.
TO COLONISE ENGLAND
THIRD AND POPULAR EDITION.
THE HEART OF THE EMPIRE.
Discussions of Problems of Modem City Life in England. Large Crown 8vo, cloth, SB. 6d. net.
CONTENTS.
I. REALITIES AT HOME. CHARLES F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P. II. THE HOUSING PROBLEM. F. W. PETHICK LAWRENCE, M.A.
III. THE CHILDREN OF THE TOWN. REGINALD A. BRAY, B.A.
IV. TEMPERANCE REFORM. NOEL BUXTON, M.A. and WALTER HOARE. V. THE DISTRIBUTION OF INDUSTRY. P. WHITWELL WILSON, M.P.
VI. SOME ASPECTS OF THE PROBLEM OF CHARITY. A. C. PIGOU, B.A.
VII. THE CHURCH AND THE PEOPLE. F. W. HEAD, M.A.
VIII. IMPERIALISM. G. P. GOOCH, M.P.
IX. THE PAST AND FUTURE. G. M, TREVELYAN, M.A.
T. FISHER UNWIN.
TO COLONISE ENGLAND
A PLEA FOR A POLICY
BY
C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P. W. B. HODGSON
AND OTHERS
" Less the pleasure-ground of the rich ; more the treasure-house of the nation."
Sir H. CAMFBELL-BANNERMAN.
LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN
ADELPHI TERRACE MCMVII
[All rights reserved.]
"Plenty of employment would be found if the land were made accessible to the men who are willing and able to work it. There is no task to which we are called more urgently by every consideration of national well-being than that of colonising our own country."
Sir HENRY CAMPBBLL-BANNERMAN, Nov. 28, 1905.
" My practical experience of over thirty years is that small holdings and allotments not only keep villagers on the land, but are and always have been a financial and social success. With me they have succeeded not only round an artisan town, but equally on the clays of North and Mid-Bucks, on the chalk hills and valleys of South Bucks, on the light lands and ordinary soils of North and Mid-Lincolnshire, and, best of all, on the grand lands of the Lincolnshire fens."
-Lord CARRINGTON, Nineteenth Century ', March, 1899.
" I leave the districts where I have seen the men at work who are fortunate enough to have acquired a stake in the land with a vivid consciousness of how there is implanted in our agricultural population a great love for the soil, and a capacity for making it yield its fruits to the fullest. This love and this capacity I see only fully turned to account when the man is working under those conditions which enable him to reap the full benefit of his own industry. Wherever I go I find a people hungering for that raw material on which alone they can use their powers. Through the length and breadth of England the cry of the people goes up, « Land ! Give us more land.' " -Report of Special Commissioner i Co-operative Small Holdings Association.
" Back to the land. It is the storehouse of wealth ; Nature's universal bank— a bank that never breaks and never dwindles, that honours every draft when drawn by labour's hand. It is a moral, a physical, a political, a national regeneration."
ERNEST JONES.
A SONG OF THE LAND
The Squire he sits in his oaken hall, Two score servants in beck and call, Five square miles inside his park wall —
Giles follows the plough to the workhouse door.
The Squire has woods and acres wide, Pheasants and fish and hounds beside, A stable full of horses to ride —
Giles follows the plough to the workhouse door.
The Squire belike is a Parliament man, Making the laws on the good old plan, Getting and keeping whatever he can —
Giles follows the plough to the workhouse door.
Giles's home is a ruinous shed,
The fruit of his labour a crust of bread,
Poor are his garments and rude his bed —
He follows the plough to the workhouse door.
Gileses wife a drudge is she,
His children are bred right bitterly,
A dog in the kennel more worth than he
Who follows the plough to the workhouse door.
Giles's son fares forth for bread,
By the glare of the city his steps are led;
He finds the slum, by landlords bled,
Leads, like the plough, to the workhouse door.
How long, O Lord, shall the people be Aliens in their own country? How long shall the Sqtrire from the park gate see Giles follow the plough to the workhouse door ?
A. G. G.
CONTENTS
PA«S
INTRODUCTION . . •• ; ' - • • xi By A. G. GARDINER
PART I
THE DISEASE W. B. HODGSON
I. THE LAND AND ITS LONELINESS . . 3
II. VANISHING ENGLAND . . 9
III. Two SHILLINGS A DAY . • 15
IV. WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON . . 22
V. MERRIE ENGLAND . . . 29
VI. FOREIGN COMPETITION . 35
VII. LITTLE LONDON . . -43
VIII. No ROOM TO LIVE . . . . 5°
Tii
viii TO COLONISE ENGLAND
PART II THE REMEDY
C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.
MM
I. IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS . . .59
II. PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL . . 68
III. A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM .... 75
IV. NAILMAKERS AND FARMERS . . .83
V. THE LAND OF GOSHEN . . . g2
VI. THE OLD AND THE NEW . . I00 VII. HOPE AND THE FUTURE .... I0;
PART III TOWARDS A POLICY
I. "WHAT WE WANT" . F. N. ROGERS, M.P.
II. THE LAND HUNGER . .^ , R. WINFREY, M.P.
CONTENTS ix
PAGE
III. THE THREE PLANKS OF PROGRESS . * 130 ARNOLD HERBERT, M.P.
IV. THE LANDLESS LABOURER . . .135
E. G. LAMB, M.P.
V. A PARISH MEETING • < * v « . 140
ATHELSTAN KENDALL, M.P.
VI. "LA TERRE QUI MEURT" . . ,» .147
PHILIP MORRELL, M.P.
VII. SOME LESSONS FROM ABROAD < . . 153 LEVI LEVER, M.P.
VIII. DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY ". . .159 CORRIE GRANT, M.P.
IX. WHAT MIGHT BE DONE WITH THE LAND . 164
H. F. LUTTRELL, M.P.
X. THE VILLAGE TRAINING . . . .168
FREDERIC VERNEY, M.P.
XI. THE WAY OUT ..... 174 E. N. BENNETT, M.P.
XII. THE VALUE OF SMALL HOLDINGS . . 181 E. J. SCARES, LL.D., M.P.
XIII. THE RURAL EXODUS .... 186 H. R. MANSFIELD, M.P.
x CONTENTS
PART IV
THE OFFICIAL TESTIMONY SUMMARISED BY C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.
PAGE
I. THE DECLINE IN AGRICULTURE . . .197
II. THE SMALL HOLDINGS COMMITTEE . . 201
III. THE RURAL HOUSING COMMITTEE. . . 206
APPENDIX . . . . ,- 209
INTRODUCTION
BY A. G. GARDINER
NATIONAL health, accordihg to Froude, is in exact ratio to the proportion of the people having a direct interest in the soil.
Tried by this test, Great Britain, in spite of its thousand millions of over-sea trade in 1906, is not only not the most healthy of European countries : it is the "tainted wether of the flock." There is no other country in which so small a proportion of the people have a direct interest in the soil. There is no country in which the land and the people are so completely divorced. In 1851 nearly two millions of persons were engaged in agricultural pursuits in Great Britain. In the interval the total population has doubled ; but the number of people engaged in the land has decreased by more than half. Nor does the decay of rural England show any signs of being checked. The latest returns issued by the Board of Agriculture on this subject show that in the twenty years 1881-1901 the number of people engaged on the soil of Great Britain declined by nearly 300,000. Here are the figures which tell how the agricultural labourer is vanishing : —
|
England ... Wales Scotland ... |
1881. 802,288 45,665 |
1891. 716,609 42,525 107,412 zi |
1901. 34,566 93,590 |
Decrease. 241,152 11,099 42,376 |
x CONTENTS
PART IV
THE OFFICIAL TESTIMONY SUMMARISED BY C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.
PAGE
I. THE DECLINE IN AGRICULTURE . . .197
II. THE SMALL HOLDINGS COMMITTEE . . 201
III. THE RURAL HOUSING COMMITTEE. . . 206
APPENDIX . . . ,. ,- 209
INTRODUCTION
BY A. G. GARDINER
NATIONAL health, accordihg to Froude, is in exact ratio to the proportion of the people having a direct interest in the soil.
Tried by this test, Great Britain, in spite of its thousand millions of over-sea trade in 1906, is not only not the most healthy of European countries : it is the "tainted wether of the flock." There is no other country in which so small a proportion of the people have a direct interest in the soil. There is no country in which the land and the people are so completely divorced. In 1851 nearly two millions of persons were engaged in agricultural pursuits in Great Britain. In the interval the total population has doubled ; but the number of people engaged in the land has decreased by more than half. Nor does the decay of rural England show any signs of being checked. The latest returns issued by the Board of Agriculture on this subject show that in the twenty years 1881-1901 the number of people engaged on the soil of Great Britain declined by nearly 300,000. Here are the figures which tell how the agricultural labourer is vanishing : —
1881. 1891. 1901. Decrease.
England ... 802,288 716,609 561,136 241,152
Wales 45,665 42,525 34,566 11,099
Scotland ... 135,966 107,412 93>59° 42*376
xii TO COLONISE ENGLAND
It will be seen that the decline was more rapid in the second decade than in the first, and that if the same rate of decrease is continued for thirty years more there will be no labourers left on the land.
The tremendous fact that emerges from these figures is that we have become a wholly town-bred population and that the stream of wholesome country blood which has served in the past to vitalise the cities is nearly dried up at the source. The story of the nineteenth century in England is the story of the depopulation of the country and the congestion of the towns.
The twin fact is due to two causes — the industrial advantage which we gained in the early part of the century and the operation of the land laws.
The Napoleonic wars, in their final analysis, were, like the wars which gave us India and Canada, economic wars. Britain emerged from them mistress, not only of the seas, but of the commerce of the world. France, the only possible rival, lay shattered and powerless, and no other country loomed on the horizon as a competitor. The advantage which the inventions of Watt, Hargreaves, Crompton and the rest gave us were exploited to the fullest extent by a nation which held, not only " the gorgeous East," but the whole world in fee. There grew up the tradition that we were to be, by a sort of decree of destiny, the workshop of the world for all time, and that other nations were to be our hewers of wood and drawers of water. The mass of the people had small share in the fruits of this enormous industrial development. Royal Commission after Royal Commission was held in the Thirties and 'Forties to inquire into the appalling conditions of the manufacturing people which had brought the country
INTRODUCTION xiii
to the brink of revolution, and it was only when the gates of our ports were flung open to the golden harvests of the West that the people began to taste some of the fruits of our industrial prosperity. A new impetus was given to the life of the towns and the drift from the countryside increased in volume. More and more the destiny of England seemed bound up with commerce, less and less with the cultivation of the soil. The theory that England was the workshop of the world and that the task of other countries was to grow food for us seemed to have the authority of a natural law.
But with the second half of the century came a change, at first slight and negligible, but gathering volume with each decade, until at the close of the century we were faced with the fact that every considerable European nation had become an industrial rival. The long advantage which this country had enjoyed had diminished and Con- tinental countries, filled with youthful enthusiasm, and starting with all the advantages derived from our long experience, were entering the field of commerce, not where we began but where we had arrived, and were challenging us not only in their home markets, but in the neutral markets of the world. Germany took the lead, and every one will recall the resentment with which we found a quarter of a century ago that she had had the impertinence to trespass on our pre- serves. That resentment was embodied in the scornful phrase, " Made in Germany," and it is the basis of the anti-German feeling that prevails to-day. But Germany was only one of a multitude of offenders. Austria and Italy, France and Russia, Spain and Hungary, even far Japan, and, above all, the United States, have each entered the field of industry.
xiv TO COLONISE ENGLAND
Together they have destroyed the theory of England as the universal provider. We are witnessing, as Prince Kropotkin has shown in his memorable "Fields, Factories, and Workshops," the decentrali- sation of industries — the building up of industries side by side with the maintenance of agriculture — and the establishment of the newer and sounder theory that the modern state must be based upon the concurrent development of field and factory.
The enormous commercial expansion of England, in blinding us to this truth, has not been an unmixed blessing. It has made us forget the land. We have forgotten that the security of a nation depends, not only on the number of its factory chimneys, but far more on the number of its people directly interested in the soil.
Thus it came about that this country had no share in the revolution in agriculture which marked the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. That revolution has touched every country in Europe except Britain. It has spread from Denmark to Siberia, from France to Servia. It has even given birth to a new era of hope in Ireland. It sprang out of the great agricultural depression which passed over Europe thirty years ago and which left the farming industry in this country largely in ruins. It marked the breakdown of one system — the system of individual, unscientific, and unorganised agriculture — and the emergence of another, the system of collective effort based on the application of science and modern invention to the industry of agriculture.
" Government and co-operation," says Ruskin, " are in all things the laws of life ; anarchy and competi- tion the laws of death."
We have witnessed in the last twenty years the
INTRODUCTION xv
astonishing triumph of government and co-operation as the principle of agricultural development on the Continent. It is only in Great Britain that the laws of death, anarchy and competition, are still un- challenged in the field of agriculture.
Before asking why England should have had no share in this vast and beneficent change, it may be well to say a word on the subject of the change itself. It began in Denmark, and that country is still the most popular object-lesson in this connection. As has so often happened — as is happening to-day in Spain — it was political adversity that led the Danes into the path of economic success. The war of 1864 robbed them, of the two rich provinces of Schleswig- Holstein and turned their attention to the unculti- vated wastes of moor, marsh and dune in Jutland. The reclamation of these lands during the last forty years and their conversion into one of the richest provinces in Europe is one of the romances of fact. Side by side with this work of reclamation there developed the system of co-operation — Ruskin's laws of death gave place to the laws of life. It was found that individual competition was ruinous, and that mutual co-operation was the secret of success. Thirty years ago there was not a co-operative dairy in Denmark. To-day there are over a thousand, and the total imports of Danish butter in this country in one year amount in value to something like ten million sterling. One effect of this development was the practical extinction of the Irish butter trade in England. That trade, conducted on the old indi- vidual, inefficient lines, could not compete with an industry highly organised, " standardised," and con- ducted on the most hygienic and scientific principles. Ireland has since regained some of the ground she
xvi TO COLONISE ENGLAND
then lost, thanks to the work of Sir Horace Plunkett and the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society in inaugurating the co-operative system. Meantime, Denmark extended the application of the co-operative system to bacon-curing, eggs, bee-keeping, &c., with results proportionately great to those achieved in the case of butter.
The experience of Denmark is only representative of what has been done and is being done in greater or less degree in all the countries of Europe, in Belgium equally with Germany, in Finland equally with Italy, in Austria and Hungary equally with France. The investigations of Mr. E. A. Pratt, recorded in his books, " The Organisation of Agri- culture " and " The Transition of Agriculture," are of the utmost value in this connection. His conclusions strike one as of less weight, for they are unfortunately conditioned by his prejudice against State action, his desire to show that private ownership of railways has no adverse bearing on the interests of agriculture, and by his apparent indifference to land tenure as a factor in the case.
The development of the system varies in the different countries according to the varying local conditions ; but, broadly speaking, there may be said to be three phases of this remarkable movement :
1. Education.
2. Co-operative purchase, handling, and sale.
3. Finance.
In the matter of education, Germany, with its elaborately graded system of agricultural instruction, is easily first ; but in each case the co-operative movement is associated with serious attention to technical instruction, in some cases under State auspices, and in the case of Italy rendered by travel-
INTRODUCTION xv
,g professors whose duty it is to advise the local •ganisations on matters of expenditure, to hold inferences, and to introduce improvements and .ethods of organisation.
Co-operative purchase, handling, and sale, has beet eveloped in various ways ; but always with striking iccess. In Germany there are something like four lousand societies of one sort and another for urchase of implements, manures, seeds, &c., or me .reduction of agricultural commodities or finally heir sale. In France the grouping of orders for the mrchase of commodities by the various associations f the Syndicat Central des Agriculteurs de France re stated by Mr. Pratt to amount in value to £8,000,000 a year. The advantages to the ind.v.dua Vom this co-operative purchase are threefold (l) vholesale prices instead of retail, (2) higher quality 3f goods, (3) lower railway rates. The advantages from co-operative treatment and sale are not less -onspicuous, though in this respect France is behind some of the other countries. Finally, there is the social amenity which issues from this business co- operation. It is one of the most frequent explana- tions of the decay of rural England that the life of the country is so dull that the young peasant flees to the town for human companionship. The co-opera- tive movement on the Continent, however, has largely modified this reproach against rural life. Through business co-operation men and women are brought into friendly relationship under auspices which ~ the interests of the individual the interests of al the bitterness of religious and political differ disappears before the humanising influence of this new social factor. Co-operation, in a word, is not only recreating agriculture ; it is helping to recreate society.
«
xviii TO COLONISE ENGLAND
In the matter of finance, the Raffeisen system of Germany, local in its operation, and founded on the unlimited liability of its members— a condition aimed at securing that advances should only be made to responsible and trustworthy persons — has been most generally adopted ; but in Italy the resources of the Savings Banks are placed at the call of the Village agricultural organisations, while in Hungary the Government have created a Central Co-operative Credit Bank, the effect of which has been so remark- able that by 1903 there were some 2,000 local co- operative credit banks affiliated, the year's business representing a turnover of some ^"3,000,000.
While this remarkable movement has been chang- ing the whole fabric of Continental agriculture, what has been the case in Great Britain ? Lord Winchilsea's National Agricultural Union developed into a merely political organisation on a Protectionist basis and expired, and the excellent National Agri- cultural Organisation Society with its affiliated societies, last year had a turnover of only £221,524. This has been hailed as " remarkable progress.** It is, unfortunately, only convincing evidence that the co-operative movement has yet to be born in con- nection with British agriculture.
The fact is not due to the cause so commonly advanced in its explanation — that is, the innate con- servatism of the British farmer. It is due to the conditions of British agriculture, which in turn are the t of our land system. Co-operation, which :s origin to industrial England, has failed to take root in rural England for the same reason that 300,000 agriculturists — denied any career on the land except that of a serf, and refusing " to follow the plough to the workhouse door "—have vanished
INTRODUCTION xix
from the soil in the last twenty years. It has failed to take root because, as the Prime Minister said in - ' his Raffeisen speech, "the land of England is the pleasure-ground of the rich, and not the treasure- house of the nation." The land has passed out of cultivation, not because we have not a fertile soil, not because we have not a suitable climate, not because we are without a market. We have some of the best soil in Europe, a climate superior to that of Denmark, a market the richest and most abundant in the world. Nor has agriculture broken down because the pro- gress of industry has peopled the land too thickly for cultivation. Belgium has a population of over 500 to the square mile ; Great Britain a population of 360 to the square mile. Belgium exports manufactured goods to the extent of £9 per head of the population ; the United Kingdom exports manufactured goods to a considerably less value per head of the popula- tion. Yet Belgium not only supplies its own dense population with food but has a million's worth left for export, while this country is fed with butter from Denmark, Finland, Siberia ; eggs from Russia and the Balkan States, Flemish potatoes, French salads, Canadian apples, and New Zealand mutton. Mean- while the country around our cities is a green solitude. Take a journey in Hesse or Baden, through land much of which has been reclaimed by the State from a condition of marsh and waste. It is like travelling through a hundred miles of market-garden. No great towns ; but everywhere over the plain red-til'"* villages, everywhere the peasant at work on hi: ittle farm, everywhere the signs of a prosperous, frugal, wholesome life in the open air. Then return by Harwich to London through the green wastes of Essex where never a man is seen tilling the soil, and
xx TO COLONISE ENGLAND
you will realise something of the enormous tragedy involved in those figures of rural depopulation which I have quoted.
The causes of the failure of British agriculture have been admirably analysed by a German expert, Dr. Hermann Levy, in his survey of " The Presen ! Position of English Agriculture." Asking why the British farmer has not been able to keep in his own hands the supply of butter, eggs, poultry, fruit, vege- tables, &c., he declares that the cause is not to be found in any advantages conferred by Nature on foreign countries as compared with Great Britain. It is due to the absence of co-operation for the produc- tion of his commodities and for disposing of them. This in turn is due, not to " the innate conservatism of the British farmer," but (i) to the varying sizes of the farms, which are difficult to organise on a common footing ; (2), to the fact that, farmers here being mainly tenants with insecure tenure, move about from district to district and are consequently less easily organised than a more settled agricultural people with practical ownership of the soil they till ; (3) to the increasing conversion of the land from agricultural to sporting uses by men of great wealth, who oppose the creation of small holdings because it might detract from the beauty of the landscape. Co-operative organisation of agriculture, in a word, can only develop under favourable conditions of tenure and cultivation, which do not exist in Eng- land. The small holder, independent, secure, must ) the co-operative system, through which alone agri ture can be restored.
it is the purpose of this book to indicate the nature of the disease that afflicts English agriculture, to describe the success that has attended the small
INTRODUCTION xxi
holding where it has been established in this country, and to indicate the reforms necessary to give the peasant the freest possible access to the soil. The Act of 1892 was a step in the right direction ; but it was timid and abortive. Only nine councils have adopted it, and under its operation a beggarly 660 acres have been set aside for small holdings.
The most significant and satisfactory feature of the articles is the essential Agreement of the various writers, approaching the subject from independent points of view, as to the means necessary " to colonise England." Substantially, they accept the policy outlined by Mr. Vaughan Nash in The Daily News three years ago and subsequently developed in an admirable series of articles in The Speaker^ under the title of " Towards a Social Policy." It may be useful briefly to summarise what seem to be the broad conclusions of the writers : —
1. The Parish Councils should be endowed with further powers (including compulsory powers) of obtaining land on lease for Small Holdings. These should be similar to those at present possessed by the Parish Councils in regard to the establishment of allotments, and they should include facilities for purchasing land which shall be held in perpetuum as parish land. There is general agreement that the community, in establishing the small holder, should not surrender its ultimate ownership of the land it acquires. A practical freehold, but not an -^con- ditional freehold, will meet all the small-? olden needs without paving the way to a new monopoly for future generations to grapple with.
2. The County Councils' powers should be en- larged and strengthened. The machinery of the Small Holdings Act of 1892 should be simplified.
xxii TO COLONISE ENGLAND
The purchase money of the would-be holder should be reduced from one-fifth to one-eighth, and more satisfactory arrangements for the advancement of money for buildings, equipment, &c, should be authorised. Finally, there should be compulsory powers for the purchase of suitable land. " Shall " and not " may " should be the note of any legislation on the subject. The futility of the Act of 1892 has shown that compulsion is essential to an effective policy.
3. The establishment of a Central Body of Small Holdings Commissioners. This is the keystone of the policy. The Central Body should be the driving power of the whole machine. It should have funds at its disposal and power to issue Land Stock (as in Ireland) on land purchased. Its functions should be (i) to stimulate and encourage action by the County Councils and Parish Councils, and (2) to purchase on its own initiative suitable estates, equip them as Small Holdings, and let them to small holders.
4. The organisation of the Small Holder. It fs not enough to establish the small holder. To be successful he must adopt the collective methods which have revolutionised agriculture on the Conti- nent. The Central Body should be charged with the task of setting these methods in operation through the three channels —
(a) Co-operative purchase, handling, and sale ;
(b) Agricultural banks ;
' ) Agricultural education and expert advice.
If we have limited the scope of these articles to
'-oblem of the small holding, it is not owing to
indifference to the allied questions of transit, &c., but
because it has seemed the most profitable course to
concentrate attention at the moment on the means of
INTRODUCTION xxiii
bringing together the manless land and the landless man.
It only remains to be said that the articles have appeared in The Daily News ; that they were com- menced by the late Mr. W. B. Hodgson, whose lamented death occurred in the midst of his labours ; that the task was then taken up by Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, M.P. ; and that the third section, consist- ing of articles by members of Parliament represent- ing rural constituencies is' especially valuable as indicating the mind of rural England expressed at the General Election a year ago. Mr. Fred Home contributed some admirable articles to the series, which are only excluded because they do not fall into the scheme of this book.
Acknowledgment is due to the Co-operative Small Holdings Society, and especially to Mr. Charles R. Buxton, the chairman, Miss Jebb, and Mr. W. A. Moore, the secretary, for much valuable help.
PART I
THE DISEASE
BY
W. B. HODGSON
I
THE LAND AND ITS LONELINESS
" WE must colonise our countryside ! "
Such is the message of splendid daring which the Prime Minister gave to the nation on the eve of the greatest political struggle of our day. The conquest of the land for the people will mean a tremendous fight, but victory will bring the pas- sionate gratitude of the poor, the toiler, the op- pressed, and will secure the party of progress in power for a generation to come. As Cardinal Manning said, "The land question means hunger, thirst, nakedness, notice to quit, labour spent in vain ; the toil of years seized upon, the breaking up of homes, the misery, sicknesses, deaths of parents, children, wives ; the despair and wildness which spring up in the hearts of the poor when legal force, like a sharp harrow, goes over the most sensitive and vital right of mankind."
What is the reason of the continuous desertion of the land until, like a new Columbus, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is able to rediscover it as a colony of great and fruitful promise for the British people ? Why is it that in forty years, while our population has grown enormously, the number of people fed by the produce of our own
4 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
soil has gone down by 15,000,000? Why is it that not merely wheat and green crops, but beef and mutton, have been going steadily down, and that the labourers employed on the soil have decreased from two millions to one, so that there is but a single man to nearly forty acres ? Why are the people being driven to the towns to aggravate the problem of unemployment?
It is in the hope of helping to answer some of these very difficult questions that I am making a short tour in the country.
I am beginning my tour at Honiton, the little Devonshire market town famous for its ancient industry of lace-making. Even in this winter-time, even in the darkness, how sweet and gracious is the country after the sultry, dusty, crowded town ! It is five o'clock, and while tea is preparing I walk a mile out into one of the Devonshire valleys amid which the old town nestles. In the country five o'clock in winter means Night. I find myself alone, the stars overhead blazing in a great violet sky. As I walk, these little sky-lamps twinkle amid the dim tracery of the leafless trees, whose trunks, like fur- clad winter voyagers, are thickly swathed in ivy. The tall hedges are full of mystery, and seem haunted by strange, watching figures. In the dark- ness beneath sounds the tinkle of falling water, like the bells of an elfin steeple. Like silvery mirrors here and there shine the roadside pools.
Slowly a team of horses comes near, drawing a vast tree-trunk on groaning wheels. A lantern swings in front. In the darkness behind the teamster cracks his whip with startling sound. He knocks
THE LAND AND ITS LONELINESS 5
his pipe on the corpse of the old forest monarch, and like a portent in the heavens there is a sudden shower of blood-red meteors. Slowly the wagon crunches its way into the silence. Far off in the darkness is a slow, sturdy, regular footfall ; it is a tired labourer walking home after his labour in the distant fields. As his shadowy figure passes one sees a grey sack thrown over his shoulders like a shawl. e«
"Good-night," he says, half in greeting, half in challenge to the unknown.
A gentle pattering of feet, and the home-coming kine flit past, their long, dark shapes like boats floating through the night. With feminine timidity they quicken their pace in passing, and one raises a voice of inquiry that sounds like the music of a bassoon.
Now the road rises a little, and the eye sweeps over a broad and lonely valley, the further side of which lifts to a curving skyline, with here and there a solemn clump of pines. Down in the bottom is a ghostly veil of mist, and beneath it, like an infant with the valley for its cradle, a streamlet is crooning softly. Overhead a long, dark cloud-form hovers, following the curve of the valley and the stream and the silvery mist below. How rich and soft and transparent is all this shadowy night-colouring — the sepia of the wide hillside that leans against the further sky, the violet of the sky, the silver-grey of the stealing mists, the ashen hue of the meadows ! You think of town, with its yellow glare and crowded faces distorted into goblin forms by inky shadows, and what this great restful calm would mean to them.
But in all the valley, under the splendid arch of
6 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
the constellations, where are the hearthlights of men that should shine in response to the lamps of heaven? Glimmering faintly is a single cottage light across the valley. And suddenly, close at hand, there springs out from the gloom a Gothic diamond-paned window illumined by a light behind a red blind, on which the forms of geraniums are silhouetted in black. The light is the flame of a match ; you see it flickering with a slow, unsteady, groping motion across the room, and you know from the fluttering zigzag that a woman, toil-worn and tremulous, one for whom the lamp of life is burning low, is lighting up the cottage for the good- man's return. The candle is found, the spluttering light of the match makes a downward swoop, and the almond-shaped candle flame burns up bright and clear.
Alone these two lights twinkle in the valley, alone under the widespread mantle of restful dark- ness, in the great ocean of refreshing night air, while in the cities men and women and children crowd together till the very streets are heavy with human breath.
Such is a Devonshire valley on a night in winter. By day the loneliness, the desolation, the visible blight which is creeping over the land are almost awe-inspiring. The tillage of the land has ceased, the fields have been allowed to lapse into "per- manent pasture." Crops did not pay, because of foreign competition, say the farmers. And so old Mother Earth has been allowed to send up just what she has pleased. Miles and miles of bare brown fields are given up to coarse grass and
THE LAND AND ITS LONELINESS 7
thistles and molehills, with hedges that have not been trimmed for years, ditches choked, and here and there reeds and thistles and swamps that show how soon "pasture" will slip down into mere common.
I have just been visiting Churchstanton, eleven miles out from Honiton, through valley after valley of the kind I have described. At one point I stood looking on a broad and once fertile slope, facing the south, every acre of which not very long ago used to produce its five-and-twenty or thirty bushels of wheat. Twenty-two farm hands were then em- ployed. Now the number has gone down to one carter and a boy. And the land — well, it would be a mockery now even to call it " pasture." Blotched all over with patches of gorse, whose seeds season after season are spread broadcast among the grass, it is as though the land were cursed with some dreadful eczema. It will take years to destroy this pest — the roots of the gorse are so tough you can hardly cut them with a knife.
" Barren land " perhaps some one may say. " Barren land " may be the refrain when I mention that the Rector of Churchstanton tells me that forty labourers' cottages in this single parish have been obliterated since he came here twenty-five years ago.
But, fortunately for the reputation of the soil, cheek by jowl with this gorse-strangled hillside that scowls up at the sun are some cottages called "The Encroachments," built by labourers themselves on common land. Each in its own plot of fruitful garden, built of good stone and mortar, and snugly thatched by the owner, the cottages are a picture of smiling prosperity. Even now, within a few days
8 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
of Christmas, marigolds and primroses and poly- anthus are in bloom on the open flower-beds. And kitchen vegetables are here, and fine fat poultry in well-fenced runs, and firewood and garden tools well housed, and every bit of each enclosure put to wise and thrifty use.
I went and stood at the fence which parted one of these little homesteads from the adjoining ''farm." On one side is a pleasant garden, on the other putrid moss and reeds growing in pools of stagnant water covered with an oily slime.
On the one hand there was a beautiful example of what man can win for himself from the ragged and savage moorland with his own hands : on the other the spectacle of the way in which land is slipping back into wilderness and morass when the labourer is driven away.
II
- t
VANISHING ENGLAND
THE Labourer and his brother the Horse are really treated very much alike. Both are worked on the land so long as they can produce two things :
A. Their own subsistence.
B. A profit for somebody else.
When they can only earn A, but no longer B, they have to go.
It is just at this stage in the economic evolution that a remarkable difference, fraught with much significance, is discovered in the treatment of the two animals.
When the Horse ceases to be a profit-yielder, there is a quick and merciful end to his days. In death, he can render one last service to mankind. His bones are ground up into a manure, and scattered to fertilise those long furrows of brown clods which used to crumble under the tread of his patient hoofs.
With the Labourer it is different. His end is neither quick nor merciful. It lingers long in the grey alley of a distant town. Darkness, dreariness, loved ones paling and sinking before his eyes — what need to go on with the picture?
