 | A sketch of old England |  |
LETTER XII.
Bidding adieu to North Wales, I again found myself at
Shrewsbury, where, resuming my horses, I returned by a
roundabout way through Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire,
Leicester, Northampton, &c. to London.
Beyond all doubt, some of the farmers in the midland counties
have brought agriculture to as high perfection as it was
ever before carried. The vast labour and expense, applied to
small farms and parcels of land, and that too with much judgment,
generally resulted in the production of the greatest crops.
While these crops met with a ready sale, and at a price affording
a profit, this vast application of labour and expense brought
with it a return of profit, and enriched the farmer. But it is
of labour, food, tithes, and taxes, there should be
no longer any spur to enterprise or exertion. The improvement
of the land, the labours of cultivation, and all the refinements
of agriculture, which the common farmers practised
with profit, because every additional bushel of wheat brought
more or less of a clear gain—all these will be abandoned by
degrees, when the fruits no longer repay the toil and expense.
My practice has been to make a short stay at the villages I
passed through; to wander about, and look at the people in
the fields, who, by dint of seeing me three or four times, would
get over their strangeness, and often converse with me freely
on their affairs. It is by frequently resorting to this practice,
that I gained a knowledge of the depression of agriculture and
its causes. No one knows where the shoe pinches, or the
cause of its pinching, so well as he that wears it; the sufferer
can best tell the sources of his grief. The noble trio that have
produced the ruin of the tenantry of England, are rents, tithes,
and taxes.
While a brisk market, a ready sale, prompt payment, and
high prices offered themselves, the tenant did not so much mind
the rent he paid, or the taxes levied upon him, both which,
have been gradually increasing with the creation and magnitude
of paper credit, paper currency, and national expenditures.
But suddenly his market is glutted, prices fall, and rents and
taxes continue the same, or become higher than they were.
His situation may easily be conceived without the magic spectacles
of political economy; he is impoverished and ruined.
The very perfection to which he brought his system of farming
adds to his misfortunes, because it will not now repay him
the interest of the labour and expense laid out upon it.
Under all these circumstances, you cannot wonder if the
agricultural interest is in a state of great depression; that the
people have no heart to labour, since neither industry
nor economy can keep them from want. That must be a
wretched country, where the two great virtues of the labouring
class, industry and economy, cannot keep the wolf from the
door. Such is the case with England. The tenantry find the
produce of their fields decreasing in value, while their rents
remain the same, and the taxes and poor rates are increasing.
The consequence is, abject poverty among a large portion,
and approaching poverty among the remainder.
I have never been among a people I pitied so much as this
industrious, patriotic, abused, and deceived tenantry. No
body of people on the face of the earth, or that ever were upon
the face of the earth, have made such sacrifices for their country.
without example, and have freely given to their country
all that they could spare, and more besides. They have worked,
and watched, and starved for their country, and contributed
to what they believed to be her safety or her glory, almost
as many millions as they have given to their own comforts.
They looked to the banishment of Napoleon and the
re-establishment of peace, as the end of their sacrifices, and
they found it but the beginning of their sufferings. They discovered,
too late, that they had sacrificed their substance for a
shadow, and riveted their own chains while they believed
themselves breaking those of Europe.
Could they by any possibility be relieved from their burthens,
and rise to a state of comparative competency, they
would be, what they once were, worthy of being the ancestors
of our countrymen. But such is not even to be hoped, without
a revolution. The government cannot, if it would, diminish
the taxes, and would not, if it could. The landlords
make subscriptions and form societies for giving them charity;
but they do not diminish their rents to any great extent, nor
do the clergy relinquish a tittle of their tithes, either for the
love of man or the love of heaven.
