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THE
AWAKENING OF ENGLAND

BY THE SAME AUTHOR,

A FEW ACRES AND A COTTAGE.

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HOW I WORK MY SMALL FARM.

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THE AWAKENING
OF ENGLAND

F. E. GREEN

THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN
NEW YORK, PARIS, LEIPZIG

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" Let no one approach agricultural reform with a light heart,
or crude theories. The labour will be Herculean. Land Reform,
whether it takes the form of small ownership or small tenancy,
only begins with them ; they are only the root, the branches are
infinite and far-spreading. This problem of ours is the most
difficult, as it is the most vital, that we have tackled in one
hundred years. It must not be approached with the idea of
swift results, or of a golden age. It will not bring back
hundreds of thousands to the land at once, and it is undesirable
that it should do so. It will be a gradual process, and this is all
the better. The task of organising, as well as creating a new
rural population on a large scale might easily spell disaster ; it
would certainly breed vast difficulties. And the small man,
labourer, artisan, or urban worker desiring to return to the soil,
must not look for Arcadia. There are no eclogues to be written
about the agriculture of to-day. The peasant owner must face
hard work, a heavy struggle, much drudgery, some disappoint-
ment. His lot will not be easy ; but it will be no harder than
it is at present ; and in this at least it will be better — that
behind it will be hope, before it a future ; that the man will be
working for his own on his own ; that he will be stimulated
by the responsibilities of complete possession." — Sir Gilbert
Parker, M.P., in The English Review, June 1911.

" We find the inhabitants of this earth divided into two great
masses; the peasant paymasters — spade in hand, original
imperial producers of turnips ; and waiting on them all round,
a crowd of polite persons modestly expectant of turnips, for some
— too often theoretical — service." — John Ruskin.

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CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

Rural England

PAGE

In which the Author walks into the Heart of

| CHAPTER II.

oe

EE The Walk continued ...... 26

J CHAPTER III.

** The Growth of a New England .... 43

o CHAPTER IV.

" But for the land, we should have starved " . 72

CHAPTER V.

Colonising Crown Lands ..... 82

CHAPTER VI.

The Farmer and Labourer as Rural Councillor . 99

vi AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

CHAPTER VII.

Moorland Holdings and the English Squire

PAGE

121

CHAPTER VIII.

Green Pastures and a Co-operative Depot .

136

CHAPTER IX.

The Islands of Intensive Culture

154

CHAPTER X.

John Bull's Other Island

. 167

CHAPTER XI.

The Workshop plus the Land

209

CHAPTER XII.

The Urban Exodus

. 249

CHAPTER XIII.

Cottage Accommodation .

265

CHAPTER XIV.

The Country House and the Independent Resident 289

CONTENTS. vii

CHAPTER XV.

PAGE

Manners in Arcady . . . .301

CHAPTER XVI.

Afforestation . . . . . . .315

CHAPTER XVII.

Capital and Co-operation . . . 334

CHAPTER XVIII.

From the Farm to the Market-place . . 348

CHAPTER XIX.

The Outlook ........ 362

ILLUSTRATIONS.

FACING PAGE

The Daily Market in the High Street, Evesham Frontispiece
Hurdle-making in a Hampshire Wood . . .18

Middle Winterslow 20

Potato-lifting at Sutton Bridge, on Crown land small

holdings, on co-partnership lines . • . . 84

A Typical 40-acre Stock Holding at Moulton, on

Crown lands, managed by the Parish Council . 92

1 . The Old Mud Cabin, replaced by the New Cottage 204

2. Typical Labourer's Cottage, with an acre of ground,

let for one shilling a week (Co. Limerick) . . 204

1. A Farm-tied Cottage at Great Bradley, Suffolk . 274

2. Excellent Small Holders' Cottages . . . 274
A Sussex Labourer of the Old Order . . . 304

IX

Bring me my bow of burning gold !
Bring me my arrows of desire !
Bring me my spear : O clouds, unfold !
Bring me my chariot of fire !

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

William Blakk.

CHAPTER I.

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR WALKS INTO THE
HEART OF RURAL ENGLAND.

Nearly a hundred years ago a typical
Englishman was continually taking long rides
in rural England, recording what he saw and
what he felt. He became the author of that
remarkable work, Rural Bides, and wras loved
and feared throughout the length and breadth
of our country. Some one has said of him that
he had the eyes of a poet ; but, unlike most
poets, he knew the value of a sheep to a shilling.
He rode about the countryside with an eye for
agricultural beauty : that is, beauty expressed
by fields of waving corn which arrest the eye
like a cloth of gold ; by cleanly hoed fields of
cabbages with their great white hearts enclosed
within their gorgeous green-blue leaves ; but
it was over a plant of swedes, or a Mock of

1

2 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

southdowns folded in the valley for the night,
that he would show the greatest enthusiasm.

Everywhere he looked for prosperity in our
fertile laud, and if he did not find it he asked
the reason why. He not only asked the
reason why, but also supplied the answers to
his own questions. And he was not content
with one answer. In terse, vigorous English
prose, which has become a classic in our
literature, he would drive his blows home, and
he was not afraid to repeat them again and
again.

Invariably well mounted, being a good
judge of horseflesh, riding his forty miles a
day, he was our typical John Bull in Revolt.
Brought up on a farm, he knew what good
tillage was, and if the farmer was not putting
his hand to the plough as he should, he said
so in trenchant language. If it was the fault
of Westminster that things were bad in the
country, he said so in still more vigorous prose,
for members of Parliament and parsons always
received the stoutest cudgelling from this
literary rustic who became known through-
out the Anglo - Saxon speaking world as
William Cobbett.

In an emasculated age, when the law of

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 3

libel seems to be held like a, threat over
the head of every scribe, one dare not write
nowadays as Cobbett wrote in 1826. Vet
Cobbett himself was not exempt from per-
secution ; for did he not endure two years in
prison for courageously writing against an act
of barbarous cruelty, in those good old days
when sheep-stealing was a hanging matter,
and snaring a rabbit a matter of transportation
for life ?

It would be interesting, I thought, to cover
the same ground on foot in Hampshire and
Wiltshire that Cobbett rode over on horse-
back in 1826, marking the change in the
conditions of rural life between his day
and ours.

The clamour on the subject of over-popula-
tion was in full cry in Cobbett 's time, that is,
when the population of England and Wales
was only 12,000,226. Now the population of
England and Wales stands at 36,075,269,
according to the census of 1911. Cobbett,
however, contended that rural England was
under -populated, and he rode forth as our
St. George to slay the Dragon of false economic
doctrines so hurtful to the well-being of our
nation.

4 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

To see the country, as Cobbett sagely
observed, and so to be free of the limitations
of the highroad, one must either ride on
horseback or walk. So with Riicksack on my
back I began my walk amid the Hampshire
Highlands ; and in the autumn of 1910 found
myself on the top of Inkpen Beacon, with my
face set towards the valley which leads to
Cobbett 's favourite resting-place, Hurstbourne
Tarrant.

On the wind-swept summit of Inkpen
Beacon stands a gibbet. A gibbet has stood
there, so the shepherds tell me, for over two
hundred years, to mark the hanging of a
husband and his mistress who had killed the
wife by throwing her into a hornet's nest.
Tragedy takes deeper root in the country
than it does in the town. In the sunlit
country purple shadows are visualised more
intently than in the grey-toned city. To-day,
the gibbet standing 1000 feet high, where the
wind is ever moaning through its arms grimly
extended against a cloud -racked sky, is a
sinister symbol of the tragedy daily enacted
in a land bereft of human life.

Here, in days gone by, beacon fires blazed
in commemoration of Imperial triumphs.

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 5

Hither came shepherds and labourers, farmers
and carters, woodmen and horsemen, to jubilate
over England's greatness beyond the seas.
But to-day, though it would not be difficult
to find on the acres and acres given over to
sport rubbish enough to burn, one would be
hard put to it to get the men from the hill-
side and valley to build the beacon. With
its proximity to Portsmouth this highland
countryside has, in days gone by, sent many a
raw farmer's lad to the defence of old England
by sea or land. To-day, though nearly every
humble cottage has its cheap oleograph of a
battle scene hung upon its walls, a khaki-clad
lad is rarely seen stepping with pride the
village street.

From this height the eye can traverse
several counties — Wiltshire, Hampshire, Berk-
shire— and grimly envisage the one prevail-
ing note : the absence of human life. Sheep
bells, the gentle music of lonely places, tinkle
in the distance, and as we descend the hill,
passing at once into Hampshire, we meet
a man in velveteens with a gun over his
shoulder. He is the typical rustic here,
and in his work lies no hope for the
future. Whilst he remains in possession

6 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

the countryside will remain devoid of in-
dustrial life.

I had walked from Basingstoke to Kings-
clere, nine miles along the turnpike road, and
passed in all but seven cottages. From
Kingsclere to Ecchinswell I passed only one
cottage, and this was built in a disused chalk-
pit ; and but one person between Ecchinswell
and Whitmay, and that a child, in a distance
of four miles. The country from Basingstoke
to this point, that is, Highclere Park, is largely
in the hands of two noble lordsi The hedges
are rarely trimmed and many of the fields are
gateless. I pitied the man who had to drive
cattle to market along this turnpike road !
Working alone in large fields, Hodge is an
isolated unit living under the roof of a farm-
tied cottage rented by his employer, the big
farmer, who rules with an unchecked hand of
iron the whole of this countryside.

When you reach Highclere you come into
closer contact with the owners of the land and
their retainers than in the hedgeless land
through which we have just passed. Brand-
new antique mansions are being built as
residences for the new race of squirearchy.
An iron gate of princely splendour flung

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 7

across the road challenges the way leading
to the mansion. Gamekeepers in velveteens
carrying stuffed birds in glass cases pass you
along the road. Grooms and chauffeurs throw
you a supercilious look as they note your
dusty boots and trousers and the Rucksack on
your back. Young women in cottages, who
bear the unquestionable stamp of those who
have served as ladies' maids, answer your
questions with the meticulous languor of
duchesses. Oppressive as all this is, there is
yet an element of Comedy in it. There is, at
any rate, the pageantry of Life. But here at
Coombe, where I next halted, lying in the
cup of the lonely hills at the foot of Inkpen
Beacon, you meet Tragedy only, grim and
unrelieved.

As you walk across a field where the
withered unharvested grasses and the tall
seed -bearing wild parsley and thistles are
shoulder high, rabbits scurry away at almost
every step you take, while pheasants and
partridges fill the air with the whirr of wings.
The first cottage you stumble across is literally
falling down. The thatch has long disappeared,
leaving the rafters and beams as bare as bones
to the open skies. Then, as you enter the

8 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

village, you come to a row of four cottages
under one roof. Only one of these is occupied ;
the other three, with their doors and windows
battered in, have been left for rats to play
havoc in and the wind to whistle through.
From the occupied cottage issues a slatternly
young wife with a sporting dog at her heels.
It is probably the gamekeeper's.

They tell me here that when a cottage
becomes unoccupied in the event of the death
of the breadwinner, or when a family leaves
to seek the higher wages and the larger
freedom of the towns, that no attempt is ever
made by the owner to keep the cottage in
repair. Where pheasants are wanted, the
peasant is not.

The more enlightened of the village school-
masters rarely encourage any of the smarter
boys to remain on the land ; and who can
blame them ? AVages in this part of Hamp-
shire and of Wiltshire adjoining are only 12s.
a week for labourers, and 14s. for shepherds
and stockmen. No promise of higher wages
is made by the large farmers to induce the
more efficient of the boys to remain at work
on the farms. Cottage parents are often
persuaded by the farmers to take away their

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 9

clever boys from school at the age of thirteen
for the sake of the extra shilling or two added
to the meagre family purse. This by law,
unfortunately, they are allowed to do, if the
boys are set to work on the farms. The
smarter boys, however, soon quit rather than
face the life of ill-paid drudgery that lies in
front of them, leaving only the dolts behind.
And so the land is deprived of brain-stuff, is
starved of labour, and denuded of capital ; and
where it does not actually go back in fertility,
it merely marks time. This is the natural
sequence to our slipshod policy of laissez-faire
applied to the land.

On one side of this valley, which runs from
Inkpen Beacon to Hurstbourne Tarrant, are
fields given over to the thistle, the wild carrot,
and the burdock, forming one vast rabbit-
warren. One could see that the plough had
at one time been at work here. I saw fields
like this near Whitmay, where I hid in the
long grass with my camera in order to photo-
graph the countryside around me running to
waste, whilst a company of sportsmen passed
by in the next field.

The irony of the waste fields of Coombe is
brought home to us with a greater force when

10 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

we learn that it was on the slopes of Inkpen
Beacon that Jethro Tull, the great agri-
culturist, used the first drill, and wrote the
book which revolutionised English agricultural
methods !

On the other side of the valley, instead of
fields growing corn, as I have no doubt they
did in Tull's day, we see acres and acres
covered with young fir-trees as covert for
game.

" This is to my taste," wrote Cobbett,
"and here in the north of Hampshire it has
its full gratification. I like to look at the
winding side of the great Down with two or
three numerous flocks of sheep on it, belonging
to different farms ; and to see lower down the
folds in the fields ready to receive them for
the night." I wonder what Cobbett would
have said to the winding side of the great
Down to-day, converted into a rabbit-warren
and a pheasant preserve !

Though he always had an eye for beauty,
it had, as I have said, to be the beauty of
agricultural fecundity. He could see no
beauty where poverty stalked the land. In
1822 wages at Hurstbourne Tarrant, at the
other end of this valley, had dropped from 8s.

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 11

to 6s. a week. Here he saw some reapers in
a field that were "very pretty girls, though as
ragged as colts and as pale as ashes." As pale
as ashes ! No wonder ; with bread at Is. the
gallon loaf and wages at 6s. !

Starvation may not be as apparent as of
yore, it is true, but let us not plume ourselves
with the white feather of Free Trade. Starva-
tion has merely shifted its quarters. The
countryside has been left empty of people, and
starvation, attaching itself as a camp-follower
to the rural exodus, has found its lair in the
foul dens of the cities. An extra 4s. a week,
with higher rents to absorb it, is nothing
much to boast of, surely, after eighty years.
Labourers with an increased standard of
comfort, due largely to elementary education,
are no more willing to bring up their families
on 12s. a week than they were on 8s. The
subjective poverty of the poor, it must be
remembered, is more intense now than it was
in Cobbett's time.

Yet the patience and endurance of the
toil -smitten, underpaid English peasant is
extraordinary. I stayed near Coombe with
an elderly man who kept a small inn. He
had been one of nine in a family supported by

12 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

a father whose wages were 8s. a week. Such
was the dogged endurance of this father in
the battle of life that he made it a rule to
supplement his meagre wages by making one
straw skep every evening after work, and it
was part of the son's work as a lad to walk
many miles to sell these skeps to beekeepers
at Is. each. In the winter months this "un-
skilled labourer" worked in the woods and
made hurdles for sheep, and now, as an aged
man, has become a small farmer.

Coombe lay under a cloud the day I visited
it. I found sad-eyed children carrying flowers
to the churchyard. A brave old Christian
soldier had just been laid to rest in God's Acre,
which he had guarded so long and so well.
This was the vicar, aged eighty-three.

"Ah, I can remember the day," said my
innkeeper friend to me — " it was about Joseph
Arch's time — when my father was only getting
8s. a week. I mind very well the Sunday
morning when the vicar gave out in his
sermon, 'You farmers go to Newbury once
a week and spend in that one day on your
dinner and your drinks more than you give
your carter for the whole week ! ' That
evening the vicar was locked out of his own

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 13

church by his two churchwardens, who were
our biggest farmers, and they never opened
the church for three weeks after ! " Those
were the days, as Colonel Pedder says, " when
the souls of squires and farmers rotted in the
cradle of an easy conscience, and when the
country parson was expected to think more of
the hurdles than of the sheep."

It was Sunday afternoon when I left
Coombe and took the rough valley road to
Hurstbourne Tarrant. There is very little
attempt at farming made along the whole
length of this fertile valley, and during the six
miles' walk I met not a soul save a John and
a Mary, who, with arms still interlocked, seemed
astonished to see me. I passed only one
group of cottages, which formed the hamlet of
Netherton. I noticed that these few cottages
were numbered 146, 148, etc., in large metal
letters, as though they belonged to some
convict colony.

"Why," I asked a cottager, "are your
cottages numbered, for there is no sign of a
street?"

" That's Mr. 's notion," he answered,

with a wry face.

The new landlord apparently could not be

14 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

bored with the pretty old-fashioned names of
"Yew Cottage" or "Rose Cottage." No
doubt, too, every employee would be duly
numbered in the books of the estate.

Though this was the highroad from Hunger-
ford to Andover, innumerable rabbits crossed
and recrossed it in the broad daylight, and the
feeling of isolation grew upon you until you
began to wonder if you were really in over-
populated England. No hedges flank the
road, nor ditches either, for on either side is a
broad stretch of green grass divided by this
white ribbon of a road, and beyond the grass,
tier upon tier, rise oaks and beeches. It
might have been a valley in some distant
uninhabited country, and the tropical flaming
patches of herb willow served but to heighten
the illusion. I lay down upon the grass by
the roadside to rest my back from the Ruck-
sack and to drink in the beauty of the valley.
Save for the flapping of the wings of the
pigeons and the poignant cry of the plover,
not a sound was to be heard. . . . When I
rose, green sward and roadway were speckled
with the white tufts of the bobbing tails of
countless rabbits, and as I walked forward
companies of them kept retreating like an

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 15

army at the sounding of the bugle. The
sight was enough to stir the blood of the most
indifferent of poachers 1

Grass grew avidly in the middle of the
road. It had time to grow, apparently,
between the going of one cart and the coming
of the next. Needless to say, no motors
vexed this highway.

I was not surprised to find, when I reached
Hurstbourne Tarrant, that all available accom-
modation had been taken up by the " shooters
from London."

Hurstbourne Tarrant, it will be remembered,
became the favourite resting-place of William
Cobbett during his famous " Rural Rides."
He preferred to call, indeed he insisted upon
calling, the place by its old-fashioned name of
Uphusband, and it was here that he wrote
many of those articles in that virile English
which have bequeathed to us so vivid a picture
of the rural England of the first part of the
nineteenth century.

The farmhouse of the Rookery where
Cobbett always found a warm welcome from
his farmer friend Blount, is passed as you
cross the bridge to mount the steep hill on the
way to Andover.

16 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Blount was a Roman Catholic, and however
much Cobbett may have attacked ministers of
the Established Church (who, by the way,
attacked him virulently the moment he came
out of prison), he always had a good word to
say for Roman Catholics. As you pass the
Rookery you will notice a low wall with a
flat, broad top to it, dividing the garden from
the road. On this Blount used to place a
plate of pork and bread for any Irish tramp
who asked alms of him. No wonder this
man attracted a character like Cobbett, for in
the churchyard I found a great flat stone as
big as a billiard-table laid over his grave. It
was to be large enough, he gave instructions
in his will, for the village boys to play marbles
on ; and he paid the old women of the village
many sums of money to pick up baskets of
flints to fill up a disused pit so that it could be
converted into a playground for boys.

I noticed a crop growing at Rookery farm
that would have astonished and delighted
Cobbett and reminded him strongly of his
visit to America. This was a crop of maize
grown to give a wealth of green fodder to
cows when the pastures are bare. If this crop
were more generally grown in the south of

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 17

England, we should be able to keep a larger
number of live stock on our farms.

Leaving Hurst bourne Tarrant for Andover,
one passes through Doles Wood. Here I
lingered awhile, for it was here that I was
once again impressed with the resourcefulness,
the thrift, the endurance of the English
peasant, especially the peasant who is a crafts-
man of the woods. I heard the sound of a
billhook at work in the woods, and this to me
is always an alluring sound. I found the
woodman, a man of from fifty to sixty years
of age, making hurdles.

" Be you the gen'leman as come round
with the squire t'other day ? " he asked me.

" Who is the squire ? " I asked.

"Mr. Dewar," he answered.

" Mr. George Dewar?" I asked with interest.

" He be the son of the squire," the wood-
man answered promptly. " He give me one
of 'is books."

At last I had happened on an estate owned
by one of the old race of squires. The wood-
man became communicative, and after inquir-
ing with that courtesy so characteristic of
the country poor, if I cared to listen to his
" clatter," proceeded to talk to me of his life.

18 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

In the leisurely way of those who live in
intimate contact with the oak, whose lives are
never fretted by hurry, he told me how two
years ago his wife had proposed that he should
buy a cottage near by that was about to be
sold. He scouted the proposition. Where
was the money coming from ? She then
pointedly asked him how much he had. He
declared his worldly wealth at £20, the accretion
of little gifts and of " overplusses " from tree-
felling and bark - stripping. Thereupon his
wife exclaimed that they could do it. She
herself owned to having £40, and the cottage
could be had for £60. " I knew," remarked
the woodman, " she 'ad put by summat, but I
'ad no idea how much. Then there was £4
for the writings," he added, thoroughly enjoy-
ing the situation of each saving in secret.

The secret teapot bank of the wife amazed
the husband as much as it did the squire and
myself. I asked him how it was done, for his
earnings did not amount to more than 3s. a
day at most. He informed me that his wife
had saved most when their sons were lads,
putting by the money paid in for their board
and lodging.

Through Andover once more we come

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WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 19

upon a stretch of billowy downs. Here, a sea
of grass under wide skies lies open to the eyes.
Each long throw of the Downs is crested by
a sinuous wood, flung over the escarpment like
a curl of sea - foam left high and dry and
crystallised through the aeons into a coil of mas-
sive foliage. This is a country apparently
given over to the flock-master with the 1000-
acre sheep-run. The Downs are bleak — so
bleak that an old man described Over Wallop
to me as a place where " you can see the wind."
The subsoil of chalk lies under a few inches of
poor soil. Surely, one would say, there could
have been no change amid these immutable
Downs since the days of Cobbett. And yet
here amidst them, a new village has been
recently created, simply by giving the labourer
access to the land.

You will not see this change if you simply
motor along the dusty highroad between An-
dover and Salisbury. You will have to turn
off at Hazlitt's Hut, ascend the ridge, and dive
down into Winterslow. One wonders whether
Hazlitt ever met Cobbett riding over the
Downs. That they did meet we know, for
Hazlitt mentions that he found him "a very
pleasant man, easy of access, affable, clear-

20 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

headed, gentle and mild in his manner, deliberate
and unruffled in his speech, though some of
his expressions were not very qualified."

Here, at Winterslow, in 1893, Major
Poore bought a poor bleak hillside farm of
200 acres. He made the one and only bid for
it at £7 : 10s. an acre. This was accepted, and
Major Poore then formed what he called a Land
Court (he is a great student of Anglo-Saxon
customs), in which copyholds were knitted
together by a thin thread of communal interest.

The land was then divided amongst the
members of the Land Court, the smallest sum
per acre paid being £8, for a sixteen - acre
holding, the highest £30, for a single acre with
a road frontage. The purchase money was
repayable in fifteen years. Every one of the
original purchasers has now cleared his debt to
the Land Court, and out of the large surplus
of £1400 acquired over the deal, every small
holder has built a house with money borrowed
at 3 per cent interest. Practically a new village
has arisen at Middle Winterslow, created by
these small holders.

It must not, however, be supposed for one
instant that the men have acquired their land
and built their houses entirely out of the profits

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- c

.1

-3
"3

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 21

of their holdings. Most of them are still wood-
men spending the winter months at work in the
woods, where each buys a few acres of under-
wood and cunningly makes of these as many
hurdles, wattles, sheep-cribs, and bundles of
faggots to sell as his skill can contrive. The
holdings, though, give them work throughout
the summer, work independent of employers,
and a roof over their heads free of the whim of
an employer-landlord ; and on this rather poor
and very exposed land I found one holder who
gained his entire living from his eight acres.
There is but little intensive culture practised,
but the working result, as a whole, has been a
success, not as measured by cash returns, but
in the more intimate sense of achieving a
greater measure of freedom. There is no other
village community in either Hampshire or
Wiltshire which lives so secure of a roof, and
of a livelihood to be won, independent of the
large farmer.

A good deal more might have been gained
from the land, so it appeared to me, if the
men had been equipped with more capital and
practised co-operation. But in spite of their un-
economic individualism, I found some interest-
ing examples of how men work the land on

22 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

this hillside. There was one man, as I have
said, who gained his entire living from his
eight acres, .though at the same time it should
be mentioned his wife took in washing. He
was a good cultivator, and grew potatoes,
sainfoin, rye, mangolds, and cabbages, and
kept a pony and two cows, besides rearing
calves. The largest small holder was he who
cultivated sixteen acres, or rather, perhaps, who
attempted to cultivate them, for one cannot
expect an elderly gentleman of sixty-six years
of age, who refuses to employ any labour save
at harvest-time, to cultivate properly sixteen
acres himself — though he has been for thirty
years a teetotaller, a non-shaver, and a strict
Baptist ! He keeps six cows and three
heifers, growing for them hay, sainfoin, oats,
mangolds, and rye. He sells some of the milk
and makes the rest into butter. He is an
interesting man, for besides the qualities I
have already enumerated he refuses to sell his
milk according to any standard of measure.
He lays down his own law, and by that you
have to abide. The customer who should ask
for half a pint of milk would go empty away,
unless he chose to accept this small farmer's
very liberal pennyworth.

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 23

Those who cultivated their land best were
those who had an acre of garden and worked
chiefly at other trades. The one-acre man, for
instance, who paid perhaps £30 for his acre,
and borrowed money to build his cottage, at
3 per cent from the surplus sum acquired by
the Land Court, would buy about five acres of
wood from the large woods near by, owned by
Mr. Singer of sewing - machine fame. He
would buy the right to cut this underwood at
a public auction held in the early autumn ;
that is, he would buy a " lot " at about oOs. an
acre and make of this hurdles, wattles, sheep-
cribs, etc. Another man with seven and a half
acres, in his way a small capitalist, possessing
a waggon and a couple of horses, will act as
carman to one or two of the woodmen, carry-
ing as many as 10,000 faggots in a season,
mostly to country bakers. Some of these
men are very skilful woodmen, and their sheep-
cribs, hurdles, and rakes find their way as far
afield as Sussex and Essex.

The handicraft of the men in the woods is
supplemented by the handicraft of the women
at the spinning-wheel, for here wool, sheared
from the sheep of the Downs, is spun by the
cottage women, and vveaved into beautiful cloth

24 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

on a large hand-loom. We can even imagine
that some day, at Winterslow, the shepherds
will be clothed in the wool sheared from the
backs of the flocks that they own as well as tend.

As I found elsewhere, it is the village
schoolmaster here who gives to the village
community that mental stimulus which wins
for it a self-reliance, which we so seldom find
in those village communities living under the
shadow of a great house with its attendant
parasitic labour. Many of these craftsmen of
the land are teetotallers, and at Winterslow, it
seemed to me, the publicans were hard put to
it for their living.

So happy has been this experiment of
repeopling an empty hillside where a farm
was going derelict, that a Conservative land-
owner, Mr. Clough, has, with admirable enter-
prise, bought an estate of 1000 acres in this
neighbourhood, and already the green valley
beyond West Winterslow is dotted with the
red-brick houses of small holders.

These holdings are chiefly for men who
want from eighty to ninety acres of land.
Unlike the holdings of the Land Court, they
are rented, the rent being £l an acre, plus
the equivalent to 5 per cent sunk on the

WALK IN RURAL ENGLAND. 25

equipment of the holding. They are of too
recent a creation to allow me to dwell on the
economic results, except to say that they have
had the healthy effect of raising the labourer's
wages round about from 2s. to 2s. 6d. a day.
It is the small holder, not the large farmer,
who invariably pays the higher wage.

It was only here at Winterslow, along the
whole range of the Hampshire and Wiltshire
Downs, that I obtained any evidence of the
rise of a new peasantry.

Over the high ridge one can take a field-
path walk all the way across the Downs to
Clarendon Park. At the foot of the hill, lying
meekly at the gates of this princely park, is
the decaying village of Pitton, which forms
a woeful contrast to the prosperous, breezy,
repeopled uplands of Winterslow. Here
pheasants are at a premium, and men and
women who wish to live by tilling the soil
are held at a discount. To grow corn on the
confines of these preserves must be uphill
work, and the cottages and farm buildings
lying in this sleepy hollow indicate the entire
lack of agricultural enterprise. Here you
tread on a pheasant at nearly every step you
take.

CHAPTER II.

THE WALK CONTINUED.

In our search for any intensive cultivation in
a countryside given over entirely to extensive
cultivation and barren sport, we have wan-
dered off the track of Cobbett when we enter
Clarendon Park. So we will now retrace his
bridle way along the fertile vale of the Avon
and mark the difference there, where villages
with roofs of thatch nestle close together amid
the fat meadows watered by the silvery Avon.
To start where Cobbett started when he
went out to slay " that monster Malthus," you
must cut across that treeless, hedgeless range
of " real Bown country," as he called it, which
makes the finest coursing ground in all
England, taking Ludgershall and Everley on
your way, and make for the little hamlet of
Wootton Rivers, where rises the Wiltshire

26

the walk continued. 27

Avon. From this point we will follow its
course to Salisbury, at any rate as far as
Amesbury, avoiding the provincial Wen and
the " Accursed Hill."

If you are from " the great Wen," and
wish to follow Cobbett along the Avon, you
would do well to get out at Savernake station.
From there you can either follow the tow-
path of the Kennet and Avon Canal — a straight,
silver -green ribbon of water now rendered
almost useless from a dog-in-the-manger
policy of a great railway company — or you
can pursue the longer and more beautiful
way through the forest of Savernake.

Save in the interest of good forestry, one
would have nothing touched in this noblest
unspoilt forest in England. I entered it as
the light of day was waning, and whilst
watching a herd of deer breaking out from
the rustling bracken, which here overtops the
antlers of the stags, a man suddenly appeared
before me. A stag which had glided almost
imperceptibly into the aisle of the overarching
beeches threw up its head, peered intently at
the advancing figure, and then at a bound
gave the signal for a general stampede of the
whole herd down the shadow-encompassed glen.

28 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

The advancing figure was that of a post-
man with the mail-bag slung over his shoulder
and a cudgel in his hand.

There, amid the lengthening shadows of
the beech grove, where the Norman barons at
one time hunted the wild boar, it was difficult
to swing one's mind round to a postman in
uniform prosaically delivering evening letters.
One can without difficulty imagine a postman
walking across Salisbury Plain, but a postman
in the heart of Savernake Forest seems some-
thing born of unreality.

He gave a spur to my interest as we
walked together by telling me that he was
making his evening delivery, and that during
the whole day he never stepped outside the
fence which encloses the forest. He walked
twenty-two miles a day, and the marvel to
me was that there were sufficient houses
inside the forest fence to warrant the appoint-
ment of a forest postman. There was, of
course, the house of the Marquis, the agent,
the steward, and a woodman's cottage here
and there, but these were scattered about.

At night, in the breeding season, he has to
give a wide berth to stags, which are then
dangerous. On a pitch-dark night the breath

THE WALK CONTINUED. 29

of a stag on your face must be an uncanny
sensation.

Eventually we made the post-office, which
was, I found, at Leigh Hill, one of the
quaintest and smallest hamlets I have ever
seen. It is on the verge of the forest, entirely
enclosed in a palisade, erected, no doubt, to
prevent the deer from leaping into the beauti-
fully kept garden of the steward, or those of
the five thatched cottages which comprise the
hamlet. In these five cottages live the post-
man, a retired soldier, a widow, a gardener,
and one other workman. The red and the
fallow deer may be seen any day promenading
Leigh Hill's solitary village street, if one may
so term the beechen thoroughfare outside the
palings. Here, we have a hamlet without a
church and without a school, and but for the
well-groomed appearance of the steward's
lawn, one could easily imagine Leigh Hill to
be a frontier settlement in the Wild West,
with palings erected to protect sleeping
pioneers against a sudden night attack.

Dame Gossip must be hard put to it here
as the day wears on, for not a soul is visible
in the afternoon. If you lift the latch of a
gate which lets you inside the palisade, pass

30 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

along a garden path, and knock at a cottage
door to ask your way, a forest woman, shy in
poise and with the look of a startled hind, may
grudgingly articulate a monosyllabic answer.
I would warn any one taking this road for the
first time of those cottage sirens who intimate
that you should keep " straight on," for that
is nearly always the way of perdition. All
ways are straight on to the rustic mind grown
accustomed to one road.

Yet it would not be an unpleasant thing
to become benighted in Savernake Forest in
the summer. It is indeed possible for that
landless wayfarer, the tramp, to possess
Savernake Forest in a more intimate way
than does the Marquis who owns it on paper.
Think of the regal splendour which envelops
a man who is clothed in garments that the
wind can whistle through, as he lies asleep in
a five-mile corridor of magnificent overarching
beeches !

As you emerge from the forest aisle of
noble beeches carpeted with purple shadows,
you catch your first glimpse of the valley of
the Avon. It is a vision of beauty which
leaps into view as the eyes traverse miles of
rolling, open country, in which downs, with

THE WALK CONTINUED. 31

bold escarpments like the prows of battleships,
ride at anchor under a mauve-tinted mackerel
sky.

To the sportsman, the sharp dip of Martin-
sell Hill will make the immediate appeal, for
it was down its break-neck slope that Assheton
Smith once rode behind his hounds at full
gallop. But that was in the days when the
English sportsman took some risk when he
went out to kill. I made a detour round the
base of Martinsell into Oare, where a well-
known squire had parcelled out some of his
land into small holdings — an oasis amidst
downland, and let for a shilling or two an
acre. Now, we learn in 1911 that this squire,
Mr. F. E. N. Rogers, has been appointed one
of the new Small Holdings Commissioners.
At Oare I found some extensive farm build-
ings given over entirely to the training of
greyhounds for coursing. The conversion of
a farm into a training school for dogs, bred
solely for sport, was indicative that unless
small holders help to raise the standard of
cultivation, increased national prosperity could
not be looked for on the large farms. Here
again I found the village schoolmaster the
most active worker for small holdings.

32 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Night bad set in when I sought for a
lodging at the hamlet of Wootton Rivers, a
hamlet where evidently not only cottages, but
men also, decay.

Consumption is rife in the village ; the
cottages dark and stuffy ; the water-supply
inadequate, and what there is of it is bad. It
is one of life's little ironies that extensive
estates from here straight down the vale are
owned by colleges and hospitals (instituted
presumably to educate the people in hygiene
and sanitary science), and yet these very
hospitals and colleges have strenuously opposed
recent demands made by the people of Pewsey
for land to till !

The standard of intelligence among the
labourers here struck me as being lower than
in most other rural districts. Either the more
highly organised die of phthisis, or set their
faces townwards, leaving the dullards to accept
12s. a week wages. The population in 1821
was 400 ; in 1911 it was only 325, in spite of
the population of England and Wales having
multiplied threefold.

It was close by here, on Milton Hill, that
Cobbett on horseback pulled up and beckoned
to a boy to lead his horse down the narrow

THE WALK CONTINUED. 33

path, so that he could quietly drink in the
beauty of the scene and begin to take stock
of the products of the land he saw in front
of him.

"Great as my expectations had been, at
this first sight of the vale of the Avon,
they were more than fulfilled. I delight
in this sort of country ; and I had frequently
seen the vale of the Itchen, that of the Bourn,
and also that of the Teste, in Hampshire ; I
had seen the vales amongst the South Downs,
but I never before saw anything to please me
like this valley of the Avon. I sat upon my
horse and looked over Milston and Easton
and Pevvsey for half an hour, though I had
not breakfasted."

Thus Cobbett the poet. Now for Cobbett

the economist. " It seems to me one way,

and that not, perhaps, the least striking, of

exposing the folly, the stupidity, the inanity,

the presumption, the insufferable emptiness

and insolence and barbarity of those numerous

wretches who have now the audacity to

propose to transport the people of England,

upon the principle of the monster Malthus,

who has furnished the unfeeling oligarchs and

their toadeaters, with the pretence that man

3

34 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

has a natural propensity to breed faster than
food can be raised for the increase ; it seemed
to me the one way of exposing this mixture of
madness and of blasphemy was to take a
look, now that the harvest is in, at the pro-
duce, the mouths, the condition, and the
changes that have taken place in a spot
like this which God has favoured with every
good that He has had to bestow upon man."

Thereupon our John Bull in Revolt begins
counting the corn-ricks, the flocks of sheep, the
herds of cattle. In one yard he counts
" fifteen banging wheat - ricks, beautiful to
behold." On another farm at Chisenbury
Priory he counts twenty-seven ricks, and looks
sadly round " to see the people who were to
eat all this food." But he could not find
then, any more than I can to-day, sufficient
population in the valley to consume the year's
harvest. Now, as then, the labourers in the
valley of the Avon produce a great deal more
than they consume.

He estimated the population that had in
former years built and worshipped in the thirty
churches in this valley of the Avon comparing it
with the population existing in 1826, which, he
declared, could all be huddled into the porches !

THE WALK CONTINUED. 35

"These parishes contain 9116 persons
who raise food and raiment sufficient for
45,580 persons, fed and lodged according to
my scale, and sufficient for 236,740 persons
according to the scale on which the unhappy
labourers of this fine valley are now fed and
lodged."

The workers indeed have been raising
nearly twenty times as much food and clothes
as they consume. They have been doing this
for many, many years, covering many genera-
tions, and they are doing it to-day in the same
manner, except that the farmer of to-day is
aided by labour-saving machinery exceeding
any known in the days of Cobbett.

I wondered whether I should catch any echo
in my travels of Cobbett and his age, and so
at Wootton Rivers I asked a villager, who
seemed to be a genius at his craft, if he had
ever heard of Cobbett. He said he remem-
bered his father mentioning him. This man
was a clockmaker who fitted his clocks with
musical chimes, the mechanism of which he
made entirely himself.1 He had bought a

1 Since writing these words I have learnt with pleasure that
my friend has presented the parish with a clock (for the church
tower), made out of bits of metal brought to him by the villagers
from time to time.

36 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

number of old grandfather clocks and made
new ones, setting them striking hymn-tunes
and popular airs. In his little village shop he
talked to me of his struggles in life.

His father, as an agricultural labourer, got
only 8s. a week, and he had six children to keep.
When my friend was seven years of age, his
father's employer agreed to take him on to the
farm as carter's boy for the magnificent sum
of £3 a year and the promise made to the
father that he would apprentice the intelligent
lad to a trade. The £3 per annum was never
paid, nor the apprenticeship ever entered into,
for in three years' time the farmer died of drink
without having paid one penny for the labour
of the boy.

The boy stayed on at the farm under a new
master. Then the station-master of Savernake
offered to find him a job on the railway. He
was now a lad of eighteen, earning 10s. a
week and keeping his father, who was a widower,
in the old farm cottage. On speaking to the
farmer about " bettering " himself, the farmer
gruffly told him that he could go and take
the old man with him too, which, of course,
meant the loss of a home, for the cottage was
farm-tied.

THE WALK CONTINUED. 37

He went to Maidenhead, and there began
to mend watches belonging to his mates, and
becoming proficient at his trade, and possessing
a musical ear, lie returned to his old village
as a maker of musical clocks. He had
entirely educated himself whilst acquiring a
skilled handicraft, and by exercising thrift
has saved a little money. He never, however,
desires other children of the poor to endure
the same hardships as he has fought through.
It struck me that if one man, a mechanical
genius, had managed to live through so many
hardships, how many that we wot not of have
gone under in the struggle for existence —
left to rot in cottages impregnated with
disease, where children have not sufficient food
on which to develop into strong men and into
mothers of an Imperial race.

At Pewsey, the largest town in this vale of
the Avon (with the exception of Salisbury), I
heard of numerous interviews being made
with the County Council land-agents, but the
opposition of the large farmers stifled any
inclination that may have been felt on the
part of the owners to let part of their large
farms as small holdings. The vale here was
murmurous with discontent, and one could

38 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

instance many cases of applicants who had
become tired of applying, and were now footing
it with those who make up that army of
workers who have their faces set steadily for
the towns.

The next village entered after Pewsey is
that of Upavon. This is the place that the
Wiltshire schoolgirl mentioned when her
teacher spoke about Elijah going up to heaven.
"Ah, yes," said the child, "I knows where
Upeaven is. Granfer took a ram there once."
It cannot have changed much since Cobbett's
time, though our population has grown three
times as great. In 1821 it numbered 464
souls ; to-day it has only 430. It is of the
type of the picturesque, semi-urban backwater,
where the retired colonel likes to dwell, and
possibly keep a nag on half-pay stabled at the
old coaching inn with its ghostly empty
chambers. Modernity once tried to conquer
the place by putting up an aggressive shop-
front which clamoured for notice as it pointedly
obtruded itself into the main street. But soon
shutters had to cover its brazen effrontery.
It seemed wrong and quite disturbing to find a
motor car being washed by a whistling 'Enery
Straker on the banks of the silvery Avon.

THE WALK CONTINUED. 39

Innovation here is but the innovation of the
non-producing class.

It is at the next village, Enford, that the
County Council can boast of its one and only
triumph in obtaining land for the people in the
vale of the Avon, and this had to be a com-
pulsory purchase from a vicar. Though it is
only 148 acres of glebe land, still it is a
beginning, an earnest, let us hope, of what is
to follow. It may mean the awakening of a
village which seems now to be sunk into a state
of torpor. But for one old man, and he a road-
mender, no one was visible in the village street
of thatched cottages, which must, I imagine,
be the same cottages as Cobbett looked upon
when he passed through this village in 1826.

" I call to mind," said an old man to
me in the village inn, " when barrels and
barrels of beer were tapped in this house every
Saturday night. Now, what do they tap ? "
He looked around the dark old room, empty
of life save for himself and myself, and then
down pathetically at his empty pot A
beerometer would after all perhaps not be
amiss as a bucolic census indicator.

We now come within the sphere of the
War Office, with the broad arrow visible on

40 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

the door of nearly every thatched cottage,
where, with the efficiency that one generally
associates with the State, cottages are put
into decent repair and the rent is no longer
the uneconomic rent of the dilapidated farm-
tied cottage, but is on a sound economic foot-
ing. The immediate result has been the
raising of wages and the maintenance of a
higher standard of life. Not that the
cottagers have any more money to spend, but
they have, at any rate, sound roofs and walls
to keep out bad weather.

As we approach Bulford with its military
camp we might expect a change from
extensive to intensive culture, for here, surely,
close at hand, is a splendid market for small
holders situated in this fertile vale. Yet what
do we find ?

At Figheldean, which is about three or four
miles from Bulford, a number of men duly
made applications for small holdings. They
were men thoroughly approved of both by
the County Council and by the Inspector
sent down by the Board of Agriculture, who
reported favourably on the proposed site,
and yet, in spite of all this, the scheme has
somehow or other been blocked at Whitehall.

