The Age of Elegance

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by Arthur Bryant


  carriage began to recede from the fixed roller-beam, and to see them at leisure, after a few seconds' exercise of their tiny fingers, to amuse themselves in any attitude they chose till the stretching and winding-on were once more completed. The work of these livery elves seemed to resemble a sport in which habit gave them a pleasing dexterity."1 "The mathematicians," wrote a young officer of Wellington's army, "from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the chemists from the soot of their furnaces bring with them dispositions which make them indifferent to the cause of humanity."

  This determinist philosophy—the precursor of Marxism—accorded perfectly with the requirements of landowners and manufacturers who, needing ever larger sums for their competitive and showy society or for the enlargement of their businesses, accepted the undernourishment and degrading surroundings of their fellow countrymen as an inevitable dispensation of Providence. It received its highest expression in the works of a clergyman named Malthus who contended that population automatically outran subsistence, nature's ruthless but beneficent law being to preserve the economy of the world by eliminating surplus mouths and hands by starvation. "We are bound injustice and honour," he wrote, "formally to disclaim the right of the poor to support. To this end I should propose a regulation to be made declaring that no child born from any marriage taking place after the expiration of a year from the date of the law should ever be entitled to parish assistance. ... A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society does not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food and in fact has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him."

  It was a proof of the extent to which educated and humane Englishmen were bewildered by the immense rise in the population —since 1750 it had almost doubled—and alarmed by the revolutionary events around them, that they accepted, and even with a kind of melancholy enthusiasm, this monstrous doctrine from a professor of the Christian Church—himself a most kindly and reasonable man.2 If a natural law of increase made vice and misery inevitable for millions, there seemed no need for the ruling and possessing classes

  1 Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835. See Gomm, 311-12. SeeBamford, I, ill; Peel, I, 259-62; Woodward, 11. 2 In a later work he considerably modified his own doctrine.

  to reproach themselves for the increase of vice and misery which attended their own enrichment or to waste money trying to remedy it. It was like the fall of the leaves in autumn.

  In this matter the poets were wiser than men of state and business. Writers of all schools of thought united in protest at Malthus's conclusions. Southey, the poet-laureate and an arch-Tory, denounced it as "a technical sophism and a physical assumption as false in philosophy as detestable in morals' and Coleridge, in his rambling but prescient talk—delivered as from some lofty height from which he descried, invisible to all eyes but his, the course of human folly and frailty for a century ahead—remarked that if society disclaimed all responsibility for the starving, the latter would reply that in that case they had no duties towards it and might take by force what was denied by humanity. Such arguments, however, made little impression on anxious ratepayers forced to alleviate the growing pauperism caused by the wage-policy of manufacturers and farmers.

  In the international sphere Britain's rulers had resisted the revolutionary claim that the strong possessed a natural right to ignore the mutual obligations of law. Yet in the economic sphere the same rulers, despite unavailing protests by the poor and in defiance of their country's historical tradition, accepted the revolutionary thesis that men had a right to enrich themselves without regard to social obligations and the continuing claims of the community. In England the legatee of the supremacy of natural right—the untrammelled liberty of superior energy and brain—was not the soldier of fortune, but the thrusting, broad-shouldered condottiere of commerce and finance. They, too, like Napoleon, regarded the world as their oyster and ravaged and exploited as they conquered. Like him, they made themselves rich and their country strong and glorious, but they uprooted and rendered millions wretched in the process. And to them was left, in accordance with the revolutionary doctrine that the pursuit of private gain must automatically enrich the community, the almost unfettered control of the ordinary Englishman's home, surroundings, food, health, and conditions of labour. Henceforward nothing was safe from the exploiters; a year or two after Waterloo, speculators started to seek for coal in the Thames valley below Oxford.

