape
which charm the eye, but sadden the heart
of all who really know the inner life of our
villages. The very scenes which find special
favour in the sight of the sportsman or the
tourist bring thoughts of pity and regret to

248 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

those who look for truth and reality beneath
the pleasant surface of the view. The hill on
which I write is covered by thin, worthless
grass, and short scrub — useless, amid utter
neglect, for man or beast ; below, some forty
acres of good pasture land are reserved for
golf ; on every side trees grow singly in most
haphazard fashion. Further away compact
woods form coverts for thousands of pheasants,
and in the distance lies the beautiful vale of
Aylesbury, controlled by a great landlord.
The eye may range for miles with scarcely the
sight of a human habitation, and the chief
relaxation of the ill-paid labourer is, appar-
ently, to witness the pursuit of a tame stag by
persons who spend far more on one day's run
than his entire weekly wages.

How long will England tolerate such misuse
of her fertile soil ? The life of the few in such
an environment as that which lies around me
is full of pleasant things : the truer life of
the country — that of those who till the soil
and feed the nation — is moribund. Who shall
deliver us from the body of this death ? The
splendid ideals of Liberalism are too often
neutralized by the personal wealth or selfish
ambition of its representatives, the cautious
concessions of Toryism have no more effect on
the maladies of our land system than a gift of

SOME OTHER REMEDIES 249

flowers in a cholera camp ; the Labour Party
has no foothold in the average village.

When in the fulness of time some great
statesman comes forward armed with full
power and authority to demand a surrender
of their stewardship from those who have
misused their trust, great will be his oppor-
tunity and great his reward. Few can suppose
that a system so deeply embedded in our
history and traditions can be hastily uprooted,
but on the other hand few impartial students
of our rural conditions can avoid the con-
clusion that the day for palliatives is drawing
to a close, and that private control of land is
our Carthage to be destroyed. Public owner-
ship is, indeed, the only policy which will
finally and completely cleanse that Augean
stable, our present Land System, of the feudal
arrogance, privilege, intimidation, and selfish
greed which have shaped the cruel history of
rural England. So, for the time being, let
every opportunity be taken to extend the
principle of collective ownership, timidly put
forward in the Small Holdings Act, until the
broad and fertile acres of our country are
wholly used in the best interests of the nation
which owns them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The student of questions connected with rural life in
England may find useful material in the following : —

ABCH, JOSEPH. — The Story of his Life : told by himself.
1898.

ARONSON, H. — Our Village Homes. 1913.

ASHBY and KING. — Statistics of some Midland Villages.

BUXTON, C. RODEN. — Minimum Wages for Agricultural
Labourers. (Cont. Rev., August, 1912.)

COLLTNQS, RT. HON. JESSE. — Land Reform. 1908,
Cox, HAKOLD. — Nationalization and Land Taxation.

CURTLER, W. H. R. — A Short History of English Agri-
culture. 1909.

DA VIES, M. F. — Life in an English Village. 1909.

FORDHAM, M. — Mother Earth : A Proposal for the Per-
manent Reconstruction of our Country Life. 1908.

CONNER, E. C. K. — Common Land and Enclosures. 1912.
GREEN, F. E. — The Tyranny of the Country Side. 1913.
HAGGARD, H. RIDER. — Rural England. 1906.

HAMMOND, J. L. le B.— The Village Labourer (1760-1832).
1911.

HASBACH, W. — A History of the English Agricultural
Labourer (translated by Miss Kenyon). 1908.

HEATH, F. G. — The English Peasantry. 1874. British
Rural Life and Labour. 1911.
251

252 BIBLIOGRAPHY

HYDBE, J. — The Case for Land Nationalization. 1913.

JEBB, L. (Mrs. ROLAND WILKINS). — The Smatt Holdings
of England. 1907. The Small Holdings Con-
troversy : Tenancy v. Ownership. 1909. Co-opera-
tion in the Tenure of Smatt Holdings. 1910.

