CHAPTER XXXI.

CHIEFLY ABOUT THE LAND.

For three months an Englishman sits in sackcloth and ashes. The matter-of-fact reviewer will tell me this is not so; and he is right and so am I.

London is not a place to live in in winter; there is, unfortunately, no place in England that is. People talk of the weather. They cannot help themselves. In his old age Dr. Johnson wrote, ‘I am now reduced to think and am at last content to talk of the weather.’ That was a sign that the Doctor at last had fallen low. As Burney writes: ‘There was no information for which Dr. Johnson was less grateful than for that which concerned the weather.’ If any one of his intimate companions told him it was hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or calm; he would stop them by saying: ‘O-oh, O-oh! You are telling me of that of which none but men in a mine or a dungeon can be ignorant. Let us bear with patience or enjoy in quiet elementary changes either for the better or the worse, as they are never secrets.’ Nevertheless, the state of the weather continues in all circles an unfailing theme. Bad weather affects the spirits by depressing them, fine raises them. We are attuned to every action of the outer atmosphere. Our suicides in November are known all the world over. It is scarcely possible to be cheerful on a dull, cold, raw, foggy day. I wonder people who can afford to go away and have no pressing claims at home do not rush off to the Riviera in search of its blue sky, its summer suns, its wealth of flowers, its richer life for the delicate, or the infirm or old.

‘We must get out of England,’ said Wentworth to his wife, one dull wintry morn, when the raw cold seemed to fill every apartment in the house, and the outlook into the busy street only revealed half-starved figures in all their wretchedness. ‘We must get out of England, and the sooner the better.’

‘Yes, I’ve long been thinking so; but the question is, where to go. We have got to think of other people besides ourselves, and of other affairs than our own. But with our tastes and habits we can live cheaply anywhere, and I have no wish to go where we shall meet a lot of idle rich people only seeking to guard themselves from the English winter and spending life in frivolous indulgence. Let us take the question seriously.’

‘That is just what I am trying to do,’ was the reply. ‘We are not too old for a grand experiment.’

‘But are you prepared to give up journalism?’

‘Yes, I am. I see a new spirit abroad, one which I detest.’

But one thing remained to Wentworth of the teaching of his early years: a love of Liberal principles; an enthusiasm for humanity; a deep yearning for the mental and moral elevation of the people—ideas deeply cherished in the Nonconformist families of the past generation. In every home the struggle for reform, the hatred of slavery, the desire to give the Roman Catholics fair play, the struggle for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the need of a national and unsectarian system of education, were held to be objects of paramount importance, and were the subjects of daily converse. In every rural village meetings were held at the chapels in their favour, and if there were no great orators to attend them, what was said at them sank into prepared soil, and bore a rich harvest. It was in East Anglia as it was all over England. The agitation went from one chapel to another. A line of communication was thus established, wrote William Hazlitt, whose father was a Unitarian minister in Shropshire, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fires, unquenchable like the fires in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, placed at different stations that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the destruction of Troy. It was from such centres came the soldiers who were to win the people’s victories in spite of the nominees of Tory lords and rotten borough-mongers, of pensioners and place-men, of time-serving priests and fawning courtiers who then ruled the land, and who fattened on the taxes wrung from an unrepresented and oppressed and a discontented—and a justly discontented—nation. Young hearts burned within them as they listened to Liberal orators, or read the speeches of such men as Henry Brougham or Dan O’Connell, or studied Liberal newspapers; and they longed for the time when they, too, should gird on the shield and buckler and do battle for the Right. In vain timid ministers and aged deacons uttered warning voices and shook their heads at the new spirit which was abroad, quoted Scripture about obeying them that have rule over you, hinted at the danger to spirituality of life and feeling by mixing in the rough warfare of the political world. As well might they scream to the stormy blast. The current was too strong: they had to swim with it or be drowned. It was a grand time of awakening. The world has seen nothing like it since. To Wentworth it was a baptism, the effect of which was never to pass away. Buxton, as usual, continued his morning smoke.