  Such a theory of society made for a new kind of mind. Commerce was growing stricter, stingier. Charles Lamb, a clerk of the London trading company that had conquered India, wrote of "this mercantile city and its gripple merchants," and related how his employers, like the Bank of England, had cut down the old saints' days' holidays almost to nothing—"the cold piety of the age lacks the fervour to recall them." No longer, he told his correspondents, could he pass their letters through the Company's bag; the Directors, "rascals who think nothing of sponging upon their employers for their venison and turtle and burgundy five days in a week to the tune of five thousand pounds in a year, now find out that the profits of trade will not allow the innocent communications of thought between their underlings and their friends in distant provinces to proceed untaxed." So, too, in deference to the new outlook—cold, calculated, remorseless—his fellow clerk, Tommy Bye, coming into the office a little hazy one morning after an evening's debauch, found himself summarily dismissed after twenty-seven years' service. "Clerk's blood, damn 'em! my brain, guts, skin, flesh, bone, carcase, soul, time is all theirs," Lamb wrote, half in jest, but also in earnest, "the Royal Exchange, Gresham's Folly, hath me body and spirit!" The apostles of Mammon were warming to their business, shutting up growing numbers of their fellows in factory and counting-house away from the fresh air and sunlight.

  It was not only in the towns that man suffered on a cross of economic necessity. The British revolution, unlike that of France, did not arise from the corruption and inefficiency of an outworn society but from the country's very vigour and success. To overcome the opposition of the less well-educated peasantry and the wasteful overcropping of the soil under the old communal system of open farming,1 and to apply the new methods of stock breeding and root-cultivation on a nation-wide scale, the land-owning class, having boldly invested enormous sums to increase agricultural production, had used its monopoly of political power to secure private acts of Parliament redistributing the arable fields and commons. With population rising by at least fifteen per cent in every decade, and

  1 "The Goths and Vandals of open-field farmers must die out before any complete change takes place." Arthur Young, cit. Ernie, 199-200. "A great portion of the unstinted common lands remain nearly as nature left them, appearing in the present state of civilisation and science as filthy blotches on the face of the country, especially when seen under threatening clouds of famine." William Marshall, The Appropriation and Inclosure of Commonable and Intermixed Lands (1801).

  grain imports stopped by the war, increased corn-growing had become both an urgent national priority and a means of vast private profits. Between 1796 and 1815 more than eighteen hundred enclosure Bills were passed, four hundred more than in the previous forty years. In no other way could the supply of home-grown food —and none other was available—have kept pace with the population.

  The social, as opposed to the economic, consequences of this agrarian revolution were, however, disastrous. Growing numbers of husbandmen who had enjoyed a small but vital stake in the land— a strip or two in the parish arable fields, pasture on the common for a few ragged cattle, pigs and geese, the right to gather manure and fuel—found themselves deprived of them. Unable to face the initial costs of legislation, fencing and drainage involved in enclosure, they were forced to sell their compensatory allotments to their richer neighbours. Those who possessed only squatters' rights on the manorial commons or waste receiv
ed no compensation at all. Men with an hereditary talent for dealing with soil and beasts were requited with payment in a medium in whose use they had neither skill nor experience. As often as not, they spent it in the alehouse. Henceforward they and their children had no resource but that of the wages they earned. They ceased to be peasants and became proletarians, without security and therefore without liberty.

  The rich welcomed the changed status of the rural poor because it made them easier to discipline. "The land," wrote a Scottish agriculturist, "is divided into a limited number of great farms, and the tenants, men of capital and intelligence, are enabled to give the best effect to the virtues of the soil, and the great body of the people live quietly under them as farm servants and hired labourers, having no care but to do their own work and receive their wages." The more profitable farming became and the more eager the rich to buy, the greater became the temptation of the poor to sell. Every year the amount of land in well-to-do hands increased. It was leased from them at high rents by a new race of tenant farmers who, operating under almost ideal conditions, with expanding markets, rising war prices, and cheap and abundant labour, could afford to operate on a far bigger scale than their fathers. Capital was found to drain, improve and compost the soil, experiment in new root and grass crops, and raise the herds and flocks of fine cattle, pigs and sheep that were the wonder of the world.

