The quantity of the harvest will be great. If the quality be bad, owing to wet weather, the price will be still lower than it would have been in case of dry weather. The price, therefore, must come down; and if the newspapers were conducted by men who had any sense of honour or shame, those men must be covered with confusion.
RIDE THROUGH THE NORTH-EAST PART OF SUSSEX, AND ALL ACROSS KENT, FROM THE WEALD OF SUSSEX, TO DOVER.
Worth (Sussex),
Friday, 29 August 1823.
I have so often described the soil and other matters appertaining to the country between the Wen and this place that my readers will rejoice at being spared the repetition here. As to the harvest, however, I find that they were deluged here on Tuesday last, though we got but little, comparatively, at Kensington. Between Mitcham and Sutton they were making wheat-ricks. The corn has not been injured here worth notice. Now and then an ear in the butts grown; and grown wheat is a sad thing! You may almost as well be without wheat altogether. However, very little harm has been done here as yet.
At Walton Heath I saw a man who had suffered most terribly from the game-laws. He saw me going by, and came out to tell me his story; and a horrible story it is, as the public will find, when it shall come regularly and fully before them. Apropos of game-works: I asked who was the Judge at the Somersetshire Assizes the other day. A correspondent tells me that it was Judge Burrough. I am well aware that, as this correspondent observes, “gamekeepers ought not to be shot at.” This is not the point. It is not a gamekeeper in the usual sense of that word; it is a man seizing another without a warrant. That is what it is; and this, and Old Ellenborough’s Act, are new things in England, and things of which the laws of England, “the birthright of Englishmen,” knew nothing. Yet farmer Voke ought not to have shot at the gamekeeper, or seizer, without warrant: he ought not to have shot at him; and he would not had it not been for the law that put him in danger of being transported on the evidence of this man. So that it is clearly the terrible law that, in these cases, produces the violence. Yet, admire with me, reader, the singular turn of the mind of Sir James Mackintosh, whose whole soul appears to have been long bent on the “amelioration of the Penal Code,” and who has never said one single word about this new and most terrible part of it! Sir James, after years of incessant toil, has, I believe, succeeded in getting a repeal of the laws for the punishment of “witchcraft,” of the very existence of which laws the nation was unacquainted. But the devil a word has he said about the game-laws, which put into the gaols a full third part of the prisoners, and to hold which prisoners the gaols have actually been enlarged in all parts of the country! Singular turn of mind! Singular “humanity!” Ah! Sir James knows very well what he is at. He understands the state of his constituents at Knaresborough too well to meddle with game-laws. He has a “friend,” I dare say, who knows more about game-laws than he does. However, the poor witches are safe: thank Sir James for that. Mr. Carlile’s sister and Mrs. Wright are in gaol, and may be there for life! But the poor witches are safe. No hypocrite: no base pretender to religion; no atrocious, savage, black-hearted wretch, who would murder half mankind rather than not live on the labours of others; no monster of this kind can now persecute the poor witches, thanks to Sir James who has obtained security for them in all their rides through the air, and in all their sailings upon the horseponds!
Tonbridge Wells (Kent),
Saturday, 30 August.
I came from Worth about seven this morning, passed through East Grinstead, over Holthigh Common, through Ashurst, and thence to this place. The morning was very fine, and I left them at Worth, making a wheat-rick. There was no show for rain till about one o’clock, as I was approaching Ashurst. The shattering that came at first I thought nothing of; but the clouds soon grew up all round, and the rain set in for the afternoon. The buildings at Ashurst (which is the first parish in Kent on quitting Sussex) are a mill, an alehouse, a church, and about six or seven other houses. I stopped at the alehouse to bait my horse; and, for want of bacon, was compelled to put up with bread and cheese for myself. I waited in vain for the rain to cease or to slacken, and the want of bacon made me fear as to a bed. So, about five o’clock, I, without great coat, got upon my horse, and came to this place, just as fast and no faster than if it had been fine weather. A very fine soaking! If the South Downs have left any little remnant of the hooping-cough, this will take it away to be sure. I made not the least haste to get out of the rain, I stopped, here and there, as usual, and asked questions about the corn, the hops, and other things. But the moment I got in I got a good fire, and set about the work of drying in good earnest. It costing me nothing for drink, I can afford to have plenty of fire. I have not been in the house an hour; and all my clothes are now as dry as if they had never been wet. It is not getting wet that hurts you, if you keep moving while you are wet. It is the suffering of yourself to be inactive while the wet clothes are on your back.
