[CHAPTER XXIV]
THE COTTAGE CHARTER. FOUR-ACRE FARMERS
The songs sung by the labourer at the alehouse or the harvest home are not of his own composing. The tunes whistled by the ploughboy as he goes down the road to his work in the dawn were not written for him. Green meads and rolling lands of wheat—true fields of the cloth of gold—have never yet inspired those who dwell upon them with songs uprising from the soil. The solitude of the hills over whose tops the summer sun seems to linger so long has not filled the shepherd's heart with a wistful yearning that must be expressed in verse or music. Neither he nor the ploughman in the vale have heard or seen aught that stirs them in Nature. The shepherd has never surprised an Immortal reclining on the thyme under the shade of a hawthorn bush at sunny noontide; nor has the ploughman seen the shadowy outline of a divine huntress through the mist that clings to the wood across the field.
These people have no myths; no heroes. They look back on no Heroic Age, no Achilles, no Agamemnon, and no Homer. The past is vacant. The have not even a 'Wacht am Rhein' or 'Marseillaise' to chaunt in chorus with quickened step and flashing eye. No; nor even a ballad of the hearth, handed down from father to son, to be sung at home festivals, as a treasured silver tankard is brought out to drink the health of a honoured guest. Ballads there are in old books—ballads of days when the yew bow was in every man's hands, and war and the chase gave life a colour; but they are dead. A cart comes slowly down the road, and the labourer with it sings as he jogs along; but, if you listen, it tells you nothing of wheat, or hay, or flocks and herds, nothing of the old gods and heroes. It is a street ditty such as you may hear the gutter arabs yelling in London, and coming from a music hall.
So, too, in material things—in the affairs of life, in politics, and social hopes—the labourer has no well-defined creed of race. He has no genuine programme of the future; that which is put forward in his name is not from him. Some years ago, talking with an aged labourer in a district where at that time no 'agitation' had taken place, I endeavoured to get from him something like a definition of the wants of his class. He had lived many years, and worked all the while in the field; what was his experience of their secret wishes? what was the Cottage Charter? It took some time to get him to understand what was required; he had been ready enough previously to grumble about this or that detail, but when it came to principles he was vague. The grumbles, the complaints, and so forth, had never been codified. However, by degrees I got at it, and very simple it was:—Point 1, Better wages; (2) more cottages; (3) good-sized gardens; (4) 'larning' for the children. That was the sum of the cottager's creed—his own genuine aspirations.
Since then every one of these points has been obtained, or substantial progress made towards it. Though wages are perhaps slightly lower or rather stationary at the present moment, yet they are much higher than used to be the case. At the same time vast importations of foreign food keep the necessaries of life at a lower figure. The number of cottages available has been greatly increased—hardly a landlord but could produce accounts of sums of money spent in this direction. To almost all of these large gardens are now attached. Learning for the children is provided by the schools erected in every single parish, for the most part by the exertions of the owners and occupiers of land.
Practically, therefore, the four points of the real Cottage Charter have been attained, or as nearly as is possible. Why, then, is it that dissatisfaction is still expressed? The reply is, because a new programme has been introduced to the labourer from without. It originated in no labourer's mind, it is not the outcome of a genuine feeling widespread among the masses, nor is it the heartbroken call for deliverance issuing from the lips of the poet-leader of a downtrodden people. It is totally foreign to the cottage proper—something new, strange, and as yet scarcely understood in its full meaning by those who nominally support it.
The points of the new Cottage Charter are—(1) The confiscation of large estates; (2) the subdivision of land; (3) the abolition of the laws of settlement of land; (4) the administration of the land by the authorities of State; (5) the confiscation of glebe lands for division and distribution; (6) the abolition of Church tithes; (7) extension of the county franchise; (8) education gratis, free of fees, or payment of any kind; (9) high wages, winter and summer alike, irrespective of season, prosperity, or adversity. No. 6 is thrown in chiefly for the purpose of an appearance of identity of interest between the labourer and the tenant against the Church. Of late it has rather been the cue of the leaders of the agitation to promote, or seem to promote, a coalition between the labourer and the dissatisfied tenant, thereby giving the movement a more colourable pretence in the eyes of the public. Few tenants, however dissatisfied, have been deceived by the shallow device.
This programme emanated from no carter or shepherd, ploughman or fogger. It was not thought out under the hedge when the June roses decked the bushes; nor painfully written down on the deal table in the cottage while the winter rain pattered against the window, and, coming down the wide chimney, hissed upon the embers. It was brought to the cottage door from a distance; it has been iterated and reiterated till at last some begin to think they really do want all these things. But with the majority even now the propaganda falls flat. They do not enter into the spirit of it. No. 9 they do understand; that appeals direct, and men may be excused if, with a view which as yet extends so short a space around, they have not grasped the fact that wages cannot by any artificial combination whatever be kept at a high level. The idea of high wages brings a mass of labourers together; they vote for what they are instructed to vote, and are thus nominally pledged to the other eight points of the new charter Such a conception as the confiscation and subdivision of estates never occurred to the genuine labourers.
An aged man was listening to a graphic account of what the new state of things would be like. There would be no squire, no parson, no woods or preserves—all grubbed for cabbage gardens—no parks, no farmers. 'No farmers,' said the old fellow, 'then who's to pay I my wages?' There he hit the blot, no doubt. If the first four points of the new charter were carried into effect, agricultural wages would no longer exist. But if such a consummation depends upon the action of the cottager it will be a long time coming. The idea did not originate with him—he cares nothing for it—and can only be got to support it under the guise of an agitation for wages. Except by persistent stirring from without he cannot be got to move even then. The labourer, in fact, is not by any means such a fool as his own leaders endeavour to make him out. He is perfectly well aware that the farmer, or any person who stands in the position of the farmer, cannot pay the same money in winter as in summer.