THE WALK CONTINUED. 41

I found some lads there at work on the
excellent school gardens, in the cultivation
of which the village schoolmaster takes an
immense pride. I saw a rod of land on which
cauliflowers, beetroots, carrots and other
vegetables were being grown, from which
plot the boy had sold 7s. worth of vegetables,
besides supplying his mother's table with
quite a quantity. That is to say, he was
making his patch of land produce at least
£56 to the acre. On the same field, or the
field adjoining, I saw a crop of thistles, among
which a mangold plant could only be seen
here and there. And this belonged to a farm
of over 2000 acres rented by the War Office
at 2s. 6d. an acre !

Now surely it would be better for the
landowner, for the labourer individually, and
for the nation collectively, to have a large
field like this cut up and cultivated to produce
more national wealth, and save lads from
migrating to the towns, as well as land from
becoming derelict.

A direct result of a backward land policy is,
so the schoolmaster informed me, that the
more intelligent boys, seeing no remunerative
outlet for work, are steadily leaving the land

42 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

to swell the ranks of the denizens of the
cities.

It was at Amesbury, a few miles farther
down the vale, that Cobbett wrote up his notes
after he had changed his wet clothes at
the inn on 29th August 1826. Once a
quiet village, Amesbury has now sprawled
into a joyless, motor-haunted town, and I soon
left this close petrol-perfumed atmosphere to
take to the open thyme-scented Plain.

As I stepped out on to the open Plain, so
generous of space and so niggard of homes, an
airship, the wonder of the new world, hovered
over the mystery of the old — Stonehenge.
Though man has equipped himself with wings,
Hodge, isolated, with bent back and toil-
smitten hand, still works with prehistoric
implements on land that is not his, at a wage
of 12s. a week. Yet it is on his labour that
the world of Science and the whole fabric of
our Civilisation ultimately rests.

CHAPTER III.

THE GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND.

In the foregoing pages we have looked at a
picture of England where the land is regarded
by the owners as a happy hunting-ground for
the wealthy, where thousands of acres are
merely marking time, if not actually going
back in cultivation, and where villages here and
there are settling down into senile decay. In
such places only the old are left The young
and able-bodied have drifted to the towns.

It is contended by some economists that
the migration from the country to the town
is the natural tendency in all European
countries. "Migration is humorously de-
scribed," says Thomas Hardy in Tess, "as the
tendency of the rural population towards large
towns, being really the tendency of water
to flow uphill when forced by machinery."

43

44 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

The tendency in Germany of a migration from
the country to the newly created urban
district is due partly to the introduction of
new agricultural machinery, such as we have
seen operating in England and America for
some time, reducing the number of farm
hands ; but it is also due to the much more
potent fact that in Germany there are many
congested districts of peasants. We have
congested districts in Ireland, and by good
government we are trying to mitigate the
evil. But where in England can one put one's
ringer on a single congested rural area ?

" I think the coming farmer," says Edison,
" will be a man on a seat beside a push-button
and some levers." In this way, I suppose, shall
we get our large farms tilled and the crops
harvested by the labour of one man ; and yet
it is curious (is it not ?) that in England the
greatest results per acre are obtained to-day by
hand labour, and particularly in those districts
where the hands work close to one another.

Fortunately for the well - being of our
nation, there are some landowners who take
their profession as landowners seriously, who
regard themselves not merely as rent-receivers
but as stewards to estates entrusted to them

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 45

by the Crown. The land to them is a factory,
and not a sporting preserve. It is a national
trust, as much as the land of Denmark is to
the owners in that country, and it is a pleasure
to turn from a district where the rabbit-warren
and the pheasant preserve seem to be the
abiding interest, to a district where the
appearance of a single rabbit within an area
of 10,000 acres causes much perturbation of
mind to the tenant.

Monks have generally been shrewd agri-
culturists, and when they built their Abbey
and made their high walled-in garden in the
vale of Evesham, they showed surely that an
intimate knowledge of Genesis did not deter
them from finding England's Garden of Eden.
Evesham is one of the earliest sites in
England, and owing to the presence of
certain salts in the soil it is found to be the
best asparagus ground in this country. Plums
too seem to grow there as they grow nowhere
else, particularly the Pershore plum.

Probably the monks were the only gardeners
in Evesham when the Abbey was built. A
fruit-grower told me that his father re-
membered the time when only four carts
left the town weekly, laden with produce.

46 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

To-day there are fourteen railways that lay
their glittering steel roads at the gates of this
garden of Paradise, and during the whole
summer months two markets are held daily
in the town.

So rapid has been the conversion of farm
land into market gardens that out of the rural
area of 10,000 acres, 7000 are taken up as
small holdings of under 50 acres each.
Indeed, so far afield has the extension of
small holdings gone that the County Council
has been obliged to knock at the gilded gates
of the Duke of Orleans at Wood Norton,
demanding admission to his farm land for
English tillers of the soil.

It was only at the Enquiry, held by the
Commissioner of the Board of Agriculture last
autumn as to the desirability of enforcing a
compulsory order against the Duke, that one
heard any sympathy in this district for the
preservation of the pheasant in place of the
preservation of the English peasant, and that
was voiced by the Commissioner ! In two
parishes in the Evesham district, namely at
Badsey with its 1161 acres, and at Aldington
with its 644 acres, every yard of ground is
taken up in holdings of less than 50 acres.

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 47

Farms in Littleton are now being acquired by
the County Council for small holdings, and the
extremely busy agent for the County Council
informed me, that, instead of there being a
cessation in the demand for land, there is an
increased demand every time a fresh farm
is acquired.

At the 1911 census the population of
Evesham chronicled 8341 persons, and as
Evesham is almost entirely inhabited by
gardeners and gardeners' labourers, we might
surely say that the rural district of Evesham
supports more than one person (man, woman,
or child) on every acre. And yet I notice
that the last report by the Worcester County
Council (1911) states that there are still 372
approved applicants waiting for 2000 acres.

How came it that in manufacturing England,
that amidst a nation of shopkeepers, we have
actually one country town entirely existing
and growing in prosperity on the labour of
gardeners ?

Besides the nature of the soil and the
forwardness of the district, there are two
economic factors in relation to land tenure
which are a great incentive to high culti-
vation. Evesham is fortunate enough to

48 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

have had in the past a race of intelligent land-
owners who realised that they obtained more
rent from the small cultivators than from the
large farmers, and that to let their land to the
best advantage they must know, not only the
character of their tenants, their capacity for
work, but also on what terms a man without
capital (save his garden tools) can make a
start in order to win his own independence.

We will take, for instance, Mr. Raymond
Webb as the typical Evesham land-agent or
steward. Acting on behalf of a family of
Evesham landowners, he will let an acre strip
to a man who is a hard-working gardener's
or farm labourer. Mr. Webb will probably
know the man's Christian name when he
applies for his plot as well as his working
capabilities. The applicant may, at this time,
be working for an employer, and if he applies
for two acres, Mr. Webb will probably tell
him that he cannot manage to keep two acres
clean while working regularly for a master.
" When I see that you are doing your acre
well I'll let you have another bit somewhere
else," he will say to the man ; " and what is
more, to give you a chance, I shan't charge
you more than 30s. an acre for the first year

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 49

or two, and then you will have to pay me £2,
or £2 : 10s. an acre afterwards." The man
will probably begin to plant asparagus or
fruit - trees, or even both, and when he has
his second acre under good cultivation he
will give up working for his master, apply
for a third acre, and work entirely for
himself. He may in course of time be
working three or four different isolated strips
on the same farm cut up for small holdings.

The other economic factor which gives the
cultivator an incentive to do his very best, is
one which operated at Evesham long before
market gardeners' Acts were passed to protect
tenants against predatory landowners. This
is the "Evesham custom" which from time
immemorial has made the new ingoing tenant
pay the outgoing tenant (not the landlord) for
agricultural improvements. For instance, the
labourer who has planted out his asparagus
bed or planted his fruit-trees in his one, or
two, or three-acre plots, knows that should he
wish to quit he will not be robbed of the
fruits of his labour, or the little capital that
he has sunk in his holding. And here, even
handicapped by working on segregated hold-
ings, the small man manages to produce a

1

50 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

great deal more than the large farmer with
his self-contained holding.

In time, of course, when the orchards
grow to maturity, the holding becomes quite
a valuable property to the tenant, although
the rent may still be but £2 an acre.

A tenant, who had the courtesy to show
me over his various holdings, took me to one
of them three miles from a station — an orchard
of apples and plums and black-currant bushes.
He planted these ten years ago. A few years
ago he was offered £30 an acre for tenant
rights. In the autumn of 1910, when I visited
him, he was offered £100 an acre for his stand-
ing crops, and £100 for the tenant lights. He
refused this offer. His rent still stands at £2
an acre.

Equipped with a better education than
most market gardeners, and with staying
powers greater than the usual middle - class
man, he has been exceptionally successful, for,
beginning with only four and a half acres, he
now crops thirty-four. He takes his market
garden as a very serious business, and motor-
cycles from one of his scattered strips of land
to another, superintending the work and re-
turning to dictate letters to a typist. He is

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 51

fortunate enough to be more or less indifferent
to markets and the little vagaries of salesmen,
for he has now worked up a large retail
business (from grower to customer), sending
away his produce in boxes containing 6 lb.
of fruit and upwards.

He has farmed in Canada, but prefers to
colonise England, which is sadly in want of
men with grit. He is the exception to the
middle-class man who goes "back to the land."
The young man who comes from a com-
fortable home and is able to secure a little
capital is to be seen in Evesham for a season
or two. As his white face becomes bronzed
by the sun, and his white buckskin knicker-
bockers a little tarnished from riding on the
manure cart, he graduates, in due course, from
the state of pupilage, and pays the ingoings in
order to take possession of some gardener's
holding. Perhaps he pays too much for the
ingoings ; or perhaps on hot summer days
the only breath of air is to be obtained on the
golf course, or the lure of the seductive river
fringed with willows is too much for him. So
while the young master plays with the sculls,
or the driving iron, the labourer sleeps in the
asparagus alley. At any rate, in a year or

52 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

two's time he will be heard to complain that
market gardening does not pay, and Evesham
will see him no more.

Mr. Raymond Webb will tell you that the
man who stays to make a success of market
gardening is the man who has laboured from
early days when that stern godmother —
Necessity — sent him out to win sustenance
from the soil. An estate plan will show you
how some names quickly disappear from the
innumerable one and two-acre strips, whilst
others will be repeated yearly. Now and
again a woman's name significantly appears.

But even the labourer has sometimes to suc-
cumb. To be suddenly plunged into a highly
competitive business after spending many years
as somebody's servant, throws many back again
into the ranks of hired labourers. The failure
of the young middle-class man is not at all
astonishing, as it seems to be an article of faith
with middle-class parents to send the duffer
of the family to work on the land, where not
only hard plodding is required, but also, in the
stress of modern competition, a keen business
aptitude.

Any one who is under the strange delusion
that the rural worker is congenitively slow

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 53

and lazy should see him at work when there is
anything to be gained beyond a subsistence
wage by industry and quickness. He should
visit Evesham at the time when asparagus is
being cut, and this takes place in June and
continues till Midsummer Day. Then you will
see men at work from as early as two and
three o'clock in the morning, ceasing only when
darkness and sheer fatigue drive them to bed.
Cases have been cited, and they are not un-
common, I am told, when men have crazily
worked themselves into the lunatic asylum.

For the cultivation of asparagus the land
must be thoroughly cleaned before planting
the beds, and so the ground is generally
occupied with a cleaning crop for the first
year, such as beans, followed by winter
cabbage. Generally the land is dug with the
two-pronged fork so common in this neigh-
bourhood, and if the ground is clean enough
to plant the asparagus the first year, rows of
lettuces or peas are grown between it in the
beds. It is not till the third year that aspara-
gus is ready to cut, and then, if kept properly
cleaned, it will last a dozen years. The crop
is worth about £40 an acre.

Another strenuous time is when plum-

54 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

picking begins in August. There are the
feverish days too of strawberry, currant, plum,
and apple picking, days when the whole avail-
able female force, big and little, of the entire
neighbourhood are earning money for their
husbands, fathers, and brothers.

The usual wages of women, when not paid
by piece-work, is Is. 6d. a day. Men are
engaged for the plum-picking as a rule, and
market gardeners like to get the same skilled
hands down from Birmingham, Worcester, or
elsewhere every year. One grower told me
he had two old men coming regularly every
summer for twenty years with their kit, just
as though they were sailors signing on to
voyage to Evesham year after year.

Last year, so loaded were the apple-trees,
when my own orchard in Surrey was almost
bare of fruit, that certain orchards close by the
water's edge recalled to me vividly a cider
district in Somersetshire "where wind -fallen
apples float whole sunny afternoons in lazy
pools above mill-dams." These were of the
early Victoria variety, which loaded the boughs
to breaking-point — a favourite cooking apple at
Evesham. Besides the yellow of the Pershore
plum, the rich purple of Bells and the scarlet

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 55

of Victorias attract the eye in the outdoor
daily market, held in the middle of the old
town with its gabled houses and its ancient
abbey tower. Then, when you see the greens
and yellows of apples and melons, the reds
and purples of grapes and plums and tomatoes
exposed for sale in the wicker " pots " with
packing paper, blue and white, fluttering in
the wind, the feeling is borne in upon you
that you are no longer in England but in
some provincial town of southern France.

Market gardening on your own, though,
develops in time a species of business aptitude
which may be useful in the individual struggle
for existence, but it is a trait that certainly
does not make for charm in human fellowship.
The Aberdonian Scot would be hard pressed to
get a living here. The desire to get the better
of one's neighbour in a deal is unfortunately
rife amongst the market gardeners of Evesham,
and from it evolves the type of large market
gardener who in time leaves off producing, as
he finds it more profitable to buy and sell.

Some growers never attempt to sell their
produce at the town market, but send it all
away to Birmingham, Bristol, or Cardiff, direct
to the greengrocers of those towns. 1 heard

56 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

of one market gardener who sent all his
produce to the south of Wales, and went to
the trouble and expense of collecting his
money every week from his customers at
Cardiff. "You make sure of the cash then,
and you quickly settle all complaints," he said.
Mr. Fels has made a gallant attempt to
establish a co-operative market at Pershore,
and there is a co-operative society in Evesham ;
but unfortunately the ingrained individualism
of the Evesham grower, righting his own
battles for so many years, tends to make him
drive his own bargains for the best of his fruit,
and to send the inferior to the co-operative
society. As salesmen grow richer, and pro-
ducers grow poorer, competitive marketing
will inevitably destroy itself. The great
captains of industry are refusing to immolate
themselves for the sake of a worn-out economic
theory. They are rinding salvation in com-
bination. The institution of impersonal, co-
operative marketing will not only be a good
thing financially, but it will also be a good
thing morally for producers, since it is bound
to lead to the standardising of goods, and in
grading them honestly we shall avoid the
mean shifts we are often put to to make the

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 57

"pot" of fruit present a fair face, though
at the bottom we know it to bear quite
another complexion.

There are those at Evesham, as of course
there are everywhere else, who complain of
foreign competition, but it seemed to me that
it would be well for them to put their own
house into order before waiting for the
assumed millennium born of a single fiscal
measure. This is indeed what the peasants
did in France and Germany when they began
to feel the pressure of the competition of the
cultivated prairies of the new worlds.

It is not often that one comes across a
grower who is an ardent Free Trader, yet at
Evesham I had an interesting talk with one
who presented the importation of foreign fruit
in a new light to me. He said, "Our
customers are greengrocers, and how long do
you suppose a greengrocer would be able to
keep his shutters down if it were not for the
trade in foreign fruit, such as bananas, lemons,
oranges, nuts ? We English growers can
only keep our shop open for about six months.
By being able to keep their trade flourishing
for the whole year, greengrocers have educated
the public to the advantages of a fruit diet,

58 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

and since the large importation of foreign
fruit there has been ever so much more fruit
grown in Evesham."

I attribute the greater intelligence of the
worker on the land around Evesham, compared
to those working as isolated units on farms,
not only to working for themselves, but also to
living socially within a township. The mental
stimulus gained by living close to one another
is of great benefit to those who spend laborious
days in the open.

It is said that there are more bicycles in
Evesham in proportion to its population than
in any other town in England. The system
of renting land in separate strips, often at
some distance one from the other, explains
the necessity for making up on the revolving
wheel the loss of time occasioned by not having
a compact holding around the homestead. It
is fortunate, perhaps, for progressive civilisation,
that each little strip has not been owned by
the cultivator. We might then have had a
congested district similar to that in Donegal
or County Galway.

The growers (or their landlords) have saved
themselves one expense, which is always a
source of trouble, and leads sometimes to neigh-

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 59

hourly feuds — the expense of erecting fences or
hedges. Nothing but a well-trodden footpath
divides one holding from another, and on most
of the holdings all that is seen of a building is
a small shed, called a hovel, where tools and
stores are kept under lock and key. Some-
times a pigsty is to be seen, for without the
pig the Evesham grower would be often at a
loss for a complete fertiliser containing humus.

To obtain stable manure from Birmingham
means paying from 8s. to 10s. per ton by the
time the manure is carted on to the ground.
The gardeners here are great believers in the
efficiency of lime and soot — lime applied in
the winter, especially around the plum-trees,
and soot in the spring in the strawberry gardens.
The other favourite manures are fish guano,
bone, and nitrate. The grower who keeps a
horse and cart will probably keep them behind
his house in the town.

Before I visited Evesham I held the
belief that the small holder should always have
his cottage on his holding, and I planned my
own holding of twenty acres with a cottage
upon it. But then I was planning for a mixed
small holding where stock is kept. Now that
I have been to Evesham and observed the

60 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

rather high standard of intelligence there, I
certainly incline to the township occupied by
agriculturists with a wide belt of cultivable
land extending around it.

Particularly do I favour this plan for the
women, who often have to lead such lonely
lives in the countrv. An Evesham agent told
me that he himself was once a believer in the
small holder having a cottage built on his land,
and accordingly he had half a dozen detached
cottages built on one, and two, and three-acre
lots. He then found it extremely difficult to
let them, and to-day they are not occupied
by those who rent the holdings, but by men
who work elsewhere as labourers !

The objection to them chiefly comes from
the wives of the small holders.

One can easily understand the feminine
revolt ; for when a woman is placed on a
holding, there are, apart from the large horned
stock, invariably the ducks, and the chickens,
and the pigs to be fed by her, besides a man
tramping in and out of the house all day long
in muddy boots.

It must not be supposed that because farm
lands have been let on easy terms to gardeners
that rent in the form of unearned increment

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 61

does not exist in Evesham, for it certainly
does. I found, for instance, one well-matured
orchard rented at £14 an acre, and from £3 to
£5 an acre is quite common in the immediate
neighbourhood of the town. (During the fall
of last year there arose a new lord of the soil
who caused much tribulation amongst those
who tilled the land.) And yet when a man has
saved a fair amount of capital after a life of
toil on the land (generally combined with a
judicious amount of dealing), he shows no dis-
position, so the estate agents tell me, to purchase
the soil that he has tilled for so many years. He
knows that at any time he can make good in
hard cash the trees that he has planted and
tended for so many years. If he has but a small
surplus put by, he uses that to extend his
operations farther afield, becoming, as a rule,
an employer of labour when he begins to
cultivate more than three acres.

If he has amassed more, he will buy a build-
ing site in the town for erecting cottage
property. An estate agent told me an amusing
story of how a tenant, whom he knew at one
time as a farm labourer, came into the office
one day and asked the agent to sell him a
building site.

62 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

" Any choice of a road ? " asked the agent.

"Well, yes; I should like a bit in

Road."

" Just one house for yourself to live in ? "

"How much would that be?" asked the
man, as though he were buying a Dutch
cheese.

Thereupon the agent figured out a house
that would cost, roughly speaking, about £300.
" But you had better build two semi-detached
cottages," added the agent, " which you could
put up for £500."

" No," said the small market gardener, " I've
only got enough to pay for one, and here it is
in this yere bag." And to the amazement of
the agent he threw a bag of gold upon the
counter.

"But we can't do business in that way,"
exclaimed the agent, smiling at the simplicity
of this son of the soil, who imagined that
buying land was as simple a thing as buying a
cow. " You'll have to see a lawyer, and I
can arrange a mortgage in the meantime, if
you like, for the extra £200."

But he would have no " truck " with lawyers,
nor anything to do with mortgages. They
always brought trouble, he said. He did not

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 63

owe anybody a farthing, and he never meant
to. "Why should I see a lawyer"?'1 he asked.
" I've known you since you were a boy, and
that's enough for me."

But as the estate agent insisted upon
refusing the money until a conveyance had
been drawn up by a lawyer, the poor man
walked away with his burden of gold, sighing
profoundly, as many an educated man has done,
over the mysteries of land purchase.

The personal factor in the neighbourhood
of Evesham entering into the contract between
tenant and owner has certainly made for the
social welfare of the neighbourhood. An
experienced agent, who, on driving round the
owner's estates, has a keen enough agricultural
eye to observe which holdings are well tilled
and which are indifferently done, is of some con-
siderable value to the landowner ; but he would
not fulfil his function as adviser to the tenant
as well as to the owner, if his duty stopped
at merely giving notice to an undesirable
tenant to quit. A good agent will inquire
at a neighbour's holding. " What's the matter
with Charlie ? " he will ask (for he knows them
all by name). " His land is getting dirty."

" Oh, he's got the hump," may be the

64 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

reply ; or perhaps it is, " You can't work the
land and stop in the public-house as well " ; or,
" He likes the water better than the land this
hot weather."

Then the agent will make a point of seeing
" Charlie," and if he finds in him a disheartened
man and quite unfit for the life of the market
gardener, he will advise him to give up the
holding before he loses more money, and offer
to find a new tenant for it who will pay him
the "ingoings."

Whilst there are agents who act in this
human way, there are others who are merely
rent -takers; and on the whole those who
rent land from the County Councils get
better, though stricter, terms than those who
rent under private landlords. The desire to
make as much as possible out of an estate is,
I suppose, inherent in human nature, and I
could point to certain farms round Evesham
where the owner is charging the large farmer
on one side of the hedge 7s. 6d. an acre, while
on the other side he is charging 50s. an acre
to the small holder.

Now the County Council demands only the
rent needed to cover the charges on the
capital borrowed and the cost of manage-

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 6.5

ment.1 At Littleton, for instance, where the
County Council has recently taken over a farm,
the rent to a number of small holders works out
at 32s. an acre. The private owner close by
was charging, I found, £2 to £2 : 10s. an acre
for similar land to small holders, in spite of the
fact that on the other side of the railway line
the farm is bringing in the private owner only
18s. an acre as agricultural land.

Though intensive cultivation is the rule in
the vale of Evesham, French gardening pure
and simple is not much in evidence ; and yet
French gardening, as it is called, was practised
in the vale of Evesham years before it became
the latest cultural mode imported from Paris.
The glass rims were used long before the
cloches which have now superseded them.

There are three fairly large French gardens
at Evesham, and one of these, the most
interesting, at Bengeworth, imported 250 tons
of manure in one season for about two acres
of land. On this rich soil five crops were
taken — radishes, lettuces, cauliflowers, onions,
and melons. In the midst of an orchard of

1 Mr. Walter Runciman, the new President of the Board of
Agriculture, stated in the House of Commons (March 1912) tli.it
County Councils need not charge small holders with the Sinking
Fund.

5

66 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

apple and plum trees, with their boughs of
dark foliage pendent with green and red fruit,
the cloches and frames make a pretty picture
sparkling in the sun. Another French garden,
which is said, I believe, to be the largest in
England, seems to be run on the lines of a
highly organised factory under glass, for on
my asking permission to enter, the French
maraicher promptly demanded a fee of 2s. 6d.
as gate-money. This was an " Evesham custom "
of which I did not approve, so I bent my
steps towards gardens less commercially
organised.

It is usual with one landowner to break
up a dirty field on a farm with a steam
cultivator before he lets it to the small holders,
charging them with the extra cost, which
amounts to about 10s. an acre. This seems
to me an excellent plan, for it is the arduous
labours of the first year, often spent in grap-
pling with a field smothered with couch-grass
and tearing out every tentacle of it, which
sometimes breaks the heart of the tenant.
The farmer generally possesses agricultural
machinery to enable him to clean his fields
well, but the small market gardener has only his
fork to rely upon, with his muscles in the

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 67

place of horse or steam power. It pays a land-
lord to do something extra to induce the market
gardener to cultivate the rough fields of his
estates ; and not only does the Evesham
gardener clean and improve the land, but, what
is more gratifying to the owner, he pays a
higher rent.

Reasonably enough one may ask, Why do
not the large farmers convert their stock
and corn farms into market gardens ? This
question I put to a successful market gardener
who himself engaged labour. It is a question
of capital, he answered. Very few farmers
have more than a sufficient working capital
to carry them over from Michaelmas to
Michaelmas ; and to embark on intensive
culture means not only buying some thousands
of fruit-trees and plants, and many hundreds of
tons of manure, but — and this they would feel
much more — also the finding of ready money
every Saturday night for the extra hands
employed.

Yet I did find one or two farmers who had
embarked upon market gardening in the
neighbourhood, though the market gardening
was carried on in addition to the stock and corn
raising. That the poor labourer should be in

68 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

one way better equipped for intensive culture
than the large farmer has a significant bearing on
the whole question of tillage. It is the personal
factor which counts for so much in farming on
a small scale. On a very large farm it sinks
to vanishing point, and with it efficient
tillage.

It is extraordinary how some of these
gardeners make a living out of a few acres
of land. Take a man, for instance, who bears
a well-known Evesham name — Agg. A few
years ago Mr. George Agg used to assist
other market gardeners in their labours ; now
he obtains a living from the four acres of fruit
garden that he rents. Another man, working
at Littleton on the land which the small
holders are purchasing through the County
Council, told me that he made a " good living "
from seven and a half acres — that is, from the
three acres he owned and the four and a half
acres he rented elsewhere. It is almost as
difficult to get a man to own to making a
" good living " from tilling the soil as it is
to get a lawyer to own to making a good
livelihood from conveying land from one owner
to another. Yet he said it simply, without
any desire to boast, for he knew that I myself

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 69

was a tiller of the soil and we were just two
men with the hoe exchanging confidences.

In case I should have left the impression
upon the reader that the Evesham wives very
rarely help their husbands on the land, let me
here state that this man was being assisted by
his young wife, who made a very charming
picture at work under a sun-bonnet. It is,
however, a very different thing to come out and
help the husband on some particular job, taking
the day out like a picnic, to being worried
by a succession of minor disturbances and
interruptions on a small holding. The man
and his wife were picking beans, and close by
on a four-acre holding two women were also
picking beans, whilst the male relative was
away marketing produce.

The married couple were dropping their
beans into a " pot," that is, a basket that
holds 40 lb. One penny per pot will have
to be paid for the cartage to the station three
miles away, and then the auctioneer's fee,
after railway carriage is paid, amounts to
about another penny per pot. In spite of all
this, as I have said, the man declared that he
made a "good living." Another man with
four and a half acres, with fruit-trees quite

70 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

young (they were only about four or five
years old), told me he made a living from the
vegetables cultivated between the trees. He
did not say that it was a good living ; and
probably it was not.

These holdings were, I think, the only ones
around Evesham where the County Council
have sold land to the small holders ; and on the
occasion of my visit only one house had been
built, though the land was bought some years
before.

The impression that Evesham must be some
small continental town, in spite of it being in
English Worcestershire, is enhanced at eventide
when the riverside Public Gardens are lighted,
and golden arrows strike across the water,
while from the shadows may be heard ripples
of subdued laughter from idly drifting boats.
From the Public Gardens float the strains of
music and flash the vision of white skirts as
young couples waltz the whole evening long.
There is an absence of the dude, the demi-mon-
daine, and the glitter of wealth. These people
are just young gardeners and their sweet-
hearts dancing — spare, sinewy figures dancing
in everyday dress. The only appearance of
great wealth, of idleness cushioned in luxury,

GROWTH OF A NEW ENGLAND. 71

is when a foreign duke or a deposed monarch
makes a fugitive visit through the town, passing
swiftly to the princely, gilded gates of Wood
Norton. But this serves only to heighten the
illusion that we are in some continental town.

CHAPTER IV.

BUT FOR THE LAND, WE SHOULD HAVE
STARVED."

" In one of those corners of our land canopied
by the fumes of blind industry, there was on
that day a lull in darkness. ... In the cottage
forges there would be but one worker, or two
at most ; in the shop forges four, or even five,
little glowing heaps ; four or five of the grimy
lung-bellows : and never a moment without a
fiery hook about to take its place on the
glowing chains, never a second when the thin
smoke of the forges, and of those lives consum-
ing slowly in front of them, did not escape
from out of the dingy, whitewashed spaces
away to freedom.

" From these smoke-begrimed forges pale-
faced women came out into the sunlight.
They formed into a procession of women on

72

"BUT FOR THE LAND" 73

strike for better conditions, but never once
did they lose the look of essential order, as if
indeed they knew that, being the worst-served
creatures in the Christian world, they were the
chief guardians of the inherent dignity of man.
... If they themselves were but the poorest,
humblest, least-learned women in the land, for
all that, it seemed to me that in those tattered,
wistful figures, so still, so trustful, I was
looking on such beauty that I had never
beheld. All the elaborated glory of things
made, the perfected dreams of aesthetes, the
embroideries of romance seemed as nothing
beside this sudden vision of the wild goodness
native in human hearts."

So wrote Mr. John Galsworthy on 6th
March 1911 in reference to the women
chainmakers at Cradley Heath on strike for
a higher standard of life at this sweated
industry.

So Mr. John Galsworthy might have
written to-day, and impressed upon our
consciousness an even more pathetic picture
of the conditions at Belbroughton, Fairfield,
and Catshill, lying only a few miles away from
Cradley Heath, but for one thing which has
saved the people from a life of degradation.

74 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

That one thing was the land with the oppor-
tunity given to till it.

Here, nearly all the cottagers, both men
and women, had been nailers — that is, engaged
in the making of hobnails — for generations
past, until the introduction of machinery in
the manufacture of hobnails threw a great
number out of work, and the little forges
stood idle. Things then became pretty bad.
Dire poverty drove many to poach and steal.
" Twenty years ago/' said the schoolmaster of
Catshill to me, as we were walking down a
little street swarming with laughing children,
clean and carefully dressed, " you would not
have dared to venture here as a stranger
without police protection." Men would then
tramp into Birmingham in search of work,
but in vain. The poor rates went up by
leaps and bounds, and in winter the squire
of the parish opened a soup-kitchen. Then
suddenly some one thought of the idea of
placing starving labourers on land starving for
want of labour. " But for the land" solemnly
said one of the men now working in the fields,
"ive should have starved."

The Worcestershire County Council were
the first to apply the powers provided by

"BUT FOR THE LAND" 75

the Small Holdings Act of 1892, and in the
same year they agreed to buy at Catshill a
farm of 147 acres at £33 an acre.

To show how necessary it is to break away
from official tradition in dealing with un-
educated people, the hand-bills and circulars
consisting of over 2000 notices, issued in an
official hole-and-corner way, received but one
application in answer. The apparent apathy
was probably due to the fact that the small
holders were asked to buy the land. However,
when a meeting was held at Catshill, and the
Act was explained to those present, the
Council satisfied themselves that a number
of people were unable to find the necessary
deposit of 20 per cent, and so agreed to take
a certain number of men as tenants as well as
purchasers.

Obviously a scheme for providing land for
about twenty or thirty men, and these the
better off of the parishioners, did not go very
far to solve the problem of keeping starving
men off the rates. Well-meaning bureaucrats
so often fail to see the irony of offering to sell
land to a penniless man.

Then in 1895 the Parish Council of Bel-
broughton awoke to the fact that they could

76 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

acquire land under the Allotments Act of
1890. They took 18 acres, which they let
to thirty tenants. They made an immediate
profit of £4 : 10s., and starting with this small
working balance they were able, during the
next eight years, to hire about 180 acres of
land at a total rental of £268, which were
relet to seventy -five tenants at a rent of
£359 : 12 : 4.

At the present moment, I believe, the
Parish Council let no less than 500 acres, and
many men who were once on the rates are now
contributing to the rates as prosperous small
holders. I am told that the improvement in
the morale of the workers here has been
astonishing ; and surely it makes for national
welfare to have little children sitting among
the corn-sheaves of their father's allotment,
basking in the sunlight, with their baby eyes
reflecting the blue of heaven, rather than
letting them hang in an improvised cradle
suspended from a nail in the fitful glare
of a forge, whilst the mother was labouring,
half-stripped to the waist, at the anvil.

Nail -making is still carried on in this
district, but only in a half-hearted way, for
most of the nailers are anxious to quit the

"BUT FOR THE LAND" 77

forge for the breezy upland farms. Yet there
are still women who make nails as a side
industry, relying on the land for the basic
needs of life. I saw one at work, a sturdy,
swarthy, broad -hipped, short woman, the
mother of a large young family. She left
her forge at midday to work on her husband's
allotment.

The extremely interesting part of the re-
colonisation of the farmlands of Belbroughton
is the entire absence of philanthropic aid.
There has been no bolstering up of land
schemes formulated by townsmen for country-
men ; no M.P. exploiting the movement to
nurse a constituency ; no Lady Bountiful to
sap democratic initiative. The Belbroughton
Parish Council, which have gone from success
to success in leasing farms, are composed
almost entirely of working men. In its
jurisdiction over the land it reminds me
forcibly of Ireland with its credit banks,
where every one knows the affairs of his
neighbour. No man, for instance, is allowed
to grow a patch of grass in the midst of arable
land which has to be kept clean for the
growth of corn, vegetables, and fruit.

The same men who at one time went into

78 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Birmingham with nothing but their labour to
sell, and who had even that rejected, are now
welcomed in the market-place of that same
town, for have they not created something of
which the town is in daily need ? These
small holdings are from twelve to fourteen
miles distant from Birmingham, and it is
common for one adult member to cart in the
produce, market it, and return loaded with
stable manure purchased for Is. a ton. Yet,
time and labour is wasted here, as at Evesham,
in the lack of co-operative marketing. Some
day these men will realise that they need not
work so hard if they would but work together.
The holdings are of all sizes, from half
an acre to twenty acres. The land is not
particularly good ; indeed it is rather poor.
Strawberries seem to bring in the greatest
returns in cash. Most of the small holders
have to devote a portion of their land to
growing hay, oats, or vetches for the upkeep
of their horse or pony, and if co-operation
were properly organised here much of this
land could be more profitably used by growing
vegetables and fruit. The plough and the
horse hoe are used more than at Evesham, for
in the general absence of fruit-trees there is

"BUT FOR THE LAND" 79

more freedom for the use of larger agricultural
implements.

The creation of these holdings, besides invins:
a livelihood to the tillers of the soil, has enriched
the manufacturers of Birmingham and the
tradesmen in the district. I heard of a wheel-
wright retiring with a small fortune acquired by
making carts and lorries for the small holders.
That is one great advantage to us nationally in
getting two blades of grass to grow where only
one grew before ; the extra blade brings greater
wealth to the tailor, the bootmaker, and the
grocer.

It struck me that at Cats hill, near by,
the small owners had rather overburdened
their holdings with building operations. We
know that the erection of country palaces by
the merchant prince had the evil effect of
rousing a spirit of misplaced ambition in the old-
fashioned squire to rebuild his manor-house,
and so become heavily involved in mortgages.
Let us hope that the small holder will not be
ambitious to overburden himself with spurious
riches.

In the same county, at Castle Moreton,
there is another interesting settlement of Parish
Council small holdings where the Parish Council

80 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

have 220 acres let out to seventy tenants. These
are quite a different type of holding to those
we have reviewed, for their success depends
largely upon their common rights for grazing.
For generations the people here have been,
more or less, small holders in a squatter-like
way. Here too, it is asserted, there was
much poaching and fowl-stealing, owing to the
poverty of the district prior to the Parish
Council taking up land in 1894. The popula-
tion had dropped from 950 in 1881 to 720 in
1891. In 1901 it rose to 795, a rise due to
the acquisition of allotments.

With grazing ground at hand, stock-
keeping, rather than market-keeping, is the
kind of farming pursued here. Welsh colts
bought at the Hereford fairs are turned out on
to the common, cider is made from the apple-
orchards, and poultry reared for the Malvern
markets. Most of the tenants follow some
other occupation, and go out sheep-shearing,
hedging, faggoting, pig -killing, and carting.
Lady Henry Somerset is the chief landowner
here, and she leases the land to the Parish
Council at from 12s. to 28s. an acre. If the rent
is not paid on audit day, the fine of Is. is exacted ;
and so strict are they in insisting upon the

« BUT FOR THE LAND.'' 81

rent being paid that there is a rule, which,
however, has never yet been enforced, that the
land will be forfeited if there are fourteen days'
arrears. There is after all no better land-
agent in England than the Parish Council !

CHAPTER V.

COLONISING CROWN LANDS.

The most remarkable visual effect produced
by the recolonisation of England is obtained
on the fenlands bordering the Wash. Though
at Evesham gardeners have covered a larger
area of ground, the effect produced is not the
same, because nearly all the gardeners live in
one township, and the aggregation of their
fruit gardens might appear to the visitor who
views them from the Abbey tower as one vast
orchard undivided by fences.

Taking the high road from Lynn to Sutton
Bridge you see, as you approach Walpole and
Wingland, a number of white houses roofed
with slates flashing in the sunlight, erected on
a stretch of flat country which a century ago
was unreclaimed marshland. Most of the
houses are built on the seaward side of King

82

COLONISING CROWN LANDS 83

John's Bank. This land consists of 957 acres
let by the Crown to the Lincolnshire and Nor-
folk Small Holdings Association. Fortunately
for the small holders, the Crown advanced the
capital to build these very substantial houses
and farm buildings.

Indeed, it is at Walpole that you come
immediately upon the best-equipped pair of
small holdings to be found in the whole of
England. This pair of semi - detached six-
roomed houses with their farm buildings cost,
I am told, £1000, and each stands in its forty
or fifty acres of land. The houses may not be
much better than the other houses built on
these Crown lands ; it is on the farm buildings
where much of the extra money has been spent.
No iron with its hideous corrugations, no
tarred felt half-torn and flapping in the breeze,
no dishevelled pigsties are to be seen here.
All buildings are of solid brick with sound
heavy timber supporting roofs heavily tiled,
and every floor is concreted. Cart-sheds,
bullock-sheds, stables, cow-stalls, loose-box,
granary, are all under one roof, and the yard
is substantially fenced.

Most of these holdings extending over this
flat fenland to the Wash are of forty or fifty

84 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

acres. Potato-picking and pea-picking were
in full swing on the occasion of my visit, and
it was delightful to find that a farm of 200
acres which before 1907 gave a livelihood to
three men only, produces now sustenance for
thirty people. Farming, before the small
holders came here, consisted of turning bullocks
out to graze in May, locking the gate, and
returning after several months to take them
away to be sold, or finished off in stockyards.

Now the fields are alive with women and
girls in blue, white, and pink sun-bonnets pick-
ing peas, and men and women lifting, sorting,
and sacking potatoes. Extra hands have, of
course, to be hired during the small holders'
harvest of strawberries, peas, and potatoes ; and
farm labourers from Norfolk, attracted by the
higher wages that small holders invariably give,
are housed and fed at the building opened by
Lord Carrington, which looks to all the world
like a mission-room.

It would be no exaggeration to say that
upon this dreary, homeless expanse new villages
have sprung up since 1907. On this fertile
land, previously rendered almost sterile by bad
farming, the plough was set to work, and from
the breast of the plough has arisen not only

COLONISING CROWN LANDS. 85

new and bountiful crops, but through its
fecund contact with Mother Earth a new race
of country children.

Fecundity is regarded here as a parochial
and national asset, just as it is in our distant
colonies ; indeed it is encouraged in a way that
would have shocked poor Malthus and given
much joy to the great stout heart of Cobbett.

At Moulton, near by, a young married man
was pointed out to me as one who had applied
to the Parish Council for one of the houses
erected by the Crown on the five-acre Parish
Council holdings. He was a very suitable
tenant, but there was one thing against him —
he was not married. However, on his giving
the Council his assurance that he would find a
wife within a given time — which he did long
before the time expired — he was granted a
holding.

One small holder of forty-six acres at Wing-
land had a family of no less than ten daughters,
and a very charming picture they made, woman-
like, cleaning up the rubbish on the strawberry
field, while the father ploughed between the
rows. Any one who knew this desolate, home-
less district before 1907 coming suddenly upon
an animated scene like this, must have felt as

86 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

though he were witnessing a pastoral play
especially staged for his benefit with girls in
their sun-bonnets forming the Arcadian chorus.

Market gardening here is carried on con-
currently with stock-keeping, and corn crops
are grown for the sake of the straw as much
as for the grain, in order to get bedding for
the horses, pigs, and cows, and finally to make
manure- heaps. The fine cart-horses that
some of these holders possessed and bred
showed how individual attention to heavy live-
stock pays even on a few acres.

Marketing, unfortunately, is carried on in
the usual individualistic way, excepting
in the case of one group of small holders
farming 170 acres, who have formed a co-
partnership society. Most of the potatoes
appear to go up to London, whilst other
vegetables and fruit find their way to the
Midlands and northern markets. A great
number of salesmen are tried by the small
holders, each one pathetically believed in for
a short time, in the way that many men rush
off to a quack when they are ill.

A great deal of the fruit goes to jam-
makers ; not only fruit, but, I regret to say.
carrots as well, which can easily be discovered

COLONISING CROWN LANDS. 87

by inspecting the labels at Sutton Bridge
station.

Socially and economically the creation of
the small holdings in this district has been a
distinct boon to the village of Sutton Bridge,
so the tradesmen inform you, and they ought
to be good judges. At the inn, however, which
caters for those who travel cushioned on
wheels and toil not, little liking is shown for
small holdings, as the following conversation
between myself and the landlady will illustrate.

" You are not one of those small holding
people, are you ? " she asked me, after I had
ordered my supper and bed.

" Well, yes, I am," I answered hesitatingly.
"Why?"

" Because I don't like them."

" Oh, I am sorry. Why not ? "

" They are a mean lot. There was a party
of M.P.'s that motored from Spalding this
summer. They had been motoring for hours,
inspecting small holdings. A special message
was sent to the stationmaster to look after
them, and some of them, I am told, were very
rich. They came in here for tea, and the
hired chauffeurs asked me whether they were
to have any tea. So I asked the gentleman

88 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

who gave the orders, and he said ■ No ' quite
sharply. Another young gentleman, feeling,
I suppose, rather ashamed at drinking tea
while the chauffeurs had to go without, said
to me, ' Give them a drink ; I'll pay.'

Curiously enough I had a similar complaint
made to me by a Wingland small holder, and
I only tell the anecdote as an illustration of
the insufferable patronage which small holders
all over the country have to put up with from
those claiming to be interested on their behalf.
I myself have had to suffer bores gladly.

