Farmer Gale, however, failed to throw much light on these alarming questions, which he did not know, indeed, were being asked. His conversation kept gliding away to his grievances, for it consisted, like that of most farmers, of grumbles. Usually these started from the little string-tied sample bags of threshed grain he carried in his pocket to be blown and tasted by hard-bargaining customers. But to-day, though he was not bound for the corn-market, he was nevertheless not to be baulked of his grievances. They were not, this time, against Nature, but against Man; for, as the fields they passed showed, the corn was particularly forward. It was not Providence that had run down wheat to thirty shillings a quarter. Free Trade was in reality the ruin of free Britain. For the labour of Continental slaves, who went with the soil, and were sold with it like cattle, who subsisted on black bread, skim-milk, and onions, was brought into competition with that of the freeborn Briton, who must thus be dragged down to the same level.
The bluff, freeborn Briton was Farmer Gale’s favourite rôle, and his ruddy face, grey bowler, and smart gaiters made him sympathetic enough superficially, while the potent landowner’s consideration for Jinny’s religious necessities had not failed to evoke a flattered gratitude in her humble breast when they drove together of a Sunday to their respective chapels. This amiable image of himself the breezy Briton was now destined to shatter. For after some critical comment on the ploughing of the fields they passed and the activities of the poachers—he would certainly have to get rid of that suspicious character, “Uncle Lilliwhyte,” who occupied a cottage badly needed for a farm-hand—he pointed out the impossibility of building another cottage as Jinny had so crudely suggested. Prices were simply ruinous.
“I tell my labourers as man to man,” he said emphatically, “that they can’t have regular employment and their present wages. Take your choice, boys, says I. Look at other countries, do they get more than their six or seven shillings a week? No! Then that’s what you’ll have to come down to.”
“But how can they live on it?” asked Jinny.
“How can farmers live?” he retorted. “We must go by the price of corn.”
“But did you go by the price of corn after the Battle of Waterloo?” asked Jinny shrewdly. “For I remember Gran’fer once telling me you got—I mean your father got—a hundred shillings a quarter then, yet folks were so starved they went burning the ricks.”
“I was only a baby then. I can’t say what happened.”
“But the same thing happened nearer our time,” she reminded him, thinking of the Bidlake tragedy.
“Oh, that silly rioting and machine-smashing. That always came out of the poor not understanding politics. If things were bad after Waterloo, it was all Bony’s work. And as for the unrest twenty years ago, we caught that from France, too, I remember dad telling me. They had risen against their king—such an unsettled people. But to-day it’s our own British Government that’s the enemy, and the money we farmers have lost this year is something dreadful.”
“But you don’t look as starved as some of our labourers’ families. I’ve seen the Pennymole children crying for dry bread, and the father saying, ‘I darsn’t cut you no more—do, ye’ll have none Saturday.’ And Mr. Pennymole’s always worked for you.”