The country that I have come over to-day is a very pretty one. The soil is a pale yellow loam, looking like brick earth, but rather sandy; but the bottom is a softish stone. Now-and-then, where you go through hollow ways (as at East Grinstead) the sides are solid rock. And, indeed, the rocks sometimes (on the sides of hills) show themselves above ground, and, mixed amongst the woods, make very interesting objects. On the road from the Wen to Brighton, through Godstone and over Turner’s Hill, and which road I crossed this morning in coming from Worth to East Grinstead; on that road, which goes through Lindfield, and which is by far the pleasantest coach-road from the Wen to Brighton; on the side of this road, on which coaches now go from the Wen to Brighton, there is a long chain of rocks, or, rather, rocky hills, with trees growing amongst the rocks, or apparently out of them, as they do in the woods near Ross in Herefordshire, and as they do in the Blue Mountains in America, where you can see no earth at all; where all seems rock, and yet where the trees grow most beautifully. At the place of which I am now speaking, that is to say, by the side of this pleasant road to Brighton, and between Turner’s Hill and Lindfield, there is a rock, which they call “Big-upon-Little;” that is to say, a rock upon another, having nothing else to rest upon, and the top one being longer and wider than the top of the one it lies on. This big rock is no trifling concern, being as big, perhaps, as a not very small house. How, then, came this big upon little? What lifted up the big? It balances itself naturally enough; but what tossed it up? I do not like to pay a parson for teaching me, while I have “God’s own word” to teach me; but, if any parson will tell me how big came upon little, I do not know that I shall grudge him a trifle. And if he cannot tell me this: if he say, All that we have to do is to admire and adore; then I tell him that I can admire and adore without his aid, and that I will keep my money in my pocket.
To return to the soil of this country, it is such a loam as I have described with this stone beneath; sometimes the top soil is lighter and sometimes heavier; sometimes the stone is harder and sometimes softer; but this is the general character of it all the way from Worth to Tonbridge Wells. This land is what may be called the middle kind. The wheat crop about 20 to 24 bushels to an acre, on an average of years. The grass fields not bad, and all the fields will grow grass; I mean make upland meadows. The woods good, though not of the finest. The land seems to be about thus divided: 3-tenths woods, 2-tenths grass, a tenth of a tenth hops, and the rest corn-land. These make very pretty surface, especially as it is a rarity to see a pollard tree, and as nobody is so beastly as to trim trees up like the elms near the Wen. The country has no flat spot in it; yet the hills are not high. My road was a gentle rise or a gentle descent all the way. Continual new views strike the eye; but there is little variety in them: all is pretty, but nothing strikingly beautiful. The labouring people look pretty well. They have pigs. They invariably do best in the woodland and forest and wild countries. Where the mighty grasper has all under his eye, they can get but little. These are cross-roads, mere parish roads; but they are very good. While I was at the alehouse at Ashurst, I heard some labouring men talking about the roads; and they having observed that the parish roads had become so wonderfully better within the last seven or eight years, I put in my word, and said: “It is odd enough, too, that the parish roads should become better and better as the farmers become poorer and poorer!” They looked at one another, and put on a sort of expecting look; for my observation seemed to ask for information. At last one of them said, “Why, it is because the farmers have not the money to employ men, and so they are put on the roads.” “Yes,” said I, “but they must pay them there.” They said no more, and only looked hard at one another. They had, probably, never thought about this before. They seemed puzzled by it, and well they might, for it has bothered the wigs of boroughmongers, parsons and lawyers, and will bother them yet. Yes, this country now contains a body of occupiers of the land, who suffer the land to go to decay for want of means to pay a sufficiency of labourers; and, at the same time, are compelled to pay those labourers for doing that which is of no use to the occupiers! There, Collective Wisdom! Go: brag of that! Call that “the envy of surrounding nations and the admiration of the world.”