The Wingland small holder hospitably
asked me in to lunch, and on my refusing told
me that a party of M.P.'s had recently motored
to his holding with their five motor cars.
" They came in here," he said, "just as though
they were on a bean-feast, and fell to eating
my strawberries in a way that would have
made them lock me up if 1 entered one of
their gardens. Some of them asked me a lot
of questions, whilst the others went on picking
and eating the strawberries. At last, when
they had taken a good feed, one of them came
up to my daughter and said, ' How much are
these strawberries a pound, for we ought to
pay you for what we have eaten ? ' My

COLONISING CROWN LANDS. 89

daughter answered, k Father don't sell them
like that ; he sends them away to salesmen.'
Thereupon, my daughter tells me, he brought
out a handful of gold and silver and coppers,
and presented her with — what do you think ? —
tuppence ! tuppence f "

At Moulton one finds Mr. J. H. Diggle,
and when you have found Mr. J. H. Diggle
you are in the company of the most experienced
small holders' land-agent in England. Mr.
Raymond Webb of Evesham runs him close,
but Mr. Diggle has a larger area and a greater
diversity of holdings to administer. If the
Board of Agriculture had been wise in its
day, it would have appointed such men as
commissioners.1

Mr. Diggle is, for instance, not only agent
for the Parish Council holdings at Moulton,
consisting of 922 acres, but also agent for the

1 It is with great pleasure I learu since writing the above that
Mr. Diggle has been appointed Commissioner for the Isle of Ely
County Council — a council of large farmers hitherto distinguished
only for what Carlyle would term pig-philosophy. They are the
only Council which have displayed the colossal stupidity to
object to applicants forming a co - operative Small Holders'
Association. It is obvious that such associations save County
Councils the extra trouble of collecting rents from individuals.
Although 400 men altogether in the single parish of Elm have
applied for land since 1008, not a foot of land has yet been
granted to them !

90 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

957 acres at Sutton Bridge, Wingland, and
Walpole, as well as agent for Lord Carrington's
972 acres at Spalding, for Sir C. D. Rose's
917 acres of small holdings at Bur well, and
for the 337 acres at Swaffham, Carbrooke,
and Whissonsett in Norfolk. These latter
holdings, as well as the holdings at Spalding,
Walpole, and Wingland, are all grouped under
one association called the Lincolnshire and
Norfolk Small Holdings Association.

This little record of duties to be performed
shows not only that Mr. Diggle is a fairly
active man, but also the extent of the small
holdings in South Lincolnshire.

At Moulton, before setting out for the
Parish Council holdings, which lie some way
out of the village on that flat expanse which
stretches out towards the Wash, I witnessed
an instance of the national utility of taxing un-
developed land. A grass field owned by Mr.
Diggle, costing considerably over £100 an acre
— and I am sure he will not mind my saying
this — held up as a possible building site quite
close to the station, had a rental value as grazing
land of 30s. an acre. On the passing of the
memorable Budget, this was ploughed up and a
crop of mustard sown by the present occupier,

COLONISING CROWN LANDS. 91

who now pays £5 an acre for the use of it, and
it produces approximately an extra £25 an acre
towards our national wealth. I have never
seen such a fine crop of mustard grown for seed.
The men were reaping it with hooks, and it
overtopped their heads with stalks like bamboo
canes. Mustard grows luxuriantly on this
black, fen, silty soil, and is a favourite crop with
many farmers.

Close to the field of mustard is another bit
of land which would have been classed as
undeveloped land. This has now been culti-
vated by a small holder and fruit-trees planted
in it ; and though the tenant, a gardener, pays
£5 an acre rent, he evidently finds the tilling
of it profitable.

As I passed through Moulton to the Parish
Council holdings (which were created after the
passing of the 1894 Act by voluntary arrange-
ment with the Commissioners for Crown
lands), I witnessed a type of the old, isolated,
uneconomic holding, owned by a man with
insufficient capital to develop it. The cottage
and buildings were falling into decay, and
the weary old owner was looking as wretched
as the horse he was holding. It has now
passed into the hands of the mortgagers.

92 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

It was a pleasure to turn from this pathetic
sight to the modern, economic small holding
created to meet a strong demand and designed
for modern agricultural requirements. Such
holdings would not have been possible had they
not been backed by the capital of the Crown,
which has spent no less than £8000 for their
equipment. A high rent is of course necessary
to meet all charges, including interest and
management, but after all £2 : 10s. an acre is
not a rack-rent for five acres of this fertile
soil, nor is £20 for a new cottage of five or six
rooms as clean and bright as a new pin, with
the five acres attached. There are other
holdings for stock-keepers, and these range from
forty to fifty acres. The five-acre men usually
have some outside work to do, and they get
the fifty-acre man, who keeps a team of cart-
horses, to plough, harrow, and horse-hoe their
land, on which potatoes form the chief crop.
I saw a photograph of these fields taken just
before the Parish Council decided to acquire
them, when the land was full of thistles as
high as my knee. Now this land, which
was once given over to the bullock and the
sheep, is peopled by a new race of English
yeomen. In the place of thistles are potatoes ;

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COLONISING CROWN LANDS. 93

and in the place of sheep are the shining faces
of little children. It is remarkable that this
entire estate of nearly 1000 acres, with houses
valued at over £8000, should be managed by
a Parish Council consisting mainly of working
men.

It is a land of opulent farmers, who know
how to turn over to the best advantage the
rich fenland soil, and it is significant that so
much land round the Wash becoming derelict
should have been left to small holders to
bring to a condition of prosperous fertility.
The rural area of Spalding is one of the few
really rural districts of England which has
considerably increased its population. In 1801
the population was 10,751, to-day it is 23,497 ;
and it is a district of small holdings.

Driving through the village of Moulton, a
figure was pointed out to me astride a black
horse. It was that of a fine old man in a
long brown shabby coat reaching down to
his muddy gaiters. On his head was a black
felt wide-awake hat, which crowned a face
tanned with the sun of many summers and
bearded with white hair reaching down to the
bottom of his waistcoat. He looked the part
he played in life — the patriarch of a large family

94 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

which he governed with a firm hand. " If he
is worth a penny," said a Moulton man to me,
"he is worth £30,000." We passed the field
where four young men were hoeing in a row.
Three of these were his sons, who had to work
doggedly like day-labourers.

In the evening, at the local inn not far
from Moulton, a dozen men walked into the
coffee - room. Most of them were large
farmers, though amongst them I noticed a
man evidently not of the same class, for his
clothes and boots were of rougher material,
and he rarely spoke. The conversation
centred round potatoes, and the advantages
or disadvantages of spraying, when to spray,
and how to spray, or whether " Dates " were
not a played-out variety.

The conversation reminded me of others
that I had heard in bar-parlours in Norfolk,
where bullocks were discussed incessantly, or
among the Downs, where " yoes " and " tegs "
formed the chief topic of conversation, and of
a little village inn in Wiltshire where I had
to seek my bed by passing through the tap-
room. " Well," I said to the landlord, as I
bade him good-night, " what has it been
to-night ? Mangolds again ? " This was at

COLONISING CROWN LANDS. 95

the fall of the year, when the hunter's moon
was riding to the full. " No," he said, " I've
been fairly fed up with mangold-wurzels. I've
had them every night for six weeks. Golden
Tankards, Yellow Globes, and Long Reds, and
as for their weights — Good Lord ! " — a pause
here which gave me to understand that no
angler's inn could possess a greater poetical
licence than his, and then with relief —
"Thank heaven, it's been foxes to-night."

I naturally thought that it was an Agri-
cultural Society meeting in the coffee-room of
this Lincolnshire inn. I was mistaken. It was
a political association which shall be nameless.

The landlady entered the room while
" Dates " were still being discussed, and osten-
tatiously placed a spittoon on the floor, a
proceeding which caused some slight embarrass-
ment in the turgid talk. At the same time
she summoned me to my supper, which was
laid in another room.

" Did you take me ? " she said, pointing
to the coffee-room.

" Who could help it. Who's the offender ? "
The spittoon was evidently intended for
some one who could not, like Mark Twain's
hero, "judge his distance to an inch."

96 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

" That horrid old man in those dirty boots
— he is only a day-labourer. But it's politics,

you know, and Mr. , the agent, says you

must mix up all classes a bit for politics;
and when I complain about my carpet, he says
that the horrid old man is a very useful asset to
us. I say / wouldn't give him the two syllables,
the old wretch ! "

In spite of the cry of agricultural distress,
there seems no abatement on the part of the
larger farmers in investing fresh capital in
land or in adding farm to farm, and in the
recolonisation of rural England the presence
of so many large farmers on our county
councils constitutes a national danger. There
are no more progressive county councils in
England than those of Norfolk, and the
Kesteven and Holland County Councils (Lin-
colnshire), and yet we find in the purchase of
farms by even these county councils traces of
underhand work inimical to the interests of
the ratepayers as well as to men applying for

land.

In Norfolk, a certain farm sold during
my tour was, I discovered, purchased quite
by accident over the heads of the County
Council by a near relative of a member of the

COLONISING CROWN LANDS. 97

Small Holdings Committee. This, though it
may have been quite a straightforward trans-
action, is significant of the value of knowing
beforehand the reserve price fixed by the
county council at a public auction.

In Lincolnshire I actually found the chair-
man of a County Council and member of the
Small Holdings Committee publicly bidding
for a farm after the reserve price the County
Council were prepared to pay had been passed
by a clear £1000 ! This means that the
chairman, as a private individual, believed
apparently that the farm was worth more
than the price fixed by the County Council
valuer. If so, was it not clearly his duty on
committee to state the price he would be
prepared to pay ? For it is evident that if the
reserved price is fixed too low the ratepayers
lose an opportunity of a good investment, and
intending small holders are deprived of their
land. Surely if a sense of honour is not great
enough to restrain councillors from entering
into competition with their own council, some
law should be passed to prevent such actions,
similar to the law we have to-day, restraining
councillors from voting with regard to contracts
in which they are personally interested.

7

98 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

On the other hand, there is the question
of placing too high a price on land purchased
by ratepayers. When land is purchased
voluntarily the continual payment of high
prices can only be avoided by altering the
personnel of the council, and thus checking the
inclination of a council of landowners to keep
up the price of land. But when land is
purchased compulsorily the appointment of
private county surveyors as arbitrators between
landlords and the council leads to mischievous
results, for self-interest too often induces
private land-agents to place a high figure on
the value of the land. Wherever compulsory
purchase is necessary it is in the interest of
the ratepayer and the small holder for the
Board of Agriculture to appoint its own
salaried surveyor.

CHAPTER VI.

THE FARMER AND LABOURER AS RURAL
COUNCILLOR.

Though few farmers are ardently in favour
of small holdings, yet there is a type of farmer
who sits on county councils, who, whilst not
being a strong believer in small holdings, is
not unsympathetic. He does not like to see
any farms in his county going back for want
of thorough cultivation, and is willing to
purchase land where there is a large number
of approved applicants. Without this type
of farming county councillor, Worcestershire,
Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk
could not have gone ahead with small holdings
in the way in which they have done, though
in all these councils progress would have been
seriously retarded without the insistent appeal
of men who are not of the farming class.

69

100 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

As a typical representative of the not un-
sympathetic type there is my friend X. whom
I visited when I was in Norfolk pursuing my
investigations. He is the tenant of three
farms, each of about 300 or 400 acres. He
takes a keen interest in rural housing ; he sits
on the county council, calls himself a Pro-
gressive, and in Imperial politics is a staunch
Conservative. A man in middle life, he has
farmed since he was a boy, working on his
father's farm, which before that was farmed
by his grandfather. His brothers and uncles
are all farmers. He is therefore wholly of
the farming stock. Farming is to him a
thorough business undertaking and not a
plaything. Sport with him is quite a secondary
consideration. When I saw him some years
ago he drove a smart dogcart into Norwich
when making his weekly journey to the bank.
Now he drives a motor car.

"Come," he said to me at his hospitable
farmhouse, "let me drive you round to my
other farms, and we will have a talk about
small holdings. I haven't very much time to
spare, for I shall have to be over at the sea-
coast this afternoon to look at some dilapidated
cottages on behalf of the Council."

RURAL COUNCILLORS. 101

I thought he displayed a rather unusual
amount of eagerness in his invitation. First
he showed me a splendid crop of standing
wheat and some samples of turnip seed which
his men had thrashed with the flail upon the
rick-cloth. By carefully selecting the seed
each year from the best plants, he was able to
sell the seed at a high price and make as much
as £56 an acre from his field of turnips.

" Now," said he, " come and see the allot-
ments 1 sublet to my men on this farm."
The strips of oats and wheat on these allot-
ments were pathetically short compared to
the crops of my friend, and the land on
which they grew was dirty.

" There you are," he said, " there are your
small holdings. What do you think of them ?
I help the men all I can. I lend them a
waggon when they want to carry their corn
to the thrashing machine. I even thrash it
for them. Whenever a man wants an imple-
ment he has only to ask for it. So all that is
made easy for them ; yet you see failure staring
them in the face here. A man cannot serve
two masters ; he has no time for both jobs.
When the Small Holdings Act of 1907 was
passed, my bullock-man came to me and said —

102 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

and mind you he had Sunday as well as week-
day work — ' I want to speak to you about
something, sir.' I replied, 'Well, fire away,
Bill. Anything I can do to help you ? '
* W ill you try and get me a five-acre holding,
sir ? ' he said. I hesitated for a moment before
I replied in these words, ' Yes, Bill, I will try
and get you your holding from the County
Council. I know you to be a hard worker
and that you have put by a little money.
But, mind you, I am not going to have you
working yourself out on your own land early
in the morning, at midday, and in the evenings,
and resting for the rest of the working-day
on my land. You must choose whether you
work for me or for yourself.' He decided to
work for himself. He bought some beasts
in Norwich, dropped £17 on them the first
year, and then emigrated to Canada."

" The fault," I answered, " with that man,
and with your men here, is that they are skid-
ding along in the old ruts they are accustomed
to. They imitate what you do, without your
facilities for buying manures or for marketing
the produce. Fancy trying to fatten bullocks
on a five-acre holding ! Why don't they leave
these things to you and other large farmers,

RURAL COUNCILLORS. 103

and grow the smaller things in which hand
work or personal attention is more needed ? '

Here, too, small holdings are out of the
track of trade. So cut off have labourers
been from the outside world, that a woman
lived in the parish for seventy years without
ever stepping beyond the confines of a small
common !

When I left my friend I lodged at a small
farmhouse, from the windows of which hardly
anything could be seen save acres and acres
of corn and roots. Herds of bullocks are
fattened in the yards in the winter, and grazed
on the marshes in the summer, and yet with
all this open, fertile farm-land around us it
was extremely difficult for me to get a new-
laid egg for my breakfast, and the only milk to
be obtained came from a cow with a tubercular
udder! Cream was imported from Norway
for visitors, and the butter came from Brittany
or Denmark ; and rather than drink milk from
a diseased cow, I, in the heart of England's
premier agricultural county, drank the milk
preserved in tins which a Swiss manufacturer
thoughtfully provides for pastoral English-
men !

Here were milk, and cream, and butter, and

104 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

eggs badly needed in these Norfolk villages
and small towns, and yet few were troubling
to produce them.

Still, Norfolk has not been behindhand in
one form of small culture. There is a splendid
series of fruit gardens on the belt of land
contiguous to the Broads of northern Norfolk,
running from Stalham to Martham ; and it was
among the orchards of Potter Heigham that
I told my friend X.'s story to the village
schoolmaster.

Like many a country schoolmaster, this one
had been endeavouring for many years past to
get land for the labourers.

"Ah," he said, when he heard the story
about serving two masters, "that reminds me
how, after a long struggle with the local
farmers, we, through the Parish Council, first
obtained allotments for the men. One farmer
in particular had been very bitter about it,
complaining that he would lose his labour
force. One day I pointed out to him five of
his men, who were allotment holders, who
seemed to be hoeing his turnips fairly quickly.
* Well, I must own up,' said the farmer,
' I made a mistake. These men, working for
themselves, have managed to get into a

RURAL COUNCILLORS. 105

quicker stroke, and I seem to be getting the
benefit of it.'"

Here at Potter Heigham the Parish
Council consist entirely of working men, and I
lighted on the chairman hoeing cabbages on his
holding of six acres. He keeps three cows
and a sow, and does some carting for the
other holders. Black-currants and raspberries
are the two chief crops cultivated on the
allotments here as well as at Hickling and at
Ingham. Black - currant picking was over
when I was at Potter Heigham, but raspberries
were still being picked by the wives and the
children while the husbands were working on
the farms. Individual marketing was, un-
fortunately, the rule here as nearly everywhere
else ; and judging from the prices being paid
by the dealers for the raspberries and black-
currants, the middleman must be reaping a
small fortune out of those who labour in the
fruit gardens. There was some talk of the
formation of a co - operative society being
evolved out of the murmurous discontent,
and it is to be hoped that the village school-
master, with the aid of the Agricultural
Organisation Society, will achieve something
before this book has been printed.

106 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

There is one man, also a parish councillor,
whom I must mention, because his annals of
toil are remarkable. He appeared to be
about fifty years of age, with a whitening
beard on a brown, healthy face, whose serene
eyes looked out at you from under a broad-
brimmed Quaker hat. He was digging on
his five-acre fruit and vegetable garden, and
digging with one hand only, a hook doing
duty for the other hand. He lost his left
hand years ago, and with amazing dexterity
has been earning his living since by catching
eels and working on the land — earning sufficient
not only to keep himself, but also to build a
cottage worth £130, and purchase by degrees
five acres of land.

In the little out - of - the - way village of
Ingham, near Stalham, I found a man who
was working on one acre of allotment, growing
black-currants and raspberries. He was a
middle - aged man who could neither read
nor write, and yet by his intelligently
directed labour he had grown £70 worth of
fruit on his allotment. His acre produced for
him two and a half tons of black-currants and
half a ton of raspberries. Probably, if the fruit
had been better marketed, he would have

RURAL COUNCILLORS. 107

made £80 or £90 instead of the £70 he received
from a dealer. Six years ago this same site
was producing only £5 worth of food towards
the national larder when it was farmed in the
ordinary way. Indeed, on the other side of
the hedge may be seen to-day land farmed
by the capitalist -farmer producing barely
more than this amount, whilst on the allotment
side of the hedge the illiterate labourer is
producing fourteen times as much.

The land here is of a clayey loam, and the
allotment holder was wise enough in the first
instance to plant the Bos Koop variety of the
black-currant, which is fairly free from the big
bud. He first planted potatoes between the
bushes, but now, of course, the bushes are big
enough to meet and prevent intercultivation.
This exceedingly industrious and intelligent
gardener wants more land, but he cannot get
it. It is the usual story : the parish council
here are dominated by the farmers, who seem
to resent this labourer working independently
of them.

Being a good craftsman he takes on piece-
work, such as thatching and cutting rushes on
the Broads. Nothing would induce him to
return to the life of a farm drudge. One of

108 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

his sons has gone to Canada, like so many
other of the young men in this part of the
world, if they have but a chance given to
them. I have recently heard from a gentleman
in this neighbourhood who knows of forty
young fellows who, during 1910, left for
America, the States drawing away the brightest
and hardiest of them across the Atlantic.

Possibly the emigration of the best of
England's manhood from our rural districts
has received a slight check in recent years
since the small opening has been given to
them to become their own masters. A hard,
penurious life may still be in front of them, as
hard as that which their fathers endured, but
they will, at any rate, gain that priceless gift
to most Englishmen — the freedom to carve
out their own destiny instead of having it
roughly hewn out for them by some taskmaster.

Not far from Ingham an interesting experi-
ment in applying the principle of tenant co-
partnership is being tried.

On the slopes of an old British camp, from
whose wooded crest ships that sail the North
Sea are visible six miles away, I found the
men of the new settlement at work. It was
an ideal site on which to earn one's daily bread.

RURAL COUNCILLORS. 109

Here one can watch wherries with their
pleasant brown sails coming down from North
Walsham sweeping round the copse, threading
their way along the sluggish Ant and tacking
across the open Broad, making their inland
voyage to Great Yarmouth eighteen miles
away. Church towers, islanded in isolation
amid ploughed fields under wide skies, could
be counted by the score. These were many,
but cottages were few. Every one of the
half-dozen men I spoke to were still lodgers,
some of them grass-widowers. Working here
by day, and sleeping by night in some crowded
old cottage perhaps a mile or two away, they
patiently await the building of those concrete
cottages that are to be erected on this mere-
stead of a hundred acres, now known as
"Wayford Tenants, Limited," Smallburgh,
by Norwich.

Every one of these men had known some-
thing of co-operation before they came to
Wayford. They possessed what is so often
lacking in small - holding communities — a
guiding principle to knit them together.
They are all co-partners in the same venture,
and three of them sit on the committee with
Mr. W. L. Charleton, the chairman, to whose

110 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

foresight and energy this new departure in
the organisation of small holdings owes its
inception.

None of these men seem touched with those
peculiarities which one finds, for instance, in
the disciples of Tolstoy, who go back to the
land. One has been a bricklayer's labourer,
another a gardener, another a carpenter,
another a dairyman. They bore the stamp
of men who are accustomed to tread the solid
earth without losing their heads in the clouds.
They seemed happy, and, animated by a fine
spirit, were confident of success. The brick-
layer's labourer, as hard as nails, had begun
to dig at 4.30 in the morning, and was still at
work at 8.30 p.m., when I found him planning
a henhouse on a board in the barn by lamp-
light.

Those short of capital could earn ready
money, whilst their crops were growing and
maturing, by delving and screening gravel in
the heart of the hillock overtopped by the
wood. A mile and a half away was a rail-
way station — Stalham. On the one side is
Norwich, sixteen miles distant, and on the
other, Yarmouth, reachable by rail or water.
On the coast-line from Cromer to Lowestoft

RURAL COUNCILLORS. Ill

lies a string of watering-places which should
form a ready market for farm produce during
the summer months.

What has made Wayford so suitable a site
for small holders is not so much the gravel-
pits and the timber overhead — which, however,
are exceptional assets on an agricultural estate
where building material is required — nor even
the rail and water facilities, nor the excellent
co-operative organisation, but the kind, light,
though rather poor soil.

As a rule either stubborn clay or chalky
land, with about four inches of top soil, is
marked out as suitable land for small holders
on which to break their spirit. Here is a soil
which can be ploughed with a pony or even
a donkey. On one side of the hedge I saw a
man ploughing with a pony thirteen hands
high, and on the other side an allotment
holder had a pair of donkeys harnessed to a
small Norfolk plough. And though spade
labour is comparatively easy on land as light
as this, yet it was interesting to find that the
plough was invariably used.

Modern agricultural implements have
already been purchased by the Society, and a
plough with a pair of horses can be hired for

112 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

7s. a day, if the small holder chooses to put
his own hand to the plough.

Hardly a fence is to be seen to divide
holding from holding, and to swallow up the
much-needed capital ; for, beyond the strip of
grazing land bordering the canal, no land is
to be put down to permanent pasture, which
rightly enough is considered a waste where
tillage can produce fodder crops of double the
quantity. It is hoped that on a six-acre
holding enough will be produced to feed four
cows, instead of the regulation number of
two cows to six acres common to the grass
farms of England. Every cow put out to
graze will be tethered, and abundance of
valuable fodder is expected from the mixed
crop of peas and corn, which in Denmark is
either cut green and fed whole, or, after
being weathered, is stacked and then thrashed
all together.

It used to be possible to obtain large
quantities of sludge from Barton Broad to
spread over the fields. This was dredged by
the marshmen at a trifling cost, but, now that
a heavy tribute is levied by an exacting
overlord, this industry has been taxed out of
existence.

RURAL COUNCILLORS. 113

The special public interest, however,
aroused by Wayford Tenants, Limited, lies
in its exceptional economic basis. It is this
which marks it out as a unique settlement of
small holders, and its further development
becomes a matter of national interest.

Besides the lack of driving force behind its
administration, there were many gaps in the
framing of the Small Holdings Act. It is
for the filling up of these gaps by associated
effort that the Wayford Society was created.
Tenant co-partnership has been applied to
town areas with astounding success, and this
is an attempt to apply the same principle to
an agricultural colony with the addition of
several distinctive features.

Each small holder becomes at the same
time the tenant of his own holding, for which
he pays a rent varying from 30s. to 40s. an
acre, and a part proprietor of all the holdings.
He is tenant and landlord combined. He has
to take up shares to the value of his holding,
but the whole amount need not be paid at
once. A minimum of £10 in shares has been
fixed with a minimum contribution of 5s. a
month towards the rest of his share capital.
He is never burthened with the task of having

114 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

to find a purchaser for his own individual
holding should he wish to leave, but with
the necessity only of transferring his shares
to some one else. He has the welfare of his
co-partner almost as much at heart as his own.

A credit bank has been formed, and all
buying and selling will be done in co-opera-
tion. A Danish extension waggon, costing
£20, has been imported. This is a wonderful
waggon, very light, and serviceable for every
kind of work on a farm, from that of drawing
timber to carrying hay. It can be shortened
or lengthened as desired. Stripped of its
sides at a moment's notice, it can be converted
into a trolley with a platform. Shortened, it
can be used as a dung cart or as a market
cart. Altogether it is the small holder's
all-purposes cart.

Every one must wish success to this enter-
prising undertaking to resettle on the slopes
of the old British camp this new race of self-
supporting English yeomen. The husbandman
has come, and come to stay ; but he, unfortun-
ately, still goes to his daily toil homeless.
There is still the crying need of cottage
accommodation.

The Norfolk County Council have, on the

RURAL COUNCILLORS. 115

whole, shown a commendable spirit of enter-
prise in acquiring land. Travelling to the fen-
lands of Lincolnshire, I heard a Norfolk estate
agent remark to a gentleman in the train,
" This is like the good old days of thirty years
ago. I have been selling a 300-acre farm
to-day at £50 an acre." The price went over
the County Council reserve price, and it was
bought by a family of farmers.

The Norfolk small holdings are not as
noticeable as those of Worcestershire, because
they are more scattered ; neither have they
the good fortune to possess the striking houses
and buildings of the Lincolnshire Crown land
holdings. Nevertheless, the Norfolk County
Council take the lead in 1911 with 6231 acres
to their credit since the 1st of January 1908.
Somerset and Cambridge come next, each
with 4000 acres, whilst Lincolnshire, divided
into three county areas — Holland, Kesteven,
and Lindsey — has acquired over 2000 acres
in the same period. The progress made by
the Cambridgeshire County Council is largely
due to the efforts of the chairman of their Small
Holdings Committee, Mr. E. O. Fordham, who
has now, I am glad to see, been appointed one
of the six new Commissioners. Cambridge-

116 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

shire, by the way, has not always had encourage-
ment from the two Commissioners originally
appointed to supervise between them the
whole of England and Wales ! These gentle-
men reported adversely on the hiring of
650 acres at Soham, but the County Council
proceeded with the acquisition of the farm,
and of the twenty-five tenants there are only
three who do not earn their entire livino-
from their holdings. These holdings have
succeeded better than most, probably because
co-operation is a live factor here where there
is actually a co-operative oil-engine and mill
for grinding the produce of these holdings.

Bedfordshire, a county of natural small
holdings carved out before the passing of the
1907 Act, is rapidly becoming a county of
market gardens. This is due largely not only
to the fertility of the soil, but to the fact that
it can be easily worked at any time of the
year. It has, too, the economic advantage
over many counties where a new race of
market gardeners are of mushroom growth.
Like Evesham, it has bred through generations
a race of skilled market gardeners, men who
at carrot-bunching time, for instance, can earn
as much as 10s. a day. Here, around such

RURAL COUNCILLORS. 117

districts as Sandy and Biggleswade, as little or
no stock is kept, all superfluous hedges have
been uprooted, and so keen are the men to
obtain small holdings that many travel on
their cycles a dozen miles a day to and from
their strips of land. Manure is railed from
London in large quantities at fairly reasonable
prices, but rent bears heavily upon the
cultivators of the soil, for as much as £4 an
acre is charged on sites near the station. " We
cannot afford," said a grower of carrots and
marrows to me, " to put our land under
ordinary farm crops."

The Bedfordshire County Council make
the fifth county which has spent over £40,000
in the acquisition of land ; and in meeting the
ever-increasing demand of the rural population
for land, they have, up to the 30th of June 1911,
provided applicants with 2759 acres ; but
altogether a thousand applicants applied for
12,350 acres. There are still two-thirds of
these waiting for land !

Where he can work with a free hand, the
parish councillor is one of the best agents to
bring about the recolonisation of our empty
countryside. This I have witnessed in my
travels again and again.

118 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

As Mr. Charles Roden Buxton, in his
admirable sketch, A Living Village, observes :
" The Parish Councillors know every acre as
intimately as they know every man. No
great landlord is half as business-like as they.
There is a healthy pressure of public opinion
which keeps pushing up the standard of
efficiency. There is a bad tenant here and
there, no doubt, but it is not very pleasant for
him as he walks down the village street of
North Creake among his fellow-ratepayers
and the tenants who know that the weeds
from his neglected ground are sowing them-
selves in their clean and constantly tended
holdings. I talked with a small holder at
Wottan who hoed his turnip-field nine times
last year and this year has done so seven times
already. His would be a surly greeting, I
fear, to a neighbour who let the thistles grow."

I have said advisedly, " where the parish
councillor can work with free hand," for in
spite of our much-vaunted democracy and
the pa?an of triumph trumpeted by politicians
over the passing of the English rural Magna
Charta of 1894, parish councils as executive
bodies are far from being democratic. Their
executive power is restricted within narrow

RURAL COUNCILLORS. 119

limits, so my experience goes after serving
on two different parish councils. And the
appearance of Hodge as an unpaid public
servant is no assurance of a democratic force
at work. I remember a wealthy shipowner,
who was also a large landowner in Kent,
endeavouring to impress me by saying,
" Hang it all, look at me ! aren't I a democrat ?
My gardener and gamekeeper and bailiff sit
on the Parish Council, and I am chairman ! "

On parish councils constituted like this one
Hodge, of course, sinks to a mere cypher.
Yet it is not the landowner whom he fears to
face so much as the large farmer. Even where
the landowner is often willing to let his land
to small holders the large farmer is in
opposition. It is not that the large farmer
has any greater measure of human wickedness
than any other class of the community. He
is often very hospitable, and generous in his
gifts ; but when he is asked to give up a field
or two of his farm, he feels that he is asked to
give up some of his income for the purpose,
forsooth, of making some of his labourers
more independent, eventuating probably with
the loss of some of his best workers.

From his narrow point of view, looking

120 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

at life through a pea -shooter, he may be
right. On the other hand, I can point to some
districts in England, such as in Lincolnshire,
Cambridgeshire, South Hampshire, and Wor-
cestershire, where an increasing number of
small holders have been a useful reserve force
of labour for farmers to call upon at harvesting
time. Furthermore, there are many large
farms of 2000 acres and upwards which are
too large for the individual farmer to work
economically. He would, in many such cases,
have less worry, less work, and a larger margin
of profit if he cultivated more thoroughly a
farm of less than half the size.

CHAPTER VII.

POOR MOORLAND HOLDINGS AND THE
ENGLISH SQUIRE.

We have been observing small holders at
work on the fat fenlands of Lincolnshire, in
the fertile vale of Evesham, and on the rich
belts of land in Norfolk. It is true that we
have seen men working prosperously on the
poor, hilly slopes of Catshill, Fairfield, and
Belbroughton, but there is actually a corner of
England where labourers are earning a living
by the sweat of their brow on land so poor
that the owner described it to me as "too
poor for farmers to cultivate." This estate
is to be found in that corner of Dorsetshire
that lies on the verge of the New Forest.
The name of the village is Verwood.

Here we come to an estate which, as far
as land tenure is concerned, is worked under a

121

122 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

system of enlightened feudalism — a despotism
without a despot.

On a poor sandy soil, the largest part of
which is still heather-clad, with a clay subsoil,
and as open to the winds as a Yorkshire moor,
scented by the resinous pines of the New
Forest and the wild thyme of the common,
live a race of small holders, tilling holdings
varying from one to twenty acres. The older
tenants are living in mud cottages made of
the clay subsoil which lay under their feet —
cottages built by them on land which is not
theirs. Many of them are yearly tenants of
houses which their fathers built, and are legally
liable to eviction. In fact, the practice which
has gone on for generations is much like what
we have had in Ireland, but Verwood is unlike
Ireland in that the tenants do not seem to be
troubled about building their houses on sand.
Here it is the landlord, the squire of Verwood,
who is troubled about the insubstantial, un-
economic footing of his own tenants.

He is the lord of the manor of some 2000
acres, and his family in past days have by
degrees permitted parishioners to cultivate
with the spade the rough heather-clad moor-
land over which the family exercise manorial

POOR MOORLAND HOLDINGS. 123

rights, charging a rent of only 10s. an acre.
One by one mud huts began to go up on these
rented allotments. The building material
was cheap and handy. The clay for making
the yellow-ochred walls was under their feet ;
the heather for thatching was cut from the
Common around them ; and rough timber could
be had almost for the asking from the forest
near by. With great faith in the integrity
of the squire's family, tenants went on build-
ing on land which was not their own. The
property being entailed, the squire himself
could not grant the freehold, but being troubled
over possible eventualities, especially as he
was childless, he got an Act of Parliament
passed in the 'eighties giving him power to
grant eighty-year leases. In spite of this,
there are tenants to-day living on land rented
by them onJy annually, who refuse to be
bothered with the eighty-year lease to which
they are entitled !

Rents are rarely raised here, for the reason
that they generally are elsewhere. They are
not raised because the industry of the tenants
has made sites more valuable. At Verwood
they are fixed at 10s. or 15s. the acre. This
landlord apparently never says to his tenants,

124 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

"As the village is growing, and as I am
becoming richer, I shall therefore have to
charge you more rent."

Market facilities are not easy at Verwood.
True, there is a railway near, but it is only
a connecting link between Salisbury and
Wimborne, and no one living within the
stretch of country lying between those two
places takes it at all seriously. It is j ust a thread
on which, spider-like, an engine leisurely spins
its way, dragging in its train a freight of weary
human beings to the web of town life.

The cattle market at Wimborne may be
useful to stock-keepers, to which, of course,
cattle can travel on their own legs, but the
best market town for garden produce to the
growers at Verwood is Bournemouth, fourteen
miles away, and that is reached by road. Hence
the railway is of little avail to the people here ;
but as forest ponies are cheap, nearly every
small holder keeps a pony and cart and
markets his own produce in Bournemouth,
which, as a growing seaside town, is an invalu-
able market centre for the small holders in and
about the Forest.

Verwood is one of those places where
greater stability in colonisation is assured by

POOR MOORLAND HOLDINGS. 125

the fact that the tillers of the soil do not put
all their eggs in one basket. Unlike the
tramp in the Adventures of Harry Richmond,
they do not believe in a life which " on one
day you lay on your back and the skies rained
apples, while there were other days when you
wore your ringers down to the first joint to
catch a flea." It is a case of simple living,
it is true, but a simple living which is equable
and free from want. Their little orchards are
sometimes full of apples, but they will accept
this golden shower as coming by the grace of
God, and give thanks for it at the Ebenezer
Chapel. They do not lie under a tree to wait
for the golden globes to fall into their open
mouths. Underneath the boughs may be
beehives, and whilst bees are storing honey,
the man would be out in the field harvesting
his oats, hoeing his roots, or driving his cart
to market with his cauliflowers and carrots,
his eggs and his butter.

On one holding I picked an apple from a
tree which was planted a hundred years ago.
It was planted in the filled - in hole from
which the grandfather of the present
occupier dug the clay for building the mud
cottage. The present tenant, who has now

126 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

many grandchildren of his own, has brought up
a family of fifteen, sustaining them out of the
produce of his holding of eighteen acres, which
was originally started by his grandfather turn-
ing over an acre of heathland. Health and
fecundity seem borne upon the wings of the
winds which sweep across the Downs.

Inside, on the two-feet thick clay walls of the
cottage, under a roof of heather thatch, is hung
a picture of Gladstone ; an oleograph of Queen
Victoria ; a lurid battle scene of Tel-el-Kebir,
savagely crowded with incidents of slaughter,
adjoining the text " God is Love " ; and on a
little table under the window a Bible reposes
on a snow-white antimacassar. Nothing would
induce the old man now to leave his mud cottage,
where he said it was cool in the summer and
warm in the winter, for a red-brick, slated,
modern house. His son could live in one of
those, he said scornfully. Perhaps he felt like
the old gipsy whom some one tried to persuade
to leave the hedgerow for a brick dwelling.
** No," he said, " I can't play any tricks with
my health at my time of life by living in a
house."

Our small holder, like most of his neigh-
bours, belonged to a thrifty, hard-working,

POOR MOORLAND HOLDINGS. 127

labouring class, which have worked themselves
into the position of being their own masters.
During the week he and his fellows are ardent
believers in the gospel of Carlyle, and on
Sunday the Ebenezer Chapel is filled with
the sound of their mournful voices, their black
coats, their black ties, and their ebony boots
shining for the glory of God.

Riches do not come to any one quickly on
these poor moorland holdings ; indeed, I know
of no one living on the verge of the Forest,
excepting one man, who has amassed enough
wealth to endanger his chances of entering
Paradise. This man started, they tell me,
without a shilling to his name. He possessed,
however, a demoniac energy. From the lord
of the manor he obtained permission to break
up two acres of the heather land at a rent of
10s. the acre. Now he is the owner of five
mud cottages.

It is a common sight here to see, built close
up against a mud cottage thatched with heather,
another modern cottage built of brick. This will
invariably be the cottage of a newly married
son, whilst the father will be the occupant of
the mud cottage. Here, it will be seen, our
stalwart sons of the soil remain in the country

128 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

and help to increase the population of a bold
and thriving peasantry. There is no lord of the
manor on this estate who interdicts the build-
ing of new cottages, no large farmer with
power to prevent land being used by the
labourer for his own benefit. Thirty years
ago hardly a cottage was to be seen across the
stretch of moorland heath. To - day, blue
smoke rises into the clarified atmosphere from
many a cottage chimney.

It is probable that success — that is, success
which is not measured by the ordinary standard
of wealth, but by the creation of a healthy and
thriving peasantry earning then livelihood free
of taskmasters — is due to other causes than
that of the absence of rack - renting and the
presence of cheap building materials. In the
first place, these small holders, like many others
in or round the confines of the New Forest,
have extensive grazing rights. This enables
the cottagers to shut up their entire piece of
grass land for hay, letting their cows graze on
the common, where they can pick up a living
in the summer on the rough grass, the gorse and
the tender heather shooting up after fire has
burnt the coarser stems.

Here handicraft too is closely allied to

POOR MOORLAND HOLDINGS. 129

tillage. Pot-making finds work for some of
those who do not live entirely out of the
produce of their land. Some of these pots,
perfumed in some mysterious way as though
the scent of the pine and the heather had
commingled with the clay, find their way to
Recent Street. One man with five acres
devoted a good deal of his time to hawking
about these pots in the surrounding villages.
The clay is under their feet, and the potter's
wheel is not an expensive plant to set up.
In the district of Ringwood gloves are made,
— the shop supplying the wool, and women
and children earn money at this trade in the
winter evenings.

One man I visited turned the heather to
account by making besoms, thus giving him-
self a winter occupation. He has, however, to
go farther afield than Verwood for his heather,
for here the cows of the small holders crop
too closely. Four shillings a cwt. is what he
has to pay to another lord of the manor for
cutting it, but he can buy the wood for his
handles cheaply, and he sells his besoms to
traders at Is. 9d. a dozen. He had the quick
dark eye of the gipsy, and the gipsy's lithe,
sinewy body, and I saw more than one physical

9

130 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

indication that there was a strain of gipsy
blood in the original squatter immigrants from
the Forest.

As the squire and I left his holding together
a little incident gave me an insight into my
host's character. The besom-maker detained
him for a moment, pointing out that the wooden
bridge leading to his cottage needed some
repair. Without an instant's hesitation this
owner agreed to have it done.

He was as unlike that type of old English
squire which Meredith portrays in his Squire
Beltham as it is possible for a squire to be.
Gentle in demeanour and courtly to all alike,
he seemed to walk and drive about as the good
shepherd of his parish. Quite indifferent to
the religious or political convictions of the
cottagers, he has won their esteem not only as
a benevolent landlord, but as one who confers
upon them the dignity of expecting them to
maintain their independence of mind. A
scholar at heart and simple in his tastes, he and
his wife live in a manor-house that might be
mistaken for a country doctor's residence.
Instead of stablemen (for one horse served the
squire's purpose), you saw a staff of gardeners
superintended by his wife, who is a passionate

POOR MOORLAND HOLDINGS. 131

gardener. Yet even in the luxurious in-
dulgence of gardening selfishness is not allowed
to dominate. The garden is thrown open
to the public every Sunday, a pleasaunce of
which the cottagers are not slow to avail
themselves, especially if they have visitors from
a distance.

His wife has strong objections to acting the
part usually played by the Lady Bountiful in
an English village. She considers it im-
pertinent to knock at a cottage door save in
the same spirit as that in which she would
exchange cards with her other friends. Need-
less to say, no case of want is allowed to pass
unnoticed in spite of her objections to district
visiting.

Amid the heather -scented common is a
bathing pool for the villagers and a dressing
shelter erected round it. This, of course, has
been carried out by the squire.

It is evident that at Verwood, at any rate,
rents are not " squeezed out of the bones of the
labourers," as Cobbett phrased it, in order to
add to the magnificence of the landowner's
establishment. The squire is quite indifferent
to splendour, so his tenants are better off than
are the tenants of those who keep up large

132 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

establishments. He takes his ownership of
the land as a stewardship for which he has to
account, and the tillage of it is of paramount
importance.

I have known two other squires who in
different ways remind me of the squire of
Verwood, though all three have different and
strongly-marked personalities. Each belonged
to the older type of territorial magnates, a
type now probably passing away and giving
place to the merchant-prince squire, or to the
Council of landowners.

One of these was a poor man : at any rate
he felt himself passing poor on £4000 a year.
This sum represented the rent derived from
three villages that he owned and the farms sur-
rounding them. He had to maintain an old,
plain-featured, but historic mansion. He took
his business as landowner as seriously as the
owner of Verwood. He was always at war
with his tenant farmers, because he was ever
striving to claim greater independence for the
labourer. "I have it on my conscience," he
once said to me, " that I hold the lives of all
these people in the palm of my hand. Is any
man good enough for the position ? " He
might indeed have quoted Horace, and said

POOR MOORLAND HOLDINGS. 133

that " Nature has appointed neither him, nor
me, nor any one else as lord of this particular
land."

On another occasion, when he was discussing
whether he should erect a statue in his park
close to the bowling-green, he groaned over
the thought that he ought not to spend the
money, because some of the labourers' cottages
wanted re-thatching.

The other landowner was a wealthy man,
and the occasion on which I met him was
when I, with the temerity of youth, asked
him to hand over a portion of his town
property to the people as a recreation ground.
Evidently my suggestion interested and
amused him greatly. He, an elderly gentleman,
brought his lawyers with him to meet me, then
a young man of twenty -two. Coffee and
cigars were produced, and he asked me with
courtly frankness to " Fire away." Having
heard my say, he blurted out, " Why don't
you ask these sweating millionaires who make
money on my land to shell out ? They get
off scot-free without any responsibility." This
gentleman was the late Squire Evelyn of
Wootton, and it was not many years after
our little discussion, which I am sure highly

134 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

entertained this excellent old squire, that Sayes
Court, the property for which I had pleaded,
was handed over to the London County
Council.

