American Laborer at 24s per week English Laborer, at 12s per week
Weekly Expense $ c. s. d Weekly Expense s. d. $ c
for:-- for:--
------------------------------- ----------------------------
Food 3 50 = 14 7 Food 7 3 = 1 75
Rent and Taxes 0 67 = 2 9 Rent 1 2 = O 28
Fuel, average of
the year O 48 = 2 O For Fuel 1 O = O 24
For Clothes 1 0 = 4 2 For Clothes 2 1 = 0 50
Total Weekly Total Weekly
Expenses -------------- Expenses -------------
5 65 = 23 6 11 6 = 2 77
-------------- -------------
I think the American reader, who is personally acquainted with the habits and domestic economy of our farm laborers, will regard this estimate of their expenditures as quite moderate. I have assumed, in both cases, that no time is lost in the week on account of sickness, or of weather, or lack of employment; and all the incidental expenses I have included in the four general items given. It must also be conceded that our farm hands do not average more than twenty-four English shillings, or $5 75c., per week, through all the seasons of the year. The amount of expenditure allowed in the foregoing estimate enables them to support themselves and their families comfortably, if they are temperate and industrious; to clothe and educate their children; to make bright and pleasant homes, with well-spread tables, and to have respectable seats in church on the Sabbath. On the other hand, we have assigned to the English agricultural laborer what he would regard a proportionately comfortable allowance for the wants of a week. We may not have divided it correctly, but the total of the items is as great as he would expect to expend on the current necessities of seven days. I doubt if one in a thousand of the farm laborers of Great Britain lays out more than the sum we have allotted for one week’s food, rent, and fuel and clothes. We then reach this result of the balance-sheet of the two men. Their weekly savings hardly differ by a penny; each amounting to about 5d., or 10 cents. At first sight, it might seem, from this result, that the English farm laborer earns half as much, lives half as well, and saves as much as the American. But he has a resource for increasing his weekly savings which his American competitor would work his fingers to the bone before he would employ. His wife is able and willing to go with him into the field and earn from three to five shillings a week. Then, if he commutes with his employer, he will receive from him 4d. daily, or 2s. a week, for beer-money. Thus, if he and his wife are willing to live, as such families do now, on bread, bacon and cheese, and such vegetables as they can grow in their garden, they may lay up, from their joint earnings, a dollar, or four shillings a week, provided a sufficiently stimulating object be set before them. To me it is surprising that they sustain so much human life on such small means. They are often reproached for their want of wise economy; but never was more keen ingenuity, more close balancing of pennies against provisions than a great many of them practice and teach. Let the most astute or utilitarian of social economists try the experiment of housing, feeding and clothing himself, wife and six children too young to earn anything, on ten or twelve shillings a week; and he will learn something that his philosophy never dreamed of.
Even while bending under the weight of the beer-barrel, thousands of agricultural laborers in England have accomplished wonders by their indefatigable industry, integrity and economy. Put a future before them with a sun in it—some object they may reach that is worth a life’s effort, and as large a proportion of them will work for it as you will find in any other country. A servant girl told me recently that her father was a Devonshire laborer, who worked the best years of his life for seven shillings a week, and her mother for three, when they had half a dozen children to feed and clothe. Yet, by that unflagging industry and ingenious economy with which thousands wrestle with the necessities of such a life and throw them, too, they put saving to saving, until they were able to rent an acre of orcharding, a large garden for vegetables, then buy a donkey and cart, then a pony and cart, and load and drive them both to market with their own and their neighbors’ produce, starting from home at two in the morning. In a few years they were able to open a little grocery and provision shop, and are now taking their rank among the tradespeople of the village. But if the farm servants of England could only be induced to give up beer and lay by the money paid them as a substitute, it alone would raise them to a new condition of comfort, even independence. At 4d. a day commutation money, they would have each £5 at the end of the year. That would pay the rent of two acres of land here; or it would buy five on the Illinois Central Railroad. Three years’ beer-money would pay for those rich prairie acres, his fare by sea and land to them, and leave him £3 in his pocket to begin their cultivation with. Three years of this saving would make almost a new man of him at home, in the way of self-respect, comfort and progress. It would be a “nest-egg,” to which hope, habit and a strengthening ambition would add others of larger size and value from year to year.
