Crying for the Light; Or, Fifty Years Ago. Vol. 3 [of 3]

by J. Ewing Ritchie

‘That is just what I am trying to do,’ was the reply. ‘We are not too old for a grand experiment.’

‘But are you prepared to give up journalism?’

‘Yes, I am. I see a new spirit abroad, one which I detest.’

But one thing remained to Wentworth of the teaching of his early years: a love of Liberal principles; an enthusiasm for humanity; a deep yearning for the mental and moral elevation of the people—ideas deeply cherished in the Nonconformist families of the past generation. In every home the struggle for reform, the hatred of slavery, the desire to give the Roman Catholics fair play, the struggle for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the need of a national and unsectarian system of education, were held to be objects of paramount importance, and were the subjects of daily converse. In every rural village meetings were held at the chapels in their favour, and if there were no great orators to attend them, what was said at them sank into prepared soil, and bore a rich harvest. It was in East Anglia as it was all over England. The agitation went from one chapel to another. A line of communication was thus established, wrote William Hazlitt, whose father was a Unitarian minister in Shropshire, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fires, unquenchable like the fires in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, placed at different stations that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the destruction of Troy. It was from such centres came the soldiers who were to win the people’s victories in spite of the nominees of Tory lords and rotten borough-mongers, of pensioners and place-men, of time-serving priests and fawning courtiers who then ruled the land, and who fattened on the taxes wrung from an unrepresented and oppressed and a discontented—and a justly discontented—nation. Young hearts burned within them as they listened to Liberal orators, or read the speeches of such men as Henry Brougham or Dan O’Connell, or studied Liberal newspapers; and they longed for the time when they, too, should gird on the shield and buckler and do battle for the Right. In vain timid ministers and aged deacons uttered warning voices and shook their heads at the new spirit which was abroad, quoted Scripture about obeying them that have rule over you, hinted at the danger to spirituality of life and feeling by mixing in the rough warfare of the political world. As well might they scream to the stormy blast. The current was too strong: they had to swim with it or be drowned. It was a grand time of awakening. The world has seen nothing like it since. To Wentworth it was a baptism, the effect of which was never to pass away. Buxton, as usual, continued his morning smoke.

‘Hear me,’ said Wentworth, as Rose rushed out of the room, declaring that she knew all he had to say. Wentworth continued: ‘As long as I can remember, the “condition of England question,” as Carlyle called it, or, as we term it, in more sensational phraseology, “the bitter cry of the outcast,” has afforded painful matter of reflection to the statesman, the philanthropist, the philosopher, and the divine. It is always coming to the front, and it will always be coming to the front, even if you hang all the bad landlords and jerry-builders, get rid of the bloated capitalist, and divide the estates of the aristocracy and the millions of the capitalists among the poor of the East-end. The working classes are not to be confounded with the men and women who herd like beasts in the wretched dens of the east. Underneath the lowest of them there is a conservative residuum whom it is impossible to get rid of, whose condition it is appalling to contemplate. They are the men who won’t work; who won’t go where work is to be had; who come to London when they should never have left their country home; who sell their manhood for a pot of beer: casuals who, born in a poor-house or a prison, children of shame from the first, mostly spend their lives alternately tramping the streets and in the workhouse or the gaol. As London increases in population, so do they. We have seen such men offered fair work by hundreds, but they prefer filth and laziness, with the chance of an appeal to the humane. “Pull down the rookery,” and the rooks won’t fly away. Burn all the fever and vice laden dens of the outcast, and there he is still, a disgrace and shame—not so much, as sensational writers pretend, to our civilization and religion as to our common manhood. Ever since we have known anything of the churches—whether Established or Free—it seems to us that they have aimed as much at the temporal as the spiritual improvement of the outcast. We have yet to learn that it is a disgrace to our civilization that it does not interfere with God’s law, that the wrong-doer must pay for his wrong-doing, whatever that may be—that if you lose your chance, another will take it—that it is too late to go harvesting in winter; that the victory is to the strong, that he that will not work shall not eat—those who forget this, who idle away the precious moments, are soon sitting in the outer darkness of the outcast, where there is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

‘It amuses us, or would, were not the subject so awful—for it may be taken as a sober truth that outside the bottomless pit there is no such utter damnation as is to be found among the outcast—to find clever writers talking of the constant neglect of the last hundred years, and to ponder over the remedies. It is now the fashion to recommend better houses to be built at the expense of the community. If we were to get free trade in land, more will be done to remove the congestion in our great cities than by the erection of improved dwellings, which will rather intensify the evil. The more society does for the outcast the more will their number and their poverty alike increase. The remedy is worse than the disease. Every halfpenny you give to the undeserving is so much taken from the deserving. Every benefit you confer on the pauper is at the expense of the honest, respectable poor, who have a prior claim. Against State action the argument is still stronger. In the first place, the State cannot deal honestly and fairly by the people. What it does is ill done, and at double expense. The people who pay the taxes are often as badly off as those for whose benefit they are spent. A slight addition to the taxation of a wealthy peer or capitalist will not deprive him of a single luxury, but it may send a small, struggling tradesman into the Gazette. We are a nation of shopkeepers, and it is easy to perceive that a time may come when our heavy taxation may cripple us in our trade with foreign competitors, when they will supply the markets, on which we have hitherto depended, when, in fact, we shall have little left to us but our National Debt.’

‘Go on,’ said Buxton. ‘You are getting rather prosy, but if it relieves your feelings, pray proceed.’

‘Well, then,’ said Wentworth, ‘I will. A gentleman sends me a scheme of a cooperative home colony, which will give the settlers three good meals a day, a house, a full suit of clothing every year, education for their children, and an allotment of half an acre of land, which shall be entirely at the disposal of the head of the family so long as he makes a good use of it and renders proper service during the regular working hours. For the purchase of fuel or tea and coffee, and such things as cannot be grown in this climate, the director will sell in the public market any surplus produce such as eggs, butter and poultry, far too much of which we get from abroad. One-sixth of the harvest and other produce will be sold to pay the salaries of director and foremen. A farm of three hundred and forty acres in the Isle of Sheppey, for instance, can be had if it be deemed desirable. If we get a population of five hundred on it, fifty acres of wheat will supply the settlement with all the bread that can be eaten there. If the cows were stall-fed, one hundred acres of land would keep over a hundred head of cattle, and such a herd would supply all the requisite milk, cheese, butter, beef and hides every year in abundant quantities. Flax could be cultivated and linen woven. A flock of sheep could be tended on the estate sufficient to yield five pounds of wool every year per head of the population. There would be no expense for manure, as the settlement would provide it all. Are you weary?’ said Wentworth.

‘Not particularly. Pray proceed. But why not try it—why not begin a scheme of the kind at once?’

‘All we have to do is to get the people back to the land. By the establishment of such home colonies work will be offered in rural districts to men and women who would otherwise be driven into our great cities to increase the pauperism which threatens our whole social edifice. The scheme, if carried out, will encourage habits of industry and thrift—unlike the work given in our workhouses, which demoralizes and degrades the recipients; it will help the societies instituted to distribute charity, as it will offer strong men and women healthy labour rather than doles, which they are ashamed to accept, which they do not ask for, and which, when taken, have a tendency to break down that spirit of independence and self-reliance which lies at the foundation of all decent manhood; and lastly, and this is an immense benefit, it would prevent land now in cultivation from becoming a desert. It seems to me this of itself is no common recommendation of the plan, when farmers are giving up farming, and their farms either allowed to run to waste or farmed by the landlords at a heavy loss. Our great Free Traders never dreamt of this when they got Parliament and the people to destroy Protection, yet such are the facts we have to face.’