JOHNSON, A. H. — The Disappearance of the Smatt Land-
oumer. 1909.

KEBBELL, T. E. — The Agricultural Labourer. 1907.

Land Enquiry Committee's Report. Vol. I. 1913.
(Issued too late for use in this book.)

DE LAVELEYE. — History of Landed Property in England
(translated by MARY THORP). 1898. A chapter
from De la Propriety et ses Formes Primitives.

LEVY, HERMANN. — Large and Smatt Holdings : a Study
of English Agricultural Economics. (Translated by
Miss Kenyon, with additions.) 1911.

LONG, JAMES. — Making the Most of the Land. 1913.
Smatt Holdings. 1913.

LUMSDEN, JAMES. — Our National Food Supply. 1912.

MANN, H. H. — Life in an Agricultural Village (Sociological
Papers). 1905.

MASTERMAN, C. F. G., and others. — To Colonise England :
A Plea for a Policy. 1907.

MELLIN, G. F. — Life in our Villages. 1891.
MOORE, H. E. — Our Heritage in the Land. 1906.
OMAN, C.—The Great RevoU of 1381. 1906.
PARKER, SIR GILBERT. — The Land for the People. 1908.

PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS (including Cd. 6894 and Cd. 7421)
(Royal Commission on Labour) ; Cd. 346 and Cd.
2376 (Mr. Wilson Fox's Reports on Agricultural
Wages) ; Cd. 4402 (Housing of the Working Classes)

PEDDER, D. C. — Where Men Decay : A Survey of Present
Rural Conditions. 1908.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 253

PRATT, E. A.— Small Holders. 1909. The Transition
in Agriculture. 1909. Agricultural Organization*
1912.

PEOTHERO, R. E. — English Farming, Past and Present.
1912.

RAD FORD, G. — Agricultural Co-operation. 1910.

ROGERS, J. E. THOROLD. — Six Centuries of Work and
Wages. 1884.

ROWNTREE, B. SEEBOHM. — Land and Labour : Lessons
from Belgium. 1911. How the Labourer Lives.
1913.

SLATER, G. — The English Peasantry and the Enclosure
of Common Fields. 1907.

STUBBS, C. W.—The Land and the Labourer. 1891.

SUTHERLAND, WILLIAM. — Rural Regeneration in England.
1913.

TAYLOR, A. W. — Scientific Agriculture in Denmark (an.
address delivered at the National Liberal Club).
1911.

TURNOR, CHRISTOPHER. — Land Problems and National
Welfare. 1911.

UNWIN, Mrs. FISHER, and others. — The Land Hunger i
Life under Monopoly. 1913.

WALLACE, A. RUSSELL. — Land Nationalization,
WOLFF, H. W.— Co-operative Banking. 1907.

INDEX

AFFORESTATION, 238
Agriculture, 9, 34, 8, 45, 54-56,

142, 244, 245

Agricultural Holdings Act, 53
Agricultural Rating Act, 154
Agricultural Labourer, 7, 38, 51,

59-94 passim, 107, 114-116,

134, 192, 212
Allotments, 176-178
Allowances, 65-67, 156 (see Wages)
Amusements, Village, 80-84
Arch, Joseph, 10, 35, 89, 97, 192

Ball, John, 18, 20
Belgium, 55
Black Death, 16, 19
I'.uxtori, Mr. C. K., 11

Canada, 214

" Census of Production," 227
Charities, 42, 48, 110, 131
Chesterton, Mr. G. K., 74
Church and Clergy, 19, 20, 24,

124, 127-129, 131, 132-135,

138-140, 241
" Clearings," 31
Ceilings, Mr. Jesse, 10, 99
Colonies, 226
Commons, 29
Compensation, 52
Conservatism, 106-109, 139, 248
Co-operation, 53, 199-202
Corn Laws, 39, 161, 214
Cottages, tied, 69, 73
County Councils, 47, 117, 184, 189
Credit Banks, 196, 200-205

de Laveleye, M.., 31
Denmark, 55, 56, 61, 189, 244
Dietary of Labourers, 85-87
Dullness of Villages, 77-79, 81