10 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
The Labourer is not even allowed, like the Horse, to fertilise the quiet countryside whose every dell and rose-bush he knew and loved so well. What can the economists be about that this waste should have escaped their attention ? Sentimental burial laws take far more care of his poor shrivelled corpse than society ever bestowed on the man while alive. He was deprived of a cottage, of a bit of land to dig, of his place on the farm, was cast utterly adrift. The corpse, on the other hand, is hemmed in by coroners, policemen, doctors, locked up in a cemetery with great iron gates. It must not serve, any more than the man that it was ; it must not be metamorphosed into rose-leaves and golden fruit, and live in the sun- shine again.
And yet is it impossible to conceive, in a vagrant, irresponsible moment, of some happy land, with a different edition, newly codified, of the Laws of Nature, where a place might be found in the scheme of things for the Labourer who could produce A (his own subsistence), but not B (a profit for some one else) ? For, mark you, the burden would not only be lighter, but toil would be sweetened and strength renewed by the joy of possession. The fruit garnered in that ceaseless wrestle with Nature would be his own — his own to make snug and warm the little home, to buy some trifling rest for his careworn partner, to pay for the bringing of roses to the pale cheek of his fragile child.
The Labourer would then have that much-talked-of thing, the " incentive to industry."
Why does the learned economist think it the best "incentive" to have to dig six inches deep for a
VANISHING ENGLAND 11
master before giving a final push of three inches deeper for yourself? Surely the best incentive is to get all the fruit.
The Labourer, on his own land, would bring up a strong, healthy, useful family of citizens.
He would produce the food our naval alarmists tell us may any week be suddenly cut off.
He would provide the home market for which our manufactures are languishing.
For each labourer settled on the land, and pro- ducing food, an exchange of food for manufactures would arise which would absorb one unemployed person in the towns.
But here I am at Churchstanton, eleven miles from the railway station of Honiton, and I have still to tell the story of " The Encroachments." As I have said, forty labourers' cottages have disappeared utterly in Churchstanton during the last twenty- five years.
The history of "The Encroachments" is both inspiring and tragic. Formerly there were numbers of little pieces of waste land dotted about the parish, and many labourers settled on patches of the road- side common and built tiny hovels in which to live. It was a tradition in the district that when " smoke would rise and water would run " from a cottage the owner or builder was secure from molestation.
So unobtrusively, bit by bit, " The Encroachments " grew up. A little patch of garden was taken in, a stone wall built, a porch or lean-to shelter added. Ragged turf gave place to the deep, rich mould of the vegetable garden, poultry had their little run, there were flower-beds and charming climbing plants. The
12 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
landscape became dotted with these little models of rustic comfort and happiness.
In 1856 there came a solemn inquiry and the enclosure of the waste by adjoining owners, on the usual pretext of better cultivation and the " putting to work " of the unemployed and idle. The cottagers who had built on the common were allowed to stay on paying a small rent to the rector.
When the present rector came, twenty-five years ago, the churchwarden, a typical old yeoman, said, " I think those rents ought to be raised." Not under- standing the situation, the rector consented, but later he found that the rents had been raised in some cases as much as 400 per cent., though every penny of the value of buildings and gardens had been created by the tenants and their families.
In vain did he try to get his overseers and church- wardens to reduce the rents again.
" These people cannot pay the rents ; they will have to leave," he said.
" That is exactly what we want," said the church- wardens and overseers, " We don't want these men in the parish. They will only come on the poor- rates."
The rector's spirit was up. He determined to organise a rebellion.
" Don't pay these rents," he said. And then a Seven Years' War raged in Church- stanton.
The more stout-hearted of the cottagers followed the rector's lead, defied the parish, and refused to pay their rent. Fierce parochial magnates glowered upon them, threatened them — all in vain. Eviction notices were prepared by the overseers, endorsed by the churchwardens, but the rector, faithful to his tiny
VANISHING ENGLAND 13
flock, refused to sign them. No rent was paid, and the little cottages, with their trim and fruitful gardens, bloomed like oases amid the wild, unkempt wilderness of so-called " farms."
But in the meantime others broke down under the constant official pressure. They could not make all their living from their little plots. They were denied the little casual employment which have made ends meet. They had to go.
As a ruthless and savage warning to other cottagers, the parish authorities broke down the empty homes. Not one stone was left upon another. They were used for mending the highways. To-day the careless stranger who passes along these roads with their picturesque, straggling hedges little guesses that the stones which crunch with so brisk and pleasant a sound under the wheels of his smart trap were once borne one by one with infinite pains and care and built into a cosy home by the labourer who has now, with all his family, been driven away — who knows where ?
I have just been standing on the site of some of these vanished homes. I cannot say " ruins " even, for not a stone remains. A little rectangle of cleared land — maybe three-quarters of an acre — shows where the labourer lived and loved and prayed, and his little ones played and prattled. A lean, solitary cabbage still struggles with the suffocating weeds.
All around is the desolate common, with its dark, forbidding clumps of gorse, its gloomy thickets, its sandy banks riddled with the holes of countless rabbits. This is the land that in the year of grace 1856 — fifty years ago — was "enclosed " by our legis-
14 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
lators for its " better cultivation " and the " putting to work " of the " idle poor."
Fifty years have gone by, and not a spade or a plough has touched the " enclosure." But the " en- croachment," the place where love and joy sprang up from the barren earth under the spade of the cottager, has been swept utterly away. Once more "legal force, like a sharp harrow, has passed over the most sensitive and vital right of mankind," bringing wild- ness and despair over those poor hearts that have gone away into their lifelong exile.
And now for the tragic ending of the story of " The Encroachments." One day one of the remain- ing cottagers died. His son, quiet and respectful, came and asked the churchwardens and overseers for a transfer of the tenancy.
They refused ! One more of these obnoxious centres of independence should vanish, one more family of possible workhouse inmates should be swept away.
The rector remonstrated. There were bitter words. " You are ruining the parish," said the churchwarden. And he went angrily away, and died of an apoplectic stroke. Then, strangely enough, the opposition to the rector broke down, and the rents were reduced all round to a fair average. So now we have pros- perous arreHfcrtile enclosures and cottages on the one hand, l$p these terrible devasted patches on the other.
Ill
TWO SHILLINGS A DAY
DRIVING in the cheerful winter sunshine along these Devonshire lanes, I pass through the village of Upottery, and soon come to four cross-roads, where a doleful ruin meets the eye. The rotten roof- timbers of a dismantled cottage stick up against the sky like the ribs of a big whale at the Natural History Museum. Like sightless eyes the windows stare out upon one. But it is clear that not long ago the place was kept with loving care and atten- tion. Carefully pruned rose-bushes still grow in the wide garden, the yellow jessamine blooms, the espalier-trained apple-trees form a neat natural railing that must have taken years to train. Ever- greens trimmed to whimsical shapes, flower-beds and vegetable garden show how busy the tenant must have been.
"Ah, yes," I am told, "that's where Fiddler Jim lived. He was a shoemaker, a clever old man, who made and mended for folk living miles around. A wonderful fiddler he was, and he would be at every wedding and dance in the parish. He was mighty fond of his garden — it was just a picture in the summer-time. Roses he loved above everything ; he had them everywhere."
15
16 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
" And why is the place all in ruins ? " " Well, the old man died, and the cottage wanted a good bit of doing up, so they just let it go."
At the end of a long day's tramp I turn down in the gloaming into a side road that brings me to the village of Weston. Almost the first cottage I come to has a yawning cavern about a yard wide in the corner, just under the overhanging thatch. Its torn sides show that the walls are made of stiffened mud. An abundance of this building material, in a semi- liquid state, lies about, and by the side of the cottage a few branches covered with thatch form a small " linny," or sloping shelter to keep the rain off the pails and other domestic utensils for which there is no room inside.
To the door at my knock comes a pale, fragile old lady in a faded lilac sun-bonnet. Her fine forehead is white as marble. White also her cheeks, with bones that stand out painfully. They have been carved by a Sculptor whose knowledge of skeleton anatomy is dreadfully precise. Her large eyes have a startled, timid look. Very quietly she answers my questions about the cottage.
" The thatch was done up about a year ago. That piece of wall under the corner should have been done then, but they have never sent to finish it."
" Are many cottages here built of mud like this ? "
" They do not call it mud, they call it * cob.' "
" Do you get rain in the bedroom ? "
" No, but the wind blows in terribly. I have not been used to this kind of thing all my life. When I married my husband was a farmer himself, and I brought him some property, but it all went by
TWO SHILLINGS A DAY 17
degrees. We carried on a small business, but the profits on that went to keep the farm going, till at last, when our family of six little ones were growing up, all was gone, and my husband became a labourer himself. In those two little bedrooms under the thatch we and our children — eight of us — all slept, and I have had all the six of them down with measles there at once."
Just then the wife of the cottager next door came home with a pail of water—they have to carry their water from the farm — and sat down at the door of her dark little living room to peel potatoes for supper. No oven had she to bake anything, not even a kitchen range or stove. Just a few iron bars and bricks propped up on the open hearth.
Ten shillings a week with a cottage, or I2s. with- out, is the regular labourer's wage, I found. The stockman and the carter get more. Cider-making used to give some extra employment, but this year that has failed, because there has been such a demand from the jam factories that most of the apples have been sent away. Apples are the basis of jam — the pulp or sweet mass which dilutes and cheapens the various kinds. It is only a fable which tells of turnips and carrots being used. This year a shortage of apples has deprived the Devonshire labourers of the little extras which came to them for cider- making.
" But how do you live on los. a week ? " I ask.
" Ah," says one of my two auditors, with a bitter laugh, " it is not living, it is starving. Many a time I have had to search the place for something that would sell to get a penny or two to buy a herring."
" But surely there are some things free ? You get milk, perhaps, in a dairy county ? "
8
18 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
But no. I actually found that my poor old lady of the lilac sun-bonnet, when she and her husband and six children with measles were sleeping under the thatch above, could only get milk by paying threepence a quart for it to their employer !
" And your six children ? " I ask. " Are any of them working on the land?"
" No, thank God ! If I had twenty not one of them should work on the land. I would sooner see them dead."
A few paces down the road one passes away from the village and out on to the dreary highway. A little wooden gate in the tangled hedge lets one through into a wild thicket. In the middle stands a piece of wall with a window — all that is left of a cottage. I scramble up a hillock formed by the ctibris. Great blocks of the "cob," or dried clay, are still intact. The rain has softened the surface into a slime on which one slips awkwardly about. Clumps of tall reeds and tough stalks of withered grass spring out of these broken fragments. There is a hole where wasps had had a nest last summer. One can poke one's umbrella deep into the stuff of which the old cottage was made.
Everywhere in the district cottages are vanishing, as the cultivation assumes a lower and lower type, and degenerates to mere " permanent pasture." The small villages are ceasing to exist. The thatcher, the blacksmith, the general shop disappear with the cottager. At Broadhembury, half a dozen miles from Honiton, a score of cottages have gone, and the general tradesman with them. At Stockland, in the Axminster Union, a dozen cottages have gone in the
TWO SHILLINGS A DAY 19
last twenty years, nearly all of them burnt down. The place has quite a reputation for fires — for a long time the insurance companies charged it extra. The fires are always mysteries, but whatever the cause the cottages never get replaced. There are half a dozen so dilapidated that I am afraid they will get burnt before long.
Few though the remaining labourers be, the farmers seem to want them fewer. ,There is a good deal of parish land or " poor " land, which the labourers have a right to. Some of them are quite miniature farmers ; hold up their heads in the world, and when they do a bit of piecework are able to ask their own price.
That is the grievance of the farmers. "These piecework men," they say, " won't work for less than half a crown a day." The economical farmer wants his odd man for a few days in the year at a florin a day, and to leave him to shift for himself all the rest.
Two shillings a day is almost sacred in Devon- shire as the labourer's hire. If you hear of a man getting 143. a week he always adds, " But I work Sundays."
Twelve shillings a week, less 2s. rent to the farmer for the cottage, is almost the universal condition. But the labourer has generally a quarter or half an acre of garden, and if he and his family can do with a bit more he can often get an odd corner of a field for potatoes. He has extra money for harvest and haymaking, and such extras as cider, and occasional milk, apples, turnips, and perhaps a rabbit out of the thousands shot.
In Stockland you may see a curious survival of the times before the New Poor-law.
20 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
A labourer there, earning the regulation I2s. a week and paying 2s. for rent, is actually getting 2s. from the parish.
" Why do you give him that ? " I asked one of the Axminster Guardians.
"Well, he has half a dozen children and he has recently lost his wife."
" Yes, but he is not out of work."
" The Guardians thought it was a hard case, as he had no one to look after things but a girl of fifteen."
" Did he ask for this money ? "
" No " (thoughtfully), " he did not ask for it. But we thought we ought to allow him 2s. from the parish, because he has no wife."
So determined are the farmers that the labourer's hire shall not increase that they are going back to this shallow device of seventy years ago ! Incident- ally, of course, this deprives the poor man of his vote.
At Westhill Ottery there are twenty or thirty small holdings reclaimed from the common by labourers, like those at Churchstanton, only in the present case the enclosure was made with the permission of the lord of the manor, on ninety-nine year leases. Sturdy, honest, respectable, these men keep a cow, a few pigs, and some poultry, attend the markets, make their six or seven pounds of butter a week, and look the whole world in the face.
• • • « •
It is clear from the cases I have given that trie- Devonshire labourer can do well wherever he has his own bit of land. Year by year his garden improves, his home becomes more pleasant and substantial. His little collection of the gear of the husbandman,
TWO SHILLINGS A DAY 21
of live stock and furniture, is added to, because he has no fear of a sudden removal. Even an allotment is a palliative, but if the cottage is his own and the land enough to keep his family through a poor year, then he is as contented and as happy as you could wish.
But these parishes are few and far between. Most of the labourers are hired out to individual farmers, and live in the farmers' own cottages. They are overcrowded to an almost inconceivable extent. Half a dozen, and even eight and ten in a family, will be huddled in two or three beds tucked under the thatch. When a new baby comes, why, one or two of the elder boys or girls must go — there is no help for it. It is this, and not the destruction of cottages, which causes the great exodus to the towns.
" I had to turn him out," the father will say of his elder boy. " It was not decent." And so the lad goes up to town.
But, indeed, there is very little to keep the young man on the land. The old happy village life of " Merrie England " has utterly withered away. The maypole and the morris-dance, the laughter of the harvest home under the yellow moon, the carol- singing of Yuletide, the games on the village green, where are they all ? What wonder that the labourer, educated as he now is, cannot bear the monotony of it all ? Why even the churchyard ghost has vanished and the bored squire gone away. We must do more than plant the labourer out in squares of arable soil. We must give him more than land and freedom. He must have some form of association, of access to the greater things of life. Never again can the soil of England be cultivated by that bovine and exclusively British creation, the " yokel."
IV
WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON
" AH, I thought it would come out at last. You're one of these agitators."
The speaker drew a long whiff of smoke, and regarded me with a solemn look of challenge. It was the market-day ordinary at the "Dolphin" at Honiton. Our good host had presided at a table laden with roast and boiled, at which sat thirty Devonshire farmers, hale and apple-cheeked. And now the cloth had gone, the boxes of tobacco and long churchwardens were littered round, and some were drinking cider, while one or two of the younger ones, pretending to a knowledge of town, had ordered a Benedictine or Chartreuse.
I had innocently inquired why the hedges in Devonshire were so wide, and this it was which had revealed to the assembled company my dark and dangerous character of an " agitator."
I soon found that Devonshire is very shy about these wide hedges. One farmer will tell you that the soil is so prolific that the hedges grow wide of themselves, another that they are made wide to keep cattle from trespassing. Hard pressed for an argument, the farmer will tell you that the hedges keep the fields warm, like bedclothes tucked in at night.
22
WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON 23
The Devonshire hedge is a marvel of luxuriance. First, it has as a foundation a broad bank of earth, fully as wide as the road — say, fifteen to twenty feet. At either side of the bank runs a close-set outer hedge, and between the two is a tangle or thicket of plants from which spring occasional trees. Even in this winter season these hedges are most picturesque, with their beech-plants all covered with gold-brown leaves, their tall, red-berried holly, their lace-like fringes of oakfern and hart's-tongue, their tree- stumps crowned with green like a church-font on Christmas morning.
The real secret of the Devonshire hedge, that strip of brake and coppice which surrounds the farm and the field, and makes the country so picturesque to the eyes of the visitor from town, is — Rabbits ! Under the overhanging gorse and bracken and fern the steep bank of bare soil is riddled with great holes. The so-called "hedge" is an enormous honeycomb of winding passages, like bomb-proof entrenchments in a besieged city, where the rabbits live and conduct their nightly raids for forage. For an individual farmer to aim at clearing his land of this pest would be like Mrs. Partington with the mop that was to sweep back the Atlantic. Let him snare and snare and snare, it will be of no avail. While there are succulent roots and luscious grasses to be had on his land, and underground rabbit- palaces in the famous Devonshire hedge, more rabbits will come. I have heard of a whole com- munity of bunnies migrating fifty miles in the night to an attractive feeding-ground.
And so the farmer, despairing of raising crops,
24 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
depends more and more on dairying, as the rabbits cannot eat his cows. He even looks to the rabbits themselves to help to pay the rent, and a grand rabbit-catching will sometimes make no mean addition to his balance in the bank. On a single farm in the South Molton district they held a rabbit-catch not long ago which lasted a fortnight, and brought in fourteen thousand rabbits.
Surely, this is a counsel of despair! To let land degenerate into sour pasture is bad enough, but to treat it as a mere rabbit warren is to abandon all hope of profitable culture. So thought a Scottish farmer, of the patient, industrious, thrifty Northern type, as he looked at the sad spectacle of these fat Devonshire lands, with their warm summer sunshine, all running to wild waste. He took a farm near Honiton, and he tried to farm it in the good, clean, laborious Scottish way. Eight thousand rabbits were taken on his farm in a few days.
But a new and strange difficulty confronted him. His horses and cattle seemed suddenly to have gone mad. They broke through the Devonshire hedges as if they were so many cobwebs. Nothing would confine them to the fields. And he found that the "ground game," as it is called, had so poisoned the soil and the grass that the poor beasts could find nothing to eat. They could not touch the foul herbage, and broke away through sheer starvation.
" Why," the reader will ask, " do they not burn and plough and destroy these rabbit-shelters, set up neat fences, and add scores of acres to their fields?"
Well, it would be a tremendous work, involving
WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON 25
lots of capital, and if one farmer did it his crops would still be liable to incursions from his neigh- bour's rabbits. Besides, the landlord would not allow it. Everywhere I go I find that the landlords are in favour of increasing, and not diminishing, the number of cities of refuge for ground game.
One farmer I have just met cultivates 215 acres of land at Snodwell, paying £100 a year in rent. He has been there twenty- four years, and has brought up ten children, all of them working like slaves to pay that £100 a year. Now the land has just been sold for £1,8 2 5, or less than fy an acre. The new owner is going to let the farm for £140, and he will reserve twelve acres of coppice, from which legions of rabbits will be able to raid the crops of the next tenant.
" I don't know what I shall do," says the farmer, whose lease is just up. "I know one thing: I cannot pay that £140."
In another case, where a small farm has fallen in, the landlord has broken it up into three portions, and added it to the holdings of other tenants, whose capital is all too small even for their existing land. The farmhouse, of course, goes; a farmer's family, servants, and dependents are removed from the soil. Cultivation goes down a step. But again the " coppice " is reserved by the landlord, this time in a corner position, in which it commands three large farms. The fewer the farms, the greater the stretches of land without human inhabitants, the better the landlord is pleased.
I have shown by examples how the labourer is being driven off these broad acres of Devonshire by the lapse of cultivation and the want of cottages. But there is a similar exodus of the class above,
26 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
the farmers themselves and their families. The case just mentioned of a farmer who has brought up ten children on the land is one in point. Every one of these has had to work, as their father put it, literally like a " slave." Even the miserable pittance of the labourer has not fallen to their lot.
Here is another case, also within a few miles of Honiton. A farmer has three grown-up sons and three grown-up daughters working on the farm. They are clothed and fed, it is true, better than the labourer. But not one of them has any money wages, anything to save. Not one of them has had any education beyond the barest elementary school rudiments. Of the science of farming they know nothing, and they are utter strangers to the marvels of modern culture. Those boys and girls have had their youth wasted in endless drudgery to make ends meet and pay the ever-recurring rent. They have not even their father's rule-of-ttiumb acquaintance with farming methods. And yet if they were to desert him, the old man would break up. It is only this free labour, " slave " labour one might well call it — held together by the desperate bond of a despairing family affection — that keep his head above water.
" Why do they pay more rent than they can afford?" some one will ask.
And, indeed, a noble earl, who is one of our best- known landowners, put the thought to me a few days ago with somewhat cynical frankness.
" Don't give it as coming from me," he said, " but farming pays ! For every farm we have to let there are at least seven applicants."
WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON 27
But what is this " paying " ? Here in Devonshire, at all events, it is the reckless bid of the farmer who knows that he must have land or perish. It is the coining into landlord's gold of the wasted lives of the son and daughter who see their parents sinking into want and helplessness. Of such a case I have just heard the sad particulars. For two generations the old man has been struggling on the same farm. In spite of his children's labour he has gradually got behindhand.
And now, at seventy, he says, " A good season would put me right." Poor old man ! He does not realise that if in the prime of his years he did not secure the fruit of that wonderful dream-season, that glorious golden fruit-time for which the farmer hopes, he is not likely to do better with one foot in the grave. He is just living on hope. With old-world, rusty machinery, he is fast going down. But he clings to his farm with desperate tenacity. Well he knows that if ever he leaves he will never get another — could never afford to stock another. So he must go on by privation and drudgery raising a rent out of all proportion to the present produce of the soil.
There is another influence in Devonshire that tends to keep up the artificial rents paid for farms. Young men and maidens here, in spite of the sinister experience of their parents, have a constant ambition to found new families. A friend has just told me this story : —
"A young couple had been courting," he said. " Their fathers, being old neighbours, put their heads together, and her father came to me to ask about
28 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
some land they thought would do to set the young folks up.
" ' You know such-and-such a farm ? ' he said to me.
" * Yes/ I said. ' Three tenants in two years.'
"But they must have it. They hear there are other applicants. So the young man takes posses- sion before the lease is signed and with nothing done, and he pays a quite reckless rent. The land has been starved, and he has no capital to improve it. And so things go from bad to worse."
The artificial scarcity of farms is made worse by the practice of cutting up a small farm when a lease runs out and adding it to the larger farms near. The farm of " Round Ball," near Honiton, once a thriving homestead, is now let by auction annually, in lots. The farmer and his family and all the labourers are gone, and the house itself is tumbling into ruins.
V "MERRIE ENGLAND"
" To colonise England."
Lover of our dear native land, what a task is this ! Look hard at our great voiceless wastes, our lean countrysides, our sodden ditches, our crumbling hamlets. Look, and think while you look of the scene as it might be : clean thatch and blossoming orchard, frolic of little zephyrs in the corn ; ring of anvil and merry patter of mill-wheel, the fierce music of the sawpit on the green, the romp of happy, brown-faced children ; the fair bosom of Earth our Mother clad once more with a delicate and beautiful garment woven of the rich and subtle things of Life ; gladness and laughter and song, labour and rest, sweet sorrow and sweeter love.
In very truth this is no question of a few sleek Acts of Parliament, or spider-web theories of a School of Economics, or turning of hordes of white- faced unemployed on to these Sphinx-like acres whose secret demands the labour and wisdom of a thousand years.
It is the calling forth of a New Life ! It is the essaying, in this little island of ours, of a fresh Creation. When we confront this stupendous task, our ears catch some faint echo of that awful music
39
30 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
that sounded when the Spirit of God brooded over the dim primeval waters, and breathed the breath that became a living soul.
Indeed, this, and no less, is what we mean when we glibly talk about restoring " Agriculture." What we have to replace is a living human society of cultivators on the great wilderness outside our towns. The word "agriculture" is just one of those vague, abstract polysyllables which politicians and econo- mists will persist in using to get rid of difficulties. It includes the notion of the " field " or " acre," and the digging or "culture," but nothing about the human beings who are to till, and not only to till, but to live. Yet it is this human element that baffles us with its endless complexities, that con- forms to no rule, and will not be summed up in a formula.
If it were merely a question of raising vast quan- tities of vegetable produce from the soil I have no doubt it could be managed with a mere trifle of human supervision. One readily conceives of a land with steam ploughs and traction engines and self-bind- ing reapers careering about like the monsters in Mr. Reid's " Prehistoric Peeps " ; of carrots and lettuces and Brussels sprouts springing up in the night like spectral armies under the stimulating glare of count- less electric lamps, of machine-mixed soil, full of moisture and warmth and ferment, spread thick over hills and valleys, to defy the frost and keep up relays of new crops all through the winter.
All this would only leave us worse off than before. Mountains of cheap food would only give us towns bigger and more crowded, with more disease, more
ENGLAND" 31
physical deterioration, more ebb and flow of " employment " — mostly ebb !
A complete human society, then, is what we must seek to establish on the soil — its members knit closely together by ties of kinship, and neighbourly esteem, and friendly co-operation, and the exchange of the multitude of small services that go to make up the sum of life. This must be the ruling principle in all our endeavours to re-establish our fallen agri- culture. No phenomenal abundance of the green herbs of the earth, no vast accumulation of flocks and herds, no stupefying totals of produce hauled round the globe by the power of steam, must divert our attention from this primary consideration of the building up on the land itself of a virile, contented, industrious, and stable people. The harvest was made for man, and not man for the harvest.
'• A truism ! " you will say. But if so, it is one that has been most wofully neglected in our national policy.
To be really efficient and successful, this society or family of cultivators must be as numerous as the land will support in comfort. Instead of thinking how to get rid of men and replace them by machines, the constant aim should be to increase the population profitably employed on the soil.
Why, I have just met a farmer who rejoices that he can save so much labour on a field and still keep up the crop by using artificial manure. The labourer is to be replaced as a fertilising agent by burnt bones and the dung of foreign sea-birds! Apart from the bad husbandry of this, it shows how the land is regarded merely as an instrument of
32 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
immediate profit, utterly regardless of the people who want homes and an opportunity to live and work.
The importance of having the largest possible population on the land is not a question of sentiment. It can be shown clearly in terms of mere pounds, shillings, and pence. A healthy, productive people engaged in the fields is a nation's truest wealth. It is always thrifty and a financial support in emer- gency, as was the French peasantry in the dark times after the war. It is a nation of strong citizens whose rooted attachment to the soil would make a conquest by a foreign invader almost hopeless. Every great commander has recognised the impossibility of a conquest of citizens. The Boer War showed the desperate resistance which may be made even by a thinly scattered population. Then, again, such a community of cultivators, thickly planted on the land, with growing crops everywhere in being and maturing at all seasons, is, apart from its own resisting power, the best of all bases for a defending or retreating army. It does away with the most difficult of all military problems, that of supplies.
Observe, I am not in any way defending war.
I merely point out that, from a military and economic point of view, a well-populated rural area, with a food supply always ready and always growing, is in itself a substitute for many of the preparations for defence upon which such immense sums are expended by the State. It acts (i) as the most powerful deterrent to invasion, (2) as a ready means of organising emergency forces, (3) as a base of supplies for regular troops.
Precisely the same considerations apply to our
"MERRIE ENGLAND" 33
naval defences. Every one knows that the great work of the Navy in times of public anxiety is to convoy the vast food supplies we draw from abroad. A food supply within the ring of our coastline is worth many millions of outlay on ships. At any time it might avert panic, riot, and financial, com- mercial, and industrial collapse.
Let us never forget that only six weeks' food, at any given moment, stands, between us and actual famine. Even the most meagre home food supply would give an immense increase of stability at enormously reduced cost.
So much for the value of a healthy agricultural population from the point of view of our present burdensome national defences. But such a people, wedded to the land, would be the nursery and training ground of strong, useful citizens. It would be the " stock " of the nation, infusing new vigorous blood into all other departments of the national life. It would be a remedy for the dreadful physical deterioration which is alarming all our most sober thinkers. It would stem the terrible tide of insanity in our towns.
" England is overcrowded," one hears.
But this certainly does not apply to the land. In Great Britain we have an area of 56,000,000 acres, and setting aside towns, moors, mountains, railways, forests, &c., we have just over 30,000,000 acres given to food-raising for man and beast. The population of this agricultural land is seven and a half millions, or one person to four acres. Food is raised for 17,000,000, or rather more than a third of our population. Prince Kropotkin has shown that it
4
34 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
England were cultivated as well as Belgium is on the average, food would be raised for 37,000,000, or nearly our whole population. This would mean 2,000,000 more men employed on the land, or a total additional agricultural population of nearly ten millions.
And these ten millions would depend upon the mechanics and tradesmen of the towns for their supplies. Such a home market would make the little percentages of trade from such and such colonies and territories, about which we hear so much, absolutely insignificant.
Millions of new workers would be needed in towns and villages to meet the wants of this new colony of ours, safely ensconced within our own coastlines.
There would be no longer any unemployed !
In these few rough arguments I have shown, I trust, the paramount necessity of regarding the problem as one of " colonising," not of mere culti- vating. We have to thank Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman for that illuminating word.
It may still be said that though this great change might pay the nation, it would not pay the individual — that foreign competition makes it impossible. That it would pay the individual as well as the nation I hope to show when examining the great masked economic interests, which, like giant magicians, have long been at work, wounding our agriculture to the very point of death.
VI " FOREIGN COMPETITION "
THE people of Britain have a very real interest, an interest of life and death, in this question of the use which is being made, or rather, not being made, of the great wilderness that lies at their doors, out in the darkness just beyond the twinkle of the street lamps. The grinding expense of militarism, the dreadful curses of the maddened crowd of the work- less, the clamour for new markets, and more new markets, at the remotest ends of the earth, the cease- less building of great cities for the insane, which we call " asylums," the horrible dwellings where the poor sleep heaped on the floor, the bloodless army of emaciated children trooping wearily to school, with crumbling teeth and failing sight and feeble brains, the woman toiling through the night that she may have a crust to soak in water for her babe — do not all these things speak of the Land ?
But we have to do with a practical question. The agricultural population, instead of multiplying and growing more of the food which is the nation's life- blood, the stimulus to every healthy activity, are leaving the land, and the land is going out of cultiva-
36
36 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
tion. There is no dispute as to the facts. Here are the official figures : —
1885. 1905.
Acres under wheat 2,478,318 ... 1,796,995
All corn crops 8,392,006 ... 7,094,232
Green crops 3,521,602 ... 3,077,042
Grasses under rotation 4,654,173 ... 4,477,518
Number of cattle 6,597,964 ... 6,987,020
Sheep 26,534,600 ... 25,257,196
Two million acres, one acre in every eight, gone out of cultivation in twenty years! Not merely corn, but green crops also.
If you say, " Oh, now we produce meat, not corn," then look at the figures as to live stock. Sheep have become fewer by a million and a third, or one in twenty. Cattle have increased by one in sixteen, but have not kept pace with population, which has grown by one in ten. The increase in cattle is not due to meat-raising, but to the town dairies, because so far we have not learned to import fresh milk.
To the twelve million people of Britain who never get enough to eat, this going out of cultivation of the land is a dreadful thing. The million and a third of acres of corn land that have vanished since 1885 would have fed seven million people, whose daily labour in return would have been a perpetual en- richment to the country.
Why are the people leaving the land ? We must not forget that if farm work is naturally repulsive, if it leads to poverty and wretchedness, we cannot expect a whole population to make slaves and martyrs of themselves even for the public good.
Now, the reason why they go away, the reason why the land is wretched and distasteful to them,
"FOREIGN COMPETITION" 37
is not that there are too many people on it, but too few.
