LORD SALISBURY ON PEASANTS.
TORD SALISBURY, in one of his bright speeches of last week, put a question to the world at large to which no one has as yet given a reply. He was, he said, entirely favourable to the growth of a peasant-proprietary, but a perplexity still lingered in his mind about it. He did not understand why the small culture, which suc- ceeded so well in some places, so generally failed in England. He was inclined to attribute the diversity of result to the character of the soil cultivated, and to imagine that on very productive land—fit, for instance, for vine- yards—minute cultivation would succeed, though it would fail upon ordinary agricultural land. That reads like sound sense, and is so ; but it is no answer to the great question propounded. The whole world, outside England, may be said to be cultivated by peasant-proprietors, and the whole world is not fertile. The people own their little farms in sandy Prussia as well as in fertile Provence, and whether prosperous or not, go on from age to age existing and contented. England is not specially infertile, but rather the reverse, and the cause of failure, if failure is inevitable, must be sought somewhere else than in the nature of the soil. We believe there are three causes, of which the first and most permanently operative is the national character. The Englishman, though willing enough to farm, does not care for farming a patch under fifteen acres, does not like the lifelong overwork, the waste of labour for want of horses, the eternal devo- tion to petty meannesses which, if a peasant's farm is to keep him, are, except upon vine-growing land, indispensable for ever. If he is to slave like that, and save like that, and send his wife on to the field, and bring up his son without education, he prefers to do it where there is some hope, to migrate to the streets of a town, or to emigrate to a foreign country where the farms are bigger. He is not so afraid of the future as to regard his patch, as every, other peasant does, as his one security against starvation ; and if he is to live poor, he much prefers regular though low wages, short hours, and an absence of any cares about weather and prices. He is not then, as he says, worked like a beast, and he has not to bear all the care and apprehension and disappointment produced by an unfavourable season. He is not particularly solicitous about his dignity, as the Irishman, for all his easy demeanour, invariably is, and is not desirous of always dwelling in the same house, digging the same patch, and treading in all things the paths he has trodden from a boy. If he is not ambitious, he has not the energy for the peasant-proprietor's life ; and if he is ambitious, he either looks outside his village and everlasting digging, or he aspires to one of those positions as village artisan— blacksmith, mason, wheelwright, carpenter, plumber, saddler, gardener, thatcher, or the like—which seem to him prizes, and really are, when he is fairly fortunate, singularly comfortable. He will work on the land, though he had rather his son did not ; but he has not that desire for being rooted to the land which with the peasantry of many countries is a sovereign passion, and induces them, as in Belgium and parts of France, to give prices for half-acres for which they never can by any possibility obtain even Consol interest. That is "not the English- man's way "—a sentence which always means that his inner character does not tempt him to that—and we greatly doubt whether, if the chance is ever offered him, he will ever avail himself of it. One man in five may, but he will not be the one best fitted for a life of great painful- ness, and a persistently sordid care such as the English cultivated hardly realise even in thought. They do not know what it is to have for a life's object never to part with a coin, and never to do anything of any sort with- out remembering first of all that the act ought either to yield or to save a farthing. Englishmen will not refuse to buy candles, or wear buttons made of broken bits of stick.
The second reason, springing out of the first, is that the English villager has not the true habitude of the peasant-proprietor's life. Certain " ways," modes of work and modes of thought, have been bitten into the true peasant, whether of the Continent or of Asia, by the centuries of work for himself which have made him what he is. He was in practice a cultivating owner, though a terribly oppressed one, ages before the Revolution, the one suffering never put upon him being eviction. Without those ways, it is difficult, if not impossible, to succeed, and they cannot be acquired. The peasantry in France are so well aware of this, that they hate the conscription mainly because it breaks their children's habitude of the farm, and declare—with truth, Mr. Hamerton says—that the child who lives six months in a town is lost to agri- culture. He never again can become laborious enough, penurious enough, or stolid enough, and he had better go away. The Englishman has never entered on this life, except as a wage-earner,—a totally different life, producing a different set of habits,—and he has a separate cause of distaste. He does not like working his wife to death in the Continental peasants' way. He will let her work very often, because he cannot help himself ; but he never likes it, and if accident raises his receipts, stops the practice the moment he can. This feeling is, so far as we know, universal in England. Labour is honour- able and all that, and all the emancipated women argue that women should work ; but all classes above the poorest regard outdoor labour for their women as a deep humilia- tion, and a man who, having means to prevent it, let his wife or daughter labour in the fields would be regarded— very justly—by his neighbours as a brute. Now, the petite culture, to succeed, involves the continuous, persistent, resigned overwork of the entire family, and not merely of its head. There is no lot on earth so hard in respect of the demands made on her strength as that of the female peasant, unless it be that of the English washerwoman, who has herself and three children to keep always, and a drunken or incapable husband to keep occasionally.