Coming to live near to his estate, I heard
many an anecdote which gave me a greater
insight into his character. For some reason
or other he was always at war with his
vicar. If the sermon was not to the squire's
taste, he would publish an antidote in the form
of a pamphlet. "I hate petty tyranny," he
would say to a friend of mine. " If the people
must have a tyrant, Fll be their tyrant." And
he saw to it with a searching legal eye that
when he built a new schoolroom no parson
should ever be allowed to sit on the committee !

Once, so I am told, a labourer was reported
to him as having stolen a faggot bundle that
fell from the estate's wood-wagon. Im-
mediately the old squire went to the labourer's
cottage and told the wife that he was extremely
sorry that there had been this fuss over a mere
bundle of faggots, and that he apologised for
any animadversions made on her husband's
character by his servants. The amazed woman
was then presented with a sovereign. But
before the squire left, he, shrewdly divining

POOR MOORLAND HOLDINGS. 135

cottage gossip, called in the woman from the
cottage next door and gave her a sovereign
also.

It is probable that had the type of English
squire such as that of Verwood and of
Wootton been common throughout the length
and breadth of our land, the day of the
appearance of a public body as a rural owner
would have been delayed for an indefinite
period.

CHAPTER VIII.

GREEN PASTURES AND A CO-OPERATIVE
POULTRY DEPOT.

From the poor moorland holdings of Wessex
it is delightful to enter a rich pastoral county
which has been one of the most progressive
counties in the poultry industry since the
passing of the 1907 Act. In this county we
see what amazing results may be achieved by
co-operative methods in poultry-keeping, even
where the soil is unfavourable.

Amid these green pastures we find a
prosperous co-operative poultry depot, which
of its kind is unique. One would expect to
find such an institution on the light, sandy
soil of Heathfield, in Sussex, so favourable to
the rearing and fattening of table birds, but
hardly in the heart of green Somerset, on cold
retentive clay pastures where the lias stone,

136

A CO-OPERATIVE DEPOT. 137

but eighteen inches beneath the surface, forms
a rocky basin for water in rainy seasons.

The station is Glastonbury, an old-world
village warmed into fresh life by the erection
of new, bright -red brick houses, set amid
verdant pastures at the foot of the grassy Tor
crowned by the old Abbey tower.

A mile and a half away lies Street, where
grey stone houses stand amid meadows richly
garlanded with apples. In the autumn the
air is pungent with cider. But cider is not
the only produce which helps to pay the rent.
Speckled Sussex hens, whiskered Faverolles,
sleek Buffs, and yellow-legged Leghorns strut
the green sward canopied with pink and white
blossoms.

There is, unfortunately, very little ploughed
land in Somersetshire, and if you stand at the
top of the Polden Hills and search the magni-
ficent vale of Sedgemoor, the patches of red
and purple earth here and there stand out
with the distinction of isolation. A field or
two of arable land is seen from Collett's
Corner, so named because it was here, in the
good old days when wages were 8s. a week,
that a man was gibbeted for stealing a sheep.
These fugitive purple patches are at Compton

138 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Dunton, where you will find a body of real
Somersetshire yeomen who have farmed small
holdings from time immemorial, men who are
earning an entire livelihood out of their twenty
or thirty-acre farms. It is they who are
growing a little corn on these patches of red
earth, more for the sake of the long luxuriant
straw — which, owing to its scarcity, they can
sell for £2 a ton — than for the grain.

Elsewhere, alike on the verdant plain and
on the hillside, graze sheep and cattle, and
where they are, of course, the cheery blue
smoke of cottage chimneys is seen at rare
intervals.

Around Street, however, houses are on the
increase, and the price of land is rapidly rising.
The population here has increased during the
last decade : a rare enough incident in rural
England. But it would not be fair to attribute
the increase alone to the multiplication of
small holdings and poultry-keeping, for there
is a boot as well as a skin factory in the
village, and yet undoubtedly, small farming
has had the effect of keeping people in rural
cottage homes.

Street, with its population of between 4000
and 5000, is relieved from that which so often

A CO-OPERATIVE DEPOT. 139

has a blighting effect upon certain districts —
the land being in the hands of one land-
owner. It is the district of many small
owners — a district of great sobriety, of thrift,
of stubbornly - held and freely - expressed
opinions. The principal inn is a temperance
one, the result of Quaker influence, which
strongly predominates here. And so honest
are the people, that when the landlord of the
inn departed for Sunday evening service with
his family he told me that I need not trouble
to lock the street door if I went out, for " all
the Street folk were honest."

The starting of the " Street and District
Poultry-Rearing and Egg-Collecting Society "
came about through the inefficiency of the
higgler. Ten years ago the higgler did as he
liked with the poultry - keeper ; now he is
unable to get a living in Street. Unfortunately
for him, at that time he did as he liked with
Mr. William Reynolds, who had just bought
forty laying pullets. The higgler called
regularly every week in the winter, but when
January was on the wane, and eggs became
plentiful and cheaper, the higgler called no
more.

Then it was that Mr. Reynolds began to

140 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

find his own market. As he had to find it
in the spring, he thought he might as well
secure for himself as good a market as he
could all the year round. He was still
faced with the difficulty which confronts every
poultry - keeper working alone : he still had
no chance to enter into the best market of all
— providing dairy and restaurant companies
with guaranteed new-laid eggs. So he induced
others to join him in the formation of a co-
operative society in order that they could all
market their eggs together in large consign-
ments. The spirit of discontent at having to
take 6d. a dozen for eggs from the higgler
knitted poultry-keepers together, transforming
competitors into co-operators.1

Originally starting in a small way, and
occupying humble premises, the Society now
rents ten acres of land and some very substantial
farm buildings with a farmhouse. The Society
began merely as an egg - collecting society,
marketing the eggs for members ; now it is
that unique organisation in England — a co-

1 The Framlingham Co-operative Society (Suffolk) was started
iu a similar small way by the schoolmaster, Mr. Warren. The
first depot was an old stable ; now it has six depots, and the
number of eggs marketed in 1011 reached 4,000,000.

A CO-OPERATIVE DEPOT. 141

operative incubating, rearing, fattening, col-
lecting, and selling Society.

To give some idea as to the size of this
industry at Street, the long cow-shed of the
old farm is now turned into a fattening shed
capable of holding 700 birds in their coops,
ranged along the walls. This side of the
business entails the employment of a man
who is fattening with a crammer, and plucking
birds practically all the year round, and this
department last year brought in a net profit
of £200. Birds were bought from members
at about Is. 9d. each at twelve weeks old, and
so well were they fattened and so skilfully
presented for the table that the price rarely
dropped below 3s. a bird, and this, it should
be remembered, was the wholesale price. Ten
thousand out of fifteen thousand birds were
fattened in this manner.

The large stone granary of the old dairy
farm has been converted into an incubating
shed, where twenty - two incubators, capable
of hatching at one time 6870 chicks, stand
on the non - vibrating earthen floor, and the
loft above is used for storing chicken food.
Then there is the cool stone- walled room like
a cellar, where 85,000 eggs were preserved in

142 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

waterglass last year, in tanks capable of holding
5000 to 7000 eggs each. It is useful to note
that eggs are popped into the preserving tanks
when the market drops below lOd. a dozen,
and 3s. 6d. spent on waterglass is sufficient
to preserve 5000 eggs. These eggs are taken
out at Christmas and sold as preserved eggs
at about a penny each.

The old stone pigsty has been converted
into brooders. Inside the farmhouse you will
find the offices of the Society and the rooms
where the eggs are tested and packed as they
are delivered by the collecting vans. Here
also lives one of the officials of the Society.

A large trade is done in day-old chicks,
and 5000 of these were sold last year. But
the incubators are also used for hatching the
eggs for members at a small fee. This I
consider to be an excellent plan, for as the
incubators are in the charge of an expert they
are worked with skill, and much labour in
the small holder's home is saved by this form
of co - operation. Outside, in one of the
orchards, beautifully sheltered by apple-trees
and fragrant with the scent of pink and white
blossoms, are some forty or fifty foster-mothers
gaily painted blue, as well as a new brooder-

A CO-OPERATIVE DEPOT. 143

house capable of holding and mothering 600
chicks at the same time. These houses are
carefully and systematically cleaned, the
manure being mixed with peat-dust and spread
on a meadow over the hedge, where a bountiful
crop of hay is sure to be harvested.

In another orchard run the chickens in
their second stage of development. Here,
of course, they are in cold brooders. This
orchard is divided into four sections by wire-
netting. In the third field are to be seen the
birds maturing for the fattening pen.

There is another department which is a very
useful one to members of the Society. This is
the department which buys the poultry food
at wholesale prices for members. Surely this
part of the Society's work might very well be
extended, so that all the feeding stuff required
by farmers for cows and pigs and horses, as
well as for poultry, might be purchased in this
economical manner.

In the early days of the Society it made
the mistake of allowing its members to bring
in their own eggs, instead of collecting them
systematically as it now does by the co-
operative van. Farmers and others would
often bring in eggs a week old, so that by the

144 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

time they were on the breakfast- table in town,
after passing through the hands of the whole-
sale and retail merchants, they would be
at least ten days old ; and during hay and
corn harvest, when the farmers could not spare
the time to bring the eggs in once a week,
and broody hens were perhaps allowed to sit
on the eggs for a week undisturbed, the results
were disastrous. That is to say, a large per-
centage of the eggs had to be returned as unfit
for the market, or were sold as " seconds," or
" cookers," at a reduced price.

Though now the Society has to pay for the
upkeep of a van to collect the eggs two or
three times a week within a radius of ten
miles, a saving in labour is effected in the
testing-room, and a higher average price is
maintained in the marketing.

Instead of getting 6d. or even 5d. a dozen
for their eggs at the cheapest time, the
members now never obtain less than 8d., as
well as the trading profit made in selling
them to large dairy companies at Is. a dozen.
Whilst the usual wholesale price in March
and April is quoted at lid. a dozen, any
restaurant -keeper should be willing to pay
Is. a dozen for guaranteed new-laid eggs.

A CO-OPERATIVE DEPOT. 145

In the winter, members will be getting
about Is. 8d. per dozen, plus the trading
profit, and the Society shrewdly pays members
a higher dividend on the eggs sent in during
the winter to discourage members from dis-
loyally making their own private bargains
when there is an insistent demand for eggs.
Moreover, in making contracts for the year,
if a dairy company wishes to have twenty
dozen a week in November, it has to agree to
take sixty dozen a week in April — that number
being the most economical quantity to send
by rail.

The eggs are packed in bottomless card-
board divisions, with wood-wool placed between
each layer inside a strongly made crate, which
is returnable. The Society makes these crates
for the outside trade.

It is the old method of weekly marketing
in distant parts of England which has given
the Calais egg, quickly collected and promptly
dispatched from Dover en route daily for
London, the precedence as a new-laid egg.
But at Street the Englishman beats the
Frenchman ; and at Street the Englishman
beats the Dane at the co-operative rearing
and fattening of table birds. The thing

10

146 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

which does handicap the British producer in
Somerset is the high railway rate for farm
produce to London. The railway companies
defend their tariffs on the ground that the
producers do not bulk their goods in the
same way as the continental peasants. How,
though, can they explain away the fact that
in Denmark the railway rates for small con-
signments are from five to seven times as
cheap as the rates charged by British railways ?

It has certainly not been an easy matter to
make poultry-keeping pay in Somersetshire.
The birds are kept on cold, damp clay of such
a nature that neither the Dorking nor the
Minorca will flourish on it. Eggs and birds
have to travel 133 miles to their largest market
— London — and low prices have ruled the
local market from time immemorial. So I
think it may be fairly said that, if co-
operative poultry-keeping pays in the heart
of Somersetshire, it might be made to succeed
in any English county if organised on a
thoroughly sound business basis.

At Street there has now sprung up a
race of poultry experts, not only inside the
premises of the Society, but also outside.
Egg-lore may be heard at every cottage door,

A CO-OPERATIVE DEPdT. 147

and the cottagers who keep birds are not by
any means typical tillers of the soil. Many
are boot operatives, others are skin -dressers
and mechanics.

By now they have learnt many things in the
art of poultry-keeping at Street. They take
good care, for instance, that their male stock
birds are either of the Sussex, Faverolle, or
Buff Orpington breed, producing plump,
white -legged chickens, whilst the scraggy-
legged Leghorns are penalised to the extent
of placing an embargo of a penny a pound
less for their flesh. They do not trouble
about whether the eggs are white or brown ;
nevertheless, it happens that the birds I have
mentioned conveniently lay brown eggs.

The Street poultry -keepers have learnt
too that the fox is their greatest enemy, and
a price of 5s. is placed on every fox's head,
which shows that the people here are not
among those who imagine that the British
Empire is dependent on fox-hunting for its
unique place among European nations.

The secretary of the Society, Mr. William
Reynolds, after ten or twelve years' experience
with every breed of fowl, has come to the
conclusion that the two best all-round breeds

148 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

for the table and for eggs are the Buff
Orpington and the Faverolle ; and he practises
what he preaches, for on his own little farm lie
runs hens of these two breeds, every one of
which is religiously trap-nested when it lays.

It is remarkable that, though there are
over two hundred poultry-keeping members
of the Society, there is not a single poultry-
farmer, pure and simple, in Street. The Street
man is far too shrewd to regard poultry as
anything but a side line. He never develops
from the poultry-keeper to the poultry-farmer.

That a co-operative poultry society can be
started with very little capital is exemplified
by the history of the Street Society. The
share capital at the beginning stood at
£44 : 12 : 10. Now, even with its large turn-
over, the capital is only £534 : 17 : 6|. The
capital required by the individual member is
only 7s. 7d. The 7d. is for a rubber stamp
for marking eggs, 2s. for entrance fee, and 5s.
for one share.

It has been a debatable point whether the
members of the Co-operative Society as poultry-
keepers at home succeed in making this side
industry pay. We know very well that as
members of a collective organisation, as

A CO-OPERATIVE DEPOT. 149

rearers, fatteners, and marketers of eggs, they
do make a profit. We can see this from the
published accounts of the Society. But as
individual poultry-keepers, do they make birds
pay by selling their eggs and chickens to the
Society ? It is very difficult to get properly
kept accounts from the members. I am
satisfied, however, after interviewing several
of them, that poultry-keeping does pay, and
it sometimes pays in an unlooked-for way.

A member told me that he ran a number
of birds on three acres of land, accumulating
a great deal of poultry manure, which he
carefully stored. He bought a field of eight
acres, which had been rented at £8 an acre.
He then bought for a small sum many loads
of roadside scrapings, which he mixed with the
poultry manure, giving his field a dressing
with this mixture. The first year he took a
heavy crop of hay off this meadow, and the
next year he let it to a farmer for 30s. an acre,
thus adding, he contends, a capital value of
£100 to his investment.

The Street Society has not, I am glad to
say, been content to rest on its oars as an
isolated successful society. It has taken a
leading part in the formation of the British

150 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Poultry Federation, into which has been
merged the National Poultry Organisation.
It was obvious to all intelligent poultry-
keepers that it would be fatal to success to
have each poultry society competing against
the others in various parts of the country for
large contracts. By federating and keeping a
record at some central office, the affiliated
societies prevent large dairy companies from
playing off one society against another. This
is a step in the right direction towards the
complete and effective organisation of our
national poultry industry.

The Street Society has still two strongholds
to conquer before it can be assured of an
abiding success. One is the railway company,
and the other is the market-place in which
the producer can hand over his wares to the
consumer over the municipal counter.

The Wholesale and Distributive Co-
operative Societies on their part should identify
themselves more thoroughly than they do with
co-operative farm production. It should be as
natural as the dawn following the night, for
the co-operative store to buy their eggs and
their poultry from a Co-operative Poultry and
Egg-Supplying Society. But the trading

A CO-OPERATIVE DEPOT. 151

co-operative societies do not seem to do this,
and even the local Co-operative Store at Street
was not, on the occasion of my visit, a
customer of the Poultry Depot.

Though there are signs of comparative
prosperity in the immediate neighbourhood of
Street, when once you get outside the sphere
of urban fellowship, life is lived here at a low
ebb. Wages are low, and many of the
cottages dotted about the Polden Hills and
Sedgemoor are unfit for human habitation.
Tubercular bacilli seems to have a permanent
home in many of them. The lias stone,
suitable as it is for the flooring of pigsties, is
hardly good enough with which to pave the
living-room of a human being. Rheumatism
and consumption are the rule and not the
exception, but it is not altogether to the paved
floors that this disease is traceable. The great
cause for consumption here is the lack of good,
nourishing food for the children of the
cottagers, for which the parents cannot be
blamed. It is the direct result of low wages.

So deeply rooted is consumption here,
and so alarmingly universal, that a local
association has introduced lady doctors and
outdoor shelters, which can be hired. It

152 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

seemed to me, though, that the surest way
to root it out would be to make conflagration
of all the old cottages, build new ones,
and institute, as recently suggested by the
Saturday Review, a minimum wage which
shall ensure parents the opportunity to feed
their children with wholesome and nourishing
food.

Much might be done throughout this dis-
trict from Glastonbury to Bridgwater to knit
together the various small holdings societies,
and by co-operative effort institute a service by
motor and steamboat to Cardiff. The land
on the southern slopes of the Polden Hills is to
a large extent land which is merely marking
time. Why not plant it with fruit-trees ? I
say this advisedly, for until the yeomen of
Somerset plough and begin to plant I do
not see that great progress can be made in
the small holding movement.

Though the Somersetshire County Council
are progressive, the tendency hitherto has
been for the County Council to select among
the applicants for land the publican, the
wheelwright, the blacksmith, the village grocer,
butcher, bootmaker, or baker who wants a
meadow to turn out his pony, cow, or pig,

A CO-OPERATIVE DEP6T. 153

rather than the agricultural labourer. I do
not blame the County Council for this, for it is
natural to the Council to select men who have
sufficient capital with which to stock the land.
Here the labourer has not yet come into his
own. It is not like Evesham, where a man
practically has only to buy a spade or a fork,
and perhaps a few loads of manure, when he
makes a start. Here it is a matter of buying
a cow, or other live-stock equivalent to its
value. And it is evident that we are not going
to get very much farther with agricultural
production if the grass-fields of Somerset are
to be used only as accommodation land on
which to turn out a pony or graze a few sheep.
Grass-land must either be more heavily stocked
or else given over to those who have literally
put their hands to the plough.

CHAPTER IX.

THE ISLANDS OF INTENSIVE CULTURE.

It is Great Britain's most southern island that
should be the small holder's paradise, the
island which, according to Jerseymen, annexed
the larger island of England by conquest and
so built up the British Empire.

Nature has been kind to this island set in a
sapphire sea, for though the soil is not naturally
very fertile it slopes gently from north to
south ; frost visits it but seldom, and the sea
yields up to its shores an abundance of good
manure which can be had for the labour of
picking up and carting. This ocean weed
is ploughed in as we plough in green manure.

It is a striking fact that only six farms on
the island are above the English statutory
fifty-acre small holding. The whole area of
the island is only 27,717 acres, which is less than

154

ISLANDS OF CULTURE. 155

one-third of the smallest English county.
Yet it produces enough food to feed a nation.
In one year its exports in potatoes alone
amounted to 53,100 tons, which were valued
on the quay of St. Helier at £356,305.

Still more striking is what this island can
accomplish in stock-keeping. The cultivated
area of Jersey is 19,171 acres, and as the Jersey
farmer is a good husbandman, only 3000 of this
is allowed to remain permanent pasture.
The low - lying rich meadow - land only is
allowed to remain as grass-land, and if you
deduct from the arable land the acreage which
does not produce food for cattle, but produces
potatoes and tomatoes for human consump-
tion, I estimate that the 11,000 cattle in
Jersey are kept on less than an acre to a cow,
for besides this head of cattle to maintain,
there are some 2400 horses, and 5000 pigs as
well.

Yet in England we farm on the principle
that it is necessary to have three acres of
land in order to keep one cow !

I have said that Jersey should be the
paradise for small holders. Unfortunately,
however, whilst Nature is kind, the economic
arrangements of man are vile. The two

156 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

railway companies, which monopolise the
export carrying trade to England, dictate the
terms under which Jersey produce shall be
taken to its chief market. Then the salesman,
whether he is on the quay of St. Helier or at
his stall in Covent Garden, dictates the prices
at which the produce of the island shall be
sold ; and the landlord, in giving the last turn
to the economic screw, leaves the cultivator
of the soil squeezed of everything but a bare
subsistence. In spite of all this, his labours
ha\^e been prodigious.

Rents seem to average about £10 an acre,
and I was pointed out one field, a very early
potato site, which could command a rent of
£30 an acre. Those who see a Utopia in
peasant proprietorship should go to Jersey to
be disillusioned, for even in this tiny island
you get the owners of early or urban sites
living a life of idleness on the rents accruing
from land on which their grandfathers worked
honestly with all their might.

I came across one farmer who told me that
it cost him £16 a vergee (two and a quarter
vergees to the acre) for the growth of a crop
of potatoes which realised for him only £14.
A loss on potatoes is serious, for, as a miller

ISLANDS OF CULTURE. 157

remarked to me, " Potatoes come first in the
mind of the Jersey man — even before his daily
prayers." Of course, the Jersey farmer is
somewhat to blame, for co-operative effort
seems to be such an easy thing to accomplish
on a small island. Yet none is attempted, and
neighbour goes on pitting his skill against
neighbour, much to the advantage of the sales-
man and to the loss of the farmer.

Yet in stock-keeping an element of collective
enterprise was introduced into the island some
time ago, and this has been of incalculable
benefit to the Jersey cattle-owner. There is
not that tremendous risk in stocking a farm in
Jersey which besets the farmer in England :
the risk of buying thoroughly bad milkers
though they carry big udders and lean necks.
Failure is sure to dog the footsteps of the
small dairy farmer in England who begins
business with two or three poor milkers bought
at a sale or a market-place where nothing is
known of the cows.

Now in Jersey every one attempts to get
his cows entered into the Jersey Herd Book,
and the absence of a cow from this book means
that she has defective qualities. Bad udders,
or even a weak quarter, will disqualify a cow.

158 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Examinations take place several times in the
year in the presence of several judges, and no
bull is looked at without its dam. The natural
result of years of selection is the maintenance
of a very high standard in cows in the island
and the elimination of what is so common in
England — the tuberculous cow.

These pretty creatures are treated with
much affection by their owners, and many of
them are housed at night even in midsummer ;
not altogether, though, because a storm might
be brewing, but because the owner is afraid
that the cow might be milked by some fugitive
hand during the night : a fact which indicates
that simplicity is not always a striking quality
in those who pursue the simple life.

So kind is the climate here that it is interest-
ing to watch how, as the cows are being moved
daily (sometimes two or three times a day)
to a fresh pitch by means of a tethering pin
and chain, the grass begins to grow again at
one end of the field as the cows are moving
towards the other end. But then the Jersey
farmer does not leave everything to Nature.
He treasures every drop of liquid manure
which drains from the cow-stalls into acemented
tank, fills an old oil-barrel with it, mounts

ISLANDS OF CULTURE. 159

that upon a lorry cart, and lets the liquid
manure drip through a trough pierced with
holes on to the pasture already grazed.

Sometimes, so quick is the growth of
vegetation in the summer on well-favoured
sites, that one potato crop is followed by
another, but more often by tomatoes, roots,
or seeds. Strawberries and grapes are grown
to a certain extent, and when the former drop
to 2d. a pound a grower told me they ceased
to pay.

It is well for the stock-keeper that Nature
is kind, for with rents from five to ten times
greater than in England, with feeding stuffs
more expensive, and the price of milk and butter
no higher, the cows of the Jersey farmer would
have to be exceptionally good to pay for the
rent of the land on which thev graze.

He sets little store by meadow hay. Why
should he ? for the grass is growing nearly all
the year round, and large hay crops are taken
from "seeds" — grass and clover. Straw,
though, has to be imported and paid for at the
high rate of £3 a ton, and the Jersey farmer
seems to spend a good deal on artificial manures,
as well as on the purchase of bran, cake, and
oats, which, of course, have to be imported. It

160 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

is a significant fact that whilst Jersey exports
to England 1000 cows annually, to Denmark
nearly the same number, and to the United
States about 500, she forbids the landing of
any cattle on her shores unless they are killed
first in the harbour.

When potato-digging begins, the Breton
peasant comes across to earn some ready
money. Sometimes he stays altogether, takes
a farm, and contents himself with smaller
profits than the Jerseyman is accustomed to,
and thus it comes about that in spite of racial
and linguistic ties the Frenchman is not beloved
by the Jerseyman.

Frenchmen are said to be quickly learning
the Jersey methods of cultivating potatoes,
and when they return to their own country,
where land is cheaper, become serious com-
petitors in this market. Fortunately though,
there is a marked tendency now towards the
early potato crop of Brittany and Normandy
being consigned to the increasing population
of French manufacturing towns.

It is in the sister isle of Guernsey that
agricultural conditions become merged into
the horticultural. Indeed, in both islands it is
difficult to get away, as you tread the asphalt

ISLANDS OF CULTURE. 161

paths from one sea border to the other, from
the feeling that you are treading the streets,
lighted by lamps, of some respectable London
suburb, where small nursery gardens, and the
paddocks of the well-to-do who keep a Jersey
cow or two, flank the roadside.

On a sunny day Guernsey, viewed from a
steamer, sparkles like a huge diamond set in a
sapphire sea. It is a place that approximates
very closely to the cultural conditions aimed
at by Prince Kropotkin in his fascinating book.
Fields, Factories, and Workshops. To me
personally, an island covered by glass-houses
makes no appeal, either industrially or aesthetic-
ally. It is certainly not life in the open air ;
and it gives one the feeling that this is factory
life under a subtle mask.

Guernsey slopes to the north and not to
the south, as does Jersey, and frosts are more
common here than in the sister isle ; this, I
suppose, is why this island took to covering
itself with an armour which gave it a better
chance when it entered the lists in the com-
petitive struggle.

Of 11,357 acres of cultivated land, in-
cluding Alderney and Sark, there are over

0000 acres of holdings of over one acre

11

162 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

under glass. Besides these, there are a
number of holdings of less than one acre
owned by working men who have erected their
dwelling-house and their glass-house on their
patch of land, not accounted for in these
statistics. Whilst Jersey has only six farms
of over 50 acres, Guernsey boasts of only seven.
In a nursery garden of 13 acres covered with
glass, it is said that as much is produced
as on an English farm of 1300 acres of land.
The average size of a holding seems to be
about 5 acres, and the usual crops grown
are grapes, tomatoes, melons, peas, and beans.
Broccoli has been one of the most profitable
crops in Guernsey.

But it is clear that room must be left on
the island for the live-stock — they can hardly
live under glass-houses ; and so we find that
about 6761 of the famous Guernsey cattle,
1600 horses, and over 4000 pigs are kept on
the remaining 5000 acres.

When I was there I did not hear very good
accounts of the financial aspects of these rows
of glass-houses, for the same disadvantageous
economic conditions hemmed in the Guernsey-
man as the Jerseyman. It is a curious re-
flection that an island close to the French

ISLANDS OF CULTURE. 163

coast, and accessible only by steamer and
rail from our large manufacturing towns,
should have been chosen as a site for the
erection of multitudinous glass-houses, all the
material for which would have to be imported
and set up on land of high economic value, and
from whence the produce would have to be
exported to England by monopolistic ship and
railway owners. Furthermore, all the coal for
heating the houses has to be imported.

But the Guernseyman has apparently the
faculty for doing things more economically
than the Englishman. It is the financial
glory of Guernsey that it built a market-place
without incurring any charge upon the rate-
payer. The fascinating story of how the
States of Guernsey built their Market-house
by means of non-interest bearing notes might
appositely be outlined here.

After the Napoleonic wars Guernsey was
in a bad way financially. Smuggling had
ceased to be an important home industry.
Employment was scarce on the island, so
much so that 500 Guernsey men left for the
United States. The sea had encroached and
engulfed a great piece of land through the
lack of embankments and sea-walls. Added

164 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

to all this, internal trade was badly hampered
by the inadequacy of its market-place and
the condition of the roads, the principal
thoroughfare from the country to the harbour
being only seven feet wide. The States of
Guernsey found it impossible to levy fresh
taxes, beyond Is. a gallon for spirituous
liquors. How, then, were they to introduce
pressing reforms without incurring a large
debt which would be saddled upon the people
of Guernsey for ever afterwards ?

It was the Bailiff, Daniel de Lisle Brock,
who seems to have been the inspired genius
of the scheme of issuing non-interest bearing
notes, and the states agreed to let the Market-
house be built, as it were, by paper, or shall
we say, by credit.

Let me give the Bailiffs own words, in his
Billet diktat of 1827: "An individual with
an income of £9000, who spends only half of
it, wishes to build a house at the cost of
£13,000. He therefore makes an arrange-
ment with his timber- merchant, his mason,
and his carpenter and others, to pay them
out of his savings, so that they shall receive a
part each year for five years. Can it be said
that he is contracting debts ? Will he not

ISLANDS OF CULTURE. 165

have at the end of the five years both his
house and his original income of £9000 ?

"The States are in precisely the same
position as regards the £13,000 which they
have to pay out of their income during the
five years included in the same table. This
sum will be paid in instalments of £2600 per
annum, with as much ease as were much
heavier engagements in 1826 and 1827.

"The time has passed when the public
could be frightened by exaggerated reports
about the debt ; most complete publicity
keeps every one acquainted with the real state
of affairs. My greatest wish is that nothing
should be hidden."

The notes issued for the Market amounted
altogether to £11,296, which were all eventu-
ally cashed to bearers out of the liquor duties
and the rents derived from the butchers' shops
inside the Market-house. A bonfire seems to
have been made every six months for the
destruction of these notes. The public, that
is, the contractors and the workmen who
were building the Market-house, as well as
the ratepayers, seem to have entered into the
scheme with zest, and the States notes, instead
of being taken shyly in payment of wages and

166 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

material, were grasped with the same avidity
as a dealer will grasp a £5 Bank of England
note.

Not only was the Market-house built in
this manner, but also the embankments were
thus erected to keep out the sea ; old houses
were pulled down, and street improvements
made, and altogether 80,000 States notes
were issued in twenty years.

Then came the insidious influence of the
private banks, which effectually stopped the
further issue of notes, to the lasting hurt of
the citizens of Guernsey, who were getting
all their public improvements made without
paying interest. Yet so highly regarded were
these notes that even to-day there are £40,000
of paper money still in circulation in the
island and used as coin of the Realm.

Would that we could get our municipal
debts contracted in this simple way. Then
the small holder would not have long to wait
for his market-places 1

CHAPTER X.

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND.

There is no need for the Englishman in
search for a rural plan of campaign to be
continually running over to Denmark. I do
not think that it is insular pride that makes
me begin to resent the tyranny of the Dane
in matters agricultural in our own country,
but the knowledge that the Danish farmer,
backed up by a good deal of capital, has put
his hand to the plough in Sussex, in Lincoln-
shire, in Oxfordshire, only to look regretfully
back to the country he understood better.

The Dane, in fact, has been rather over-
done. He has been so often hurled at our
heads as the model ploughboy to imitate, that
we begin rather to dislike and even to suspect
him. Indeed, a Danish friend has informed
me that the Danish farmer has been seriously

167

168 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

disturbed by the question put bluntly by a
writer of his own country : " Is the game
worth the candle ? " That is, the game of
sending the best butter, bacon, and eggs to
England, and eating instead margarine and
fat Chicago bacon. As the prices of imported
feeding-stuffs have steadily risen in Denmark
the price obtained for the butter has fallen.

Some time ago I visited a large farm
managed by Danes in an English county, and
said to be run on Danish lines. Apart from
the delightfully furnished office, which might
have been a Cook's Tourist Office in Piccadilly,
leading out into the yard, I was not very
much impressed by the imported Danish
methods.

The all-round, utility waggon, adaptable
for all farm purposes from carrying manure
to carrying two tons of hay, and the light
harness, attracted my attention chiefly ; but
somehow the factory bell, sounded in the early
morning, at the dinner hour, and in the late
afternoon, seemed to strike a discordant note
in the quiet English landscape. It is not as
conducive to prayer as the Irish Angelus
stealing over an Irish bog. The sudden
tuning u p of the English rustic to foreign

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 169

methods lias led, as I expected, to shirking
when the farmer's back is turned ; and the
attempt to work a farm with the labour of
old soldiers and sailors has proved futile.

I would rather go to Ireland for lessons
for the English, excepting always for lessons
as to how land should pass from one race of
landlords to another. We do not want a
repetition of Land Acts which have made
litigation rife in a country too prone to go
to law.

Englishmen, who have obtained a picture of
Irishmen from the comic characters in plays,
or from the sentimental songs of Thomas
Moore, are all adrift as to the qualities which
go towards the making of a typical Irishman.
To some, Irishmen are mystical dreamers, but
to Mr. Bernard Shaw they are the most
practical race on earth. Our Puritanical
training, however, makes us distrust the
aphorisms of wits. Yet, Sir Horace Plunkett,
who possesses to a large extent the Irish
genius for organisation, says that in Ireland
"a bull, a boat, or a hand-loom is more readily
appreciated than a professor, a leaflet, or an
idea." In political organisation, of course, the
Irishman gives the Englishman a long lead,

170 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

and only in Ireland could you find such a
juxtaposition of interests as in the editor of
the Irish Homestead (the official organ of
the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society),
Mr. George Russell, the well-known painter,
and the " A.E." of Irish mystical poetry.

The recent census returns show us that
whilst the population of Ireland decreased in
1881 and 1891 91 per cent, by 1901 it had
decreased 5 2 per cent ; by 1911 it had decreased
only 1*7 per cent.

One province, namely, Leinster, actually
showed an increase of 499 in 1911. This
check in emigration may be attributed to
two causes — the re-settlement of the Irish
farmer on the land that he has farmed, or
on land which has previously been grazed by
bullocks, and the building of cheap cottages
with an acre of land attached for the Irish
labourer.

The forces which have operated to keep
many thousands of Irishmen from becoming-
citizens of the United States have been the
formation of the Congested Districts Board, the
County Councils, the Agricultural Organisa-
tion Society, and above all the Department
of Agriculture for Ireland, which owes its

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 171

inception to Sir Horace Plunkett, who be-
came its first vice-president.

The Department owes nothing to West-
minster either in the way of its creation or in its
personnel, which is thoroughly representative
of Irish life. The difference between the Irish
Department and the English Board of Agri-
culture is striking. One is in daily touch with
the Irish farmer, whether he lives in Conne-
mara or County Down, and the other is as
aloof from the life of the tiller of the soil as
the gods of Olympus from the helots of Sparta.

The Department is governed by a Council
of Agriculture consisting of two members
appointed by each county council (Cork being
regarded as two counties and returning two
members) making in all sixty-eight persons.
The Department also appoints one half of this
number of persons, observing in its nomina-
tion the same provincial proportion as obtained
in the appointments by the popular bodies.
This adds thirty -four members, and makes
in all one hundred and two councillors, in
addition to the president (who is the Chief
Secretary) and the vice-president, who are
ex-officio members. The Council of Agri-
culture is thus composed of many men who

172 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

have intimate knowledge of the hardships
attending the life of the tiller of the soil— a
life alien to those few officials who form
the English Board of Agriculture.

In an office in Upper Merrion Street
hangs a map close to the desk occupied by
Professor Campbell, the assistant secretary
of the Department which gives one an
informative picture of one feature of the
Departments work. This map is studded
with pins showing the whereabouts of the
numerous stallions provided by the De-
partment to improve the breed of horses
used by the farmers. There is also another
map showing the farms on which are kept
the bulls and boars sent out to improve the
breeds of Irish cattle and pigs ; but so thick
are these pins upon the ground, so to speak,
that little can be seen of the physiography of
the Emerald Isle.

When 1 expressed my admiration of this
map to Mr. Campbell, he said to me, " But
remember you have come to the worst
country in the world to see successful hold-
ings. Out of 600,000 small holdings there are
200,000 scheduled as uneconomic, of which the
occupiers are just beginning to be lifted out

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 173

of a life of wretchedness by what our critics
are pleased to call a spoon-fed policy." This
statement, however, only added interest to
my visit, for 75 per cent of the population
of Ireland are dependent on what they can
wrest from the soil for their daily bread, and
of these 75 per cent occupy holdings of less
than 30 acres in extent.

Here indeed we are witnessing the making
of a new Ireland out of conditions worse than
those which obtained in Denmark before she
inaugurated her bold agricultural state policy.
Out of the seething pot of Irish politics has
emerged a new life.

Just outside Dublin stands a factory for
the polishing of the human machinery which
forms the refining element in the agricultural
revolution. This is the Glasnevin Agri-
cultural College, where a young Irish farmer
can, at a cost of £15, obtain for a term of
eleven months a practical education in agricul-
ture, horticulture, and dairy farming ; and
this small sum not only includes tuition, but
board and lodging, as well as laundry and
medical attendance.

In England, even with grants from county
councils, the fees of one of our agricultural

174 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

colleges are rarely less than £60 or £70,
rising to £120 or more. There is, indeed, no
agricultural college in England where the fees
are low enough, as in Denmark and Ireland,
to admit without a scholarship the son of the
poor farmer or the small holder, let alone the
agricultural labourer.

The difference between the mental alertness
of the Irish jarvie and the London cabman
was brought home to me as I drove on an
outside car to Glasnevin College. The jarvie
discussed the merits or demerits of the two
vice-presidents of the Board of Agriculture,
and especially as to their knowledge of horses,
in a way that one would never dream of
hearing from the lips of a London cabman.
Moreover, during the time he waited for
me outside the College, he had thoroughly
mastered the contents of an article of mine
which had just appeared in a magazine that I
had left lying on the seat of the car.

This incident was to me illuminating, as it
immediately indicated the world of difference
I should find between the Connaught peasant
and the Sussex labourer. Among the bogs of
Mayo you will find tattered peasants fervently
discussing albuminoid ratios, and percentages

JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND. 175

of soluble phosphates, with the zeal dis-
played when discussing the acts of piety of
St. Patrick.

At the College, not only are there sons of
small farmers training to become better agri-
culturists than their fathers, but also the
future agricultural instructors who shall in due
course work under the Department or the
County Council. It was charming, too, to find
a retired army officer taking lessons in modern
agriculture, so that he may become a land-
owner with some knowledge of the qualities
of land, and impart this acquired knowledge
to his tenants in return for taking rents from
them.

At Glasnevin are bred many of those fine
young pedigree bulls which are placed in
distant parts of the country for the improvement
of Irish cattle. I saw one worth quite £300 on
its way to Limerick. It will be kept there by
some small farmer who will be given £15 for
its keep, and he will have to let any farmer in
his district have the use of it for the sum of Is.
In England the customary service fee for a
third-class bull is 5s. It is not necessary to
go over to Ireland to witness the marked
improvement in Irish cattle. In most of our

176 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

large English markets and fairs Irish cattle
have in the past been treated with scorn.
They are now sought after eagerly by English
farmers. We import from Ireland twice the
number of cattle that we do from all other
colonies put together.

Bred here too are those large white York-
shire boars, which are eliminating the strain of
undersized mottled pigs met with so frequently
in the west country. "The gintleman who
pays the rint " is now better coated and more
imposing in appearance than he used to be.

A boar will be sent to a farmer and kept
by him for a sum varying from £3 to £5 a year,
and the sows in the district are served for the
fee of Is.

Perhaps the most striking difference in Irish
live-stock is in the ass, which is the poor man's
horse, especially in the West. By importing
donkeys from Spain, the Irish ass now met
with in many parts of the country is a much
more serviceable animal than the small native-
bred one.

Trap-nesting too is in vogue in Glasnevin,
and by means of this ingenious contrivance
strains of good laying hens are bred and sent
into the country to propagate their breed.

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 177

The plan adopted for establishing poultry-
stations is to forward to some congested district
thirty hens with three cocks of a laying strain
to a farmer and his wife, and a gratuity of £o
a year is awarded to the farmer, who in return
is obliged to sell at least seventy sittings to the
local farmers at Is. a sitting.

I notice in looking at the agricultural
returns of Great Britain that Ireland now
exports to England eggs realising a larger
sum of money than either Russia or Denmark.
An extract from the last annual Report of
the Kings County Committee of Agriculture
shows how Irishmen are beginning to be alive
to the importance of co-operative marketing
of poultry as well as of butter. " The poultry
industry is looked down upon," runs the
Report ; " yet from Garry castle district alone
800 boxes of fattened poultry were dispatched
to the London market during the last three
years. The average price received was 7s. 9d.
per pair. Deducting Is. 8d. as the cost of
fattening each pair and the cost of carriage to
London, the net average receipt per pair was
6s. Id. The average price of chickens in the
district during the same period was 3s. 3d., a
clear gain of 2s. lOd. on 2400 pairs, which

12

178 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

meant increased money in circulation in the
district to the extent of £340. £340 of profit
in a brief period in one district as a result of
one scheme's co-operation ! At the present
time it needs only organisation and the con-
sequent solving of the transit question to
multiply ten times over the profits derived
from the poultry industry."

Mr. T. W. Russell, the Vice-President of
the Department, announced at the Poultry
Conference held in Dublin in 1911 that there
had been an increase of precisely one million
sterling since 1904 in eggs and poultry in
Ireland : an increase attributed to the adoption
of co-operation.

Fruit culture is taught on the latest scientific
principles at Glasnevin, and now there are
over a hundred fruit stations established in
Ireland, where fruit culture is still in its infancy.
One of the wisest things, perhaps, that the
college authorities have done is to lay out the
beautifully kept fruit plantation at Glasnevin,
for it appears to me that the Irish farmer
knows far less about scientific fruit-growing
than of the growing of farm crops and the
rearing of live-stock. The English farmer
is, as we know, traditionally a bad gardener,

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 179

but he, at any rate, does not expect to see the
sow rooting up his kitchen garden or his hens
scratching up the flower garden, which proceed-
ings the Irish farmer appears to regard with
the utmost complacency. It forms, indeed, an
ordinary operation in garden tillage.

It is the universal use of the plough where-
in lies the economic hope of this pastoral
country. The same instinct which impelled
the English labourer to smash up agricultural
machinery in the early part of the nineteenth
century, drove the Irish peasant to clear
cattle off the land wherever he felt blue
smoke from his own hearth should be seen
arising.

Yet while Hodge is receptive of only one
idea at a time, and is swayed by but one
sentiment, Patrick seems filled with warring
contradictions. " They are the merriest
people and the saddest, the most turbulent
and the most docile, the most talented and
the most unproductive, the most practical
and the most visionary, the most devout and
the most pagan," wrote the late Harold
Frederic in his splendid work of fiction,
Illumination.

