“Then, if you would second my doctrines, you must do the thing I told you I meant to ask of you. You must take down the cottages inhabited by those about to emigrate; and it must be done immediately on their departure, or I shall have to publish the banns of nobody knows how many young couples the very next Sunday. Unless you have inquired into the fact, you will hardly believe how many marry just because there is a house ready. We have too many dwellings in proportion to our food.”
“I have had thoughts already of removing to my new farm some cottages that belong to me, and of buying others from the speculators in our parish funds, who are far too ready to build in our neighbourhood. There will be little encouragement for them to build again when all the surplus population of the parish is located on my pauper farm, where no strangers may intermeddle. You must come and see the ground I have laid out.”
Mr. Jackson readily agreed to go, but had great doubts about the final results of the scheme. This seemed to Mr. Fellowes very strange, as they agreed upon the extent of relief at present wanted, and upon the capability of this farm to supply it.
“It was you yourself who told me, Jackson, that it is not the whole of the people now distressed that it is necessary to relieve. It is only the redundancy that we have to take care of.”
“Certainly: but it should be so relieved as not to produce a further redundancy.—We have among us, as we agree, sixty labourers more than we want. Of these none actually starve, and they therefore deprive some others of a portion of necessaries. It appears accordingly that three hundred are insufficiently fed and clothed because there is a redundancy of sixty.”
“Well! my district farm will take off sixty at once, and more afterwards.”
“And will therefore produce an immediate relief, restoring to the remainder of the three hundred their proper share of necessaries; so would the emigration of sixty. But mark the difference three generations hence. Our young people who emigrate carry their descendants with them to a land where they are wanted. The descendants of your pauper cultivators must be turned out upon society after all, in greater numbers than you now abstract from it. It will be well if the grandchildren of your present dependants have not to emigrate at last, after the expenditure of much capital that might have been better employed, and at a much greater ultimate cost than at present.”
“You seem to forget, Jackson, that the capital I am laying out is all to be reproduced, and that the people on my farm are to work themselves free. If any reliance is to be placed on calculations which have been conducted with the utmost care, if experience is to be trusted, if I may believe what I saw last month with my own eyes in the Belgian colonies (which it is worth a long journey to see), a good deal more than the cost of settling my paupers and providing for them will be raised by their labour upon the ground. The best of them will in time repay me, and go out with money in their pockets to make room for others.”
“And where are they to go? To carry more labour and new families into a market which is already overstocked. How much easier to remove them at once to a labour market where they and their children will be permanently welcome!”
“I am for ever met with objections about raising rents and overstocking the labour-market,” cried Mr. Fellowes—“I that take no rent, and bind myself to employ all the labour!”