Robinson Crusoe lived on an island. It was a fertile island, just as Devonshire is fertile. But he met with the most tremendous difficulties, because he was alone. When he found and planted that priceless handful of barley, all the birds of the air came as volunteer reapers the moment his back was turned. When he had spent months in chiselling a boat out of a giant cedar, he found he could not move it the few yards to the shore. He was baffled at every turn because he had only one pair of eyes and one pair of hands.
The more people you get to work in one place, the more you increase the power of each. The lonely Devonshire farmer is a Robinson Crusoe. His farm is a Crusoe Island. True, it is not surrounded by sea, but if the smoke of your neighbour's homestead is a couple of miles away across the fields, he is not much use to you when you need a helping hand or a little advice.
Think of all that is lost by big, widely scattered farms, as compared with little ones where the farmers work almost shoulder to shoulder. Think of it, if you like, as a mere question of money profit. The farmer with the big farm has his stock, his buildings, his manure, at a central point. His dung must be carted over rough, heavy land to fields, perhaps, a mile or two away. And every horse eats up as much of the produce of the soil as would feed a married couple and two or three children. Implements, seed, feeding stuffs must all be carried about over immense distances.
The most trifling errand, to supply a sudden need for man or beast, will mean a drive of miles to the
38 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
nearest shop. There is no telegraph, no telephone, no electric car humming its busy way along the country roads from village to village. There is no quick parcel post to enable him to develop a trade in little profitable things, such as eggs, cream, honey, vegetables, or fruit with the towns. Even letters are generally dropped in a rickety box at the roadside, and have to be sent for when some one has time.
If a machine wants repairing it may be days before a man can be got to do it, and his double journey and the loss of time will cost the farmer dear. The thatcher and blacksmith and tinker are getting more and more rare, because there are not enough people to keep them at work.
On these scattered farms nothing is ever at hand. You can't get anything done in time to be of any use. The land is never under the master's eye. Tramp about the fields never so much, and still mis- chief will be done long before he sees it. There are not enough eyes watching the land.
All the countless little exchanges of service be- tween neighbours, which cost nothing but are worth their weight in gold, are lost when the cultivators are separated by such distances.
The result is that the farmer is not a business man. He keeps no books. He does not know which parts of his business pay. He takes no account of all the little things, the " save-alls " which would cost little in labour and bring in a golden return. There are sunny walls, abundance of stable manure, about the homestead, but he never tries small crops which could
" FOREIGN COMPETITION" 39
be watched from the kitchen window and sold in the towns. He never tries to sell things to his neigh- bours. I have just been in to a little public-house at four cross-roads. They had no tea — "the teaman has not called this week." "Cocoa?" They had no milk.
" But," I said, " there is a big farm across the way." " They would not give you milk. It's all set up for the day."
" Give me a jug," I said', and I went and got some fine, frothy milk and an invitation to call again. But no one had ever thought of a farmer's wife selling milk. •
" Why don't you grow corn ? " I asked a farmer at Chard.
"Oh, we only grow a little to get straw for the cattle. The corn itself does not pay with this foreign competition."
Now, there are several things to say about this. Corn has gone up 50 per cent, in the last ten years. The Manitoba farmer got 55 cents a bushel at the elevator in 1894; now ^e Sets nearly 100. The farmer here gave up corn as a bad job ten years ago, and has apparently not really thought the matter over since.
" Foreign competition," indeed !
Ten shillings out of the twenty-seven or twenty- eight received by the British farmer goes in rent.
A pretty handicap with which to start against the competition of the free land of Canada.
But will it be believed that the British farmer actually gets four or five shillings less than he might do because he is in such a hurry to get to market ?
40 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
Here is a diagram showing the weekly corn prices in 1905 : —
BRITISH WHEAT f> R. I C €T S : l&OS
Look at that tremendous drop of prices in August and September?
What does it mean ?
Why, the British farmer, poor fellow, pressed for his rent, ignorant of market methods, is rushing to sell his corn.
In addition to paying IDS. a quarter to his land- lord, he loses 55. more by a forced sale to raise the rent itself.
And then he talks about " foreign competition " ! Why, he does not get half the price that is paid cash down to his Canadian brother. Lucky for him if he had not that steam thresher, and had to keep men with the flail threshing all winter.
He would get 53. a quarter more for his wheat.
On his lonely farm, with no busy society of culti- vators round him to give him ideas, the farmer just drifts on. With a pathetic longing for some com- munication with the outer world, he wastes two or three days a week in going to markets, where he has nothing to sell, and meets others just like himself.
Out of the " Dolphin " window here I saw a
"FOREIGN COMPETITION" 41
curiously instructive group of three. One was a farmer of the old type which I have been describing. Slow, thoughtful, with that curious, anxious light they have in their eyes, his bronzed and wrinkled face haloed in iron-grey whiskers, he was talking to a younger man, full-cheeked, booted, and spurred, with smart Chesterfield and shiny tan-coloured leg- gings. A few days ago this old farmer was seen by a visitor standing on a heaped-up cart of mangels, tossing them one by one 'into a shed, while half a dozen labourers, waiting to be taken on, sat on a fence smoking their short black clays, and watched the old gentleman doing the work any one of them would have undertaken at two shillings a day.
This farmer priced his own labour at two shillings a day ; yet he pays £600 a year in rent !
The younger man is of an altogether more modern type. He is a farmer, too, but he not only goes to two markets a week, but shoots two days and attends hunts on two others. Both unbusinesslike, in op- posite ways ! Who can wonder the land is going down ?
The third man was a splendid figure, a Breton peasant from Roscoff, tall, broad-chested, smiling, bearing on his shoulder, like the spies of Joshua, a great pole, from which depended immense strings of onions. He had come all the way to Honiton 'to sell them. But at Roscoff the little farmers are crowded thick on the land, they nurse the soil like a baby, grow rushbanks to shelter the beds, and by their close communication learn so much that they can even cross the sea to market produce which they carry on their backs. And here were these Devon- shire farmers haggling over the price of onions with a man who pays £$ an acre rent, and then has to
42 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
travel hundreds of miles at his own expense to market. This is " foreign competition." Foreign wits, foreign industry, foreign intelligence, the result of a brisk, lively communal life, as compared with our society of Robinson Crusoes who come from their lonely farms and stand all day idle in the market-place !
VII "LITTLE LONDON"
AFTER Devonshire, Norfolk !
Norfolk, with its silvery broads, its sunlit cliffs aflame with poppies, its rich plains standing high above the sea, its splendid churches, grey and stately and serene, their great towers seeming to shed over the labours of the husbandman a protecting spirit coming down the ages with its promise of fruitfulness and peace.
I have come, however, not to enjoy, but to under- stand. And if any one wishes to realise what the " rural exodus " means I commend him to Norfolk, and especially advise a ramble through the forty- eight parishes of the Erpingham Union, stretching across from the coast at Cromer and Sheringham to North Walsham.
Here, near the small village of Corpusty, about ten miles inland as the crow flies, I discover a hamlet named "Little London." I admire the grim satire of the rustic who invented that name. He harboured no illusions about " streets paved with gold."
One of the cottages in " Little London " is in- habited by an old man named Goldsmith, formerly
44 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
groom and gardener to a local clergyman, now nearly eighty, and living on 33. 6d. club money, 2s. from the parish, and what he can grow in his garden, which with the cottage costs him 2s. a week rent.
Let me try to tell you the kind of cottage it is. The little kitchen is about four paces by three, and it is the only living and cooking room for the old man and his wife, and a grown-up son and daughter. The daughter is consumptive, and sits all day long before the fire. The window does not open, the little room quickly gets unbearably hot, and the only way to get fresh air is to open the door. In a frosty wind this, of course, means that in a moment the hot air is blown out, and the room goes down to freezing- point.
" If the door is opened we are perished," says Mrs. Goldsmith.
And her shivering daughter, with the constant painful cough, bears out the statement.
The floor of the kitchen is of bricks, and full of hollows. On a rainy day the water comes in streams down the stairs, which are entered by a sort of cup- board door near the fireplace, and the kitchen is then a series of little lakes.
" Before lighting the fire in a morning," says Mrs. Goldsmith, " if it has rained in the night I have to scoop up the water into a dustpan, and throw it out of the door."
I asked permission to inspect the upper part of this interesting cottage. As I went up I saw the muddy tidemarks on the wall that showed how the rain came in to the stairs. The space above, exactly big enough to hold three beds, one for the old couple,
"LITTLE LONDON" 45
and the others for the son and daughter, was about as well protected from wind and weather as if it had been a birdcage. The lead window was in such a dilapidated state that sundry efforts to tie it in place with string had been of no avail.
Over the beds the bare tile roof let the wind in everywhere, and the painstaking labours of the old lady, who had stuffed the cracks in the roof with rags and brown paper, were not sufficient to prevent one seeing the sky. The' plaster partition at the head of the beds was only held up by repeated paperings, and bulged out like a balloon.
" I am afraid some windy night it will come down, and smother us in plaster," said Mrs. Goldsmith.
In winter this upper storey is as cold as the outside air. The family, and especially the invalid daughter, are afraid to go upstairs to bed out of the hot kitchen.
An ingenious plan is adopted to prevent the rain from wetting the beds. For a long time Mrs. Goldsmith noticed that one of her sons, who has since left, had a very bad cough. She also noticed that the bed used to be very wet.
" It's those night-sweats," she said to herself.
But one day she happened to see that the rain was dripping on the bed from the roof. By placing pans and other kitchen utensils on the bed in suitable places she caught the trickling water and kept the beds dry.
I find this plan is well known in Norfolk. I have found two other cottages where it is adopted, though in many cases the water comes in in such a way that it cannot be caught.
Of course, the sleeper has to lie very quiet in bed. If he overturns the pans he is worse off than ever.
46 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
Still, with practice, and especially if the pans are firmly placed after the sleeper has settled down, a good deal of water can be kept from soaking the bed.
" Why did you not insist on having the place done up before you came in ? " I asked.
" We came in the day the last tenant went out, and were glad to get in anywhere at all. There was no time for repairs."
" Little London " is reeking with infamies of sani- tation, but the single case I have given must suffice as an example. Let me now introduce you to a different type of human dwelling - place. Near Felbrigg, on the Norwich Road, my eye was caught by a railway carriage without wheels, near a large farm-house.
"What's that?" I asked.
" Oh, that's where the labourer lives. The railway company sells these old carriages at £6 apiece, and some of these farmers buy one to put up a labourer. It comes cheaper than a cottage."
Walking up to the carriage, I found it was an old- fashioned third-class car, originally with five com- partments. Two of these had been made into the bedroom, where the labourer, his wife, and three children slept, the other three compartments having been knocked into one to serve the purposes of kitchen, drawing-room, library, study, dining-room, &c. The bedroom floor is always wet in rainy weather. As for the kitchen, it has a stove, oven, and stovepipe going up through the roof. In such a small place if the windows are shut it is roasting hot when the oven is on, and if the windows are open the place is like an icehouse in a minute.
"IJTTLE LONDON" 47
No wonder the wife is rheumatic and the children always ailing. Twelve shillings are the wages of the labourer, and for his £6 mansion he used to pay a shilling a week rent, but now he gets it free as part of his wages.
At Southrepps I come across a cottage on Lord Suffield's estate occupied by^a labourer, his wife, and their family of three. Both living-room and bedroom are on the ground floor. The leaden window, like the one above referred to, has rotted away so that it might almost as well not be there. The bedroom, where the father, mother, and two children sleep (the eldest son sleeping in the outer room), is just big enough to hold two beds, with a few inches of gang- way between them. One of the incidental effects of the cramped space of all these poor cottagers is that they have no room to put anything away. It is difficult to see how they find room to undress, or where to put their clothes at night, unless they heap them on the bed and sleep under them. But they literally have no room to put things away. When one thinks how many kinds of clothing are only needed for certain exceptional occasions or seasons, and how things for occasional use will keep as good as new if only neatly put away, it does seem hard that the labourer should be compelled to allow his few poor garments to go to wreck because he has not room for a chest of drawers or one or two trunks.
But that is not the worst trouble in this particular cottage.
" Just stoop down, sir, if you please, and feel the floor."
48 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
I do so. Plunging my arm down into the dark space between the beds, for there is not room to see, I find my knuckles sinking into what feels like a bed of wet moss.
" It's the water that rises through the floor. You may mop and mop as much as you like, but there is always more. The people that used to live here covered it all up thick with sacks. But that doesn't seem decent like. So we put three thicknesses of carpet down. But lor', it might as well be bare."
No wonder one hears of rheumatics. Fancy stepping out barefoot on such a floor on a cold winter's morning !
The reason why the bedroom is practically a well is easy to see. The garden outside slopes upwards from the wall of the cottage, and drains right into its foundations. There is no channel to intercept the rain-water and keep it from soaking through.
The well is in the centre of the garden, a little way up the slope. It is a circular, brick-lined pit, thickly grown inside with ferns, mosses, and other plants. It is quite a pretty sight to look down and see all this greenery. But necessarily all the withered and decayed vegetation drops down into the water. A brown sediment falls to the bottom of the water drawn for drinking. It has not a foul taste, but it is bound to be unwholesome in the summer.
At the risk of offending squeamish readers, I feel bound to mention one other point. The privy is a ramshackle structure over a cesspool a little higher up the slope of the garden. The boards of the seat are so decayed and gnawed away by rats as to be full of holes and crevices, and in imminent danger of collapsing.
"LITTLE LONDON" 49
" Whenever one of the children goes up there I am afraid it will fall through altogether," says the mother.
This is bad enough. What I saw at " Little London," and forebear to mention, was worse.
VIII "NO ROOM TO LIVE"
IT is well for some of these Norfolk cottages that there is a " rural exodus." Otherwise some of them would burst !
I have just been looking at some tumble-down little cottages at Corpusty, so absolutely rotten that the bricks have got eaten away by the weather, and the mortar stands out. But the most deplorable thing about these places is their microscopic size. The living or ground-floor room in one or two that I looked at had a kind of washing copper built in the corner, which seemed to take up nearly half the space. There was just room for the goodwife to walk round in the L-shaped remainder.
The pitiful result is that the poor people have no chance of keeping anything. Walking up a muddy lane I found that some of them had small sheds, with rickety, moss-covered doors, half eaten away by wind and weather, where they harbour a few of their belongings for which there is no room in the cottages. A dilapidated perambulator, a few bits of carpet, would be stacked up with other oddments, gradually perishing for want of protection from the weather.
Thus the want of a little more cottage room not only means foul air, overcrowding, violent alterna-
60
"NO ROOM TO LIVE" 51
tions of heat and cold, but the loss of all that domestic and household gear which in a well-ordered family goes on accumulating all through life. Opportunities occur of picking up things which will be useful by and by, and thus a little storage room will mean that the labourer toward the end of his days will be well dowered with all the comforts of village life. Wealth will have come to him free, because he has been able to seize opportunities — to store the hen's feathers, which will make pillows for his old age, to keep the bits of finery which will serve to deck his children's children, and so on. But these tiny cottages mean that nothing can be kept, there can never be an eye to the future, there is no encouragement to thrifty management and the making of a permanent home.
Here are a few instances of the number of inhabitants crammed into the cottages of the Erpingham Union. Mr. Tuddenham, the Sanitary Inspector, found at Bodham, not far from Shering- ham, thirteen people sleeping in two small attics — parents and eleven children of both sexes, from twenty-five years old downwards. At Roughton a most respectable family — two parents, one grand- parent, four girls, aged twelve, ten, five, and two, and five boys, aged twenty, eighteen, sixteen, fourteen, and seven — slept in two small rooms. At Thorpe Market six people slept in a room nine feet by seven and a half. At Northrepps nine people slept in two small rooms, at East Runton ten people in two small rooms, at Hanworth twelve people in two small rooms. Besides the parents, there were daughters aged twenty, eighteen, sixteen, and five, and sons aged twenty-two, fourteen, eleven, nine, three, and two,
52 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
Remember that two rooms in these cases never means two rooms approached separately from a land- ing. One is entered by a ladder-like staircase from below, and the second from the first, generally, as I have seen for myself, without a door between. Indeed, there would be no room for a door to open. Think how you would decently apportion those two rooms among that family of twelve.
In a cottage at East Runton not only did a family of seven sleep in two small rooms, but the inspector adds the remark, " Visitors taken in the season ! " At Felbrigge, where I saw the railway carriage dwelling, the inspector found eight people living in a single bedroom. There were many other cases in which nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen people slept in two small bedrooms.
In spite of this terrible overcrowding, which goes on unchecked from year to year, the number of cottages is yearly going down. At Roughton I found that four cottages have gone out of use in the last four years. The young labourer who told me this was a most intelligent young man, and his eyes flashed as he described the humiliations and diffi- culties that his class have to suffer merely in seeking a place in which to live. At Aylmerton ten cottages have gone in the past few years, at Beckham seven, at Bodham five, and so on right through the Union.
Most of the cottagers are too timid to tell their case. They are fearful of being turned out, and dread the sanitary inspector and his cautions about over- crowding.
And, indeed, whither can they go ?
At Overstrand I visited a house where ten people had been reported as sleeping in two bedrooms.
" It's not so bad now," said the wife of the cottager
"NO BOOM TO LIVE" 53
" Father's dead, and one of the little ones has been taken, so we are only eight."
Poor body, I suppose she thought that if a few more died the offended authorities would at last be propitiated.
" Why," it may be asked, " is not Part III. of the Housing Act put into force ? Why not petition the County Council for an inquiry with a view to the building of more cottages ? "
That is just what the Erpingham Union did. Over ten years ago they tried to put the Act in force, without success, but in 1902 the evil had become so acute, that they again applied to the Norfolk County Council for an inquiry. The letter was simply acknowledged, and twelve months passed. Then the County Council said, " You must name one parish where you say the need exists."
The effect of this, of course, is not only to make the provision of cottages for all the forty-eight parishes an interminable matter, but to throw all the expense on a tiny area which may consist of only a couple of farms. By preventing the whole Union from co-operating the County Council makes a sufficient scheme an intolerable burden to the selected parish.
However, the Union were not to be daunted. They named the parish of Aylmerton. The County Council decided in 1903 to grant an inquiry, but it has not yet been held.
The law is very humorous in these matters. Before an inquiry could be held the Union must prepare plans and specifications of the cottages they propose to build, indicate what land will be suitable,
54 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
estimate its price, and the expense of water supply, and so on. All this costs a great deal of money. But the Union are denied the power to spend any- thing at all until the holding of the inquiry which is to determine whether cottages shall be erected or not. Thus the law cannot be put in force.
The Union authorities naturally cannot enforce the law against overcrowding unless there are cottages enough. Already they have had to receive into the workhouse families able to pay for a cottage, but unable to find one.
"The thing is quite simple," says one of the greatest landowners of the county to me. " Is a labourer going to pitch muck for twelve shillings a week without amusements ? I wouldn't."
" The labourer is better off than ever," he goes on. " He has milk from the farm, which he never got before. It is true we have a man in the workhouse because he cannot get a cottage. But why? No one will let to him, because his children are dirty and destructive, and they break all the windows. Other- wise he could get plenty of cottages."
The " plenty of cottages " I have certainly failed to see. But as I am invited to go and see the cottages of my informant, I make a railway journey to another part of Norfolk, and find one or two really substan- tial and convenient little houses, each with three bed- rooms, kitchen, and sitting-room. The father of the family in one case is bearing water from the well, while the boys, home from school, are hoeing in the half-acre garden with desperate vigour, but not much apparent result.
However, I walk on to the village green, an idyllic
"NO ROOM TO LIVE" 55
picture, with its vast trees and pretty little thatched cottages, with their pretty flower gardens. Into one of these I enter, clean and tidy and well kept, but before the boys " went off" there were eight people sleeping in the space above, with their heads tucked under the sloping thatch.
"We had to get the room divided into two, for decency's sake," I am told.
Next door there was the same overcrowding, even on this model estate.
As to the water, the people are afraid of it. There are ominous tales of typhoid.
"The fact is," the landlord had told me, "it is medicinal water, sulphuretted hydrogen — just like Harrogate ! It is good for them !"
But the villagers think otherwise.
PART II
THE REMEDY
BY
C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.
I
IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS
SOME have survived through all the evil days, from the time when the land was in the hands of those who worked it. Some have been deliberately con- structed, through the effort of Parish Council or County Council, or the energy of one man or a group of men determined to break through the tendency towards consolidation. And some have arisen almost by chance, through the character of a village or the opening of some particular oppor- tunity which has been denied to the less fortunate. And of these last is the famous Winterslow experi- ment, where in a remote village in Wiltshire, far from the world and with few of the recognised conditions which guarantee success, one of the most interesting of modern attempts at land colonisation is just coming to a satisfactory conclusion.
We drove out from Salisbury on one of those radiant autumn days for a seven-mile ride over the Downs. At first the way led between tall trees, with glimpses between of the yellow stubble, and the land all parched for lack of rain. The road wound upward, opening far distances. The trees
59
60 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
fell away, then the marks of cultivation. The chalk appeared, with the scanty soil above it. At last even the hedges ceased, and there was nothing in all the horizon but the wide earth under the wide sky, and the white roads winding over the brown hills.
After many miles of this landscape a line of trees appeared crowning a long crest. We descended through plantations of juniper bushes, then up through a kind of cutting in the hillside resembling nothing so much as an ascent to a mediaeval strong- hold. The low tower of Winterslow Church ap- peared, and the first houses of the village. Beyond the village stretched the great woods of Winterslow and Norman Court, which are still full of the memo- ries of Fox, and Sheridan, and Hazlitt, and the men of a hundred years ago.
Here in Winterslow has long lived a race of men of independence and vigour. A religious revival of some years back had helped to promote thrift and sobriety. There were small holdings in actual working before Major Poore's experiment com- menced. And many of those who came into it had already some savings which they were prepared to put into the land.
In 1892 "Cooper's Farm," of some two hundred acres, was in the market. The land, on the whole poor, though some of it good for this district, had been much neglected and was in a shocking condi- tion. A little group of villagers, including the schoolmaster and the village blacksmith, had been accustomed to meet to discuss with Major Poore the business of the County Council. They agreed to attempt a small-holding experiment on this farm. Theirs was the only offer at the auction sale, and
IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS 61
the land was knocked down to them for £1,500 — at the exceedingly low price of about £7 los. per acre.
Major Poore gave the required security for the purchase money. The various sections of the land were valued — largely through the knowledge of old, experienced men who knew what it was really worth. A piece of some eighty acres, supposed to be too heavy for small working, was sold in a lump for £800. The remainder was divided into lots from half an acre to twenty acres, and offered to those of the village who decided to come into the scheme. These lots were priced at different values — from £10 or £12 to £30 an acre. The occupants agreed to pay 5 per cent, interest on the capital and to purchase the land outright in capital and interest in twenty- eight half-yearly payments extending over fourteen years. They were united into a company forming the " Landowners' Court " — with the land divided into five sections, and each section electing a chair- man and vice-chairman ; the whole, with the secretary and the directors, forming a permanent committee. It was calculated that as the payments were com- pleted the funds at the disposal of the company would steadily increase. At the end of the fourteen years the Landowners' Court was to have some £1,400 at its absolute disposal (representing the difference between the purchase and selling prices), and the landowners themselves would be the owners of their own land.
Has the experiment succeeded ?
I had arrived almost at the end of it. Some seven purchasers bought outright with their savings. The remainder have been regularly making their half- yearly payments. None of the original purchasers
62 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
defaulted. None gave up, except one who went on a farm of his own. On November 4th of 1906 the last payments were made. The Landowners' Court has to-day a balance of ^1,300. And the forty-five members on that day were owning land (on a lease of 2,000 years) with no encumbrances but rate and tithe.
The "landowners" have not been content with their land. They have built houses upon it, borrow- ing money for the purpose from the Oddfellows and other friendly societies, or in some cases from the Landowners' Court. Over thirty houses, built since the beginning of the experiment by those concerned in it, stand to-day to testify to the stimulating effect of its operations.
The cottages of the Landowners' Court members stand on a sloping hillside in a great crescent, facing the woods. The land runs up and down from them in long strips, mostly of one or two acres in extent. The men and boys were working on their plots as I passed from one to another to learn their opinion of success or failure. The whole, in the autumn sunshine, with the long brown fields set in the forest background, formed a pleasant picture of industry and repose.
The cottages are of an astonishing variety. Some are substantial buildings of red brick, some of mud and chalk, faced with plaster. There are long, low buildings of the bungalow type, one-storied, thatched, with white walls. There are even one or two of corrugated iron. In the hollow are the cottages of a more rudimentary type, built by the original small- holders who had annexed the common land more
IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS 63
than a hundred years ago. Some of the landowners had passed from these to their new abodes. The contrast was marked. The average rooms in all the village work out at some five and a half per cot- tage, and the whole house accommodation offers a marked advance on the normal type of cottage in the normal landless village.
They were not indeed beautiful. Life has been too hard till now to think much of ornament. But there are little orchards growing up round them, and flowers in the gardens ; and Mr. Witt, the schoolmaster, is confident, now that the worst of the strain is over, that the effort towards beauty will steadily develop.
For the men take pride in their new houses. They are rejoicing that the land is now their own, It has been a tremendous struggle, especially for those who launched out somewhat boldly into elaborate building. But the worst is now over. They can look forward with confidence to the future. I met none, amongst all I talked with, who regretted the effort made, who now would have had it otherwise.
Criticism indeed is there in plenty. The men are a fine set, of an independent, strong, intelli- gent type. There are many Dissenters, mostly teetotalers: the prevailing opinion is Radical, though in the village blacksmith I discovered a Socialist and eager follower of Mr. Keir Hardie. They are sometimes annoyed by the efforts of imaginative journalists, and one of the holders in- formed me that "if they wrote any more lies in the newspapers " about Winterslow he would " write and contradict them."
The holdings are mostly small — of the nature of
64 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
allotments. One man claims to live entirely off a piece of seven acres. Those with smaller quantities are using their land to supplement the earnings received outside. Some are pensioners, others carters, one local secretary of the Rechabites. There are three agricultural labourers, the postmen and the postmaster, and several of the village trades- men. But the work in the woods and at hurdle- making is the chief industry; and more than a third of the holders are engaged in them. It is largely the opportunity of this winter work which has made the Winterslow experiment a success. There is no market gardening, and practically no fruit. The land is used for the growing of potatoes and cabbages, with some corn, and roots of all sorts, grass, and clover. All keep pigs and poultry.
Cows are being kept in this astonishing village, and yield good butter. And this, although the land is on a hill 500 feet high, exposed to all the storms of winter, where twenty years ago the people had to journey five miles for a water supply. To-day wells have been sunk and over fifty tanks constructed in twelve years. But the long drought to-day has been felt badly, and I was informed that this was one of the worst seasons since the work began.
For the rest, the produce goes mainly to the pigs and to support the family needs. Some potatoes are sold, although the marketing is difficult, with Salisbury seven miles away on one side and Bulford camp ten miles on the other. One man claimed to me that his acre was worth to him some £20 a year, besides another £6 or £8 from pigs and poultry. Another emphasised the hard- ness of the combined life on the land and in labour
IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS 65
outside — work from before dawn till after sunset with no rest — and protested that two or three acres was not enough to support a man. He thought that if the " Government " could lend them money at a lower rate of interest than 4 or 5 per cent, they would do better.
Opinion varied as to the amount of land required for complete support : from ten or twelve acres on the heavier land to twenty-five on the lighter.
Co-operation, I should think, was the advance most urgently needed. All were loud in their protest against the " Middleman " and his profits, especially in the selling of the pigs and the pota- toes. There has been a lecture on Co-operation, but nothing more done. A holder of some thirty acres — outside the Landowners' Court — was strong in his demand for such Co-operation, and offered to " place a little money in it " if it could be started.
Mr. Witt was confident in the stimulating effect of the experiment on the village. The price of land has risen, and he regrets that the surplus of the Landowners' Court was not used to purchase more. A school field and recreation ground has been purchased by the Parish Council for some £225, or at about £5 an acre. In the old days it could have been obtained at half the price. The whole village population numbers more than 800, of which about a quarter are members of the Landowners' Court and their families.
Why has the experiment succeeded? In its favour was the character of the people ; the sym- pathy and help of Major Poore ; also the hearty
6
66 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
support of Mr. King, a neighbouring farmer ; and the energy and capacity of Mr. Witt, the school- master, who, from all I could learn, has been the life and soul of the enterprise.
Two other items also were probably essential : one the exceeding cheapness of the land ; the other the existence of the woods in the neighbourhood, with the work they regularly supplied. There is also the presence of good roads everywhere adjacent to the land purchased.
On the other hand, the land, though purchased so cheaply, was sold at a greatly enhanced value — twice or three times as much as the purchase price. A normal experiment could forego the Landowners' Court profit. Also interest has been paid at 5 per cent, often on houses as well as on land. That is a higher figure than would be necessary in any public scheme.
The miracle, indeed, is that it has not collapsed in failure. Everything else has been against it. The land is poor, and had been long neglected. The place is remote in its encompassing hills far from any markets, high up on the windy plains, and exposed to all the winter cold. It has no single natural advantage for small holdings. The experi- ment resembles Dr. Johnson's famous dancing dog — the wonder is not that it danced badly, but that it dances at all. It would seem that if small holdings succeed at Winterslow they would succeed far beyond the recognised boundaries of possible success.
And the bedrock facts remain. No one can question the severity of the struggle which these men have gone through, nor the pluck and the grit they have shown in its continuance. The Irish
IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS 67
peasant is buying his land in forty-nine annual payments. These men have bought theirs in four- teen. In the same time they have built houses, large and comfortable, and have been paying in- terest on the borrowed money. There has not been a single defaulter, and the people who originally started are there to-day.
And the results? Winterslow almost alone amongst the neighbouring villages shows a definite increase in population during the past fifteen years, and this though it steadily decreased before that time. The land has been inconceivably improved, the labourers are better off, the population of the village has been kept on the soil. I think in these wind-swept uplands, in an existence so remote and austere, there are elements of well-being lacking in that life which crowds all the city ways. The children as I saw them were well dressed, clean, intelligent, healthy. The men were of a type far different from the inhabitants of the feudal village. They are free men. They eat of the fruit of their own labour, not unsatisfied. And none can make them afraid.
Night was falling as I drove out of Winterslow, and my last sight of it was of the long escarpment with the trees black against the skyline, under the light of an enormous yellow moon. A little mist was gathering in the valleys and over the hills, filling the twilight with a great impression of mystery and beauty. We came down into Salis- bury as into a sea of vapour; from the centre of which rose triumphant that tall Cathedral tower which has watched the passing of six hundred years.
II
PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL
" WHEN I have been living in the Midlands, which are sodden and unkind " ; — so Mr. Belloc commences his poem in praise of the South Country. I have never found the Midlands unkind ; but " sodden " they were, indeed, on this the first day of the autumn rains. We drove from Birmingham under grey skies, from which descended a kind of solid downpour, veiling the distance in grey mist and turning the roads into thick streams of mud. It was the first break after the long drought, and every one, except the hapless visitor, was rejoicing at the change. I drove to Bell Broughton with Mr. Impey, that veteran land reformer. He was full of the stori< of '85, and showed me, framed and hung in his house, the original pamphlet he had written upon " Thi Acres and a Cow," which had started the great agitation. After twenty years of quietness and indifference he was once more full of hope for the coming of reform. He emphasised the greatness of the opportunity offered, as well as the peril of its refusal. And the chief difference, in his opinion, between then and to-day was to be found in the fact that whereas in the older time small holdings were, in a sense problematical, with analogies mainly
PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL 69
drawn from foreign experience, to-day there are a series of definite experiments, on the tiniest scale, but very fruitful in lessons of wider application, which in the past twelve or fifteen years have demonstrated their practical working.
And of these not the least instructive were the developments which had taken place amongst the nail-makers of Bell Broughton and round Bromsgrove.
