The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1869-11-30 00:00:00

Contsponbence.

OUR PEASANTRY. PEASANTRY.

To the Editor._

Sir,—ls the British valiant, who has just now so
many urban advisers, and meets with so much
sympathy, clerical and other, from those who have
nothing to do with him but to say, "Be ye warmed,
be ye clothed "—is be so very much worse off than
the average of mankind? It is very necessary that
society should not get into heroics in discussing grave
questicms of universal concernment It may be
called upon to be as goods. its word; its word may
pledge it to • practical impossibility. Let it be
assumed that peasant life ia all that Canon Girdlestone
and the Commissioners for inquiring into the employ-
ment of women and children engaged in agriculture
have described It to be; haa it ever occurred to them
to consider whether, as • problem in political
economy, there are materials for satisfying the ideal
of speculative philanthropism? Country life in Eng-
land is by no means perfect I doubt whether any
condition satisfies the estimate of the man. Go
higher and higher: he will want a drawing-room
when he has got to, parlour; • brick house when
he has put together his wooden shanty. Ask Mr.
Howard, of Bedford, agricultural implement maker
and member of Parliament. He has been all over
Europe; be ilea made himself an auto-commissioner
—very competent for the task —for ezamining and
reporting on rural life on the Continent. In wages,
in clothing, in food, in shelter, in anzillary provision
for destitution, be declares the common people of
France, of Italy, of Germany, of Spain, of Russia—
, indeed, of the most favoured States—to be very far
below the ooudition of our own. He, and many
others with him, regard the peasant proprietor as a
very mach poorer man than the peasant. He has
been in the hat of the Norman, the chtlet of the
Alpine shepherd, the hovel of the Neapolitan, the
Sicilian, the Tuscan. They sing and dance on •
cucumber or an onion and a hunch of rye. He com-
peres labourers all over Europe with the commiserated
hedger of England, and, without laying that the
latter is in •state of comfortable competency, be very
energetically avers that the former ate all very far
below the level of his condition.

I want to know where oar amateur philanthropy
is going. We have it on the black and white of the
Registrar General that the mortality in Canon Gir•
dlestone's social pandemonium is greatly below that
of our towns and cities—below that of the highly•
paid mechanic clam. The cry of distress comes, not
from the village, but from the farm. The emigration
I. that, not of ploughmen bat of artisan& It is the
highest paid labour that is the most helpless and
discontented. Of coarse, I should be glad to find
the country a Lubberland, where ready•roasted
geese, with knife and fork for wings, fly about the
streets crying, "Come, eat me." Tell me where
that dispensation prevails, and " I will end my days
there." Philanthropy cries aloud that Hodge's
wages are too little, his cottage • pigoitye, his
clothing rags, his scanty food swill and crusts.
With the fact before us, that an English is by far
the most ezpensive !shearer in Europe—that he has
twice the appliances of his Continental fellow•
sufferer--had not those who raise the clamour that
now has become so loud, better inquire from what
warm additional applianoes are to be drawn ? The
farmer is the only friend who finds him wages, a
cottage, clothing, • potato patch. Is it altogether
decent for those who find him just nothing at all, to
turn round upon his only employer, and abuse the
tenantry, as if those who alone stand between him
and starvation were the only authors of it ? I want
to come at some practical result oat of all this
rhetorical humanitraioagering. Who is to find the
money for all these fine feelings? If the ploughman
cannot work, or the shepherd has no sheep, what is
it that maintains them in or out of door.! The
rates of the struggling tenant. Speak out. Do you
want him to pay more wages—that is to say, to give
more for labour than the market price? Out of
what fund is it all to come? Are the farmer's
profits so great that he CAW afford a margin for this
large humanity? I aver, and am ready to prove,
that he Is the poorest paid capitalist in the whole
circle of trade. His risks are imminent. He has to
contend with all the vicissitudes of the seasons, with
has
lay
cri
t • ,0
nu:o disease
vh
ei
contingencies?en
retoagriculture stock,hn.4 emoluments
usoi with t hlrwirregularbehind
gdepartmenttli.daaicapitalessao outlay
grocer,etherettuzh. foreignoovtfoighno
capital,
another
ict )jh," usefult
cotton.
soi
art-.
Imithsminitapbeoeirenyis:dn'scanegrProwra,sniamielPelf
acre.: property.
to e
any
ndr
content himself
Wtohu r t
,riok"
heirbiafininreysarithnibehisotconhrereeenrtatutorntthdweafiovtharih tfuh.vparoeseuens
er
reat
double his profits ? Is it the landowner you look
charity of beneficence by deputy' What other cap:
vfoeoarirntary?
msoulrnoh
arts? How, then w it that it produces one-thwd
of
yotcastra,tleinabthoewe.wosurldpearcrejor
breeds, competitive implements, drainage, manures,
upon the science of production ! When the Ayrshire
herd, who
.had oatmeal porridge at all his meals
if he wasii't tired of it, ho auswercxl`
' \ ad yo ban Laito tLru vi toy weet ' Food tb,