Education, 95-105
Election Cries, 116
Emigration, 64, 92, 93, 166, 167

Enclosure Acts, 14, 26-30
Exodus, Rural, 59-94

Farmers, 50-58, 180, 202. 214
Feudal System, 14, 18, 19, 40
Food Supply, 61, 64, 142, 143
Fox, Mr. Wilson, 9, 189
France, 21, 38, 55, 189, 217
Free Trade, 39, 56, 206-217 patrim

Game, 39, 44, 45, 53, 73
Germany, 17, 21, 38, 62, 63, 203

Haggard, Mr. Rider, 9, 97
Harvest Festivals, 123
Hasbach, Herr, 9, 32
Health of Bural Population, 71. 72
Housing, 69-76, 146-156

Increment Unearned, 234, 237
Inns, Village, 82, 83
Insurance, National, 144-146
Ireland, 148, 153, 154, 204
Italy, 38, 63, 64, 189

Jacquerie, 21

Johnson, Rev. Arthur, 27

Kelmscott, 107

K .It, 15

Labour, Hours of, 81 (note)

Labour Party, 113, 114, 148, 248

Land Agents, 180

Land Courts, 161, 162, 211

Land Values, Rating and taxing

of, 91, 225-231
Landowners, 39-50, 75, 1*7, 179

218, 241
Liberalism, 110-113, 148, 248

Machinery, 88, 89
Mann, Mrs. H. H., 177
Marlborough, Duke of, 74
Masterman, Mr. C. F. G., 8, 128
Monasteries, Suppression of, 32

265

256

Money, Mr. Chtozza, 92
Morality, Village, 137, 138

INDEX

Nationalisation, Land, 231-249
Newspapers, 111, 112
Nonconformists, 121, 122, 125,

135, 136
Norway, 82, 188

Old-Age Pensions, 90, 144, 145,

192

Oman, Professor C., 17
Otmoor, 27, 29

Ownership and Tenancy, 182-187
" Oxford Movement," 124

Parish Councils, 118, 119
Parochial Settlement, Law of, 25
Peasant Revolts, 17, 22, 23
Pointer, Mr. J., 114
Politics, Village, 47, 48, 49, 84,

106-119, 178, 183
Protection, 34, 206-217
Protector Somerset, 24
Prothero, Mr. Rowland, 189

Raffelssen Banks, 203, 205
Railway Freights, 200
Rates and Taxes, 52, 215
Recruits, Army, 62, 88
Religion, Village, 120-140
Rent, 50, 53, 75, 161
Rogers, Thorold, 26
Roman Catholicism, 125, 137
Rowntree, B. Seebohm, 64, 72

Rural District Councils, 56, US

148
Raskin, 131

Schoolmasters, 104, 105

Small Holdings, 30, 44, 92, 163-

197

Small Holdings Act, 187
Small Holdings Commissioners, 172
Smith, Adam, 26
Socialism, 114, 238. 239
" Speenhamland System," 33
Sport, 41, 43-46, 79, 80, 178, 179,

234, 242
Standard of Living, 57, 67, 68. 76,

77, 85-87

Statute of Labourers, 16
Strikes, Agricultural, 17, 130, 224
Swing Riots, 34, 35, 220

Tariff Reform, (see Protection)
Temperance Reform, 82, 112, 135
Tenure, Agricultural, 52
Trades Unionism, 35, 89, 160,

217-224, 231

Turner, Mr. Christopher, 10
Tyler, Wat, 23

Valuation, Land, 228, 234, 243

Wage, Minimum, 158, 159
Wages, 16, 65, 66, 67, 75, 85, 90,
131, 150, 156-160, 213, 21«

Yeomen, 31

Zola, La Tent, 217

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Philosophy and T^eligion

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84. LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

By Prof. GEORGE MOORE, D.D., LL.D., of Harvard. A detailed examination
of the books of the Old Testament in the light of the most recent research.