A few years ago Bell Broughton was a nailing vil- lage. Each little cottage has still to-day the nail shed attached to it, with the block and the chimney and the forge. Men and women worked hard all day for wages which averaged some 125. a week in the case of the one, and 43. to 53. in the other. The industry steadily declined under the competition of machinery. The life became a hard, wretched slavery for a diminishing pittance. The people were becoming demoralised under the influences of poverty, and were continually before the magistrates for poaching and thieving ; a very large number were on the rates, and doles of bread and soup were regularly given by the Squire during the winter.
Under such circumstances the Rector, the Rev. J. H. Eld, became, twelve years ago, chairman and first clerk of the newly-formed Parish Council. He immediately set himself to acquire land to let out in small holdings. The first piece hired was a small plot of 1 8 acres. This was so successful that the Council have proceeded since to obtain every piece of land they could get hold of. To-day they are renting 1 80 acres, which is let to 75 holders, of whom 27 have over an acre each. For the first piece
70 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
they were forced to pay a rent of over £3 an acre. Later they took a farm which was practically de- serted, let at 1 5s. an acre, of which the rent had not been paid for two years. This land was let to them at 22s. 6d. an acre. They spent £60 on drainage, roads, and improvements, and have now re-let it in small plots at 303. an acre. They always let at a price so as to keep a margin for emergencies. They have over .£250 in hand. They have lost no money at all in defaults or bad debts. They are eagerly looking round for fresh land to hire, and the land hunger of the village is still unsatisfied.
Even in the driving autumn rain the charm of this country is manifest ; with its roads set in deep hedges and tall trees scattered amongst them, and the gently sloping hills everywhere giving colour in the near distance. The little houses, many old and picturesque, are set in fruitful gardens, gay with all the October flowers. The land is indeed a garden — converted into such by the energy of those who determined that the people should have access to the land, and by the response of those people when the opportunity was given them.
For of its success there can be no doubt at all. The village has become transformed. The people grow for the Birmingham market, twelve miles away, strawberries, flowers, potatoes, all kind of vegetables. They keep their own horses and carts, and do their own marketing, going in with the produce and coming out with manure for their own land or to sell to their neighbours. They buy up on the ground as they stand the fields of vegetables from the neighbouring farmers, bunching and cleaning them and taking
PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL 71
them into Birmingham to resell in their carts. Flowers, I learnt, are the most remunerative of all. Then the strawberries. One man had had an offer of £150 for his two acres of strawberries. This was exceptional ; but £100 was not excessive. On one farm there are now twenty-six horses working where formerly there were two. The ambition of all was to keep a horse, and every one then wanted a piece of pasture land. The nail-sheds were converted into stables ; the derelict larid was growing large crops of fruit and vegetables ; prosperity had come from the liberation of the land.
I had a most interesting talk with Mr. Gill, the Chairman of the Parish Council, a designer who works for a Birmingham firm, and devotes his leisure to disinterested service for his neighbours. He was full of enthusiasm for the work accomplished, and of hope for the work still to be done. The great demand was for land and more land both for those who had received some already and wanted more, and also to give a start for the landless men. A striking example had been offered the night before my arrival. One of the tenants had relinquished a plot of 4j acres. The Council (to make this go round as far as possible) had divided it into four plots of half an acre each, one of an acre, one of I J acre ; and had invited applicants. Thirty-six had applied, of whom twenty had no land at all, and this although only one end of the village recognised that they had any chance of acceptance. There was £9 los. com- pensation to be paid to the outgoing tenant, but Mr. Gill thinks they would have paid almost any sum to get on to the land.
72 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
But the increase is difficult. A squire of the old school denounces the whole scheme, because it " makes the people too independent " and " raises the price of labour." The Parish Council has no compulsory powers of hiring or purchase. The greater part of the land is taken on a twelve months' agreement only, and although one of the principal landlords — a clergyman — has promised not to disturb the Council till his death, there is nothing to prevent them being turned out in a year in other parts, or the rents raised against them. Farmers farm badly is Mr. Gill's complaint ; the land is impoverished, and they then demand and obtain a reduction of rent. We farm well, and as the very result of our own improvements the rent may be raised against us. He pleads for security, for the right to be given to the Parish Council to buy the land within its own boundaries, and keep it as Parish Council land; for compulsory powers of having small holdings as well as allotments. Allotments of less than half an acre he thinks of little use ; and there is an object-lesson in their failure in a neighbouring village. The men cannot live on them, and are com- pelled to work as labourers in Birmingham ; the allotments are left to the wives and children, and but little care is given to them. If they had more land the men would give up their labourers' work and devote themselves to the land itself, with results similar to those at Bell Broughton.
For there is nothing here exceptional in the land itself ; much of it is poor, and most of it only made productive of such excellent crops by careful manur- ing and indefatigable labour. Birmingham — a steady market only twelve miles away — is one of the factors of success. But at Birmingham much of the produce
PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL 73
is purchased for Lancashire and the northern towns. Undoubtedly, however, the possibility of return loads of cheap manure has helped considerably. There is no co-operation, and I expect under the circum- stances it would be difficult and (in selling, at least) perhaps not very profitable. But there are schemes for combining to purchase at wholesale prices.
I learnt of some special 'cases of those who had worked their way up the ladder — from the first tiny patch of land to a complete economic independence. One was of a labourer who used to walk eight miles a day to his work for 6Jd. an hour. He now farmed two acres of land, owned his horses and a young heifer, with a substantial sum in cash put away. Another, once with a great reputation as " King of the Poachers," had transferred his energies to the market garden and had passed on to the larger County Council holdings at Catskill.
Twenty-seven of the seventy-five tenants are princi- pally dependent on their holdings for a living ; all are in want of more land. The others are continually pressing the Parish Council for land to raise their small plots into economic holdings. An enterprising farmer has taken advantage of the demand and sublet land rented at 255. an acre for £3 to the small holders.
We entered one cottage quite casually as two strangers caught in the rain. Everything was clean and tidy, a bright fire burning, an aspect of modest comfort. The wife welcomed us. The husband was away with the cart at Birmingham, taking in his carrots and parsnips. The story was soon told.
74 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
There was the nailing in the old days — work from nine till seven for the women for 43. or 5s. a week ; work from seven to seven for the men for los. to I2s. Sometimes work all night. Then half an acre offered on the allotments, and then a further opportunity of improvement as more land became accessible. Now they work three acres of land. The children help. They own a horse and cart, the horse stabled in the old nailing shed, which we were taken to see. Their great desire is more land : with two acres more they would be satisfield.
The land was on the hill above ; long lines of strawberries, broccoli, cabbages, carrots, a little oats, all carefully cultivated on the land which a few years ago had been practically derelict.
" Last year," said Mr. Impey as we left, " I heard a noble lord deprecating legislation as a remedy for the ills of mankind in the well-known quotation : —
" How small of all that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cause or cure."
" I wish I could have shown him Bell Broughton as I knew it yesterday and Bell Broughton as I see it to-day."
Ill
A FIGHT FOR' FREEDOM
IT lies remote from the cities along the borders of the Malvern Hills ; a large straggling parish centred in the great common. I came to it in a long drive from Malvern, a piece of Wimbledon planted out in the West Country ; along roads whose hedges were thick with blackberries, and past golfers pursuing their desperate business in the rain. There must be few more radiant visions in England to-day than the view as I saw it from Castle Morton Common. It is a riotous feast of colour ; behind, the purple hills ; all round, the yellows and reds and browns of the gorse and blazing bracken ; beyond blue vistas on a far horizon. The open land as it falls downwards is studded with the little clumps of trees which, in patches of orchard and a red roof peeping through them, mark the freeholds reclaimed from the common land. Twelve counties stretch below, with great cities whose lights at nightfall can be. seen shining far over the wide plain ; on a quiet evening you can hear the sound of many bells.
Here for many generations have lived a vigorous, independent people. They have been kept from servitude by the absence of resident landlords, by the presence of the freeholders with their own little
76 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
plots of land, and by the unenclosed common, which has given them opportunity for the exercise of common rights. There has always been a demand for land in the district. The Parish Councils Act of 1894 gave them the opening they desired. Castle Morton stands to-day at the head of those sixteen Parish Councils who have put into operation the clauses dealing with small holdings, as one of the very few villages where the Parish Council has been of substantial benefit to the people.
Mr. Weaver, the Chairman, a sturdy Radical yeoman of the old school, told me the history of it all. At the beginning, while the Act was in the making, they had seen its opportunities. Imme- diately on its passing they had Determined to make effective use of it. They set themselves to canvass the whole village ; they had tramped from house to house through the muddy lanes, on the wet nights, interviewing each individual voter ; they had per- suaded them to resist the blandishments of the farmers, who had pleasantly arranged amongst themselves the membership of the Council ; and they had elected and maintained — alone amongst neigh- bouring villages — an independent and democratic Parish Council. In the twelve years of its existence it had secured about 220 acres of land for the people of the village.
This had not been accomplished without the fiercest opposition. The farmers were everywhere bitterly opposed to the small holdings and the inde- pendence which accompanied them. The land agents, if not so actively hostile, were not inclined to en- courage them. All round the landlords were con-
A FIGHT FOR FEEEDOM 77
vinced that small holdings meant the ruin of sport and the spread of Radical sentiments. It is not without a modest pride that Castle Morton to-day contemplates its achievement in spite of so many adverse influences.
The land is rented from Lady Henry Somerset and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. These latter have been sympathetic all through to the movement towards independence, and deserve every credit for breaking through the traditional opposition to the creation of the small holder. It is gathered in three plots in different parts of the scattered parish. The largest of these was offered as the poorest part of a farm, taken on a twenty-one years' lease at a rental of I2s. an acre. It has been re-let in plots varying from I2s. to 233. an acre — free of rate. It is much of it very poor, stony land, and was taken over in a very foul condition. Some has been put down to pasture by the men themselves. Some is divided into one, and two acre lots and used for growing a variety of crops. There is but little market-garden- ing, and no fruit on the Council land, though a good deal on the freeholds outside. Wheat is grown for home consumption (none of it sold), beans for the pigs, vetches, roots, potatoes. The rent is paid regularly. There is a fine of is. for a failure to pay on audit day ; but there have been no defaults, and the cheques are paid by the Council, I was proudly informed, more punctually than those of the farmers.
As we tramped over the long fields, with the boundary posts alone marking the successive tenancies, Mr. Weaver gave me a short life history of each of its occupants. Living was obtained in a variety of ways. The common, of course, was a great stand-by. Most of the villagers had cows out
78 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
upon it, and would cut the gorse and bracken for bedding and subsequent manure. The hill above was fruitful with blackberries, and yielded a welcome crop which was freely gathered and sent to distant markets. Every one kept pigs and poultry, and the wives would sell eggs and butter and fowls for the Malvern visitors seven miles away. The freeholds were largely planted with little orchards, full of apples and plums, and cider was made by all. Some buy Welsh colts in Hereford Fair for turning out on the common. One tenant works at the stone quarry, turns out young cattle on the common, and adds the allotment ground to two acres of his own. Many do a little work for the farmers at harvesting time. One supplements work on his holding with sheep- shearing, pig-killing, and faggoting. All work hard for a livelihood, and all want more land.
The difficulty of getting enough land was the burden I heard everywhere. We have enough allot- ments, the clerk of the Parish Council informed me. We want small holdings. Whenever a piece is available there is a rush of applicants; "pretty near a free fight for it," as Mrs. Weaver described it. On the last occasion they had to have recourse to the ballot to decide amongst competing claims. The men " would rather give up a hand than lose an acre," was Mr. Weaver's vivid phrase. But the land cannot be obtained for love or money. Most of the parish is held by a few large farmers, six men holding 1,400 acres. On the last occasion when the agent suggested a few acres should be let to the Parish Council the farmer informed him that " if he took an acre he should have the lot, for he would throw up
A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM 79
the farm." They get the worst land : odds and ends here and there : but " we don't complain." They pay a higher rent than for the land let in large farms. They farm better ; land which was yielding farmers fifteen bushels an acre was now giving thirty. They are rated higher, and complain that the small plots pay 7s. or 8s. an acre while the large farms pay 2s. to 43. The land hunger is taxed by the competition which forces up rents to an abnormal figure. Yet all the economic advantage is unable to break down the steady, persistent prejudice of country opinion against the transference of land directly into the hands of the labourer.
They call for compulsory powers of hiring to be given to the Parish Councils. They are willing to give a fair rent for the land and make no demand for confiscation. They believe that in many cases, with the possibilities of compulsion behind, they could persuade the agent to break down the farmers' opposition. Only access to the land, is the experience, can keep the people in the country. If land and cottages were obtainable " plenty would be glad to come back here " who had gone away to the cities for lack of either. They acknowledge their condition, which holds a square mile of free common, to be an exceptional one ; but all round there are " thousands who want it." " Not a labourer but would like an acre or two." A man could live without the common rights if he had twenty to twenty-five acres. If such small farms were available in the neighbourhood many would move on to them opening the smaller holdings to the landless men. The Government should buy land, or hire it, and put up cottages and buildings upon it. They could let these again easily at a profit. Here in the country the Liberal Party
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is still the Labour Party. Now that a Liberal Government is again in power they had the strongest hopes of " Land Reform."
At least here the Parish Council land scheme has helped to stay the rural exodus. Up to 1891 the population had decreased from 950 to 720. By 1901 it has risen again to 795. The people are intelligent, industrious, independent. The poaching and chicken stealing, for which its inhabitants had attained a reputation all over Worcestershire, is said to have disappeared with the prosperity which the land has brought. They seek no eleemosynary aid, and warmly repudiate the dole system of a beneficent Feudalism. They advocate no predatory policy. They are confident that they can make the land pay if only they are given a chance. They merely ask to be allowed to work out their own salvation in these remote and quiet hills, with the opening of the oppor- tunity for frugal comfort which only direct access to the land can give.
We sat in front of the large open fireplace under the low roof in Mr. Weaver's picturesque house, decorated with portraits of Gladstone and John Bright. The rain splashed steadily outside; Mrs. Weaver pressed upon us generous hospitality, while the old fighter in the cause of reform told of the passing days through which they had struggled into freedom. It was a peep into the heart of rural England ; told in language very picturesque and simple. They were fortunate in not being " accurst " with a resident landlord. The parson, " a Tory, of course," had been " pliable," and helped them by backing the wish of the majority ; he was now dead
A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM 81
and they were a little anxious about the new man, an Archdeacon, and, therefore, probably "less pliable." He told how the agent had attempted to forbid the people the blackberrying, which provided " clothes and shoes for the children in the winter " ; of the petition to Lady Henry Somerset, and the letter to Mr. Labouchere asking that Truth would "obtain publication of the rascal's villainy"; of the consequent withdrawal of the prohibition. He told how the Parish Councils round had collapsed, being captured by the landlord and farmers ; of how the Parish Council land in one had been snatched up by a farmer for his own son ; of how the farmer had died shortly afterwards from cancer in the throat : "which may have been a judgment on him," said Mr. Weaver. He told stories of the Homeric contest at the General Election ; of how his sons had con- fronted the Tory speakers with posers concerning Chinese Labour and Unemployment; of how when the speakers were compelled to fall back on the virtues of the Tory member, who gave blankets and coals every winter, the audience had stoutly retorted : " We don't want that here." He outlined the hopes for the future which had accompanied the great change ; how his son wished to migrate to New Zealand, but he was persuading him to stay, as he was sure that the Liberals would give an opportunity to get land here at home ; how the people cared nothing for the Education Bill, and little about foreign affairs ; what they wanted was Land Reform. "Tell Sir Henry," said Mr. Weaver, with delibera- tion, " if the House of Lords reject the Education Bill — don't reesign. And if they reject Mr. Asquith's Progressive Taxation — don't reesign. And if they reject Land Reform — don't reesign. But get enough
7
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from Progressive Taxation for old-age pensions. And go to the people with old-age pensions for the towns and land reform for the country ; and," he added impressively, "we'll putt ye in for twenty yeers."
The long line of the downs casts its shadow over our way homeward ; standing up solitary out of the great plain like the huge grave of one of the older gods. I thought of one who in the old days had escaped from the city to consider " all the welth of the world and the wo both," upon the Malvern Hills. He had seen the rich successful and content, the poor perishing, with no man laying it to heart. He had written in his vision of " Piers the Plowman " out of his own heart's bitterness something of his passionate impatience with it all. He had deemed that the patience of God must be well-nigh exhausted — five hundred years ago.
IV
NAILMAKERS AND FARMERS
THE Small Holdings Act was passed in 1892. It represented a kind of belated attempt to carry out the " unauthorised programme " of seven years before. The County Councils were here given powers of settling people on the land. A County Council of intelligence and energy in a district favourable to small holdings might have effected a small agrarian revolution.
As a matter of fact the Act stands to-day as almost a complete failure. Experiments in its working have only been made by one or two Councils, and these only on the tiniest scale. The largest, and, in many respects, the most interest- ing, is the attempt made by the Worcestershire County Council to convert the nailmakers of Catshill into market gardeners.
Immediately on the passing of the Act this Council appointed its Small Holdings Committee, and circulated handbills and notices. Two years later they reported that as a result of over two thousand public notices issued one application had been received ! It would have appeared to most that the demand was dead ; that the Council had done all that was reasonable ; that nothing more remained to do.
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There were land reformers on the Council how- ever, who refused to be content with such a confession of failure. It was agreed to make a start amongst the nailmakers of Catshill, and as a result of a petition sent in, and a public inquiry, a farm of nearly 150 acres was purchased at an average price of £33 an acre (including the timber). The land was divided up into thirty-two lots and offered to applicants. By the provisions of the Act one-fifth of the purchase money must be paid by the incoming tenant. In 1896 ten tenants were found ready to pay this 20 per cent, and thus become purchasers of their land. The remainder were allowed to have the plots while completing their share of the pur- chase money by instalments.
To-day there are twenty-five tenants, five buying more than one lot each. They are purchasing the land in forty years from the first payment. The value works out at from £32 to £50 per acre, which means an annual payment of something between 303. and £2 per acre. The interest of this experiment is very greatly increased by the housing scheme which accompanies it. From the beginning it was seen here — as in all small holding schemes — that the pro- vision of fresh houses would be a necessity. It was therefore arranged that the County Council should here also come to the aid of the tenant. The small holder presents to the Council the plans of his house and stables, with the estimate of the cost. He provides one-quarter of the price, and the Council advances him the remaining three- quarters. Payments are arranged so as to terminate at the same time as the land purchased. They work out at something like 4 per cent, of the capital advanced. At the end of the time the tenant will
NAILMAKEKS AND FARMERS 85
come into absolute possession of house and land simultaneously, free from all mortgages and obliga- tions.
Catshill lies in undulating country twelve miles out of Birmingham. The district where the small holders are established is a little bare and common- place, with none of the fascination of some other districts visited. Standing on the highest ground, where one of the most successful of the small holdings is established, the whole thing stretches out below like a map. Nine houses have been built under the County Council scheme. They are all on view ; all of red brick, standing up straight out of the fields of vegetables ; substantial villas, with bow windows and porches, and stables and out- houses behind. They look like nothing so much as a comfortable suburban street which has been broken up and scattered at random over the fields. Inside they are roomy and pleasant: the smallest with three rooms below and three bedrooms above. They cannot be called things of beauty, although time and the gardens and little trees planted around them may make them less truculent in fifty or a hundred years. But they are an inconceivable advance on the " picturesque " country cottage, with its low ceilings and faulty sanitation. The people take immense pride in them, and the expenditure on each — from £250 to ^"500 — was deliberate. I found a wide consensus of opinion that they were too ambitious, and that the owners would have done better to invest more of their capital in stock and in the land than to sink it in house property. But, after all, it is welcome to find this determination towards the raising of the standard of a home. The low
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rate of interest makes things here easy which would be impossible without it, and men are buying these comfortable villas for a rent of some 55. or 6s. a week.
The staple industry is market-gardening for the Birmingham market. Strawberries are the only fruit grown, but these in the past have been im- mensely profitable. This year has been the worst since the beginning. I heard complaints that the plants were getting useless, the ground being worked out, and that the market was becoming overcrowded. These complaints probably mean not much more than that the dry season has greatly diminished the profits. In addition, potatoes are grown, and cabbages and other kinds of common vegetables. The soil is light and stony — not more than fair second-class land. There is little attempt at inten- sive cultivation, or the raising of any special crops. There is very little poultry kept — the ground is "too valuable," and pig-keeping is only on a very limited scale. All keep horses, and take their produce to sell at the Birmingham market, and bring back the manure which is such a vital factor in the success of the enterprise. From eight to twelve acres is said to be necessary for an entire livelihood — which very few possess. The others supplement their earnings by horse-work for the villagers or neighbouring farmers and by miscellaneous activities.
I found Catshill on this fine day after the rains a scene of busy industry. Some of the holders were building a rick together; others were digging up their potatoes, or planting cabbages in the fresh wet soil. One of the most successful had here made
NAILMAKERS AND FARMERS 87
land pay, which had been refused by all others on account of its evil appearance. He had been a nailer in the old days with some success, making special kinds which demanded special skill. I gathered also from some occult allusions to rabbit snaring (which he enjoyed greatly) by Mr. Impey that the nailing had been eked out with other less reputable occupations. Now he was farming his thirteen acres, and had built a substantial house. He complained that this season had been a bad one ; " very crooel " for the strawberries. He agreed that the Council scheme had brought great benefit to the district. There was the land there in the old days, but it was impossible to get hold of it. " They'n seemed a bit speerin' on't." It was hard work, he allowed ; but those who worked hard can get on and make a decent livelihood. The wife, who was with him, and who helped in the work, agreed that these times were better than the old days. In another field I found a landless man working for his neighbourers : lifting potatoes by contract, and assisted in the work by his wife and three small children. He could make at this some 43. a day. He acknowledged to Mr. Impey that this was better than the old 2s. a day wages ; but described in graphic fashion the difference of method under the two systems. Then, with his coat on, sundry pauses for surveying the scenery or to take a whiff of his pipe, a general determination not to kill himself with overwork. Now, he thought "there was something wrong " if he knocked off for a moment before the work was done. He was a builder's labourer, now out of work. His great longing was to start with a plot of land of his own. He would be prepared to make a start on half an acre. He thought he could
88 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
get a living off three acres. But no land could be obtained. If any came into the market it was snatched up immediately by those more fortunate. If some of the bigger farms could be broken up to give those like himself a chance it would be "a lot pleasanter for a lot of us."
On another holding a man was surveying his newly- bought pig gobbling up a liberal meal of potatoes. He was engaged in some obscure struggle with the Council concerning repairs, and appeared a little dissatisfied with life. He thought the strawberries were ceasing to pay, and that the reason pig-keeping was not more prevalent was the lack of capital. He professed his readiness to relinquish his holding if he could obtain the money expended on it. Mr. Impey assured him that the Council would accept a tenant who wished to come in, and that if he advertised the thing for sale at the price he would receive twenty or thirty applicants. A neighbour praised this as a fair offer, and both acknowledged that there would be no difficulty in finding a purchaser on such lines.
In the neighbourhood of Catshill I came by chance upon Tom Bryan, once Mayor of Southwark and Labour leader, now established in the Midlands as a practical agriculturist. It was interesting to hear an outside criticism of the Council experiment. He complained as others have complained elsewhere of the effort of the imaginative journalist who drives furiously through the village and subsequently lets himself go upon it.
He thinks all the men need more land, the quantity they possess only yielding a good living if cultivated
NAILMAKEKS AND FARMERS 89
far more intensively and skilfully than at present. But the land around has been forced up in rent by the demand for small holdings from 153. to 553. or 6os. an acre. He thinks also the holders lack enter- prise. They have too many of their eggs in one basket — the strawberries and the market-gardening ; they ought to combine this with pig-keeping and bees and other subsidiary developments. He is con- vinced that the Parish Council, as a machinery for establishing small holdings, is better than the County Council : less paternal, more democratic ; the people establishing the work amongst themselves, discussing matters together, learning independence and citizen- ship, instead of being governed by the Committee of another class, far away. He deplores the weakness of the social ideal which here, as elsewhere, has made co-operation impossible. He has seen a succession of carts passing into Birmingham, each half empty, each taking its owner for a 24-mile ride and a day's work. Why should they not combine and run a motor in and out ? But the men are mostly Radicals and Primitive Methodists ; and " Radicals and Primi- tive Methodists," said Mr. Bryan, "do not readily take to combination."
Mr. Impey was inclined to the opposite view. He agreed that more land was desirable, but admired the thrift and independence of the men, and thought that in the special circumstances of the case each man did better with his own market for his produce and his own seller of manure than he would do in a general combination. At least, he could testify from his lifelong knowledge of many of the holders the immense improvement in human well- being that had come to them out of the land. With the decline in the nailing industry— at best, a hard,
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austere life — starvation was literally confronting them. The industry to-day was nearly dead, and those who had not succeeded in getting on to the land have wandered into the cities or fled across the sea. Here a prosperous community had been established by the deliberate action of a County Council which had refused to be discouraged at the failure of its first efforts.
He admitted that the men would probably have been content to hire from the Council upon terms which eventually would have left the land in its absolute ownership. But he did not think County Councils, in the present condition of public opinion, could be induced to buy land. He thinks the 20 per cent, purchase money too great a strain on the average holding, and would like to see these condi- tions relaxed. Worcestershire was in some respects the Mecca of small holders owing to the enormous development of market gardening and fruit growing in the Evesham district. Yet in Worcester, with its 480,000 acres, there was probably not 30,000 acres in the hands of the small holders. Some of the land was unsuitable, but the bulk of it could easily be adapted to direct cultivation. The possibilities in South England were limitless, if prejudice could be overcome and the right stimulus applied. But land- lords, on account of sport, and farmers, for fear of diminishing labour and raising its cost, were almost universally against it.
To put the people on the land is not an ending, but a beginning. It is a long effort — not accom- plished in a generation — before they have learnt the most skilful methods of cultivation and the necessity
NAILMAKERS AND FARMERS 91
for combination. But it is at least a beginning ; while over the greater part of rural England the present system of agriculture is near its end. Com- paring the free village as I have seen it to-day with the feudal village as I have long known it in the past, I would fully endorse the verdict of the Land- less Labourer. It would be " a lot pleasanter for a lot of us" if the one could be transferred into the other.
"THE LAND OF GOSHEN"
SPALDING lies in the centre of that rich plain which extends within the boundaries of three Cathedral cities — from Ely in the south to Peterborough on the west, and nearly to Lincoln on the north. It is a land of Goshen : rich, fat land, the finest soil in England. Here nearly a hundred years ago Cobbett had noted the contrast between the prosperity of the pigs and the poverty of the peasants. Here to-day the farmers can defy the effect of the fall in prices and the so-called agricultural depressions. It is a region where a little land can give good returns ; where in consequence the demand for allotments and small holdings is almost unlimited. There are pro- bably 2,000 small holders in the villages of South Lincolnshire alone, and over 20,000 holdings in the county under 50 acres.
And here, three miles from Spalding, is the scene of the famous experiment on Lord Carrington's estate, in the subdivision of large farms to satisfy this land hunger.
It arose from small beginnings ; nearly twenty years ago by the formation of allotment clubs
amongst the labourers with a weekly subscription.
Then on the passing of the Small Holdings Act a
"THE LAND OF GOSHEN" 93
progressive County Council were persuaded to pur- chase from Lord Carrington a farm of 88 acres and to let it out in I to 3 acre plots. Later Mr. Winfrey formed an association, to which Lord Carrington let increasing quantities of land. They commenced with 217 acres; then added 60, then 265; and taking over also 116 acres of scattered allotment fields, to-day the Association are controlling 650 acres, or more than a square mile of land, at a rent of £1,018.
The Association is directly responsible for the rent to Lord Carrington and for the rates to the local authorities. It divides up the land into suitable patches, arable and grass land ; relets it to its tenants ; manages the property and collects the rent. It holds the land on a 21 years' lease. It lets the grass lands at from 363. to 45$. an acre, and the arable at about 355. It has over 200 tenants, and can receive 40 or 50 applicants for any piece of land which it finds vacant.
The day I spent with Mr. Diggle, who manages the estate for the Association, was one of the most interesting in my tour round England. In the morning I was permitted to witness the signing of the agreements of the eight largest tenants, six of whom have moved into the cottages Lord Carrington has just built for them. The frank discussion of difficulties and demands was an object-lesson in the tact and patience required in the work of promoting small holdings and of the method by which, through such tact and patience, the difficulties can be over- come. But small holders, like the rest of the human species, are not entirely free from jealousy of each
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other and distrust of any combination of business and philanthropy.
We drove out from Spalding into the level land. The cottages on the outskirts were nearly all held by men who worked on the Association land, and who had to. journey three, four, or five miles to get to their holdings. The length of this journey was undoubtedly a severe handicap, and the fact that the men were willing to undertake it shows the force of the land hunger. We passed a public-house, where I was told the takings had greatly diminished since the men had obtained access to the land. Then we shook off the straggling village and passed out to the wide fields. This low land, with the great dykes draining it and the long black fields stretching away to the limitless horizon, is only vacant when the ripe corn turns it for a moment into a sea of gold. To-day, with the autumn sunshine over it and all the signs of the dying year, there is but the mournful beauty of wide spaces under clear skies. Little church spires in the distance alone mark the presence of the little quiet towns : Crowland Abbey, in the brooding silence of its great memories, showed far in the dim distance. The smell of the earth and the smell of autumn mingle in the sharp union of permanence and decay ; the blue smoke lifts upward steady in the windless air ; the whole gives a great impression of spaciousness and silence. The enor- mous arch of sky stretches over a land whose tranquillity may be disturbed, but cannot be de- stroyed.
The land of the Association lies in a long, narrow patch, extending from the Spalding road on the one side to the river Welland on the other — a distance of
"THE LAND OF GOSHEN" 95
over three miles. At the roadside are the six new cottages which have been built by Lord Carrington for the largest of the small holders. They are pretty, comfortable buildings, which I inspected inside and out, each with a parlour, a large kitchen and pantry, and a dairy below, and four good bedrooms above. They have cost some £500 a pair, and are let for £10 a year. This is not an economic return ; but the addition is made by the increased cost on some of the poorer land which i's let with the holdings. Behind are the necessary farm buildings which have been put up by the Association, of dark-stained wood with corrugated iron roofing, looking very clean and pleasant, erected at the cost of about £90 each. With the house and building is let about 25 acres, and there would appear to be no difficulty in making the house and land together, let as an "economic holding," pay a fair rent on the capital expended.
Thence I passed to inspection on the holdings and talks with the men who were working on them. The farming is of the orthodox type, growing corn, and especially potatoes, and raising stock ; there are few attempts at fruit or flowers, or any special develop- ment of high-priced vegetables or market gardening. The size of the holdings varied from a few roods of land to the largest holding of some forty acres. Most of the tenants had started as labourers ; of the eight most successful seven had commenced as boys on the land, earning 6d. a day at scaring birds and other boys' occupations. Estimates at the amount required for a complete living varied, some thinking they couid support themselves on as little as ten acres, others demanding twenty-five or thirty. They lamented the waste of time in travelling four or five miles to get on to their holding and the absence of
96 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
nearer cottage accommodation. One tenant, renting five acres from the Association and four from the County Council, was making a complete living out of his nine acres, growing beans, potatoes, and corn crops, and keeping pigs and young stock. Another had been on a farm for twenty-one years as a day- labourer at 1 6s. a week until given this opportunity. He now occupied seventeen acres. His cottage had been adapted to his needs by the building of a dairy, and he possessed accommodation in the buildings of the large farm, which had been most ingeniously divided so as to provide for seven small holders. His chief regret seemed to be that Lord Carrington had not visited his house on his recent visit. His bees had died in the winter, but a wandering swarm had come to him this summer, which looked like a Providential compensation. He showed us with pride his young pigs in the pigstyes he had built, and his horse, for which he would not take .£30. He declared that Lord Carrington was the first who had made land there accessible to the poor man. Land, he admitted, was offered in plots before, but always in small pieces at double the price of the larger farms. Lord Carrington was letting at the same price to the little man as the big man, for which the poor man could not be sufficiently grateful.