  For the farm labourer on the other hand these improvements meant a fatal deprivation of amenities. He lost with the open field and common his milk, butter, poultry, eggs and cooking fuel. Having no stake in what he raised, he gained nothing from its increased price.1 On the contrary, having now to buy most of his own and his family's food, he was doubly the loser. Though his wages rose during the war, they did not rise as quickly as prices. The inflationary rise began for him at the wrong end, with the proceeds of labour instead of its reward. It was aggravated by the growing tendency of farmers, producing no longer for sustenance but for profit, to sell to middlemen whose profits had to be added to the price of his bread and ale. At the same time his family's supplementary earnings from domestic handicrafts were being reduced or eliminated by the growing competition of machines. The farmhouse where the young unmarried labourer had formerly boarded with the homely family of his yeoman employer became the residence of a finer kind of farmer, whose sons hunted and whose daughters played the piano and who could not be bothered with the board of farm domestics. Many of the smaller farmhouses disappeared altogether in the engrossment of farms which followed the enclosures. The landlords and their new tenants, Cobbett wrote in 1821, stripped the land of all shelter for the poor. Simond earlier noted the same phenomenon; the countryside swarmed with gentlemen's houses and opulent farms, but the dwellings of the real poor were hard to discover. Among the roofless ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey he saw peasants and their children squatting with pigs and poultry. "The poor are swept out of the way," he wrote, "as the dust out of the walks of the rich."2

  Before enclosure the chief source of hired agricultural labour had been the smallholder or commoner, who devoted two or three days a week to looking after his own land and worked on that of a richer neighbour for the remainder. Though the latter was now becoming the peasant's sole support, the farmer who employed him, being in an advantageous bargaining position—for a man with a hungry family cannot stand on terms—was slow to raise his wages. By 1795

  1 "The labourer who sows and does not reap sees abundance all round him, creates it and does not partake of it." Simond, I, 172-5. "Shall we never cease to make him a miserable being, a creature famishing in the midst of abundance?" Cobbett, Rural Rides, I, 502. "The poor forger is hanged, but where is the prosecutor of the monopolising farmer?" See Ernie, 305-12; Hammond, Village Labourer, 97-145, 161-5; Woodward, 9, 158.

  2 Simond, 1,222. See idem, II, 72; Fowler, 260-1; Grote, 26; Hammond, Village Labourer, 112-120.

  the rapidity with which prices rocketed under the triple stimulus of war, increased urban population, and a bad harvest temporarily threatened the landless labourer with immediate famine. In the face of this threat the Berkshire magistrates at their meeting at Speenhamland that summer took a fateful decision. Instead of enforcing a minimum wage—a measure which, though empowered to take, they shirked out of deference to the new economic teaching—they fixed a basic rate of subsistence, based on the fluctuating price of corn and the size of the family, and authorised a grant in aid to all who were being paid less than this by their employers. By thus subsidising wages out of rates, they pauperised the labourer.

  Magistrates in many parts of the country had followed their well-intentioned example. Not only were farmers countenanced in their reluctance to pay an economic wage, but poor-rates had rocketed out of all proportion to the incomes of the smaller ratepayers, who had thus become saddled with part of the working costs of their richer neighbours. The decent employer was taxed to subsidise his unfair competitor and—since no man with savings could qualify for relief— the thrifty husbandman to maintain the unthrifty. By 1818 the annual national contribution to poor-rates, little more than £700,000 in 1750, had risen to nearly eight millions. More than a fifth of the rural population, of England and Wales—Scotland had no poor-law —was in receipt of some form of parochial relief. Thousands of small husbandmen, faced by rate demands beyond their means, were also driven into the ranks of the landless workers and became themselves a charge on the rates. The poor-laws, wrote Malthus, had created the poor they assisted.1

