Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
SECTION I.
PEASANT LIFE.
The peasant life may be more picturesque than the artisan life; but the artisan is less helpless against oppression than the peasant. Lord Macaulay relates how, in consequence of the state of the currency in 1695—
"The labourer found that the bit of metal, which, when he received it, was called a shilling, would hardly, when he wanted to purchase a pot of beer or a loaf of rye bread, go as far as sixpence. Where artisans of more than usual intelligence were collected in great numbers, as in the dock-yard at Chatham, they were able to make their complaints heard and to obtain some redress. But the ignorant and helpless peasant was cruelly ground between one class which would give money only by tale, and another which would take it only by weight."[1]
And the peasant's wretched condition had lasted for innumerable ages—through which they lived like the beasts with which they shared the tillage of the ground, and then died like those beasts, leaving no trace behind them of a moral and intellectual being. Day and night, summer and winter succeeded each other, but the sun of each successive day which brought so many blessings to the prosperous and the happy, brought nothing to them but fresh toil and suffering, and, it might be, the reflection that they were one step nearer to the grave in which they would be at rest, and feel cold and hunger, pain and sorrow no more. And if that inanimate dust, which once had life and a human form, were now to be endowed with the power of human speech, what tales of oppression and suffering, of agony and horror, could it not unfold? The country churchyard seems to awaken memories that carry the mind of the observer further back into the past than the urban churchyard, though the latter may show one or two names more celebrated than any that may be read on the tombstones of the former. The village Hampden and the mute inglorious Milton, if they ever lived the village life out of Gray's "Elegy," lived and died as unheard of and as unrecorded as if they had never been. There have undoubtedly been men who though born peasants have succeeded in climbing "the steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar." But the mass did not thereby emerge from its lot of poverty and toil. For they are particularly deprived of that power of combined action which is within the power of the artisans of some degree of cultivated intelligence, collected in considerable numbers in towns. This evil has gone on increasing till acre after acre of the soil of England which was termed common land has been appropriated with the manifest effect of making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
The inclosure of commons may be taken as an instance of the conversion into private property of what was not private property, under the pretence that the effect will be to give more employment to the agricultural labourer. In my inquiry into this question, the evidence which I received, and my own observation, were not in favour of the conclusion that the inclosure of commons was advantageous to the poor. On the contrary, as the number of inclosure bills increased the condition of the agricultural labourer became worse and worse, till a man had but seven shillings a week to support himself, his wife, and seven children.
In reference to the conversion into private property of what was not private property, it may be remarked here that, according to the system of law established in England at the Conquest, in those waste lands, which are usually called commons, the property of the soil is generally in the lord of the manor.[2] But in common fields the property of the soil is in the particular tenants.[3]
There is evidence that though the lords of manors were the predominant powers in regard to the land question according to the law of England, the commoners, as they were termed, were not altogether powerless. Thus, to give an illustration or two, the right of the commoners to the pasturage may be subservient to the right of the lord of the manor; for if the lord of the manor has immemorially built houses or dug clay-pits upon the common without any regard to the extent of the herbage, the immemorial exercise of such acts is evidence that the lord reserved that right to himself, when he granted the right of pasturage to the commoners.[4] And if a lord of a manor plant trees upon a common, a commoner, though he has no right to cut them down, has a remedy by an action.[5]
Such cases show that the class called commoners in the English law books had a recognized position in the English constitutional polity; and it would seem that a scheme which made use of the authority of the English Parliament for converting those waste lands and common fields in which the poorer classes of the community, though they had not the property of the soil, had such a beneficial interest in the land "as to feed their beasts, to catch fish, to dig turf, to cut wood, or the like,"[6] was a scheme somewhat analogous to that of Sancho Panza when governor of the island of Barataria. It is said by the witnesses examined before the Parliamentary Committee of 1844, on the inclosure of Commons, that judicious inclosure would make a large portion of common lands much more productive. This may be a tolerably safe prediction; but it has two aspects. Its productiveness may be advantageous to some and disadvantageous to others. Sancho Panza's plan of deriving advantage from the government of an island, looked rather promising to Sancho himself, for it was a very simple proceeding. Sancho simply proposed to sell the inhabitants of the island for slaves, and put the money in his pocket. But to the people sold the plan might not appear so good as it did to Sancho.
Sancho Panza's scheme of getting rich, though it may wear the semblance of being only one of the elaborate jokes of him who was said to have "smiled Spain's chivalry away," has a melancholy affinity with certain schemes which, instead of being jocular and imaginary, are, on the contrary, too serious and too real. Since the year 1800, about two thousand inclosure acts have passed. Before that time about one thousand six hundred or one thousand seven hundred had passed. It was stated in evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons in 1844, that a large extent of common and waste land had been illegally inclosed under the provisions of the Act of 1836 (6 and 7 Wm. IV., c. 115), passed for facilitating the inclosure of open and arable fields in England and Wales; and the persons who hold such lands have no legal title, and can only obtain one by lapse of time. The chief motive for thus dealing with commons appears to have been that they thus get the inclosure done cheaper than by applying to Parliament for a private act.