I arrived in Roscommon just after a cattle-

180 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

drive, and whilst " the merriest people " painted
in the night a certain large grazier's cattle blue,
and drove them many miles across the bogs,
" the saddest " wailed over lost days spent in
unproductive labour. There is that inherent
love of sport in the Irishman which will make
him deny himself bread in order to paint a great
grazier's cows blue, and I am convinced that
it is the exercise of this sporting instinct in
practical matters which makes the Irishman
at times a bad business man.

A great deal of farming in years gone by
consisted in the sterile game of passing cattle
and pigs from one hand to another, each farmer
hoping to make something out of the " deal " ;
and it is plain even to those who are ignorant
of political economy that this kind of unpro-
ductive labour must keep the farmers, as a
class, poor. When the creameries were first
instituted, and contracts had to be made with
English butter merchants, the same sporting
instinct drove the creamery secretaries to try
to drive bargains with stolid, phlegmatic British
butter merchants. The Irish farmer thought
that by startingto ask an exorbitant price, asthey
had traditionally done with their cattle, they
could always come down ; but unfortunately

JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND. 181

for the creameries, the coming down invariably
resulted in a brief but conclusive negative on
the part of the English butter merchant, who
had no time for commercial pleasantries.

The bartering away of a daughter for a pig,
a calf, or a heifer, with the priest as auctioneer
in the matrimonial market, throws, I admit,
an ugly side-light on the practical side of the
Irish character, but my own experience leads
me to have only pleasant feelings toward the
unfailing courtesy and generosity of the Irish
people.

In England, especially around the district
dominated by a large and wealthy country
house, or near towns where the rich merchant
sets up his mansion, one can hardly get a gate
opened or be directed on one's way without
giving the looked for "tip" of the price of a
" pint." Now I travelled over the wildest and
poorest parts of Ireland with my camera, and I
was warned by an Irish doctor not to insult
the Irish peasant, however poor he might be,
with a tip for any service performed ; and on
the only occasion that I did insult an Irish
peasant — which, by the way, was at the point
nearest to England — Waterford — I received a
well-deserved rebuke.

182 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

The peasant, with a tattered coat and a
battered-in hat, was driving a herd of swine
for transportation to England. On the quay
at Waterford I asked him to oblige me by
driving the swine out of the shade into the
sunshine. This took a good deal of manoeuvr-
ing on his part, and after I had taken the
photograph and shut up the camera, I ran
after him and cried out, " Here's a drink." He
turned round to me, and waving his stick
shouted, " No ! no ! can't we do that one for
the other, now ? " In this graceful manner
did he bring me into line with the great
brotherhood of those who toil.

Their desire to play being nearly always
stronger than their desire to make money was
borne in upon me as I stood in the market-
place of Castlereagh photographing a big
cross-bred Spanish-Irish donkey with a little
donkey of the old Irish breed by its side. An
amphitheatre was immediately formed, and
the entire business of the day was suspended
whilst witticisms were passed between the
owners of the donkeys and the crowd.

I must, however, draw a distinction between
the Irish peasant and the Irish bourgeoisie.
The ugly side of commercialism is strongly

JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND. 183

developed in the prosperous country shop-
keeper and publican, who, as the " gombeen-
man " or money-lender, has been responsible
for as much misery amongst the Irish people
as the landlord class, and unfortunately for
local government in Ireland this creature is
still to be met with on the seats of the
mighty. He is far too often the poor law
guardian, and so exercises publicly as well as
privately his tyrannical sway ; and if the
Congested Districts Board and the Depart-
ment for Agriculture had been called into
being for no other reason than to strike at the
domination of this despot, that alone would
have justified their existence.

The Credit Banks, formed by the State
Departments, are, I am thankful to say, now
reducing the power of the gombeen-man.
Instead of paying anything from 60 per cent
upwards (and the cost of several drinks) for
money borrowed to carry over a bad season,
or with which to buy a cow or a pig,
the Irish farmer can now borrow it at 3
per cent.1 The gombeen-man has generally

1 This low rate of interest unfortunately is only charged in
Congested Districts when the transaction takes place without the
intermediary of a Joint-Stock Bank.

184 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

obtained his security by getting a deed on the
land, and it is when failing to pay the interest
that many thousands of poor Irish farmers
have let their holdings slip into the hands of
the money-lender. I asked a nationalist who
was driving me round the Congested Districts
of Roscommon how it was that Captain
Moonlight had never shot the gombeen-man
as he has the landlord or his agent. "It is
because," came the response, " the farmers
think the gombeen-man has done them a
favour, however much he may rob them,
whilst the landlord has never done anything
for them," which I think again illustrates
Harold Frederic's dictum that they are " the
most turbulent " and yet " the most docile
people."

Though the gombeen-man as petty usurer
had had his wings clipped by Credit Banks,
Mr. George W. Russell struck a note of
warning in the Irish Review for June 1911
as to the probable rise over the border of a
race of small proprietors. " I know," says Mr.
Russell, " Socialism is the logical solution of
all difficulties, but there is no use talking
about it in Ireland. When the State decided
on turning tenants into proprietors it set up

JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND. 185

a barrier against socialism which will last, I
fancy, for a couple of hundred years yet, for
an Irish farmer would pour down boiling lead
on the emissaries of the State who tried to
nationalise his land, the land he sweated sixty
years to pay for. There is no fear of socialism
in Ireland. There are other and real dangers.
There is the danger that without a complete
reorganisation of the business methods in
rural Ireland it will step back gradually into
the old order with a new class of landlords.
There is the fear that Michael Mulligan,
gombeen-man, and his class will begin gradu-
ally to absorb the farmers as their tied
customers, and so create a new aristocracy.
Indeed, they are already doing this. The old
aristocracy swaggered royally to the devil.
They borrowed money at 60 per cent to
ruin themselves. The new aristocracy, whose
coming I dread, have been accustomed to lend
money at GO per cent to ruin others. I
prefer the former type, though I hope no one
will accuse me of unduly exalting it. I believe
the alternative habit is the more dangerous of
the two, and is less easily got rid of as a
family tradition."

In a congested district such as we find near

186 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Castlereagh we get " the most practical and
the most visionary of races " working out its
destiny by the aid of agricultural science and
organisation. The work of thinning out a
congested district is work in which comedy
and tragedy are closely interwoven ; it is a
process intensely Irish.

Where mud cabins are huddled together is
a farm which might not total more than six or
even four acres, consisting perhaps of a score
of isolated patches of land — recording, no
doubt, the passage of the greedy incisors of
the gombeen - man. From this wretched
holding, the nursery of a fiery patriotism, the
visionary in the old-time farmer, who wishes
to stay where his clan is, has to be overcome
by an appeal to his sense of the practical.
The surveyor will have to argue with him that
it is better for him to lose his old mud cabin
not worth £80, in order to inhabit a new
cottage worth £150 or £200 built on the thirty-
acre holding ready for him some miles away on
land which was recently grazed by the bullock
and the sheep. And when once the migrant
has been persuaded to leave his wretched
cabin and his uneconomic farm of isolated
patches of land, to take up abode in a new

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 187

settlement, he is not left there to starve as
we in England practically invite the English
small holder to do. Immediately, a loan from
the Credit Bank is granted him at 2J or 3 per
cent, the security for which, even in the Wild
West of Ireland, being taken on two personal
securities, is indicative that finance based on
the character of the untutored Irish peasant
is regarded as a greater gilt -edge security
than real property.

The payment for his new thirty-acre hold-
ing, including the cost of his cottage, covers
a term of sixty-six years at 3j per cent interest,
which amounts to an annual payment on the
average of £17 or £18 a year. That is, he
buys a house and thirty acres by the annual
payment of a sum less than half the English
small holder pays for rent.

Of course the land is very poor ; indeed
many an English small holder would scorn
to till land covered with stones so large
and plentiful that, as Mr. George Birming-
ham says in one of his novels, " It looks as
though when the Creator was riddling out
the earth over Europe He used to empty
out the sieve over Connaught." These stones
account for the long, narrow spades with which

188 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

the farmer clears the land before he can begin
to plant his potatoes. The stones are put
into heaps as one sees farmers in England pile
up the swedes in a field of roots. Then they
are carted away in a donkey-cart and used for
erecting field-walls.

The agricultural instructors, who spend
their whole time in teaching the farmers modern
methods, soon get them to quit using the spade
for making their lazy beds in which to plant
potatoes, and induce them instead to plough,
drawing drills for the tuber.

Very often the little patch of oats cultivated
on the old uneconomic holding, the one crop
which brings in ready money, has been
cultivated solely by the spade.

It is obvious that a poor peasant, though
able to borrow money from the Credit Bank,
would not find it profitable to keep two work-
ing horses on thirty acres, nor to buy the larger
and more expensive of the agricultural imple-
ments. He can, though, purchase one or two
implements and keep one horse, and so the
difficulty is overcome by neighbours co-operat-
ing in the ploughing or drilling in of seed :
the two single horses of two settlers being
harnessed together as a ploughing team, and

JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND. 189

in this way the small farmer works his land as
economically as the large farmer.

I think, however, the Department of the
Congested Districts Board, which has large
powers extending even to the equipment of
small holders with live-stock, should form a
depot for the storing of the larger up-to-date
agricultural machines, to be let out to farmers
at a fixed charge, high enough to save the
taxpayer from any burden. Implements would
then be kept with greater care and used more
methodically.

To find the exact sum needed for the equip-
ment of a thirty-acre farm, I got this list from
one farmer showing the payments made by
him amounted altogether to £200.

Cost of Equipment and Stock

8 Cows at £15 .

£45

0

0

6 Two-year-old Cattle . ,

60

0

0

6 Calves

7

10

0

4 Store Pigs

4

0

0

12 Hens

1

16

0

Cart ....

6

10

0

Donkey-cart and Harness

6

0

0

Harrow

2

0

u

Drill ....

2

0

0

Carry forward

£134

16

0

190 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Brought forward .

£134 16

0

Working Horse .

16 0

0

10 Ewes

17 10

0

Sow in Pig .

5 0

0

Donkey

1 10

0

5 Sittings of Eggs

0 5

0

Harness

3 0

0

Plough .

4 0

0

Roller.

4 0

0

Manure, Seeds, etc.

13 19

0

£200 0

0

The importance of tillage in the regenera-
tion of Ireland cannot be over-emphasised. I
will not dwell on the question of land owner-
ship, for enough has been written on that point
already by hundreds of politicians. It is
sufficient for the moment that we are com-
mitted to a certain land policy, which forfend
we should ever imitate in England ! I have
been repeatedly told that every Irishman, as
well as every Englishman, has a strong senti-
mental feeling about owning a patch of his
native land ; but when it comes to assuring
to the tiller of the soil security of tenure,
I find that the sentiment of the Irishman
is assimilated to that of most English-
men : with fixity of tenure at a fair rent he
remains content.

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 191

What every migrant wants is not so much
a parchment deed entitling him to the sole
ownership of a holding as to know the extent
of his annual payment. What, however,
we English do envy in the Irish is the
organising capacity of their State officials, the
enthusiasm and humanity of their instructors
and surveyors, and the assistance given by the
State in the equipment and stocking of hold-
ings, and the domestic and agricultural educa-
tion afforded to peasant girls. The spoon-fed
policy, indeed, has been as successful in
producing in Ireland a new race of inde-
pendent-minded, alert, scientifically trained
agriculturists, as a similar policy pursued in
Denmark and Hungary has produced splendid
results in those countries.

Whilst there were large graziers, in place
of small farmers tilling the soil ; whilst there
were small farmers haggling with one another
over their cattle and pigs, instead of labouring
productively ; whilst there was an entire lack
of co-operative production and marketing,
Ireland was doomed to become a depopulated
island.

The two problems which absorbed the
attention of Irish agricultural reformers

192 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

were : (1) how the farmer was to make better
use of his land ; and (2), when that was accom-
plished, how he was to market the produce to
better advantage.

When the history of the New Ireland
comes to be written, it will be shown how the
solution of the second of these problems took
precedence over the first. To stimulate
the Irish farmer to greater industrial activity
it was natural enough that he should be
shown how to market to advantage what he
had already produced before he could be asked
to produce more. That is a lesson which rural
educationists, and all who are eager to revive
country life, have yet to learn in England.

The Honourable Horace Plunkett, a poor
speaker, a member of the suspected landlord
class, the brother of a lord, and a Protestant,
first took the field in 1889. What he asked
the Irish farmers to do was to help themselves
by forming agricultural co-operative societies.
Regarded with suspicion by priests and
nationalist leaders alike, Mr. Plunkett (now Sir
Horace) seemed to have set himself an almost
superhuman task. Sometimes his meeting
consisted solely of the village schoolmaster and
the parish priest — impelled by curiosity — and

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 193

perhaps a travelling companion. Often his
meeting took place in an open field with the
sky for a roof. Fifty meetings were held
before a single society was formed. And then,
all of a sudden, in that dramatic way peculiar
to Ireland, the fiat went forth that the proposals
he made were certainly practical. The business
side of the Irishman became convinced, but
what helped Sir Horace Plunkett more than
anything else was that he roused the social
instinct of the clan-loving Celt, making him
respond to the feeling that he was doing
something for the good of his clan, or the
race, as well as something for his own
individual good. And this is where we
Englishmen are woefully lacking. We are
self-destructively individualistic.

The more broad-minded priests began to
see that their parishioners might be lifted out
of their slough of poverty, and once the priest
really took up the co-operative agricultural
organisation — and none is more active to-day
than Father Tom Finlay, S.J. — its success was
assured.

After Mass the parish priest would an-
nounce to his flock that a meeting would be
held. At the same time he would strongly

13

194 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

urge, and even order, the men to attend ; and
he himself would frequently take the chair.

" Where are ye going, Michael O'Flanagan?"
the priest would roar to a retreating form at
the close of the service. " Just ye come back
and listen to the speaker." And Michael
O'Flanagan would remain to become enrolled
as a member of the I.A.O.S.

The immediate practical outcome of this
agitation was the formation of co-operative
creameries, amid the rich meadow - lands of
County Limerick.

The formation of these co - operative
creameries effected a revolution in the butter
trade of Ireland and England, and to-day the
creameries realise for the farmers as high a
price — that is, a fraction over lid. a pound —
as the creameries in Denmark do for her
farmers.

Stock-raising has always been a favourite
pursuit of the Irish farmer from time im-
memorial, and whilst in England the increase
of dairying has led, unfortunately, to the
laying down of more arable land to grass, in
Ireland, thanks to the efforts of the agri-
cultural instructors, land once grazed by
bullocks is now growing corn and potatoes.

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 195

Irish dairy farmers are beginning to see that
the more they use the plough the more cows
they can keep on their holdings, and the
greater will be their cash returns.

Yet however successful the appeal to self-
help might be in the more prosperous farming
districts, in the wretchedly poor districts of
Connaught and Kerry it was like appealing to
the stones which littered their poor fields.

To the rescue of these poorer districts
came Mr. Arthur Balfour in 1893 by the
formation of the Congested Districts Board,
which Mr. Michael Davitt described as a
Board " with large powers for the application
of State Socialism." Another person, of a less
reputable type, has been heard to describe the
officers of this Board as "a lot of spalpeens
who would never rest till every blessed cock in
the country had laid an egg before its breakfast
in the morning." This ironical utterance came
from the lips of a gombeen-man who began to
feel that his lucrative business of adding field
to field, so trenchantly denounced by Isaiah,
was tottering to its fall.

But Sir Horace Plunkett was not one to be
content with the limiting of the gospel of Self-
help to certain districts. What was good

196 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

for Connaught was good also for Leinster,
and Ulster, and Munster ; and his crowning-
success in agricultural organisation on a
national scale was the formation of the De-
partment of the Board of Agriculture for
Ireland. It was surely a great achievement
for a race crushed by a century of bitter
political disappointment to begin to reorganise
a depressed industry by means of a State
Department.

Though the newly formed Department
took no part in the trading side of the co-
operative creameries, leaving that to the local
branch of the I.A.O.S., it helped them by what
might be termed its moral support. The
Department would assist the local body of
farmers with architect's plans of creameries,
give advice as to the purchase of materials,
and by an arrangement with the Joint Stock
Banks the local farmers could, backed by the
State, borrow money for the building of the
creameries, sometimes costing over £1000 at
4 or 5 per cent interest. Here again it is the
personal element that forms the basis of the
security.

The Department too would send inspectors,
differing from the ordinary factory inspector,

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 197

in that they would give advice and prizes for
the best-kept creameries and the best butter.
It also suggested rules and methods as to
the ratio of payment to the farmers according
to the butter-fat.

The usual plan adopted by a number of
farmers in a dairying locality is for each cow-
keeper to take shares according to the number
of cows he possesses — usually £l per cow.
But these shares are rarely fully paid up.
Instead, the actual cash is obtained from the
Joint Stock Bank, sufficient to erect the
building and buy the necessary expensive
machinery. Mistakes were made at first, as
when the creameries bought the cream direct
from the farmers, with the disastrous con-
sequence of the manufacture of inferior butter,
for cream which has been standing in an Irish
kitchen in different degrees of temperature
and of culinary smells (to say nothing of the
pig) is not in ideal condition for the manu-
facture of butter.

Now, however, the milk is taken from the
churn direct from the cowshed in a donkey-
cart driven by the farmer's wife or daughter.
She will drive up at one end of the creamery,
where the milk -churn is taken on to the

198 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

receiving platform ; the milk is then turned
into a tank, weighed and strained, and passed
direct into the separating tanks. The woman
will then draw away her donkey-cart to make
room for the next one in the order of procession,
and the separated milk will be returned to her
through an outlet in the creamery wall direct
into her cart. This she takes away for her
pigs and calves. About once a fortnight an
official of the creamery will test the milk from
each farmer's cows in order to arrive at an
average of the percentage of butter-fat. Then
at the end of the month, the cheque will be
paid to each farmer according to the amount
of butter-fat he has sent in, and the market
price obtained for the butter.

A further step, in my opinion, should be
taken by the Department, in exercising some
control over the quality of the butter, that is,
to standardise it as is done by the State of
the Australian Commonwealth, and a further
step in voluntary organisation might be at-
tempted by the Irish creameries (such as has
been brought about by the English poultry
societies) in linking themselves together to
avoid competing against each other in the
same markets.

n

JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND. 199

Butter is not the only product of the
creameries. Eggs are also marketed, and a
good deal of cream is sent even as far afield as
London, though the dairy companies take
good care not to inform their customers that
the cream they are buying has come by steamer
as well as by rail.

Milk too is sent to London in the winter,
and if the dairy industry were thoroughly
organised, I am informed that the whole of
Liverpool and Manchester could be supplied
daily with milk from Ireland.

In spite of the comparative success of the
Agricultural Organisation Societies, education
has still to do its work, even among the more
prosperous of the dairy farmers in the south.
It might be more effectively shown how
farmers could keep a larger number of cows
on their small holdings.

Many farmers had to be thoroughly con-
vinced that it would pay them to plough grass-
land before they would put their hand to the
modern plough. It was all very well, they
said, to talk about ploughing the poor, hungry
soil of Connaught, but when it came to the
rich pastures of Limerick it was another thing.
They were probably right had they kept to

200 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

their antiquated methods in growing potatoes
and cereals, but the agricultural instructor
showed them the new methods — methods in
which native wit played its part in convincing
the Gael.

Finding that the farmers in County Limerick
were using an antiquated form of plough, the
instructor went to a well-known blacksmith
and showed him how to make a plough suit-
able for their land. Then he attended a
meeting of farmers and exhorted them thus :
" Men of Limerick, many a dark deed has
been done by night in poor old Oireland, now
I want you to do another dark deed this very
night. I want you to collect together all the
old ploughs you can lay hold of and throw
them into the Shannon."

When the new plough was made, it is said
that the blacksmith grew so enthusiastic over
it that he ploughed with it from morning until
night, forgetting to go home for his midday
meal ! Though 1 will not vouch for the
veracity of this part of the story, for it might
bring me into trouble with the S.P.C.A., I
can say it is true that he could not cope with
the orders given to him by the farmers for the
newly modelled plough.

JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND. 201

The farmer had yet to be convinced as to
the advantages of tillage over growing grass.
Even though an efficient implement had been
made for him, a practical and sceptical, though
a visionary race, wanted something more
materialistic than lectures to show that tillage
paid better than growing grass for hay or
pasture.

In England we have one experimental
agricultural station — Rothamsted — of which
we are justly proud — one ; and yet agriculture
is still our greatest industry ! In Ireland an ex-
perimental plot may be found in every district.
If the instructor cannot persuade the farmers
in his district to try tillage in the place of
growing grass, or what is more common, to
try his methods of scientific tillage in the
production of potatoes, oats, and roots, instead
of antiquated ones, he will say to the most
sceptical of the farmers : " Let me have a
rood of your land and I will give you the seed
potatoes, the superphosphates, or other fer-
tilisers, then you must follow my instructions,
do the work, and compare the crop from this
rood with the crops you obtain by following
your own methods."

These valuable practical experiments, now

202 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

published for all the world to read, have
shown the Irish farmer that his old-fashioned
Champion potato is out-dated, giving place to
Up-to-dates, Factors, and Ninety folds ; that
by sprouting potatoes in boxes before planting
he can get an extra yield of 5 tons per Irish
acre, and by following the new methods of
tillage, manuring, etc., he can obtain altogether
an increased yield of 11 tons per Irish acre.
Furthermore, it has been shown that by
growing potatoes, oats, mangolds, and turnips,
the increased profit per Irish acre of tillage
over grass amounts to £9 : 18 : 9.

The dairy instructors have added their
quota to the prosperity of the country by
showing that the Irish farmer annually loses
money by sending over to England his heifers
as twinters or yearlings, instead of calving
them down, making butter from the cream,
and feeding pigs or calves with the separated
milk, and producing their own bacon.

One of the most interesting features in the
revival of rural life in Ireland is the practical
education of the girls, who are being trained
to become efficient housewives and mothers,
— to become, in fact, helpmates to their
husbands. This educational movement, making

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 203

for the economic emancipation of women,
curiously enough is carried on in remote
places islanded by bogs, where the teachers
are nuns, presided over by a Mother Superior.
Truly, the old order changeth, giving place to
the new.

I visited a large mansion once owned by an
Irish peer and now occupied at night by nuns,
and by day by peasant girls who tramp several
miles across the bogs to learn pig-keeping,
gardening, bee-keeping, dairying ; and in-doors,
washing and ironing, cooking, cleaning, and
the decoration of the home. Every day these
good and gracious ladies, these high priestesses
of Demeter, are teaching girls from fourteen
years of age upwards not to spend their lives
merely in making Irish lace, or in parasitic
labour, but to become efficient housewives and
mothers.

The importance of educating Irish lasses
in domestic economy can hardly be over-
estimated, for Irish cooking has become a
byword. But apart from the education of
the Irish peasant girl as a housewife, her
education as a gardener and a decorative artist
is one which is likely to produce tidier, if not
happier, homesteads. The Irish farmer is a

204 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

much worse gardener than even the English
farmer, and it is the woman rather than the
man to whom the aesthetic appeal can be
more readily made.

It was difficult first of all for surveyors
and instructors to break the tradition of
letting the sow and the poultry take posses-
sion of the doorstep and the garden. Such
a thing as a creeper, or a shrub, or a fruit-tree
for decorative as well as utilitarian purposes
was unknown until the instructor began to
offer plants at cost prices at the various horti-
cultural stations, and at first, even to give
them away.

Then, on a new settlement, when Mrs.
Pat O'Flaherty saw Mrs. Tim Murphy had
a prettier-looking garden and house-front than
hers, the spirit of emulation awoke in Mrs.
Pat, and she too asked for shrubs and fruit-
trees at cost price ; and the young wife having
a taste for gardening, cultivated at some
council school, keeps the destructive sow
within its own demesne.

The other influence besides that of agri-
cultural education and organisation responsible
for the stemming the tide of emigration, has
been that of building labourers' cottages with

..'. .-'J

(i.) The old Mud Cabin, replaced by the new Cottage.
(2.) Typical Labourer's Cottagej with an acre of ground, let for one
shilling a week (Co. Limerick).

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 205

half an acre or an acre of land attached.
From 40,000 to 50,000 of these cottages have
been let at rents varying from as low as 7d.
to 2s. 8d. per week, but taking them on the
average we might say that in Ireland a rural
proletarian can get a five-roomed cottage with
an acre of land for Is. a week. This low rent
is, of course, an uneconomic one, but in
order to prevent the labourer from emigrat-
ing to America the Irish farmer and land-
owner are willing to add a subsidy from the
rates to supplement the grant from Imperial
taxes.

Wages are low in Ireland where there is
little difference between the economic position
of the labourer and the farmer. They do not
run to more than Is. 6d. per day. The farmer
does not suggest paying higher wages in order
that the labourer should be able to pay an
economic rent, because the farmer is probably
as poor as the labourer, and in some cases
poorer. Shocking as this may appear to
orthodox political economists, it should be
remembered that the same principle has
operated in England ever since the passing of
the Agricultural Rates Act ; for in England
the village tradesman and the country doctor

206 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

have to make up the moiety from which
farmers and landowners are exempted on agri-
cultural land.

At any rate, we have to admit that unsound
political economy has achieved an undoubted
success, whilst in our own island the Housing
Acts applied to rural districts and based on
" sound economics " have made no headway at
all, — have been, indeed, a pathetic failure.

One criticism I may make against Irish
cottages, whether these be the new homes of
migrants or of labourers, is their appalling
ugliness. Beauty should be the handmaid of
Simplicity, but in Ireland Simplicity serves at
the altar of Ugliness. The Celtic renaissance
in literature and in art might surely express
itself more fittingly with the stones of the
field.

To sum up, I might venture to quote the
words I wrote in the London Magazine, June
1910. " An economic revolution is daily taking
place in Ireland. So peacefully is it working
to its predestined goal that many people are
unaware of the wonderful work it is doing in
the creation of a new Ireland. At the bottom
of that seething turmoil, known as the Home
Rule agitation, always lay this basic factor —

JOHN BULLS OTHER ISLAND. 207

earth hunger — the primeval desire of the
peasant to possess his native land. The
peasant is now possessing the land, and taking
a larger share in its government. In the
place of the constable we see the agricultural
instructor at work. In the place of the
exacting gombeen-man who preyed upon the
poverty of the people we have a Government
acting as benevolent banker. In the place of
competitive strife we have agricultural co-
operation. In the place of the wretched old
mud cabin we see now clean five-roomed
cottages. In those silent places amid grassy
plains, where yesterday only bullocks were to
be seen, we now hear the laughter of children
at the doors of smiling homesteads. This is
what I saw in Ireland with a mind, I hope,
unbiassed by bitterness or sectarian prejudice."
Three-fourths of the gaols are now empty,
and one at Enniskillen has been converted into
a school. Yet there is a tragic note which
must be sounded in the midst of the birth of
a new life in Ireland. Even to-day, with all
this extra agricultural activity in the Emerald
Isle, thousands of poor Irish farmers in the
west migrate to England and Scotland every
year during the potato, the hay, and the corn

208 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

harvest to earn the much-needed ready money
to pay for food and fuel during the winter
months. That is to say, they leave their little
farms at the very time that their labour is
most needed, the time for harvesting their
own potatoes, their own hay, and their own
oats. Whilst this denudation of labourers
proceeds on Irish farms, agriculture must
always remain at a low ebb.

CHAPTER XI.

THE WORKSHOP PLUS THE LAND.

There is no doubt that whilst in the industrial
centres of England the introduction of
machinery has had the effect of displacing
many hands, it has given employment to many
more. That is because industrial England has
been the workshop of the world. On the
other hand, I think we may safely say that
the introduction of agricultural machinery has
had the effect on farm lands of eventually
reducing the number of hands employed.
Even the making of the new agricultural
machinery has not employed many extra
English hands in the towns, for a great deal of
it is made in America, where they seem to
have the art of making the machines light,
and at the same time durable.

When I was visiting Ireland I met an

209 14

210 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

American bagman, who informed me that he
had been one of the greatest agricultural
instructors Ireland ever had. I was talking
to one of the Department of Agricultural
County instructors at the time, and I naturally
looked at my informant with a note of interro-
gation on my eyebrow.

" I introduce new machinery to the farmers,"
he informed me in his expansive way, "and
teach them how to use it, and, as an Irish

farmer once said to me, ' P of Belfast can

take the fat off my horses' backs with his
heavy tackle, but what I want to know is,
can he put it on again ? ' Now, with my
stuff a horse can gallop, etc/'

The farmer does not use his agricultural
machinery as a manufacturer uses a new
machine in a town, to produce a greater quan-
tity in a shorter time, but for the purpose
of keeping down his wages bill. Machinery
has hardly increased the productivity of the
farm, and it has been used almost entirely for
extensive rather than for intensive culture.

It is well known that the best of our agri-
cultural machinery is exported to our colonies
and foreign countries. I have a friend, for
instance, who farms 1200 acres of more or less

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 211

unreclaimed land in New Zealand. On his
farm he keeps a herd of 120 cows and has
a Lawrence-Kennedy milking machine with
which to milk them, and yet, I suppose, in
the very heart of the English county, where
this machine is actually made, few farmers
are using it.

Is it not through the lack of capital rather
than the low price of corn that the English
farmer still uses machines of an out-of-date
pattern ? For it must be remembered that
when the English farmer had to face the
competition of the new world where wheat
could be produced on virgin soil without
manure, rented at prairie value, rents at home
began to rise in 1852-53 and tended upwards
until 1880, and even for several years after
this our farmers continued to take farms at
high and even impossible rents.

During this long period of thirty years, the
surplus wealth derived from farm lands went
towards making capital, not for the farmer, but
for the landlord. Now, with reduced rents, it
is the owner of agricultural land who is
making slow financial progress, whilst it is the
farmer with the aid of newly invented, labour-
saving machinery who has the opportunity

212 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

to improve his position. The labourer remains
very much where he was before ; indeed he
is probably worse off, for while wages have
increased 12 per cent since 1895, prices have
risen 18 per cent, and rents of cottages have
steadily risen at a still higher ratio.

Instinctively, the English agricultural
labourer, as would all of us were we in his
place, regarded the agricultural machine as
his enemy. Used as his master, as a kind of
inhuman fiend which rendered the labourer's
sinewy arms atrophied, and which robbed his
wife and family of food, the agricultural
machine became undoubtedly the labourer's
enemy. But used as his servant, it would
immediately become his friend, lessen the
severity of his toil, shorten his hours of labour,
and bring extra food to his wife and family.
The thing which ought to have been done by
a wise Government was never done. The
labourer was never given the opportunity to
own the machine individually or collectively,
and in consequence he became a dangerous
disturber of the peace.

In Ireland this lesson has been learnt, and
in Wicklow, Kilkenny, and Waterford you
will see large threshing machines worth up-

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 213

wards of £700 owned collectively by poor Irish
peasants and worked by them co-operatively.

With the creation of Small Holding Co-
operative Societies, and large farmers' Agri-
cultural Societies, which are now steadily on
the increase, we hope to see a better class of
agricultural machinery used on our small and
large farms. But without co-operative effort I
fear we shall witness with the extension of small
holdings a retrograde movement taking us
back again to the sickle and the flail.

There are many who would not regret this.
I was once lecturing before a society composed
of middle-class and working people who had
made somewhat a fetish of the Simple Life.
I was advocating the collective use of the milk-
ing machine, Canadian water-mills, and manure-
carriers and distributers for the stock-keep-
ing small holder. As I have had to clean
out my cowsheds many a time, as well as
milk the cows, and also to draw water from
distant ponds, I had a somewhat intimate
knowledge of unclean hard drudgery.

Thereupon a lady in the audience, expen-
sively gowned by Liberty, vehemently pro-
tested against my " pernicious doctrine " and
spoke of the beauty of a pastoral life, in

214 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

which the hand-milking of cows by charm-
ing milkmaids and the dancing round the
Maypole were romantically coloured. She
even admired the life led by the German and
Breton peasant woman, and regarded the
loading of a dung -cart on a wet day by a
peasant woman as an idyllic occupation.

" How would you like," I asked her in
reply, " to place your fair cheek against the
dirty flank of a cow with its knotted, damp
tail flicking round your neck for ten minutes
or a quarter of an hour ? The first bar of a
Morris song would surely die upon your lips.
But if our dairymaids and cowmen had the
milk machine going they would not only feel
inclined, but possess the opportunity as well,
to dance round the Maypole."

It is for all forms of brutalising hand labour
that I would introduce the machine. Of
course I do not regard milking as a form of
brutalising labour when the cow rises fragrant
from its dew bath on a misty May morning.
Then milking is quite a pleasant occupation.
But in winter it is not quite so pleasant, when
the cow sleeps in the byre and has to be
thoroughly cleaned before milking begins.

For the shifting of heavy masses of farm-

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 215

yard manure ; the distributing of liquid and
artificial manures ; the building up of high
stacks from the low waggon in place of the
elevator, and all such dehumanising work,
I would introduce the machine. If agri-
cultural machinery were used too for the
breaking up and cultivation of those rough
tracts of grass land which feed nothing
but rabbits, we should achieve a distinct
national gain. But in the interests of the
revival of country life, in the interests of
raising the standard of national physique, and
of bringing joy into the lives of our workers, I
am strongly in favour of a movement which
brings handicraft into play, a movement which
I might sum up in the phrase "the workshop,
plus the land."

We have already an urban exodus which
might be described as the Garden City move-
ment, where the town workman is taken out
from the city to live close to the factory
erected in the country. This migration began
as far back as JefFeries' time. In his Wild
Life in a Southern County he writes : " It is
true that of late years many manufacturers
have found it profitable to remove their
workshops from the city into the country,

216 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

the rent of premises being so much less, water
to be got by sinking a well, and wages a little
cheaper. They retain a shop and office in the
city, but have the work done miles away.
But even this is distinctively associated with
centralisation. The workmen are merely paid
human machines ; they do not labour for their
own hands, in their own little shops at home."

This kind of thing is still the factory
system, though possibly placed under better
conditions. From an intelligent mechanic or
a creative artist, and one made in the image
of God, man sinks to a mere machine-minder,
and in the process he loses the dignity of
manhood.

The unrest among the working classes in
the towns is largely due to the lack of joy
in their work ; the joy of creating and seeing
the fulfilment of some work in its entirety.
As a cog in the industrial machine the work-
man loses his grip on life. And the agri-
cultural labourer isolated in a lonely cottage,
working often from morning till night without
another human being visible to appeal to,
through lack of fellowship cannot live his life
fully. It is natural that he should become
insensitive to the quickening of thought

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 217

usually animating those working in association.
" I have said it often enough, but I must
say it once again," wrote William Morris,
"since it is so much a part of my case for
handicraft, that so long as a man allows his
daily work to be mere unrelieved drudgery,
he will seek his happiness in vain. I say
further, that the worst tyrants of the days of
violence were but feeble tormentors compared
with those captains of industry who have
taken the pleasure of work away from the
workmen. Furthermore, I feel absolutely
certain that handicraft, joined to other condi-
tions, of which more presently, would produce
the beauty and pleasure in work above-
mentioned : and that, if that be so, and this
double pleasure of lovely surroundings and
happy work could take the place of the
double torment of squalid surroundings and
wretched drudgery, have we not good reason
for wishing, if it might be, that handicraft
should once more step into the place of
machine-production ? "

The force of the French saying, Toujours
perdrix, is as keenly felt by the English
workman as by the French ouvrier, if
indeed either the French or the English

218 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

workman ever stands much chance of
getting too much game. The Japanese have
a proverb, too, that " bean sauce that smells
too much of bean sauce is not the best sort
of bean sauce." So it is with the English
mechanic and the agricultural labourer. The
carpenter who has been at work with his tools
all day does not want to return to the bench
after tea. The agricultural labourer at work
hoeing turnips all day on some farmer's land
is not particularly keen about trudging up to
the allotment ground after his evening meal
to hoe his cabbage-patch. This accounts for
the partial failure of the allotment system for
the agricultural labourer, and also for its strik-
ing success for the mechanic or urban worker.
The Simple Life need not necessarily be
a dull life. A change of occupation will be
entered into with zest by the man who has
worked all day at one particular job. The
ploughboy may possess the joy of the artist as
he follows the plough. I have written else-
where : As the strong, deep line is drawn
across the acres of seared stubble he may
strike the impelling, vivid line sought for so
eagerly by every artist as he stands before his
canvas at the inception of his creations. The

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 219

ploughman thus marks out his broad line of
perspective with that simple instrument which
has been the agricultural craftsman's chief
tool for so many centuries, and with it he
draws line after line until the field of mottled
green and pale yellow is transformed into rich
shining Vandyke -browns. . . . There is
beauty in his work, creative and scenic beauty
such as falls to the lot of very few of his
brother-craftsmen in towns. But no Ruskin
has ever taught him to see clouds. Pan has
never piped to him. In his conditions of
labour, in his home, in his dwarfed, toil-smitten
figure there is little else but soul-destroying
sordidness. Yet when he comes to sow the
golden grain over every particle of the pre-
pared soil, the life of the multitude lies in the
palm of his hand. And this, I have written as
a field worker, and not as a man of the study.
But the ordinary boy on leaving school has
been so taught that he sees no beauty in the
work of the fields, and to prevent him from
drifting into a town something more than
village halls with entertainments, given by a
class other than his own, is wanted. He needs
some other interest in life besides that of
working the land : something that will satisfy

220 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

the mechanical or artistic craving which has
been stimulated by modern education and the
modern press. He must be able to catch a
glimpse of a future in which he can see a
likelihood of earning a living on land tilled by
his own hand, of sleeping under a roof that he
can call his own, and of varying his labours in
the field with work at the bench, in the studio,
or in the woods. It will not be by Morris
Dances, or village institutions, excellent as
these are, that we shall keep our intelligent
youngsters from becoming American citizens
or drifting into our own unsavoury slums.

On the other hand, many a town workman
of the best type is forever seeking to escape
from factory conditions. He wearily sighs for
the sweet air of the open road, and would
sacrifice much to vary the monotony of his toil
by keeping a few hens or a cow, or by keeping
bees, or by growing fruit and vegetables. He
yearns to watch something grow to maturity
under his own hands so that he may restore
his waning zest for life.

He wants a little piece of land on which
he can work when his own trade is slack, land
on which he can raise for himself the basic
needs of life. For the town workman to take

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 221

up his tools and become a country mechanic
means that the opportunity to find fresh jobs
when his last one is finished has been taken
away from him. Instead of going into the
next street, it probably means going into the
next county. Besides, there is invariably the
village carpenter already on the spot, as well
as the village blacksmith, and possibly also a
mason and a bricklayer.

It is evident that to gain sustenance for
himself and family he must either be individu-
ally a well-known cabinet-maker, wood-carver,
stone-mason, or metal worker, or he must
form one of a community of fellow- workers in
allied trades, sufficiently strong in numbers to
undertake work together as a Guild of Crafts-
men, a corporate body to which advertising
would be a small item to its individual
members.

The necessity for establishing workshops in
the country comes home to us when we realise
how phthisis seems to single out for attack
our younger town craftsmen endowed with a
fine creative energy. And not for this reason
only, nor for the sending out into the country
anaemic young men and women whose vitality
lias been sapped in the stuffy atmosphere of

222 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

town factories and offices ; but also for the
checking of that ever-increasing rural exodus
of young women from the health - giving
countryside to the overcrowded town.

Whilst for 1881 to 1891 the emigration to
the towns amongst males amounted to 7*4,
amongst women it was as much as 33*5 per cent.

It is obvious then that if the more capable
young women are bent on leaving the villages
for the towns the more capable young men
will follow them thither. Moreover, those
who have any knowledge of village life will
bear me out when I say that young girls who
have left the country to take up positions as
smart parlour-maids, nurses, or dressmakers
are strongly disinclined to renew " walking
out " with the yokel who paid court to them
before they donned the cap and apron or
carried a bandbox.

When the country lass returns to her
village for a holiday she is a "young lady"
in domestic service, whose patronage is sought
for by proprietors of fashion papers and of the
" Princess " novelette type of literature, and
she looks with a critical eye upon her swain
who is still over-weighted with great chunks
of clay upon his hobnailed boots.

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 223

I do not say that she has improved in
character, but she has begun to breathe a
different atmosphere, an atmosphere embarrass-
ing to the lungs of the yokel. So she finds
her mate in the town and there fulfils her
destiny.

There are other reasons why the mating
in the country is checked. There is in all
probability no decent cottage for the young
people to inhabit. But this takes me to
another subject of which more later.

For the present we want to see how it is
possible for the country girl to find work in
her own village other than domestic service,
or work in the fields.

I believe that it is not altogether snobbish-
ness which keeps the cottage girl in many
parts of England from working on the land.
Socially, the girl who has married a small
holder holds her head higher than does the
wife of an agricultural labourer, but she does
not hesitate to bend her back to help her
husband when help is badly needed on her
own holding.

This is quite a different thing to being
employed by a farmer or a market gardener
where she has to work in a gang, and very

224 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

often to endure a good deal of coarse chaff as
well as petty tyranny. She notices, too, that
London turns out its human refuse to pick
hops and fruits. Would she therefore not be
losing caste if she became one of a gang ?
The titled lady may smile when she reads this,
but caste is as strong in the cottage girl as in
the countess.

Once a friend of mine asked a young carter
to let his wife come strawberry picking. The
husband proudly remarked that it was impos-
sible, for his wife "ivas no common labourers
daughter but a blacksmittis " !

To find employment attractive enough to
keep the country lass in the country has been
a problem for which it is difficult to find a
practical solution, for it is a sex question as
much as it is an industrial one. If you find
work for girls which has a refining influence
there must also be work for young men which
has the same effect on character. The setting up
of hand-looms and spinning-wheels, the making
of baskets, the binding of books, and other
handicrafts suitable for feminine fingers are
excellent things in their way, but unless there
is also the potter's wheel, the carpenter's bench,
the blacksmith's anvil, the engineer's vice,

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 225

the woodman's hut, or the small holding for
the man, we shall not get very far with the
recolonisation of England.

The glamour of the town has forged fetters
which it will take a generation or two to break.
Trades where both men and women can, more
or less, work in association and live in village
communities will have to be established in the
countryside.

It must be admitted, I think, that intensive
culture, except in favoured, early sites, or
where the fertility of the soil is great or the
facilities for marketing unusually good, will
not make very much headway. This highly
specialised occupation will remain speculative
while we live in a competitive age. The mixed
small holding is of a more stable character,
that is the holding on which food is largely
produced for the house, but this often requires
some other craft attached to it to attract the
young back to the land, or even to make them
stay on the land — a craft which brings in ready
money in winter and adds to the attractiveness
of rural work and life.

At Winterslow we have seen how the
cottage girl can earn a little extra money at a

pleasant craft by spinning wool on the wheel.

15

226 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

This is taken to the weaving shed in the village
where it is woven into a good homespun cloth.
And on a hillside farm cut up into many hold-
ings she can probably see her future mate in
the summer harvesting his corn, or in the
winter she may hear the echo of his axe in the
woods near by where he will be felling trees,
fashioning hurdles, sheep-cribs, or wattles out
of the underwood. Here, for the girl, there is
some other occupation besides the domestic
one, and for the young man some other craft
than that of tilling the earth.

