We can speak with examples under our eyes. Every time a bit of an estate is sold, hereabouts, the cottages thereon are purchased by the local grocer or butcher: and up goes the rent that had been three and six or four shillings a week to seven and six and ten shillings. Here, where we live, there are practically no important landowners, and what is the result? Not the most miserable cottage to be had under seven and six a week, a rent liable to be raised at a moment’s notice. The butcher, the baker, these are the “landlords,” and the rent they exact is exactly what they know they can extract out of the unfortunate tenant, in the present state of cottage scarcity. We ourselves have spent weeks in striving to secure a roof for a wretched woman with three little children, whose husband had attempted to murder her and after her escape had danced upon all her furniture, and burnt the remnants. We had to engage a cottage three months in advance, and then the rent was eight and six a week! She was a stupid poor goose of a woman, who couldn’t do anything for her living except an occasional day’s charing or rough washing. Of course we ought to have let her go to the workhouse; but we didn’t. We guaranteed the rent instead and took in the eldest boy as an unneeded garden assistant. ‹He is rather like a garden slug, so we thought he ought to be at home in the borders›! The other day a local tradesman raised the rent of a cottage sixpence a week upon the hard-working mother of a large family, who occasionally comes in “to oblige” at Villino Loki; and when she remonstrated he humorously remarked that Mr. Lloyd George was “driving him to it!”
THE REFRESHING FRUIT
There is a proverb that “good wine needs no bush.” The Chancellor’s efforts to convince his victims of the comfort of the plaster which is blistering them are almost pathetic. But surely it is another proof, if one were needed, of the weakness of his cause. A local laundry owner has been receiving six pounds a week, lecturing, in Devonshire of all places, on the blessedness of the Act as experienced by himself and staff. One of our district nurses, a delightful sturdy North Country woman, was “approached” as to whether she would undertake, for a consideration, to use her persuasiveness with her patients and make them see how much they were benefited by the stamp tax. She declined with a heat that may have astonished the emissary.
It must indeed be a little difficult to make, say, a struggling greengrocer understand the debt of gratitude he owes to the law which constrains him to pay fourpence a week for the assistant he can so ill afford as it is and mulct that discontented youth of threepence! More especially when baker and grocer charge him more to cover their own losses.
The obvious remedy, says Mr. Lloyd George, is for the greengrocer to raise the prices in his town! He does; and somehow it doesn’t work. Being in a poor district and all his patrons being poor, they buy less from him, and he buys less from them.
“But look at the comfort in sickness!” It is tiresome, it almost seems like putting bad will into it, that the greengrocer’s wife should develop consumption before the first stone of any sanatorium is ready!
Now, that prosperous, contented class, the labourer on the great estate, a man who lives on his lord’s lands, if not rent free, very nearly so, with wood and garden produce, potatoes, milk and what not, and steady employment all the year round, he is to be benefited—save the mark! A “minimum wage,” cheap housing, the fixed hours, the sacred half-holiday, it sounds so plausible! The propagandist is volubly at work. “No wonder,” as the young Squire we have recently visited once ruefully said to us, “my decent, contented, God-fearing villagers were turned in a couple of hours into shrieking, blaspheming lunatics by such a gospel, preached with forcible arguments in the public-house.”
Of course they will get their demands. Striking, with “peaceful picketing,” generally gets its way, even if not backed up by Government emissaries and the glorious visions flash-lighted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But what will be the result? Half the amount of employment on the estates of those who can still afford to keep them, and no all-the-year-round engagements. When the work is slack the over-paid and inimical labourer will naturally be discharged. We say inimical, for how can friendly relations be maintained if the old solidarity is destroyed? This, of course, is what is aimed at; and the quack remedy, the patent pill alluringly held aloft, is—State ownership of land! The land is to be managed like the Workhouse, the Prison, and the Reformatory, of which, we are all aware, the British State makes such a brilliant success. We know how the poor love the Workhouse, and how happy they are in it; yet one can scarcely take up a police report without finding some desperate pauper sentenced for revolt. Oh, no doubt it will be a Merry England when these disinterested and dashing tinkers get their way.