Those persons whose passion for getting rich has induced them to make such use of the English law and English Parliament, have deprived themselves of any right to complain, if those Englishmen who have not derived any benefit from the inclosures of common land should take leave to inquire somewhat minutely into the whole subject of property in land.
Those who seek to go on increasing their riches by the inclosure of commons or waste land may say, if they think fit, that they are increasing the productiveness of their country, and as a consequence, its population; but they are destroying the natural beauty of their country, and more than the natural beauty, the ideas associated in the mind of man, with solitary meditation in fresh air and amid wild flowers and clear streams. With the inclosure of commons and waste land is closely connected the stopping up of public footpaths and ancient rights of way, and the rooting up every hedge-row and hedge-row tree, and ploughing up every place where a wild flower or shrub could grow. I will quote some remarks from J. S. Mill in defence of what Adam Smith has called the stationary state which, to the political economist of the last two generations, presented a stagnant and unpleasing prospect:—
"The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food, for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedge-row or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake posterity, that they will be content to be stationary long before necessity compels them to it."[7]
Mill goes on to say:—
"It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes."[8]
In another page of the same work the writer says:—
"The exclusive right to the land for purposes of cultivation does not imply an exclusive right to it for purposes of access; and no such right ought to be recognized except to the extent necessary to protect the produce against damage, and the owner's privacy against invasion. The pretension of two dukes to shut up a part of the Highlands, and exclude the rest of mankind from many square miles of mountain scenery to prevent disturbance to wild animals is an abuse; it exceeds the legitimate bounds of the right of landed property. When land is not intended to be cultivated, no good reason can in general be given for its being private property at all; and if any one is permitted to call it his, he ought to know that he holds it by sufferance of the community, and on an implied condition that his ownership, since it cannot possibly do them any good, at least shall not deprive them of any, which they could have derived from the land if it had been unappropriated. Even in the case of cultivated land, a man whom, though only one among millions, the law permits to hold thousands of acres as his single share, is not entitled to think that all this is given to him to use and abuse, and deal with as if it concerned nobody but himself."[9]
In the passage last quoted from J. S. Mill's Political Economy the words "necessary to protect the owner's privacy against invasion "are particularly deserving of attention, and before I had recurred to the passage for the present purpose, I had noted in the margin of the newspaper (The Daily News for April 18, 1844) containing a letter headed "Trout fishing in Scotland," and signed "J. A. Erskine Stuart," an objection that occurred to me at the time to what is said in the letter about what the writer calls "a fisher's path." The words used in the letter are "there is what is called a fisher's path from the source to the mouth of the river, and this gives a manifest right of way from time immemorial to the angler." The note I made at the time is this: "An objection to a fisher's path is that when all the population of a populous town have access to this 'fisher's path,' when the path approaches very near to the landowner's mansion or dwelling-house, the owner or landholder has surely a right to demand that the law shall protect his privacy against invasion. I know several cases where a trout or salmon stream runs through a private park in which is the owner's mansion-house. If the 'fisher's path' doctrine be law there is an end to all privacy in the life of any one who has a trout stream running through his park. And a blessing is thus, by this 'fisher's path' theory, turned into a curse.
At the same time it must be observed that within the last half century the landholders have become much more strict than they were before in prohibiting angling even for trout, to say nothing of salmon; and their proceedings in that matter, added to their game preservation being destructive of the small crops of the peasant tenants, of which an account written from personal observation will be given in the third section of this chapter, cannot be viewed as having a tendency to strengthen their position, and to establish them as Strafford bragged he would establish Charles the First and his posterity in wealth, strength, and glory, far above any of their progenitors.
The question of trout-fishing is complicated by the vast increase of population which renders "free trout-fishing" a very different thing from what it was when the population was comparatively small. I know nothing to which the word Conservative may be more judiciously applied than to the preservation of the fair pursuit of trout-fishing; that is to the angling for trout with the artificial fly, and not to the use of certain kinds of bait which may tend to the production of a large bag, but to the destruction of all fair fishing, and only to be practised by those who fish, not for health and sport, but for the pot, and bring discredit on angling as turning it to a mere trade in fish.
- ↑ History of England, iv. 119.
- ↑ 2 Bl. Comm. 32.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ 5 T. R. 411.
- ↑ 6 T. R. 483; 1 Bos. and Pul. 14.
- ↑ 2 Bl. Comm. 32.
- ↑ Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill, vol. ii., p. 331, sixth edition. London: Longmans and Co., 1865.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Principles of Political Economy, vol. i., pp. 290, 291.
CHAPTER V.
SECTION II.
AN ENGLISH VILLAGE IN 1844-5.
I will endeavour to give from my rough notes some idea of the condition of the peasantry of the district I had undertaken to visit for the purpose especially of ascertaining how much of the average earnings of a peasant's family go in purchasing clothing and articles paying excise or duty to government, as stated in the words of Mr. Cobden's letter to me, dated Manchester, November 5, 1844, and quoted in the Introduction.