‘Hear me,’ said Wentworth, as Rose rushed out of the room, declaring that she knew all he had to say. Wentworth continued: ‘As long as I can remember, the “condition of England question,” as Carlyle called it, or, as we term it, in more sensational phraseology, “the bitter cry of the outcast,” has afforded painful matter of reflection to the statesman, the philanthropist, the philosopher, and the divine. It is always coming to the front, and it will always be coming to the front, even if you hang all the bad landlords and jerry-builders, get rid of the bloated capitalist, and divide the estates of the aristocracy and the millions of the capitalists among the poor of the East-end. The working classes are not to be confounded with the men and women who herd like beasts in the wretched dens of the east. Underneath the lowest of them there is a conservative residuum whom it is impossible to get rid of, whose condition it is appalling to contemplate. They are the men who won’t work; who won’t go where work is to be had; who come to London when they should never have left their country home; who sell their manhood for a pot of beer: casuals who, born in a poor-house or a prison, children of shame from the first, mostly spend their lives alternately tramping the streets and in the workhouse or the gaol. As London increases in population, so do they. We have seen such men offered fair work by hundreds, but they prefer filth and laziness, with the chance of an appeal to the humane. “Pull down the rookery,” and the rooks won’t fly away. Burn all the fever and vice laden dens of the outcast, and there he is still, a disgrace and shame—not so much, as sensational writers pretend, to our civilization and religion as to our common manhood. Ever since we have known anything of the churches—whether Established or Free—it seems to us that they have aimed as much at the temporal as the spiritual improvement of the outcast. We have yet to learn that it is a disgrace to our civilization that it does not interfere with God’s law, that the wrong-doer must pay for his wrong-doing, whatever that may be—that if you lose your chance, another will take it—that it is too late to go harvesting in winter; that the victory is to the strong, that he that will not work shall not eat—those who forget this, who idle away the precious moments, are soon sitting in the outer darkness of the outcast, where there is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

‘It amuses us, or would, were not the subject so awful—for it may be taken as a sober truth that outside the bottomless pit there is no such utter damnation as is to be found among the outcast—to find clever writers talking of the constant neglect of the last hundred years, and to ponder over the remedies. It is now the fashion to recommend better houses to be built at the expense of the community. If we were to get free trade in land, more will be done to remove the congestion in our great cities than by the erection of improved dwellings, which will rather intensify the evil. The more society does for the outcast the more will their number and their poverty alike increase. The remedy is worse than the disease. Every halfpenny you give to the undeserving is so much taken from the deserving. Every benefit you confer on the pauper is at the expense of the honest, respectable poor, who have a prior claim. Against State action the argument is still stronger. In the first place, the State cannot deal honestly and fairly by the people. What it does is ill done, and at double expense. The people who pay the taxes are often as badly off as those for whose benefit they are spent. A slight addition to the taxation of a wealthy peer or capitalist will not deprive him of a single luxury, but it may send a small, struggling tradesman into the _Gazette_. We are a nation of shopkeepers, and it is easy to perceive that a time may come when our heavy taxation may cripple us in our trade with foreign competitors, when they will supply the markets, on which we have hitherto depended, when, in fact, we shall have little left to us but our National Debt.’

‘Go on,’ said Buxton. ‘You are getting rather prosy, but if it relieves your feelings, pray proceed.’

‘Well, then,’ said Wentworth, ‘I will. A gentleman sends me a scheme of a cooperative home colony, which will give the settlers three good meals a day, a house, a full suit of clothing every year, education for their children, and an allotment of half an acre of land, which shall be entirely at the disposal of the head of the family so long as he makes a good use of it and renders proper service during the regular working hours. For the purchase of fuel or tea and coffee, and such things as cannot be grown in this climate, the director will sell in the public market any surplus produce such as eggs, butter and poultry, far too much of which we get from abroad. One-sixth of the harvest and other produce will be sold to pay the salaries of director and foremen. A farm of three hundred and forty acres in the Isle of Sheppey, for instance, can be had if it be deemed desirable. If we get a population of five hundred on it, fifty acres of wheat will supply the settlement with all the bread that can be eaten there. If the cows were stall-fed, one hundred acres of land would keep over a hundred head of cattle, and such a herd would supply all the requisite milk, cheese, butter, beef and hides every year in abundant quantities. Flax could be cultivated and linen woven. A flock of sheep could be tended on the estate sufficient to yield five pounds of wool every year per head of the population. There would be no expense for manure, as the settlement would provide it all. Are you weary?’ said Wentworth.

‘Not particularly. Pray proceed. But why not try it—why not begin a scheme of the kind at once?’

