If assessment had once become the practice, the real struggle would have arisen when the great prosperity of agriculture began to decline; at the time, that is, when the Speenhamland system began to show those symptoms of strain that we have described. Would the customary wage, established under the more favourable conditions of 1795, have stood against that pressure? Would the labourers have been able to keep up wages, as critics of the Whitbread Bill had feared that they would? In considering the answers to that question, we have to reckon with a force that the debaters of 1795 could not have foreseen. In 1795 Cobbett was engaged in the politics and polemics of America, and if any member of the House of Commons knew his name, he knew it as the name of a fierce champion of English institutions, and a fierce enemy of revolutionary ideas; a hero of the Anti-Jacobin itself. In 1810 Cobbett was rapidly making himself the most powerful tribune that the English poor have ever known. Cobbett’s faults are plain enough, for they are all on the surface. His egotism sometimes seduced his judgment; he had a strongly perverse element in his nature; his opinion of any proposals not his own was apt to be petulant and peevish, and it might perhaps be said of him that he generally had a wasp in his bonnet. These qualities earned for him his title of the Contentious Man. They would have been seriously disabling in a Cabinet Minister, but they did not affect his power of collecting and mobilising and leading the spasmodic forces of the poor.

Let us recall his career in order to understand what his influence would have been if the labourers had won their customary wage in 1795, and had been fighting to maintain it fifteen or twenty years later. His adventures began early. When he was thirteen his imagination was fired by stories the gardener at Farnham told him of the glories of Kew. He ran away from home, and made so good an impression on the Kew gardener that he was given work there. His last coppers on that journey were spent in buying Swift’s Tale of a Tub. He returned home, but his restless dreams drove him again into the world. He tried to become a sailor, and ultimately became a soldier. He left the army, where he had made his mark and received rapid promotion, in order to expose a financial scandal in his regiment, but on discovering that the interests involved in the countenance of military abuses were far more powerful than he had supposed, he abandoned his attempt and fled to France. A few months later he crossed to America, and settled down to earn a living by teaching English to French refugees. This peaceful occupation he relinquished for the congenial excitements of polemical journalism, and he was soon the fiercest pamphleteer on the side of the Federals, who took the part of England, in their controversies with the Democrats, who took the part of the Revolution. So far as the warfare of pamphlets went, Cobbett turned the scale. The Democrats could not match his wit, his sarcasm, his graphic and pointed invectives, his power of clever and sparkling analysis and ridicule. This warfare occupied him for nearly ten years, and he returned to England in time to have his windows broken for refusing to illuminate his house in celebration of the Peace of Amiens. In 1802 he started the Political Register. At that time he was still a Tory, but a closer study of English life changed his opinions, and four years later he threw himself into the Radical movement. The effect of his descent on English politics can only be compared to the shock that was given to the mind of Italy by the French methods of warfare, when Charles VIII. led his armies into her plains to fight pitched battles without any of the etiquette or polite conventions that had graced the combats of the condottieri. He gave to the Reform agitation an uncompromising reality and daring, and a movement which had become the dying echo of a smothered struggle broke into storm and thunder. Hazlitt scarcely exaggerated his dæmonic powers when he said of him that he formed a fourth estate of himself.

Now Cobbett may be said to have spent twenty years of his life in the effort to save the labourers from degradation and ruin. He was the only man of his generation who regarded politics from this standpoint. This motive is the key to his career. He saw in 1816 that the nation had to choose between its sinecures, its extravagant army, its rulers’ mad scheme of borrowing at a higher rate to extinguish debt, for which it was paying interest at a low rate, its huge Civil List and privileged establishments, the interests of the fund-holders and contractors on the one hand, and its labourers on the other. In that conflict of forces the labourer could not hold his own. Later, Cobbett saw that there were other interests, the interests of landowners and of tithe-holders, which the State would have to subordinate to national claims if the labourer was to be saved. In that conflict, too, the labourer was beaten. He was unrepresented in Parliament, whereas the opposing interests were massed there. Cobbett wanted Parliamentary Reform, not like the traditional Radicals as a philosophy of rights, but as an avalanche of social power. Parliamentary Reform was never an end to him, nor the means to anything short of the emancipation of the labourer. In this, his main mission, Cobbett failed. The upper classes winced under his ruthless manners, and they trembled before his Berserker rage, but it is the sad truth of English history that they beat him. Now if, instead of throwing himself against this world of privilege and vested interests in the hopes of wringing a pittance of justice for a sinking class, it had been his task to maintain a position already held, he would have fought under very different conditions. If, when prices began to fall, there had been a customary wage in most English villages, the question would not have been whether the ruling class was to maintain its privileges and surplus profits by letting the labourer sink deeper into the morass, but whether it was to maintain these privileges and profits by taking something openly from him. It is easier to prevent a dog from stealing a bone than to take the bone out of his mouth. Cobbett was not strong enough to break the power of the governing class, but he might have been strong enough to defend the customary rights of the labouring class. As it was, the governing class was on the defensive at every point. The rent receivers, the tithe owners, the mortgagers, the lenders to the Government and the contractors all clung to their gains, and the food allowance of the labourer slowly and steadily declined.