One day in the month of December, 1844, I walked along the road that ascends a somewhat steep hill separating two villages from one another in one of the south-western counties of England. The view from the summit of this hill (and there are several such views in that part of the country, which is a good deal wooded, and beautifully diversified with hill, dale, and water) is a finer one than English scenery, which is apt, though soft and rich, to be somewhat tame, usually furnishes. When this view first opened upon me, the effect of the various colours presented by wood-land, pasture, and ploughed land, joined to the very slight haze, or frost fog, in the atmosphere, natural to a day in December, was as if I had come suddenly upon a bay with the sea immediately beneath me. As I began to descend, however, the illusion was gradually dispelled, and I beheld a scene which at a more favourable time of the year I felt must be one of great natural beauty, and must have presented a fine specimen of an English village, at least as far as regards the picturesque, for the village in question was so scattered that it might be almost said to be co-extensive with the parish in which it was situated —a circumstance which may add much to the picturesqueness, without, as appeared in this instance, adding anything to the prosperity of a village.
Sir Walter Scott in Waverley, in his description of the hamlet of Tully-Veolan, says: "The houses seemed miserable in the extreme, especially to an eye accustomed to the smiling neatness of English cottages." Alas! either "the smiling neatness of English cottages" has, at least in some districts of England, passed away, or Sir Walter Scott's knowledge of English cottages was very partial and imperfect.
Arthur Young, travelling in France before the Revolution, and walking up hill, bridle in hand, overtook a poor woman, looking sixty years of age though she was not twenty-eight. She said that she and her husband had seven children, a farm with one cow and one little horse. Their cow helped them to support their children, but the rent and taxes they had to pay for their little farm crushed them down. She said she had heard that somewhere, in some manner, something was to be done for the poor.
I met with cases in that inquiry showing how what has been turns up again in this world whirling round its old axis. To call this "strange!" would be a foolish saying, we should rather say "strange!" if it were not so. A new lacker of more or less brightness in its polish is every now and then laid on the surface of the old machine. But the machinery within goes grinding on in its old way. In a melancholy majority of cases the hearts of men are hard and their brains soft, whereas the chances would be considerably better with softer hearts and harder brains. With all that philosophers write, and all that philanthropists do (and I really believe in the existence of true philanthropists even in spite of the existence of false philanthropists), the old saying "homo homini lupus," "man is a wolf to man," still holds true: and the old verse of the old song has not lost its melancholy meaning—
"Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play:
For some must watch, while some must sleep;
Thus runs the world away."
Returning from one of my "inquiries" in the neighbourhood of a small town in a south-western county, I walked part of the way back with an old man in a strange long blue cloth dress coat, with enormous brass buttons, which had once been yellow, and top boots, the tops of which had once been yellow too. It was his Sunday dress, perhaps half a century, at least a quarter of a century, old. A tailor in a town in those parts told me that he had just seen a man come into that town with a coat on his back which he (the tailor) had made for him twenty-four years before. I could not at first guess what the strangely accoutred old man could be. He turned out to be a shoemaker. He said that for ready money he could make a pair of labourer's shoes for nine shillings and sixpence, and get about two shillings and sixpence by the job. And even if in full work he could hardly make more than three pairs of such shoes in a week, which would bring him, if paid, but seven shillings and sixpence for his week's work. But he lost money, he said, by the agricultural labourers not paying him. They promised to pay at the rate of one shilling a week, but could not. He was often very ill off himself. He said "he was sure the Queen did not know how ill off the poor people were, or she would do something for them." Some had only one shilling a day or six shillings a week, some only five shillings a week. And the bread-tax was then upon them in all its oppressive force.
I will note here another recollection of that inquiry which had other difficulties besides the hostility of the farmers mentioned, I think, in the preceding section. I was walking along the road between Corfe Castle and Wareham, which last is separated from that part of Dorsetshire called the Isle of Purbeck by a small stream running into Poole Harbour, where, at a part of the road which lay between two high banks, I suddenly saw two powerful men in the dress of sailors advancing towards me. I had in my pocket about fifty pounds which I had, just before I left London, drawn out of my bankers for my travelling expenses, and I had not so large an account at my bankers as to render the loss of this sum of money a matter of indifference to me. However, I resolved to make the best of it, and when the two sailors came close to me and said that they were travelling on foot from Liverpool to Poole, to seek for employment, I gave them a shilling, with which fortunately they appeared satisfied, thanked me, and continued their journey.
To return to the particular village before mentioned. Walking down hill towards this village some fifty or sixty years later than the day when Arthur Young walked up that hill in France, I encountered some sights and some scenes, which those witnessed by Arthur Young in France in that bygone time could hardly exceed in the materials they afforded for "taking the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt."
