'the farms large enough to keep a score of cows, six horses and a small flock of sheep and goats, and to maintain a family and servants in all that land usually produces, leaving a surplus for sale sufficient to pay taxes, wages, and to provide the comforts and necessaries of life to a fair extent,' all which could be bought 'for 1000l. or 1200l., or even less.'
As regards the agricultural labourer, or cotter, Mr. Laing conceived 'his average condition to be that of holding land on which he could sow three-quarters of an imperial quarter of corn and three imperial quarters of potatoes, and which would enable him to keep two cows, or an equivalent number of sheep or goats.' His wages are stated to have been 4-1/2d. to 6d. per diem, in addition to his food. It was consequently 'amusing to recollect the benevolent speculations in our Agricultural Reports, of the Sir Johns and Sir Thomases in our midland counties of England, for bettering the condition of labourers in husbandry, by giving them, at a reasonable rent, a quarter of an acre of land to keep a cow on, or by allowing them to cultivate the slips of land on the roadside, outside of their hedges.' He also derides 'the agricultural writers' who 'tell us, indeed, that labourers in agriculture are much better off as farm servants, than they would be as small proprietors,' for 'if property is a good and desirable thing, the very smallest quantity of it is good and desirable.' It was obvious to Mr. Laing that the forty families of two or three Norwegian highland glens, 'each possessing and living on its own little spot of ground and farming well or ill, as the case might be, were in a better and happier state, and formed a more rationally constituted society, than if the whole belonged to one of these families (and it would be no great estate), while the other thirty-nine families were tenants and farmers.'
Mr. Laing found the happy agricultural population of Norway 'much better lodged than our labouring and middling classes, even in the south of Scotland;' and that no nation was at that period either better housed, or so well provided with fuel. The standard of living appeared to be higher in Norway than in most of our Scotch highland districts, although the materials were the same, namely, oatmeal, barley meal, potatoes, fish—fresh and salted—cheese, butter, and milk. He understood that it was even usual for the yeoman farmers to have animal food—'salt beef and black-puddings'—at least twice a week. At all events, he says, four meals a day formed the regular fare, and with two of those meals even the labourers had a glass of home-made brandy, distilled from potatoes by the yeoman, who 'could malt and distil in every way he pleased,' and thereby 'make free use of his agricultural produce,' with the result of 'increasing the general prosperity, improving the condition of the people, and promoting the increase of their numbers.'[7]
There was, at the time of Mr. Laing's residence in Norway, 'small difference in the way of living between high and low, because every man lived from the produce of his farm, and observed the utmost simplicity and economy with regard to everything that took money out of his pocket.' Furniture and clothes, except the yeoman's Sunday hat, were all home-made. 'Here was a whole population, in an old European country, dealing direct with Nature, as it were, for every article, without the intervention of money, or even of barter.' It was only the small yeomen on the verge of the Fjeld, or in the glens, far above the level of the land producing corn, and the inhabitants of districts less favoured by nature, 'whose common bread consisted of the bark of trees, mixed and ground up with ill-ripened oats; but even in their case, trout, dried and salted for winter, was no inconsiderable part of their provision, their houses being, at the same time, comfortable, though small, with wooden floors and glass windows.
Apart from these exceptionally situated proprietors, Mr. Laing found there really was 'no difference between the residence of a public functionary, of a clergyman, or of a gentleman of larger property and that of a Bonde, or peasant. The latter are as well, as commodiously and even showily, lodged as the former can be, and the properties are as good.' Mr. Laing, however, makes a reservation under this head in respect of the 'cultivated classes,' as being indisputably superior in mental acquirements to the yeoman farmer, and who lived in the same manner as the corresponding classes in England.
Towards the end of his stay in Norway, Mr. Laing often heard 'from the most intelligent men in the country' that the yeoman farmer lived too high; indulged too much in expensive luxuries, as coffee and sugar; in frequent and expensive entertainments at each other's houses; in carrioles, sledges, and harness of a costly kind; and even in a horse or two more than the farm work required; and he certainly thought this had resulted in a general want of money among them to pay even the most trifling taxes and other sums. A man with land worth three or four thousand dollars, and with horses, cows, and all sorts of products in abundance, was often at a loss for five or ten dollars. Nevertheless, he was of opinion that 'the increase of the tastes and habits which belong to property tended to keep population within the bounds of what can be comfortably subsisted, and without which the increase of subsistence would tend to evil rather than good.' It was, indeed, 'a good thing that they all had the ideas, habits, and character of people possessed of independent property upon which they were living without any care about increasing it, and free from the anxiety and fever of money making or money losing.'
Their subsistence, Mr. Laing exultingly and repeatedly points out, was derived mainly from husbandry, carried on under less favourable conditions of soil, climate, crops, and pasturage than in the Scotch highlands;—
'but on the simple Norwegian system, to live on the produce of the land being the main object, and the labourer (the cotter) being paid chiefly in land, a good crop would be an unmingled blessing; whereas in countries where agriculture is carried on as a manufacture, a succession of good crops may glut the markets, ruin the tenant, and even reduce the money wages of the labourer. In Norway neither good nor bad crops can affect the proportion of population to the land that could in ordinary seasons subsist on it. Paying no rent, the Norwegian yeoman farmer is not usually employed in prospective improvements, but simply in raising food, so that he can see at once whether the land is sufficient to produce subsistence for himself and his labourers. If grain and potatoes for the use of the farm, and a little surplus for sale to pay the land-tax and buy luxuries with, can be raised by the farm, all the purposes of farming in Norway are answered.
On the subject of pauperism, Mr. Laing alleges that 'the dread of poverty was less influential in Norway, where extreme destitution is as rare as great wealth, and where there is so much less difference in the comforts and consideration of the richer and poorer classes.' The indigent were farmed out for a week or so at a time among the yeomen farmers, 'whose poor-rate like the tithes of the Church, was too inconsiderable to mention.' The state of property, and its general diffusion throughout the social body, had also, he had no doubt, a beneficial effect on the moral condition of the people. 'The desire for wealth being considerably blunted, it was not the same actuating, engrossing principle of human action, the spring of much that was evil and immoral being thus removed.' Only one case of downright drunkenness—that of a Laplander—had come under his personal observation, and it was only on special occasions that the yeoman farmer could be seen a little elated. His theory, however (we may remark in passing), respecting the influence of property on the moral condition of the people is not supported by other facts which he quotes, namely, that owing to the restraints upon marriage, 'exercised as in Paris or London, by a high standard of living,' the 'proportion of illegitimate to legitimate children in Norway was 1 in 5,' while in a parish he specifies, it was (between 1826 and 1830) 'as high as 1 in 3-26/136.' He mentions that engagements between couples lasted generally one, two, and often several years, especially in the case of servants in husbandry waiting for a house and land to settle in as cotters. In such cases, he says, 'it too often happened that the privileged kindness between betrothed parties was carried too far,' and 'the betrothed became a mother before she was a wife.'
We quit this painful phase of peasant proprietorship with the observation that, notwithstanding a still wider diffusion of property and of moral qualities which, according to Mr. Laing, that diffusion is calculated to engender, 8.38[8] per cent. of the live children born in Norway between 1866 and 1870 were born out of wedlock, the corresponding proportion in 1836 having been 7.07 per cent. It is natural to find, under these circumstances, that the marriage rate was 6.84 per 1000 of the population in 1866-75 against 7.31 per 1000 between 1834 and 1836, with a fractional decrease of the total number of births in the former period, the average per family remaining slightly over four.