Later a large farmer — and very efficient one — in the neighbourhood was kind enough to give us a lift, and on the way to our destination expressed the case against small holdings. He thought the demand for these entirely due to the giving of the franchise to the labourer. He asserted that the large farmer employed as much labour on his land as the small
-THE LAND OF GOSHEN" 97
farmer, and got more out of it, so that the cutting up of large farms into small farms would not support one additional person on the soil. If agriculture paid better they would employ more labour; as it was, they had to cut it as low as possible. That was why the men dismissed went into the cities. Make it profitable and they would come out again quick enough. This could only be done by raising prices and protecting the English farmer against foreign competition. " It's bound to 'come," he asserted with cheerful confidence. He attributed the depopulation of Ireland to the fall in the price of wheat, and expressed the utmost conterr ot for Denmark, where they kept only a few "old black and white cows." He could find a more profitable occupation than making butter or cheese. If they wanted Dutch cheeses they could go to Holland for them, and if cheap butter, to Denmark, with its "old black and white cows." Where small holdings paid it could only be done by starving and crippling the children, of which he mentioned some examples. Some one must own the land, and the present landlords are as good as any other, and were fair and generous to their tenants. For the rest, wheat at 6os. a quarter, as in the old days, would be the best machinery for repopulating the country districts of England.
In contrast to this deliberate opinion I visited a small holder who had fought his way upwards on Parish Council allotments. He had commenced as a labourer at 2s. a day — sometimes taking home 73. or 8s. a week, or less than a farthing for each meal of his children. Then he had obtained half an acre of allotment land, and for three years had sold nothing on it, growing wheat and potatoes as food for the growing family. Then he had added another
8
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half-acre and commenced a bit of building, and so advanced by little and little to his present position of comparative comfort. He now farmed four acres, and would be content with two more. He had erected a picturesque huddle of buildings entirely with his own hand. He had brought up here a family of nine, and taught himself to read and write. He did a little of everything — jobbing work with his pony and trap, pea picking in his kitchen in the winter with all the family assisting and one reading aloud to them. " I could tell you of hundreds of things," was his comment. He was a teetotaler and never owed a man a penny ; had fought his waj upwards in a tremendous struggle ; would leave better chance for his children than ever he had ceived as a child.
Mr. Diggle showed me later the classified lists of applicants for land. They amounted already to moi than 2,000 acres, from persons of varied occupatioi most of whom had saved a little money — £100, £150 — which they were prepared to put into th< land. There could be no doubt of the large possi- bilities of development before small holdings in thi< particular district. But here large farming pays, that there is not much land in the market at any- thing like reasonable rents. And capital is requin for the adaptation of the large farm for the smalh men and the provision of cottages and building' Yet the Association have shown the way. T) hundred people have been given access to the lan< without having cost any one a halfpenny. They ai cultivating it profitably, and the rents are regularb paid. And there is the commencement at least ol
"THE LAND OF GOSHEN" 99
the ladder through which the landless man may pass from the cultivation of half an acre in his free time to complete economic independence. While there is hope there is life ; and such hope, widely stimulated, would do more than any " brightening of the villages " to bring back life into rural England. It is good to find our present Minister of Agriculture associated directly with such an endeavour, and expressing his ideal in such words as those of his last visit to Spalding : " I hope that this great experiment, which has given so much comfort and happiness to so many families, may go on increasing, so that in days to come, as its pioneer, Mr. Winfrey, has said, you may have not only 2,000, but 20,000 acres in South Lincolnshire under small holdings for the benefit of yourselves and the community at large."
VI THE OLD AND THE NEW
IN a corner of Norfolk, a tiny oasis in the flat fen land, tucked away some immense distance from the world that changes, stood a typical fen hamlet. The cottages were in active decay, the population diminishing, the whole bearing an aspect of fatigue and of extreme old age. Here in one fortunate exception, experiment has been made in the revival of energy which accompanies the liberation of the land for the people. First came the allotments of one acre or less. Mr. Winfrey, member of Parlia- ment for the division, found on visiting Nordelph, the still surviving craving of the labourers for the land. He purchased a small plot of fifty acres, and arranged to let it out for a 5 per cent, return. Offered at such a rent at a meeting in the village chapel, the whole population were clamorous for it, and after recourse to the ballot, the majority had to be sent empty away. He persuaded them, however, to attempt the putting in motion of the Small Holdings Act ; to petition a County Council they had never seen concerning an Act of which they had never heard. The Norfolk County Council, more progressive than most, were stirred into timid action. At length a farm was bought at Nordelph of some
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THE OLD AND THE NEW 101
one hundred and ten acres. By some singular folly the twelve acres of grass land was let off to a farmer already farming many hundred acres, and the farm-house to a resident widow. Both would have been invaluable to the small holders, and both have only been returned to them, after some agita- tion, this Michaelmas. The remainder of the land is let out in small plots at such a rent as in fifty years will repay principal anjd interest. At the end of that time the small holders of Nordelph will have purchased the land from private landlords and returned it to the community.
I motored with Mr. Winfrey from King's Lynn through the poorer and more beautiful land of the higher region of Norfolk ; until the scenery changed into the familiar landscape of the fens, with the black earth and the great dykes running through it ; and the evidence in the crowded and frequent stackyards and the huge mangolds and potatoes of the earth's fertility. Land here will sell for £40 an acre, and farming is still exceedingly profitable. But for the fact that labour will not stay, and the villages are dwindling and the cottages falling to pieces, farming might continue here on the old system for many generations. But the presence of the cities, with the escape thus offered from a hard life of servitude with the workhouse at the end, is assuring- the coming of an end.
I visited first a small farmer of some thirty-six acres, in part on Mr. Winfrey's land, who told, in language vigorous and picturesque, the story of his fight towards independence. He had been born " near the Union." He had come (in his own
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expression) "out of the earth." He had worked as a labourer ; then combined day work with work on a piece of land ; now he was working entirely as his own master. He thought that little farms of fifteen or twenty acres were much needed, and also one or two acre allotments ; but he did not believe in men trying to farm five or six acres, which was "neither hog nor mutton." People said to him, if all had small holdings, where would the labour come from ? " God bless my soul and body," said the old gentleman, " can't we help each other ? " The payment for ploughing made to the higgler he thought the severest strain on the small holder. The men came to him to complain, " The higgling hits you hardest, bor."
A worker on five acres — risen from the soil and looking still almost a part of it — was good enough to go through with us the items of his budget. He had an acre of allotment land on which this year he had grown roots and potatoes, two acres of County Council land and two acres of land from Mr. Winfrey. On one of these he had grown oats and barley at a net profit of £8 ; on the other, wheat, with a net profit of £6. He kept three cows, and had just bought a fourth ; sold butter to the extent of some los. a week, and kept four pigs also. His chief necessity was more land. It was the necessity of all.
Nordelph stretches along the side of the great dyke, and huddles in a kind of discoloured nest by the bridge over it. Two buildings— the Church and the Methodist Chapel — stand out from the mass of crumbling cottages. The whole place gives an overpowering impression of forlornness and decay.
THE OLD AND THE NEW 103
It has neither beauty nor desirableness, pride nor grace. It forms a kind of sanitary reformer's night- mare. The dykes serves as water supply and main sewer combined. The cottages are clogged into a kind of warren instead of being spread out over the level land. Mr. Winfrey was kind enough to give me some particulars as to their condition. Within a quarter of a mile of the bridge are seventy cottages, of which fifty- three have less than three bedrooms ; forty- three have two, and ten have only one. In one case (perhaps the worst, but not extravagantly different from others), ten people are living in two bedrooms, the largest room 12 by 12 by 6 ft. They include the father and mother, two sons, fifteen and ten years old, five daughters, twenty-two, nineteen, seven, six, two and a half, and a grandchild one and a half years old. Six sleep in one room, and four in the other. They have plenty of work and good money, but " to get another house means leaving the parish." The landlord is a Justice of the Peace.
I saw the sanitary arrangements in some of these cottages — the closets within five feet of the front doors, and within ten feet of the front doors of the houses opposite ; ash-pits at the side of the closets, and soft water tanks two feet from the ash-pits. In others, the cesspools have to be emptied through the houses. In others there are no cesspools, and the closets are on the edge of the river.
Such is the housing in these crumbling Norfolk villages. Dr. Crosse's report on the neighbouring hamlets reveals that there is nothing exceptional about Nordelph. Small wonder that disease is endemic in their crowded and pitiful homes. And work is plentiful, and all the surrounding earth richly bringing forth her increase. The investigator
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starting upon examination of rural England, thinks that the question to be answered is : " Why do so many go ? " Before he has concluded, he will find the query more perplexing, " Why do any stay ? "
I wish I could bring before you the impression this afternoon as we stood in the sunshine in the little open space before the bridge, with the still water on one side and the forlorn village on the other; with the little eager crowd which had gathered round on the news that Mr. Winfrey had arrived, gazing at the great motor, an intruder from another world, from that world of efficiency and progress of which they had no knowledge or share. He is building two cottages on his land, and the demand for them was great. There was the possibility of the news coming of fresh land available. One could see that his energy and help had stirred the village into the force of action, and was slowly making the dry bones live. They wanted to contest the County Council seat, and put in a Progressive ; but that meant finding a man of means ; and where could the man of means be found ? They all wanted the new cottages, but readily acquiesced in the fairest policy — the putting of the names in a hat and the drawing out of the two lucky winners. Everything as I stood there seemed against them : the mournful, low, unhealthy land, the huddled, decaying houses, the absence of leadership, the remoteness from all the life and clean energy of the world. Hope had indeed come — almost by chance — to Nordelph, and to-morrow there would not be the same as yesterday. But I saw a vision of a thousand Nordelphs, outside the limits of this solitary County Council experiment. A near hamlet, fired to sudden hope by the astonish-
THE OLD AND THE NEW 105
ing news of its neighbour's success, had petitioned for a similar beneficence. The petition had passed eighteen months ago to a Council far away at Norwich. Nothing had been done, and the people had settled down again to sleep.
I could not admire sufficiently the forces which still made resistance to the corroding apathy and despair ; the road mender and field preacher who had inspired the men to continued courage ; the holders who were building their little sheds and gathering in their little harvests, and bringing up their children in hope of better times ; all who in these neglected places amid the long dominance of the reaction, and in their crowded, decaying cottages had fought disease, and exercised thrift, and reared children, and clung to the last rags of decency and honour, and hoped always for the miracle which at last had come to pass, in the triumph of the effort of reform.
But never, as here, have I so longed for the coming of some such change as that brought by Mr. Wells's Comet ; with the great burning of all useless and unclean things when sanity returned among the children of men. To clear this congested mass bodily into the river or consume it in one gigantic bonfire! And to give all these people a chance; in houses which could be made into homes, where children could be raised clean and vigorous in body and in mind ! The old longing, born of impatience at the slow courses of change, to shatter into bits the sorry scheme of things, and then " remould it nearer to our heart's desire."
We returned through Cambridgeshire and the fruit country, a region which has been transformed
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in less than a generation into a huge garden 01 manifest and growing prosperity. Round Wisbech, as at Evesham, the fruit growing has proved the salvation of the small holder, and stayed the rural exodus. I saw land bought fifteen years ago for £33 an acre, and planted with fruit trees, now worth £150 an acre. I interviewed a holder of five acres purchased at .£200 an acre, who was rejoicing over an exceptionally prosperous season. I saw the trees bent down with such an apple harvest as the memory of man cannot parallel ; the great masses of red and yellow trees all golden and splendid in the afternoon sunshine. I found them picking and packing for the Glasgow market, and everywhere a sense of satisfaction and rejoicing at the benignant autumn weather, and the generous bounty of the kindly fruits of the earth.
We drove home over the level land straight into the evening sunset ; past orchards of apple and plum and pear, and new cottages springing up, and every sign of a growing comfort ; through Wisbech, with its narrow, crooked streets, and the slow, shining river ; out into the open land, with the bright orange- coloured wagons on the roadside, and the corn stacks everywhere proclaiming a rich plenty ; past little villages with the little churches and the weather- cocks on their spires, and the red Methodist chapels, and the little cottage gardens gay with late hollyhocks and sunflowers ; through Thorney, with its ruined abbey and its model houses under their great trees ; and across the long stretch of deserted fen. Until in the distance a smudge of smoke grew on the darken- ing horizon ; and tall chimneys, challenging the great cathedral, proclaimed a return to the unquiet effort of the cities ; where men can stand upright ; unafraid.
VII
HOPE AND THfc FUTURE
"THE mistake they made," says Mr. Paul in his " History of Modern England," " was to neglect allotments, and dearly did they pay for it. ... It would have been better to put off Home Rule for a year than to give up * three acres and a cow/ They were, however, given up, and nothing was put in their place except a Crofters Bill for Scotland," which, " excellent in itself, did not take the place of a general Allotment Bill."
The result of this neglect of " the social issue, more social than political, upon which Lord Salisbury had been defeated," was ruin even to the Home Rule cause, to which it had been sacrificed. It was the victory in the counties which saved the Liberal party in 1885. It was the disaster in the counties which destroyed the Liberal party in 1886.
" It was in the English counties," says the historian again, " that the most conspicuous reverse was seen. * Three acres and a cow ' had proved a mockery. The only acres now mentioned were the acres of the Irish landlords, and there was no cow. Small London wits had sneered at the political capacity of the agricultural labourer. Both in 1885 and in 1886 he showed himself very keenly alive to his own
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political interests. On the former occasion the English counties returned 152 Liberals and 101 Conservatives. This time the Liberals were 83 and the Conservatives 170. . . . In the northern counties, where agriculture was less predominant, the Liberals held their own."
History never repeats itself, but there are singular resemblances between the situation of to-day and that of twenty years ago.
Once again the Liberal party has swept rural England upon a "social issue, more social than political." Once again the Irish question is big on the horizon. Once again a year has passed — one sixth, perhaps one-fifth, of the allotted life of Par- liament— and nothing has been done for the rural labourer. Once again a Crofters Bill for Scotland is presented, which, "excellent in itself," cannot " take the place of a general Allotment Bill."
The countryside has been stirred into political energy and hope, as it has not been stirred for a generation. Wherever I have journeyed, north, south, east, and west, I have found the villagers looking eagerly towards the new Government for the policy which they so ardently desire. They have fought manfully for the victory of the Progressive cause. They have made themselves enemies and undergone persecution in the work for its triumph. They have confronted the sneers of those who ask them continually what return or betterment they expect to get from a Liberal party, which imme- diately it attains power will throw them over for other interests.
To-day they still refuse to believe in the possibility of such a betrayal.
All their hopes gather round the land. The pro-
HOPE AND THE FUTURE 109
vision of direct access to the land is the one pathway to freedom, comfort, security. So confident are they in the promises of politicians that I have found men modifying their plans, keeping sons at home, or making preparations for seed and stock, because they are sure that the better time is coming at last.
This land hunger, and the success of the small man where the land hunger has been satisfied, are facts which I could not believe till I had seen them.
In my own village in the South Country allot- ments were offered and abandoned. All desire for independence appears to have vanished from the labourer. I doubt if ten men would apply for hold- ings if they were offered to them. The older men work contentedly for good wages for the large farmers ; the younger men slip quietly away to the big city.
But I have seen enough to know that this con- dition is not normal. Even in the feudal village the desire for the land and for independence on it may be aroused once again. In large tracts of England it is the one vital question. The inhabitants are not thinking of Home Rule or Tariff Reform or National Education. There is for these but one question — How to get more land.
And when they get it, they somehow make it pay.
I doubt to-day if " Back to the Land " can mean any large return from the cities. This can only be proved by experiment and experience. But I am entirely convinced that the liberation of the land is the one thing, and the one thing only, which can keep the people in the country.
I have seen the small holdings created by the
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energy of the villagers in the heart of the Wiltshire Downs ; created by a County Council in Worcester- shire and in Norfolk ; created by a Parish Council under the Malvern Hills and by another on the borders of Birmingham ; created on the lands in Lincolnshire by our present Minister of Agriculture. I have seen them on poor land and on good, near and remote from markets, buying their land or hiring it, building their houses or buying the houses built for them. I have found a life of variable hardness and austerity ; many requirements, some discontent. But in all I have found rents regularly paid ; a rise instead of a fall of the population of the parish ; pauperism diminished ; and a spirit abroad of inde- pendence and of enterprise which one can seek for in vain in the sleek, comfortable, model villages of
Feudal England.
• ' • t • •
I have before me, through the courtesy of its officers, the complete and most illuminating series of reports of the Co-operative Small Holdings Society, covering practically all the small-holding villages in England. They vary enormously in prosperity and success. But these features are common to all.
They are scattered far and wide, through Southern England from Cornwall to Norfolk. They are tiny oases in the midst of the normal system of landlord, farmer, and landless labourer. They deal not with " allotments " of half an acre or less, designed to anchor the labourer on the soil by giving him profit- able employment digging in the evenings, but with the ladder of hope by which alone the labourer from the first cultivation of small pieces of land can advance to complete economic stability.
Here is Verwood, in Dorset, where the labourers
HOPE AND THE FUTURE 111
were allowed to lease portions of the moorland at a rent of IDS. an acre, and a guarantee that it should not be raised against them ; and have now reclaimed it, and grow produce on it for the Bournemouth market, twelve miles away. Here is the famous Rew farm experiment near Dorchester, in the midst of a declining agricultural district, where Sir Robert Edgcumbe cut up a small farm, and is selling it in plots to the purchasers. It(is land in most ways unsuitable for small holders, and the success is but qualified. Yet, although "the place gave one a feeling of desperate struggle, hard work, and poverty," the investigator noted also "a spirit of independence and happiness at working for them- selves which seemed to compensate for everything."
Or the estate in the New Forest, which Mr. Eyre has cut up into small holdings, and so stayed the flight to the cities : where the common rights in the forest and the large keeping of stock have maintained prosperity. And the estate of Mr. Harris at Halwell, in North Devon, where small holdings were created " largely by taking small bits of land off the larger farms and adding them to adjoining cottages " ; and while the population in all Devon has gone down 30 per cent, the population of this parish has gone up 80 per cent. Or the holdings in the Far Forest, where the clergyman is organising co-operation in the dairy and the purchase of foodstuffs and manures; and the County Council has been petitioned to ac- quire land and relet it to holders and reports no land in the market ; and the small holder pays from £2 to £4 per acre for the same land which is let to the large farmer at from 135. to 2os.
Here is Calstock, from which forty years ago a farmer journeyed to London, and seeing the price
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obtainable for early fruit at Covent Garden, was convinced that he could grow it as good in Cornwall; where now, on poor, stony land the small holders grow paying crops in their warm and sheltered valley ; and 107 small holders out of 423 started as labourers or the sons of labourers. Here is the wonderful success of fruit, market-gardens, and asparagus round Evesham, where in soil, in places good, but sometimes indifferent, aided by the com- petition of two railways, and the prevalence of the " Evesham custom " of secure compensation for im- provement, a whole district has been changed into a fertile and prosperous garden.
Here, again, is the Norfolk Association of the Norfolk members of Parliament buying poor land in remote Norfolk parishes, and letting it out to the villagers ; as at Whissonsett, six miles from a station, a typical decaying East county village, where the population had fallen from 666 to 450. And here in an extract from the report of the audit dinner is some evidence of the response which will be made if only the chance is given : —
" Mr. Nelson, one of the tenants, said that he, as a tenant, should like to express his thanks to the Norfolk Small Holdings Association for procuring these farms and cutting them up for the small holdings, which had been such a great benefit to them all. * I remember the time/ he went on, 'when I had not a bit of straw, and had to go and cut a bit of grass to bed my horse with, while the pigs were wallowing in manure and water. I hope it will not be long before we have larger hold- ings. If the Association could see their way clear to buy or hire more land, they would have no difficulty in letting it.'
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" Mr. Girling : I agree ; we would take as much again, if we had the chance.
" Mr. Long : I should be pleased to double my holding.
" Mr. Buscall : I would like an acre or two more.
" Mr. Lakey : I could do with five or six acres more.
" Mr. A. E. Strongroom : I could do with some, too. t
u Mr. G. Brown : I believe there would be some more join the Club if you had the land to offer them.
" Mr. Nelson : Several now wish they had made an application at first."
The land for which they appeal is there — all around them. Their " doing with it " and " taking it " means nothing of violence or confiscation. They are willing to pay the price for it at which it is let in large farms. They are willing to pay more than the price at which it is let in large farms. They are willing to hire it from Council or public body at a rent which will pay not only the interest on the purchase price, but the purchase price itself. So that through their energy and toil, in fifty years' time the land which to-day is in private ownership will pass back again into the absolute possession of the community. If only they are given a chance !
I have tried to tell of the things which I have seen in rural England. I have shown the dark side as well as the bright. I have never pretended that the giving of direct access to the land was anything more than a beginning. I have noted the frequent hardness of life, the failure of co- operation, the absence of skill and enterprise, the
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lack of a social ideal ; if I have noted also the freedom and vigour and hope which such a change has brought into the forlorn villages of England. But given this beginning I have faith that the other things will follow. The English agricultural labourer cannot escape in a day — perhaps not in a generation — from the consequences of his degradation in the long poverty and serfdom of a century. Give him a chance in the country as to-day he has a chance in the town, and he will show you in the country as effectually as he is showing in the town the qualities which make for human well-being. If not in himself yet in his children, developments of skill and com- bination will assuredly follow the start for which he is now waiting.
This great opportunity is challenging the energies of the party of reform. It is the challenge of a national policy. In these crumbling cottages and dwindling villages are being fought out the destinies and future of an Imperial race. Those who oppose reform with the forces of inertia and prejudice, or who scorn reform here as parochial while they gaze over wide horizons, are scorning the remedy for disease at the vital heart of Empire.
In this present Parliament — in legislation fearless and far-reaching — a Government with energy and insight and imagination could set in motion forces which within a lifetime would transform the country- side, and re-establish this people of England in their own land.
PART III
TOWARDS A POLICY
"WHAT WE WANT"
BY F. N. ROGERS, M.P.
THE prominence given of late to Irish legislation and temperance reform in the forecasts for the work of next Session is provoking some measure of uneasi- ness in the minds of those in touch with rural con- stituencies in England. It is not that the devolution of Irish Government and the prevention of alcoholism are regarded as anything but highly desirable objects for the attention of Parliament. But Governments and Parliaments move slowly. Reforms precede and follow one another. If one subject is taken up another is perforce postponed, and our expe- rience tells us that it is generally rural aspirations that have to wait. Governments are urban in their sympathies. Their members represent urban con- stituencies ; the Press which supports and influences them is urban in its character and its scope. The grievances of a suburb attract more notice and receive more attention than the silent, unvocal decay of an English countryside.
What is k, then, that our rural Liberals want from this House of Commons, and why do we want it? As to the why and wherefore. Everybody knows that rural England is being depopulated, that much of the land is imperfectly cultivated, that houses are
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too few and too bad, that in many districts land is " tumbling down " to rough pasture with disastrous results to all classes. These evils are patent to all, and diverse are the reasons given, still more diverse the remedies suggested.
To the writer the main cause of the decay of rural life is its lack of opportunity. Much might be written, no doubt, on the dulness of village life, the want of recreation and intellectual movement ; but by lack of opportunity I mean, above all, the lack of material, money-getting opportunity. It is this, above all, which drives the young men away. It is here that the intervention of Parliament is most of all required. The rest will follow. Agricultural labourers, from whom the main exodus comes, share in the common aspirations of the working classes. They want better conditions of labour, more leisure, better wages, a larger share in the wealth they create and in the opportunities that wealth can be made to provide. Trade unionism has never taken root amongst them. They do not organise to improve their lot. They leave. The most energetic seek those chances in life which the powers that be in their village deny them. The rest wait patiently for legislation. Their most deeply-seated and widespread conviction is that the salvation of their class lies in the land, not as hired labourers merely, but as cultivators of some modest portion of it for themselves. The agrarian movement in rural England is the counterpart of the Labour movement in the towns. It has its roots in the same causes, it is fed by the same ugly facts of industrial life, and Parliament has to it the same duty of recognition and sympathy.
The concrete form which the movement takes in
"WHAT WE WANT" 119
Wiltshire is the desire for a larger and cheaper supply of small holdings of land, at a fair rent, with proper security of tenure, and of a size suit- able for the occupation of men with small capital and frequently having some other occupation.
This is what we want the Government to do for us, and we do not want our needs to be pushed aside by other reforms, however desirable they be. We want to share and share ^alike. In some villages much of the land is already let in this manner. Where the system prevails you find less pauperism, more energy and alertness of mind, more widespread well-being, and more independence of character. High as the rents are, where these small holdings prevail a ladder does exist for a careful and thrifty man to climb to a condition of greater independence. It is this ladder that ought to exist in every English village. What might not English rural life become if every parish possessed a belt of small allotments of land immediately surrounding its cluster of cottages, available for the men who really meant to try, with good hopes of working out their lives towards some other goal than that of " parish pay ' at the end? Critics will say that that is all very well in favoured districts, where soil and climate and markets are favourable ; but that in the normal dis- tricts (and that is where they all seem to live) a small occupier would simply have to work much harder than a labourer for a more uncertain and possibly a smaller wage
The first answer to this is that much depends on the rent. If a small holder is paying a rent three or four times in proportion to that paid by a large tenant, owing to the fact that competition forces up the rent far beyond the agricultural value of the land
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then it is obvious that the test is not a fair one, and that only by a Land Court, or by bringing more small holdings into the market by legislation, can the proper conditions of success be secured. But given a fair rent, the real answer to the criticism is that a small holder with anything from two to twelve acres of average land does not depend solely on his land for a livelihood. He has some other means of living; perhaps a small business, or is engaged in some of the casual but skilled occupations which every village contains. Out of a colony of nine small holders known to the writer, one is a car- penter and wheelwright, one a roadman, one a baker, two are hay and straw tiers and sheep shearers, one a coal hawker, one a thatcher and woodman, one a pensioner, and one a postman. The trade or business and the holding work in together, gaps of unemployment are filled by work on or about the land, and capital visibly grows. Apart from the special districts where special crops can be grown, and where intensive spade cultivation is economically successful, a supply of small holdings as a reserve against unemployment, a natural bank for savings, an adjunct to a trade, and an incentive to thrift, is an invaluable factor in the economic life of a village.
The weakest point of these holders is in buying and selling. They buy too dear and they sell too cheap. Leisure is insufficient for constant attendance at markets and sales, and frequently they sell to a creditor, a bargain which is apt to prove a bad one for the debtor. Eventually the spread of co-opera- tive principles will cure this. It is the small holder of land, above all, who will gain by co-operative agricultural trading.
"WHAT WE WANT" 121
The Central London Unemployed body, so I read, is preparing large schemes for the coming winter. "These schemes comprise the erection of 100 cottages for training at Hollesley Bay, at an approximate cost of .£15,000 ; the erection of greenhouses, forcing beds, and so forth, at an esti- mated cost of £2,690 ; maintenance of colony with 350 men for six months, which would affect between 700 and 800 men, as each man would probably be given about twelve weeks' work."
It is, no doubt, an admirable scheme, reflecting much credit on the determination of the body to deal resolutely with a great evil. But does it not sometimes occur to our people, and more particu- larly to our Legislature, that it would be both cheaper and more effective to keep on the land those already there, who, without "training and maintenance for six months," possess the necessary knowledge of rural pursuits, but who, as a matter of fact, are steadily leaving the country as fast as they can to find elsewhere an outlet for their labour and an opportunity for their life's work? Since their childhood they have lived on the soil. All their skill is in rural handicrafts and knowledge of the varied work of the farm. Would not it be even possible that in the hoped for "colonisation of England" they would prove more successful pioneers than unemployed townsmen, trained at great expense, and probably ignorant of the most elementary facts of rural life? With one set of laws we are driving population wholesale into the towns ; with another we are beginning to teach at enormous expense to a minute fraction of it such rudiments of nature as will enable it to return. The pity and the wastefulness of it all !
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Now, before the progressive energy of this Parlia- ment is spent cannot we get from it machinery such as this — powers to a County Council to hire com- pulsorily, without restrictions on acreage, land for the purpose of small holdings, to make advances from a grant from the Consolidated Fund for build- ings and fencing, watering, &c., such advances to be made good by addition to the rent?
For the initiative I would trust the Parish Council to petition the County Council, as in the Allotments Clauses of the Act of 1894, a strikingly successful piece of legislation, and it should be obligatory ("shall," not "may") on the County Council to hold an inquiry when so petitioned.
Finally, at the centre there should be a permanent body of Small Holdings Commissioners charged with the duty of ensuring that fullest opportuni- ties be given by the local authorities to establish small holdings according to local requirements and wherever local conditions are not hopelessly adverse. And I should like to see the annual vote for the expenses of this Commission criticised according to the number of English families that in the course of the year they have settled on that most undeveloped of all Imperial estates, the soil of our own country.
It will be something of a tragedy in the history of the Liberal Party, and a disappointment past expres- sion to its most earnest supporters, if this present opportunity be not used to the full to realise our desires. We want a Land Bill, and we want it, as Hilda Wangel says, "on the table."
II
I
THE LAND HUNGER
BY R. WINFREY, M.P.
THE question is being asked of the great Progressive majority in Parliament, " What are you going to do for rural England ? "
We have made some little progress since the extension of the franchise in 1885, it is true ; but it is so very little, that unless the pace is accelerated we shall all be in our graves before the problem has been seriously grappled with. The only advantage of the last twenty years of " marking time " is that we can see more clearly the absolute necessity for drastic land reform, and, therefore, we ought now to be able to take with us the landed section of the Liberal Party, and even the Tory social re- former.
The time is fully ripe to grasp the nettle, like men of mettle, and adopt a whole-hearted policy of getting the people back to the land.
And when I say getting the people back to the land, I must not be misunderstood. Except in rare cases, I am not an advocate of bringing people back from the towns to country life. What I want to do for
the next twenty years is to give every country-born
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son of the soil a fair opportunity of remaining in his native district, and of acquiring by degrees enough land to live upon, a decent house to live in, and a system of co-operation which will ensure to him the fruit of his labours. If that is done we immediately start to re-people the rural districts, and we stop the exodus into the towns.
Those who have already migrated to the towns must stay there, with few exceptions. We have two young men on our small holdings in Lincoln- shire who have given up town life and returned to help their father on thirty acres of land, and they will probably marry and settle down with us, and we shall establish them as small holders. But ninety-nine out of one hundred who have gone out from the country cannot, for one reason or another, return. Indeed, the time that would be occupied in bringing them back can be much more profitably employed in finding places in the country for every young man already there who is prepared to marry, settle down, and cultivate the land.
I have just caused the following advertisement to appear in a local newspaper :
SOUTH LINCOLNSHIRE SMALL HOLDINGS ASSOCIATION.
THE above Association is prepared to receive APPLICA- TIONS from Persons residing in the several Parishes in South Lincolnshire, who are desirous of HIRING SMALL HOLDINGS up to 60 Acres in extent, either with or without houses.
Forms of application will be sent on receipt of a postcard addressed to the Steward, Mr. J. H. DIGGLE, Moulton, Spalding. All information will be treated as confidential.
R. WINFREY, Chairman,
THE LAND HUNGER 125
The result already is that applications have been received for two thousand acres of land, and still the applications come pouring in.
What we want is speedy — I say speedy advisedly — access to the land, and hundreds of new houses erected fit to rear families in.