What is this? A cottage built of wood and without a chimney, the smoke ascending through what appears a large hole in the roof. The chimney fell down, I learned on inquiry, some time since, and had not been rebuilt. The thatch of the roof had been extended over the space where the chimney was; and the smoke, occasionally accompanied by sparks of fire, found its way through as it could. So that, besides the greater danger of fire, the condition of the interior of the cottage was fully worse than in those cases in which the chimney was originally only a circular aperture in the roof. For here the efforts of the smoke to escape to upper air are rather more often unavailing, than where the original design of the cottage architect did not contemplate any chimney at all. I was informed that a deaf woman was in the house when the chimney fell in, and had only left the chimney corner a moment or two before the chimney tumbled down.
Soon after I came to another tenement in this village, which appeared to be undergoing some repairs. It was a cottage of two rooms, without a garden—rent thirty shillings a year. The tenant of it was a labourer, with seven shillings a week, and a wife and six children at home. The woman said she had lived there thirty years, and could never get any repairs done, except a tile now and then. Most of the cottages in the parish were thatched, but this one was tiled. The farmer to whom she paid the rent always said he spoke to the college[1] which was the owner, but could not get them to do anything.
No repairs for thirty years! Corporations are said to have no souls. Here is an example—a proof indeed—of the truth of the saying. But though there are certain powers and rights which corporations have by law, I cannot find that they are entitled by law to have no souls—and no bowels of compassion. Stomachs they certainly have in fact, whether they have them in law or not. I therefore apprehend that this corporation cannot plead that they are entitled by law to feel no compassion for the sufferings which their tenants endure by reason of the entrances of the wind and the rain, the frost and the snow, through the "rents of ruin" which time has made in their hovels.
Whether their landlords were or were not entitled by law to plead that they had no souls, it seemed to go hard anyway with these poor people. For it did not appear that the advantages enjoyed by the other proprietor, the noble or most noble marquis, in the matter of soul, was attended by perceptible advantages to the poor cottagers. "He's a marquis indeed!" was the observation I heard on the spot. "He takes every thing out of it, and brings nothing into it. The Lord deliver us from such a marquis!"
I cannot say how the case might be in respect to any parish where this marquis might be resident. It is possible that he might be there as popular as he was unpopular here. The case is anyhow, at least, somewhat different where the proprietor is resident. It needs no very advanced stage in civilization for the preference of a flower-garden to a dunghill in front of one's house. It requires no very great amount of humanity to remove squalor, filth and extreme misery from under one's nose; to desire to see the cottages clustered round one's park gates, not merely neat and picturesque, but decently clean, commodious, and comfortable. A comparison of the cottages in certain localities near the owners' residences with those in certain other localities at a distance from such residences will occur to every one who has seen anything of the present state of England— at least, of its state some years ago. Sir John Falstaff declared that, when he was elevated to the peerage, he should forswear sack, and live cleanly, as a nobleman should do. It is natural that a nobleman should not desire to have a slovenly unhandsome cottage come betwixt the wind and his nobility.
The price of bread is always considerably higher in these places than in the neighbouring towns; a fact which is partly accounted for by the number of bad debts met with by those who sell bread and flour. One man said he could not get paid, and gave up the trade. He said he lost about fifty pounds before he shut up his shop. Another man said the people had got between two and three hundred pounds in his debt. In truth, the public in those parts of the kingdom could not and did not live on their wages: and the above is only one of the ways in which those wages were eked out so as to enable them to keep body and soul together in the most miserable manner. As I wept along, I observed another shop shut. The man who kept it, was informed, had been ruined by bad debts, and went off in the night with all the goods he had left.
Nearly opposite this shut-up shop, getting over a stile, I found a footpath leading across a corner of what was once a park, through which had run a fine clear, rapid stream, well supplied with fine trout—such as are met with in the Kennet, and such streams as you will find some pleasant as well as instructive talk about in Mr. Kingsley's delightful paper called "Chalk Stream Studies." The family, whose possession of this estate, however, was by no means ancient, had a house here once; which they occasionally visited. At such times no doubt the village bore a very different aspect from that which it wears now:—
"A merry place, 'tis said, in days of yore.
But something ails it now—the place is curst."
The stream still runs on, but no longer through a park. For the house is gone, not a trace of it remaining; the park ploughed up, though round the edge of it might still be seen the traces of the drive, in the circling avenue marked out by the trees still standing. The far older and stronger castle of the older and mightier lords of the place, has left some relics of its huge and frowning walls, which, if they seem to tell some broken tale of feudal tyranny in days long past, can hardly be suggestive of the picture of a more miserable population than that which now clusters round them, while they are suggestive of that high-spirited and warlike race who had set their seals to the Great Charter, and in securing their own liberties against the encroachments of their kings, laid the foundation of the liberties of England, and thereby of the liberties of all mankind.
From the stile above mentioned there was a view of a house of considerable size, prettily situated, which an old woman informed me was the house of the clergyman, adding, "We don't have much good from he." The living is worth upwards of one thousand pounds a year; but the incumbent at that time did not appear to enjoy a large amount of popularity among his parishioners, who, on the other hand, extolled the virtues of a neighbouring squire, the labourers on whose property were much better off than those in this parish, most of them living rent free and having fuel found them by their landlord.
