"My dear Martineau,
"Your interesting letter was sent to me by Monday afternoon, and first told me that Miss Bremer was in London, which I learned only by a pencil note on the outside, '142 Strand.' That evening I was going to see my two sisters—one returned from the Continent, and one come from Derby. And on Tuesday morning I was engaged to come hither to meet Kossuth! So I fear I have missed Miss Bremer. But, from to-day's news, I fear there is no chance of K. arriving till next Monday or Tuesday; and I shall probably go back to-morrow. I will try to see Miss Bremer immediately, but am much disappointed.
"I have had a little correspondence with Mr. Kingsley lately—rising out of a recent lecture of his, the practical results and practical principles of which gave me great pleasure. He says he has 'done his work' of protesting and denouncing capitalists, and now hopes to give himself to construction and practical creation; and much as I fear some of his generalizations, I hope great good from his purely excellent aims, and the amount of aid he can command. He agrees most heartily with my denunciation of large towns as the monster evil, and takes the matter up agriculturally thus: No country can be underfed while it returns to the soil what it takes out of it"—[The italics are my own. Is not this sentence of infinite value to us to-day?]—"for, in the long run, the soil will always give back as much as it receives. Every country impoverishes itself which pours into the rivers and sea the animal refuse which ought to be restored to the soil.
"No community can avoid this prodigality, unless its inhabitants live upon the soil. Therefore towns ought not to exceed the size at which the whole animal refuse can be economically saved and directly applied to agriculture.
"To me it seems that every reason—moral, political, agricultural, economical, sanitary—converge to this same conclusion; and I apply Delenda est Carthago to every city in Europe.
"On the subject of masters and servants, he says, 'Masters should be considered "infamous" who hired servants by the day or week, and not by the year; or who dismissed old servants without any other reason than to lower wages; but such a thing, to be possible and effective, must be mutual. The servant must have no power to leave a good master in order to raise his wages. But at present, while the servant is under no bonds to the master, and does not like to bind himself, it seems to me quite impossible to treat the masters as having any moral responsibility for the servants more than for foreigners. When we buy tea, we cannot ask whether the Chinese get a comfortable livelihood by selling it at that price.' That is an extreme and clear case to which we approach in every commercial transaction in proportion as the other party claims that the relation shall be one of mere marketing….
"Ever yours affectionately,
"Francis W. Newman."
The next letter, which is dated September, 1851, and which was written just after Newman's return from his Swiss tour, goes on with the same subject as the last, and also touches on the evils of suddenly introducing machinery; while it shows clearly that, in the long run, better wages are gained for the worker by its means—"Machinery is in every light the friend of the poor." He says very truly, "The first great want of the workmen is better morality and more thriftiness, not better masters or higher wages." Putting quite aside the question of whether "higher wages" are not needed by the workman, nothing can be truer at the present time than this fact, brought thus before us by Newman. It is, beyond all question, these faults which run through the bulk of the labouring classes (as we term them)—lack of the true spirit of morality and thriftiness.
It is difficult altogether to account for the reason why the lack of these characteristics is so much to the fore to-day, or to think of the remedy which shall reach and cure them. But that it is a presence in our midst is a self-evident fact. No one who has travelled much in France (to name only one other country), but is aware how vast is the gulf which divides the ways of living of our own labouring classes and of those which obtain across the water. There, thriftiness is the rule. They use a far simpler diet, and one which the land supplies them with, and are content. There is a far more healthy tone about them, even if it be a rough one, than there is among our own poor. I am constantly in France myself (it is the country of my own ancestors), and I have never failed to be struck by the absence there, in the country, of the vice which disfigures so often the home life of our villagers. You do not see there the sights that make the streets on Saturday evening in England a degrading scene. When the French villager is happy, he can be it without the aid of drunkenness. And as far as the cultivation of the land is concerned—well, we need only look at home in our "French Farming" schemes to-day and we shall find that when we want to come "back to the land," to find out how much care and industry will bring out of it, we have to send for a Frenchman to show us his country's secrets of manuring the land, so that the soil becomes precious and will yield, even from so small a space as a quarter of an acre, incalculable riches in the way of marketable goods.