The third, and perhaps the most operative of all the obstacles to peasant-farming in England, whether as proprietor or leaseholder, is the enormous expense of starting it. Townsmen never realise to themselves what this will be. Take fifteen acres of fair land as the most hopeful size for a farm to be cultivated without hired labour or horses. The price of that land is £450; and then a large cottage, with some sort of barn, must be built upon it, costing, if it is to last even for one generation, £250 more. Where is a labourer to get £700 any more than £7,000 ? He may, it is replied, hire on lease from the parochial Council, which will not evict him. Very good ; let us just look at that. The Council of a parish of 1,200 souls, 240 houses, has to provide farms, say, for 100 agriculturists. They will cost £45,000 for the land, 1,500 acres, alone, and £25,000 more for the buildings, or £70,000 in all. The money could not be borrowed at less than 4 per cent., and to meet the cost of repairs, drainage, insolvencies in bad years, " flittings," and sudden deaths, the charge to the tenants must be at least 6 per cent., or £4,200 a year. That is more than £2 10s. an acre, or two and a half times the average rental of farm-land at the best of times, and five times what it is now letting for in counties like Essex and Suffolk. We by no means say such a rent cannot be paid, for spade-labour is as profitable as it is exhausting to the soil, and the peasant-leaseholder will not stick to one cultivation, or hamper himself with rules made for other circumstances; but we do say that the problem will from the first be an excessively difficult one, and that we do not wonder that all who know the conditions shrink back from the confident conclusions of idealists, who assume, to begin with, that village ratepayers, all aware what seven lean years signify, will be eager to drown themselves in debt, in order that their own poorest class may become suddenly the parish's poor tenants. We shall see. We state these difficulties all the more frankly because we are heartily on the side of the theory that the owning cultivator is a class to be encouraged. We cannot con- ceive of a change which would give greater stability to English institutions than the covering of the land with a million of little freeholders. They, if they succeeded at all, would alter nothing except under compulsion, and would compel their Members to repudiate Socialist pro- clivities with a completeness which, to us at least, would be most hopeful and satisfactory. They would be good Free-traders, too, for they would let nothing be " protected " unless corn was protected also ; and to tax the bread of the towns is just the one thing they could never accomplish. But we want the Freeholder to seat himself on the soil, as he pleases, when it is convenient, and in his own way, not to be dumped down, half-frightened, and half-exultant, at his neighbours' expense. We have no more confidence in outdoor relief in the shape of little farms than in the shape of coin, and distrust communism in villages rather more than in big towns, for in the latter there are sure to be some capable men. Let us clear away every possible obstacle to the transfer of the soil ; let us encourage subdivision by every honest means ; let us even, if that be practicable, enable the peasant to borrow for his cottage as the landlord has borrowed for his drains ; but let us then leave the new tenure to grow up of itself. The labourers can bargain like other men, can combine like other men, and know what they want at least as clearly as other men ; and to treat them all as children who must not only be started in life, but have their trade chosen for them, is an absurdity which will only result in some sort of rural disaster, probably akin to the scene now witnessed in Massachusetts, where entire villages full of freehold farms are lying deserted, the churches rotting, the houses tumbling, the rates unpaid, and the population gone to plough where land is distributed under the Homestead Act in patches of a hundred and sixty acres instead of patches of forty. The " magic of pro- perty " will accomplish much, but it will not make English proprietors, whether peasants or not, remain content with bare food, or enable them to pass easily through a cycle of low prices, such as has half-ruined the " bloated temitorialists," and threatens to extinguish one of the worthiest classes in the country, the squires with from one thousand acres to three thousand acres apiece. To hear some of the half- Socialists talk, one would think that Parliament could not only divide the land, which, of course, it can do if it is dishonest enough, but create farm-buildings by fiat, and then order the weather to be favourable, crops to grow anywhere, and prices to rule at, say, 50 per cent. above their present level. The English world has about land a perfect mania for believing hopeful nonsense, temporary of course, but all the more vexatious for that.
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