‘All we have to do is to get the people back to the land. By the establishment of such home colonies work will be offered in rural districts to men and women who would otherwise be driven into our great cities to increase the pauperism which threatens our whole social edifice. The scheme, if carried out, will encourage habits of industry and thrift—unlike the work given in our workhouses, which demoralizes and degrades the recipients; it will help the societies instituted to distribute charity, as it will offer strong men and women healthy labour rather than doles, which they are ashamed to accept, which they do not ask for, and which, when taken, have a tendency to break down that spirit of independence and self-reliance which lies at the foundation of all decent manhood; and lastly, and this is an immense benefit, it would prevent land now in cultivation from becoming a desert. It seems to me this of itself is no common recommendation of the plan, when farmers are giving up farming, and their farms either allowed to run to waste or farmed by the landlords at a heavy loss. Our great Free Traders never dreamt of this when they got Parliament and the people to destroy Protection, yet such are the facts we have to face.’

‘And yet there are people who believe in Cobden still,’ said Buxton.

‘I knew him well,’ said Wentworth, ‘and a better man never lived. He was right in the main, though his enthusiasm led him astray, and no wonder. Let me, in the language of Goldsmith remind you—

‘“How wide the limits stand Between a splendid and a happy land.”’

Buxton laughed when Wentworth had finished his rhapsody. Buxton was given to laughter. He was not a man who took life very seriously. Perhaps he would have done better had he done so as far as his own personal interests were concerned. As Swift said of Arbuthnot, it might be said of him, that he knew his art better than his trade.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said, as he rushed out of the room to his own den, whence he returned with an old faded handbill, which was as follows:

SPENCE’S PLAN

for Parochial Partnerships in the Land is the only effectual remedy for the distress and oppressions of the people. The Landholders are not Proprietors-in-Chief; they are but the _Stewards_ of the Public, for the LAND IS THE PEOPLE’S FARM. The expenses of the Government do not cause the misery that surrounds us, but the enormous exactings of those _Unjust Stewards_, Landed monopoly is indeed equally contrary to the benign Spirit of Christianity, and destructive of the Independence and Morality of Mankind. ‘The Profit of the Earth is for all.’ Yet how deplorably destitute are the great mass of the People! Nor is it possible for their situations to be radically amended but by the establishment of a system founded on the immutable bases of Nature and Justice. Experience demonstrates its necessity, and the Rights of Manhood require it for their presentation.

To obtain this important object by extending the knowledge of the above system, the Society of Spencean Philanthropies has been established. Further information of its principles may be obtained by attending any of its sectional meetings, where subjects are discussed calculated to enlighten the human understanding; and where, also, the regulations of the society may be procured, containing a complete development of the Spencean system. Every individual is admitted free of expense who will conduct himself with decorum.

‘I never heard of Spence,’ said Wentworth.

‘Of course not,’ said Buxton. ‘In these days of boasted progress we know nothing of what has been. Radicals always ignore the past. You really need a little enlightenment. Shall I enlighten you?’

‘By all means.’

‘It was in 1775 Mr. Spence began his public career. Like most original thinkers, he commenced in the country. His political opinions were first pronounced in the form of a lecture read before the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775, and printed immediately afterwards, from which time, he says, he went on continually publishing them in some shape or other. They are fully explained in his “Constitution of Spensonia: a Country in Fairy Land Situated Somewhere between Utopia and Oceana.” According to his scheme, the land belongs to the people, and individuals should rent the land from their respective parishes, the rent constituting the national revenue, and the surplus, after all expenses were paid, was to be divided equally amongst all the parishioners. The larger estates were to be let for one-and-twenty years, and at the expiration of that term relet by public auction, the smaller ones by the year, and the larger ones sub-divided according to the increase of population. The legislative power was to be vested in an annual Parliament elected by universal suffrage, women voting as well as men. The executive was to be in the hands of a council of twenty-five, half of which was to be renewed annually. Every fifth day there was to be a Sabbatical rest, not a Sabbath, for no provision was made for public worship, and in the new world no mention was to be made of parsons, though the constitution was to be proclaimed in a more or less religious form. At the end of the pamphlet, as it was published, was an epilogue, intimating the flight of poverty and misery from this lower world, and there was an appeal:

‘“Let us all join heart and hand Through every town and city, Of every age and every sex, Young men and maidens pretty, To haste this golden age’s reign On every hill and valley, Then Paradise shall greet our eyes Through every street and alley.”’

