presence, and seemed to me when I saw him last to be getting in face more and more like England’s greatest orator—as regards latter days—Mr. John Bright. In his far-away home he seemed to me to retain his love for Wales and the sense of the superiority of the Welshman to any one on the face of the earth. The Doctor is an ardent Gladstonite—and people of that way of thinking are not quite as numerous in the Colonies as they are at home.
Another Welshman who made his mark in London was the Rev. Dr. Thomas, a Congregational minister at Stockwell, a fine-looking young man when I first knew him as a minister at Chesham. He developed the faculty of his countrymen for lofty ideas and aims to an extent that ended in disastrous failure. It was he who originated the idea of The Dial—which was to be a daily to advocate righteousness, and to beat down and to supplant The Times. The motto was to be “Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” He got a great many people to take shares, and commenced the publication of The Dial in the first place as a weekly. But the paper was a failure from the first. Another idea of his was to raise a million to build workmen’s institutes and recreation halls all over the kingdom, but as the late Earl of Derby, when appealed to on the subject, replied, it carried its own condemnation in the face of it. A society,
however, was started, but it never came to much. The real fact is that institutions established for working men, not by them, are rarely a success. Dr. Thomas also claimed to have started the idea of the University for Wales, and was very angry with me when I, after some inquiry, failed to support his claim. His great success was the publication of a magazine for preachers, under the title of The Homilist. The writer was a great man, not so much so, perhaps, as he thought, and had his full share of Welsh enthusiasm and fire. But he made a terrible blunder over his Dial scheme. He had done better had he kept to the pulpit. Parsons are not always practical, and the management of successful daily newspapers is not exactly in their line. The shoemaker should stick to his last; but in spite of Welsh poetic geniuses, the great fact which always strikes men in London is the commercial successes of the Welshmen who venture to try their fortune on the metropolitan stage. This especially strikes me with regard to the drapery trade. Many of the largest establishments in that way are owned at this present time by Welshmen—such as Jones, of Holloway; Evans, of Oxford Street, and many more. Few of them had capital or friends to help them, yet few men have done better in the pleasant art of money-making—an art rare, alas! to the class to which I have the honour to belong.
CHAPTER X.
A Great National Movement.
One national movement in which I took a prominent part was the formation of freehold land societies, which commenced somewhere about 1850, and at which The Times, after its manner in those days, sneered, asking scornfully what was a freehold land society. The apostle of the new movement, which was to teach the British working man how to save money and buy a bit of land on which to build a house and secure a vote, was Mr. James Taylor, born in Birmingham in 1814. Like all other Birmingham boys, James was early set to work, and became an apprentice in one of the fancy trades for which Birmingham was famed. His industrious habits soon acquired for him the approbation of his master, who, on retiring from business before Taylor was of age, gave him his indentures. About that time Taylor, earning good wages and not having the fear of Malthus before his eyes, got married and lived happily till, like too many of his class, he took to drink. After years of utter misery and degradation, Taylor, in a happy hour for himself and society,
took the temperance pledge and became a new man. Nor was he satisfied with his own reform alone. He was anxious that others should be rescued from degradation as he had been. For this purpose he identified himself with the Temperance cause, and was honorary secretary to the Birmingham Temperance Society till he became the leader and originator of the Freehold Land Movement, and then for years his life was given to the public. He had but one speech, but it was a racy one, and his voice was soon lifted up in every town in the land. The plan pursued was to buy an estate, cut it up into allotments, and offer them almost free of legal expense. There never was such a chance for the working man as an investment, and thousands availed themselves of it—and were all the better for it—especially those who to pay their small subscriptions became teetotalers and gave up drink. And yet a learned writer in The Edinburgh Review had the audacity to write, “Notwithstanding this rapid popularity, however, notwithstanding also the high authorities which have been quoted on their behalf, we cannot look on these associations with unmixed favour, and we shall not be surprised if any long time elapses without well-grounded disappointment and discontent arising among their members. However desirable it may be for a peasant or an artisan to be possessor of the garden which he cultivates and of
the house he dwells in, however clear and great the gain to him in this case, it is by no means equally certain that he can derive any pecuniary advantage from the possession of a plot of ground which is too far from his daily work for him either to erect a dwelling on it or to cultivate it as an allotment, and which from its diminutive size he will find it difficult for him to let for any sufficient remuneration. In many cases a barren site will be his only reward for £50 of saving, and however he may value this in times of excitement it will in three elections out of four be of little real interest or moment to him.” Happily the working men knew better than the Edinburgh reviewer, and the societies flourished all the more. The Conservatives were, of course, utterly indignant at this wholesale manufacture of faggot votes, as they were contemptuously termed, which threatened the seats of so many respectable Conservative county members, but in the end they thought better of it, and actually started a Conservative Freehold Land Society themselves, a fact announced to me in a letter from Mr. Cobden, which I have or ought to have somewhere in my possession. The societies increased so greatly that a journal was started by Mr. Cassell, called The Freeholder, of which I was editor, and was the means of often bringing me into contact with Mr. Cobden, a man with whom no one ever came in contact without
feeling for him the most ardent admiration. At one time I saw a good deal of him, as it was my habit, at his request, to call on him each morning at his house in Westbourne Park, to talk over with him matters connected with the Freehold Land Movement, in which he took, as in everything that increased human progress, the deepest interest. As he once remarked half the money spent in gin would give the people the entire county representation, and besides provide them with desirable investments against a rainy day. Mr. James Taylor was always cheered as he showed his hearers how a man who drank a quart of ale a day engulfed at the same time a yard of solid earth. Land at that time was to be had remarkably cheap, and great profits were made by the early investors, and the moral benefit was great. Men learned the value of economy and thrift, and were all the better for gaining habits of forethought and self-denial. In our days the societies have become chiefly building societies, the political need of getting a vote in that way not being of so much importance as it was then.
In the early days of the Victorian era the workman had no inducement to save, and he spent his money foolishly because he had no opportunity of spending it better. The Poor-laws as they were till they were reformed by the Whigs—a heroic reform which made them
everywhere unpopular—actually offered a premium on immorality, and the woman who had a number of illegitimate children—the parish rewarding her according to their number—was quite a prize in the matrimonial market. The old Poor-law administration became the demoralising agency to such an extent for the manufacture of paupers that honest wage-earners were at a discount, while numbers of the rate-paying classes found their lot so intolerable that they elected to swell the pauper ranks, and thereby much increased their pecuniary, if not their social, condition. The earlier a labourer became a married man and the father of a family the better off he became and the more he got out of his parish. We can scarcely credit it, yet it is an undoubted fact that under the old Poor-law, if a labourer was known to be thrifty or putting away his savings, he was refused work till his money was gone and he was reduced to his proper level. Even the labourer usually at work received parish pay for at least four children, and if he worked on the roads instead of the fields he received out of the highway rates a pound a-week instead of the usual nine shillings. If a working man joined a benefit club it generally met in a public-house, and a certain proportion of the funds were spent in refreshments—rather for the benefit of the landlords than for that of the members. It was not till 1834 that a reformed