Here is a cottage a mere ruin. It is built of mud, supported by upright and cross pieces of timber, originally forming squares, but now distorted by time and neglect into irregular figures for which geometry has no name. Is it inhabited? Yes; and the woman in this hovel says that in the cold weather they pay two shillings a week out of their seven shillings a week for firing, and they have eight children. They have no garden, and she says their rent is one pound a year.
But a man now pointed out a cottage worse than any of these that have been described, saying he could drive a horse and cart through it. And in truth he scarcely exaggerated when he said so. There were holes in the windows large enough to put both hands through; and holes in some parts of the walls large enough to put the whole body through. The roof was also full of holes. The occupant of it said the rain ran in in a hundred places; that they could not lie in their beds dry. A good many cases had been met with of families (generally those, too, in the coldest and worst dwellings) who had no blankets, even in that severe winter. And of those who had blankets, the best off had not more than two to a bed—frequently but one—while most people found three too few, and that too in houses made to keep out the cold, with doors, windows, and chimneys of very different construction from that of the majority of agricultural labourers' cottages. The family in this cottage of which I now speak had no blankets. The children (there were seven of them), some in rags and almost naked, were cowering round the embers of a fire on the hearth within the large chimney—the only sheltered spot in the cottage. One poor little thing, a boy about two years old, was playing among the embers, unconscious alike of the dark fate of his race and his own. His little brother had been burnt to death only a short time before, while engaged as he now was.
These children had recently lost their mother—one consequence of which was the death by burning of the little boy. They were now under the care of their eldest sister, a girl about seventeen. Rather less than three weeks after this time on visiting this village again, I was informed that this girl was dead and buried. She had gone to a gentleman's house at a little distance to beg, and, standing about two hours in the cold and the wet, she caught a cold, which, from the state of the cottage, insufficient covering (there were, as I have said, no blankets), and the want of necessaries, turned into a fever and carried her off in about ten days. She died raving mad. Her life had been short and miserable. Better to be in the grave than to go on living thus.
In cases of starvation, this is the usual termination of the melancholy process. "Towards the end," says Liebig ("Animal Chemistry," p. 26), "the particles of the brain begin to undergo the process of oxidation, and delirium, mania, and death close the scene."
I will not weary the reader with more of the details of that day's work. Those already given may perhaps be considered more than enough. Whatever may be the condition of that village now, what has been said conveys, as far as it goes, a strictly accurate description of what it was at that time.
Ten years after my visit to the English village I have attempted to describe, it happened to me to pass a few weeks in a Scottish village. I made a few notes on the matters which in the Scottish village chiefly attracted my attention. It will be seen from what is put down in the following section of this chapter that the condition of the inhabitants of the Scottish village was better than that of the inhabitants of the English village, in so far as their cottages were not in ruins. But in other matters, such as their being obliged to eat bread made of damaged flour and to submit to their little crops being destroyed by the landlord's game—against which grievance they were totally without redress or remedy—their only remedy being to leave the land where they and their forefathers had dwelt for centuries—it may appear a little doubtful whether the people in the English village or those in the Scottish village were in the most unenviable condition. The people in the Scottish village were, as to shelter from the weather, better off than the people in the English village, but they were under a landlord who, though sometimes called a religious or pious nobleman, appears from the facts to have been an oppressive and hard-hearted tyrant.
- ↑ A college in one of the Universities which was the owner of this part of the parish with which this village was nearly co-extensive.
CHAPTER V.
SECTION III.
A SCOTTISH VILLAGE IN 1855.
The Scottish village referred to, on which I have made a few notes, belonged, with all the surrounding country, to one of those Leviathan landholders, among some half-dozen of whom the greater part of Scotland is parcelled out, and who, unlike their English brother peers who profited by the plunder of the English Church lands at the Reformation in England, and rose at once from a humble station to be lords and knights, profess to trace their descent from kings and heroes of very remote times. I will not at present trouble the reader about those pedigrees, farther than to state that this village had once belonged to an Abbey, the ruins of which still remained in the condition in which they had been left at the Reformation in Scotland, and had come into the possession of the family of the present proprietor some years after. Into the root of their title I do not inquire. It might be as good or even better than many other titles to Church property. Lord Byron was very proud of the possession of Newstead Abbey, and seems to have got into his head with much poring over his pedigree, some touch of the confusion which he ascribes to the Polish Count Palatine in Mazeppa, and to have satisfied himself that the Byrons of the sixteenth century were identical with the Buruns of the thirteenth century, of which identity there is no evidence.
This Scottish village afforded much matter, both from observation and reflection to any observing and reflecting Englishman. The first thing that naturally struck an Englishman was the contrast between it and the English villages—particularly the villages of the southern and south-western counties of England. The most striking contrast that first presented itself was the monotonous regularity of this Scottish village, as compared with the picturesque irregularity of many English villages. I will explain what I mean by monotonous regularity by stating that this village, though situated in a most picturesque country, was merely a collection of cottages, built of a sort of red stone—they had a few years before been hovels of clay and turf—placed close together, end to end, in rows forming the village street, resembling the rows of negro cabins on a planter's estate, where nothing is left to the individual will of the tenant, but he must squat in the one case as the slave owner, in the other as the laird bids him. Whereas everything that gives beauty to an English Village springs from the circumstance of the individual will having been as free to select a spot for a dwelling as the oak on the village green to shoot out its boughs as nature prompted it.