Give, then, the British agricultural laborer good, healthy Housing, Free Schooling, and let him empty the Jug into the Basket, and he may work his way up to a very comfortable condition at home. But if he should prefer to go to Australia or America, where land is cheap and labor dear, in a few years he may save enough to take him to either continent, with sufficient left in his pocket to begin life in a new world.
CHAPTER XII.
FARM GAME—HALLETT WHEAT—OUNDLE—COUNTRY BRIDGES—FOTHERINGAY CASTLE—QUEEN MARY’S IMPRISONMENT AND EXECUTION—BURGHLEY HOUSE: THE PARK, AVENUES, ELMS, AND OAKS—THOUGHTS ON TREES, ENGLISH AND AMERICAN.
Having now pursued a westerly direction until I was in the range of a continuous upland section of country, I took a northward course and walked on to Oundle, a goodly town in Northamptonshire, as unique as its name. On the way, in crossing over to another turnpike road, I passed through a large tract of land in a very deshabille condition, rough, boggy and bushy. I soon found it was a game-growing estate, and very productive of all sorts of birds and small quadrupeds. The fields I crossed showed a promising crop of hares and rabbits; and doubtless there were more partridges on that square mile than in the whole State of Connecticut. This is a characteristic of the country which will strike an American, at his first visit, with wonder. He will see hares and rabbits bobbing about on common farms, and partridges in broods, like separate flocks of hens and chickens, in fields of grain, within a stone’s throw of the farmer’s house. I doubt if any county in New England produces so many in a year as the holding of Mr. Samuel Jonas already described. Rabbits have been put out of the pale of protection somewhat recently, I believe, and branded with the bad name of vermin; so that the tenant farmer may kill them on his occupation without leave or license from the landlord. It may indicate their number to state the fact, that one hundred and twenty-five head of them were killed in one day’s shooting on Mr. Jonas’s estate by his sons and some of their friends.
It was market day in Oundle, and I had the pleasure of sitting down to dinner with a large company of farmers and cattle and corn-dealers. They were intelligent, substantial-looking men, with no occupational peculiarity of dress or language to distinguish them from ordinary middle-class gentlemen engaged in trade or manufacture. Indeed, the old-fashioned English farmer, of the great, round, purply-red face, aldermanic stature, and costume of fifty years ago, speaking the dialect of his county with such inimitable accent, is fast going out. I have not seen one during my present sojourn in England. I fear he has disappeared altogether with the old stage-coach, and that we have not pictures enough of him left to give the rising generation any correct notion of what he was, and how he looked. It may be a proper and utilitarian change, but one can hardly notice without regret what transformations the railway regime has wrought in customs and habits which once individualised a country and people. A kind of French centralisation in the world of fashion has been established, which has over-ridden and obliterated all the dress boundaries of civilised nations. All the upper and middle classes of Christendom centre themselves to one focus of taste and merge into one plastic commonwealth, to be shaped and moulded virtually by a common tailor. Their coats, vests, pantaloons, boots and shoes are made substantially after the same pattern. For a while, hats stood out with some show of pluck and patriotism, and made a stand for national individuality, but it was in vain. They, too, succumbed to the inexorable law of Uniformity. That law was liberal in one respect. It did not insist that the stove-pipe form should rule inflexibly. It admitted several variations, including wide-awakes, pliable felts, and that little, squat, lackadaisical, round-crown, narrow-brimmed thing worn by the Prince of Wales in the photographs taken of him and the Princess at Sandringham. But this has come to be the rule: that hats shall no longer represent distinct nationalities; that they shall be interchangeable in all civilised communities; in a word, that neither Englishman, American, French nor German shall be known by his hat, whatever be the form or material of its body or brim. If there were a southern county in England where the mercury stood at 100 degrees in the shade for two or three summer months, the upper classes in it would don, without any hesitation, the wide, flappy broadbrims of California, and still be in the fashion,—that is, variety in uniformity. The peasantry, or the lowest laboring classes of European countries, are now, and will remain perhaps for a century to come, the only conservators of the distinctive national costumes of bygone generations.