Walks and talks of an American farmer in England (Part 2 of 2)

WALK WITH A RUSTIC.—FAMILY MEETING.—A RECOLLECTION OF THE RHINE.—IGNORANCE AND DEGRADED CONDITION OF THE ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER.—HOW HE IS REGARDED BY HIS SUPERIORS.—THE PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT.—DUTIES OF THE GOVERNING.—EDUCATION.—SLAVERY.— THE DIET OF LABOURERS.—DRINK.—BREAD.—BACON.—FRESH MEAT.

We were bound for Monmouth that night, and soon after sunset, having one of the farm labourers for a guide, we struck across the fields into another lane. About a mile from the farm-house, there was a short turn, and at the angle—the lane narrow and deep as usual—was a small, steep-roofed, stone building, with a few square and arched windows here and there in it, and a perfectly plain cube of stone for a tower, rising scarcely above the roof-tree, with an iron staff and vane on one of its corners—“Saint some one’s parish church.” There was a small graveyard, enclosed by a hedge around it; and in a corner of this, but with three doors opening in its front upon the lane, was a long, crooked, dilapidated old cottage. On one of the stone thresholds, a dirty, peevish-looking woman was lounging, and before her, lying on the ground in the middle of the lane, were several boys and girls playing or quarrelling. They stopped as we came near, and rolling out of the way, stared silently, and without the least expression of recognition, at us, while we passed among them. As we went on, the woman said something in a sharp voice, and our guide shouted in reply, without, however, turning his head, “Stop thy maw—am going to Ameriky, aw tell thee.” It was his “missis,” he said.

“Those were not your children that lay in the road?”

“Yaaz they be—foive of ’em.”

So we fell into a talk with him about his condition and prospects; but before I describe it, let me relieve my page with a glimpse of rustic character of another sort. It is one of the delightful memories of our later ramble on the Rhine that writing of this incident recalls. A very simple story, but illustrative in this connection of the difference which the traveller every where finds between the English and the German poor people.

We had been walking for some miles, late in a dusky evening, upon a hilly road in the Rhine land, with an old peasant woman, who was returning from market, carrying a heavy basket upon her head and two others in her hands. She had declined to let us assist her in carrying them, and though she had walked seven miles in the morning and now nearly that again at night, she had overtaken us, and was going on at a pace, that for any great distance we should have found severe. (Of course, ladies, she wore the Bloomer skirt.) At a turn of the road we saw the figure of a person standing still upon a little rising ground before us, indistinct in the dusk, but soon evidently a young woman. It is my child, said the woman, hastily setting down her baskets and running forward, so that they met and embraced each other half way up the hill. The young woman then came down to us, and, taking the great basket on her head, the two trudged on with rapid and animated conversation, in kind tones asking and telling of their experiences of the day, entirely absorbed with each other, and apparently forgetting that we were with them, until, a mile or two further on, we came near the village in which they lived.

Our guide was a man of about forty, having a wife and seven children; neither he nor any of his family (he thought) could read or write, and, except with regard to his occupation as agricultural labourer, I scarcely ever saw a man of so limited information. He could tell us, for instance, almost no more about the church which adjoined his residence than if he had never seen it—not half so much as we could discover for ourselves by a single glance at it. He had nothing to say about the clergyman that officiated in it, and could tell us nothing about the parish, except its name, and that it allowed him and five other labourers to occupy the “almshouse” we had seen, rent free. He couldn’t say how old he was, (he appeared about forty,) but he could say, “like a book,” that God was what made the world, and that “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom he was chief”—of the truth of which latter clause I much doubted, suspecting the arch fiend would rank higher among his servants, the man whose idea of duty and impulse of love had been satisfied with cramming this poor soul with such shells of spiritual nourishment. He thought two of his children knew the catechism and the creed; did not think they could have learned it from a book; they might, but he never heard them read; when he came home and had gotten his supper, he had a smoke and then went to bed. His wages were seven shillings, sometimes had been eight, a-week. None of his children earned any thing; his wife, it might be, did somewhat in harvest-time. But take the year through, one dollar and sixty-eight cents a-week was all they earned to support themselves and their large family. How could they live? “Why, indeed, it was rather hard,” he said; “so hard, that sometimes, if we’d believe him, it had been as much as he could do to keep himself in tobacco!” It is an actual fact, that he mentioned this as if it was a vastly more memorable hardship than that ofttimes he could get nothing more than dry bread for his family to eat. It was a common thing that they had nothing to eat but dry bread. He got the flour—fine, white wheaten flour—from the master. They kept a hog, and had so much bacon as it would make to provide them with meat for the year. They also had a little potato patch, and he got cheese sometimes from the master. He had tea, too, to his supper. The parish gave him his rent and he never was called upon for tithes, taxes, or any such thing. In addition to his wages, the master gave him, as he did all the labourers, three quarts either of cider or beer a-day, sometimes one and sometimes the other. He liked cider best—thought there was “more strength to it.” Harvest-time they got six quarts, and sometimes, when the work was very hard, he had had ten quarts.