Beyond Salisbury, just as you enter the
Plain near Stonehenge, there is the Stonehenge
Woollen Industry which was started by Miss
Lovibond. This industry which Miss Lovibond
told me doubled its trade last year, has un-
doubtedly had the effect of keeping the country
lass in the village, spinning and weaving on
the hand-loom. But what " uplift," as the
American would say, there is to keep the
enterprising young man in or around the
village I have yet to discover.

Philanthropists, and other benevolently
minded ladies and gentlemen, so constantly
lose sight of the fact that the young men and
women of the working classes are human

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 227

beings endowed with the same emotions as
those of the leisured classes.

At three other handicraft centres, at
Campden in Gloucestershire, at Haslemere
and Compton in Surrey, we get, perhaps, the
most interesting group of craftsmen in England.
But here again we find that the groups of
workers are chiefly composed of one sex. At
Campden they are men, at Compton they are
men and lads, and at Haslemere they are
chiefly women.

Of these three centres Campden is the
most compelling. Here we find a group of
town craftsmen, who by migrating from
London, work in an old silk mill at their
various skilled crafts, and when trade is slack
labour on the 77 acres of land which they
have acquired amid the Cotswolds. It is the
most striking example of the workshop plus
the land movement. And it is not only the
career of these town craftsmen that this migrra-
tion affects, but also the future career of
many a young countryman brought into
contact with men endowed with an artistic,
creative energy.

"It is the constant perception of beauty
that is an amulet against the coarsening effect

228 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

of manual labour, and a substitute for many
of the refinements of civilised indolence,"
wrote a reviewer when noticing my book,
A Few Acres and a Cottage. In return for
the practical knowledge which the countryman
gives to the townsman on the cultivation
of the soil, the town craftsman gives to the
countryman a glimpse of artistic creation
which could be moulded of the clay under their
feet and carved from the wood in the forests.
The value, too, of a new social life infused
into the dry bones of decaying villages like
Campden, where high thinking has long been
divorced from simple living, can hardly be
too highly placed.

Not long after the settlement of these
town craftsmen in this mediaeval village, left
high and dry, and stranded among the Cots-
wold Hills since the industrial revolution,
technical schools, art classes, social clubs,
swimming-clubs (which followed the making
of a swimming-pond) were formed in rapid suc-
cession, and even Hodge, who had almost lost
hope on his 12s. a week, began to take heart
of grace. The craftsmen, unable to cultivate
the whole of their 77 acres themselves, invited
Hodge to come and take a hand.

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 229

The craftsmen whose physical outlook was
no longer trammelled by the prison walls of
streets and factories, whose perception of
beauty was no longer dulled by the ugliness
and sordidness of the towns in which they
worked, found that new visions of beauty
came to them as they followed the plough,
traversing the hillside with eyes clarified by
the clear air and lungs sweetened by the
fragrant sweat of the earth.

Yet the question forces itself upon us :
how could craftsmen who were employed
in performing fine and delicate work, such
as chasing silver, enamelling, designing and
carving in wood and stone, become tillers
of the soil and not feel the effect in the
workshops after a hard day's toil on the
land ?

I have interviewed several of these crafts-
men, and whilst one or two of them have
confessed that their hands would shake at
first after working on the land, they said
that after getting themselves into training
in the use of the spade, agricultural labour
ceases to affect the delicacy of their touch in
the workshop or the studio ; and as designers
the contact with the earth gave to their work

230 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

a quality of freshness impossible to acquire
in the city.

To the blacksmith and the carpenter, and
all craftsmen accustomed to hard, physical
labour, there should be nothing foreign in
spade labour, though it was a carpenter who
admitted to me that digging brought into play
muscles very little used at the bench, causing
a stiffness in his limbs when he returned to
the workshop from the land. As far as the
blacksmiths are concerned, it is quite the
common custom of the village blacksmith all
over the country to rent a field or two at the
back of his smithy.

I am writing now of some of the most
skilled enamellers, silversmiths, carvers in
wood and stone that we have in England.
Their work, indeed, is known all over the
world, and when an American college desires
corbels carved on its walls, it has to send to
Alec Miller of Campden both to design and
execute these. The increased virility of their
work is surely accounted for by the fact that
the artists live so much in the open air.

Though work with the spade may cause
the hand to shake when using the brush or
the graver's tool, there is, as a rule, no

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 231

necessity to go direct from the holding to the
bench. According to the weather, the season
of the year and the briskness of trade, a day
or two, or even a week perhaps, might be
spent continuously on the land, and then a
week or two perhaps in the workshop.

One of these craftsmen, a silversmith, has
become a farmer of 40 acres. He has married
into yeoman stock, and it is quite refreshing
to observe the difference between the furniture
inside the stone farmhouse of the newly married
yeoman - craftsman, and compare it with the
early Victorian furniture, the oleographs, and
the terrible portraits seen in the farmhouses
round about. So much do the craftsmen
value the work of their fellow-craftsmen that
they pay one another handsomely for simple
but beautiful pieces of furniture ; and I have
seen one or two engagement and wedding-
rings beautifully wrought in gold on the
fingers of this community of craftsmen.

It is said by many that the townsman,
especially the born cockney, never settles down
contentedly in the country. At Campden
there is a craftsman, a French-polisher by trade,
who has lived all but the last few years of his life
in the purlieus of Bethnal Green, and 1 doubt

232 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

whether during all this period of town-life he
has ever cultivated anything in the open air
beyond that which he could grow in a back-
yard ; and yet earth hunger in this man is so
strong that I found him lightly wearing his
threescore years of life, and forking out the
twitch one bitter winter morning on his bare
acre-holding on the wind-swept Cotswolds.

"My trade has gone to pot," he said, "but
I don't care. This is what I love." Just
that bare acre of earth on which not a green
thing was to be seen, nothing in fact to give
it the cosy feeling of home ; not a shed nor
a hedge to distinguish it from that of any-
body else, with his cottage a mile away in the
village ! Even his home had been turned
into a small-holder's warehouse, for one bed-
room was full of trays of sprouting potatoes,
and downstairs a room was filled with sacks
of grain and meal produced on his holding.

Our cockney agriculturist wisely produced
largely for home consumption, and not for the
market. In the kitchen hung a side of bacon
which had once been a part of his own pig fed
on the meal ground from his own grain. His
own plucked chicken and eggs were on the
larder shelf, and he produced a loaf which had

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 233

been made by his wife from flour ground at
the miller's out of his own bag of wheat.

It is difficult to imagine a more unkind
piece of earth to till than this wind-swept
hillside smothered with couch-grass ; and nine
miles away lies the vale of Evesham where
the air is as mellow as that of a Proven cal
village.

With the insistent call of the land in this
Cotswold village a new desire has arisen
among the villagers to find expression in the
creation of things of beauty. Several of the
lads have been taught to work in metal, to
carve wood, and one or two of them, I hear,
have become skilled silversmiths. So alive
has the whole village become to an artistic
interpretation of life, that a perfect uproar
was raised when a shopkeeper proposed to
introduce a plate-glass window into the old-
fashioned, romantic village street !

Secondary education has been advanced
a stage with the formation of a technical
institute with a smithy, and one young crafts-
man cycles out to the surrounding villages
to teach raw country lads the elements of
drawing.

Immediately there leaps to the mind the

234 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

new question as to what extent can we train
country lads to become skilled craftsmen in
wood, iron, silver or stone, without creating a
new artistic proletariat that have no means of
finding employment for their talents.

In Denmark the parent is swift to take
advantage of every educational improvement
for his sons and daughters. He will pinch to
let them go to the high schools and colleges,
because he knows very well that what they
learn there will equip them for their future
career. The Government of Denmark does
not let the youth of its country run to loose
ends when it leaves the High School. The
winter school will cost the farmer only £10
for his son or £6 for his daughter : the Govern-
ment finding the balance of the cost of main-
tenance. Then, too, there is nearly always a
position on a farm waiting for him when he
can use his knowledge for his own benefit and
that of his country.

Our laissez-faire traditions have let educa-
tion grow completely out of joint with
economic conditions. The country worker
knows that the education with even the " rural
bias " which Sir Robert Morant urges upon our
country schools, fits boys for little else than to

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 235

be clerks and shop assistants. The child loses
interest in a system of education divorced
from life as it should be lived in the country.
The large farmer is never slow to take
advantage of the apathy of the labourer to
reduce education to its irreducible minimum.

Mr. Balfour saliently remarked in a speech
made in the City in 1908 : " You will never
have individual initiative carried to its most
effective limits, unless you give that security
to the results of enterprise which it used to
be thought was the primary duty of a govern-
ment to give."

That is just the very thing we do not do,
and yet with the power now granted to muni-
cipal authorities, and the institution of the
Works Department by various Town and
County Councils, how easy it would be to
train for public service the young craftsman
in technical and the secondary schools. By
inspiring more craftsmen with a sense of
beauty we might strike a blow at building
those terribly ugly edifices used as schools,
colleges, hospitals, workhouses, infirmaries,
village halls and cottages.

With the growth of Democratic repre-
sentation, education in the beauty of design

236 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

should have far-reaching results in country
districts, for we should have the collateral
advantage of getting men of taste on Rural
District Councils, responsible for the passing
of designs. The ordinary builder whose work
has acted like a nightmare on all those who
have sought peace and beauty in the country
will then receive a check. We might begin
to get councillors with choice ideas.

Much, too, might be done in the country
individually, by the influence of artists, who are
beginning to take up their abode in remote
country districts. I have in mind one young
artist in particular who feels that pictures are
no longer wanted, and occupies his time in
designing and making book - plates. His
presence in the village has had a magical effect
upon the work done by the village blacksmith
and the local house - builder, painter and
decorator. On the inside of the smithy door
may be seen chalk designs for coal-scuttles,
bellows, fenders, gates, etc., suggested by him
to the blacksmith out of his love of creating
beautiful designs for simple, useful things.
The colour schemes of the local house-decorator
too have improved under the tutelage of this
artistic friend of mankind.

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 237

The presence of one or two well - known
artists in the Sussex village of Amberley,
which lies picturesquely hooded under thatched
roofs, has, I know, withheld the ravaging
hand of the jerry - builder destitute of taste,
and the influence of artists who have taken
up their residence at Haslemere and Campden
is already discernible.

At Haslemere the Peasant Arts Society
received its creative inspiration from Mr.
Godfrey Blount. This artist gives up much of
his valuable time to designing table-cloths, em-
broidered linen towels, pinafores, and carpets,
which are either spun or woven on the hand-
loom in his house, where most of the rooms
have been converted into working rooms, or at
the Haslemere Weaving Industry, instituted
by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph King.

The colour schemes in many of these
designs are very beautiful, and I understand
that Mrs. Blount is now largely responsible for
them. It is she who superintends the work of
the dozen or so of girls drawn from the district.

At St. Cross, and especially at the larger
workshop of the Haslemere Industry so charm-
ingly housed, the handicraft woman is more in
evidence than the craftsman. Here, though

238 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

most of the girls are drawn from the working
classes, opportunity is given to the gentle-
woman who wishes to learn a trade which she
can work at in her own cottage. Yet handi-
craft at Haslemere is not limited to that
particularly associated with feminine fingers, for
wood-cutting, iron work, and pottery are also
encouraged, and indeed any rough attempt on
the part of the peasant to grope his way to
God with his own hand, as, I think, Mr.
Blount would say, has a chance of being
exhibited in the charming shop that gives
distinction to the Haslemere High Street.

Though the work at Haslemere is executed
by fingers less gifted, it makes a greater
sensuous appeal to the eye than the work at
Campden. Handicraft amounts to a religion
at Haslemere, where in the little green barn of
the country church, prayers are uttered every
morning in the breakfast hour by work girls
and craftsmen, who ask God to "deliver us
from the Egyptian bondage of profitless work,
and to lead us safely through the Deserts of
Infidelity and Aimlessness and Ignorance to
the Promised Land of Aspiration and joyful
effort." The Haslemere ideal was well ex-
pressed by Mr. Blount to me when he said

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 239

that he considered it more desirable that a
workmen should express himself clumsily
with a chisel than that a great artist should
arise every now and then out of the race.

Those who possess a plot of land strenuously
labour on it at sunrise and sunset, but as land
is held up by its owners round this village
and is ever rising in value, little land is
obtainable in spite of the demand for the
earth. It was pleasing to find that the oak
used for some of the furniture made at Hasle-
mere was felled at Cranleigh near by, so that
in this industry, as in that of making pots
from the noble clay round Compton, we get
nearer the real thing — that is, the conversion
of local material into useful as well as beautiful
works of art.

Mr. Hunter had his St. Edmundsbury
Weaving Works here at one time, where on
his large hand-looms he wove silk into a cloth
of gold for Nero in Stephen Phillip's play,
and superb altar-cloths for some of our great
cathedrals. He has now taken his works to
the Garden City.

One cannot help feeling that in spite of
the sincerity of the pioneers of the handicraft
movement at Haslemere, that preciosity is in

240 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

the air. I was told before I went there that
I must be careful not to enter a Haslemere
room in a colour scheme of green with a
red tie, or I should cause certain unpleasant
vibrations in the air. The word "peasant,"
too, has become rather a cult, and when one
sees the word hammered out on metal over a
West End shop which is the London depot of
the Society, somehow the word uncomfortably
suggests a pose. And I remember that it
was a Haslemere lady who once introduced
me at a garden party with great enthusiasm
as one who had become " quite a peasant."

Yet there are two things for which one is
grateful to the Haslemere handicrafts. One
is that the work-girls employed there receive
a wage higher than the Winterslow spinners
and even higher than the Wiltshire labourers,
for they earn fourpence an hour, and the
Haslemere industry is, I am told, a self-
supporting one. The other thing to their
credit is that though many of their produc-
tions are necessarily high priced, they do pro-
duce some useful household furniture which
comes within the means of ordinary cultured
middle-class people.

Many years ago Ruskin made the challeng-

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 241

ing statement that " cheap things make cheap
men." But we were then puffed up with
commercial pride and our economists laughed
at him. "Now, suddenly," as Mr. C. R. Ashbee
says in his stimulating book, Craftsmanship
and Competitive Industry, " we are faced with
the phenomenon, a monster with two heads,
that we have never observed before. A vast
output of useless, sweated, cheap industries, a
vast growth of nerveless, characterless, under-
fed, cheap men and women. The monster
stands face to face with our civilisation, it
threatens to extinguish our culture, to destroy
our life as a people."

Cheap men react upon industry, in that
they, driven by necessity, demand cheap
goods. So the more artistic productions are
at the present denied to the great mass of
the working people. Yet among the more
highly paid of the artisan class there is a
growing tendency to abolish the cheap and
nasty bric-a-brac articles in house furnishing,
causing repeated purchase and a tax upon the
time and temper of the already overworked
house drudge, and to substitute for these
hideous and useless articles others of utility,

beauty, and durabilitv. Dust-bins will not be

' 16

242 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

so easily filled up, and the homes, even of the
working classes, will be more simply, yet more
splendidly furnished, as taste as well as condi-
tions of labour improve.

Would that we could abolish from builders'
plans, for the sake of the housewife, that
useless room with all its heathen gods dedi-
cated to the memory, as Mr. John Burns has
said, "of the rent collector, the insurance
agent, and the undertaker."

I even came across this fetish of cottage-
building on Mr. Fels's estate by the lonely
shores of the Blackwater. I was told by his
manager that this room was still worshipped
by the labourer's wife. I very much doubt it,
though, and it is very evident that she would
be much more comfortable with a larger living-
room in these otherwise remarkably good
cottages erected at so low a price.

At Compton, near Guildford, where the
Potters' Art Guild owes its formation to Mrs.
G. F. Watts, a co-operative, self- paying, in-
dustry has grown up out of making pots and
garden statues from the Surrey clay. Many
of these are exported to South Africa packed
in the large wicker baskets that are made in
this same neighbourhood.

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 243

The educational value of Mrs. G. F. Watts'
Hostel at Compton has extended to the villages
round about ; and many a lad showing taste
in designing and modelling in clay has been
taken from the technical and secondary schools
and kept at Mrs. Watts' Hostel and there
trained in the modelling room at Compton.

Fascinating as are all these modern mani-
festations of revolt against machine-made
articles, interesting as is the tendency to fashion
things with the hand in country workshops,
and so humanise work, a great deal of it is
still bound to be beyond the scope of the
ordinary rural worker born in the country
cottage. His craftsmanship will belong to
what we may term agricultural life. Nearly
every farmer nowadays complains of the lack
of good thatchers, skilled woodmen, experi-
enced shepherds, capable hedgers and ditchers
and rick-builders, and of the few men left who
can cleave a thatching-rod or a hoop in the
woods, to say nothing of finding a competent
hurdler. Though I live in a woodland
district surrounded by 1000 acres of wood,
the only men apparently capable of making
wattles are two brothers who travel from
village to village.

244 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Education to counteract this lack of skill
in the agricultural labourer is only supplied
by evening classes where the schoolmaster,
without any agricultural knowledge, gives
lessons in measuring a haystack. This is,
I suppose, what the Board has meant in the
past by giving education a " rural bias/' that
is, a bias towards giving lads an aptitude to sit
on a stool in an auctioneer's office.

In Ireland the county council agricultural
instructor, who has either been a farmer or is
the son of a farmer, will, as we have seen,
take off his coat in the arable field and show a
group of farmers how to handle a plough of
modern design. In Hungary and Denmark
winter schools are established in the villages, in
which the young men are shown by an in-
structor who knows how to weave a hedge,
thatch a stack, or cleave a rod with an adze.

Educationalists in town so often forget
that the countryman learns more by his seeing
than by his mental eye. It will take the
countryman a week to learn from printed
descriptions and diagrams what it will take
him an hour to learn by a practical demon-
stration in front of his eyes.

To create a lasting interest in agricultural

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 245

craftsmanship, it is necessary to formulate a
land policy which will give every young man a
chance to employ his newly-acquired know-
ledge for his own benefit rather than for the
benefit of a farmer. If he be a woodman
small holder, such as we see at Winterslow
and at Far Forest, let him be taught how to
turn a rake-handle, how to punch out the teeth
for the rake, how to turn spokes for a wheel,
how to repair and paint a cart, how to make
a field-gate, and how to build a shed or a dairy,
so that much work now sent away to urban
centres, and creating an unhealthy environ-
ment, be done in the heart of the country, and
performed with as great a skill as is to be
found in the best of urban workshops.

The village smithy should glow with greater
brilliance in the life of the country people,
and I think it would had our country black-
smiths a better training. Any one who has
worked in fields with the hoe, the scythe,
or the fork ; or in the wood with the adze,
the hook, the axe, the old round-nosed bit,
the punyard, or the hawk's-bill, will know
how necessary it is to get tools shaped
and sharpened to that exact angle and edge
necessary to work with ease on the peculiar

246 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

soil, or in the wood characteristic to each
neighbourhood. We know how inadequate
for the job the machine-made shop tool often
is, and how useful an intelligent blacksmith
is who knows the exact requirements of the
individual worker — how the hoe has to be
drawn out, how the scythe has to be set, how
the bill-hook has to be curved.

I doubt if the bark-stripper's punyard or
the hurdler's hawk's-bill could be bought at the
ordinary ironmonger's. It is the village black-
smith who usually has to make these to order.
But the country blacksmith, destined to spend
his life amid many risks in shoeing horses, has
become a poorly-paid worker. He, at any
rate, should have a better technical education,
spend shorter hours in an atmosphere heavily
charged with grit and smoke, and be given
access to the land on which he can work some
hours every day in the pure air.

Workers in wood might be multiplied were
forestry more encouraged by the State. Beech
for chair-making, for instance, might be more
generally grown, for the woods at High
Wycombe have long failed to supply all the raw
material, much of which has to be imported.
" Can we not have again," as Mr. Ashbee

WORKSHOP PLUS LAND. 247

says, " our gates of cleft wood that yield to
a horse's easy pressure, instead of the factory
planed laths that snap?" Basket - making
business might be easily revived with a little
encouragement from the Government. It
is with pleasure that I notice the Welsh
Industries Association have applied for the
grant from the Development Commissioners
of £2000 per annum for five years to en-
courage the growth of osiers in South Wales.
Even the silvery birch, so delightful to view
from the aesthetic standpoint, can be turned
to good account with the axe by the making of
clogs for the factory-workers in the Midlands.
Indeed, in the north corner of Yorkshire a
large rural industry in clog-making goes on in
the woods where the silver and green birch
stand in plantations twenty years old. No
town factory has yet encroached upon this
purely rural handicraft. It is only when the
soles of the clog fashioned out of the birch
have to be fitted with leather uppers and
straps that they come under the factory system.
Unfortunately the Small Holdings Act of 1908
disallows land being taken for any other in-
dustry but that of agriculture. This should
be amended, for as it stands it stultifies the

248 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

expansion of rural industries naturally ancillary
to husbandry.

To revive village life, not only must land
be given to the mechanic, but the tiller of the
soil should be taught a craft to which he can
turn his hand and exercise his creative faculty
when the earth lies sodden under sable clouds.
The country girl must be given some other
outlook in life than that of domestic service,
some other chance of a mate than an ill- paid
agricultural labourer. Let him be a worker
on the land by all means, but a worker who
has joy in his work and obtains an adequate
financial reward for his industry. And it
must be clearly understood that no amount of
agricultural education will ever arrest the rural
exodus unless the wages paid to the village
labourer are high enough to render unattrac-
tive the lure of the town, with its higher wages
and its greater freedom.

CHAPTER XII.

THE URBAN EXODUS.

The recent Census Return of 1911 shows an
increase of 10*2 per cent in rural districts —
recording a pushing out of the tentacles of
suburbia farther and farther afield. We have
been painfully aware for some years back of
a rural exodus ; but there is also, we joyfully
note, an urban exodus.

Two forces have been at work elbowing
the townsman out into the country — one, the
economic pressure of town sites driving the
manufacturer out into the country, and the
other, the natural desire of the colonising
Englishman for the open road — or even for
the road planted with the dusty laurel or the
attenuated lime. If the townsman cannot
work in the country by day, he will at any rate
breathe its pure air at night.

249

250 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

We have seen the practical organised result
of all this in the rapid formation of the Garden
City of Letchworth with its 3818 acres,
Kenilworth with its 1000 acres, Bourn ville
with its 525, Port Sunlight with its 350, Wood-
lands with its 127, and Ears wick with its 120.
An economic idea has been sown, and out of
it has arisen the modern "garden village."

These are all highly capitalised schemes,
dependent chiefly upon one or two large
industries taken from the towns and planted
right out in the country. Besides these, there
are indications recently of the townsman with
a little capital setting out to start a new life
in the country, and forming those small -holding
settlements which are recruited almost entirely
from the towns. They, however, have had
very little effect in emptying the congested
slums of the towns. That is a problem we
have yet to settle, and one which cries aloud
for immediate solution. With railways owned
by the State and lower passenger fares, con-
gestion might be easily relieved. Indeed, it is
only through State control of transit that our
town workers will ever be able to live like the
Belgian urban workers often happily do —
twenty miles out in the country.

THE URBAN EXODUS. 251

New countryside industries, such as Chivers's
jam-making at Histon, which draws many young
women out from Cambridge, and Mr. Wilkins's
at Tiptree, Essex, which keeps young women
in the country instead of letting them drift
into our towns, are industrial movements
which make for national health. But these
are dependent more or less upon factory
conditions of life. What is perhaps more
interesting to us in these pages is the settle-
ment of the man with his family on the land
from which he hopes to derive the best part
of his livelihood.

Now there are a large number of our lower
middle classes, and the more prosperous of the
working classes who seize every opportunity
to escape from town conditions of life to win
a partial, if not a whole livelihood from the
land. There is, too, the same unrest among the
girls of the middle class, who, after a training
at Swanley and other colleges such as Cardiff
University, as well as at hostels such as that
of Lady Warwick's, seek to become lady
gardeners, beekeepers, etc. Has not Mr.
Tickner Edwardes drawn a charming picture
in his fascinating book, The Bee-master of
IVarrilow, of girls, once anaemic typists, now

252 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

winning health, if not large earnings, on a bee-
farm in Sussex ?

If you stand on the top of Leith Hill, your
eye will be arrested, as it roams the Weald, by a
number of red and white cottages some six miles
to the south-east. This is the Cud worth estate
of small holdings, which is by some regarded
a failure as a small-holding settlement. Yet
in spite of failure from the purely agricul-
tural standpoint, here we get an estate of some
400 acres on the borders of Surrey and Sussex
on which some forty or fifty families have
erected houses and are working daily in the
open air.

It is interesting to note that every one of
these families has come out of a town. A
few of these back-to-the-land folk, it is true,
need not work for their livelihood ; but whether
or not they are spurred by necessity, every one
keeps some live-stock and does some garden-
ing, and the children, instead of being brought
up in the Old Kent Road, Brixton, or Stoke
Newington, are taught to plant a tree, to handle
a hay-rake, or to milk a cow. They will live
intimately with the wind, the clouds, and
Mother Earth.

A few of these settlers are attempting, and

THE URBAN EXODUS. 253

one or two are actually succeeding, in spite of
many drawbacks, in earning an entire living
from the land. The majority, however, have a
small income — it may be but a few shillings —
and practise some other craft besides that of
agriculture, or earn part of their subsistence
by working for others on the land.

The obstacles were many at Cudworth.
The farm, like many others offered for small
holdings, had been starved by the last tenant,
and the Small Holdings Association, which
bought it for about £12 an acre, resold it to
the small holders at prices varying from £20
to £35 an acre. But speculation in sites did
not stop here. Since then some of the small
holders have been obtaining some " unearned
increment " for themselves by selling fields at
£50 to £60 an acre. This is one of the evils
(from the future small holder's point of view)
of peasant proprietorship.

Then the land is of a heavy clay, and quite
unsuited for the purpose for which it was
originally bought, that is, for market garden-
ing. As Lord Onslow remarked at a luncheon
in the village hall (at which I was present),
"If small holdings can be made to pay here
where the soil is hungry and heavy, and far

254 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

removed from local markets, they can be made
to pay anywhere."

The farm is from three to four miles
from a railway station, and seven or eight
miles from Dorking, Reigate, or Horsham.
Furthermore, the farm is surrounded by
preserves, and fruit cultivation is carried on at
great expense, for every row of strawberries
and every individual currant-bush has to be
closely netted. Then the method of paying
for the land b^ twenty half-yearly instalments
proved to be too heavy a burden for those
who were not small capitalists. Added to
this burden were the instalments payable for
building.

Professor Long, the originator of this scheme,
said that the country labourer could have a
yard of land for the price of a glass of beer ;
but the country labourer evidently thought he
would have to sacrifice too many glasses before
he could acquire the smallest holding of three
acres. Hodge made no appearance on the
estate as a purchaser ; instead, he grinned with
scepticism as he watched small urban shop-
keepers, mining, mechanical, and even marine
engineers, non - commissioned officers with a
pension, a chemist, an ex-civil servant, and

THE URBAN EXODUS. 255

other townees essay the country life, and helped
as the hired skilled labourer to repair the
mistakes made by the novices.

Most of these back-to-the-landers made a
gallant attempt at poultry farming at the
start. It is curious to observe the close
affinity that somehow seems to exist between
the townsman-turned-farmer and the hen. Dis-
illusionment soon follows the undigested perusal
of poultry papers, and it was inevitable that
the pioneers of Cudworth working individually
should take up poultry farming and lose
money at it.

The individualism engrained in the small
business man operated against agricultural
prosperity at Cudworth. Each small holder
attempted not only to produce individually,
but also to market individually, and even
to compete against one another in the small
local markets, with, of course, disastrous
results. The upkeep of a horse and trap on
holdings sometimes of not more than five
acres of poor grass-land, with only a small
patch for a garden, is distinctly uneconomic ;
and when that horse and cart has to be driven
sixteen miles by its owner to market, with
half a load taken in and none at all returning,

256 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

you can easily see how the individual system
breaks down. The spectacle of small holders
each wasting time and money in driving
his own trap with a small freight three or
four miles to the station and back again is
one which would call forth derision both from
the Irishman and the Dane.

The estate is suitable for dairy farming,
and there is a tendency in the small holders
to gravitate in that direction, though one of
the more enterprising of the fruit-growers has
obtained a small motor car, and uses it daily
during the season to market his strawberries.
He, at any rate, does not feel bound to sell
at any price rather than bring the stuff home
again when eight miles from home. He simply
burns a little more petrol and vanishes into
another town.

In spite of its non-success from the agri-
cultural point of view, the cutting up of the
Cudworth farm has been successful in giving
a country home to some forty or fifty town
dwellers and their families, who now replace
the one farmer and his two labourers — the sum
total of the old regular farm staff. To succeed
agriculturally, the estate should have been cut
up into ten, instead of fifty holdings. Excel-

THE URBAN EXODUS. 257

lent dairy holdings of thirty or forty acres
might have been worked with success.

A much more interesting experiment in
providing land for the town dweller is that which
has just been started at Leigh, three miles out
of Keigate. This land was purchased to meet
a specific demand ; that at Cud worth, before
the demand was made. At Leigh 194 acres
with two cottages have been bought by the
Surrey County Council for the reasonable sum
of £4500, and this land has been let by the
Council to the Reigate Small Holders, Limited,
at a rent of about 21s. 6d. an acre. The low
rent shows the advantage of small holders
forming themselves into a co-operative society,
the members of which are almost all residents
in the towns of Reigate and Redhill. The
occupation of nearly all of these men is garden-
ing, and each of them, I am told, intends to
gain his entire livelihood out of holdings vary-
ing from five to thirty acres. At the same
time, I am informed that most of these men
possess a little nest - egg elsewhere. The
County Council have built six cottages this
year, which they let at a rent equivalent to
5^ per cent on the capital expenditure.

As the small holders here have a community

1

258 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

of interest, and are knitted together in one
society, they stand to achieve a greater success
than that obtained at Cudworth, where there
is a marked difference in class, in education,
and in ethical aims.

In yet another Home County, Essex, it was
again men and women tired of town life
who were attracted to Mr. Fels's colony at
May land, and it is not surprising that this
colony, so far as a settlement of town small
holders is concerned, has not been a success.
The large French garden — the largest, I believe,
in England — has hardly been a success either ;
but then who could expect to find a French
garden situated four and a half miles from
a railway station a commercial success ? It
has been an experimental garden from which
others have learned lessons, and that is about
all that one could have expected from it ;
though its manager, Mr. Smith, still looks for
financial success. There is one portion of the
colony, however, which is likely to succeed, and
that is the large farm ; and the Mayland farm
is instructive in that it shows how those parts
of England that lie away from the beaten
track of trade, and are on heavy soil, are more
likely to succeed when farmed extensively

THE URBAN EXODUS. 259

than when farmed intensively. As far as I
can see, Mayland as a small-holding colony of
five-acre fruit farms has failed. It has failed
because its democratic founder, Mr. Fels, put
a plutocratic qualification upon the selected
small holders. Men were selected for their
capacity to come equipped with a £100 note
rather than for the capacity to make a success
of the life which was entirely new to them. It
failed, too, because the holdings were too small.

It is a significant fact that men were selected
at Cudworth too for their property qualifica-
tions, rather than for their capacity to till the
earth with advantage.

Many of these settlers came from Woolwich
and other urban districts, and yet one cannot
lay the blame altogether on the unfitness of
the men. In my opinion, Mayland should
never have been cut into five-acre fruit farms,
but rather into thirty- or forty- acre stock-
raising holdings. A life which presents to
the townsman six months of digging heavy,
dirty land, unrelieved by any other winter
occupation, is a sore test to the most ardent
of earth lovers.

Evidently Mr. Fels entered into this
undertaking with the best of intentions, but

2G0 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

with a lack of practical knowledge. It was,
I believe, in 1905 that he one day strolled
into an auction market in London and made
a bid for a farm of 620 acres on the shores
of the Blackwater. He had never seen the
land ; nevertheless it immediately became his
property.

I remember the land before that date. I
remember its Dutch landscape with here and
there a group of trees or a stunted, weather-
beaten hedge, and nothing but these, or the
sails of a picturesque windmill to intercept
the unbroken view across the glimmering
Blackwater.

To the credit of Mr. Fels be it said, across
this very expanse the eye now lights upon the
top of brown sails of barges idly napping in the
wind, barges which yearly bring from London
hundreds of tons of stable manure. We see
the glittering whitewashed cottages roofed
with red tiles built in a semicircular sweep
for the small holders. We see too the belfry
of the new open-air school, and its adjoining
club and library, which, with the newly-
erected co - operative stores, make up the
village street.

The small holdings, of which there are

THE URBAN EXODUS. 261

twenty-one, are divided into five-acre lots, two
acres of which have been planted with fruit-
trees, leaving three acres of arable land. The
rent is based on an interest payable to Mr.
Fels of 5 per cent on the capital expended in
the creation and equipment of the holdings.
An excellent system of easement is afforded
in that no rent is charged the first year, a
small one the second year, a larger one the
third year, and the full rent is not demanded
until the fourth or fifth year, which, roughly
speaking, works out at £30 on each holding.
Very little dairy work is attempted, most of
the small holdings being devoted to market
gardens.

In spite of these favourable conditions in
land tenure, I found that most of the small
holders were deeply in debt to Mr. Fels. I
was shown how the system of co-operative
distribution in sending away the produce of
all in bulk to market had been perfected,
so I was told, " up to the last button " ; but
what was the use of that when the produce
was sent to Covent Garden on the chance of
what it might fetch ? It is like casting your
throw against an enemy who plays with loaded
dice. In many instances produce hardly

262 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

covered the cost of carriage. In the case of
strawberries the expenses exceeded the receipts
one year, and tomatoes realised less than a
penny a pound after paying expenses. Co-
operation merely perfected a method for making
the fortunes of Covent Garden salesmen.
This might have been avoided had co-operative
distributers come to the rescue of co-operative
producers.

A new system of selecting tenants has now
been adopted whenever a holding becomes
vacant. The property qualification of £100
has been abolished, and the agricultural
labourer who shows sufficient capability is
put into the vacant holding. He is paid a
wage of £l a week on the understanding that
he produces as much as he possibly can, work-
ing harder than he ever did in his life before,
and he is credited with the sales of his produce,
and debited with his wages and rent. When
a balance of £50 eventually lies to his credit,
he is given the money with a lease of the
holding assuring security of tenure for life.

The skilled man without capital is found to
be a better investment than the unskilled man
with capital.

Instead of sending produce to Covent

THE URBAN EXODUS. 263

Garden, Mr. Fels's manager now sends non-
returnable crates, carriage paid within a London
radius, filled with farm produce to the value
of 2s. 6d., 5s., and 10s. Cream, butter, eggs,
honey, chickens, fresh and bottled fruit, and
pork are sent away, as well as vegetables.
The fundamental idea is to increase the
business in such a way that the manager will
be able to direct a regular and remunerative
method of cropping each holding.

The administration of these small holdings,
and the care taken in the education of the
children in the splendid open-air school, is all
admirable. Mechanism here seems faultless ;
but somehow one cannot help feeling that the
spirit of associated labour is lacking. One
cannot help feeling too, that to know how to
handle men is as important in starting a farm
colony as to know how to handle live-stock. It
is excellent that a tract of land which formerly
employed only three men and two boys now
finds full employment for fifty-three men and
seven boys. It is splendid too how a new
village has sprung up in a waste place of the
earth with its new human fauna ; but though
it has not outwardly the common aspects
of an old English village, with its squire

264 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

and its parson, there is still the feeling of
dependence here as elsewhere in those who
live from hand to mouth on the goodwill of
a wealthy man. One is glad, though, that
there are no other outward and visible signs
of English civilisation. There is no police
station, no public-house, no lunatic asylum,
and no workhouse.

CHAPTER XIII.

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION.

The men who pay wages ought not to he the political
masters of those who earn them (because laws should he adapted
to those who have the heaviest stake in the country, for whom
misgovernment means not mortified pride or stinted luxury, but
want, and pain, and degradation, and risk to their own lives and
to their children's souls). — Lord Acton.

Rural housing, perhaps more than the question
of getting people back to the land, has baffled
reformers for the last three decades. Mr.
John Burns, as President of the Local Govern-
ment Hoard, has failed to touch even the
fringe of the problem. Will Mr. Walter
Runciman, as President of the Board of
Agriculture, reconstruct our decaying villages
from his Cottage Bureau ?

xVs cottages decay there are practically
no new ones to take their places, so that
not only is there no provision in many districts
for young couples who wish to get married,

265

266 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

but the middle-aged with families often have
to live under insanitary conditions.

A few extracts from the Report (1910) of
one Medical Officer of Health taken from a
district not remote from London (the Guildford
Rural District) will suffice to show not only
the urgent need for new cottages, but also the
need to free them of farm tenure.

" Albury. — Very little building has been
going on in this parish, and five cottages have
been closed within about the last two years.
. . . Two men working at Albury Heath have
to walk from Shalford daily, a distance of at
least four miles. A fanner's son, who is
married, has to walk at least two miles daily
to the farm. A block of three cottages
belonging to another farm are very old and
in an insanitary condition.

" Wanbord. — Six cottages have been pulled
down during the last few years, and only two
of these are now being replaced. Rents are
from 3s. to 3s. 6d., but most of the cottages
go with the farms. The number of these is,
however, insufficient, as I heard of one man
who had to walk four miles daily to work ;
two others live in Puttenham, and a man and
wife live in a shed on the farm.

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 267

" IVorplesdon. — At least two labourers with
large families were recently turned out of
cottages rented at 6s. 6d. a week, and had
nowhere to go to. One of them, who worked
for the Council, was admitted to the Union
Workhouse, and the other man, wife, and
seven children were temporarily housed in
one room of another cottage. In another
instance, the inspector found a family of three
occupying an out- building, with filthy sur-
roundings, on a small farm.

" Artington. — Only two cottages have
been built during the last five years.

" East Horsley. — No cottage-building has
taken place in this parish for many years,
and six cottages pulled down before the date
of the last census have not been replaced.

" East Clandon. — My recent inspection
revealed a very unsatisfactory state of things
in this village, both as to the condition of the
cottages, and also in respect to overcrowding.
There is special need here for further cottages,
in addition to the repair or reconstruction of
those existing."

The rural housing question as well as the
land question have presented features as
baffling as that of the rustic mind. Not that

268 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

the rustic does not know what he wants, but that
the town legislator never seems to know how
to fulfil that want. Our countryside remains
silent ; it is only in towns, where votes are
plentiful, that one hears the clatter of tongues.

The Housing of the Working Classes Act
1890 has proved a momentous failure as
applied to rural districts. Though not formu-
lated as a Housing Act, there have been more
cottages built in twenty months, under the
Small Holding Act 1908, than in the twenty
years since the passing of the Working
Classes Act. So hedged about by obstacles
was it, and apparently drafted by lawyers
purposely to run an obstacle-race, that the
Housing Act became almost a dead-letter. It
has now been supplanted by the Housing and
Town Planning Act of 1909.

In this there has been an honest attempt
to obtain direct appeal from the poor cottager
who wants a cottage, to the highest admini-
strative authority — the Local Government
Board. There is to be no more of the old
wrecking procedure of getting the Parish
Council to apply to the Rural District Council,
and for that body to apply to the County
Council, which should again apply to the

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 269

Local Government Board, which holds an
Enquiry and refers the question back to the
County Council, before poor Hodge can get
a cottage to live in ! — the telling of the
getting of which runs something like the
nursery rhyme of the House that Jack
built.

Now there is no need for the Rural District
Council to obtain the sanction of the County
Council before instituting building schemes.
Furthermore, there is to be no additional
price for the land on account of the purchase
being made by Compulsory Order ; and two
of the most important improvements made in
housing legislation by the passing of the Town
Planning Act were that any local authority
might by agreement acquire land and hold it
for purposes of building, although it may not
immediately intend to build ; and that any four
householders of the district can make a direct
appeal to the Local Government Board without
having to undergo the arduous labour of con-
verting opposing locally elected persons as to
the urgency of the case.

This is, of course, a great step towards
obtaining the key to the situation. Yet in
spite of the simplification of procedure, some-

270 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

how or other the four good men and true
are rarely forthcoming. This the townsman
cannot perhaps understand — the fear that the
countryman still has of the powers that be,
the fear that even if he gets what he wants he
will be severely punished by the employing
class which he has for the time outwitted.1

Now that the Finance Act has put the
wholesome fear of taxation upon owners, and
so checks them from placing a fictitious value
on land simply because it is wanted by a
public body, sites will, we may hope, be
more easily found. There still remains the
difficulty, however, of building cottages to let
at a rent as low as the old insanitary cottages
which ought to be condemned and vacated.

Whilst the cottagers who live huddled
together in overcrowded insanitary cottages,
without even a clean and adequate supply of
water, feel that any move on their part toward
getting a new cottage, through a public body,

1 A striking exception has recently been made (January 1912)
by the labourers of East Stow, who bombarded the Local
Government Board so persistently with complaints, that the
hostile Rural District Council have agreed to build forty new
cottages. Yet we learn from Sir Arthur Boscawen (in the
House of Commons, 15th March 1912) that whilst 1344 cottages
have been closed under the 1909 Act, only 116 new ones have
been built.

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 271

might mean not only a closing order which
would turn them on to the streets, but also
the implacable resentment of their landlord,
who is probably also their employer, not much
progress is likely to be made. And should
new cottages be built, the higher rent exacted
without higher wages to meet the increase,
or having to face the possibility of being
stranded without any wages at all, deters the
cottager from meeting trouble, as he would
say, half-way.

In a village in which I was elected a parish
councillor, I had to make my visitations to
insanitary cottages stealthily by night. In so
great a fear do the cottagers live of being
turned out of their wretched hovels, that I
had to presume upon the fact that I was a
parish councillor and assume some kind of
official right to examine the dirty puddles
from which the cottagers had to draw their
water-supply. The owner of these cottages
was not only a parish councillor, but was
also something much more to the point — a
rural district councillor.

In front of me at this moment lies a letter
from a friend, who tells me that he can do
nothing with the insanitary cottages in his

272 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

parish because the clerk of the council has
the letting of them !

On another occasion, in quite a different
parish, I informed a lady who took a great
interest in hygiene, that several of the cottages
on her large estate had nothing but stagnant
ponds from which to draw their water-supply,
and that several children in these cottages
had been down with diphtheritic throats. She
called, with her agent, upon one of the unfortun-
ate cottagers, who, fearful of consequences,
said that he himself had made no complaint.
And yet, impelled either by a sense of humour
or by yokel simplicity, he invited his land-
lady and her agent in turn to partake of a
glass of the water. But neither the lady nor
her agent were thirsty that afternoon ! When
she left, she advised the cottager to send a
sample to the Medical Officer of Health ! Of
course this was never done, and even if it
had been, assuredly the Medical Officer would
have rejected a sample which he himself did
not take in a special phial.

