It appears from Mr Stuart, that the parochial clergy, the body to which he belongs, have for many years had their attention anxiously directed towards the case of the agricultural labourers. He tells us that the synods of Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen, and Angus and Mearns have instituted inquiries regarding their condition—these inquiries being chiefly intended, as might have been expected, to ascertain the moral, religious, and educational state of our labourers, although the effects of the bothy system and of feeing-markets upon the social condition of servants are likewise investigated. Through the courtesy of a clerical correspondent, we have before us reports from twenty-seven parishes in Morayshire, in answer to a series of questions circulated by the synod of Moray in 1848, as well as a copy of the Elgin Courant, April 1848, containing a very full discussion by that ecclesiastical court on the moral and social condition of the agricultural labourers of that province. The synod of Angus and Mearns instituted an investigation of the same kind some fifteen years ago, and a most elaborate report, based upon the information collected, was drawn up. Measures were suggested for elevating the condition of the farm-servants; and in some counties pastoral addresses were read from the pulpits of the Established Church upon the subject. It appears, however, that this agitation of the question by the Church met with no countenance or encouragement from the laity. We know, indeed, that Sir John Stuart Forbes, and two or three other proprietors, took then an interest in the inquiry, and were alive to its importance—but, generally speaking, the proprietors and farmers seem to have been quite unprepared to take up the subject.
It is very curious, nevertheless, to observe that the very evils pointed out by Mr Stuart in his pamphlet, and the very remedies suggested by him, are all embraced and expounded in the reports of the ecclesiastical courts now before us.[[6]] It is a remarkable instance, apparently, of the well-known mental phenomenon, that the mind previously must have undergone some preparation for the reception of the truth, before the truth can suitably affect it. Mr Stuart has had the sagacity, or good fortune, to fix upon the opportune moment for making his appeal, and to find a benevolently disposed auditory. He has done what his brethren, in synods assembled, could not do. He has effectually hit the nail upon the head—and we hope he will reiterate the blow again and again, until he sees the objects of his benevolent wishes in some good measure obtained.
It appears to us that on such a subject as the present every thing approaching to exaggeration should be most anxiously avoided. There is a danger, now that the attention and interest of the public have been so awakened, that overdrawn pictures of the degraded condition of our Scottish peasantry will be indulged in; and this is all the more likely, as proving acceptable to the democratic classes, and as reflecting disgrace on the character of landed proprietors. In point of fact, we believe that it is unquestionable that our rural population, both in respect of their sanitary and moral condition, occupy a position very superior to that of the manufacturing classes of our towns. By the census of 1841, for every two deaths in agricultural districts there were more than three in our towns; and in towns exclusively manufacturing, such as Leeds and Birmingham, there were seven deaths for every two in agricultural localities. Glasgow is the only Scottish town where the statistics of mortality are noted, and there ten would die out of a population of three hundred, while out of the same number in agricultural counties there would be only three deaths. In the matter of moral statistics by the same census the commitments in manufacturing districts, compared with agricultural, were as five to one. We believe the statistics of drunkenness would report likewise in favour of the superior sobriety of our rural population, so that our agricultural labourers, it seems, are truly more healthy, more sober, more virtuous, at least in the eye of the criminal law, than those of the labouring classes in our towns. We believe that the agricultural labourers are better fed and better clothed, and, in many aspects of the case, as well housed as the labouring classes in our large towns and cities. In this fashion, if he pleases, the landowner may evade all appeals to his benevolence, and may scornfully reject all reproachful insinuations of having neglected the condition of the labouring poor upon his estates. He may well inquire how far he has contributed to raise the poor on his estate to a higher social condition in respect of health and sobriety, when contrasted with the poor of our towns; and if this has not been so much the necessary result of their circumstances and manner of life, that a very slender portion of the merit can be appropriated by him. The opulent inhabitants of our cities are not bound by any especial tie of social duty to the degraded and dissipated poor of the cities. They are not their tenants, nor are they engaged in their employment. Though living in close proximity with them, the rich are, for the most part, profoundly ignorant of the condition of their poorer fellow-citizens, who breathe the mephitic exhalations of unventilated lanes, and whose homes are but dismal cellars, into which the meridian sun, struggling through dense masses of hovering vapour, fails to transmit anything stronger than a murky twilight.
