The Report of the Commission is a remarkable and searching picture of the general demoralisation produced by the Speenhamland system, and from that point of view it is most graphic and instructive. But nobody who has followed the history of the agricultural labourer can fail to be struck by its capital omission. The Commissioners, in their simple analysis of that system, could not take their eyes off the Speenhamland goblin, and instead of dealing with that system as a wrong and disastrous answer to certain difficult questions, they treated the system itself as the one and original source of all evils. They sighed for the days when ‘the paupers were a small disreputable minority, whose resentment was not to be feared, and whose favour was of no value,’ and ‘all other classes were anxious to diminish the number of applicants, and to reduce the expenses of their maintenance.’[417] They did not realise that the governing class had not created a Frankenstein monster for the mere pleasure of its creation; that they had not set out to draw up an ideal constitution, as Rousseau had done for the Poles. In 1795 there was a fear of revolution, and the upper classes threw the Speenhamland system over the villages as a wet blanket over sparks. The Commissioners merely isolated the consequences of Speenhamland and treated them as if they were the entire problem, and consequently, though their report served to extinguish that system, it did nothing to rehabilitate the position of the labourer, or to restore the rights and status he had lost. The new Poor Law was the only gift of the Reformed Parliament to the agricultural labourer; it was an improvement on the old, but only in the sense that the east wind is better than the sirocco.
What would have happened if either of the other two remedies had been adopted for the problem to which the Speenhamland system was applied, it is impossible to say. But it is easy to see that the position of the agricultural labourer, which could not have been worse, might have been very much better, and that the nation, as apart from the landlords and money-lords, would have come out of this whirlpool much stronger and much richer. This was clear to one correspondent of the Poor Law Commission, whose memorandum, printed in an Appendix,[418] is more interesting and profound than any contribution to the subject made by the Commissioners themselves. M. Chateauvieux set out an alternative policy to Speenhamland, which, if the governing class of 1795 or the governing class of 1834 had been enlightened enough to follow it, would have set up a very different labouring class in the villages from the helpless proletariat that was created by the enclosures.
‘Mais si au lieu d’opérer le partage des biens communaux, l’administration de la commune s’était bornée à louer pour quelques années des parcelles des terres qu’elle possède en vaine pâture, et cela à très bas prix, aux journaliers domiciliés sur son territoire, il en serait resulté:
‘(1) Que le capital de ces terres n’aurait point été aliéné et absorbé dans la propriété particulière.
‘(2) Que ce capital aurait été néanmoins utilisé pour la reproduction.
‘(3) Qu’il aurait servi à l’amélioration du sort des pauvres qui l’auraient défriché, de toute la différence entre le prix du loyer qu’ils en auraient payé, et le montant du revenu qu’ils auraient obtenu de sa recolte.
‘(4) Que la commune aurait encaissé le montant de ses loyers, et aurait augmenté d’autant les moyens dont elle dispose pour le soulagement de ces pauvres.’
M. Chateauvieux understood better than any of the Commissioners, dominated as they were by the extreme individualist economy of the time, the meaning of Bolingbroke’s maxim that a wise minister considers his administration as a single day in the great year of Government; but as a day that is affected by those which went before and must affect those which are to come after. A Government of enclosing landowners was perhaps not to be expected to understand all that the State was in danger of losing in the reckless alienation of common property.
What of the prospects of the other remedy that was proposed? At first sight it seems natural to argue that had Whitbread’s Minimum Wage Bill become an Act of Parliament it would have remained a dead letter. The administration depended on the magistrates and the magistrates represented the rent-receiving and employing classes. A closer scrutiny warrants a different conclusion. At the time that the Speenhamland plan was adopted there were many magistrates in favour of setting a minimum scale. The Suffolk magistrates, for example, put pressure on the county members to vote for Whitbread’s Bill, and those members, together with Grey and Sheridan, were its backers. The Parliamentary support for the Bill was enough to show that it was not only in Suffolk that it would have been adopted; there were men like Lechmere and Whitbread scattered about the country, and though they were men of far more enlightened views than the average J.P., they were not without influence in their own neighbourhoods. It is pretty certain, therefore, that if the Bill had been carried, it would have been administered in some parts of the country. The public opinion in support of the Act would have been powerfully reinforced by the pressure of the labourers, and this would have meant a more considerable stimulus than might at first be supposed, for the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners shows that the pressure of the labourers was a very important factor in the retention of the allowance system in parishes where the overseers wished to abandon it, and if the labourers could coerce the local authorities into continuing the Speenhamland system, they could have coerced the magistrates into making an assessment of wages. The labourers were able by a show of violence to raise wages and to reduce prices temporarily, as is clear from the history of 1816 and 1830. It is not too much to suppose that they could have exercised enough influence in 1795 to induce magistrates in many places to carry out a law that was on the Statute Book. Further, it is not unreasonable to suppose that agricultural labourers’ unions to enforce the execution of the law would have escaped the monstrous Combination Law of 1799 and 1800, for even in 1808 the Glasgow and Lancashire cotton-weavers were permitted openly to combine for the purpose of seeking a legal fixing of wages.[419]