FARMERS AND PARSONS.
TN this month's Nineteenth Century we have a rejoinder . by Colonel Pedder to the criticisms of Colonel Har- court and Mr. Waters on his article, "Where are the • Village Gentry ? " It is probable that the divergence between the views of English village life severally taken by the combatants is due in part to the fact that they refer to different districts. "The genuine rural village,' says Colonel Pedder, has little in common with the "village of gentility," and the Thames-side village in which Colonel Harcourt lives is eminently a "village of gentility." So far Colonel Pedder is right. It is the exodus of what may be called the working gentry from London and other great cities that has done so much to counterbalance the exodus of the rural gentry from the villages to London or the watering places, and. the former exodus covers only a limited area. But when Colonel Pedder speaks of these "villages of gentility" as necessarily implying "a deficiency somewhere or another of one of the elements needed to perfect our English Arcadia," he is not right. It is not from distant rural villages that the pleasant little com- munities which are so frequent in the Thames Valley and in many another outlet from London are recruited. They have left no deficiency in "our English Arcadia" because they were not in it originally. Their inhabitants have for the most part lived the busy lives of professional men in all parts of the world, or are actually living those lives in the. neighbouring city. If the gentry have deserted the really rural villages it is not, by Colonel Pedder's own showing, for the villages of the Home Counties ; it is for the social and intellectual delights of the Cromwell Road. It is quite true that the creation of these villages in the Home Counties—for in many cases the change is so great that it may be called a creation—has done nothing to repeople the villages of Northumberland or East Anglia with resident gentry. If these last have been deserted by the gentry, they are deserted still. But the number of what are practically new villages, each with its fair proportion of gentry, that have come into existence of late years must in fairness be set against this desertion. From the point of view of Northumberland or East Anglia no doubt nothing is gained by the multiplication of villages in Kent or Surrey. But from the point of view of England a great deal is gained. Loss remains loss, but it ceases to be loss on the balance.
Colonel Pedder is on surer ground when he says that to call attention to the "denudation of resident gentry" is to do a public service, and he instances the case of Ireland. But Ireland is hardly an accurate parallel. She is a warning, indeed, but a warning against a particular type of land legislation. Ireland—modern. Ireland—started with a bad. land system, and we have been vainly trying for „a generation to tinker it into a, good one. In England there was nothing the matter with the 'land system so long as agriculture was pros- perous. It is faulty in many cases now because the land. no longer supports adequately the three classes who have to live by it. So far as the "denudation of resident gentry" is the effect of poverty arising from this cause it is irremediable, or only to be remedied in part by the growth of a different class of resident gentry. There is, indeed, another cause of denudation, which is not irre- mediable in one sense, though in another sense it is more irremediable still. It is conceivable that im- poverished landlords may become rich and be once more able to live in their old houses in the old fashion. But it is not conceivable—except as the result of a social miracle —that men who have changed their manner of life not because they are no longer rich enough to maintain it, but because they find their homes dull and the world beyond their homes full of amusement, should suddenly feel a reviving interest in the dull routine of duties to tenants and labourers.
, Colonel Pedder is even more concerned with the "severe strictures which Colonel Harcourt and Mr. Waters have passed on his remarks about the clergy. "They cannot understand how an alliance between the parson and the farmer should encourage Dissent." The interests of the farmer and the labourer are antagonistic ; and whether the parson takes sides or stands apart, he must offend one of them. Now the farmer, according to Colonel Pedder, is "the parson's most potent ally," and "the price of the entente cordials which reigns between the two is too often paid by a 'subservience' fatal to his influence upon the conduct of his parishioners." Colonel Pedder is not without examples to support his contention. He tells us of a Christmas-tree in a village school-room 6,et up by some farmers "on their own, account entirely and at their own expense—the parson being merely present as a guest "—from which "a miserable little party of Dissent- ing children, only fifteen in number, were shut out." But would it not have been difficult for the parson to dictate to these farmers whom they should ask to a party got up "on their own account and at their own expense" ? Might they not have told their " guest " to mind his own busi- ness? Probably they looked at the matter in Much the same light as that in which they would have looked at a harvest supper given to their own labourers. It is the business of each employer to feast his own men, and so we can imagine them thinking that it is the business of each Church to feast its own children. If the parson had gone out of his way to preach a more comprehensive hospitality we doubt whether he would have been understood. More probably his interference would have been set down to a feeble desire to make himself popular with the Nonconformists in his parish. Personally, we feel as much disgust as any one can at the intolerance of the farmers, but we really cannot see how the parson was to blame. Two other cases relate to rights of way. In one a parish road had been closed by a farmer, and the vicar on being asked to head a list of protesting signatures declined on the ground that he was not willing "to have any quarrel with a parishioner." In another case an ancient church path "known as a right of way by all the older villagers, and duly garnished with stiles and a, cuckoo gate," was closed without any protest from the clergyman As both these rights have since been asserted with success by the Parish Council, it certainly seems that the clergyman in each case would have had ground for remonstrating with the farmer. But he was possibly very ill acquainted with the law on the subject, not strongly impressed with the loss which the parishioners incurred. by the farmer's action, and. almost certainly not prepared with funds out of which to defray legal expenses. There is always something to be said for not interfering where you have not the means of interfering effectually, though it is a doctrine in which indolence and. timidity sometimes find convenient refuge. One of the reasons, indeed, for settin4 up Parish Councils was that there should be a public body capable of enforcing the law in these and similar matters without stirring up the ill-will that commonly follows private action.