The question for the Government is : " How quickly and how thoroughly can it be done ? "
Well, if we take past land legislation as our guide, we shall make a fresh start on new and drastic lines.
In 1885, I remember well Mr. Henry Chaplin saying that a quarter of an acre was enough for a working man; in 1887 he advanced a stage, and supported the Tory Allotment Act, limiting the quantity to an acre. But that Act was hardly worth the paper it was written on, for it put upon the Boards of Guardians the duty of supplying the land if they could obtain it from the landowner by voluntary means.
The labourers of South Lincolnshire sent in 2,000 applications for one-acre lots, and in two years they secured a paltry twenty acres. And any one who knows the composition of a rural Board of Guardians might easily have foretold the result. There is no secret about it; the majority of Guardians are farmers, or under the thumbs of the farmers, and even to-day they are not converted in their hearts to the value of allotments from the farming point of view. At any rate, there is no enthusiasm — no propelling force.
And when the Allotment Amendment Act of 1890 was passed giving the County Councils com- pulsory powers if the Boards of Guardians failed, it made matters very little better, for in nine cases
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out of ten the same class of men had the adminis- tration of the law in their hands.
The Parish Councils Act was a distinct improve- ment, and in the open parishes (by open, I mean where the cottages belong to a number of owners, and not to two or three landlords, and large enough to get a majority of working men and small shop- keepers on the Parish Council), the allotment clauses of the Act have been fairly administered. But here, again, if voluntary methods fail — and in quite half the cases they do fail — the compulsory powers are left with the County Councils, and the power comes back to the same class of men, who, if they dare not make a frontal attack, in preventing the acquisition of land, do it all the same by raising a thousand and one petty objections.
Then when we come to the Small Holdings Act of 1892, there is no improvement — rather the reverse; the power rests with the unsympathetic County Council, and there are no compulsory clauses, so between one and the other it is almost a miracle if a small holding is secured.
Fourteen years have elapsed since the passing of that Act, and what a melancholy record ! Only eight County Councils in England have acquired land under its provisions. The total area of land so acquired has only been 569 acres, which means practically an average of forty acres a year since the passing of the Act, and the total number of men placed on the land under its provisions has been 1 66, or an average of twenty small holders a year.
I recently saw a report which had been prepared for the Somersetshire County Council. The Clerk of the Council had written round to all the other County Councils asking what had been done under
THE LAND HUNGER 127
the Small Holdings Act. I noticed, amongst others, that the report from the Isle of Ely County Council was to the effect that it had not been found prac- ticable to put the Act into operation. Such a report is, of course, to those of us who know, ridiculous in the extreme. The Isle of Ely is a most fertile district, and many of the parishes are specially adapted for small holdings. Indeed, in one of the parishes that I call to mind at the moment, called Manea, there has been such a struggle for land that the rents are up to £3 and £4 per acre, and I know from some of the parishes in this locality applications have been sent in to the Isle of Ely County Council. Land is frequently coming into the open market, and might be purchased by the authority, yet nothing has been done, and one has only to know the personnel of this County Council to understand very clearly why the Act has not been put into operation. It is a County Council made up largely of farmers.
I expect we shall have another illustration of the same thing at Ramsey, in Huntingdonshire, where Lord de Ramsey has turned out some eight hundred allotment tenants because of some trivial dispute. An appeal has been made to .the Hunts County Council to provide small holdings ; they have held an inquiry, received the applications of the men, come to the conclusion that there is no land in the market, and that is how that matter will be allowed to subside, unless pressure can be brought to bear from some outside source.
Further, although a small percentage of land has been supplied under the Allotment Acts, the Parish Councils Act, and the Small Holdings Act, no houses and buildings have been provided whatever
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so that it is only the men who are already house- holders, and who live near the land so acquired, whose wants have been in any way met by these Acts of Parliament.
Whilst these pettifogging methods have been going on thousands of young men have left the country, never to return, for the want of a decent home and a bit of land attached to it.
So the housing problem must go hand in hand with the small holding problem, and the Govern- ment have to face the fact that public money and public credit must be provided for both.
We must do for England what we have done for Ireland, and what we are proposing to do for Scotland under the Small Landowners Bill.
Above all, Parliament, which represents the people, must be the propelling force. This question must be solved from the centre. A new public department must be set up, or a new branch of the Board of Agriculture created, and Commis- sioners appointed with knowledge, tact, and deter- mination to see this great work accomplished during the next twenty years. The Commissioners must be responsible directly to Parliament, and the nation must find the money and the credit to accomplish the work.
It is no use trusting in such a vital matter as this to the chance of a friendly County Council or District Council — the very men who want land are not on those bodies and are not likely to get there ; and the men who are there, or the vast majority of them, are not honestly in favour of this movement. We have an illustration of this in the Holland (Lincolnshire) County Council. Whilst we had a Progressive majority on that Council we secured
THE LAND HUNGER 129
three farms for small holding purposes. For twelve years these small holdings have been a success, the rents, which are punctually paid, cover the repayment of principal and interest, and the rate- payers have not been asked for a farthing, and yet now that a majority of Tory farmers predominate the Council, although frequent applications have been sent in to them by men requiring small holdings in other parishes, nothing has been done to continue a policy which every one admits has been successful. It is this experience which has taught me the lesson that we shall never colonise England and get the people back to the land, or decent houses built, through the instrumentality of local public bodies. The question must be dealt with as a national one, and the work must proceed under the eye of Parliament itself.
10
Ill
THE THREE PLANKS OF PROGRESS
BY ARNOLD HERBERT, M.P.
To Colonise England ! It is a striking phrase, and striking phrases are liable to incline practical folks to incredulity. They recall the unpractical ideals of writers who describe the mountains cultivated to their tops ; and they turn with abhorrence from the notion that our beautiful countryside is to be converted into an endless series of allotments disfigured by tumble- down sheds and unsavoury pigsties.
What is it, then, that we really mean by the phrase? It is that, while preserving the character of our country with its opportunities of enjoyment and of sport, it shall be made to maintain the people upon it in better conditions, and that a career shall be opened to those who dwell in the country, with a prospect of raising themselves and bettering their conditions without leaving the place of their birth.
What prospect at present is there before the agricultural labourer? However steady and com- petent a man he is, can he look forward to anything better than earning his fixed weekly wage, so long as he is fit for work, and in the end becoming an inmate of the workhouse ? That is not good enough
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THE THREE PLANKS OF PROGRESS 131
for the rising generation in the country, and that is why they flock to the towns.
There were enough subjects in all conscience to talk about at the General Election ; but, according to my experience in the rural districts, no subject was listened to with more rapt attention, nothing aroused greater interest than the exposition of a scheme of land reform which would open a career to the villagers in the country they know and love so well.
The subject may be conveniently dealt with under the two headings of— (i) Allotments ; (2) Small Holdings; (3) The General Conditions of the Tenure of Land.
(i) Allotments.
These cannot be looked upon as in themselves opening a career to the labourer. They are merely an amelioration of existing conditions. The function of allotments is not to raise produce for sale, but only for the supply of the holder and his family. In Bucks near the villages and small towns allot- ments are very general, and I can say from experience that they not only provide an addition to the table, but in hard times they have stood between many families and want.
Other counties are not so well off in the matter of allotments, and it ought to be the universal rule that an allotment is available for every villager, and, I should like to add, for every dweller in a small country town, who desired it. At the same time the landlord, whether an individual or a local body, ought to have and to exercise some control over the way allotments are kept, so as to prevent them being the unsightly objects they often are at present. Thus, for instance, it ought not to be permissible to
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an allotment holder to put up unsightly and tumble- down tool sheds and pigsties.
(2) Small Holdings.
By this is meant such a holding as will occupy the main part, or a very substantial part, of the time of the tenant — say anything up to fifty acres.
Such holdings do exist in some parts, but generally speaking they are not available to the labourer.
These small holdings are the crux of the matter. It is they that would supply the career to the labourer of character and enterprise ; and if they were made available in reasonable quantities, not as a universal rule, but as adjuncts in fair proportion to the larger farms, they would not only stop the drain of the best blood from the country, but they would be of enormous value to the larger farmers by planting round them a number of reliable men whose spare time would be available for work on the larger farms. Small holdings are intended to produce food for sale, and it is not by any means everywhere that small holdings could succeed. Climate, local con- ditions, the proximity of markets, and the means of transit must be all taken into consideration. Therefore, although the power of obtaining land for small holdings should be compulsory, it should only be put into operation after the Board of Agriculture had been satisfied that the conditions were such as to render success probable.
Speaking generally, too, I think it hardly likely that small holdings can succeed unless the holders will avail themselves of the advantages of modern commercial methods of buying and marketing pro- duce involved in co-operation. Individual small holders cannot hope to obtain from railway com- panies, for irregular and uncertain consignments,
THE THREE PLANKS OF PROGRESS 133
rates that will compete with those granted to small holders abroad, who, by co-operation, are able to guarantee fixed quantities of produce packed in the most advantageous manner.
The question, therefore, whether the probable tenants of small holdings are of sufficient intelligence, and are prepared to adopt the co-operative principle, should be a material consideration in determining whether compulsory powers of taking land for small holdings should be put in operation.
Granted all that, I do not think any great success for small holdings can be anticipated unless along with the power of obtaining the land and the com- mercial advantage of co-operation there is at the same time made available the capital with which to stock and work the holding. It is perfectly illusory to say to a labourer, however steady and capable, "You may obtain a small holding," unless you also give him the chance of obtaining the work- ing capital with which alone he can make it a success.
What is required is to open to a man an oppor- tunity of rising on his own character and his own ability.
This can be done, and can only be done by the simultaneous inauguration of agricultural banks, which should be worked on the mutual credit system, upon the lines of the Raiffeisen Banks in Germany. A man's own neighbours, who would form the com- mittee of the bank to whom he would have to apply for a loan, know his capacity better than anybody else ; and if they were willing to accept the scheme of working he laid before them, and to make him an advance of their own money upon the security of the success of that scheme, there would thus be provided
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TO COLONISE ENGLAND
the best guarantee for the practical and successful working of the system of small holdings.
We are far behind other nations in the organisation of agriculture. It is only organisation that is re- quired. But we must be ready to learn from the experience of others, and not allow sentiment to lead us into unpractical schemes destined to failure.
If, however, we afford the chance of obtaining small holdings, and simultaneously introduce the principle of co-operation in buying and marketing produce, and also in supplying the necessary capital upon business terms, we may fairly expect to bring about a revolution in rural life in England.
I say nothing about my third heading, viz., the general conditions of the tenure of land ; but it may be taken as certain that a generation which had learnt to apply modern commercial methods to agriculture, and to make small holdings a succe< would not long be content to be hampered by the antiquated restrictions of the present system ol tenure.
IV
THE LANDLESS LABOURER
BY E. G. LAMB, M.P.
" THE conscious human efforts do so much less than the unconscious ones," said my old friend the Pro- fessor. " I am inclined to think something might have been done to retain the yeoman, but I doubt if you can bring into existence a class of small holders. Nevertheless, I will consider any such proposal with- out prejudice."
And that is all we land reformers ask. I should like to believe it possible that so great a question as the re-establishment of the people of England on the soil of England might be permitted to remain outside party strife, but I know that whichever party shall be credited with doing it, or even with having made an honest effort to do it, will have the representation of the rural constituencies for many years.
I take it that we all agree that if a contented, prosperous class of cultivators of the soil could be called into being it would be well for the country. I am not going to argue whether there is, or is not, a demand for small holdings. Those of us who have lived in touch with the agricultural labourer know too well the unsatisfied land hunger that consumes
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him. And there is the land to be had without inter- fering with the farming industry. The small holder cannot be multiplied ad infinitum everywhere. He will want either work outside his holding or some home industry. He will not compete with the farmer; his methods of cultivation will be different ; but he will sell his labour at a fair price, and it will be better labour. I have no hesitation in affirming from per- sonal experience that the small occupier is in intelli- gence and industry far above the labourer who has lived in a tied cottage, be they brothers. Unfortu- nately, intelligence and independence are qualities that have not been encouraged in rural England.
If all the land is not suitable neither are all the men. Roughly speaking, wherever you find that there are or have been squatters, there you will find suitable land and the human material. Work on the soil demands at least as much skill as, and more perseverance than, any other industry. The con- ditions may be hard. The reward is a free life in the world as God made it.
In my opinion, men deported by public bodies as surplus town population would be of no use as small holders. (I am not expressing any opinion now as to farm colonies.) We must look to the existing rural population, and especially to their children. It must never be forgotten that, though a question of supreme national importance, the colonisation of England will be determined by local conditions, not only soil, climate, markets, and so on, but the character of the people.
I take a parish in which I know every man, either personally or by repute, and find that some 12 per cent, of the labourers would, in my opinion, be able to deal with a holding of from three to eight acres.
THE LANDLESS LABOURER 137
This may be thought a small percentage, but it will do to begin with. Our population is less than three hundred souls : I can find some eight men : we should want to acquire less than one hundred acres, and to borrow, say, ^"3,000 to build cottages. Rem acu tetigimus, now comes the crux — What about the money ? Men we have got : machinery we can get ; but money ? Whence and how ?
The reason why so little have been done to carry out the Small Holdings Act, 1892, is that there has been no willingness to run the machinery, and no power for the machine. The County Councils of England, for the most part in rural England, repre- sent the landowning and farming classes. Over the walnuts and the wine is settled who shall represent the people. Squire or farmer succeeds squire or farmer. Both fear the emancipation of the serf, and both fear the rates. If you propose to make the County or District Councils the authority to carry out a real Act to create small holdings, you must create a new class of Councillors, and to do this you must pay the Councillors their expenses, and a fair day's wage. This is to democratise the local authori- ties. But to effect small holdings I am inclined to believe you must give power to the smallest unit, the parish, because the parish is an historical and living entity, and you can get direct evidence at a Parish Council or parish meeting, where everybody knows everybody else's affairs and capacities.
And what an outcry there will be ! " The rates will go up ! " Now, there is no doubt that the farmers of England have a legitimate ground for complaint as to the incidence of rates. To put it broadly, the farmer pays on more than his income, and the business man on less. The matter is one for
138 TO COLONISE. ENGLAND
immediate settlement. The whole accumulated wealth of the country should contribute to both national and local needs. The income tax should be graduated, and the assessment for income tax should be the basis on which rates are levied. Granted this reform, and we have the money needed to buy the land and build the cottages.
In my opinion, the local authority should remain the proprietor and the small holder be a tenant. Peasant proprietorship is the counsel of perfection. But you would have to make mortgage illegal, to forbid subdivision, to prevent sale or sub-lease ; which seems not possible. Retain the small holder, therefore, as tenant, at a rent such as will give a fair return on cost of land and buildings, plus insurance of crops and stock : the holder to have security of tenure as long as he pays such rent, and the right to pass on his holding to a successor on the same terms, the tenancy to terminate should he become in receipt of parish relief. I believe the expenditure will be profitable to the local authority. A small holder near me pays £2 an acre for land that would not be worth 153. to farm. But a class of small holders would be such an advantage to the nation morally that the State can well afford to foster the movement. Surely we can devote the equivalent of the cost of one Dreadnought to start a National Agricul- tural Bank.
I suppose I should conclude with some truism about co-operation. The fact is that the British agriculturist is the most individualistic of human beings. Farmers continue to buy at retail prices and sell at wholesale ; the agricultural labourer continues to undersell his fellow in the labour market. Will education and independence teach combination and
THE LANDLESS LABOURER 139
co-operation ? Let us get our small holdings first and talk about the rest afterwards.
One thing the State must do : it must teach the next generation to till the soil ; to dump down even picked men into small holdings without some super- vision, instruction, and financial help would be to court failure. Their cultivation must be intensive, and knowledge of intensive cultivation there is none. Demonstration plots in suitable localities are an absolute necessity; opportunity for advice should be made easy ; patience must be illimitable.
I expect to hear, " Communal ownership is Social- ism disguised," but we wish our small holders to live individualistic lives. I expect to be told, " You tax one class to benefit another," but I only desire all to contribute, according to their means, to benefit the nation. Some one will say, " This is a revolution ; " my reply is, "It is to avert a revolution."
V A PARISH MEETING
BY ATHELSTAN KENDALL, M.P.
EXTRACT from the minutes of the Hellburied Parish Council, October i, 1906: —
" Resolved : That a parish meeting be called to consider the question of the ' Colonisation of England/ the causes which prevent it, and the methods which would forward it."
At the meeting which followed the passing of this resolution Mr. John Wain, C.C., mason and local preacher, took the chair at 7.30 as Chairman of the Parish Council. There was a large attendance. The Chairman read a letter from the Squire regretting that he would not have finished dinner in time to take the chair, but that he hoped to look in later on ; also one from the Vicar, who said that evening service would prevent his attendance. The Chairman said that The Daily News desired to ventilate this ques- tion, and he thought it their duty to help. He believed that the labourer wanted land. Their boys and girls wanted better and more practical education until they were older. Young men and young women wanted a club to go to in the evenings. Labourers should have their cottages free of the fear of losing them when they lost their employment.
A PAEISH MEETING 141
Cottages which were unfit for habitation should be reported by the Parish Council to the District Council. If the sanitary inspector agreed with the Parish Council the landlord should not be allowed to shut them and ruin the labourers, but should be com- pelled to put them in order. (Cheers.) The medical officer should not be a local practitioner, whose best patients were the landowners, on whose property he had to report. They should have free and indepen- dent men to judge in these matters. They wanted parsons who were friends of the poor, and not, as the Bishop of Birmingham had just said, friends only of the rich. They wanted squires who were ashamed of the fact (or at least willing to apologise for it) that they had never earned sixpence in their lives. They wanted the best educated men in the parish to set an example of hard work, thrift, sobriety, and tolerance of other people's opinions. They wanted to compel County Councils to find allotment and small holding land when the Parish Councils asked for it. As Chairman it was his business to open the meeting and not make a speech, and this he had much pleasure in doing.
Mr. William Brown, an old farmer, said he was Tory born and bred, and his father before him. He did not, as a rule, hold with anything new, but there was certainly something wrong with the country districts. He supposed they could not have Protec- tion— (loud cries of " No ") — but something must be done. He had held his farm, and his father before him, for a matter of eighty years between them. He had never seen his landlord in his life. Some man in London wrote for his rent, and it was always paid to the day. The rent was low enough, but he had to do all repairs to the buildings himself. He had spent
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hundreds of pounds on his holding. He held his land on a yearly tenancy. A month ago he heard his land- lord had died. A week ago he got notice to quit next Michaelmas from the new owner. (Cries of " Shame ! ") Was that right ? (Cries of " No.")
Mr. Jones, another farmer, said that a Tory Govern- ment had passed a Land Purchase Bill, and made the English taxpayers lend the Irish tenants a hundred million pounds to buy their holdings. And because this sum was not enough for the landlords the Tory Government had made the English tax- payers pay twelve millions more as a bribe to the landlords to sell their land. As farmers had voted Tory since the last flood, and probably would till the next, why didn't the last Tory Government do some- thing like that for the English farmers ? The reason was that in Ireland the farmers always voted for what they wanted, and against their landlords, and so they got what they wanted. In England the farmers voted for their landlords, and they got what the landlords wanted. (Cheers.)
William Earl said he had five sons between four- teen and twenty-one. He had advised them all to go to a big town to get their living. He had been an agricultural labourer for forty years, and had never been able to save a farthing or keep out of debt. He earned weekly at nineteen within a couple of shillings of what he had ever earned since. It was true he had a quarter of an acre "of allotment land now, and that helped. But it was nigh being the worst land in the parish. It was ij miles from his work and his home. He paid twice as much for it as any farmer thereabouts did. Unless a majority of working men in the parish could force a landlord to sell or let plenty of land to the Parish Council for
A PARISH MEETING 143
small holdings the labourers never would be free men. The labourer on the land was the last man in the industrial race. He wished he had left the village years ago when he was fit. Now it was too late. But his boys would not stay if he could help it.
John Wright said labourers wouldn't mind going short of victuals if they could do any good by it. But what was the use of saving £10 if you could not get a bit of land to hold to and improve your circum- stances ? He only knew of two holdings of under ten acres within five miles, and there was no chance of getting them for love or money. He had two daughters and three sons, and a cottage with more than two bedrooms was not to be got in the village. Men left the villages because they wanted to live decent, and a family like his could not be brought up decent in most villages.
The Squire, who had listened to the last few minutes of the discussion, said he was much shocked at some of the speeches he had heard. Many men there seemed discontented with their lot. They had been put into the world to do their duty in such positions as it had pleased God to call them to. He tried to do his duty in the position to which he had been called, and others should do the same. They should submit to their lot, as he did, and make the best of it. (Ironical cheers.) It was true he got up when he liked and had breakfast when he liked, and hunted and shot and kept a motor-car. But these things all involved the employment of labour and the circulation of wages. A disgraceful Bill, called the "Land Tenure Bill," had been introduced into Parlia- ment. This Bill proposed to let farmers invite their friends to kill the rabbits on their landlords' farms ; to make landlords pay compensation if the game did
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any damage to the crops, and would force a landlord to keep his tenants whether he liked to or not. What would be the use of being a landlord if this Bill passed, he would like to know ? All this disturbance and discontent was the result of education and giving workmen votes and parish councils. Allotments took a man's interest away from his master's work, and small holdings were no good to any one without capital, and would not pay even then.
The Chairman said that as the Squire seemed satisfied with things as they were, possibly he would allow those who were not a chance of speaking.
Thomas Smith said village life generally meant tyranny. They all remembered how Miss Drayton, the teacher, had been dismissed from the school because she would not go to school on Sundays. In the next village the County Council put the parson's wife on the school management committee, although there were four Church persons (including the parson) on already. In another village he knew the Noncon- formist children were withdrawn from the Church Catechism because the parson said the conscience clause made the Tory Education Act a fair one. When the summer came, the Nonconformist children were not allowed to go to the school treat. They all knew that after the last election the Dame-President of the Primrose League had written to the grocer, Mr. Hales, telling him he might send his bill in, and saying she should not trade with him again because he had voted Liberal. Next Sunday he had heard she celebrated her conduct by going to church twice. A man would never call his soul his own in country districts till he could get some land on the credit of the State, and then he would be able to stand up against injustice and feel a man.
A PARISH MEETING 145
The Rector having meanwhile come in, the Chair- man asked if he desired to make any remark.
The Rector said he was sorry more of the men in the village did not come to church. He had heard that the chairman once said of him at some Radical meeting that the parson's chief friends ought to be the poor, and he further said that he ought not to keep a carriage, play golf, give and go to tennis parties, ride to hounds, occasionally spend a month in Switzerland in the summer, and go to dinner- parties. The duty of the clergyman was to know his flock, especially those whom Providence had called to positions of affluence and importance in the parish. He was often able to influence such persons to help the poor and deserving, and this he could not do if he did not meet them in the ways the chairman had complained of. Clergymen of the Church of Eng- land were not like Nonconformist ministers. They were usually persons of gentle birth, and university training, and they naturally made friends with their equals, and not their inferiors. He confessed he did not know why such a meeting as this should be called, or what the " Colonisation of England " meant. He did his best to keep the people in the parish by preaching the gospel of contentment with our lot, and distributing the village charities. (A Voice : " To Church people.") These discussions do no good, but a lot of harm. They made men become discontented. Radicals and Socialists had no respect for landlords or property. He begged to announce that he should preach next Sunday on the subject of ordering ourselves lowly and reverently before our betters. He begged to wish them good-night.
It being now late, the Chairman called on Parish Councillor Jones to propose a resolution, as follows :
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" This public meeting of the inhabitants of Hellburied records its opinion that in this parish there is wanted : Firstly, power to Parish Councils to buy or rent land for small holdings under schemes to be approved by the Local Government Board, without control of County or District Councils. Secondly, similar power to get land for cottages ; and, thirdly, this meeting records its opinion that, granted the first two conditions, co-operation and organisation, pur- chases and sales will put every villager in a position of freedom from squires, parsons, bad farmers, narrow-minded grand ladies, and all other evil-dis- posed persons."
The resolution was carried unanimously. It was further resolved to send copies to the Squire and parson, whose engagements had (it was presumed) compelled them to leave the meeting before its conclusion.
VI
"LA TERRE QUI MEURT"
BY PHILIP MORRELL, M.P.
AFTER so much that has already appeared it seems almost impossible to say anything further in favour of a policy of land reform. It is, after all, the old Liberal policy. The present Government is pledged to it. The demand for it arises not merely in the rural districts, but in every part of the country ; and in those districts which I know best I do not believe any single consideration carried more weight at the election than the Prime Minister's emphatic words upon this subject. It is a proposal that will soon have reached that most dangerous stage when every one speaks well of it.
But if any Liberal is still in doubt as to the urgency of this problem, let him come and visit Oxfordshire. There he will see what land monopoly means. He will see villages decaying and the land neglected and starved. He will see cottages unfit for habitation, crowded and yet insufficient ; and when they have fallen to ruins none built to take their place. If he makes inquiries he will find that it is next to impossible for " the small man " to get a piece of land ; that, except here and there, small holdings are unknown, and that in many places there
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is a dearth even of allotments ; that the County Council has a small holdings committee which seldom or never meets, and that the only recent application made to them was summarily rejected on the ground that the applicants, four working men, could not afford to buy their holdings out- right.
If he looks at the agricultural returns for the county he will see that out of 15,000 persons engaged in agriculture some 12,000 are in the position of labourers or hired men, and that the average wages of the labourer in Oxfordshire are lower than in any other county in England. And from the census returns he will not be surprised to learn that whereas between 1891 and 1901 the population of the urban districts increased by 4,770, the population of the rural districts in the same ten years went down by 7,805.
But except among the labourers and their families he will not see any signs of poverty. On the con- trary he will find that the land is most of it in the hands of rich men — many of them newcomers who have made money in the towns, and who generally have not either the motive or desire to try and make a profit from the land they hold ; that large houses are being built and parks and gardens laid out ; and that sport was never more flourishing. In a word, he will be observing the familiar fact that land in such districts as this is becoming more and more the pleasure-ground of the rich and less and less the treasure-house of the nation.
Let me give from my own experience a few typical cases.
W is a village of about 900 inhabitants,
"LA TEEKE QUI MEURT" 149
situated upon a railway, in the centre of an agricul- tural district, about twenty minutes by rail and six miles by road from a large town, and within easy access of London. With any fair chance it is a place that would quickly develop. There are already one or two small holdings and market- gardens, which are doing well. But for the most part there is no outlet of this sort. The houses are cramped together, many of them without gar- dens, and as the place is surrounded by large estates, no further land is available. The only allotments are upon a north slope, more than a mile away. In spite of the railway and the proximity of good markets the population is steadily declining.
C is a small and picturesque village, situated
less than a mile from a station, on a main line, with rich meadows running down to the Thames. The cottages are well built and comfortable, but as the whole parish belongs to a single landlord — a rich man of independent income, who will not sell or develop — it is impossible for any one but a labourer to get a footing in the place. Between 1891 and 1901 the population went down by more than 25 per cent.
I is another " one-man village," situated per- haps less favourably than the last, but within four miles of a growing town. All the land is let to a single farmer, and every cottage is in his hands as a " tied cottage." The inhabitants are not allowed to keep either pigs or poultry for fear they should rob their employer. They have no allotments, and hardly any gardens, but are allowed the use of a bit of field to grow potatoes. The houses are in a wretched state. The first thought of every young man is to get away.
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N is a place of about 500 inhabitants, splen- didly situated round a large common, within five miles of a market town, and about forty miles from London. There is a great demand for cot- tages and small holdings ; but almost the whole parish is in the hands of two big landlords, neither of whom will develop his estate in this direction, and no land therefore is available. At the last census the population of the parish had been reduced by more than 20 per cent.
These are, as I have said, typical cases. With the exception, perhaps, of one of them they give almost too favourable a view. In hundreds of other villages of England a similar or worse state of things could be found. Everywhere the same pro- cess is going on. Silently and steadily the country population is being forced into the towns, there to increase unemployment and distress. If we had not the example of foreign countries — of Holland with its small holdings and of Denmark with its admirable land policy, in both of which countries the rural population is steadily increasing, and of those rare spots in our own country where small holdings have already been tried— we should be inclined to believe this process inevitable. And yet no one pretends that the land of this country is over-cultivated or that it could not support a far larger population than it does now and produce a far larger return. Of the £1 6,000,000 of agricul- tural produce — principally butter, eggs and bacon— which we import every year from Denmark alone, how much, under better conditions, might be produced here?
What, then, is the remedy, or, rather, how is it to be applied? How are we to secure for the
"LA TERRE QUI MEURT" 151
working occupier the elementary conditions of success ?
In the first place there must be a comprehensive policy. A mere tinkering of the Small Holdings Act or of the existing Housing Acts will be not only insufficient but useless. Although here and there a local authority has been found strong enough to act, in face of all the obstacles which a careful Legislature has placed in its way, in the majority of cases, as things are at present, it is impossible for any real progress to be made. The grip of the old order is too strong. The odds in favour of obstruction are too heavy. You may talk of the advantage of small holdings, and demonstrate the probable gain both to landlord and tenant, but as English society is now framed some of the strongest forces in rural life will always be against you. To the average landowner, and still more to his agent, the creation of small holdings means the growth of an independent spirit, the encouragement of Radicalism, and the spoiling of sport. No argu- ment but compulsion will overcome such objections as these.
In the second place delay is fatal. The question has been discussed long enough. It is time for the Government to take action. By waiting they only strengthen the forces of obstruction. The old lethargy, which was shaken off for a short time at the election, will return, and the agricultural labourer will begin to believe, as there are plenty of willing voices to persuade him, that the Liberal Party cannot help him.
Let me now sketch very briefly the sort of policy that seems to me to be required.
(i) The establishment of a Land Commission or
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of a branch of the Board of Agriculture on the lines of the proposed Scottish Land Commission, with power to grant assistance for dividing or adapting land, building dwelling-houses, &c.
(2) The establishment wherever possible of volun- tary committees — similar to unemployment com- mittees or to the Dutch Boards of Health — whose expenses would be paid, and who would act in conjunction with local authorities, or, failing them, with the central Government, in receiving applica- tions, collecting information, and generally providing the motive power to make a start ; such committees to be nominated in part by the central Government and in part by the County Council.
(3) The establishment of a branch of the Board of Agriculture to deal with agricultural co-operation by providing skilled teachers and lecturers, and by assisting in the formation of societies.
(4) The conferring on County Councils and muni- cipal bodies of simple and uniform powers for the compulsory purchase and hiring of land for any public purpose — e.g., allotments, small holdings, housing, water, drainage, rights of way — in place of the diverse complicated and generally unwork- able powers which they now possess.
(5) The requiring of all local authorities to levy their rates on the certified capital value of the land, such value to be afterwards the basis for fixing the price where it is required to be taken over.
When such measures as these have been carried through — not piecemeal, but comprehensively and thoroughly — we shall at least have made some advance towards the colonisation of England.
VII SOME LESSONS FROM ABROAD
BY LEVI LEVER, M.P.
IT will surely occur to the man in the street that of all times in the history of the nation the present is the most propitious for seriously considering the best means of colonising England, and solving the great and intricate question of the unemployed. A time when the trade of the country is in many dis- tricts distinctly booming, a time of unrivalled progress, notwithstanding the prophecies of Mr. Chamberlain that a few years would see the decline of our great industries. A time when an enormous increase is shown by the Board of Trade returns in our imports, exports, and re-exports for the nine months just ended.
Added to all this is the fact that we have in power a strong Government with a gigantic majority such as has not been enjoyed since the Parliament imme- diately following the passing of the great Reform Bill of 1832. A majority to be accounted in a great measure to the democratic views of the candidates who pronounced themselves so strongly in favour and desirous of helping forward drastic domestic legislation in preference to spending vast sums of money on useless foreign expeditions.