-----
try ou real turtle if yen can afford et; bet if
whether, after all, the whole test of the significancy
may it not be worth while to consider
and drink ? "Give us each day our daily bread,"
ow much and what • people can get to eat
anovdertalhel dtherwewdldis,
oyiefonyalilfcjinechis'riett: ask'. Go through the villages_ of the
Continent ; you wil rarely see • butcher's shop.
other maiondary luxuries which hers an on mu in
the remotest perishes/. The prodigious lacrosse in
Enter • grocer's, and you find no bacon or epees
the production and importation of animal food ha&
it than • Brahmin
that
never see or expect to taste it—of those whose mates-
tors in our own country, scarce half • century age
would a sacred Bull, or • Mussel:man pork.
tkor thP"ee MSMerewith—olethdosier e'r'hdo;,
noe does not bear out the resulte
My experience
reported by the Reverend Graochue Girdleshme to
result from • removal of the labourer from an under.
• • lam informed that the migrant does
no more thought of oonstiming
mid district.
wit find himself so much better off, as bee be..
aseerted.• The Commissioner appointed to report on
the diet of the three nation, found that the Irishman
was the most untritiously fed, and the Eoglishome
the worst. There teems to be little thee! tor eon.
trivance about the Dorset or Wiltshire wife mid
mother. She provides ezpensive trash without
nourishment or substance in it. The Comterimeeier
avers that everywhere in Scotland the medical
orocrve • degeneration of the race where wheaten
jmead, tesi, and beer are substituted for the milk,
oaten cake and porridge, and other simple food of
the country, their health and strength by no means
keeping pace with their increased ability to purchase.
Man is not for ever eating, like the horse or cow.
Allow not nature more than astute needs ;
Men's life is cheap.. beast's.
What is it that speculative philanthropy propoisee
Is it that landowners should build cottages at
and charge only • shilling • week' Whit inr the
difference between the yearly rent, £2 12a., and the
legal interest .C 7 on the outlay but alms ? Is
that the farmer should raise wages to 14e. • week,
when the market value of labour is Si. ? What is
that but out-door relief to every man that gets it?
How lung could such • systezu last? Ii the squire
expected to go on building and repairing at •
perennial loss, imod his tenant to be held to doling
out Sc, ri week to every man in his employment for
, nothing—a private pooroute in addition to that which
he gives to the union, in common with his peighbonrs ?
Call that by what fine name you please, it is really
, nicking every peasant • pauper, dependent, not
, upon the steady and unfailing recurrence of honestl3,.
, earned wages, but upon • voluntary contributice
, from the capital of his employer, which muht
. inevitably come to an end by his ruin—for bow can
the struggling tenantry long continue to he the
universal voluntary almoners of the whole rural
, population' Wheat now averages only 45e. •
quarter. What margin does that afford either to
, squire or farmer to be liberal? Where is the
pauperism—where the unemployed and the destitute
—even now, with these unremunerative price'
Why, among the cotton spinners of Lancnishire, and
the iron founders on the Thames, Tyne, Wear, and
Mersey-laq in Wilts or Dorset. Does any registrar
report deaths by starvation among the pea...eery?
Thof part of the weekly returns is supplied only by
the wows within.
It le usiehas to help the peasant, or any other
claw, by the voluntary sacrifices of the chants.: ly
competent. The ploughman can only be effectually
served by enablig him to help bituself. You take
from him his cow., his pig, Ins common, his privi•
lege@ of turf and brush cutting, his potato patch. 1
cannot conceive how • mother can bring up Weldon
or cultivate house thrift without milk. It is not by
, gains, but by savings, that peasant life is sustained.
The ploughman can only make an approach to cem-
fort by utilising the services of every member of
his family, and that is just what our existing
r territorial economy renders impossible. The fareier
, and the squire first deprive the ploughman of all the
means he 1, ready enjoyed of eking out his income,
and then object to his keeping a cow, a ewe, r •
i pig because be will steal their provender to feed
, them. It is only too true that theft of farm pro-
duce is the role, and that too mavy beer taes are
nob' disguised receiving-house& If the labourer is
. deprived of the means of helping himself, is it cur-
pricing that he should do it from his master's barn
or rickyard ? Peasant proprietors, small farmers,
little crofter, are useful, not only economically,
, but as • desideratum in social morals. They stand
between the farmer and the peasant—an example to
' and a link between both. Their sympathies are with
labour—their interests are with property. They
till their own ground—they or their children oce:-
eionally join the the prolefaire bind on the work of
the farmer's glebe, his hay meadow, or his corn-
field. When out of eleemosynary work they can
fall back on their own land. Where is the cow, the
sheep, the pig. the potato patch, the orchard, the
garden, the hen roost, the duck pond; and every
child, from the oldest to the youngest, utilised,
doing something that has not to be paid for in
money? Even still there is • partial compromise of
this system in Scotland, whose the condition of the
rural population in greatly superior to what it is
here. In many districts they are permitted by their
employers to enjoy the privileges of cow, sheep and
pig keeping, and of potato allotments. The ploegh-
men of my youth I often find the small farmers of
my maturer years. The race is still stalwart,
virtuous, efficient, and in their sphere intelligent.
All our peasantry need is free-trade in land, cheap-
ness of transfer, the emanicipation of the soil from
tenure by corporations, charities, churches,the Crown
—in Mena upon the market—equal sucoeesion in
heritage as in personalty, and great national works
in drainage, roads and rails. The alternatives are a
general exodus, a fatal depletion, a growing callous-
ness to the shame of pauperism, property eaten up
with rates. Let once a stampede set in in England
and Scotland as it has done in Ireland, and we mar
live to realise Goldsmith's aphorism that
. .

•
A bold peasantry, its wintry, s pride,
When once destroy'd cat never be anonlied.
PUBLICOLA.

• Two years ago a number of florist labourers left
thig county to go mining in the north. but almost all
returned—they didn't like the quality or quitotity of the
work. and could not earn no mui.h at it as their pay in.
Dorset.—ED.