There are other matters, however, more serious than rights of way in which Colonel Pedder charges the country clergy with the same interested inaction. "I really do not know what the limits of the tolerance of the Church may be when great farmers are concerned. Cottages may be squalid hovels, sanitation may be of a sort that would turn the stomach of an Esquimaux—the Church sees nothing, does nothing, is not even appealed to. Her aloofness is taken for granted When it comes to having to choose between alienating the rich and ignoring the cause of the poor the average clergyman chooses the path of peace." This is a very grave charge, and we do not deny that there is some truth in it. There are bad clergymen. as well as good, clergymen who neglect the material wel-. fare of their parishioners just as they neglect their spiritual welfare. But it is not quite clear what Colonel Pedder, would wish a clergyman to do. Is he to make his vicarage a Cave of Adullam resorted to by all the malcontents of the parish ? Is he to make it his business to examine their complaints, and decide—usually after hearing only one side — which are reasonable and which unreason- able ? Is it his duty simply to see that the law is obeyed, or must he aim at something higher than law, and expect a farmer to give his labourer as good a home as he has himself? What is he to say if the farmer pleads that the rents which his labourers are able to pay leave no margin for repairs or improvements, and that he has no other fund from which he can draw the money it would cost to make them ? Is he to bid the farmer put the claims of his labourers before those of his family ? Should he, not- withstanding that the local authority has appointed officers to look after sanitary matters, act as an amateur inspector of nuisances ? Is he to do the work of every county official as well as his own ?
We suppose that Colonel redder would have an answer ready to every one of these questions. We frankly con- fess that we have not. There is no more difficult position than that of a clergyman in a parish mainly composed of farmers and labourers. His first instinct, probably, when he finds himself in charge of a parish is to make himself a universal redresser of wrongs. But after a time he begins to realise how many difficulties there are in the way of doing right, and to have a little sympathy with the farmer who finds that the puzzle is sometimes too hard for him. He begins to see, for example, that housing is mainly a question of wages, and that in the majority of cases good cottages would be built if only the tenants could pay• the corresponding rents. He finds that in the Northern counties, where wages are high, the housing difficulty is very much less, but then he also finds that the work given in return for those high wages is very much better than what is given in the South. At what point in the circle is he first to intervene? Is he to ask the farmer to pay more for work which is not worth more ? Or is he to persuade the labourers to give better work in the hope that the conscience-stricken employer may at once raise their wages ? Whichever line be takes he will probably not be listened to, and will as likely as not make enemies of both parties. Of course, if he listens to Colonel Pedd.er he will disregard this consequence and. go on with a single eye to defending the weaker party in every quarrel. But he will not do so very often without discovering that the weaker side is not always the right side, and that a penniless landlord may be as much an object of pity as a tenant who cannot get his roof mended or his drains set right. In the end he will come to judge each case on its merits, and to discover how many there are in which the rights and wrongs are so awkwardly, because so evenly, distributed that it is impossible to take the side of either party without reserve. No doubt a country clergyman may throw all these considerations to the winds and. run full tilt at every abuse he comes across. If he does this be may now and again do some good. But we suspect that in the end. he will more often do harm, and be set down, even by the labourers he is trying to help, as a meddler and a busybody.
Previous page