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Side by side with this ever-increasing prosperity we unfortunately have a great mass of unemployed, who are not to be altogether absorbed, as some would expect, by an improving trade, owing to the great increase in the introduction of machinery, and the somewhat exacting conditions of the labour market, which are such as to demand the most skilled and energetic workers, whilst casting aside the aged and the less efficient.
What is the remedy ?
Land reform ! Land reform ! Land reform !
The initial step to be taken is for all advocates of land reform to lose no opportunity of expounding the evils of the existing old feudal system, and of making it perfectly clear that the electors are anxiously awaiting from the present Government a measure of reform which, if it does not altogether remedy, will at least do something to mitigate the evils and honestly try to make life more tolerable in the villages, whilst attempting to create an air of independence and self-reliance amongst the agri- cultural labourers, so that they may be retained on the land, instead of being driven, as now, by dearth of employment and cottage accommodation, from the countryside to the already overcrowded towns and manufacturing centres.
The remedy is, I believe, to be found in :
The Land Tenure Bill,
Small holdings,
A national system of afforestation, and
Legislation to prevent land going out of cultivation.
The Land Tenure Bill is of paramount importance. It will give the farmer that freedom of cropping and
SOME LESSONS FEOM ABROAD 155
disposing of his produce which is absolutely essential if farming is to prosper here as in other countries ; whilst, at the same time, it provides for compensa- tion for unreasonable disturbance. These provisions will prove an inestimable boon to the farmer, and, at the same time, constitute a very powerful factor in retaining the labourers on the land, as tenant farmers will feel justified in incurring considerable expenditure in converting portions of their land from a more or less unprofitable cultivation to the production of vegetables, fruit, and the like, involving a great increase of labour, but invariably proving a lucrative form of culture.
To illustrate my argument, I will just take one farm in East Anglia, where the income derived was so miserably inadequate that the farmer recog- nised the necessity, if he remained, of embarking in fruit and vegetable cultivation, notwithstanding the risk of being turned out at short notice, being only a yearly tenant. The result has been most satisfactory, as the number of people finding employ- ment on the farm to-day is more than double what it was previously, and the weekly wages paid, albeit the introduction of machinery, has increased at an equal rate. The farmer is prepared, the moment he has security of tenure and compensation for un- exhausted improvements, to extend this department of his business, which will, he assures me, afford employment for a very much larger number of men, women, and lads. I at once suggested, as most people would, that he should obtain a long lease of his farm, and thus feel free to extend his enterprises, and improve his holding. What was
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the reply? The same as you hear all over the country : that the landlord refuses to grant a lease of any kind.
If, after passing the Land Tenure Bill, the Govern- ment will introduce a real system of small holdings we shall at once see arrested the present serious migration from our villages, and a great increase in the petite culture which has proved in France such an enormous source of income to the peasant farmers, and of the very greatest advantage to the nation as a whole.
Who would be bold enough to contend that the British peasant, given, as in France or Germany, his small holding, is not equally able to successfully undertake egg production, poultry rearing, and pig breeding ?
I will not debate the advantages to be derived from small holdings, as they, I think, are admitted by all social reformers of whatever politics. The question that should exercise our minds is how best to establish such a system. The present method, through the County Councils, has proved to be absolutely futile.
I agree with Mr. Winfrey that the responsible authority must be Parliament itself. His suggestion that a new branch of the Board of Agriculture should be created for the purpose of accomplishing this great work will generally commend itself. Petitions of Parish Councils or of any body of would-be small holders in a district should at once receive the attention of this suggested new sub-department, which must possess compulsory powers to acquire all such lands as may be required. Opponents of the system may contend that small holdings cannot be made to pay. This is a fallacy. We
SOME LESSONS FROM ABROAD 157
have already proof to the contrary in this country. Let us in a way study and imitate the conditions obtaining to-day in Germany and France, where the land is very much subdivided, perhaps in some cases too much so, which is a point that requires to be safely guarded against.
In France there are over two and a half million holdings under twenty-five acres ; in Germany there are over two and a quarter million holdings under twenty-five acres ; whereas in the United Kingdom the land is in the hands of comparatively few, e.g., 710 persons own about one-quarter of all England and Wales ; seventy persons own about one-half of Scotland. What undoubtedly is required to ensure the success of small holdings, which must of necessity be accompanied with a sufficient cottage accommodation, is the founding of small local co- operative societies for the better collection and dis- tribution of the produce, and for the better purchasing of the requirements.
The great obstacle in the way of establishing small holdings will be the high prices asked for land, which assumes at all times such an abnormal price when landowners think it is required. The solution of this difficulty is perhaps to be found in the taxation of land values, a subject that must receive serious consideration if a stop is to be put to the withholding of the land from the people.
Just one word on the important subject of affores- tation, which, if taken vigorously in hand with earnest determination, might do more than any other for
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helping the necessitous unemployed over the ever- recurring periods of trade depression.
A beginning has been made on a small scale by one or two local authorities, but this is a matter that requires to be taken in hand by the Government itself, inasmuch as the unremunerative period would be somewhat long and form too great a local burden, whereas a Government grant, however large, would not be prejudicial to the nation's finances, and would in the long run prove a moral, financial, and com- mercial success.
It has been computed there are thirty million acres of cultivable land still uncultivated in the United Kingdom. Surely if this uncultivated land were taxed the Government could acquire vast tracts, at a low price, quite suitable for timber growing, which in Germany has been undertaken on a large scale, and proved financially successful when scientifically managed after one hundred years. In the meantime, what a boon timber-growing estates would prove to this country, finding work of such a nature for the unskilled unemployed as to arouse a new interest in life, and would go a long way in re-establishing the health, strength, vigour, and morale of the poor creatures pressed into the already overcrowded towns by force of adverse circumstances.
VIII
DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY
BY CORRIE GRANT, M.P.
(i) THERE can be no question of the Need. Ask every Progressive member of Parliament what the rural labourers want ; ask every political agent, every local preacher, the same question. The answer is ever the same, " To get land ! "
A personal experience of my own is in point. Since March, 1895, I nave Deen UP anc* down the Rugby Division on my bicycle, until I know every road in it (every short cut especially, because they are usually, alas for my tyres, long cuts because of gates and stones!). Last autumn I obtained in each of my visits an invitation to tea in some cottage to meet the village workers. We usually met between four and five, and after our meal talked until it was time for the meeting at seven or eight. Whatever we began about those talks ended in " the land." The need for it, the varied possible uses for it, the present unproductiveness of it, the hopelessness of getting it !
After one of these meetings my host said to me, " I hope you will come again, Mr. Grant. We are getting to know you a bit now." They had
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never asked me before, though I had been to the cottage several times ; would not have asked me then but for a broad hint, after ten years' work. In that one sentence lies one explanation of the problem of colonising England, never understood or even thought of by town dwellers. One great difficulty in dealing with the rural land question lies in the shyness, the suspicion, the slowness to form an opinion, or to determine on action along new lines of the agricultural labourer.
(2) Why is not the need supplied ? There is that great law of supply and demand, the cure for half the evils of life fifty years ago. But supply implies willingness to sell, and to sell what is wanted. Every week for years past the Warwickshire papers have advertised land for sale in that county — estates, large farms, farms, small farms, now and then small holdings. But bits of an acre, with the right to take the next lot or lots at the same price, I have never seen advertised. Nobody does for agricultural land what companies and speculators are ready to do for building plots. No one buys a farm, and breaks it up into small holdings and allotments. The reason is obvious. The demand at any one spot is not equal to absorbing the whole of a farm.
In one of my villages a landlord is willing to sell about 200 acres worth 2os. an acre for £2$ an acre. Several people would like some of it. One man wants eleven acres, another four, and in one way or another forty-five acres could be let at 403. an acre, or even more. The villagers want to hire, not to buy. If he divided his farm to suit them the landlord would have to spend the profit rent for some years to come in the expenses involved in the change, and he might lose his present tenant into
DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 161
the bargain. Like many other people, he is "not taking any risks."
(3) Who can supply the need ? The landlord can, of course, and if men were anxious to copy Lord Carrington's example as a landlord, in every county, perhaps even in every petty sessional division, we might have his experience reproduced. But they are not. Talk to them as I have done to scores. You get no sympathy, no comprehension of the urgency of the need. Most of them say that their labourers don't want land. " They don't ask for it, and they are not backward in asking as a rule." What an argument ! They might as well say that labourers don't want grapes, because they never ask for the hothouse fruit in their greenhouses.
Some landlords, it must be added, rightly say this. Where in a village there is regular work, good wages, pretty cottages, with good gardens, allotments, and the big house always there to run to in an emergency the present-day labourer is content. His son won't be.
An equally large class of landlords don't want small holdings. They know that these will affect their game and their hunting, and unless taken in hand as a definite business, they won't appreciably increase their income. "They are all worry and trouble," one man said of his small tenants to me. It depends on how they are handled, I think.
Then there are the land agents. Every one will admit that some years ago the country land agents, both resident and professional, did much to help in the supply of allotments. Here and there, too, some of them have taken much trouble to get bits of land for men whom they thought trustworthy and deserving. As a class, however, they are too much
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taken up with big affairs and big estates, and have no time or inclination for these small things.
It comes to this, that the labourers must help themselves, advised and stirred up and guided by helpers and well-wishers outside. Individually they can do nothing. Acting together in a village, and electing and controlling the Parish Council, they can do much. It should be, then, our first aim to call attention, emphatically and persistently in the rural districts, to the powers already possessed, and not fully exercised, and in Parliament to the extensions wanted.
For instance, a Parish Council can call upon its Rural District Council to provide cottages with gardens up to half an acre (with an appeal on refusal to the County Council), and the Rural District Council can buy land, either by agreement or compulsorily, for the purpose, and borrow the money on loan (Housing of the Working Classes Acts, 1890 and 1900). I know of one case in which this power has been exercised. It is true that it took an energetic, tactful, leisured woman some six years to carry through. But this is always so the first time.
It very often pays the village clergyman to sell his glebe, because the price when re-invested gives him both a better and a more certain income. He can do this now under the Glebe Lands Act, 1888, with the consent of the Land Commissioners. One condition of consent may be that the land, or some part of it, is to be offered for sale in small parcels, or to the Rural District Council for allotments.
There is a power in Section 17 of the Small Holdings Act, 1882, which seems to have been overlooked. A County Council may advance to any tenant (holding any quantity of land between one and fifty acres), if he can agree on a price with his
DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 163
landlord, three-fourths of the purchase money. Any Parish Council also may call the attention of the County Council to the need for small holdings, and so set the machinery of the Act in motion.
Further power, of course, is the one thing that is essential, and fortunately we can move along the line of legal precedent, broadening downwards here and there. Under the Allotments Extension Act of 1882 (45 and 46 Victoria, c. 80) a.11 trustees of charity lands must set apart a field suitable for allotments, and must every February give notice on the church doors of the land so set apart, and of the rent. It is not a far step to require them to sell to the Parish Council. Why, indeed, should not all ecclesiastical, educational, or charity corporations holding land be required to sell to all local authorities ? It is still a principle of our common law that corporations cannot hold land, and where they have over-ridden it they only want it for its income. Notoriously they are the worst land- lords in the kingdom.
The procedure almost must be shortened, simpli- fied, and much lessened in cost. There is no longer any need for inquiries by headquarters and provisional orders. Town Councils and County Councils ought to be able compulsorily to acquire land within their own area after notice to the landlord by the authority and inquiry by them unless within a certain time the Public Department interposes. The price to be the market value. These two proposals are not revolutionary, and they are not mine. They were part of a scheme for taking land compulsorily for public purposes outlined six years ago by a very great legal authority.
These are just hints at the lines that ought to be followed.
IX WHAT MIGHT BE DONE WITH THE LAND
BY H. F. LUTTRELL, M.P.
IT is time, indeed, that the English land question should receive attention in Parliament. For while in many respects, both as to legislation and adminis- tration, we are in advance of other countries, as regards our land laws we are immeasurably behind. It is useless to expect a proper treatment of the land until we have our laws relating to land suitable to the present-day requirements of the people. Before we plant we must remove the old stumps. Those ancient laws and customs of settlement, entail, and primogeniture which were passed centuries ago in the supposed interests of the large owners of land still remain ; and so rigid are they that a quarter of Britain is owned by a few hundred persons. We have thus the spectacle of a few surfeited and masses hungering.
In the towns these laws have built up that cramp- ing system of leaseholds, and in the country they prevent the owners from developing their properties and improving their farms and building and main- taining cottages. Under them it is possible for property to be settled upon an unborn descendant,
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WHAT MIGHT BE DONE 165
and for such property to be under control and restrictions imposed by a former owner, the removal of which is costly ; while under primogeniture, in case of intestacy, the whole property devolves upon one son, and he not of necessity the most capable, but the eldest.
For what are these laws and customs ? To keep together great properties and prevent, so far as the State can prevent, their p9ssible distribution. What do they mean ? That no other individual who lives on them, however industrious, however thrifty, how- ever energetic, can ever hope to own one single yard of land. Surely it is time these laws were changed. It would be futile to spend time and money on this subject until we have cleared the way by removing these obstacles, for there can be no real freedom of trade, either in town or country, when such unjust laws hamper freedom and security. Then, having done this, we should be free to start a system suitable to present-day conditions. We must first determine what is to be our destination, and then lay down the lines.
Is it to be private or public ownership? If public ownership, should it be a national leasehold system, as in India, or a decentralised system, with delegated powers to local representative authorities. While most land reformers are agreed that an occupying ownership would be preferable to our present system, many would be opposed to State assistance for such a system, and this on account of the difficulty of its application to future needs, and of the fear of its growing into one of land monopoly. They would contend that a system which suited Ireland would not of necessity suit Britain, Ireland being more sparsely populated and the holdings smaller, ren-
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dering such a scheme more easy. Besides which occupiers there were already recognised as part owners, and it was more the completion of an already recognised system than the making of a new one. What in Ireland is largely a peasant proprietorship would in Britain become a farm ownership, and from farm ownership to land monopoly would be a smaller step than from peasant proprietorship.
Whether it be public or private ownership, the first step must be for the State to resume its rights over the land. It must be made clear that, where necessary in the interests of the public, the State has a perfect right to acquire the land. This principle has already been admitted in the case of railways. If it were thought right compulsorily to acquire land for the construction of railways, surely such com- pulsion may be made to apply where land was required to satisfy the needs of the public. Com- pulsion does not mean confiscation, for where a fair price is paid it cannot be called confiscation.
The dread of compulsion has crippled our Allot- ments and Small Holdings Acts, and rendered them of but little avail. Experience shows that if the most is to be made of the land there must be given to the occupiers of the land reasonable security in their tenure and freedom to farm well.
But more than this is required. There must be facilities given for small holdings. It must be re- cognised that to-day land cultivation does not mean corn-culture supplemented with animal culture, but that fruit and vegetable and flower culture are making large contributions to the returns. And there is a demand for more than the present supply, for in 1904 two million pounds' worth of apples, more than half a million pounds' worth of pears, and more than half a
WHAT MIGHT BE DONE 167
million pounds' worth of plums were imported, and of vegetables over a million pounds' worth of onions and nearly two and a half million pounds' worth of potatoes—almost the whole of which might have been grown in this country. For the production of these, facilities should be given for small holdings. Would not difficulties be a better term than facilities for what the State has done so far in the direction of granting and the extension of small holdings ? It is a locked-gate system. The field is large, the gates are many; but they are locked, and locked by the word " may."
Where there's no will there's a may. And where there's a may there's no way. In order to place small holdings within the reach of the people, we must turn many of our permissive proposals into compulsory powers. We must let representative public bodies have the power to take over land — if necessary, by compulsion — and these bodies should be given facilities, by State loan or otherwise, to set up small holdings and dwellings. It is all-important that these bodies should be really representative of the people, and to be so they must be bodies with which the people are in touch. The Parish and Urban Councils are the most representative of our Councils, and to them much of the work should be entrusted.
THE VILLAGE TRAINING
BY FREDERIC VERNEY, M.P.
WHAT do we want, and how are we going to get it?
We do not want to revolutionise an industry suddenly by abolishing landlords or farmers for the benefit of labourers. I will not even here advo- cate the fashionable expedient of farm colonies as applicable generally, although they may doubtless be of great use in exceptional cases. In the words of a countryman who knows the Midlands well, and who has lived all his life among farm labourers, "What we want is a few small holdings in every village, and the method of obtaining them made easy."
Could any ambition be more natural or more wholesome for a farm labourer than the desire to get hold of a bit of land, on which he may spend skill, knowledge, and experience, and may get a fair return from them ? When a tailor wants cloth, or a shoemaker wants leather, he has not to go and pay a lawyer for investigation of title a heavy fee, nearly or quite as big as the price of the raw material. Still less is there any absolute bar, whether feudal or otherwise, to prevent his buying cloth or leather.
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THE VILLAGE TRAINING 169
Make land as easy to buy as cloth or leather, and one great and unjust hindrance in the way of farm labourers will have disappeared.
To get the land we must utilise the machinery of our local self-government. And this for more reasons than one. It is only local men who know local requirements, and it is local requirements, varying greatly in different counties, and even on different estates and in different parishes, that we have to meet. Secondly, by not using Local Govern- ment machinery it becomes rusty and unusable. Moreover, Local Government means organised self- help, and every opportunity for the development of this excellent quality should be eagerly seized. A Parish Council can easily find out whether in the Parish there is an effectual demand for land, either to hire or to purchase.
On being satisfied that there is such a local demand, which cannot be supplied except by the exercise of compulsory powers, a Parish Council should apply to the County Council, who would make their own independent inquiry and act accord- ingly, using every endeavour to purchase the land by agreement, rather than resort to compulsion, but not being deterred from using compulsion where necessary. And this process has to be made easy, speedy, and cheap. The land is only a part of what must be provided. " Every small holding, to be quite successful," writes a very experienced estate agent in Bucks, " must be thoroughly equipped with up-to-date farm buildings." Here Government loans must come in at a low rate of interest, their repay- ment (principal and interest) being spread over a number of years.
In many parts of the country the putting up of
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buildings will mean the reinstatement of those which have been destroyed in years gone by, when there was the mania for consolidation of small into big holdings. The creation of small holdings should be carried out so as to inflict the minimum of injury to those from whom the land is taken. The supply should follow the demand. It should never exceed it. A great deal will depend upon the observance of fairness and the exercise of tact and common sense, and here again local knowledge both of men and of places is essential. The rent payable for the plots of land should be based upon that paid by farmers of the neighbourhood, always allowing for the quantity, the position, and quality of the land taken, and for every consideration which a valuer would have to bear in mind in fixing a fair rental or selling price for the plot in question. If any scheme of land reform is to be permanently success- ful there must be nothing in it that could reasonably be described as confiscation. Working men in Eng- land never have desired, and never will desire, the " confiscation " of anybody's property. They are too honest and too proud. The taking of land com- pulsorily can only be defended on public grounds for the public benefit. It is for the benefit of the whole community, and especially for that of every class dependent on agriculture, that the ownership of land should have a far wider basis than it now rests upon in England.
If any scheme of land reform is to be really suc- cessful, education must take its part in it. Village boys must be trained up as skilled workmen in the field as carefully as town lads are now trained as skilled men in the workshop. The great movement of the last few years that has been planting poly-
THE VILLAGE TRAINING 171
technics and technical institutes all over London and in every provincial town has hardly touched country life. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money have been invested in giving the knowledge to artisans which they require to become skilled men on the way to becoming skilled masters, and it is an excellent investment. There is plenty of room for skill on the farm, and even more for skill on the small holding, and the land reformer who leaves out of account a scheme of education that shall train up from childhood to manhood, by prac- tice as well as in the elements of theory, those who have to get their living on and by the land — that land reformer begins by an omission which no amount of subsequent care will ever supply.
Education is one element of success. Co-opera- tion is another. The transformation from abject poverty to comparative comfort and prosperity among the small tenants in Ireland brought about by the co-operative movement has given everybody who has watched the process an object-lesson in land reform which he can never forget, and the adaptation of the same principle, in very different circumstances and conditions, on the Continent is at last arousing country folk in England to do something in the same direction. One thing is absolutely certain that, with- out co-operative agencies, foreigners would never have been able to flood our markets with their farm produce, and enrich themselves by English money.
To sum up, what we want is —
Firstly. — To provide such an education and train- ing for boys at country schools, and for lads on the farms, that will make the best of them into skilled workmen fit to get out of the land all that it has to give.
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Secondly. — To enable our Local Government Authorities cheaply and speedily to remove all obstructions which prevent those who work on the land from getting allotments or small holdings on purchase or on hire of such a kind, and in such places, that they can cultivate them productively.
Thirdly. — To encourage combination and co-opera- tion, and to show their economical advantages over unrestrained competition for purposes of production and of sale.
Under the portrait of one of the most successful colonisers and administrators that ever went from England to the United States is the motto " Fatti Maschi Parole Femine." Every Liberal must wish that the words of this appeal for land reform may speedily give birth to action of a masculine and vigorous kind on the part of our Liberal Government. It is impossible to exaggerate, and difficult to realise, the importance of the problem of land reform.
In 1851 about one-ninth of the whole population of England and Wales (some 32^ millions) were engaged in agriculture.
In 1901 — fifty years later — less than one-thirteenth of the population were so employed.
When the fullest allowance has been made for the legitimate attractions of town life — its higher wages, its wider interests, its more pungent fun, those of us who have been " country birds," and love the freedom, the health, the intimacies with man and beast, of country life, and those of us who also know what town life means for poorer men, women, and children, look upon the rush from the country into the town, stimulated by artificial means, as an ever- increasing danger to the healthiest, biggest, and best of our national industries.
THE VILLAGE TRAINING 173
No better "national service" could be rendered by the League that has adopted this name than to apply concentrated energy upon the problem how to improve the conditions of country life for the poor, so that those who live and work there may find scope for their ambition, a prosperous outlook for their children, and something infinitely better than I2s. to 1 6s. a week, and a workhouse in which to end their days.
XI THE WAY OUT
BY E. N. BENNETT, M.P.
THE land hunger in rural England is not so great in 1907 as it was five-and-twenty years ago. The hopes of the agricultural labourer — the most neglected class of our workers in England — have been disappointed ; the enthusiasm of the village movement in the eighties has long since cooled in face of pledges unfulfilled and legislative futilities, and the young men and women, despairing of better things, flock to the towns or emigrate to the Colonies.
Nevertheless, it is not too late to check the exodus. It becomes harder year by year, but there is still a great opportunity for wise and fearless legislation the main object of which is rather to keep on the land the people who still remain faithful to their village homes than to bring back those who have abandoned them.
Let no Liberal underrate the opposition which will meet any courageous scheme of land reform. When temperance legislation comes before Parliament we shall doubtless realise the amount of antago- nism offered by all the forces of monopoly and privilege in this country. But the opposition to
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THE WAY OUT 175
temperance legislation will be as nothing compared with that brought to bear against any scheme of land reform. We have had a slight foretaste of its quality in the attitude of Tory landlords towards the Land Tenure Bill of 1906. If the Government are not really determined to carry through a strong and drastic scheme of land reform, if they are going to frame their Bill with a view to please weak-kneed Liberal landlords, and then modify its provisions in order to buy off Tory 'opposition, they had far better leave the question alone.
The dread menace of Protection roused the agricul- tural labourer from a long political sleep ; his hopes — though the stirring enthusiasm of Joseph Arch's days has ebbed — are fixed once more on the Liberal Party. After our Oxfordshire victories I was constantly met with the pathetic cry from the poor labourers and their wives — the average weekly wages for Oxfordshire are about 133. 8d. — " It is a hard struggle for us, sir; do your best for us ! "
Small freeholds, small tenant holdings, or allot- ments ? That is one question. The other is the pro- vision of cheap houses. From my own experience of rural districts I should say that the desire for allot- ments is frequently satisfied where it exists, and that this means of adding to the labourer's income is at best precarious and unsatisfactory. The rent charged for accommodation land for this purpose near a town or village is often exorbitant : every one knows of allotment holders who pay at the rate of £2 to £$ per acre, while the farm land over the edge yields from IDS. to £i. 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 put in after the day's labour is
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finished. The returns, too, are often wretchedly meagre. Here are the statistics 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. I (better land). Average crop, 27 bushels of potatoes at 2s. per bushel, £2 143.
Expenses— £ s. d.
Rent (is. 8d. to 35. 4d.), say ...... 034
Manure, say ............ o 10 o
Seed, say ............... 030
land and potatoes, say ... o 10 o
This leaves a profit of £i 73. 8d. a year— about 6d. a week ;
No. 2 (inferior land). Average crop, 14 bushels of potatoes at 2s. per bushel, £i 8s.
Expenses — s. d.
Rent .................. 3 2
Manure (two loads every second year) ... 5 o
Seed .................. 3 o
Digging land and potatoes ......... 5 o
16 2
Here we find the magnificent profit of iis. rod. per annum, actually less than 3d. a week !
No, the provision of allotments will never be ade- quate to induce the rising generation of young farm labourers to remain on the land. A most careful investigation by Mr. Mann into the economic condi- tions of village life — carried out on the lines of Mr. Rowntree's researches in York, and published in " Sociological Papers " (Macmillan, 1904) — has proved conclusively that in many villages in the South of
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England and the Midlands one may expect to find no less than 41 per cent, of the working agricultural population living in "primary" poverty, i.e., on in- comes so low that they cannot possibly furnish them- selves with the food, clothing, &c., which is necessary to keep them in sound physical health. It is useless for landowners and others to say that the labourers " get enough to keep themselves comfortably." Stern facts and figures prove quite the contrary. And while such appalling economic conditions continue can one expect that any young and vigorous labourer is likely to prefer a rural life, with pauperism at its close, to the chances of work in our cities or colonies, because you provide him with an allotment which he must cultivate after a hard day's work, and from which with good luck, he may derive a profit of 6d.-is. a week?
The choice then, lies between "peasant proprietors '' of small freehold properties and tenant holders paying rent to a landlord or some private association or to a Government Board of Commissioners. At first sight the idea of the small holder owning and cultivating his own plot of land is attractive, and wonderful results are achieved by the peasant proprietors of such countries as Denmark, Holland, and France. But all those who, like the writer, have had personal experience of the conditions under which these small holdings are frequently cultivated are disposed to favour the creation of tenant-plots rather than free- holds. Perpetual subdivisions of the land amongst sons and daughters, the grip of the mortgage and the moneylender, the low standard of comfort, and the unceasing toil — all these are factors in Continental systems with which we must reckon.
Against these, of course, we may set that strong 13
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sentiment of ownership and the complete freedom from control ab extra which render the Land Pur- chase Act so acceptable to the people of Ireland.
We have in Oxfordshire two singularly interesting examples of land divided up amongst a considerable number of small freeholders. At Minster Lovell the colony of freeholders founded by Feargus O'Connor still exists, and at Carterton, some two miles from Clanfield Station, a vigorous settlement has sprung up in quite recent years. It is impossible here to discuss in any detail the points of failure or success in these two colonies. Suffice it to say that at Minster Lovell it has been found practically impos- sible to support a family on any holding of, say, less than five acres and a cottage, and in consequence many of the smaller holders engage in other occupa- tions supplementary to the work of their little farms — one is a shoemaker, another a mason, and so on.
It is, perhaps, too soon to draw definite conclusions from the Carterton experiments. The soil is poor, but the occupiers are experienced, industrious, and highly intelligent. Fine crops of fruit are grown, including grapes, and, despite some dismal prophecies to the contrary from those who did not know the calibre of the Carterton settlers, the butter which is produced on one or two holdings is of the very best quality. As far as can be gathered, there is every prospect that this most interesting settlement will prove successful, in spite of unduly heavy rating and a poor soil, and that the little farms will yield, in the words of one of the most experienced Carterton residents, " not a fortune, but a healthy and pleasant life."
If any Land Bill is framed on the basis of tenant
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holdings, then the question arises, What agency shall act as intermediary between would-be tenant and present landowner ? I am absolutely convinced my- self that any idea of employing, in this connection, County, District, or Parish Councils is useless. Machinery of this sort will yield us nothing but futility and disappointment. The Tories knew what they were about when they established County Councils — some of the most retrogade and illiberal bodies in Great Britain, saturated too often with that landlord prejudice which hates land reform in general and " small holdings " in particular. Speaking gene- rally, the District and Parish Councils are little better for our purpose. Unprogressive Tory influence is, alas ! in most cases strong enough to control the policy of these smaller bodies, as well as those of the County Councils. If we are to accomplish anything we must establish a strong and sympathetic Board of Land Commissioners, furnished with powers of com- pulsory purchase at reasonable market rates, without the absurd and unnecessary "compensation for dis- turbance." Such a body would gradually cover the whole of rural England, discover for itself whether the labourers really desire to secure small farms of, say, five to twenty acres, buy suitable land, and let it to suitable tenants at a fair and equitable rent.
This is, I am certain, the only satisfactory means of producing a genuine scheme of land reform.
The housing question is too big a one for treatment here. But I cannot help thinking that in England we have strangely neglected the use of wood as a material for house construction. Landlords tell us they cannot build decent stone cottages to pay them 2\ per cent., and although this feat seems to have been accomplished by the landowner of the well-known
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Brandsby estate, in Yorkshire, the statement of such inability to provide cheap stone cottages seems as a rule well founded. Why not try wood? In the Lofoden Islands, where all timber is imported and costs almost as much as it does in England, and wages are about 2^-3 kroner (2s. 4d.-3s. 6d.) per day, I can build an excellent five-roomed house for, say, 1,000 kroner (£55 I is.). Such a house is warm and weather- proof, and with care will last fifty years or more.
At any rate, all existing enactments have merely played with the question. But now we have a powerful Liberal Government with a strong Radical element in it. The Labour Party is altogether with us in this matter of the land, and our Prime Minister has strongly encouraged our hopes of reform. We must fulfil our pledges, we must turn our attention to the humble, patient people who live in the little country villages.
XII THE VALUE OF'SMALL HOLDINGS
BY ERNEST J. SCARES, LL.D., M.P.
I AM quite sure that a multiplication of small holdings would be the means not of bringing back to the land those people who have left the land, but of retaining on the land those men, and, what is more important, the children of those men, who are now engaged in agricultural pursuits. People who are not brought into close touch with the agricultural labourer do not realise the dreariness of his present outlook. He may be as thrifty and careful as you please, but except in those rare cases in which he is able to get possession of a small farm, he will never have the opportunity of using his hard- earned savings to the best of his skill and ability. Ambition, that useful spur to all human endeavours, must be banished from his nature, for his chances of promotion, after he has attained the dignity of 135. a week, a cottage, and a patch of potato ground, are practically nil. He may sweep the board at local ploughing matches, he may be the best hedger and ditcher in the neighbourhood he may thoroughly understand the cattle which are committed to his charge, but only in rare cases has this an effect on
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the amount of wages he receives. In default of a small holding, any agricultural knowledge he may acquire will always be acquired for the benefit of another, and he has practically no chance of im- proving his position in the world. He must be out of doors at all seasons of the year and in all weathers. If he is in bad health — and even people who spend their lives out of doors are by no means free from human ills — he must either go to work or forego his wages and decrease the weekly allowance of his wife and family.
As a consequence, at the age of sixty he is generally in the clutches of "roomatics," his bowed and twisted body loses its strength and usefulness. In many cases a kindly farmer keeps him on to do such jobs as he is capable of doing, but his wages begin to decrease, and in a few years' time comes the inevitable demand either for outdoor relief or the much-dreaded application for admission to the
workhouse.
