This is the new thrift, which has replaced that of the peasant. I do not say that there is no other saving—that no little sums are hoarded up; for, in fact, I could name one or two men who, after illness protracted to the stage when sick-pay from the club is reduced, have still fought off destitution with the small savings from better times. In most cases, however, no hoarding is possible. The club takes all the spare money; and the club alone stands between the labourer and destitution. And let this be clearly understood. At first it looks as if the member of a club had money invested in his society—money there, instead of perishable goods at home. Yet, in fact, that is not the case. His payments into the club funds are no investment. They bring him no profit; they are not a useful capital that can be renewed with interest. At the Christmas "share-out" he does get back a part of the twenty-six shillings contributed to the slate-club during the year; but the two pounds a year paid to the benefit society are his no longer; they cannot be "realized"; they are gone beyond reclaiming. Though he be out of work and his family starving, he cannot touch the money; to derive any advantage from it he himself must first fall ill. That is what the modern thrift means to the labourer. It does nothing to further—on the contrary, it retards—his prosperity; but it helps him in a particular kind of adversity. It drains his personal wealth away, and leaves him destitute of his capital; it robs his wife and children of his savings; but in return it makes him one of a brotherhood which guarantees to him a minimum income for a short time, if he should be out of health.
An oldish man, who had been telling me one evening how they used to live in his boyhood, looked pensively across the valley when he had done, and so stood for a minute or two, as if trying to recover his impressions of that lost time. At last, with appearance of an effort to speak patiently, "Ah," he said, "they tells me times are better now, but I can't see it;" and it was plain enough that he thought our present times the worse. So far as this valley is concerned I incline to agree with him, although in general it is a debatable question. On the one hand, it may be that the things a labourer can buy at a shop for fifteen shillings a week are more in quantity and variety, if not better in quality, than those which his forefathers could produce by their own industry; and to that extent the advantage is with the present times. But, on the other hand, the fifteen shillings are not every week forthcoming; and whereas the old-time cottager out of work could generally find something profitable to do for himself, the modern man, having once got his garden into order, stands unprofitably idle.
Perhaps the worst is that, owing to the lowness of their wages, the people have never been able to give the new thrift a fair trial. After all, they miss the lump sums laid by against need. If their earnings would ever overtake their expenses and give a little margin, they might do better; but buying, as they are obliged to do, from hand to mouth, they buy at extravagant prices. Coal, for instance, which costs me about twenty-six shillings for a ton, costs the labourer half as much again as that, because he can only pay for a hundredweight or so at a time. So, too, the boots he can get for four or five shillings a pair are the dearest of all boots. They wear out in a couple of months or so, and another pair must be bought almost before another four or five shillings can be spared. In its smaller degree, a still more absurd difficulty handicaps the people in dealing with their own fruit-crops. To make raspberry or gooseberry jam should be, you would think, an economy delightful to the cottage women, if only as a piece of old-fashioned thrift; yet they rarely do it. If they had the necessary utensils, still the weekly money at their disposal will not run to the purchase of extra firing and sugar. It is all too little for everyday purposes, and they are glad to eke it out by selling their fruit for middle-class women to preserve, though in the end they have to buy for their own families an inferior quality of jam at a far higher price.
Wherever you follow it up, you will find the modern thrift not quite successful in the cottages. It is not elastic enough; or, rather, the people's means are not elastic enough, and will not stretch to its demands. There is well-being in it—variety of food, for instance, and comfort of clothing—as soon as both ends can be made to meet and to lap over a little; but it strains the small incomes continually to the breaking-point, so that every other consideration has to give way under it to a pitiful calculation of pence. For the sake of pence the people who keep fowls sell the eggs, and feed their children on bread and margarine; and, on the same principle, they do not even seek to produce other things which are well within their power to produce, but are too luxurious for their means. "'Twouldn't be no use for me to grow strawberries," a man explained; "my children'd have 'em." It sounded a strange reason, for to what better use could strawberries be put? But it shows how tightly the people are bound down by their commercial conditions. In order to make the Saturday's shopping easier, they must weigh the shillings and pence value of everything they possess and everything they attempt to do.
These considerations, however, though showing that present times are not good, do not prove that they are worse than past times. It may be that there was poverty in the valley before the enclosure of the common quite as severe as there is now; and, so far as concerns mere economics, that event did but change the mode of the struggle for existence, without greatly affecting its intensity. People are poor in a different way now, that is all. Hence, in its more direct results, the loss of the common has not mattered much, and it might be forgotten if those results were the only ones.
But they are not the only ones. The results have spread from the economic centre outwards until the whole life of the people has been affected, new influences coming into play which previously were but little felt. So searching, indeed, has the change been, and so revolutionary, that anything like a full account of it would be out of the question. The chapters that follow, therefore, do not pretend to deal with it at all exhaustively; at most they will but draw attention to a few of its more striking aspects.