6

Social Science

i. PARLIAMENT

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history and practice of the House of Commons since Bagehot's 'Constitution.' "
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seldom appear more than once in a generation." — Morning Post.

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" A book of rare quality. . . . We have nothing but praise for the rapid and
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mclusiveness of subject-matter." — Morning Post.

59. ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

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University. " Its importance is not to be measured by its price. Probably
the best recent critical exposition of the analytical method in economic
science." — Glasgow Herald.

7

6Q. THE NEWSPAPER By G. BINNKY DIBBLEE, M.A. (Illus-

— trated.) The best account extant of the

organisation of the newspaper press, at home and abroad.

77. SHELLEY, GODWIN, AND THEIR CIRCLE

By H. N. BRAILSFORD, M.A. " Mr Brailsford sketches vividly the influence of
the French Revolution on Shelley's and Godwin's England; and thp charm and
strength of his style make his book an authentic contribution to literature." —
The Bookman.

80. CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROFIT-SHARING

By ANEURIN WILLIAMS, M.A. — " A judiciousbut enthusiastic history, with much
interesting speculation on the future of Co-partnership." — Christian World.

8 1. PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE

By E. N. BENNETT, M.A. Discusses the leading aspects of the British land

problem, including housing, small holdings, rural credit, and the minimum wage.

83. COMMON-SENSE IN LA W ^y Prof. P. VINOGRADOFF,

1 ' ' II I II II- •-•-.TJ JJ. O. L*.

85. UNEMPLOYMENT By Prof. A. C. PIGOU, M.A.

IN PREPARATION

ANCIENT EGYPT. By F. LL. GRIFFITH, M.A.

THE ANCIENT EAST. By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A., F.B.A.

A SHOR T HISTOR Y OF EUROPE. By HERBERT FISHER, LL.D.

THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE. By NORMAN H. BAYNES.

THE REFORM A TION. By President LINDSAY, LL.D.

A SHOR T HIS TOR Y OF R USSIA . By Prof. MILYOUKOV.

MODERN TURKEY. By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A.

FRANCE OF TO-DAY, By ALBERT THOMAS.

HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. By Prof. R. S. RAIT, M.A.

LA TIN AMERICA. By Prof. W. R. SHEPHERD.

HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF SPAIN. By J. FITZMAURICE-

KELLY, F.B.A., Litt.D.

LA TIN LITER A TURE. By Prof. J. S. PHILLIMORE.
THE RENAISSANCE. By Miss EDITH SICHEL.
ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAISSANCE. By ROGER E. FRY.
LITERARY TASTE. By THOMAS SECCOMBE.
CHA UCER AND HIS TIME. By Miss G. E. HADOW.
WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS CIRCLE. By A. CI.UTTON BROCK.
SCANDINA VI AN HISTORY &> LITER A TURE. By T. C. SNOW.
THE MINERAL WORLD. By Sir T. H. HOLLAND, K.C.I. E., D.Sc.
SEX. By Prof. J. A. THOMSON and Prof. PATRICK GEDDES.
THE GROWTH OF EUROPE. By Prof. GRENVILLK COLE.
BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. By Canon

R. H. CHARLES, D.D.

A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By CLEMENT WEBB, M.A.
POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bacon to Locke.

By G. P. GOOCH, M.A.
POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bentham to J. S.

Mill. By Prof. W. L. DAVIDSON.
POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Herbert Spencer

to To-day. By ERNEST BARKER, M.A.

THE CRIMINAL AND THE COMMUNITY. By Viscount ST. CYRES.
THE CIVIL SERVICE. By GRAHAM WALLAS, M.A.
THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT. By JANE ADDAMS and R. A. WOODS.
GREA T INVENTIONS. By Prof. J. L. MYRES, M.A., F.S. A.
TO WN PL A NNING. By RAYMOND UN WIN.

London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

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