In 1910, Mr. F. Swanzy, J.P., carried out,
by means of travelling correspondence, an
inquiry concerning conditions prevailing in
the county of Kent. The report is summed

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 273

up as follows : " Of the correspondents who
dealt with housing about half complained of
the want of cottages and of overcrowding and
insanitary conditions. In some cottages, we
are told, there are ladders to the bedrooms,
bad floors, bad roofs, and sieve-like walls.
Another correspondent speaks of a row of
cottages unfit for habitation, but 'labourers
must take them, for there are no others.' In
another village complaints have resulted in a
row of cottages being closed ; but as no new
ones have been built the effect is overcrowding.

1 The worst cottages are owned by , and

if complaint were made, we expect the result
would be a notice to quit,' says another inform-
ant. In many districts, farmers hold or hire
the cottages, and sublet them to their labourers
— a thoroughly bad system, which goes far to
reduce the labourer to a state of servitude.
In some villages there are no cottage gardens.
Complaints to the local authorities, the Local
Government Board under the new Housing
Act, are made rarely, and have not as yet had
much effect."

The worst evil in rural housing is this
system of farm-tied cottages. Not only does
it lead to uneconomic rents and low wages, but

18

274 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

also to the employer — that is, the farmer —
being given the opportunity to exercise any
amount of petty tyranny. " Wages may be
low, perhaps only 12s. a week, but there is
the extra money for harvest, and I give him
a cottage, or let him one for Is. 6d. or 2s. a
week ; and so he is well off." This is the
contention of the farmer.

In my opinion, the letting of cottages by
farmers to their own employees should be
penalised and considered an infringement of
the Truck Act. No landlord of a farm should
be allowed to delegate to the farmer the
letting of the cottages on the farm.

Townsmen should remember that they
enjoy comparative freedom in town compared
to the agricultural labourer in the country.
The town workman may never see his em-
ployers, or know who they are beyond their
names or the names of the company for whom
he is working. He has little fear of running
up against them in the street or of having to
live under a roof owned by his employers. In
the country the labourer meets his farmer-
employer nearly every day in the fields or in
the lanes, and he feels that if he offends the
master, or the master's friends, he may lose not

■ A farm-tied Cottage at Great Bradli S oik.

i rents and six child] m shown here (with an extra bi

the l the I. a week.

(2) Excellent Small-holders' Cottagi

Built on Sir C, D. Rose' rown Lands), at Burwell : six rnoms in all, and li

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 275

only his work, but, what is even more important,
the chance of getting a roof over his head, or
indeed any employment in the neighbourhood.
In his Secret of Rural Depopulation, Lieu-
tenant-Colonel D. C. P. Pedder gives us a
gruesome picture of tied cottages being used
as booby-traps. "Most cottages," he says,
" are tied to farms. Say a farmer has a very
bad one, how is he to get a labourer in and
get him to stay ? What is he to do ? First,
there is the advertisement, ' Good cottage
and garden.' Much hiring is done by letter.
The labourer sees the advertisement. To go
and see the cottage means losing a day's wage.
I wish the wives went ; but they don't. And
they don't encourage their husbands to go.
There is the money lost to begin with, and
very likely a bad head resulting from much
strange beer, and after all, 'what could he tell if
he saw it V Such is the contempt felt for the
masculine mind by our natural rulers. He
applies by letter for the place, is accepted, and
fetched over with family and furniture in his
master's waggon. If he goes into the cottage
provided, the trap falls. He will be had up
before the magistrate if he refuses to fulfil
his agreement of service in writing or verbal.

276 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

I must give instances. Here is one from an
Oxfordshire paper of a couple of months ago.
A labourer is inducted as I have described.
He stays one day and goes. His plea is that
he had not seen the inside of the cottage ; that
it was raining, and that he had no choice but
to put his furniture and family under cover.
The master's son says he took him round, and
that he had a 'chance' of seeing the inside
before he took the place. I have no doubt he
might have seen it if he had insisted. But
labourers have no courage to insist. He had
not seen it. Fined £2 : 6s. ; a month's wages,
I suppose."

The younger generation are alert enough to
know that their subjection is complete when
once they are inside a farm - tied cottage.
Hence it is that we get that strong disinclina-
tion on the part of the young men to become
agricultural labourers and so forfeit the freedom
which they feel is enjoyed by those who live
in towns ; and it is useless to expect that the
blow to sever the letting of the cottage from
the farm is to be struck by a subject race.
The reform must come from the town, like
nearly every other reform which shall affect
the life of the agricultural labourer.

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 277

The difficulty confronting us is to get the
demand for better cottages expressed by those
who want them. That great Democrat of
Battersea, the President of the Local Govern-
ment Board, would be, we all imagined, the
first to recognise this fact. He did in fact
recognise this fact when he framed the Town
Planning Act of 1909, but a regime of
bureaucracy at Whitehall seems to have
dulled his wits with regard to the village
labourer. In the administration of his own
Act he has shown himself adverse to holding
any Local Government Board Enquiry unless
a complete case is presented by the petitioners ;
that is to say, unless the village labourer,
unlearned in letters, shows himself possessed
of forensic knowledge ! Mr. John Burns does
not seem to realise that the country labourer
has as great a horror of filling up a " form "
as the educated followers of Captain Prettyman
of filling up Form IV. of the Finance Act.

It seems to me that the only way to obtain
evidence is to appoint Housing Commissioners
just as we have appointed Small Holdings
Commissioners, who shall make a tour of
inspection of all districts where bad housing
conditions prevail. For this is not an in-

278 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

dividual but a national problem waiting for
solution. The commissioners should be men
who know how to elicit information from
country labourers, and the inquiry should not
be made publicly where the tenant has to
speak under the eye of his landlord, but held
privately between the commissioner and the
applicant.

There still remains the supreme difficulty
to be settled of building cottages at a low
enough rent to meet the pocket of the country
labourer. I have often gone into this question,
and I have come to the conclusion that it is
quite impossible in any district to build new
cottages which shall compete in rent with the
old farm-tied cottages let at Is. 6d. or 2s. a
week. Either one or two things must happen.
Either wages must go up to meet the higher
rent (by the institution of a legal minimum
wage), or a subsidy must be made out of rates,
or the national exchequer, to meet the deficit
made on letting cottages say at 2s. a week,
which should really be let at 3s. 6d. a week to
cover all charges. The burden of the Sinking
Fund charge should be lifted off the shoulders
of the tenant of a cottage as off that of the
tenant of County Council land.

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 279

In certain districts cottages could be built
to let at an economic rent. That is, where
the wages of agricultural labourers stand
at 18s. or £l, and where land and building
material is fairly cheap. We have seen what
excellent cottages Mr. Fels has erected at the
cost of only £130 at Mayland. He, however,
makes a point of paying his men a living wage,
and his tenants are thereby able to pay the 5 per
cent of interest on the outlay and thus pay the
rental value. We have seen, too, that where
building material, such as clay and timber, and
heather for thatching, are close at hand, as at
Verwood, excellent detached cottages can be
built for £70. In Ireland many cottages are
built for the labourer which cost no more than
£100 ; and I would point out to those who
fear that cottages being let at uneconomic
rents would inevitably tend to lower wages,
that labourers' wages have risen 25 per cent
to 30 per cent in Ireland since the erection
of cottages there in 1889.

Now, if cottages can be built for about £100,
with the letting value of 2s. 6d. per week, there
should be no call made upon the ratepayer or
the taxpayer, and the slight raising of rents
might have the wholesome effect of the

280 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

labourers obtaining by organisation a higher
wage, and at the same time having better
cottages to live in than those which they have
vacated. The new cottages should at any rate
give the children room in which to breathe.
Those tubercular breeding dens, with low-
pitched bedrooms without fireplaces and shot-
holes for windows, might then very well be
razed to the ground.

I am told that in the north of England,
where boiler clinkers can be had for the cart-
ing, and in other parts where gravel is in
abundance and cheap, and coast shingle easy
to get, cottages made of concrete blocks are
being built for £90. For these cottages in
which cement is used to the proportion of
one to four or five, a block-making machine
can be hired for £6 a month. Such cottages
could be let at a rent compassable by the
labourer. Indeed, I know of one small-holding
settlement where cottages built in this way
are now being erected.

Yet we have to face the fact that in many
districts building material is not to be obtained
in this easy and cheap manner, and it is these
districts which we cannot as a nation afford to
leave undeveloped, simply because labourers

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 281

are not getting high enough wages from their
employers, and land is held tightly by the
present owners. In such districts the pro-
posed Housing Commissioners should do
excellent work, and if it is found that cottages
could not be built at a rent low enough to
meet the income of the agricultural labourer,
I fail to see why farmers and landowners, who
directly or indirectly benefit by the low
wages paid to labourers, should not contribute
specially towards the rates. This would not
be introducing any new principle in the finances
of Local Government. Already landowners
and farmers have been rate-aided by the re-
mission of half the rates on agricultural land,
and it seems hardly fair to put an extra tax
upon the village shopkeeper, the blacksmith,
the publican, and the doctor, because labourers
not employed by them cannot pay a rent
high enough to enable them to live in a decent
cottage.

There are, I suggest, two ways of getting
over the difficulty of covering the cost of
building. One would be a grant from the
national exchequer towards any reasonable
building scheme presented by a Rural District
Council to the Local Government Board, and

282 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

approved of by its President. The other way
I suggest is to take a greater advantage of
the Building Clause (8) under the Small
Holdings Act of 1908. This Act specifically
states that a holding may be anything from
one acre to fifty. The Act of 1892 stated
that not more than one house should be built
on a holding, but Section 8 of the 1908 Act
may be interpreted to mean that two or three
cottages might be built together on the same
plot, provided each tenant has a holding
adjacent to the building site. If this plan of
building a cottage with an acre of land close
to it were adopted in a great many rural
districts, not only would it go a great way
towards solving the rural housing question, but
also it would give the labourer at least one
acre, which would be an immense boon to him
in times of unemployment. Besides, and this
would appeal most of all to the ratepayers,
the accommodation rent for an acre of land
attached to a cottage should be high enough
to cover all charges on outlay. The clause
in the amended Small Holdings Act of 1908
giving powers to Parish Councils to build
cottages on allotments of one acre is excellent.
Unfortunately, though, no Parish Council have

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 283

as yet taken advantage of this clause. In
my opinion the Act should be further amended,
so that cottages could be built in villages on
half an acre of land, and I may mention here,
that during an interview I had with Mr.
Walter Runciman on the 20th February 1912,
he intimated to me that he was in favour of
this amendment as well as one which would
allow the capital charge for outbuildings to be
spread over a longer period.

In recent years, concurrently with the
movement of townsmen towards spending their
week-ends in the country, there has also been
a gradual rise in the value of old cottages.
Many good people with the best of intentions
have not yet realised that, in taking these old
country cottages and furnishing them for the
week-end, they are making it increasingly
difficult for the labourer to live. It is not
good that a producer should be elbowed out
by a non-producer. However, as we cannot
make new laws to prevent townspeople from
occupying country cottages (and I do not see
why we should, for I can quite sympathise
with those who desire to get out of town
as quickly and as often as they possibly can),
we must see that new cottages are built to

284 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

prevent our countryside being depleted of
wealth-producers.

There are bye-laws and the lawyers to be
reckoned with. Bye-laws, however, can easily
be altered, but lawyers seem destined to be
with us always. I am not one of those who
join in the general outcry against the bye-laws.
Sane bye-laws are often the only protection
that country-folk have against the misdoings
of jerry-builders, but I do object to bye-laws
being gerrymandered by builders, or their
friends, who sit on rural district councils,
framing them in their own interest.

A workman, or a person possessing no
property, who is elected to sit on a district
council is likely to go there with cleaner hands
than those who handle property. But, un-
fortunately, such a person is often devoid of
any aesthetic sense. It is a depressing thought,
showing to what extent commercialism has
debased the finer sense of beauty in man, that
even the country cottager looks upon the
hideous suburban villa as a palace of delight,
and his own picturesque country cottage with
contempt as old-fashioned. Here it is that the
educated independent man with taste would
come in and play a great part in the revival

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 285

of country life. It is probable, though, that
owing to the opposition of " vested interest "
and the apathy, or suspicion of Hodge, that
he would rarely get elected. Why not, then,
allow rural district councils to co - opt artists
(in the widest sense) in the same way in which
county councils co-opt educational experts ?

Lawyers are more difficult to get rid of,
judging by the composition of the House of
Commons. Conveyancing is still a costly
process in spite of the fact that people of all
shades of political opinion agree that the
transference of land should be as easy as the
transference of stock.

A large landowner once told me that he
sold an acre of land for the building of cottages
for £100, and in totalling up the lawyer's
expenses on his side and on the buyer's, as
well as the mortgager's, the charges amounted
to exactly another £100 !

There is an Act of which few people seem
to be cognisant called " The Land Transfer
Act of 1875," the purpose of which was to
simplify and cheapen the transfer of land by
registration at the Land Registry Office in
London from one owner to another, but some-
how or other it has been kept dark, and the

286 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Act has more or less become a dead-letter.
Whilst penning these lines, the following
interesting communication, published in the
Daily News on the 28th July 1911, claimed
my attention : —

"Mr. R. Winfrey, M.P., in conversation
with our Lobby Correspondent last evening
furnished some striking instances of the value
of the Land Transfer Act of 1875, as to the
failure of which, owing to the local authorities,
the Lord Chancellor and the ex - Lord
Chancellor made complaint in the House of
Lords two days ago.

" In 1894 Mr. Winfrey said he moved on
the Holland (Lincolnshire) County Council
a resolution urging upon the Lord Chancellor
of that day the desirability of creating a local
land registry office in that administrative
county. He was opposed by the legal gentle-
men on the Council, but he succeeded in
carrying the resolution.

" ' Shortly afterwards,' continued Mr.
Winfrey, 'three Boston solicitors started a
correspondence condemning the action of the
County Council, and asserted that in cases
where the Land Transfer Act had been put
into operation it had ignominiously failed and

COTTAGE ACCOMMODATION. 287

greatly increased the expense and difficulty of
transfer. In order to test this statement, I
proceeded to register a small piece of land to
demonstrate to the Boston lawyers what could
be done under the Act.

" ' I went to the Land Registry Office in
London, and in less than one hour I had,
without the intervention of a solicitor, registered
five acres of land in two parishes at a cost of
£l : 4 : 6d. I was very interested to find that
no less a personage than the then Prime
Minister, Lord Rosebery, was at the same
time registering some of his land under
the Act.

•• * Previous to registering this land, as
an absolute owner with a possessory title I
had owned it for eleven years. I have just
recently entered into an agreement to sell
it to the Rural District Council for housing
purposes. I understand that the Clerk to the
Rural District Council will be prepared to
accept the title as registered ; we shall apply
in due course to the Registry Office for the
necessary transfer, and all will be done without
the intervention of lawyers, at an ad valorem
cost of about lis.'"

We shall have to face the tragedy of rural

288 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

depopulation with a bold heart. It is clear
that as a nation we cannot afford to let
cottages in our villages tumble down with
none others to take their place. If necessary,
England must imitate Ireland in the rejuvena-
tion of her deserted villages and labour-starved
acres. We should be prepared to spend money
on recolonisation with as much patriotic fervour
as in spending money on Dreadnoughts.
County cottages are surely as much needed
as ironclads, for in our cottage homes are
born our heroes of the sea. We should regard
it as a national business undertaken for the
sake of the England that is To Be.

Rural problems have been given the cold
shoulder by most politicians, presumably be-
cause there are not many votes to be picked
up along the highways and hedges. There
has been a new note though proclaimed by
those who tramp the crowded streets of our
cities with nothing but a bag of tools over
their shoulders for their worldly wealth, that
the problem of the countryside shall be their
problem too — the national problem — and those
who wish to solicit their votes will have in
future to reckon with the birth of a new spirit
in a triumphing democracy.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE COUNTRY HOUSE AND THE INDEPENDENT

RESIDENT.

It has been the fashion of what mijrht be
termed Victorian writers to extol the influence
of the country house and to give it a place
which it no longer occupies in the destiny of
rural England. In Ireland there is a section
of the landowning class who are doing every-
thing within their power, short of the great
Tolstoyan requital, to improve the condition
of their tenants and to pass on to them some
of the knowledge which they have acquired at
Dublin or at Oxford.

When I was in Ireland I was given a
vivid description by a Nationalist of a little
titled lady — aged fourteen — acting the blue-
stocking mentor to raw Irish youths of eighteen
in the evening class room. In England similar

289 19

290 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

scenes may sometimes be enacted, but in
Ireland it has the added moral value in that the
landowning class are preforming what they feel
an act of restitution. In England, in spite of
the four hundred odd Enclosure Acts dis-
possessing the labouring and yeoman class of
some millions of acres, an air of patronage and
condescension overshadows nearly every act
of requital performed by the possessing class.

There is in rural England far more out-
ward evidence of charity than in our towns, but
we must not be led by this to imagine that the
rich countryman is any more charitable than
the rich townsman. Nowadays, as often as
not it is the great town capitalist, who, having
made a large fortune out of town workmen,
sets up as a country squire, and spends a
little of the surplus wealth created by labour
in the luxury of subsidising a Lady Bountiful.
The country house of George Meredith
differs from that of Jane Austen as the
country house of Mr. John Galsworthy differs
from that of Mr. Meredith. There is less
simplicity to - day than in the days of Jane
Austen, and a much greater, amounting almost
to a feverish, display of wealth. The motor car
has cut off for ever that personal touch between

THE COUNTRY HOUSE. 291

the rich and the poor man. We remember
Mr. Jerome K. Jerome's lady who desired a
country house within an easy carriage drive of
some nice little slums. Now, 1 suppose the
advertisement would be amended to " an easy
motor drive."

On the other hand, there is, I imagine, a
larger intellectual life in the country house of
to-day than in the time of Jane Austen, and
though this may be largely tinged with
cynicism, the mental outlook is clearer than
that which obtained in days gone by.

Lady Henry Somerset, who must have had a
large experience of the English country house
in various counties, has stated " that there is
far more spontaneous happiness in a village
where there is no great house than even in the
best village where everything is beneficially
arranged by a great landlord for the benefit of
the people." " Servility and envy," once said a
youth to her, "was the effect of the great
house. Servility, because we are all afraid
we may lose if we offend ; envy, at the sight
of what appears to be so wonderful and
romantic."

The occupation of a country estate by a
new family from town is always a disturbing

292 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

influence in village life. If the new family be
very wealthy, the head of it descends upon it
like a conqueror. The little village grocer
and the publican may rub their hands with
self - gratulation, but the parson and the
schoolmaster, if they be thoughtful men, and
the little lady with slender means who drives
herself about in a pony-chaise, will fear the
setting up of the golden calf in their midst.
The labourers will no doubt regard the change
from the old squire to the new squire with
indifference. As an economic factor the
large country house is to him what Buckingham
Palace is to the sleeper on the benches in the
Park. His wife may cast an anxious glance
at her daughter growing to maturity. Charity
will come their way, she supposes, as it came
before, for they look upon it now as a matter
of right, and though charity may ennoble the
giver, it rarely ennobles the receiver.

Probably the most evil outcome of a large
establishment in the country with a great
number of male servants is in the exaltation of
a false standard of life. Parasitic labour, of
no use from the national standpoint, will be
valued higher than honest productive toil.
Male servants, selected often for their looks,

THE COUNTRY HOUSE. 293

are usually over-fed, self-indulgent, and indolent
in their habits, and produce a demoralis-
ing effect in the midst of a hard-working com-
munity. A large establishment has also this
vicious effect upon national life, that when a pro-
position is made to impose a tax upon unearned
increment in order to bring under cultivation
land lying idle or merely marking time, the
threat to reduce the number of servants em-
ployed in the large country house will bring
the parasitic class, and all that they are con-
nected with, in full hue and cry, with the
master of the establishment at their head,
against those who desire to produce more food
for the nation.

Apart altogether from the debasing
qualities in charity in any neighbourhood
afflicted with the presence of a wealthy family,
the feeling becomes common that it is very
desirable to get well rewarded for little services
— a feeling generated by the lavish tips so
often given by visitors to the servant class.
An air of snobbery begins to invade the
village. As the villagers become more sophisti-
cated the moral tone sinks lower. The old
sturdy peasant traditions gradually become
effaced. Dull though the topics of con-

294 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

versation may have been before, concerning
mangolds and pigs, yet it was largely free
from the vulgarity of the talk of the music
hall, of champagne - swilling, of comparing
the lavish display of one country house with
another ; free, too, it was, of the garbage of
the divorce court, and all the other genteel
topics of conversation introduced by the
flunkeys from town.

No one, perhaps, could be more out of
sympathy, intellectually and artistically, than
myself with the mental outlook of those who
clothe themselves in black, and with dour
faces find spiritual refreshment on Sundays in
the Ebenezer Chapel of the countryside ; yet
I cannot help recognising the greater virility
of those who live outside the pale of the
Established Church and the scope of the
patronage of the country house. Indeed, if
one were to compare the general happiness of
those who live in village communities with no
large country house near at hand, or even with
a benevolent landlord, the greater happiness
will be found with those who are endeavouring
to shape unaided their own destinies.

In many places a great deal too much is
done for the poor by philanthropic ladies.

THE COUNTRY HOUSE. 295

What the country poor really want is not
that something should be done for them, but
that they should be given the opportunity to
do it for themselves. Those tiresome, amateur
theatrical performances by the " local gentry,"
should be superseded by performances given
by the rustics themselves portraying their
own lives. Village dances should not be per-
formed under the patronage of any one, least
of all of the vicar. They should be spontane-
ously organised by the villagers themselves.

The library of the village institute might
very well be relieved of its ponderous tomes,
as well as of its very frivolous and sporting
side, such as the " Pink 'un," suitable enough,
though it may be for idle moments in the
country house ; and books which tell of their
own lives and what can be made out of their
own lives put in their place. Debating societies
should be organised by the young men them-
selves, without any intellectual deadweight to
crush the diffident. Cricket clubs should not
only be self-supporting, but they should also
cease to support the local publican.

Though the country house with its luxury,
its diffusion of meretricious standards of what
is good and what is bad, its abrogation of

296 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

simplicity, and its display of wealth has an
influence which certainly does not make for
righteousness, there is a splendid opportunity
in rural England awaiting members of the
educated classes who are not dependent upon
either large farmers or the landowning class
for their livelihood, to exercise an influence
for good.

Some one may remind me that there is the
country doctor, sometimes the lawyer and
the auctioneer, and always the clergyman, to
help to make rural life more bearable for the
poor who labour with their hands.

There are, it is true, these gentlemen ;
but can any one say, excepting in very rare
instances, that either the doctor or the land-
agent, the lawyer or the parson, have sufficient
courage to battle for the poor, when in fight-
ing it means contending against farmers and
landowners, on whom professional men in the
country are largely dependent for their daily
bread ?

Indeed, I have found that in cases of rural
sanitation concerning schools and cottages,
the doctor, while agreeing entirely with me
or any other sanitarian, has begged to be
excused from uttering any public opinion on

THE COUNTRY HOUSE 297

the case under discussion. In fact, I have
found the mechanic, or even the labourer,
display more public spirit than gentlemen of
the medical profession. It is notorious, of
course, that in the case of public footpaths,
commons, schools, and rural housing, the
land-agent and the lawyer invariably range
themselves on the side of the possessing class.

There is, at any rate, I am told, the clergyman.
He certainly has his livelihood secure from the
disfavour of landowners or farmers. But can
it be said of him that he is invariably beloved
by the poor ? There are, of course, individual
clergymen who have spoken out nobly on the
side of the poor, but country labourers know
that the parson belongs to the same class as
the squire, that he is a persona grata in every
country house, and is imbued with the same
feelings and class interests which, unfortunately,
when he takes Holy orders, he does not
renounce. He is still one of "the gentry,"
and in that phrase lies an unbridgeable chasm.

The parson, however, is a human being like
any other professional man. His family is
probably large and his income extremely small,
and it may be that he is dependent on the Easter
offerings of the wealthy, just as the game-

298 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

keeper is dependent on the tips of the guns
at the autumnal carnage. He cries for peace,
but unfortunately often mistakes spiritual
stagnation for the peace that passeth all
understanding.

Here, then, is the opportunity for members
of the educated classes. Let them take up
their residence in the heart of the country and
help to revive rural life in the same way in
which young men have joined University
Settlements in slum areas. The artist, and
the man of letters, who can pursue his avoca-
tion as well, if not better, in the country than
in town, might very well become a pioneer
in stimulating a revival of country life.
There are the men, and the women too, who
have small independent means — the smaller
the better, for then there will be less fear of
them being identified so intimately with the
possessing class. There is plenty of work at
hand for them to do.

When I write of the possessing classes I
do not refer only to the landowning class. It
is the large farmer who really possesses the
executive power in the country. The land-
owner might be spending most of the year in
town, or even abroad, or he might be merely a

THE COUNTRY HOUSE. 299

sportsman, or a scholar, indifferent to every-
thing outside of his library, park, or preserve.
It is the farmer who is always on the spot,
who is always to be found sitting on the
school management committee, or sitting on
the rural, or the district, or the county
council. He has the letting of the cottages
as well as the employing of labour, and it is
he who is generally the implacable foe of all
reform in education or sanitation, of a larger
freedom for labourers, or the restoration of
the land to the people.

Educated men, with a passionate love of their
country, desiring to develop all its resources,
human as well as material, can do, and some
are doing, splendid work to help the un-
educated classes to voice their wants, or to
express them on paper regardless of the
stubborn opposition of the farming class. Such
men are a delight to meet, and I have found
them working as isolated units helping the
formation of small-holding societies in Somer-
setshire, agricultural co-operative societies in
Norfolk, land and home leagues in Wiltshire,
tenants' defence leagues in Yorkshire ; and I
have known personally two large landowners
who have issued month by month leaflets

300 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

showing labourers how they were to organise
themselves in order to obtain better conditions
of life !

The moral support of even one independent
gentleman in a country parish has a far-reach-
ing effect, an effect which townsmen can
hardly understand.

CHAPTER XV.

MANNERS IN ARCADY.

That manners in rural England may have
been better before 1870, as a writer in a high-
class sporting paper would have us believe, is
quite conceivable. Of that time, however, I
cannot speak, for I was not old enough to
hold intelligent conversation with my fellow-
countrymen ; but from all accounts it appears
that hat-brims are now in better condition
than they were then, and the hems of the
cottage women's skirts are now less soiled.

I remember, some years ago, a revolutionary
act in manners taking place in a Kentish
village. A gallant young butcher lifted his
cap to the wife of a knight, whom he served
with beef — and very good beef too. As Sir
Leicester Deadlock might have observed, this
was opening the floodgates with a vengeance !

301

302 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Her ladyship, unlike she who stooped so
nobly to the butcher of Maurice Hewlett's
unforgettable romance, stopped the intrepid
youth and informed him that only from her
social equals could she accept so bold a
salute. On her side, one must recognise the
high moral courage in a lady, who, though not
nobly born, yet was richly endowed with the
panoply of wealth. In giving vent to a
freedom of speech, rare even among snobs, she
had struck a true note amid her clanging
discords. Good manners are only possible
where social equality is assured.

In the whole of my experience in Arcady
I have known only one individual of the
educated classes, and she a lady, who could
treat the poor in exactly the same way as
she did the rich. One other of my acquaint-
ance, who came of the stock of scholars and
grandes dames, considered herself a democrat
until she went to keep house on her brother's
farm in Canada. Her Christian name was
Lucy, and she declares that on the day of her
arrival she knew that she was no democrat,
for she shivered all over when one of the farm
hands addressed her as " Lu."

The manners of the English are, of course,

MANNERS IN ARCADY. 303

notoriously bad, whether they live in the
country or in the town, but I do not think
that any one class is worse than another. On
the whole, I am inclined to agree with Mr.
Stephen Reynolds and with Mr. Chesterton
that the poor are more ceremonial and
courteous than the rich. They are not, it is
true, gifted with the graciousness of the
Spaniard or the Breton peasant. English
mechanics do not struggle with their bags
of tools in their hands in order to take off*
their cap to a fellow-workman, and to bid him
" Good morning " as one sees the workman do
on the Danish highroad. Nor can they refuse
a tip — a rare occurrence — with the graciousness
of the French workmen who helped Stevenson
with his canoe on his " Inland Voyage."

" At Hautmont," he wrote, " near a dozen
grimy workmen lent us a hand. They refused
any reward, and, what is much better, refused
it handsomely, without conveying any sense
of insult. 'It is a way we have in our
countryside,' they said. And a very becom-
ing way it is. In Scotland, where also you
will get service for nothing, the good people
reject your money as if you had been trying
to corrupt a voter. When people take the

304 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

trouble to do dignified acts," continues this
Shorter Catechist, " it is worth while to take
a little more and allow the dignity to be
common to all concerned."

Our rustic poor have no manners like
these ; yet they possess a courtesy which is
of a finer flavour than that of the rich. In
the amenities of commerce the poor are more
ceremonial. If I, for instance, want to sell
a pig to a cottager, he will, on his arrival,
compliment me on my view and on my cattle
before he looks in the sty. Then he will tell
me that the pig is a very nice pig, " ah, that
she be," before the peculiar ritual of the dealing
begins. There is no abrupt verbal pistol-shot,
" What do you want for it ? " of the upper class
when purchasing a hunter or a motor car.

The rustic poor have not learnt to express
themselves in print. Socially they are not
even vocal. We have many essays on their
manners by members of the educated classes ;
but when the poor begin to write about the
manners of the upper classes, we shall have
satire of a new and wonderful order.

The relationship between the modern
country parson and the elderly labourer is
sometimes, nowadays, a humorous spectacle.

A Sussex Labourer of the old order.

MANNERS IN ARCADY. 305

The labourer who has been accustomed to
treating the parson as one of "the gentry"
whose lack of patronage he fears, does not
understand the democratic ways of the new
young vicar, who is perhaps a member of the
Christian Social Union. The vicar wishes to
treat the labourer as his comrade and equal,
calls him by his Christian name, and extends
to him the hand of fellowship. Then the
poor labourer with a movement in which
suspicion, fear, and respect are mingled,
boo-o-les at his hat-brim, takes his clay pipe out
of his mouth, and looks at his toil-smitten fist
with an air of stupefaction.

It is the old-fashioned, sporting, human
parson who can unbend, but at the same time
maintain his position as patron, and never as
servant to the people, who is still the most
popular — popular in the sense that he is in-
variably understood.

I remember one such a parson who accosted
a labourer on horseback with the greeting,
" Well, Hopkins, still working for old Billy
Goodman ? "

" Beg pardon, sir, I am still working for
Mr. William Goodman," replied the labourer

with ceremonious dignity.

20

306 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

" Oh, very well then," said the parson
cheerfully ; " which way are you riding ?
Come and have a glass of beer with me."

A labourer who hedges for me told me the
other day that our parson was popular because
he knows his manners — apparently a rare
gift — " He never visits you without knockin',
and he won't come at meal times, neither."

I remember once hearing an author, dis-
tinguished for his knowledge of rural England,
telling a company of friends that, after making
minute inquiries into the lineage of families
in the two counties that he knew best — Kent
and Sussex — he found that the descendants
of the old English aristocracy were in the
main living in labourers' cottages. This may
account for that quality of dignity, of pride
in one's manhood, which is the distinguishing
mark of our country poor. This may seem
a strange assertion in the face of the touching
of forelocks or of hat-brims, but those arts
are almost mechanical, and as much a matter
of tradition as it is with the soldier in the
army to salute his superior officer.

The quality is sometimes an ignoble one,
but it does, at any rate, distinguish the
labourer from the tradesman class, which

MANNERS IN ARCADY. 307

apparently swallows insults that Hodge would
never endure for a moment without forcible
retaliation. I remember a man who had
been working for me in the hay-fields telling
me with a wry face that he had knocked
another man down, and that he was sorry
for it. I said, " Then, why don't you go and
apologise to him?" He stared at me with
astonishment, and then replied with the
hauteur of a Bourbon prince, " I never
apologised to nobody in my life ! No, I
couldna' apologise to no one ! "

That the poor have a keen sense of justice
and a fine feeling for human dignity I could
further illustrate by an episode which occurred
in a certain parish. The vicar, in his sermon,
described in almost every particular except
that of mentioning his name, a sinner in their
midst. At the next parish meeting a labourer
got up and expressed the views of most of
those present by saying that if any one was
going to be drummed out of the parish, he
was going to be drummed out along with
him, and that the parishioners objected to
personal attacks being made from the pulpit.

The attitude of the country poor, in the
south of England at any rate, where feudalism

308 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

has taken the longest time to die, is still,
more or less, that of the mediaeval villains.
During the recent attempts of the suffragette
party to obtain signatures in favour of woman's
suffrage, I found that the poorer a man was,
the more anxious he was that only ladies of
property should be allowed to vote.

During hay-making, when I was working
on my rick, taking the hay from the unloader
and tossing it to the rick-builder, the follow-
ing conversation took place.

George (the pitcher, who had been a
Cockney carman). " I don't 'old with this
yer suffragit business — leastways not for the
domesticated woman."

I. " Who do you mean, George ? "

George. " I mean the wives of working
chaps like myself, though no one can say I
don't love my wife. I give 'er a kiss every
mornin' afore I starts for work."

Then Tom, the rick -builder, with the
reticence of the real country labourer, and
speaking with a touch of scorn at the glib-
tongued Cockney, said, " What I does to my
missus is nobody's bisiness but my own —
kissing 'is missus ! — ugh ! "

The rustic is burdened with one foolish

MANNERS IN ARCADY. 309

characteristic, which is directly the outcome
of his pride ; he would rather lose his money,
even his honour, than be "made a fool of."
So sensitive is he upon this subject that he
would infinitely prefer to remain silent rather
than venture an inquiry which, in the making,
would betray his ignorance. He learns, not
by asking questions, but by using his eyes.
This came home to me when I first began
my career as farmer and persisted in asking
many questions as to local conditions.

" Take my advice," said an old countryman
to me, "don't ask so many questions. They
will take you for a fool." Of course this did
not cure me of my insatiable curiosity, and in
order to stimulate curiosity in the rustic mind,
I would persistently ask questions at county
council horticultural lectures in the village
which I might have answered myself.

It was exciting to watch the slow dawn of
a gleam on the faces of the villagers intent on
seeing if I should be "made a fool of." The
anticipated pleasure did not come, for, to my
amusement and to the discomfiture of the
torpid mind, the lecturer remarked that he liked
to receive questions, for they invariably in-
dicated the intelligence of his listeners I

310 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Another weakness of the rustic, and one
not altogether confined to the uneducated
classes, is its petty parochialism, displaying
the mean spirit of the little Englander. I
remember, when captain of a village cricket
club, after a season of matches which were lost
through the stream of ale running too freely
on the cricket-ground, I wanted to institute
certain reforms, and the secretary, who was,
as usual, the village publican, demurred at a
general meeting, declaring that for his part
he " wasn't going to be criticised by a bloom-
ing furriner," by which term he meant one
who was born outside his parish.

By the fostering of this spirit of parochialism
we get the appalling lack of solidarity so often
to be found amongst country workers.

At a meeting of large landowners, united by
a common hate of the Land Clauses in the
Budget, I heard one gentleman sedulously in-
flaming the lower and unpatriotic passions of the
labourers by asking them what was the good of
the Development Grant to them ? How would
the afforesting of waste places, he argued,
help any to find work in a parish of flat
meadows and well -tilled land. And yet,
surely, as a large landowner he should have

MANNERS IN ARC AD Y. 311

been one of the first to foster that most
precious thing, a national, social conscience.

That the younger country labourers and
mechanics are becoming more independent
one does not doubt, but the process of exfolia-
tion is, I admit, not a beautiful one. No
flowers emerge from this national renaissance :
only a very stiff and prickly thistle. This is
largely due to its unnatural growth in the
rank soil of the gardens and stables of the
rich. They quickly acquire the abrupt bad
manners of the wealthy, and like their masters
become impudent to all but those who
possess wealth, or what wealth purchases —
power. They have in some way to show
what they consider their " independence," to
regain their self-respect which they lose in
their parasitic service — hence their surliness
to those who in no way govern their lives.

This, however, is true in the main only
of those counties where both master and man
are parasites upon the producers. The poor
in these counties have little sense of social
injustice. That has been stifled in the in-
dividual competitive struggle for places in the
homes of the wealthy.

It is curious to note how in England young

312 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

men of the middle class are ashamed to per-
form useful and probably ennobling acts of
labour, which they are proud of having done
in Canada or Australia. I have heard of
a Major, it is true, who used to enter
Salisbury market triumphantly on a tumbril
loaded with pigs or calves, and sometimes
with manure ; but how many ordinary trades-
men's sons would do this ; and if they did,
would they not have to dress for the occasion
in spotless gaiters and spotted waistcoats to
avoid the danger of being taken for the carter ?

The farmer class, although often educated
in the same village school as the children of
the labourer, are for ever inculcating into
their children that they are of a superior
caste, despite the fact that the farmer may
not be any more refined or intellectual than
the labourer. To illustrate how far this base
training is carried out, I will cite a case where
ill-breeding was allowed to defile one of the
most sacred times of a child's life.

A lady kindly offered to make a present of
confirmation caps to all the girls in her parish.
At this, a small farmer, with little or no
education, strongly objected to his daughter
wearing the same pattern of cap as the

MANNERS IN ARCADY. 313

daughters of the labourers who were being
confirmed at the same time !

On the whole, I am inclined to think that
in spite of a British churlishness which seems
to paralyse country people and to prevent
them at times from behaving graciously, in
comparison with the manners of the continental
peasant, our country poor, in spite of their
poverty (or is it because of their poverty ?),
are more generous than any other class of
society ; certainly, I believe, that the act of
giving fills them with greater pleasure than
the class which has superfluous wealth, and it
would make for greater social solidarity if
the well-to-do could habituate themselves to
receive presents from the humblest of the poor.
Lady Bountiful too often forgets that the
poor cottage woman she visits sometimes
finds it more blessed to give than to receive.

The ever-shifting economic conditions of
those who rent the big houses, displacing the
old families, are puzzling to the old labourers.
In their conservative natures there is still a
lingering respect for " the gentry," because
these belong to the soil on which they and
their fathers worked. " A gentleman " to
them is essentially a member of the unem-

314 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

ployed. The only work permitted to him is a
little light farm management. The old squire
stayed at home and knew them all by their
names, and where they lived, but the nouveaux
riches are for ever running up to town in their
motor cars on business, just like any other
tradesman, and these form no more a part of
the daily life of the country poor than the
factory owner does in the life of his mill-
hands.

" Fraternity " in France has no doubt
revolutionised French manners for the better,
but "Fraternity" in rural England is an
almost unknown word, and the manners of
our fellow-countrymen attest the lack of its
divine quality.

CHAPTER XVI.

AFFORESTATION.

There was a time when every Englishman
not only regarded his country symbolically as
a heart of oak, but treasured the timber of his
country as a woman treasures her chastity.
To despoil our woods was to despoil our
country.

It is in his relationship to timber that Dr.
A. R. Wallace particularly differentiates man
from the rest of the animal world : " Taking
first the innumerable kinds of wood whose
qualities of strength, lightness, ease of cutting
and planing, sometimes of surface, beauty, and
durability are so exactly suited to the needs
of civilised man that it is almost doubtful if
lie could have reached civilisation without
them. . . .

" Let us remember that before the dawn of

815

316 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

history down to about the middle of the last
century every ship in the world was built of
wood. Had no wood existed suitable for
sea-going vessels, the whole course of history,
and perhaps civilisation, would have been
different. Without ships the Mediterranean
could have been almost as impassable as was
the Atlantic. America would still have been
unknown, as well as Australia, and possibly
Africa ; and the whole world would be for us
smaller than in the days of Columbus. All
this might have happened if the nature of
vegetable growth, while differing little in
external form, and equally well adapted for an
intelligent animal life, had not possessed those
special qualities which fitted it for minister-
ing to the various needs of intellectual,
inventive, and advancing man."

The axe, as Walt Whitman says, has been
the servant "of all great works on the land
and all great works on the sea."

The planting of the oak has perhaps been
the noblest tradition handed down to us in
the ownership of land by the individual.
The thought of an England in the future,
when planting for posterity was the one
quality which ennobled the ownership of land

AFFORESTATION 317

and distinguished the old landowner from the
mere rent-receiver. To-day, in spite of many
lectures from Sir William Schlich, landowners
have received his entreaties with deaf ears.
The old feudal lord was willing to plant the
acorn in the soil of his country for the glory
of his country. The new race of landowners
living without any feudal ties, any forced
military service to the Crown, rejects the
proposition to plant, on the score that the
investment would hardly yield 3 per cent on
the capital.

Nor can we expect many men to possess
either the patriotic ardour, or the time, to
practise Mr. Charles Hurst's magic pastime
of planting the golden - brown treasures of
Sherwood Forest wherever he comes across
an open space in spinneys or coppices, heaths
or banks protected from cattle and the hedger
and ditcher.

In The Book of the English Oak we learn
how this gentle patriot enriches our country
as he takes his rural walks with a wallet
tilled with the seeds of the oak.

"The setting of an acorn," he says, "is
such an important matter that I will describe
my method minutely. Having selected a

318 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

suitable spot, I remove the turf very carefully
with a large clasp-knife, making a circle of
bared soil about eighteen inches diameter. I
next prod the ground thus cleared for the
depth of eight or nine inches, and remove all
large stones, roots, worms, slugs, or deleterious
matter that may happen to be present. I
then pat the loose earth with my hands, and
leave a small hollow in the centre about three
inches diameter and from one and a half to
two inches deep, having reserved a little soil
to fill this hollow after the acorn has been
placed in it. I then place the seed gently
but firmly at the bottom of the hollow, and
cover it to the level of the soil with the earth
reserved for the purpose. This I then press
down, making sure that the soil touches the
acorn on all sides, and I afterwards sprinkle
the spot with loose grass to hide all traces of
my labour. Finally, I place a few thorns
round the spot as a fence. It was my custom
at this early part of my journey to address the
unwitting acorn, mentally, when I had given
the final pat, after the following fashion :
* Now, good hap seize thee, little seed ; grow
in a manner worthy of thy noble parents and
be a delight for many weary men whose light

AFFORESTATION 321

we read the Report of the Rural Develop-
ment Commissioners published in July 1911,
we naturally hoped, after Mr. Lloyd George's
early intimations as Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer, that there would be a large grant
made for the reafforestation of waste land.
Instead, we learn that no grants are proposed
towards afforestation in England, because,
forsooth, expenditure on an enterprise so
new and so strange in modern England must
be preceded by careful survey ! One would
naturally have imagined that a survey would
have taken place by now after the Report by
the Royal Commission of Afforestation in 1909,
which made the statement that " afforestation
being practicable, and desirable, and 9,000,000
acres being available without material en-
croachment upon agricultural land, the best
rotation to secure sustained timber yields is
150,000 acres to be afforested annually."

Why do we hear nothing more of this
definite proposal to afforestate the 9,000,000
acres which could grow as much timber as
we import ?