There was this great difference between the Speenhamland system and a fixed standard of wages. The Speenhamland system after 1812 was not applied so as to maintain an equilibrium between the income and expenditure of the labourer: it was applied to maintain an equilibrium between social forces. The scale fell not with the fall of prices to the labourer, but with the fall of profits to the possessing classes. The minimum was not the minimum on which the labourer could live, but the minimum below which rebellion was certain. This was the way in which wages found their own level. They gravitated lower and lower with the growing weakness of the wage-earner. If Cobbett had been at the head of a movement for preserving to the labourer a right bestowed on him by Act of Parliament, either he would have succeeded, or the disease would have come to a crisis in 1816, instead of taking the form of a lingering and wasting illness. Either, that is, other classes would have had to make the economies necessary to keep the labourers’ wages at the customary point, or the labourers would have made their last throw before they had been desolated and weakened by another fifteen years of famine.

There is another respect in which the minimum wage policy would have profoundly altered the character of village society. It would have given the village labourers a bond of union before they had lost the memories and the habits of their more independent life; it would have made them an organised force, something like the organised forces that have built up a standard of life for industrial workmen. An important passage in Fielding’s Tom Jones shows that there was material for such combination in the commoners of the old village. Fielding is talking of his borrowings from the classics and he defends himself with this analogy: ‘The ancients may be considered as a rich common, where every person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath a free right to batten his muse: or, to place it in a clearer light, we moderns are to the ancients what the poor are to the rich. By the poor here I mean that large and venerable body which in English we call the mob. Now whoever hath had the honour to be admitted to any degree of intimacy with this mob must well know, that it is one of their established maxims to plunder and pillage their rich neighbours without any reluctance: and that this is held to be neither sin nor crime among them. And so constantly do they abide and act by this maxim, that in every parish almost in the kingdom there is a kind of confederacy ever carrying on against a certain person of opulence called the squire whose property is considered as free booty by all his poor neighbours; who, as they conclude that there is no manner of guilt in such depredations, look upon it as a point of honour and moral obligation to conceal and to preserve each other from punishment on all such occasions. In like manner are the ancients such as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Cicero and the rest to be esteemed among us writers as so many wealthy squires from whom we, the poor of Parnassus, claim an immemorial custom of taking whatever we can come at.’[420]