I have in the preceding section quoted a few words from Sir Walter Scott's description of the village of Tully-Veolan. I will now quote a few words more. Sir Walter Scott, in describing the village of Tully-Veolan, says: "The village was more than half a mile long, the cottages being divided from each other by gardens, or yards, as the inhabitants called them, of different sizes." I can truly say, however, that such was not the case in this village of which I write—for the cottages were placed close together, without gardens or greensward between them and the road or village street, though many of them, perhaps all, may have had a bit of ground at the back by way of garden or kailyard.
Another part of Scott's description of the village of Tullly-Veolan, mentions the great number of useless dogs, and the story told of them by a French tourist who, wishing to find a reason for the number of dogs he saw, recorded as one of the national characteristics of Scotland, that the State maintained in each village a relay of curs, called collies whose duty it was to chase the chevaux de poste (too starved and exhausted to move without such a stimulus) from one hamlet to another, till they drove them to the end of the stage. Travellers in Scotland now might not find the number of curs so great as described by the veracious French tourist; but Colonel Thompson related a curious story of the Scotch collies which he heard on his Free Trade expedition in Scotland. The country people used to be followed to church by their collie dogs, which were all put into an appointed place in the church by themselves; and the dogs knew by the change in the preacher's tone when he was winding up, and with one consent cried Hoo! in joy at their approaching liberation. It came into one preacher's head to try the experiment of imitating the tones of winding up, and then going on again. Which he did; and the dogs made their Hoo! in the wrong place.
To return to this Scottish village. I obtained tolerably good lodgings at a house of two stories belonging to one of the principal shopkeepers in the village, whose wife, a good cook, and remarkably intelligent woman, attended to the lodgings. One of the first things that attracted my attention was the badness of the bread procured from the village baker—the bread being sour from an unpleasant combination of bad flour and bad yeast.
I therefore ate chiefly bread made by my landlady in the shape of flat cakes of moderate thickness. These cakes were, I think, called scones, the name given also in Scotland to barley cakes—but never to oat cakes, which are called bannocks. The reason given for the badness of the baker's bread was this: A combination or company of persons in the village enriched themselves by selling to the villagers damaged flour; against which grievance and villany there was no redress, because, though the "great man" most probably did not know of this villanous proceeding, the poor people dared not complain for fear of these scoundrels' influence with him being used to ruin them, by getting them turned out of their small tenements or holdings.
But this was but one of many evils incident to the condition of these Scotch villagers. The English squire is strict enough about the preservation of his game, and the English farmer often feels to his cost the consequences of such preservation.
But this is nothing to what the Scottish inhabitants of this village—which is only an average example of a Scottish village—ab uno disce omnes—felt and suffered. They were as much attached by feeling to the soil, where their fathers had lived for many generations, as the villeins regardant were bound to the soil by the feudal law. It is, indeed, as I have heard some of them sorrowfully say, "a grievous oppression," when the great landholder, who is the lord of the soil for miles round, tells them, if they complain of the all but total destruction in many cases, in some of the total destruction of their little crops by his game—that, if they do not like it, they may go elsewhere; and when this "great man's" numerous gamekeepers, who with their guns on full cock, strut on the public highways with the airs of Prussian policemen, shoot the poor man's favourite little dog, sitting inoffensively at its master's door.
"Strange!" said an Englishman one day as he eyed one of the Prussian policeman-like gamekeepers with a grim look—"Strange! that the descendants of the Scottish peasants who fought so hard and so successfully for liberty and independence at Bannockburn, should have gotten so little of what their forefathers bled for. I dislike this country, except for some of its scenery, and its pure air and clear streams. But the condition of these villagers reminds me painfully of the treatment of the people of India by their native oppressors—treatment which, as a soldier and administrator, I have always done my best to improve. What business have these descendants of cow-stealers and robbers of Church property with such enormous domains? We might say to them—'Bruce we know, and Douglas we know, but who are you? I should have taken off my hat to Bruce, because he was Bruce; and I take it off to Wellington, because he is Wellington.' But these cow-stealers and Church-robbers! Ugh!"