England and Wales are to be content
apparently for the present with the receipt
by the Commissioners of a comprehensive

21

322 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

scheme of agriculture. Scotland, even in the
face of the tragic revelation of the Census
and the enormous tracts of country which
lend themselves to reafforestation (estimated
at 6,000,000 acres), is only to be provided with
a central demonstration area with a forestry
school attached, and with small forest gardens
for the local use of the agricultural colleges !
Ireland comes off little better. The Com-
missioners have agreed to advance £30,000
for the purchase of land, and to further
advances as soon as formal and definite
applications are made under the Act
for the maintainance and management of
small woodlands in the hands of the county
councils.

In Ireland, where land can be bought very
cheaply in congested areas, a sum of money
to be spent in planting belts of woodland to
protect the newly-settled migrants in exposed
parts of the country should be very useful.
Here alone in the three kingdoms is there
a Department of Agriculture prepared to
furnish advice to workers on all matters re-
lating to forestry, including the selection of
sites for plantations, suitability of soils, choice
of trees, treatment and valuation of existing

AFFORESTATION. 323

woods, draining and fencing of woodlands,
valuation of timber, and the growing of
osiers.

Up to July 1911 the Department of Agri-
culture for Ireland have acquired 7000 acres
for afforestation ; a small area compared to the
3,700,000 acres of state forests of Hungary ;
but still a step in the right direction.

It appears from the Report that we can do
things in Ireland that we seem afraid to do in
Scotland and England. And yet Scotland
has 9,000,000 acres of waste land waiting
for development ! The real sportsman who
prefers the pleasures of the chase to the love
of killing as many heads of game within as
short a space of time as possible, has nothing
to fear from the reafforestation of the deer
forests. He will win a much finer trophy in
woodland areas than he would in open spaces.

Why are we afraid to reafforest waste
lands of England ? The appeal to landowners
has proved futile. They will probably tell
you that their estates are already burdened
with debts and that they do not see the
advantage of sinking a large sum of money
to bring in a small return. This is natural
enough. Afforestation is obviously an enter-

324 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

prise requiring the resources of the State.
The individual works largely for personal
profit, the State for posterity.

Hungary passed an Act in 1879 which
made it compulsory to reafforest de-afforested
and now barren land, and it prevented the
de-afforesting of land which could not other-
wise be profitably cultivated unless an equal
portion of land was afforested at the same
time. The State of Hungary also buys forest
land for pleasure resorts, or to prevent
foreigners from acquiring large tracts for
sporting purposes. We might, I think, follow
the example of Hungary in this respect in
certain parts of Scotland when the American
comes a-buying large estates there for shoot-
ing ; and in England, surely, such open spaces
as Exmoor and Ashdovvn Forests might be
acquired and planted by the State.

Then there are areas such as the Cotswolds
where there is little water, and planting might
be profitably carried out in many parts of
England up to an altitude of 1200 feet.

We might begin in a small and an exceed-
ingly useful way with afforesting the catch-
ment areas which form the gathering ground
for water for large towns. Many thousands

AFFORESTATION. 325

of acres in North Wales and Yorkshire are
used as catchment areas for water - works,
affording no returns to the municipalities which
own them save an occasional day's sport to a
few town councillors and their friends. It
has been proved by having the gathering
ground on the banks of the river Gileppe,
in the town of Verviers in Belgium, under
forest, that this is the best means of keeping
the water pure and of regulating the flow.

Then, of course, there is the revenue to be
derived in the future from the sale of the
timber. The ratepayer of to-day may say
that it is all very well, but / shall never derive
any benefit from the afforestation of our catch-
ment areas. One might, however, point out
to him that it is one way of getting the unem-
ployed of his town off his hands as well as
off his conscience, for when unemployment is
at its acutest, then is the time that .labour is
wanted for draining, fencing, digging holes,
and planting. But if the town corporation
is still unconvinced as to the civic wisdom of
increasing the value of land situated in a
different county, probably the best way would
be to induce Government to give a grant in
aid to town councils which are enterprising

326 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

enough to afforest their catchment areas.
State interference or State ownership in
relation to wood is nothing novel in Great
Britain or in most European countries. I
have instanced the case in Hungary, and then
there is the striking example in Saxony, which
owns over 428,000 acres of State forest yielding
a net return of over £l an acre, whilst in
England only 67,000 acres of woodlands belong
to the State, or 2j per cent, a percentage
which is smaller than in any other European
country.

Yet in England we have traditionally
regarded our woods as something sacred which
needs special protective legislation. In 1543,
for instance, "The Statute of Woods" was
passed to prevent the owners of woods from
felling the standard timber trees in their copses
except under the observance of certain fixed
rules, and it compelled them to store young
standards of oak, or, failing that, of elm, ash,
asp, or of beech, which were then the most
valuable kinds of timber — oak for shipbuilding,
ash for agricultural implements and bows,
aspen for arrows, and beech for furniture.
Thus the previously existing copsewood
method of growing standard timber trees above

AFFORESTATION. 327

an underwood of hazel, oak, ash, etc., cut at
regular intervals of from eight to ten, or from
twenty to twenty -five years, according to
local circumstances, became by a statute the
typical national form of forestry.

Underwood or copsewood has, during the
last quarter of a century, been hardly worth
growing to yield a remunerative return to the
owner. With the falling of prices for hoops,
ash sticks, hurdles, wattles, poles, and the
increase of the mania for game preserving
and battues, the underwood has been largely
neglected, and in consequence the standard
trees as well.

In the days when the walls of England
were of oak, standards were kept well apart, so
that each tree in growing freely should provide
strong knees and crooks for ships' timber.
Modern forestry aims at growing straight
stems close together, so as to get the largest
and most valuable crop of timber per acre
from the ground at the smallest cost of pro-
duction ; that is, where forestry in England
is scientifically cultivated as a craft. Most
owners, unfortunately, regard their woods
merely as places of covert for their birds, and
as a consequence many of our woods are

328 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

mismanaged ; and though here and there an
owner, who feels his responsibility as a citizen
of the British Empire more strongly than his
love for killing something, may be induced to
start a fresh plantation of standards, invariably
the rabbits and hares are so numerous amid
the preserves that the tender shoots have a
poor chance of surviving as they spring up
from the ground or from the stubs of the
underwood.

The amount of damage that rabbits and
hares have inflicted upon British agriculture
is incalculable. I have known farms where
the farmers have gone to great expense in
netting their fields of winter wheat against
rabbits, yet a gamekeeper's foot has been
inserted under the wire netting so that the
rabbits may grow fat at the farmer's expense.1
In spite of all that can be said by the apologists
of sport adding to the revenue of the farmers,
the forest sporting rights throughout England
and Scotland taken as a whole amount to little
over one shilling an acre. The farmer must

1 In a motor tour I undertook in Suffolk in February this
year (1912), I came across a scandalous instance near Wood-
bridge, where small holders could scarcely get a living out of
poor heath land overrun by game. The landlord would not
relinquish his sporting rights.

AFFORESTATION. 329

lose a good deal more than a shilling an acre
in having a large number of rabbits and
pheasants about his corn-fields and meadows ;
and the owner of woodlands would find it more
profitable to convert his copse into high forests
or even to retain them, if he cuts them at
regular intervals, than to let them run to
economic waste pure and simple.

The Ground Game Act does not give the
protection to the small farmer that it is said
to give. You can shoot your rabbit, it is
true, as it comes out of the wood, after
sacrificing perhaps half an hour of your
valuable time waiting for it at sundown with
a gun in your hands ; and you may kill one, or
even a brace, but that will be the end of your
sport, for the rabbits will then retire into the
woods until it is dark. The small farmer
cannot afford to employ a rabbit-catcher, or
even to snare rabbits, which often means
spending time and trouble for the benefit of
some one with a virtuous aptitude for early
rising exceeding his own — some one who will
find a use for those capacious pockets which
are made in the lining of rustic coats. Even
ferreting on a wet winter's day is not a very
profitable manner of employing time, for

330 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

rabbits caught in this manner have cost me
a shilling a head. In spite of ferreting and
shooting, I once lost seventy apple-trees
one winter's night of severe frost. They
were completely ringed round by rabbits and
hares. There is no compensation to meet
cases like this.

A case could be made out for the in-
telligent management of woods concurrently
with preserving game, but, unfortunately,
wherever this is attempted it is the gamekeeper
who is invariably given the precedence over
the forester.

At the time of writing this book the only
grants made in England for the encourage-
ment of forestry is the small sum of £250 a
year to the University College of North Wales,
and the same sum to the Armstrong College,
Newcastle-on-Tyne. There is the Forestry
Department in the University of Oxford for
the training of our Indian civil servants. The
most distinguished, however, of our Indian
foresters have been those who have learnt
their trade in the well -managed woods of
Saxony. To the making of good foresters, as
well as good farmers, it requires something
more than the lecture and the laboratory, and

AFFORESTATION. 331

the best government school that our Govern-
ment has aided is its own school in the Forest
of Dean, which is for the training of the young
craftsmen of our woods.

Perhaps few people are competent to
realise the skilled work that the craftsman
of the woods undertakes. Not only is he
a worker in applied arts, but he is also an
imaginative artist. In the midst of a thicket
of bramble or of clean underwood he has,
when he strikes, to visualise possible rake
handles, hoe handles, sneads for scythes, shafts
for axes, hoops for barrels, slats for hurdles
and sheep-cribs, as well as bean sticks and pea
boughs, leaving what cannot be shaped for use
as faggots for burning in the baker's oven or
in the cottager's open fire-place. A blow
delivered in the wrong place may spoil the
economy of his craft.

He has, too, to wield the long-handled
felling axe, to push the two - handled saw,
to drive in wedges, to rip off the integument
in great flakes with the punyard and the
spud. " Go out ripping and you will come
in ragged ; go into it ragged and you will
come out of it naked," is an apposite saying
among woodlanders.

332 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

What a contrast is the life of the wood-
lander, living where the scent of the earth is
good and where every sound echoes to harmony,
to that of the factory worker, living amid bad
sounds, bad smells, and engaged in uncreative
joyless labour. It has always seemed to me
that woodcraft is work which might appeal to
young middle-class men with some imagination,
who are willing to forego many of the luxuries
of life for the sake of interesting, though
strenuous work, as well as for the independence
they might win for themselves on a few acres
of land near the woods.

There is no doubt that our Government
would be striking a valiant blow at the social
canker of unemployment had they the courage
to start a large and comprehensive scheme of
re-afforesting our waste lands. Even without
fresh legislation (as Mr. Arthur P. Grenfell
points out in his valuable pamphlet, " Affores-
tation and Unemployment ") the State might
to-day, under Section 20 of the Small Holdings
Act (1908), buy large tracts of rough woodland
for a small sum, letting parts of them to small
holders and afforesting the rest.

The words of Mr. John Nesbit (the dis-
tinguished editor of The Forester) bearing

AFFORESTATION. 333

on this subject are words of wisdom : " The
annual bill for wood is rising rapidly and is
certain to increase very greatly in future,
although a very considerable proportion of
what we need for pit wood and pulp for paper
might very well be grown on our waste lands
and low-grade pastures, while at the same
time such woodlands would provide other
special advantages in affording increased em-
ployment, shelter to crops and live-stock, and
in tending to prevent floods and soil erosion,
and to regulate and purify the water-supply
throughout all well-wooded catchment areas."
In 1911 Sir William Ramsay pointed out
the necessity of re-afforesting waste lands in
view of the gradual but sure extinction of our
coal supplies ; and in 1912 we are faced with
the tragedy of a national coal strike. It is at
such a time that every countryman feels the
injustice of being robbed of the old rights of
getting fuel from common lands, and the vital
necessity of re-afforesting land enclosed against
his will.

CHAPTER XVII.

CAPITAL AND CO-OPERATION.

Access to the land and a cottage to live in is
the first desideratum in the colonisation of
England, but to withhold from the settler
capital to stock his land or equip his home-
stead is like placing a starving man in a golden
palace. We realised this plainly enough in
Ireland when we began to resettle the migrants,
and yet it has taken the Government four
years to realise the necessity of capitalising the
English small holder. It is not charity that
the tillers of the soil are demanding, but the
use of some of that wealth that they have
already created ; and they are willing not only
to repay this money, but something additional,
too, in the shape of interest.

A great deal has been written about credit
banks, and in this book I need hardly traverse

334

CAPITAL AND CO-OPERATION. 335

the ground again. All political parties are
agreed that there is a necessity for their
formation. There is even a clause in the
Small Holdings Act of 1908 which permits
the county council to advance loans to the
co-operative societies ; but as it is a permissive
clause, and county councils are as a rule im-
practicable, unimaginative assemblies, it has
become, like the Housing Act, a dead-letter.

This section of the Act (No. 49) runs as
follows: "A County Council may promote
the formation or extension of, and may, subject
to the provisions of this section, assist societies
on a co-operative basis, having for their object,
or one of their objects, the provision or the
profitable working of small holdings or allot-
ments, whether in the relation to the purchase
of requisites, the sale of produce, credit
banking, or insurance or otherwise, and may
employ as their agents for the purpose any
such society as is mentioned in subsection (4)
of this section."

Now before we dwell on what the small
holders should do by voluntary co-operation
amongst themselves, it would be pertinent to
show what county councils themselves might
do as landowners and builders. This, in my

336 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

opinion, is an important, practical, and aesthetic
consideration. Nothing handicaps a small
holder so much at the start as to find, after he
has become possessed of his land and cottage,
that before he buys stock he has to expend a
good deal of his small capital in the making of
poultry -houses, pigsties, possibly a cowshed,
stockyard, a dairy, or a fruit room and granary.
Then there is the aesthetic consideration of
the man in the street, who goes out into
the heart of rural England for a holiday only
to find beautiful sequestered spots disfigured
by squalid sheds, with tarred felt roofs hanging
on, as it were, by their eyebrows.

The county council might very well
follow the excellent example of the Crown
Lands Commissioners in the way in which they
built the substantial homesteads in the fenlands
of the Wash, erecting every outhouse con-
ceivably necessary for the live-stock of a small
holding.

Furthermore, by building substantial farm
buildings, well planned, in central sites, county
councils could at the start encourage co-
operation as well as economise in the erection
of farm buildings that could be used in
common by a group of small holders.

CAPITAL AND CO-OPERATION. 337

For instance, take the example of a granary,
which is rarely found of any size on a small
holding; and yet without a good-sized, rat-proof
granary you cannot expect a small holder to
buy in large quantities, and therefore he loses
the opportunity of buying at low market rates.

Such expensively built farm buildings as
granaries and stables might very well be
erected under one roof, and each small holder
be required to pay rent for stall room or his
private bin in the large granary. Outside in
the stockyard might be erected the common
Dutch barn big enough to cover half a dozen
large haystacks, and a large liquid manure
tank, made for the use and profit of all.
Here, too, could be housed the gas-engine
used for grinding corn, pulping roots, or
crushing cake, and a Canadian mill erected
to supply sufficient water for all. In this
way, apart from the utilitarian and aesthetic
considerations, the small holders would
naturally become co-operators.

Now we have to consider the question of
raising capital for the small holder who has to
equip his holding with live-stock and imple-
ments, and this brings us back, naturally,
to Credit Banking.

22

338 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Since private banks became limited
liability companies the advances made by the
old-fashioned country banker— who was as
often as not also a gentleman farmer— to small
agriculturists have almost ceased to exist.
The new manager of a branch, who has
been reared in- the atmosphere of the Stock
Exchange, and would hardly know a heifer from
a steer, or a gilt from a boar, is naturally shy
of advancing money to agriculturists, in spite
of his knowledge of the bulls and bears which
haunt Throgmorton Avenue. By private
effort the total capital invested in credit
banks in the whole of England amounts to
the ludicrous sum of £1600.

Without formulating complicated schemes,
which are generally a compromise between
public and private enterprise, so dear to the
heart of legislators, and so bewildering to the
plain man, it seems to me that the best way is
the simple and direct way.

We could easily advance money without
the setting up of any new public authority
or the formation of any new syndicate. There
is already the national bank, in the shape of
the Post Office, a branch of which is to be
found in every remote parish in England.

CAPITAL AND CO-OPERATION. 339

There is already the parish council, com-
posed, we must assume, of the most trusted
men in every parish. Why should not our
Government give statutory powers to parish
councils to draw upon the post office for small
sums, making the parish council committee
responsible for repayment ? We should bear
in mind that the credit banks in Ireland have
advanced a quarter of a million without loss —
money advanced on character and not on
property as security.

At the time of writing I learn that a new
bill has been framed by the Government
which contents itself with paying the expenses
of forming, managing, auditing, and inspecting
credit societies — not a word, apparently, as
to providing the money, which makes the
Government bill what Hamlet would be
without the Ghost.

Is the English peasant, we wonder, less
honest than the Irish ? If not, why does the
Government show this extreme timidity in
advancing money to men poor and honest,
whilst the wealthy owners of stallions are
allocated large sums from the Development
Fund?

If my plan of advancing money through

340 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

the post offices to the parish councils is not
acceptable to the Government, then I would
suggest as the next best plan that they should
advance money to agricultural co-operative
societies, and in this way, besides helping
to capitalise the tiller of the soil, whose labour
is rendered sterile by the want of capital, it
would also be a way to encourage small
holders to co-operate.

Credit banking, after all, is the form of co-
operation which finds the capital. Now, it
is that form of co-operation which deals in
buying and selling which is obviously the next
step to be taken in agricultural development.
In spite of the excellent progress made of late
in the creation of the new branches of the
Agricultural Organisation Society, England is
behind Ireland and far behind other European
countries in agricultural co-operation. The
largest agricultural co-operative society in
England is the Eastern Farmers' Co-operative
Association, which, with a called-up capital
of less than £1000, does a turnover of
£300,000. As the members farm on an
average 300 acres, we have a striking instance
here of how co-operation can interest the large
as well as the small farmer.

CAPITAL AND CO-OPERATION. 341

What we do in England, however, is noth-
ing to what is being done on the Continent.
In Denmark, for instance, there is a co-
operative dairy in almost every parish, besides
the thirty-six co-operative bacon factories, the
live-stock insurance co-operative organisations,
and the egg societies, which export about
50,000,000 eggs. Germany can boast of
17,000 co-operative societies, and it is said that
the agricultural necessities bought through
the German credit banks amount to over
£4,000,000. Italy, Belgium, Hungary, and
France have all made rapid strides in agri-
cultural co-operation. Even Finland and
distant Siberia are rapidly learning what it is
apparently so difficult for the English farmer
to learn.

Of slow growth, agricultural co-operation
in England suffers from the disadvantage of
dwelling largely only on one phase — co-
operative buying. In my opinion co-operative
selling, though more difficult, is far more
important. The countryman, working often
in an isolated and almost secretive way,
is suspicious of any one but himself handling
his produce. This is curious, considering the
trusting way in which he sends his produce

342 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

to market, not knowing even if the price
obtained will cover the cost of carriage !
He will have to relinquish his childish belief
that his particular miller and his particular
salesman are going to give him preferential
rates ; and I agree with Professor Long
that the farmer is much more likely to
co-operate when a state official goes round
and tells him to do so, than when his neigh-
bour (who might possibly get the job of being
the local secretary of the society !) tries to be
persuasive.

There is one strong reason why the small
man still sticks to his " dealer " or miller. It
is because the dealer or miller is generally
willing to buy eggs and butter from the
small man, who is four miles from a station
and has his one horse at work in the fields. It
may be that he buys his feeding stuff from
the miller at top prices, and sells produce at
lowest market rates, but as he manages to
get rid of his produce without carriage he is
satisfied. Not until agricultural co-operative
societies arrange to fill up the waggons with
farm produce, instead of going home empty
on the return journey, will they succeed in
making much progress among the smaller

CAPITAL AND CO-OPERATION. 343

farmers. They must, in fact, become salesmen
as well as buyers.

So much has been written about co-opera-
tion that the subject has become an accepted
commonplace — accepted in all but its practical
application. But here I should like to break
up new ground.

We were told in the spring of 1911 that
the Board of Agriculture had applied for
£20,000 from the Development Commissioners
for the organisation of co-operation. But on
the 26th of June of the same year, when the
Report of the Commissioners was published,
we learnt that the £20,000 was still under
consideration,1 and yet a sum of no less than
£41,050 was recommended to be advanced
by the Board for light horse-breeding ! Of
course we know that fox-hunting is still an
important industry in England. In fact, we
were informed by a noble earl that without
it the British Empire would fall into a state
of decay. Still, one would have imagined that
a stronger case might have been made by the

1 The Development Commissioners, I am aware, made a further
grant of £'50,000 a year for scientific research (26th August
1911). Let us hope those trained to teach will be fieldsmen and
not schoolmen, that is, men not afraid to take oif their coat and
handle a plough.

344 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

Board for a supply of first - class bulls and
boars for the improvement of the cattle and
pigs throughout the country. The owners of
horses are, taken as a whole, wealthy gentle-
men ; the owners of pigs and cows are, taken
as a whole, poor men. There is not the
same likelihood of hunters being less well bred
as there is of cows and pigs, and there is
a danger in increasing the number of small
live-stock owners in this country who have
not sufficient capital to buy the best of bulls
and the best of boars for service.

Hungary, I think, was the first European
state to improve its standard of live-stock by
purchasing first-class sires and sending them
into many country parishes for service. The
improvement in Hungarian cattle has been
most marked. In Ireland, as we have seen,
the Department followed this excellent ex-
ample by allowing farmers to have the use
of valuable bulls for a nominal fee.

In England most small farmers have to
pay a fee of 5s. for the use of a third-class
bull or 2s. 6d. for an indifferent boar. Already
we have complaints from the large graziers
of the difficulties of obtaining good store
cattle.

CAPITAL AND CO-OPERATION. 345

Of the grant of £41,050, no less than
£26,000 is to be paid in premiums to the
owners of stallions and brood mares. It shows
that the rich owners are not adverse to the
spoon-fed policy when the feeding is applied
to their own mouths. Let them therefore
loyally work to obtain a good cow and a
good pig for every small holder.

In allocating further grants from the
Development Fund I would stress the need
of national co-operation in the creation of
rural depots for the storing of expensive
agricultural machinery. Such depots might
be built at the newly-formed farm Institutes,
or kept in the village in the same way as fire-
engines or any other implement of public
utility. I would particularly urge the buying
and storing of expensive machinery. To de-
velop the agricultural resources of our country
we must encourage tillage ; we must bring into
active cultivation some of the twelve millions
of acres of grass-land which are not "laid down "
but, as the farmers would say, " fallen down "
to grass. By increasing the number of small
farmers in this country we are not likely to
increase corn-growing, for the obvious reason
that the small man without expensive machinery

346 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

cannot compete against the large farmer with
his self-binder. We cannot go back to the
sickle and the flail. To work with economy
nowadays we must call in the self-binder with
its four horses in the corn - field, and the
thrashing machine in the stackyard.

It should be realised how little a farmer
uses his most expensive machinery during the
whole of the year. In this he is placed at a
great disadvantage with the ordinary factory
owner, who considers it a hardship if his engine
ceases running for one day. How little are
the mowing machine and the self-binder used
during the year on a moderate - sized farm !
Possibly for two weeks ; then for fifty long
weeks they will lie idle, probably rusting and
deteriorating in some damp, open shed, or
under a waggon-cloth.

But every one will be wanting to use these
machines at the same time, remarks the cavil-
ling wiseacre. If that be so, then it only
remains to ballot as they do in Ireland with
their large co-operative machines which tour
from farm to farm ; even as it is, the small
farmer always has to wait the convenience of
the owner of the machine when he hires the
use of one.

CAPITAL AND CO-OPERATION. 347

As the producer, the provider of the
necessaries of life, is given the opportunity, or
is encouraged to co-operate on the lines I
have roughly sketched, there should be some
close interrelation between the co - operative
producer in the country and the co-operative
distributer in the towns. As the English
peasant begins to produce more butter, more
eggs, more bacon, more beef, more fruit and
vegetables, there should be less excuse for the
mechanic who sits on the committee of a co-
operative stores in Manchester or Glasgow to
send his orders for the necessaries of life to
foreign countries. Soon, let us hope, there
will be as close a tie between the agricultural
co-operative societies and the town distributive
stores, as there is between these stores and the
Co-operative Wholesale Society.

CHAPTER XVIII.

FROM THE FARM TO THE MARKET-PLACE.

A move in the right direction was made by
the Postmaster - General when he extended
and cheapened the cost of telephonic com-
munication between the producer and the
market salesman or retailer. As the telephone
is rapidly superseding the telegraph at country
post offices, I fail to see why the telephone
should not be used in the same way as in
towns by a payment of twopence a message
instead of an annual subscription of £3, which
is a heavy speculative item for a small holder
to bear even in co-operation with two or three
others. When this has been brought about,
and small producers have sensibly agreed to
bulk their goods to the station by sending one
waggon-load together instead of each sending
a few packages in separate carts, we have yet

848

FROM FARM TO MARKET 349

to face the difficulty of obtaining reasonable
traffic rates on the railways. Here the State,
by practically giving the railways a monopoly,
should step in either to control rates, or to take
over the entire management of the railways.

England is the only European country of
any commercial importance that leaves the
great steel public highways under the control
of individuals whose business it is to serve tne
public at as high a price as they can possibly
exact.

It is not only the agricultural producer who
feels the pressure of high railway rates, but
the merchant princes as well. Not only has
the farmer to pay (according to Sir Bernhard
Samuelson) 59s. 3d. to send cattle from Hull
to Manchester, while for the same distance the
charge in Germany would be only 38s. 6d., in
Holland 37s. 6d., or in Belgium 29s. 6d. ; but
the dealer in agricultural wares would, in
England, have to pay 25s. to send a quantity
of machinery from Leeds to Hull that in
Germany would only cost him 4s. 6d., in
Belgium 8s., and in Holland 5s. 6d. for the
same distance.

Ireland seems to fare worse than England
and Scotland, not only in tariffs on goods,

350 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND,

but also in passenger fares. Minerals, for
instance, cost 6s. 7d. per ton in Ireland
and 2s. 7d. a ton in England ; and passenger
fares in Ireland, according to the Financial
News, "cost 13s. 9d. per 165 miles, whilst
for the same distance you could travel on
the State railways in Belgium for 8s. 2d., or
in Germany for 10s. 8d., or in Denmark for
4s. 4d." A dealer, Mr. J. E. Biggar, before
the Revision of Rates Committee, 1890,
stated that the annual purchase of pigs
amounted to between 30,000 and 60,000
pigs, and declared that his firm had to close
Clones and several other markets on account
of the high rates. Another dealer said that he
could get pigs brought from Copenhagen to
Ardrossan for a third of the sum and nearly
as quickly as he could from Ballina to
Ardrossan.

Instances might be multiplied to a weari-
some degree. Apologists for the railways
contend that farmers do not co-operate and
bulk their goods. That is so. But it is
equally true that when large dealers and
merchants send large consignments the tariffs
are higher than on Continental State lines.

The fear of the cost of administration holds

FROM FARM TO MARKET. 851

back many people from resorting to the entire
State control of our railways, but when we begin
to compare the cost of managing State lines
on the Continent with companies' lines, we
shall see that the State lines are more economi-
cally managed.

Mr. J. S. Jeans has drawn up the following
comparative statement : —

Countries.

State Lines.

Companies' Lines.

Per cent.

Per cent.

Germany .
Austria-Hungary

9-40
6-50

1310

8-47

Belgium .

5-05

10-13

Denmark .

6-89

5-77

France

16-16

9-58

Italy

Norway .
Holland .

6-49
7-30
5 30

8-76

7-00

10-35

Roumania

4-40

10-80

Russia

9-27

13-70

It will be noticed that in France alone is
the cost of State administration considerably
greater than private administration. This
difference, Mr. Jeans tells us, is explained by
the fact " that the State only owns the feeders,
and companies the main trunks. France there-
fore is exceptional. But in the case of countries

352 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

where the conditions of the comparisons are
more parallel, the State lines will be seen to
be invariably the more economically managed
as regards administration."

The recent railway strike, crippling the
whole trade of the nation at a moment's notice,
has shown to us all in a vital way that the
railway lines have become the real metal
highroads in which certain companies of
individuals have been granted monopoly rights.
Surely it is an anachronism that any nation
dependent upon the use of these metals for its
daily existence should suffer its food-supply to
be carried or withheld at the dictation of
individuals. No other country permits the
individual to exercise such despotic rights.

There are many parts of the British Isles,
out of the beaten track of trade, where
there is no railway service, or places in-
efficiently and expensively served by railways,
where a well - organised road motor service
would be of an enormous benefit to pro-
ducers as well as consumers. Such a service
might be of incalculable use in bringing food
from the farm to the town in the event of a
suspension of the railway traffic.

A great deal of time is often lost in sending

FROM FARM TO MARKET. 353

perishable goods along branch lines where
handling takes place two or three times before
the goods reach the market-place. Think how
this affects commodities like milk and straw-
berries, especially when one bears in mind the
cartage to the station at one end and from the
station at the other.

A good motor lorry could easily collect
as well as deliver goods to a market-place, or
to shops in a town thirty miles away, and
should the town be glutted with some par-
ticular produce, the lorry could continue its
career to another town.

A well-organised telephonic system should
prevent produce being sent to glutted markets.
But the question arises : Who should own and
control the motor lorries, and where should
they be housed ? In the purely rural districts,
I would suggest that the county council
should have the control of the motors, or
possibly the rural district council, and they
might be housed where the local fire-engine is
housed, or in the depots where I have sug-
gested that agricultural implements should be
stored. It would, however, be easier, perhaps,
as far as obtaining fresh statutory powers are

concerned, to let the municipal authorities who

23

354 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

own the market-place exercise control over
the motors.

It should be thoroughly realised that there
are already quite enough demands made upon
that "unskilled labourer," the tiller of the
soil. Besides being a gardener, stock-keeper,
carpenter, woodman, thatcher,hedger, plumber,
etc., it is expected of him that he shall as well
be a good business man. This expectation is,
of course, preposterous. The mechanic draw-
ing good wages in the town never has to sell
anything but his labour, and yet he is ranked
higher than the cultivator of the soil, who has
not only to be a skilled workman, but also to
be a crafty man of business if he is not to
go under in the struggle for existence.

There is, we know, a kind of small stock-
keeper who is also a dealer. He is a good
business man in a pettifogging way. But,
nationally speaking, no economic progress is
made by farmers changing cattle in the sterile
game of skinning one another in the process.
It is the man who is producing store stock,
milk, and crops with whom we are concerned,
and it is a melancholy reflection that the best
cultivators of holdings are often the worst
business men. It is a pity that they should

FROM FARM TO MARKET. 355

ever be compelled to become salesmen. Indi-
vidual and national efficiency is only achieved
by encouraging these men to stick to the job
that they can do well. They should be relieved
of all the anxiety of marketing goods and the
waste of time in attending markets. Other
men can do this much better, and these should
not be self-interested men but men working
in harmony with the producer. Think with
what greater heart the small farmer would
work if he were sure that every drop of milk he
produced would be taken from his gate by the
collector of a co-operative dairy, together with
his eggs to an egg depot, and his bacon to a
bacon factory. And with what greater zest
the grower of vegetables and fruit would
work were he sure that his produce would be
carried away and sold by a salesman who was
his own servant.

Yet collective organisation in production,
collection, and delivery of farm produce is of
little avail unless the producer has some
control over the selling of his produce. It
is at the end of the furrow — whether the
cultivator works alone or in the company of
others — where he meets with success or
failure. It is at the end where most of the

356 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

robbers stand to plunder the hard-won earnings
of those who till the earth.

In a Free Trade country where we boast of
having few tariffs, and laugh at the octroi
exacted on farm produce as it enters a French
town, we have by Act of Parliament created a
monopoly in market-places which in turn sets
up an internal tariff as grievous as any octroi
endured by the French peasant.

" Notwithstanding," says Mr. A. C. Wilkins,
the well-known fruit-grower and jam-maker,
"the enormous growth of trade induced by
the railways, there appears to be no greater
number of markets in London than there were
two or three centuries ago. The Encyclopaedia
Britannica gives the names of the eleven
markets existing in the time of Stowe the
chronicler, which correspond nearly with the
eleven at present existing, and continues: ■ Since
the removal of Hungerford Market to make
way for Charing Cross station, Covent Garden
has remained the only vegetable and flower
market of importance in the Metropolis,
although vegetables of a cheap kind are sold in
the Boro' and at Spitalfields, also at Farringdon
Road and the Great Northern Railway. ... In
1328, a Charter was granted to the Corporation

FROM FARM TO MARKET. 357

of London by Edward III., conveying to it the
sole right to establish markets within seven
miles' circuit of the City. The system, though
now broken up — even with regard to pro-
visions, so far as the retail trade is concerned
— remains intact in regard to the vending of
certain provisions wholesale." What states-
man, Mr. Wilkins asks, shall win immortality
by breaking up the rest ?

" They (the producers) send up their best
produce under the illusion that they are deal-
ing with the merchant princes of the best
market in the world, whereas, in reality, they
are only supplying the lowly costermonger
with job lots at half-price. Covent Garden
market especially monopolises the most valu-
able market site in London because of its
proximity to the West End, but it is meanly
managed, cribbed, cabined, and confined. Out-
side the market, in the dirty narrow street,
waggon-loads of choice produce wait for hours
and lose their market. Hundreds of empty
carts bar the drivers' way to the salesmen's
stands, and the drivers fiercely contest every
inch of room. The writer himself has gone
through this experience from 4.30 to 7.30 a.m.
After urgent remonstrances he has had to wait

358 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

on the top of the waggon and then see his
precious peas divided among the costermongers
at half-price."

" It is no exaggeration to say that the con-
dition of the markets is deplorable from the
market gardener's and the small holder's point
of view. The markets appear to be conducted
in the interests of privileged individuals who
constitute a monopoly disastrous to the welfare
of the workers of the land.

" From the point of view of the State, the
markets of London and the country, if well
organised, with adequate root and branch
reforms, could have immense possibilities
of wealth and be well calculated to settle
spontaneously upon the land the large rural
population in comfort and prosperity. . . .
He (the producer) has laboured at his task
twelve months, and then gets only half the
value of his labour, whilst the middlemen
between them with a few hours' work receive
half his profit."

Indeed, under the segis of the State an
enormous monopoly has been built up on a
site which once belonged to the monks of
Westminster, and from which now the Duke
of Bedford derives a princely tribute.

FROM FARM TO MARKET. 359

I myself have experienced the disadvant-
ages of sending produce to Covent Garden,
and on my pointing out to a large salesman
that my gooseberries realised a sum much
lower than other gooseberries of inferior
quality, I was coolly informed that as a small
grower I could hardly expect to have my fruit
sold until after the large grower's fruit had
been cleared ! There is another evil too
against which the small grower has to contend,
and that is the vested interest of the salesman.
He is himself often a buyer of large fields of
standing crops of vegetables and fruit, and it is
natural enough that his own wares should take
precedence in the market. Then again, who
is to know that Mr. Isaacs," market salesman,"
is the proprietor of Messrs. Union Jack & Co.,
"greengrocers," of the market approach — the
firm which bought your stuff from Mr. Isaacs ?

In Holland, most of the market gardeners
and the stock-keepers, tired of the low prices
meted out to them by the dealers, have formed
their own co-operative markets with their
salaried salesmen. Why can we not do the
same in England ? And in doing so, why can
we not go one better and have municipal
markets with salaried auctioneers, for stock

360 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

as well as for fruit and vegetables, open not
only to members of co-operative societies but
to every farmer or grower, large or small ?

There are many people who are not
aware of the tremendous sway exercised by
auctioneers over private markets which are
sometimes their own. I know, for instance, in
the south of England, a certain large market-
place over which one auctioneer holds an
undisputed sway, and this auctioneer, like
many others, is himself a large breeder of
pigs and cattle. No one knows to whose bid
the hammer sometimes falls, and even if private
auctioneers are not directly interested in the
selling of cattle at low prices, they are some-
times indirectly interested. A friend of mine
once heard an auctioneer coolly turn round to
his clerk in the middle of selling a beast and
say, " We must let So-and-so have this or he
will be grumbling again." Rings of dealers we
can hardly help — they may be formed any-
where— but we can at least see that our cattle
are not sold in privately-owned markets and
that the auctioneer goes there with clean
hands.

What the producer asks for is a fair field
and no favour. Markets, indeed, should be

FROM FARM TO MARKET. 361

freed from private ownership, and salesmen
or auctioneers should be the salaried officials
of the municipality. In no other way, that I
can see, can we save producers from the
octopus grip of the present market monopolists.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE OUTLOOK.

" Country life is very good, in fact, the best—
for cattle," wrote Sydney Smith ; and Scotland
was evidently the country he had in his mind.
Whilst from Ireland the stream of emigrants
to the States has been partially checked by
the aid of legislative measures, in Scotland it
has been proceeding at a disastrously rapid
rate owing apparently to the lack of land
legislation and the blind adherence to laissez-
faire economics. This, however, does not
seem to be in main the fault of the Scotch
so much as it does the fault of those who take
up comfortable quarters on the banks of the
Thames during certain seasons of the year.

Deer and sheep have rapidly encroached
upon land once farmed by the crofter class,
and the tragic story of rural Scotland might

362

THE OUTLOOK. 363

be found in the attempt to convert the land
into a pleasure resort for multi-millionaires,
who are more often than not of anything but
British extraction. " Of course all this is,"
as John Ruskin remarked, " quite natural to a
sporting people who have learned the smell
of gunpowder, sulphur, and gas tar better
than they have that of violets and thyme."
Scotland indeed has need of a modern Isaiah
who will cry out with vigour, "Woe unto
them who lay field to field till there be no
place, that they may be placed alone in the
midst of the earth."

But let us realise at once that whether it
be sheep or whether it be deer that displace
them, men, women, and children are fast dis-
appearing from the glens of the Highlands ;
and while this continues we must be prepared
to face racial bankruptcy north of the Tweed.

There is no room in this little book to deal
with the Scottish problem which on the
publication of the last Census stirred within
us all a profound misgiving as to the land
policy, or the lack of a land policy, which we
have been pursuing fugitively for the last
hundred years. Those who claim that the land
given over to deer and grouse is fit for nothing

364 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

else should consider whether a good deal of it
is not fit for reafforestation. Surely in some
of the lowland counties sheep have seriously
encroached upon good arable land to the detri-
ment of the nation ; and with the labourer
goes the blacksmith, the cobbler, and the tailor.
The shepherd alone remains. Plinius, it
should be remembered, found in the establish-
ment of large landed properties the cause of
Italy's ruin.

In England a great deal has yet to be done
in settling people on the land. At the end of
1910 we learnt that there were still 127,256
acres applied for and not yet found for
applicants, 30 per cent of whom are agri-
cultural labourers. We learn too that only
1*8 desire to purchase land, which proves
that with security of tenure freedom can be
purchased more economically as tenant than as
owner. There is too the wisdom of the ages
to guide us, for was it not the first husband-
man who framed in imperishable language the
words : " The land shall not be sold for ever,
for the land is mine " ?

In certain journals I notice a subtle
tendency to give very rosy accounts as to
the possible profits to be made out of small

THE OUTLOOK. 365

holdings, journals that are strongly in favour of
small holders purchasing their land. A timely
warning might here be given to those inclined
to be lured into buying slices of land on
derelict farms in the hope of winning large
profits.

In spite of the richness of our land, England
in its yield per acre stands nearly the lowest
of continental countries. We can boast of
only £4 per acre to our credit, whereas
Belgium, with a much poorer soil, produces
£20 to the acre. It is probable that the size
of our English farms compared to those of
Belgium, Denmark, Prussia, and France has
something to do with this low yield. The
average size of a holding in England is 70
acres, whilst in Denmark it is 49 acres, in
Prussia 33^, in France 24, and in Belgium 14j.

Mr. Christopher Turnor, in his interesting
book Land Problems, states that no farmer
can farm individually more than 1000 acres
with efficiency, and that from the national
standpoint the man with 25 acres is the citizen
to be prized. The latest returns show,
fortunately, I think, for the nation, that the
farms are becoming smaller in size. However,
I would by no means say that there is no

366 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

room for the large farmer, so long as he farms
efficiently ; but were I autocrat of this Realm
I would penalise the large farmer who farmed
so badly that the whole nation as a body
politic had to suffer for it. The landowner
has power to get rid of a bad tenant — why,
then, should not the State take over land
which is going derelict ? It is nothing novel
for the Crown to sequester large estates
for a mere political whim ; why, then, should
not the State intervene to save, as it were,
its heart's blood from being drained ?

Such farms when acquired by the State at
their market price could be worked for national
purposes — for breeding horses, for raising beef
and mutton, or growing corn for our army
and navy.

The question of rural education I have
dealt with in the chapter devoted to handicraft,
and I do not think that I need to stress the
points at issue, for it seems to me that our
Government are more alive to the develop-
ment of rural education than to other forms of
agricultural development. In July 1911 we
learn than no less than £325,000 is to be
advanced from the Development Fund up to
March 31, 1916, to aid and form Farm

THE OUTLOOK. 367

Institutes, and one of the proposed schools is
similar to the winter schools such as I have
already suggested in these pages — that is, a
sixteen to twenty weeks' winter agricultural
course for the sons of small farmers who have
acquired some practical experience on the land
since leaving elementary schools.

It is, however, the business organiser and
marketing facilities that are more wanted than
the teacher, and that is why I have laid
greater stress on this, the business side of
agriculture. Improved methods of culture
will follow rapidly as the tiller of the soil
obtains greater marketing facilities, and with
them access to capital. I have shown how
in Ireland agricultural organisation preceded
agricultural education and how success in co-
operative organisation acted as a stimulus to
improved methods of tillage.

Agriculture is still our greatest industry,
producing annually £200,000,000. It is the
industry on which every other rests. It is
the most ancient and honourable of crafts.
Without it none of the arts could flourish.
Without it human life would cease. In the
stifling atmosphere of our congested cities we
have learnt that man cannot reproduce his

368 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

kind after the third generation. As our cinder-
heaps increase, let us see to it that the grass
of our green pastures does not wither.

The grave labour problems, with the
recurring disturbances assuming greater
dimensions as both capital and labour become
more highly mobilised, will gather into huge
proportions if the people of England remain a
landless proletariat. So long as the workers
are divorced from the land, so long will the
unrest grow. The people are working at
breaking-point.

Not only is the subjective poverty greater
amongst the half-educated poor to-day than
it ever has been, but the objective poverty has
been steadily growing since 1895. We learn
from the Board of Trade that though wasres
have increased 12-4, prices have increased 19*4.
This means that the purchasing power of the
wage -earning class has decreased. At the
same time the incomes of the wealthy class
steadily rise.

In spite of Insurance Bills little is done to
ensure work for the unemployed. No new
industries are created. In an age of competitive
strife, to put one man to work means displacing
another — everywhere, but on our wasted

THE OUTLOOK. 369

acres, where the greater productivity means
a greater demand for factory - made goods.
Under our very feet lies an undeveloped
source of wealth. When we have removed
from our eyes the slime and grit of our cinder-
strewn cities, then perhaps we shall awake to
the necessity of re-colonising our own land.
We must begin by retracing our steps to
England's green pastures.

" A lions, comrade, the road is before us 1"

THE END.

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