It would not have been possible to create a great labourers’ union before the Combination Laws were repealed in 1824, but if the labourers had been organised to defend their standard wage, they would have established a tradition of permanent association in each village. The want of this was their fatal weakness. All the circumstances make the spirit of combination falter in the country. In towns men are face to face with the brutal realities of their lives, unsoftened by any of the assuaging influences of brook and glade and valley. Men and women who work in the fields breathe something of the resignation and peace of Nature; they bear trouble and wrong with a dangerous patience. Discontent moves, but it moves slowly, and whereas storms blow up in the towns, they beat up in the country. That is one reason why the history of the anguish of the English agricultural labourer so rarely breaks into violence. Castlereagh’s Select Committee in 1817 rejoiced in the discovery that ‘notwithstanding the alarming progress which has been made in extending disaffection, its success has been confined to the principal manufacturing districts, and that scarcely any of the agricultural population have lent themselves to these violent projects.’ There is a Russian saying that the peasant must ‘be boiled in the factory pot’ before a revolution can succeed. And if it is difficult in the nature of things to make rural labourers as formidable to their masters as industrial workers, there is another reason why the English labourer rebelled so reluctantly and so tardily against what Sir Spencer Walpole called, in the true spirit of a classical politician, ‘his inevitable and hereditary lot.’ Village society was constantly losing its best and bravest blood. Bamford’s description of the poacher who nearly killed a gamekeeper’s understrapper in a quarrel in a public-house, and then hearing from Dr. Healey that his man was only stunned, promised the doctor that if there was but one single hare on Lord Suffield’s estates, that hare should be in the doctor’s stew-pot next Sunday, reminds us of the loss a village suffered when its poachers were snapped up by a game-preserving bench, and tossed to the other side of the world. During the years between Waterloo and the Reform Bill the governing class was decimating the village populations on the principle of the Greek tyrant who flicked off the heads of the tallest blades in his field; the Game Laws, summary jurisdiction, special commissions, drove men of spirit and enterprise, the natural leaders of their fellows, from the villages where they might have troubled the peace of their masters. The village Hampdens of that generation sleep on the shores of Botany Bay. Those who blame the supine character of the English labourer forget that his race, before it had quite lost the memories and the habits of the days of its independence and its share in the commons, was passed through this sieve. The scenes we shall describe in the next chapter show that the labourers were capable of great mutual fidelity when once they were driven into rebellion. If they had had a right to defend and a comradeship to foster from the first, Cobbett, who spent his superb strength in a magnificent onslaught on the governing class, might have made of the race whose wrongs he pitied as his own, an army no less resolute and disciplined than the army O’Connell made of the broken peasants of the West.

CHAPTER XI
THE LAST LABOURERS’ REVOLT

Where not otherwise stated the authorities for the two following chapters are the Home Office Papers for the time (Municipal and Provincial, Criminal, Disturbances, Domestic, etc.), the Times and local papers.

I

A traveller who wished to compare the condition of the English and the French rural populations in 1830 would have had little else to do than to invert all that had been written on the subject by travellers a century earlier. At the beginning of the eighteenth century England had the prosperous and France the miserable peasantry. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century the French peasant had been set free from the impoverishing and degrading services which had made his lot so intolerable in the eyes of foreign observers; he cultivated his own land, and lived a life, spare, arduous, and exacting but independent. The work of the Revolution had been done so thoroughly in this respect that the Bourbons, when Wellington and the allies lifted them back on to their throne, could not undo it. It is true that the future of the French peasants was a subject of some anxiety to English observers, and that M‘Culloch committed himself to the prediction that in half a century, owing to her mass of small owners, France would be the greatest pauper-warren in Europe. If any French peasant was disturbed by this nightmare of the political economy of the time, he had the grim satisfaction of knowing that his position could hardly become worse than the position that the English labourer already occupied. He would have based his conclusion, not on the wild language of revolutionaries, but on the considered statement of those who were so far from meditating revolution that they shrank even from a moderate reform of Parliament. Lord Carnarvon said in one House of Parliament that the English labourer had been reduced to a plight more abject than that of any race in Europe; English landlords reproduced in the other that very parallel between the English labourer and the West Indian negro which had figured so conspicuously in Thelwall’s lectures. Thelwall, as Canning reminded him in a savage parody on the Benedicite, got pelted for his pains. Since the days of those lectures all Europe had been overrun by war, and England alone had escaped what Pitt had called the liquid fire of Jacobinism. There had followed for England fifteen years of healing peace. Yet at the end of all this time the conquerors of Napoleon found themselves in a position which they would have done well to exchange with the position of his victims. The German peasant had been rescued from serfdom; Spain and Italy had at least known a brief spell of less unequal government. The English labourer alone was the poorer; poorer in money, poorer in happiness, poorer in sympathy, and infinitely poorer in horizon and in hope. The riches that he had been promised by the champions of enclosure had faded into something less than a maintenance. The wages he received without land had a lower purchasing power than the wages he had received in the days when his wages were supplemented by common rights. The standard of living which was prescribed for him by the governing class was now much lower than it had been in 1795.