One day the Englishman referred to was walking along the road leading to the village, with his fishing-rod in his hand, when an open carriage overtook and passed him. Two men were seated in it, one of whom being seated with his back to the horses, the man on foot had from that circumstance a better view of his face. It was a face that appeared to indicate that the owner of it considered himself a person of very great importance. The expression of this man's face said as plainly as if the words had been written there in characters larger and far less ambiguous than those of an Act of Parliament, that he considered himself as being not only absolute master of all the land for miles on miles round about, but also absolute master of all the human beings who had the misfortune to live on that land. There was something in the haughty, insolent, despotic look of this man which roused the Englishman's combativeness. And as the latter returned his haughty look, which seemed to demand what right a "gutterblood" had to be walking on his domain with a fishing-rod in his hand, there was something in the expression of his features that seemed to be new to the rural magnate, accustomed as he was to domineer among dependents and the smaller lairds who looked upon him as a small god—a very small one indeed—and to rouse in him an emotion of rage, mixed with some other emotions he did not much care to analyze—inasmuch as an emotion very much akin to fear lay coiled up among them.
The carriage rolled on, and, by a turn of the road, was soon out of sight. And the pedestrian walked on too, wondering who those men might be in the carriage that had just passed him. Presently he met the clergyman of the parish, the minister as he was there called, and, as he had a slight acquaintance with him, he stopped and asked him whose carriage it was that had passed him, and which the minister coming in the opposite direction had met.
"That's the Lord 's carriage."
"Who's the Lord ?"
"The eldest son of that right honourable, as well as right worthy, and pious nobleman, the Earl of ."
"He is the owner of the land about here, is he not?"
"Ay, he is so."
"Did not his family get possession of it at the Reformation, when they got the lands of that Abbey?"
"Ay, they did so."
"I have read some story about roasting a man till he signed some deeds."
"His lordship and his noble ancestors were aye a very pious family; and had just a perfect abhorrence of that man of sin, the Pope of Rome, and all his works. May be then it's not unlike that they might show their zeal for the true religion by taking vigorous measures to get the lands out of such hands."
"That," said the Englishman, "is rather a new view of the matter. But as to the change of hands of the Abbey lands. I have my doubts whether a change might not have been made of rather a different kind. But might I ask which of the two seated in the carriage was Lord ?"
"His Lordship sat with his back to the horses."
"And the other who sat with his face to the horses?"
"Oh, that was the Earl of , a rich English nobleman, the eldest son and heir of the great Marquis ."
The Scotch have generally a vast respect for English noblemen, whom they assume to be all rich, as they have a notion that England is a rich country. And the English return the compliment by the prodigious respect they have for those Scottish magnates who are reported to be the owners of a great extent of country, and in some cases to have a very large rental.
"You seem to think, Sir," said the Englishman, "that the ancestor of this worthy and pious noble- man, the Earl of , did well in getting these lands by any means out of the power of the man of sin, the Pope. I am no admirer of the Pope and his works any more than yourself; but if you will permit me, I should like to ask you a question or two. I am a stranger here, and I naturally feel some curiosity about things that are strange to me."
"I shall be very ready to answer any question in my power to answer. Sir," replied the minister.
"Well, then," continued the Englishman, "if you will consider merely the temporal condition of the inhabitants of this village, for as to their spiritual condition there cannot be a doubt of its superiority under such a pastor as yourself, do you think it was better or worse when the Abbot of that Abbey was their landlord than it is now when the worthy and pious Earl of is their landlord?"
This question seemed to puzzle the worthy minister a little, as opening up certain points of view which had never before been presented to his mind. After a short pause, he replied—
"Better or worse? How can it be a question, Sir, when in those days the poor people were little if any better than benighted heathens, without either preaching or teaching that had the smallest savour of the true Gospel, or the pure unadulterated Word of God in it?"
"I excepted their spiritual condition expressly from my question," said the Englishman. "No doubt as to their spiritual condition they were kept in great darkness and ignorance. But I have always understood that the Roman Catholic clergy were easy landlords; and I have read in your Scottish histories that the nobles and gentry who got possession of the Church lands were the reverse of easy landlords. And now I see here a landlord feeding his game upon the little crops of his poor tenants, and I am informed that when they humbly petition for redress their petitions are treated with the disregard that a beast of prey might be expected to show for the petition of the animal he preyed on. Is this just? Is this merciful? Is this the conduct becoming a pious nobleman?"
"Sir," replied the minister, "in obedience to the command—judge not that ye be not judged—I would be far from presuming to judge a great and pious nobleman as respects this matter of game—though even I myself in respect of my small bit of glebe land have been a sufferer in no small degree, and moreover I did even once venture to present a humble memorial to his lordship on the subject, and thereby, I fear, did incur his lordship's displeasure. For great men. Sir, do not easily brook any opposition to their will."
"So much the worse for the great men themselves in the long run," said the Englishman. "It is one of the greatest advantages of a free country, with a free Parliament, and a free press, to protect great men, as you call them, against themselves. Some of the greatest men that ever lived. Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, have gone to destruction because they were without such protection. As for these small tyrants, such as your landlord here, you see what monkey tricks they play when left to themselves. And, indeed, I believe they lose the little intelligence they may have bad from nature, and descend in the scale of being so as to form the connecting link between man and the baboon."