He had heard of America and Australia as countries that poor folks went to—he did not well know why, but supposed wages were higher, and they could live cheaper. His master and other gentlemen had told him about those places, and the labouring people talked about them among themselves. They had talked to him about going there. (America and Australia were all one—two names for the same place, for all that he knew.) He thought his master or the parish would provide him the means of going, if he wanted them to. We advised him to emigrate then, by all means, not so much for himself as for his children—the idea of his bringing seven, or it might yet be a dozen, more beings into the world to live such dumb-beast lives, was horrible to us. I told him that in America his children could go to school, and learn to read and write and to enjoy the revelation of God; and as they grew up they would improve their position, and might be land-owners and farmers themselves, as well off as his master; and he would have nothing to pay, or at most but a trifle that he could gratefully spare, to have them as well educated as the master’s son was being here; that where I came from the farmers would be glad to give a man like him, who could “plough and sow and reap and mow as well as any other in the parish,” eighteen shillings a-week—

“And how much beer?”

“None at all!”

“None at all? ha, ha! he’d not go then—you’d not catch him workin withouten his drink. No, no! a man ’ould die off soon that gait.”

It was in vain that we offered fresh meat as an offset to the beer. There was “strength,” he admitted, in beef, but it was wholly incredible that a man could work on it. A workingman must have zider or beer—there was no use to argue against that. That “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners,” and that “work without beer is death,” was the alpha and omega of his faith.

The labourers in this part of England (Hereford, Monmouth, Gloucester, and Wiltshire) were the most degraded, poor, stupid, brutal, and licentious, that we saw in the kingdom. We were told that they were of the purest Saxon blood, as was indeed indicated by the frequency of blue eyes and light hair among them. But I did not see in Ireland or in Germany or in France, nor did I ever see among our negroes or Indians, or among the Chinese or Malays, men whose tastes were such mere instincts, or whose purpose of life and whose mode of life was so low, so like that of domestic animals altogether, as these farm labourers.

I was greatly pained, mortified, ashamed of old mother England, in acknowledging this; and the more so that I found so few Englishmen that realized it, or who, realizing it, seemed to feel that any one but God, with His laws of population and trade, was at all accountable for it. Even a most intelligent and distinguished Radical, when I alluded to this element as a part of the character of the country, in replying to certain very favourable comparisons he had been making of England with other countries, said—“We are not used to regard that class in forming a judgment of national character.” And yet I suppose that class is larger in numbers than any other in the community of England. Many have even dared to think that, in the mysterious decrees of Providence, this balance of degradation and supine misery is essential to the continuance of the greatness, prosperity, and elevated character of the country—as if it were not indeed a part of the country.

A minister of the Gospel, of high repute in London, and whose sermons are reprinted and often repeated in America, from the words of Christ, “the poor ye have always among you,” argued lately that all legislation or co-operative benevolence that had the tendency and hope of bringing about such a state of things that a large part of every nation should be independent of the charity of the other part, was heretical and blasphemous. Closely allied to such ideas are the too common notions of rulers and subjects.

In America we hold that a slave, a savage, a child, a maniac, and a condemned criminal, are each and all born, equally with us, with our President, or with the Queen of England, free and self-governing; that they have the same natural rights with us; but that attached to those natural rights were certain duties, and when we find them, from whatever cause,—no matter whether the original cause be with them, or our fathers, or us,—unable to perform those duties, we dispossess them of their rights: we restrain, we confine, we master, and we govern them. But in taking upon ourselves to govern them, we take duties upon ourselves, and our first duty is that which is the first duty of every man for himself—improvement, restoration, regeneration. By every consideration of justice, by every noble instinct, we are bound to make it our highest and chiefest object to restore them, not the liberty first, but—the capacity for the liberty—for exercising the duties of the liberty—which is their natural right. And so much of the liberty as they are able to use to their own as well as our advantage, we are bound constantly to allow them,—nay, more than they show absolute evidence of their ability to use to advantage. We must not wait till a child can walk alone before we put it on its legs; we must not wait till it can swim before we let it go in the water. As faith is necessary to self-improvement, trust is necessary to education or restoration of another: as necessary with the slave, the savage, the maniac, the criminal, and the peasant—as necessary, and equally with all necessary—as with the child.

Is not this our American doctrine in its only consistent extension? We govern in trust only for another, and a part of our trust is the restoration of the right-ful owner by helping him towards that sound and well-informed mind and intelligent judgment that makes him truly free and independent.