  The effect on the labourer was even more disastrous, for he was robbed of his self-respect. Having lost his proprietary rights, he found himself a member of a pariah class; a labour reserve from which landlords and farmers drew when it suited them without regard to human rights and feelings. In many places the overseers—generally farmers little above those they administered in birth and education— insisted that the grant of parish relief entitled them to a complete control over the lives of those whose wages they subsidised. They sent them round the local farms, including their own, in chains or gangs, as though they were serfs. A visitor from Jamaica who saw some of

  1 Simond, I, 225. See idem, 229; II, 295. It was a system, said Southey, which converted the peasantry into the poor. See also Darvall, 46; De Selincourt, II; Dicey, 101; Ernie, 308-12, 327-8; Hammond, Village Labourer, 104; Porter, 88, 90; Smart, 137-8; Woodward, 431.

  these gangs at work considered that his negro slaves were better off.1 This accumulation of evil circumstances had fallen on the rural poor so rapidly, first in one locality and then in another, that few of those who were not directly affected were even aware of what was occurring. In most places its effect was not felt until the great agricultural depression set in after the war. But wherever it struck, it left the English peasantry, the traditional backbone of the country, suffering from a feeling of bewildered helplessness. Old England was tightening into neat-hedged and gated fields and high-walled parks; the sense of property was running mad and cruel, and there seemed no place in it save a serf's for the poor countryman whose ill-requited labour had wrought the transformation. Though many landlords and farmers maintained the old kindly, paternal relations with those who worked on their own farms and gardens or lived in their immediate vicinity, others, in their absorption in fashionable and sporting pleasures, increasingly left the management of their estates to professional intermediaries. The way in which bailiffs and land-stewards whittled away or ignored ancient rights was bitterly resented. In the manor of East Burnham, bought in the early years of the century by the great Whig family of Grenville, the latter's agent claimed an absolute rather than a manorial property in the soil, contemptuously refusing to fulfil the lord's duties of ringing pigs and maintaining fences, and selling the peat, wood, turf and sand from the common to non-parishioners.2 At Middleton Lord Suffield's steward broke up the village bowling green and turned it into a burial ground, because he could not keep its rustic frequenters in "respectful bounds." As he passed through Savernake Forest, Cobbett noted how many s
mall farms had been swallowed up to add park after park to Lord Ailesbury's domain.

  "Hence, yeoman, hence!—thy grandsire's land resign;

  Yield, peasant, to my lord and power divine!

  Thy grange is gone, your cluster'd hovels fall;

  Proud domes expand, the park extends its wall;

  Then kennels rise, the massive Tuscan grows,

  And dogs sublime, like couchant Kings, repose!

  Lo! 'still-all-Greek-and-glorious' art is here!

  Behold the pagod of a British peer!"3

  1 Farington, VIII, 39. See Cobbett, I, 94; Fowler, 246-7; Simond, I, 224-6.

  2 Grote, 40-1, 44-6. 3 Ebenezer Elliot, The Splendid Village (1833).

  The labourer's suffering was aggravated by the increasing rigour with which the game laws were enforced by landowners obsessed with the new mania for vast battues and game-bags. A Parliament of game-preservers, in the south of England at least, was banishing the peasant from the sports of his fathers. Men whose families were hungry and who saw pheasants, hares and partridges swarming in every wood around them, could not resist the temptation of going out at night with gun and net to fill the pot or reap the rewards— far higher than their wages—offered by the agents of the London poulterers. When caught, they received short shrift from magistrates, who in this matter, so close to their hearts, could be utterly ruthless. By a savage act of 1816 a man caught at night in an enclosure with instruments for trapping game could be sentenced to transportation, by two magistrates, one of whom might be the injured property owner, while a blow, struck or even threatened in a poaching fray, could be punished by the gallows. The war between poachers and gamekeepers reached a terrible crescendo in the agricultural depression after the Napoleonic wars. Hundreds were killed or maimed in pitched battles in the woods or by the spring-guns and man-traps with which the more ignoble landlords protected their property and pleasures.1

 

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