The Englishman would not have gone so far in the expression of his opinions, for he was always careful not to say unnecessarily what might hurt the feelings of any person unless such person, by having been the aggressor, rendered an attack on him a mere act of self-defence; but he saw that the worthy minister, though he might consider it his duty to speak of the great land-holder with a certain guarded tone of respect, was greatly displeased at the destruction of his own and his parishioners' crops by the landlord's game, and by the unfeeling manner in which redress was refused.
"Now, Sir," continued the Englishman, taking a small volume out of his pocket, "with your permission I will read to you a short passage out of a History of Scotland I have here in my hands, a book written by a man from whom, though in common with the rest of the world I admire his genius, I differ totally on many points, and in none more than in his admiration of your Stuart kings. The writer I am about to quote is Sir Walter Scott; and the admission of gross injustice and rapacity on the part of your nobility is the more important as made by a writer whose bias was quite as aristocratical and as much against the Scottish democratical Church as that of Thucydides against the Athenian democracy; and this passage, therefore, bears some analagy to a passage in the eight book of the History of Thucydides."
"Sir Walter Scott was no friend to the Kirk of Scotland, and he has done his best to ridicule the poor persecuted covenanters, and to do honour to their base and cruel persecutors."
"I don't say a word in defence of his worship of such heroes as Claverhouse—a man whom I don't even much admire as a soldier—and who, in every other respect, can only be an object of detestation for his tyranny and cruelty—cowardly cruelty too, in order to establish the despotism of such despicable tyrants as Charles the Second and his brother James. These were one set of your native oppressors. But what say you to this description, which I have reason to know is borne out by the best historical evidence, of the other set of your native oppressors, consisting of such right worthy and pious noblemen' as this Earl of ?"
He then read the following passage:—
"It remained to dispose of the wealth lately enjoyed by the Catholic clergy, who were supposed to be possessed of half of the revenue of Scotland, so far as it arose from land. Knox and the other Reformed clergy had formed a plan for the decent maintenance of a National Church out of these extensive funds, and proposed, that what might be deemed more than sufficient for this purpose should be expended upon hospitals, schools, universities, and places of education. But the Lords, who had seized the revenues of the Church, were determined not to part with the spoil they had obtained; and those whom the preachers had found most active in destroying Popery, were wonderfully cold when it was proposed to them to surrender the lands they had seized upon for their own use. The plan of John Knox was, they said, a 'devout imagination,' a visionary scheme, which showed the goodness of the preacher's intentions, but which it was impossible to carry into practice. In short, they retained by force the greater part of the Church revenues for their own advantage."
"Ay," said the minister, "John Knox's scheme was a good and honest one, though the Lords who had gotten the Church lands might call it visionary."
"I quite agree with you. The conduct of John Knox in this was that of a wise statesman as well as of an honest man; the conduct of those Lords was the conduct of a band of robbers. A pack of greater ruffians, I believe, never appeared upon earth, in any age or country. The persons who got hold of the Church lands in England were mean men of the grade of lackeys and cooks. But the Scotch plunderers were to a man pre-eminent, even in that age of bad men, for ferocity, treachery, and cruelty. The chief of them, James Douglas, Earl of Morton, a man of a ferocious, treacherous, and cruel disposition, brought a stain on the name of Douglas of a peculiar kind; a stain too that shows that the morality of the nobles of that age had fallen below the level of the morality of two or three centuries back. This Morton surrendered to the Queen of England the unfortunate Earl of Northumberland, who, having been unsuccessful in his rebellion in England, had fled for refuge into Scotland, which had always before been a safe and hospitable place of refuge for those whom misfortune or political faction had driven into exile. What aggravated the blackness of the transaction, was that when Morton himself had been forced to fly to England, on account of his share in Rizzio's murder, he had been courteously received and protected by the unhappy nobleman whom he now delivered up to the vengeance of the Tudor Queen. 'It was,' says Sir Walter Scott, 'an additional and aggravating circumstance, that it was a Douglas who betrayed a Percy; and when the annals of their ancestors were considered, it was found that while they presented many acts of open hostility, many instances of close and firm alliance, they never till now had afforded an example of any act of treachery exercised by the one family against the other. To complete the infamy of the transaction, a sum of money was paid to the Regent Morton on this occasion, which he divided with Douglas of Lochleven.' There are other cases of cruelty, and treachery, mixed up with cant and hypocrisy, recorded by Sir Walter Scott, upon the authority of contemporary evidence of the most authentic kind, which prove that the heroes of your Reformation in Scotland may rank with the worst men of the worst times; that they may vie with Ezzelino in ferocity, with Borgia in treachery and cruelty, and with Louis the Eleventh in rapacity, in hypocrisy, and in baseness."
"But you do not include in this description John Knox and the other preachers?"
"No—I mean the laymen—and of those, not the people generally, but the laymen who called themselves of noble, or, at least, of ancient families. And, my dear Sir, when we remember that that miscreant, Louis the Eleventh, was the first who assumed the title of 'Most Christian King;' we ought to reflect that a man may obtain the appellation of a 'worthy and pious nobleman,' without possessing any very just title to it. I think that Virgil's hero, 'pious Æneas,' is as pretty a scoundrel as you often meet with."