This is the only government that we of the free United States of America, whether as fathers or children, statesmen or jurymen, representatives or rabble, either claim or acknowledge. And it is of this that all true Americans believe, “that is the best government that governs the least.” Using government in its properly restricted sense, as the authority and forcible direction of one over another, we hold this to be as self-evident as that the life of free love is better than the life of constrained legality, that the sentiment of mutual trust is nobler than that of suspicion or of fear, that the new dispensation of Christ is higher than the old one of Moses. What else there is than this care over the weak and diseased in the public administration of our affairs, is no more than associated labour—the employment of certain common servants for the care of the commonwealth.

Education, then, with certain systematic exercise or discipline of the governed, having reference to and connected with a gradual elevation to equal freedom with the governing, we hold to be a very necessary part of all rightful government. Where it is not, we say this is no true and rightful government, but a despotism and a sin.

But we shall be at once asked: Is your fugitive law designed for such purposes? Do your slaveholders govern the simple-minded Africans whom they keep in restraint on these principles?

So far as they do not, their claim is “heretical and blasphemous.”

Let us never hesitate to acknowledge it—any where and every where to acknowledge it—and before all people mourn over it. Let us, who need not to bear the heavy burden and live in the dark cloud of this responsibility, never, either in brotherly love, national vanity, or subjection to insolence, fear to declare, that, in the misdirection of power by our slaveholders, they are false to the basis of our Union and blasphemous to the Father who, equally and with equal freedom, created all men. Would that they might see, too, that while they continue to manifest before the world, in their legislation upon it, no other than mean, sordid, short-sighted, and barbarian purposes, they must complain, threaten, expostulate, and compromise in vain. If we drive back the truth of God, we must expect ever-recurring, irrestrainable, irresistible reaction. The law of God in our hearts binds us in fidelity to the principles of the Constitution. They are not to be found in “Abolitionism,” nor are they to be found—oh! remember it, brothers, and forgive these few words—in hopeless, dawnless, unredeeming slavery.

And so we hold that party in England, which regard their labouring class as a permanent providential institution, not to be improved in every way, educated, fitted to take an equal share with all Englishmen in the government of the commonwealth of England, to be blasphemers, tyrants, and insolent rebels to humanity. (Many of them as good-souled men as the world contains, nevertheless.)

I have before said, and I repeat it with confidence, that I believe this party to be the weaker one in England. I must believe that the love of justice, freedom, and consistency, is stronger with Englishmen than the bonds of custom, self-conceit, and blind idolatry of human arrangement, under however sacred names it has come to them.

But our British friends will ask: Would it be practicable to give these poor toiling semi-brutes any—the smallest—exercise of that governmental power, which, so far as they be not wholly brutes, is their right? Yes, we American farmers would judge, yes: there are offices to be performed for the commonwealth of each parish or neighbourhood, of the requirements of which they are, or soon would make themselves, fit judges. If there are not, then make such offices. Who is a kind, firm, and closely scrutinizing master; who is a judicious and successful farmer; who is an honest dealer with them; who is a skilful ploughman, a good thatcher, a good hedge-trimmer, in the mile or two about them, they always have formed a judgment.

With regard to the habits of drinking and the customary diet of those by whose labour England is mainly supplied with food, I fear my statements may be incredible to Americans; I therefore quote from authority that should be better informed.

A correspondent of the Agricultural Gazette mentions, that in Herefordshire and Worcestershire the allowance of cider given to labourers, in addition to wages, is “one to ten gallons a-day.” He observes that, of course, men cannot work without some drink, but that they often drink more than is probably of any advantage to them, and suggests that an allowance of money be given instead of cider, and the labourers be made to buy their drink. In this way, he thinks, they would not be likely to drink more than they needed, and it would be an economical operation for both parties. In Normandy, the cider district of France, three gallons a-day is the usual allowance of labourers.

It would be unjust not to add, that in a large part of England the labourers are much more comfortable than these statements might indicate. I am also convinced that the condition of the labourer generally is improving, and that he is now in a much less famishing condition than ten years ago. The main stay of the labourer’s stomach is fine, white wheaten bread, of the best possible quality, such as it would be a luxury to get any where else in the world, and such as many a New England farmer never tasted, and, even if his wife were able to make it, would think an extravagance to be ordinarily upon his table. No doubt a coarser bread would be more wholesome, but it is one of the strongest prejudices of the English peasant, that brown bread is not fit for human beings. In Scotland and Ireland, and in some hilly districts of England, only, wheat bread is displaced by more wholesome and economical preparations from oatmeal.

With regard to fresh meat, a farmer once said to me, “They will hardly taste it all their lives, except, it may be, once a-year, at a fair, when they’ll go to the cook-shops and stuff themselves with all they’ll hold of it; and if you could see them, you’d say they did not know what it was or what was to be done with it—cutting it into great mouthfuls and gobbling it down without any chewing, like as a fowl does barleycorns, till it chokes him.”