It is to the protection afforded to farmers by the monasteries in retired places that we owe the dissemination of the people in rural districts, which would have been otherwise impossible. Those who have lived in a country convulsed by war, like our South, can best appreciate this.
Mallet (History of the Swiss, vol. i. p. 105, a Protestant authority) tells us that "the monks softened by their instructions the ferocious manners of the people, and opposed their credit to the tyranny of the nobility, who knew no other occupation than war, and grievously oppressed their neighbors. On this account the government of monks was preferred to theirs. The people sought them for judges, (that is, as umpires.) It was a usual saying that it was better to be governed by the bishop's crosier than the monarch's sceptre."
The kindness and charities performed by the religious orders, remarks Cobbett, (History of the Protestant Reformation,) made them objects of great veneration, and the rich made them in time the channels of their benevolence to the poor. Kings, queens, princes, princesses, nobles, and gentlefolk founded monasteries and convents, that is, erected the buildings and endowed them with estates for their maintenance. Others—some in the way of atonement for their sins, and some from a pious motive, gave while alive, or bequeathed at their death, lands, houses, or money to monasteries already erected. So that in time the monasteries became the owners of great landed estates; they had the lordship over innumerable manors, and had a tenantry of prodigious extent, especially in England, where the monastic orders were always held in great esteem, in consequence of Christianity having been introduced into the kingdom by a community of monks.
One of the greatest advantages attending the monasteries in the political economy of the country was that they of necessity caused the revenues of a large part of the lands to be spent on the spot whence those revenues arose. The hospitals and all the other establishments of the kind had the same tendency, so that the revenues of the land were diffused immediately among the people at large. We all know how the state of a parish changes for the worse when a great land-owner quits his mansion in it, and leaves that mansion shut up, and what an effect this has upon the poor-rates. What, then, must have been the effect of twenty monasteries in every county, expending constantly a large part of their incomes on the spot? If Ireland had still her seven hundred or eight hundred monastic institutions, there would be no periodical famines and typhus fevers there; no need of sunset or sunrise laws shutting the people up at night to prevent insurrections; no projects for preventing the increase of families; no schemes for getting rid of a "surplus population;" no occasion for the people to live on third-rate potatoes—not enough, at that; for their nakedness, their hunger, their dying of hundreds with starvation, while their ports are crowded with ships carrying provisions from their shores, and while an army is fed in the country, the business of which army is to keep the starving people quiet.
Sir Walter Scott thus exposes the nonsense of the "economists on the non-influence of absenteeism." In the year 1817, when the poor stood so much in need of employment, a friend asked the Duke of Buccleugh why his grace did not prepare to go to London in the spring? By way of answer, the duke showed him a list of laborers then employed in improvements on his different estates; the number of whom, exclusive of his regular establishments, amounted to nine hundred and forty-seven men, who, with those whose support depended on their wages, would reckon several thousand; many of whom must have found it difficult to obtain subsistence had the duke not foregone the privilege of his rank in order to provide with more convenience for them. The result of such conduct is twice blessed, both in the means which it employs and in the end which it attains in the general economy of the country. This anecdote forms a good answer to those theorists who pretend that the residence of proprietors on their estates is, a matter of indifference to the inhabitants of the district. Had the duke been residing and spending his revenues elsewhere, one-half of these poor people would have wanted employment and food, and would probably have been little comforted by any metaphysical arguments upon population which could have been presented to their investigation.
"Many such things may be daily heard," says Howitt, "of the present Duke of Portland."
The monks, whose religious character gave them an extraordinary security, as they were the first restorers of agriculture, so they were the first improvers of our gardens. Their long pilgrimage from one holy shrine to another, through France, Germany, and Italy, made them early acquainted with a variety of culinary and medicinal herbs and various fruits, and amongst the ruins of abbeys we still find a tribe of plants that they have naturalized.
Lingard, writing of the consequences of the "Reformation," tells us that "within the realm poverty and discontent generally prevailed. The extension of inclosures, and the new practice of letting lands at rack-rents, had driven from their homes numerous families whose fathers had occupied the same farms for several generations, and the increasing multitudes of the poor began to resort to the more populous towns in search of that relief which had been formerly distributed at the gates of the monasteries. The reformation preachers of the day—Knox, Lever, Gilpin, Latimer—avow that the sufferings of the indigent were treated with indifference by the hard-heartedness of the rich; while, in the pursuit of gain, the most barefaced frauds were justified, robbers and murderers escaping punishment by the partiality of juries or corruptions of judges. They tell us that church-livings were given to laymen or converted to the use of the patrons," etc.
In dealing with that shameful pauperism, the annual reports of which ring in the ears of the British government—"mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" which presaged the fall of Babylon—it behoves us to distinguish the victim poor and the fighting poor. The fighting poor exasperate the evils of poverty by ineffective insurrections against the organized government of the rich. Protesting against injustice and maladministration by strikes, which they cannot sustain, and which soon leave them at the mercy of the employers they have defied, they provoke the severity of the laws by disorderly conduct, by poaching, robbery, arson, etc., necessitating the maintenance of a numerous and rigorous police, and even of standing armies. These withdraw great numbers from productive industry, and double the expenses of government, which must, at last, be borne by the working classes, however indirect the methods of taxation. It is true that the aristocracy in command of armies could enrich England by the spoil of India, or Spain by that of Mexico and Peru; but these ill-gotten gains have cursed alike the robber and the robbed. No country has ever maintained a real prosperity except by home production and the contentment of its producing classes. The fighting poor, not organized in armies under the discipline and pay of governments, but remaining an integral part of the people, are intimately leagued with the victim poor by family ties, and even by the imminence of a common fate, since a wound, a fit of illness, a fraud, the prolonged lack of work, or other misfortune, may depress them into pauperism. This class of poor is the most dangerous element of a nation, and costs in waste and in precautions a great deal more than the sum expended in pauper relief. An administrative method which conciliates this class with the rich, with the established government and public order, is evidently master of the situation. This end has been achieved by the religious organization of labor.