If the country gentleman can persuade himself that he holds no nearer relationship to the tenantry and labourers upon his estate, than the wealthy citizen does to the industrious poor who live within the same municipal bounds, but who otherwise are totally unconnected with them, it would be unreasonable to expect from such a one those expressions of regret which have fallen so gracefully from the lips of others, or that he will find any difficulty in escaping all appeals addressed to him, not only as he is not conscious of having overlooked any duty, but because he is prepared to deny that he has any duty to discharge in the matter. Or if the country gentleman can take up the very elevated position which a certain school of economists have of late been expounding and pressing upon his attention, then he will have reached a region so pure, and so superterrestrial as to be infinitely raised above all vulgar care about the comfort and welfare of those who till the glebe and tend the herds of that “dim spot which men call earth.” According to this high philosophy, the landowner is taught to look upon his land as a mere article of commerce, and that the great question with him ought to be to discover how, with the least possible outlay, he can raise from it the greatest possible revenue. To examine into the condition of the cottages upon the estate—to build new ones, and to improve the old—to do this personally, or, as that may be impossible, to order it to be done by some competent and responsible party—all this seems out of his department as the owner of the land and the recipient of the rent. If the farmer is content that his labourers should live in miserable hovels, where their physical energies must be debilitated, and where the decencies of their moral condition must suffer wrong, where their fitness for their daily toil is being impaired by the discomforts of their homes, and where, from the same cause, the period in the ploughman’s life of complete capability for his work must infallibly be abridged, what signifies all this to the landowner? His political economy saves him from all compunction. If the thews and sinews of the ploughman, by such treatment, become prematurely useless, it matters not—the wheels and pinions can be replaced, and other thews and sinews will be found to work the work. It is a devout hallucination upon the part of Mr Stuart to fancy that he can persuade such a landowner as this, that, on mere pecuniary grounds, it would prove a wise economy in him to build new cottages and to remodel the old, and to improve and add to the bothy accommodation. Mr Stuart’s argument on such a subject would necessarily be largely leavened with moral considerations, which the economics of the landlord did not embrace, and the mere money-profit looms dubiously in the distance. Mr Stuart would have no chance with such a stern philosopher as this, who could demonstrate by an irrefragable arithmetic that he could do the thing cheaper! We are sorry to think that any such party should be in the position of a landed proprietor. ’Tis a pity such a man had not had his money invested in the Three per Cents, or in a street of three-storeyed tenements suitable to accommodate the middle classes of society, who would take care of themselves, and, peradventure, of the laird likewise. We know no situation in human life so enviable as that of a country gentleman. His privileges are manifold, and his appropriate recreations and pleasures exquisite. His peculiar duties are indeed very responsible, but they are deeply interesting and delightful. Surely a country gentleman is knit by dearer and more sacred ties to the people that live upon his estate, and that cultivate his fields, than the rich man of the city to the poor artisan, to whom he is united by the accident of his living in the neighbouring street. Nay, we hope that no country gentleman would care to be thought actuated by no warmer or kindlier feelings towards the pendiclers and poor cottagers that dwell on his estate, than the potent noblesse of the cotton-mills can reasonably be expected to be towards the shadowy troops of sallow girls that, like so many animal automata, ply their nimble fingers o’er the power-looms and spinning-jennies of their tall-chimneyed temples. If the accursed commercial element is henceforth to be the sole ruling motive in the management of landed property, the country gentleman will speedily sink to the level of a commercial gentleman. The charms of his position will die away—the honours now so spontaneously rendered to him will be withheld—and the ancestral influence of his house and name will become the poet’s dream. We have contrasted the condition of the labouring poor in the country with that of the labouring poor in the town, but there can be no just comparison betwixt the position of a landed proprietor, and the duties which it entails towards the agricultural labourers on his property, and the position of a mill-spinner towards the people whom he employs; and we should be sorry if any landowner should seek in this way to vindicate his subsequent neglect of the duties which Providence has manifestly laid upon him. If our landed proprietors are not imbued with some just sense of the responsibilities of their station, and actuated by some steadfast determination to practise self-denial in other matters, that they may improve the condition of the industrious poor upon their properties, we despair utterly of any permanent practical good resulting from the present movement. If our farmers are, as a body, not prepared at present heartily to enter upon the work of reformation, we have to thank one class of politicians who have for years been industriously indoctrinating the farmer with the dogma that his business, in its highest phase, was just the manufacture of certain agricultural products from the soil. The farmer long listened in wonder to the lecturer, not knowing well what the high-sounding philosophy might mean. But he at last embraced the doctrine, and he now, we fear, too often entertains the feelings which the doctrine was so likely to engender. As a manufacturer, the farmer cannot for his life see that he has any more concernment than any other manufacturer with the condition, character, and habits of his operatives. For a year he hires them, and they go, and he sees them no more. The root of the evil Mr Stuart correctly traces up to the altered feelings and conduct of proprietors and tenants towards their dependants.
Mr Stuart, in speaking of our agricultural labourers, “as things were” some sixty years ago, adverts to a period when the servants lived in family with their masters—when the master sat patriarchally at the head of his table, surrounded by his children and domestics, and when all knelt at the same family altar to offer up the evening prayer. The social characteristics of the people of that day were excellent; but their creature comforts were few, and their agriculture wretched. It was the era of run-rig, of outfield and infield—the former being scourged as the common foe—while on the latter our agricultural sires practised high farming. During the summer the men were half idle, and in the winter they were wholly so, saving that occasionally in the forenoon that venerable implement the flail, wielded by a lusty arm, might be heard dropping its minute-guns on the barn-floor. The women wrought the work in summer, and plied the wheel in winter. We are old enough to remember the spinning-wheel, and are disposed to echo the sentiment of the poet—
“Grief, thou hast lost an ever-ready friend,
Now that the cottage spinning-wheel is mute;
And care a comforter that best could suit
Her froward mood, and softliest reprehend.”
Mr Stuart reverts to this bygone age in a strain of tenderness; but he faithfully depicts its grievous physical disadvantages as they were experienced by the poor. There is a dash of romance in Mr Stuart’s genial nature, and he has interwoven his narrative with some quaint old-world reminiscences; but his excellent sense conducts him always to the sound conclusion. He does not idly sigh for that which has passed away; and he sees that the habits of a former age, if they could be recalled, would not suit the taste of the present generation, nor meet the exigencies of the existing agriculture. In certain districts of Aberdeenshire and elsewhere, the farm-servants may be said yet to live in the family—that is, they get their food in the kitchen, and by the kitchen-fire they sit in the winter evenings until they retire to their beds, which are generally in the stable. But the master and his family are meanwhile in the parlour. The master’s restraining presence is not in the kitchen; and upon the testimony alike of farmers and of clergymen, now lying upon our table, the results of the system are so deplorable, that bothies are asked for and preferred as the least of two evils.