‘Ah,’ said Wentworth, ‘I see there is nothing new under the sun.’

‘But the taxes?’ said Buxton. He continued: ‘This scheme was published long before the French Revolution broke out. Up in the north there had risen a solitary and original thinker who advocated female voting, universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, and had got hold of the idea—which has led many of our modern apostles to fame and fortune—that the land lay at the root of the Condition of England question, that all private property in land must be destroyed, and that it must be done at once.

‘Spence, then, was, to use the cant of the present day, a Progressist. To him belongs the honour of having first presented the land question in all its bearings to the general public. What was his reward?—a Government prosecution with a fine of £20 and a year’s imprisonment at Shrewsbury. Well might a nobleman, as Wilberforce tells us, show him the picture of crucified Christ, and bid him mark the end of a Reformer.

‘One cause of Spence’s failure is obvious—he tried to do too much. “When I began to study,” says he, “I found everything erected on certain unalterable principles. I found every art and science a perfect whole. Nothing was in anarchy but language and politics. But both of these I reduced to order; the one by a new alphabet, the other by a new constitution.” Of what he called his natural or philosophical orthography we know but little, save that one of his works was printed in it. Had he aimed at less he would have accomplished more. He was no vulgar demagogue; that trade was not a paying one when Spence proclaimed himself “the unpaid advocate of the disinherited seed of Adam.” “This, gentlemen,” he exclaimed when on his trial—he was too poor to retain attorney or counsel for his defence—“this, gentlemen, is the Rights of Man; and upon this Book of Nature have I built my commonwealth, and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” He added, as well he might: “I solemnly avow that what I have written and published has been done with as good a conscience and as much philanthropy as ever possessed the heart of any prophet-philosopher or apostle that ever existed.”

‘It was all in vain. The Government of the day feared the result of his teaching. Had he set up for a philosopher and clothed his ideas in mystic language, perhaps he might have been overlooked; but he published what he called “Pig’s Meat” for the people, and that made him dangerous. He had no friends and became an easy prey. He was poor, he stood alone, and was generally held to be little better than a lunatic; even the professed friends of liberty kept aloof from him. Well might be exclaim, as he did before his judges, “Perhaps, my lords, I have entertained too high an opinion of human nature, for I do not find mankind very grateful clients.” After his trial and imprisonment Spence became an itinerant vendor of books and pamphlets, chiefly his own works, which he carried about in a vehicle constructed for the purpose. He died somewhere about 1812, while Britons were hard at work on sea and in every land in Europe setting right public matters according to their fashion—paying foreigners to fight for their own independence, singing all the while that they never would be slaves.’

‘We are wiser now,’ said Wentworth.

‘Perhaps,’ was the cynical reply. ‘You are everlastingly talking,’ he continued, ‘of an outcast London; but, after all, it is on outcast London that the chief blame of its misery lies. Let us have an Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and at once, in outcast London, where boys and girls become fathers and mothers before they are out of their teens, and when they have no chance of earning a living, and know not and care not for the little ones they bring into the world. In respectable London a man does not marry till he fancies he can keep a wife. In outcast London it is the reverse. In such a case population represents the thoughtlessness of the nation. In many cases it represents the most brutal selfishness. Men and women can’t complain if they reap what they have sown; but have not we a right to say a word on behalf of the children? For men and women to bring up their children in the way in which it is done in outcast London is a crime. To bring a baby into the world to lead a diseased and wretched life where it can never get a mouthful of wholesome food, a ray of sunlight, a particle of fresh air, to curse a young life that God meant to be so full of bliss, is a crime so awful that we can see no fitting punishment. To improve outcast London the first thing is to stop the supply. There is no remedy if reckless pauperism is to be allowed to grow rampant in our midst.

‘One word more,’ said Wentworth. ‘Suppose we think more of the decent poor, and less of the outcast. Suppose we give the respectable working man as much sympathy as we give his good-for-nothing brother. Suppose we take the sober operative as much by the hand as we do the inebriate. Suppose we act on the idea that industry is honourable, and that the men who live by it are men to be honoured; that the world with all its blessings is for the worker, whether he tills the soil or ploughs the deep, whether he builds the loftiest viaduct or burrows in the deepest mine.’