As regards the number of meals that she gave her family, we had four daily; for, in addition to the afternoon tea, we had a late supper. I noted one. All the young children had gone to bed, for Mrs. Benton was an excellent house-mother. For supper, we had onions, soft cheese, bread, cold pork, stout for the mother to drink, and ale for the father. After supper, Benton read aloud a small portion of the New Testament; the son of twenty-one before going to bed kissed his mother and bade his father good-night, and the daughter kissed both parents.
Mrs. Benton asked a blessing at meals: “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us thankful, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.” Thanks were returned by the young children. One said, “Thank God, father and mother, for a very good tea. Amen.”
Mrs. Benton delivers tracts. She takes them to dissenters’ houses; for the plan on which “the church” acts seems to be that all these are only stray sheep from their fold. They are indeed parishioners. Jackson, the carpenter with whom I boarded, as he rented land, was obliged to pay tithes for the support of the clergyman, although he himself was an Independent or Congregationalist.
Though she is a church-woman, Mrs. Benton tells me that one of her uncles is a bitter dissenter. He would not open a prayer-book, and even objected to the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer at the close of another supplication.
FARMS AND FARMERS.
This village where the Bentons lived closely adjoins the fenny or swampy land of the east of England. Said Benton, “Perhaps a hundred years ago the fens grew nothing but reeds and rushes and produced a quantity of wild fowl.” “All the geese in Lincoln fens” I had before heard of. The water is now kept out of the fens by means of steam-engines. This level land is well fitted for tillage, but bad weather had been very unfortunate for the wheat farmer. He generally holds more land than the dairy farmer, but he had been suffering from a succession of wet harvests. Before the abolition of the corn laws, high prices were kept up by a duty on foreign grain, but now the farmer cannot compete with our Western grain. An experienced man told me that the man who held even as high as one thousand acres was going behind every year.
In the summer of 1881, before the harvest was gathered in, I was told that there had not been a dry harvest since 1874. Some idea of what an English summer can be was given to me by Benton, the farmer with whom I boarded. He said that in 1879, at a Royal Agricultural Show near London, the farm implements were up to the hub in mud, and boards were spread for people to walk upon. In meeting, some would get shoved off up to the knees in mud. Men did not go round offering to black shoes, but with pails of water to wash off the mud. Yet there were thousands there.
The average of wheat raised in England is much greater than ours. In this country we do not hoe wheat and then weed it. But the production of England is scarcely half the amount required for the population. In 1880 the amount raised was sixty-four millions of bushels; the amount needed, one hundred and seventy-six millions. In 1881 they hoped to get one hundred millions of their own produce. One of my friends said that they would have starved the last year or two but for America.
In considering the English climate it is well to remember the high northern latitude. There is no city on our continent, not even Quebec, which is so far north as Paris. London lies in the latitude of Newfoundland and Labrador. Whether wet climates like that of England and Ireland can successfully compete in wheat-raising in the long run with our drier ones may well be doubted.
Another acquaintance spoke to me of the depressed condition of this district. He said that within a radius of six miles, six large farmers, cultivating three or four hundred acres each, had failed since the last harvest. “For four years,” he added, “the seasons have seemed to alter,—snow and rain fell in seed-time; there was little or no sun to mature the grain at harvest. There were floods of water covering acres of ground, so that one farmer holding perhaps five hundred or more acres, that had also been cultivated by his father and grandfather, lost in three years about twenty thousand dollars. Then he took his remaining capital and went into other business.”