In Darkest England, and the Way Out

by William Booth

The land is the source of all food; only by the application of labour can the land be made fully productive. There is any amount of waste land in the world, not far away in distant Continents, next door to the North Pole, but here at our very doors. Have you ever calculated, for instance, the square miles of unused land which fringe the sides of all our railroads? No doubt some embankments are of material that would baffle the cultivating skill at a Chinese or the careful husbandry of a Swiss mountaineer; but these are exceptions. When other people talk of reclaiming Salisbury Plain, or of cultivating the bare moorlands of the bleak North, I think of the hundreds of square miles of land that lie in long ribbons on the side of each of our railways, upon which, without any cost for cartage, innumerable tons of City manure could be shot down, and the crops of which could be carried at once to the nearest market without any but the initial cost of heaping into convenient trucks. These railway embankments constitute a vast estate, capable of growing fruit enough to supply all the jam that Crosse and Blackwell ever boiled. In almost every county in England are vacant farms, and, in still greater numbers, farms but a quarter cultivated, which only need the application of an industrious population working with due incentive to produce twice, thrice, and four times as much as they yield to-day.

I am aware that there are few subjects upon which there are such fierce controversies as the possibilities of making a livelihood out of small holdings, but Irish cottiers do it, and in regions infinitely worse adapted for the purpose than our Essex corn lands, and possessing none of the advantages which civilization and co-operation place at the command of an intelligently directed body of husbandmen. Talk about the land not being worth cultivating! Go to the Swiss Valleys and examine for yourself the miserable patches of land, hewed out as it were from the heart of the granite mountains, where the cottager grows his crops and makes a livelihood. No doubt he has his Alp, where his cows pasture in summer-time, and his other occupations which enable him to supplement the scanty yield of his farm garden among the crags; but if it pays the Swiss mountaineer in the midst of the eternal snows, far removed from any market, to cultivate such miserable soil in the brief summer of the high Alps, it is impossible to believe that Englishmen, working on English soil, close to our markets and enjoying all the advantages of co-operation, cannot earn their daily bread by their daily toil. The soil of England is not unkindly, and although much is said against our climate, it is, as Mr. Russell Lowell observes, after a lengthened experience of many countries and many climes, "the best climate in the whole world for the labouring man." There are more days in the English year on which a man can work out of doors with a spade with comparative comfort than in any other country under heaven. I do not say that men will make a fortune out of the land, nor do I pretend that we can, under the grey English skies, hope ever to vie with the productiveness of the Jersey farms; but I am prepared to maintain against all comers that it is possible for an industrious man to grow his rations, provided he is given a spade with which to dig and land to dig in. Especially will this be the case with intelligent direction and the advantages of co-operation.

Is it not a reasonable supposition? It always seems to me a strange thing that men should insist that you must first transport your labourer thousands of miles to a desolate, bleak country in order to set him to work to extract a livelihood from the soil when hundreds of thousands of acres lie only half tilled at home or not tilled at all. Is it reasonable to think that you can only begin to make a living out of land when it lies several thousand miles from the nearest market, and thousands of miles from the place where the labourer has to buy his tools and procure all the necessaries of life which are not grown on the spot? If a man can make squatting pay on the prairies or in Australia, where every quarter of grain which he produces has to be dragged by locomotives across the railways of the continent, and then carried by steamers across the wide ocean, can he not equally make the operation at least sufficiently profitable to keep himself alive if you plant him with the same soil within an hour by rail of the greatest markets in the world?

The answer to this is, that you cannot give your man as much soil as he has on the prairies or in the Canadian lumber lands. This, no doubt, is true, but the squatter who settles in the Canadian backwoods does not clear his land all at once. He lives on a small portion of it, and goes on digging and delving little by little, until, after many years of Herculean labour, he hews out for himself, and his children after him, a freehold estate. Freehold estates, I admit, are not to be had for the picking up on English soil, but if a man will but work in England as they work in Canada or in Australia, he will find as little difficulty in making a livelihood here as there.

I may be wrong, but when I travel abroad and see the desperate struggle on the part of peasant proprietors and the small holders in mountainous districts for an additional patch of soil, the idea of cultivating which would make our agricultural labourers turn up their noses in speechless contempt, I cannot but think that our English soil could carry a far greater number of souls to the acre than that which it bears at present. Suppose, for instance, that Essex were suddenly to find itself unmoored from its English anchorage and towed across the Channel to Normandy, or, not to imagine miracles, suppose that an Armada of Chinese were to make a descent on the Isle of Thanet, as did the sea-kings, Hengist and Horsa, does anyone imagine for a moment that Kent, fertile and cultivated as it is, would not be regarded as a very Garden of Eden out of the odd corners of which our yellow-skinned invaders would contrive to extract sufficient to keep themselves in sturdy health? I only suggest the possibility in order to bring out clearly the fact that the difficulty is not in the soil nor in the climate, but in the lack of application of sufficient labour to sufficient land in the truly scientific way.

"What is the scientific way?" I shall be asked impatiently. I am not an agriculturist; I do not dogmatize. I have read much from many pens, and have noted the experiences of many colonies, and I have learned the lesson that it is in the school of practical labour that the most valuable knowledge is to be obtained. Nevertheless, the bulk of my proposals are based upon the experience of many who have devoted their lives to the study of the subject, and have been endorsed by specialists whose experience gives them authority to speak with unquestioning confidence.

SECTION 1.—THE FARM PROPER.

My present idea is to take an estate from five hundred to a thousand acres within reasonable distance of London. It should be of such land as will be suitable for market gardening, while having some clay on it for brick-making and for crops requiring a heavier soil. If possible, it should not only be on a line of railway which is managed by intelligent and progressive directors, but it should have access to the sea and to the river. It should be freehold land, and it should lie at some considerable distance from any town or village. The reason for the latter desideratum is obvious. We must be near London for the sake of our market and for the transmission of the commodities collected by our Household Salvage Brigade, but it must be some little distance from any town or village in order that the Colony may be planted clear out in the open away from the public house, that upas tree of civilisation. A sine qua non of the new Farm Colony is that no intoxicating liquors will be permitted within its confines on any pretext whatever. The doctors will have to prescribe some other stimulant than alcohol for residents in this Colony. But it will be little use excluding alcohol with a strong hand and by cast-iron regulations if the Colonists have only to take a short walk in order to find themselves in the midst of the "Red Lions," and the "Blue Dragons," and the "George the Fourths," which abound in every country town.

Having obtained the land I should proceed to prepare it for the Colonists. This is an operation which is essentially the same in any country. You need water supply, provisions and shelter. All this would be done at first in the simplest possible style. Our pioneer brigade, carefully selected from the competent Out-of-Works in the City Colony, would be sent down to layout the estate and prepare it for those who would come after. And here let me say that it is a great delusion to imagine that in the riffraff and waste of the labour market there are no workmen to be had except those that are worthless. Worthless under the present conditions, exposed to constant temptations to intemperance no doubt they are, but some of the brightest men in London, with some of the smartest pairs of hands, and the cleverest brains, are at the present moment weltering helplessly in the sludge from which we propose to rescue them.

I am not speaking without book in this matter. Some of my best Officers to-day have been even such as they. There is an infinite potentiality of capacity lying latent in our Provincial Tap-rooms and the City Gin Palaces if you can but get them soundly saved, and even short of that, if you can place them in conditions where they would no longer be liable to be sucked back into their old disastrous habits, you may do great things with them.