• • • • •
This being the average lot in life of the agricul- tural labourer, and when we remember that the young unmarried labourer living outside of the farm does not receive wages of the same economic value as the married man (for though he receives a little more in money he does not receive the full equivalent of the economic rent of the cottage and perquisites), and when we remember the dulness of many of our country villages and the ambitious longings inherent in the breast of every man, can we wonder that our young men flock to our thickly- populated towns, knowing full well there is always a demand for the fresh country strength of agricultural bone and sinew ?
THE VALUE OF SMALL HOLDINGS 183
Small holdings would not only help to keep the young agricultural labourer on the land, but would assist many a farmer to start his sons in life without crippling himself or depriving himself of the capital he needs for . his own concerns. They would not only be beneficial to- the State, but they would be beneficial to the landlords, as they would rear up a race of men able and competent for agriculture and fit to use every acre of land to its best possible advantage. In support ' of this contention I am permitted to quote an extract from a letter to me of a well-known Devonshire land agent, who does not agree with my political views, but who is as anxious as I am to get more people on the land. He says :
" I find from experience that if I have a large farm to let of some hundreds of pounds a year I have very few applicants for it ; but if I have a small farm of less than £100 rent, I have many applicants, and the smaller the holdings the more the applicants, and a better chance there is of letting to a good working tenant."
If we are to obtain a sufficiency of small holdings, drastic and compulsory powers of purchase will have to be conferred by the Government upon some authority either already constituted or to be con- stituted for the purpose, and no Government scheme could possibly be complete without such provisions. At the same time, it must be remembered that just as Mr. John Burns proposes to deal with the problem of unemployment by many and divers means, so also the methods of solution of this agricultural problem must be varied, alternative, and elastic. Every bond- fide and thoughtful contribution to the discussion is well worthy of consideration, and even though its
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lines may be neither heroic nor Socialistic, it may well be that it will assist us in the way we want to go. Even a scheme which would be approved by the House of Lords must not necessarily be rejected on that account, and if good landlords may incidentally be benefited by our policy I do not consider that this should be used as a hostile argument. For these reasons I venture to put before your readers a suggestion which has been made to me by the land agent whom I have mentioned above, and I do not think I could do better than conclude my article by quoting his own words : —
" I have for a long time advocated an increase of small holdings between twenty-five and fifty acres, and I am sure the number might be increased very considerably to the great advantage of the State, and of the rural labourer, and with some advantage to the landowner.
I would suggest that the State should advance to landowners such sums as might be necessary to enable them to provide the necessary houses and buildings, or one or the other, together with a sum for the subdivision of the field, on the same terms as to interest and repayment as that granted to the Irish tenantry, viz., about 3| per cent, for a term of about sixty-eight years.
" I am sure, from personal knowledge, that in North Devon many small holdings would be provided if the landowners had only the opportunity of getting the money at a reasonable rate of interest. The State could, if it wished, make it a condition that in the event of the owner borrowing money for that purpose, the holding should, for as long as the money remains un- paid, be farmed as a small holding, and in the event of the landowners wishing to add to it a larger holding
THE VALUE OF SMALL HOLDINGS 185
he could only do so by paying off the loan, and thus relieving himself of that restriction.
" The State would be secure as regards the advances, as the charge would be a first charge, similar to that now given to the land loans companies, and the work should be carried out to the satisfaction and with the approval of the Board of Agriculture. The difference in value of the land without the buildings and the value of the holding with the buildings would be the security for the outlay. An owner would have to expend £400 to £600 on a small house and build- ings ; and if the land consisted of, say, twenty-five to fifty acres, which would be, roughly speaking, worth £20 an acre, the value of a twenty-five acre holding would be worth about £900, the State only having expended £400, and the rent to pay the interest and rent of the land should be about £40 per annum, the landlord paying the tithe rent charge and doing the landlord's repairs. If this scheme be adopted, the Imperial Exchequer would stand to lose absolutely nothing. The amount to be charged for interest and sinking fund would be amply sufficient to recoup the State, not only for the cost of the loan, but also for all working expenses, and, in my opinion, therefore, a large number of small holdings could be created in North Devon by a simple Act of Parliament, without any expense to the taxpayer or ratepayer."
XIII THE RURAL EXODUS
BY H. R. MANSFIELD, M.P.
I AM glad that the day of spurious Imperialism is past. I trust the day of genuine Imperialism is dawning. The future of our country depends not upon the extension of her borders beyond the seas, but upon the maintenance of a vigorous manhood and womanhood at home.
Everybody agrees that the people ought to be kept on the land, but nobody seems anxious to pay the piper. Mr. Kipling made it quite popular to " pay, pay, pay " when it was a matter of destroying life, but that sort of patriotism is not stirred by any thought of preserving it. Lamentations by people in high places at the depopulation of the villages have generally ended in vain regrets that the labourer fails to appreciate the peculiar beauty of the simple life. He is blamed for turning his back on the dim country lanes for the gas-light glare of thronged cities. He is censured for choosing to leave the rustic beauty of his insanitary cottage in the village for the monotony of a jerry-built house in an endless street. It is wondered that he is willing to give up his long hours, low wages, and fresh air for the sake
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THE RURAL EXODUS 187
of toiling for shorter hours and more money in a noisy and noisome factory.
If we are to arrive at the cause and eventually the cure for depopulation we must examine the circum- stances of the case from a more sympathetic point of view.
What are the facts of the case as they present themselves to a young labourer when he is old enough to begin to look around him, and, as he would say, " reckon things up a bit " ?
His father is a labourer getting far on the wrong side of fifty, whose strength is not what it was. Although he has toiled hard and long, year in and year out, from youth to manhood, from manhood to the beginning of dreaded old age, he is no richer in this world's goods than he was the day he began. Fortunate is he if he is not in debt at the shop and to the doctor as well. How could it be otherwise ? A wife and family with ten or fifteen shillings a week gave him no chance to put by for the days when he can work no longer. He has laboured, but other men have entered into the fruits of his labour. He hopes to keep his present place for some years yet, but who knows when sickness or accident may not end it all ? And if he leaves his present master it will be more difficult each year to find another. Farmers will tell him they " have no use for men who haven't got a bit of steel in them." The end, whenever it comes, is invariably the same : " George, work is a bit slack and things aren't very good ; so I am afraid I shan't be wanting you after next week." Then for a few weeks a weary attempt to find work, to hold on to home and freedom. The shopkeeper begins to shake his head. Nobody will trust him. Nobody wants him. But the landlord wants his
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cottage, and then — the workhouse. But perhaps he lives where the landlord or farmer does not turn out the old workman whom he no longer needs ; so by taking a lodger, keeping a pig, getting an odd job now and then, and with what the parish allows him, he is able to end his days by the old fireside. How often even this scanty reward for all his labour is tinged with sadness, perhaps bitterness ! For the son who is now doing the work the father once did is taxed, willingly or unwillingly, by the guardians with the maintenance of the father. And to the son, with his ever-growing family, the shilling or eighteenpence out of the weekly wage means deprivation of some little luxury in the home that would help to make life sweeter, or some necessity the lack of which makes life more weary. The son and his wife have to look carefully at each sixpence before it is spent. There are so many little things wanted, especially when the children are coming. It is always at this time that society taxes the poverty of the young man for the infirmities of the old.
What chance or hope has the young man to do better than his father ? You may talk of honesty, of industry, of thrift, but in what was his father found amiss ? It is not lack of virtues which brings the young labourer's father to pauperism in old age. One wonders sometimes if it is not because of them ! Men of rougher mould, less unselfish, less truthful, less faithful, less patient, might have done as well. Men who could grab and grasp might have done better ! It seems difficult to believe that (as the world reckons) they could have done worse for them- selves and their children.
The young labourer sees only one course before him if he remains in the village — to follow in his
THE RURAL EXODUS 189
father's footsteps. To give all his strength and knowledge to the soil that it may produce wealth for other men's enjoyment. He can never become richer than his ten or fifteen shillings a week. Ill-health, misfortune, or ailing wife — and he can easily, surely, become poorer. In good fortune or ill, in strength or weakness, the end is all the same.
Even if the young man despises the town and clings to the fields, it is by no means certain that he will be allowed to remain. When men add field to field and farm to farm — even though they do not produce one half the wealth of which their lands are capable — less and less labour is required. Even if the young man gets a place he may have to wait long before he has what he may call a home. Who builds cottages for labourers in these days? His only chance is to wait until death or some other reason causes some other worker to leave the parish, and then the young man may be able to step into his comrade's antiquated, tumble-down cottage, ill-ventilated and worse drained. Two rooms up and two rooms down, where it is difficult to fight against disease, and more so to observe the decencies of life. But the District Council may seize the opportunity to declare the place unfit for habitation. While the Council is slow to act in this way, it never by any chance uses its powers to make provision for those who need housing room. So men have sometimes to walk miles — to the next parish, sometimes to the nearest town — in order to find house room. The young people must put off the happy day because there is no home to which the blushing bride can be taken. True, we have laws to provide housing, but so drawn as to make it difficult for the most energetic authority to provide cottages within the limits of the labourer's means.
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True, too, we have laws to provide land for the people, but so drawn that it is simplicity itself for the Councils to make them of none effect.
So the young man turns his eyes away from the country towards the cities of the plain.
He sees there more than one employer to choose from. He sees more than one opening for industry. A hundred houses "with all the latest improvements " can be had for asking. Unknown luxuries in the way of food, clothing, and entertainment can be had for payment. He can not only choose his employer, but need not, unless he desires, make obeisance to any man. Men who came from the country, who were young and strong as he is, have gone before and have succeeded. If he goes he at least may hope to some day own his own cottage, to succeed in trade ; possibly to employ labour, to enter public life, to gain honour and distinction !
Once in a hundred times his dream is realised. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the village loses a man who would have added to the wealth and strength of the nation. Too often the town only gains an unskilled labourer who in times of industrial stress and storm directly or indirectly swells the ranks of the unemployed, and sometimes the unemployable.
How are we going to stop this misuse of our best life, to cure this wasting disease of civilisation ? We must set about the work of preserving the life of the rural districts with something of the same deter- mination with which we set about, say, the destruction of the Transvaal. We must build our Dreadnoughts for the creation and preservation of life, as well as Dreadnoughts for its destruction. I would ask that with as little delay as possible we should push forward legislation to
THE RURAL EXODUS 191
1. Provide land for every villager capable of cul- tivating it.
2. Provide cottages for every villager who requires one (at two shillings per week).
3. Reform and cheapen the methods of railway and other communication.
4. Establish depots in every county for the pro- vision, at lowest price, of all that is wanted in culti- vating a farm.
I have no doubt these reforms may be described as Revolutionary and Socialistic. Without using capital letters, I prefer to describe them as imperialistic and conservative. I am not troubled about labels, but I think mine are the more correct. There is no need for any wild upheaval, of any drastic laws which would deprive present holders of their rights and possession, or which would transfer the control of land in a wholesale manner. All I ask is that the dangerous conditions arising from landless and homeless people should be treated in the same man- ner as would be adopted in the case of an insanitary or waterless area. Take my suggestions as to land and housing. I want the Board of Agriculture and Local Government Board to have powers to ensure the provision of small holdings and labourers' cottages wherever there can be shown to be a demand for them. It is almost useless in these matters to give additional powers to the County Councils. Those Councils invariably lack both the detailed knowledge of the people's wants and the desire to concede them.
The only authority which knows the requirements of a village and its people is the Parish Council. The Parish Councils should be provided with the necessary means of making its wants known to the two great
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departments I have named. These could easily be framed so as to show the exact conditions of life in every village in the kingdom. Each parish should make a return giving the population, the number of habitable houses, and the number of rooms per house, the amount of land let in allotments or small holdings, the number of men holding and the number still requiring land, the amount of land required, &c. When these returns had been received, and wherever a good case was made out for intervention from Whitehall, a local inquiry should be held. If, as a result of the inquiry, the Board was fully convinced that either land or houses were required, then an order should be issued to the County Council to make the necessary provision. There are, of course, a hundred and one vitally important details to be considered : the period for which money could be borrowed, the system of repayment, the provision of compulsory powers, the arrangement as to manage- ment, payment of rent, &c.
All I ask now is that we should consider this matter in the same light as that of drainage or water supply, believing that it is of equal importance to the health and wealth of the nation.
Methods of communication, and more particularly the control and organisation of railways, must receive attention before long. At present our railways, willingly or unwillingly, give a preference to foreign produce, which is injurious both to agriculture and the general public. It is both difficult and costly for even the big farmer to get his produce to town. It would be impossible for a multitude of small holders to succeed unless there was a much better and cheaper method of placing their produce on the market.
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193
The fourth item in my programme may provoke the most criticism, but it is already established in many parts of Ireland, and has achieved a remark- able success. What the Congested Districts Board has done for Ireland the Board of Agriculture could do for England. The Irish small holder is able to get his seed, his manures, his implements, his pedigree stock, his building materials, from the Board. Advice, practical assistance, and encouragement are given him at every turn.
If our Government will but do one half for the peasantry of England of that which successive Governments have already done for the peasantry of Ireland, I have no doubt that the wilderness and solitary places of our rura- districts will in time rejoice and blossom like the rose.
14
PART IV
THE OFFICIAL TESTIMONY
SUMMARISED BY
C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.
SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES
IMPORTANT Government publications were issued last year bearing directly upon this question. The most noteworthy of these are (a) the Report on the Decline in the Agricultural Population of Great Britain, issued by the Board of Agriculture ; (|3) the Report of the Departmental Committee on Small Holdings in Great Britain; (7) the Report of the Select Committee upon Rural Housing.
I. THE DECLINE IN AGRICULTURE.
The Board of Agriculture here summarises replies sent in to certain specific questions addressed to its correspondents in every county in England, Scotland, and Wales. These questions include queries as to the continuance of the agricultural decline ; the causes of that decline ; the influence upon the decline of alterations in the system of farming, especially the encouragement of fruit farming, poultry rearing, and market gardening ; and the nature of the demand for allotments and small holdings.
Testimony varies greatly from county to county, and even within the borders of the same county. But the general conclusions reveal (a) a general opinion that the agricultural decline has continued in the five years since the census ; (/3) that the causes
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of the decline include the extension of machinery in agriculture, the increasing desire of the labourers to leave the land, and deficiency of adequate or satis- factory housing accommodation ("reported from about thirty counties "), and the lack of incentive to remain on the land, and of any reasonable prospect of advancement in life. This last is largely bound up with the difficulty of acquiring small holdings and the locking up of the land on the big farms.
The testimony, though striking in its emphasis upon the over-supply of allotments, is equally striking in the wide consensus of opinion as to the inadequacy of the supply of small holdings. The labourer, in fact, has no more use for a long piece of land to labour upon in the evenings after a hard day's toil. What he exceedingly desires is the opportunity of advancement and a career given by the ladder to- wards independence and a more or less complete subsidy from the land.
Here are a few random extracts from the corre- spondents of the Board of Agriculture.
Huntingdon. — " In the Fenlands there is a great demand which is hardly met."
Hertford. — "There is a great scarcity of small holdings, and it is almost impossible to get allot- ments on favourable terms."
Middlesex. — "There is a difficulty in obtaining small holdings. Small pieces of about 20 acres let readily at high rentals ; much land within ten or fifteen miles west of here, now devoted to corn, if cut up into small holdings, with suitable house and premises, would let readily at enhanced rents."
Lincoln. — " At present," says one correspondent, "owing to the great demand, small holdings com- mand a higher rent than they are really worth,
SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 199
generally 50 to 75 per cent, higher than similar land let to larger tenants." " There is a difficulty," says another, " in obtaining land for small holdings, for which there is a keen demand."
Yorky E. Riding. — " A difficulty is experienced in obtaining suitable land for allotments and small holdings."
Kent. — " The importance of small holdings and their usefulness in keeping villagers on the land are not sufficiently realised in' Kent. Where there are small holders they do well, especially those who have a little fruit land."
Surrey. — " Small holdings at fair rents are badly wanted, but are difficult to get. Had they been obtainable it is thought the decline in population would not have been so great.
Sussex. — " There is a great demand for small grass holdings from ten to forty acres," says one. "There is very great difficulty in obtaining small holdings," asserts another, "for which there is a keen demand."
Hampshire. — " The supply is not equal to the demand, as there is always competition for a good holding."
Nottingham. — "There is a keen competition for small holdings of ten to forty acres, and these command very often a higher rent than is justified by the profit to be got out of them."
Leicester. — "Small holdings are stated to be very difficult to obtain in many villages, and the rents are proportionately very much higher than those of larger farms."
Northampton. — " There is a difficulty in procuring small holdings, for which there is an increasing demand."
200 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
Salop. — " There is a good demand for convenient small holdings with houses and buildings thereon," says one, " and a number of these would let readily to suitable tenants." " Holdings of three or four acres of grass land," says another, " are not sufficiently plentiful, and had such been offered to thrifty labourers the prospect would have counterbalanced the desire for change."
Worcester. — " No doubt more small holdings would be taken up if they were available." But one of the difficulties is " the unwillingness of the large farmers to part with any of their land, so that even if a land- lord is willing to incur the expense, a small holding can practically only be carried out on a change of tenancy."
Somerset. — "Small holdings let readily and at higher rents than large farms."
Dorset. — " While in some districts there is little demand for small holdings in others they are keenly competed for."
Devon. — " Small holdings are in good demand : as a rule the tenants do well"
Cornwall. — " There are many thousand of acres of unenclosed land, much of which might be turned to very useful account, and many labourers if they could have financial assistance on the security of their holdings would be inclined to try what they would do with it.
Hereford. — " Forty years ago there was quite a number of 5- to 5o-acre farms in this district, and many of the cottages had from a half to two acres of orcharding attached. An industrious man with a family was able to keep a few sheep or a cow or two, and grow fruit, &c. ; from this small beginning many of the best and most practical farmers in our district
SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 201
have sprung. In West Herefordshire we have many large estates of 7,000 to 10,000 acres ; the owners, being large game-preservers, preferred to have large farms rather than small holdings. Where these existed they have been bought up by the large owners, and the demand for them growing, they have often let for more than double the rent of adjoining farms."
>' f II. THE SMALL HOLDINGS COMMITTEE.
A Departmental Committee on Small Holdings was appointed by Mr. Ailwyn Fellowes in April, 1905. It originally consisted of the Earl of Onslow (Chairman), Earl Carrington, Mr. Jesse Collings, Sir Ralph Anstruther, Major Craigie, Messrs. C. Bidwell, William Brown, James Long, J. Willis Burd, R. A. Yerburgh, M.P., and Sir Francis Channing, M.P.
Lord Carrington resigned on his appointment as Minister of Agriculture in December, 1905, and appointed Mr. Munro Ferguson, M.P., in his place.
The Committee reported in December, 1906. They notice the comparative failure of the Act of 1892. They declare that " any further development in the direction of the division of the land into small holdings must be undertaken by a Central rather than a Local Authority, and that experiments so conducted should fall on the taxes rather than on the rates ; and, further, that it is essential to any scheme for the establishment of small holdings undertaken either by individuals, associations, or public authorities, that the money required for the equipment of the holding should be advanced at the lowest rate that the State credit will allow."
Of the Agricultural Land of England — excluding
202 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
woodland and mountain and heath land — they find that small holdings of from one acre up to fifty, although two-thirds of the entire number covered only 15 per cent, of the cultivated area, 58 per cent, are in farms of 50 to 300 acres, and 27 per cent, in farms of over 300 acres.
They note (and in part explain) the failure of the Small Holdings Act of 1892, and make a number of minor recommendations designed to improve the machinery of its working.
They note the instances of success in the recent establishment of small holdings, some of which experiments have been described in earlier pages of this book.
They endorse the reality of the demand, even outside those districts where at present small holdings are plentiful. " A strong presumption is raised by the evidence that in many other districts, and in other branches of agricultural work, small farming may be usefully encouraged, and may be placed on a sound, economic, and profitable footing, if methods are adopted of starting the men most likely to work the land well, and of organising and systematising on economic and more business lines details of production and collection and distribution of produce."
They urge that practical steps should be taken by the Government to promote all forms of agricultural co-operation, and especially to encourage the forma- tion of Agricultural Credit Societies with an annual grant from the Board of Agriculture to the Agri- cultural Organisation Society, and the use of the Post Office Savings Bank's deposits for village Co- operative Credit Societies on the approved security of a Central Co-operative Agricultural Credit Association.
SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 203
Their principal recommendations include : —
(1) The formation of special branches of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries to make definite experi- ments in the creation of small holdings ; an annual grant from Parliament for such work ; compulsory powers to be given to the Board for acquiring land ; an annual return to Parliament showing the progress made in the provision of small holdings by the local authority ; the Board to be allowed to equip the holdings with suitable buildings, and to let or sell it at discretion.
(2) The amendment of the Small Holdings Act 1892 ; reducing the purchasers' initial payment from one-fifth to one-eighth ; giving the County Council more elastic powers of recoupment and conditions of tenure.
(3) The granting of State loans to landowners at the lowest rate of interest possible without loss, to enable them to equip and adapt voluntarily provided small holdings throughout the country.
(4) Further facilities for agricultural instruction in rural districts ; the systematic training of would-be small holders ; the promotion by the State of credit banks and the work of agricultural co-operation.
Supplementary reports are in addition presented by Mr. Munro Ferguson, Mr. James Long, and Sir Francis Channing ; and a separate report by Mr. Jesse Collings, who does not sign the general report.
Mr. Munro Ferguson emphasises the necessity for more definite action on some of the lines laid down by the Committee, and suggests some financial modi- fications. He would desire rather to encourage special "intensive" cultivation than small farms engaged in normal farming. He declares that the
204 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
new authorities set up by the Board of Agriculture " should buy land as proposed, but at rates fixed by official valuators, with allowance for severance and other damage, but with no compensation for com- pulsory sale." He urges the acquirement by urban communities of the adjacent land. He objects to the advancement of public loans to private owners, and pleads that " any fresh grants of public money, for which so far as land development is concerned sylvi- culture has just claim, should be devoted mainly to expropriation where private ownership hampers public policy."
Mr. James Long deprecates omissions "which appear to me to be vital in relation to the extension of the Small Holding system by the aid of Govern- ment influence and propaganda and public money."
Sir Francis Channing emphasises the serious facts of rural depopulation — more serious than the Census returns indicate. "In this country the soil has a productive capacity per acre greater than in France or Germany, and vastly greater than in Denmark. The markets into which foreign products come in ever-increasing quantity are at our own doors. The methods which have enabled the foreign and colonial agriculturist to get and keep control of the wholesale trade here are precisely the methods which have been applied in the United Kingdom to other branches of co-operative work more effectively than in any other part of the world. Success in small farming here ought, therefore, to be not more, but less difficult to attain."
He is convinced that the material is there, in town and village, which, given a fair chance, would culti- vate the land in small holdings with efficiency and success. He is very urgent in demanding the work
SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 205
of the State in stimulating, encouraging, and popu- larising co-operative action and methods, and in facilitating agricultural education. In the provision of land he regards State action and State powers as imperatively necessary. " Many farmers are distrust- ful, agents obstructive, landowners ill-informed and timid. It is an age of extreme luxury, when estates are bought by the enormously rich for social prestige, and without thought of the duty that attaches to the owner of land as the nation's trustee. With many the passion for sport overrides everything, and will throw every obstacle in the way of subdivision which endangers the interests of shooting or of hunting. Again, large numbers of landowners are bound hand and foot, and precluded from aiding in the creation of small holdings."
He deplores a grave defect in the report, in the absence of recommendations to extend the powers of local authorities for the acquisition of land. Com- pulsory powers to the County Councils to hire as well as purchase land deserve the attention of Parliament.
He demands caution in the works of the Central Authority, especially if that authority is to be encouraged to purchase large blocks of land with a view to Small Holdings experiments. •
He commends the methods outlined in the Small Landowners (Scotland) Bill introduced into Parlia- ment by the Secretary for Scotland in 1906.
He asks for a distinct Small Holdings Commission or Land Commission for England also.
Mr. Jesse Callings in his independent report utterly repudiates the giving of State loans to private landowners for the equipment of Small Holdings. He pleads strongly for occupying owner-
206 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
ship and for State action on a large scale. " I hold that the policy of Small Holdings has long since passed the experimental stage, and if we are to wait the results of certain ' definite experiments/ it will be a long time before the ' land hunger ' which exists can be satisfied."
III. RURAL HOUSING.
On April 27, 1906, the Housing of the Working Classes Acts Amendment Bill was read a second time, and committed to a Select Committee.
The Committee was constituted of Sir John Dickson-Poynder (Chairman), Major Dunne, Messrs. Mackarness, Morrell, Rowlands, Vivian, T. R. Bethell, Lane-Fox, Abel Smith, Ginnell, and Col. Lockwood.
That Committee, after hearing voluminous evi- dence, reported in December, 1906.
In reviewing existing conditions they note the widespread scarcity of satisfactory rural cottage accommodation, as revealed by present evidence and every previous investigation. " The want of proper housing in rural districts finds its counterpart in the congestion of the towns ; and the evils arising out of overcrowding will never be successfully grappled with until it is fully realised that the root of the problem lies in the diminution or stagnation of population that has for years past characterised rural districts."
Cottages without adjacent land cannot be built in agricultural districts to secure a return to cover inte- rest and sinking fund in addition to the other usual outgoings if let at the prevailing rents paid by farm labourers. But the Committee announces abundant
SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 207
evidence to show that the difficulty of rent would be largely diminished by the addition of land to the cottage.
The outcry against " by-laws " as a means of pre- venting cottage buildings is brushed aside. "The cottage question has been found quite as acute where no building by-laws exist at all."
They note the " insanitary and indeed deplorable condition of much of the existing cottage property," owing to the perfunctory administration of the present Sanitary and Housing Law.
Local fear of increased rates, difficulty of obtaining land for the erection of cottages at a reasonable price, and the great expense attending the exercise of compulsory powers under the existing law are certi- fied as reasons for the failure of the Councils to put into operation Part III. of the Housing Act of 1890.
In offering recommendations the Committee "have to record their conviction that the evil is of a wide- spread and fundamental character, and that if any real improvement is to be effected, it can only be by drastic change in the character and administration of the law." The recommendations are far-reaching and important. They include : —
The transferring of the Administration of the Public Health and Housing of the Working Classes Act from the Rural District Councils to the County Councils, retaining to the Rural District Councils concurrent powers to build under Part III. of the Act of 1890.
The statutory duty of County Councils to appoint a Medical Officer or Medical Officers of Health and a sufficient number of sanitary inspectors for the purpose of carrying the statutes into execu- tion. Officers to devote the whole of their time to
208 TO COLONISE ENGLAND
the duties of their office, to hold these appointments during good behaviour and to be removable only with the consent of the Local Government Board.
Register of survey of all buildings intended for human habitation to be compiled and revised periodically.
Local Government Board to appoint a special Housing and Public Health Department with a staff of travelling sanitary and housing inspectors to super- vise the administration of the Public Health and Housing Laws by the County Councils and their executive officers.
Simplification of the law for acquiring land com- pulsory. "No reform in connection with rural housing can be of any effective use unless further facilities for the acquisition of land are given." No solution will be satisfactory that does not enable a local authority to purchase land compulsorily for any public purpose upon the basis of its rateable value. Compulsory power should be given to the County Councils to acquire land for small holdings — subject to appeal against arbitrary treatment from the landlord to the Board of Agriculture.
The Treasury to lend money for the erection of cottages at the lowest possible rate at which they themselves can borrow, the period of redemption of loan to be lengthened, and grants from the Exchequer for necessitous rural areas to be administered by and allocated to County Councils at the discretion of the Local Government Board.
APPENDIX
AGRICULTURAL POPULATION, 1851
Agricultural labourers 1,077,627
Farm servants ." 364,194
Gardeners 80,946
Farm bailiffs 12,805
Farmers 303,720
Graziers 3,047
AGRICULTURAL POPULATION, 1901
Of the several classes of the agricultural population specially referred to in these reports the numbers returned in Great Britain were, in the last three census years,1 as follows : —
|
Class. |
1881. |
1891. |
1901. |
Increase (+) or Decrease (— ). |
|
|
1881-91. |
1891-1901. |
||||
|
Farmers and Graziers ... |
No. 279,126 |
No. 277,943 |
No. 277,694 |
No. -1,183 |
No. -249 |
|
Farm Bailiffs — Foremen |
22,895 |
21,453 |
27,317 |
-1,442 |
+ 5,864 |
|
Shepherds |
33,125 |
31,686 |
35,022 |
-1,439 |
+3,336 |
|
Agricultural Labourers — Farm Servants |
983,919 |
866,543 |
689,292 |
-H7,376 |
-177,251 |
1 Certain changes in the classification adopted at different censuses must be borne in mind in comparing the returns.
15 209
210
TO COLONISE ENGLAND
EXTENT OF LAND ACQUIRED BY COUNTY COUNCILS FOR SMALL HOLDINGS UNDER THE SMALL HOLDINGS ACT FROM ITS COMMENCEMENT (OCTOBER, 1892) TO DECEM- BER 31, 1902 : —
Acres.
Great Britain ............ 652
Number of County Councils acquiring this land
Roods.
2
Perches.
NUMBER OF AGRICULTURAL HOLDINGS IN EACH OF THE UNDERMENTIONED CLASSES IN GREAT BRITAIN, WITH THE AVERAGE SIZE OF HOLDINGS (JUNE 4, 1906).
|
Countries. |
bove i and t Exceeding 5 Acres. |
bove 5 and t Exceeding 50 Acres. |
bove 50 and t Exceeding joo Acres. |
Above 300. |
Total. |
si 9 |
|
c |
c |
<a |
•t'o |
|||
|
Total for Great |
No. |
No. |
No. |
No. |
No. |
No. |
|
Britain |
109,749 |
232,375 |
150,881 |
17,828 |
510,833 |
63-2 |
|
England |
80,917 |
166,017 |
109,736 |
14,711 |
37L38I |
66-2 |
|
Wales |
10,279 |
3L7I3 |
18,022 |
411 |
60,425 |
46-2 |
|
Scotland ... |
18,553 |
34.645 |
23,123 |
2,706 |
79,027 |
677 |
Thus the class described as " Farm Bailiffs" in 1881 and 1891 was described as " Farm Bailiffs — Foremen " in 1901 ; and the class "Agricultural Labourers — Farm Servants — Cottagers" in 1 88 1 was described as "Agricultural Labourers — Farm Servants" in 1891 and 1901, while in the latter year the class was divided so as to distinguish men in charge of horses and cattle respectively.
APPENDIX
211
PERCENTAGE OF EACH CLASS OF AGRICULTURAL HOLDINGS TO TOTAL NUMBER IN 1906 AND 1895 IN GREAT BRITAIN.
Counties.
Above i and
not Exceeding
5 Acres.
1906.
1895.
Above $ and
not Exceeding
50 Acres.
1906.
1895.
Above 50 and
not Exceeding
300 Acres.
1906.
1895.
Above 300 Acres.
1906.
1895-
Great Britain
21-48
%
45-28
% 2Q-54
28-43
%
England
Wales
Scotland
21-79 17-01
23-48
22-90
25-30
44-70 52-48 43-84
44-87 Si'37 42-59
29-83 29-26
28-13 30-04 28-63
0-68
4-10 074
348
SOME OF GREAT BRITAIN'S IMPORTS OF FOOD FROM ABROAD IN 1906.
£>
Wheat and wheat flour 41,324,776
Maize 11,034,748
Oats 4*713,265
Animals for food 9,944,859
Bacon and hams 15,893,227
Beef 10,925,309
Mutton 7,413,602
Pork 1,414,976
Poultry, rabbits, &c 3,841,785
Butter and cheese 27,946,533
Eggs ... 6,812,436
Vegetables ... ... 3>379»988
Total ... £144,665,704
ttbe $re»bam
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, VTOKING AND LONDON