There was a letter of mine on agriculture in the Times of 14 June 1920, and the editor of Justice thereupon sent me a leading-article in his paper of 17 June. I wrote a letter in reply, and he printed it in Justice of 1 July, and afterwards printed other letters from me in reply to things that other people wrote there. These people, of course, were socialists, and one of them was organizer of the Agricultural Workers’ Union. He lamented “the want of knowledge of agriculture in the Socialistic and Labour forces”; but his own facts and figures were very often wrong, and his reasoning was not exact. I shared his aspirations for Utopia; but he was going there across the clouds, and I was going along the land.
On an average the wheat crop in England is about a ton for every acre sown, or more than double the average for the United States or Canada. But wheat is not sown here except on land that suits it; and the average would soon go down, if wheat were sown on land that is less suitable. These people seemed to think that there would always be a ton an acre, however barren the land—or several tons an acre, if ‘Science’ were invoked. And they also seemed to think that wheat alone is ‘food,’ although our forefathers ate barley, oats and rye. These can be grown on land that is not good enough for wheat; and our island might perhaps grow food enough for the whole population—as these people said it should—but the population would have to be content with something less luxurious than wheaten bread.
They also put the claims of labour very high: unreasonably high, I thought. When a labourer comes to a farm, he finds fields fenced and drained and ready for cultivation, barns and stables, carts and ploughs and every needful implement, horses and food for the horses, and manures and seeds for the land. It is surely an abuse of language to talk of the crop as the produce of his labour. Suppose the crop fails utterly, as it sometimes will, from bad weather or other causes quite beyond control. As there is no crop, there is no produce of his labour; and (logically) he ought not to get anything at all. By accepting a fixed wage, he insures against that risk.
A maximum wage for agricultural labourers was fixed by the magistrates for Devon at Quarter Sessions, 13 April 1795. They were empowered to do this by the Acts of 5 Elizabeth and 1 James I, and “having made due enquiry of the wages of the labourers in husbandry in this county, and having had respect to the price of provisions and other articles necessary for the maintenance and support of such labourers at this time,” they made an order that “all manner of men labourers in husbandry shall take, with the meat and drink accustomed to be given in each district of the county respectively, the sum of fourteen pence per day and not above.” But piece-work was excepted—“all labourers in husbandry shall take by the great or task work as they shall agree.”
In his report to the Board of Agriculture in 1807 Vancouver says that agricultural wages had not changed in Devon since 1795. He puts the daily wage at 1s. 2d. and a quart of cider for the regular hands, and 1s. 4d. and the quart for casual hands, or 8s. a week instead of 7s., as they had none of the allowances the others had—ground for pig-keeping, and corn for bread-baking, and other things, at less than market price; and he mentions that the 7s. could be commuted into 3s. 6d. and maintenance: pages 361 to 363 and 446. And while a man was earning his 7s. on the land, his wife could be earning 3s. 6d. at her spinning wheel, and there might be other spinners in the family: pages 446 and 464. But he adds that this home industry was being destroyed by factories; so that whole families had now become dependent on their earnings on the land.
Agriculture was thus called upon to pay a wage that would support men’s wives and families, just when it could not pay enough to support unmarried men. The industrial North was a necessity, but it meant destruction for the agricultural South; and many people here expressed themselves as forcibly as Cobbett, Cottage Economy, section 232, “The lords of the loom, the crabbed-voiced, hard-favoured, hard-hearted, puffed-up, insolent, savage and bloody wretches of the North, assisted by a blind and greedy Government, have taken all the employment away from the agricultural women and children.”
Instead of fixing a maximum wage, as in Devon, the magistrates for Berks drew up a plan, 6 May 1795, ‘the Speenhamland plan,’ which was copied by other counties but never had the force of law. (The old Roman town of Spinæ was a mile or two from Newbury, and Quarter Sessions held at Newbury were nominally held at Spinæ, then known as Speenhamland.) The plan was drawn up clumsily. It allowed too little for the wage-earner and too much for his family: he had from 3s. to 5s. a week according to the cost of living as measured by the price of corn, but he also had 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. for his wife and each one of his children. Thus a man with a wife and seven children had twice as much as a man with a wife and two children, and five times as much as an unmarried man, though the cost of living would not be five times as much or even twice as much. That wrecked the plan: it meant paying one man a great deal more than another for getting through the same amount of work. Still, the old plan took account of facts, whereas the present notion is to fix a wage that is sufficient for an average family. This leaves big families short, and also takes money out of industry to pay unmarried men the cost of families they have not got.
In a letter to my father, 2 December 1849, my grandfather sends a message to a friend who had been talking of the good old times, and then describes the bad old times that he remembered here. “I have sold potatoes for 9d. per bag and hog sheep for 2s. 9d. a head. [A bag of potatoes is 160 lbs., and hogs are sheep between one and two years old.] Such was the distress among farmers then that labourers were put up to auction by the parish authorities, and hired for 6d. to 9d. per day.” Under the Speenhamland plan 6d. a day (3s. a week) was the minimum for a single man, and 9d. a day (4s. 6d. a week) was the minimum for a married man without a family. No doubt the 6d. or 9d. was quite as much as farmers could afford to pay when prices were so low; but men with families could not subsist on that. In their case (to use the modern terms) the economic wage was less than a subsistence wage; and the parish authorities paid them a subsistence wage and took the economic wage, the balance coming from the rates.
In agricultural districts the ratepayers were chiefly landowners, parsons with glebe and tithe, farmers, millers, and blacksmiths and others who made things for the farms; and thus the contribution from the rates came indirectly out of agriculture. It was, in fact, a general charge upon the industry, based on the employing classes’ means, but applied according to the labouring classes’ needs, so that no labourer was worse off for having a big family. No doubt it also was a subsidy to agriculture from ratepayers who were wholly unconnected with the land; but few such people could be found in country places. At the census in 1801 the parish of Lustleigh had a population of 246, and 236 of them were classed as agricultural.
Subsidies to any industry are open to abuse; but in a choice of evils this may be the lesser of the two. At present, if an economic wage is less than a subsistence wage, the industry slows down or stops, production is decreased or ceases, and hands are unemployed; and then these hands receive subsistence wages out of rates and taxes. But in a subsidy the public would only pay the difference between the economic and subsistence wages, all hands would be employed and production would go steadily on.