In comparing the situation of the manufacturing with that
of the agricultural labourers, I found the balance against the
former in every point of view. There is more misery, as well
as vice and ignorance, among them. Their wages are actually
and literally entirely insufficient to satisfy the wants of nature,
where a man has a family to support. In many of the manufactories
of Birmingham and Manchester, they labour only
half the time, three days in the week, because there is not work
for them, and this at one-third, and sometimes one-half less
wages, than they received during the war. No one, that has
not seen can conceive the squalid and miserable looks of these
people, between the dirt and unwholesomeness of their employment,
the ignorant worthlessness of their characters, and the
shifts the poor creatures are obliged to resort to in order to
exist. It is not to be wondered at, if in the madness of misery,
and cast out as it were from a participation in the common
benefits of society, they become turbulent, seditious, and dangerous.
It is because they are hungry, and their children are
starving, and not because they have read Thomas Paine or
William Cobbett, that they are become radicals, as is the
phrase of the day. Give them plenty to eat, and they will
lie down as contendedly as a pig in the stye. Probably more
than two-thirds of them cannot read; what absurdity then to
suppose, or what hypocrisy rather to pretend to suppose, they
are excited to acts of violence by books!
That you may the better understand the actual and fundamental
causes of this depression in the agricultural interest,
and be satisfied that poor-rates, tithes, taxes, and rents, and
not a “superabundant harvest,” are at the root of the evil, I
will state to you some facts, which I neglected in the proper
place. They will, however, come in well enough here, especially
as they are entirely corroborated by testimony delivered
to this very committee by agriculturists from different parts of
the kingdom. In one of the counties, I was assured, that all
agricultural produce had, within a given period, suffered a
depression averaging thirty-five per cent. while the poor-rates
in the same period had advanced seventy-five, and the taxes
about seventy per cent. The poor-rates, in other counties, in
many cases, amount to an assessment of from twelve to fifteen
or sixteen shillings an acre per annum. In another place I was
told by farmers, hard at work even in the midst of this hopeless
state of things, that their actual losses upon the last year's
crop amounted to as much as their whole rental. In other
places, such is the depression of the tenantry, that they have
not been able to pay a shilling of rent from one to two years
past, and the landlords have permitted them to remain, because
no others would occupy them, even on condition of
paying tithes, taxes, and poor-rates, and living rent free. In
other places, warrants of distress for rent have been issued to
four times the number ever known before, in the same period
of time; and the shopkeepers have gone so far in some cases,
as to enter into combinations not to trust the farmers, from a
conviction of their total inability to pay. When I asked these
unfortunate people, what possible modification of things would
relieve them, the answer invariably was, “relief from tithes
and taxes.” All agreed, that it would be impossible to go on
much longer, unless these were reduced at least one-third. This
is impracticable without a reduction of the expenditures of
the government, and the interest of the national debt. As to
tithes, the clergy might be brought to relinquish these, under a
discipline similar to that King John exercised upon the rich
Jew. Every way, therefore, it seems to me, that any salutary,
permanent change in the situation of the English tenantry is
hopeless, from any voluntary reduction of their burthens either
by the government or the church. They must either be content
to accept from the rich that charity which is exercised at
the expence of their own labours; or emigrate; or boldly demand,
that they be permitted to share in the blessings of that
government, for the support of which they pay so dearly.
Such is the wretched state to which Mr. Pitt's policy; his
system of funding, borrowing, and wasting, has brought Old
consists in relieving one class at the expence of another;
bleeding until the patient is near fainting, and then filching a
smelling bottle from his neighbour's pocket, to afford him a
temporary resuscitation. It is thus that the present ministry
supports itself, by playing off alternately the wants of the
poor against the fears of the rich; arraying them from time to
time in opposition to each other, and holding the balance of
victory in its own hands. Should this income tax be laid, the
consequences are pretty obvious. The landlords, who have
been duped into the support of every arbitrary measure of
late, and thus entirely lost the affections of the poor, will be
unable to make head against ministers; while the tenantry
will very probably laugh in their sleeves, and support the very
ministry they have been accustomed to denounce and revile.
Had the landlords made common cause with the tenants, they
could have done what they pleased; but they were frightened
at the “Spencerean system,” and will ere long feel the consequences.
They will have the privilege of being next devoured.
| A sketch of old England | |