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Leader (1850-1860), 14th September 1850, Edition Town of 1, Page 589, Untitled Article

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      Untitled Article

      THE IiANDOWNEBS AND THE BTXTCHEBS . An aggrieved landowner , smarting under the operation of free trade , in the shape of cheapened corn and cattle , suggests that some method should be taken to prevent the " middlemen , " meaning butchers and cornfactors , from obtaining so large a share of the price of farm produce as they now receive . In a pamphlet on " The Merits and Tendencies of Free Trade and Protection , " he recommends the landowners and farmers to form associations for the direct sale of their produce to the public , ' without the intervention of middlemen . " He

      complains that the trade only allows him 3 £ d . per lb ., after deducting commission and cost of carriage , for JteajyMaful ox beef , which they retail at 7 d . per lb . He quotes another case where a man received only about 2 d . per lb . for several beasts , and , on sending to the butcher fox a piece of one of the same animals when slaughtered , he was charged 6 jd . per lb . for it . As the indignant landowner justly remarks : — * ' The very idea of giving a butcher one-half the value of a fat ox to induce him to cut it up and sell it to his customers , appears too preposterous to be entertained , much more to be submitted to . "

      The remedy which he recommends to his fellow-sufferers is that they should establish for themselves slaughter-houses and shambles in every city , town , and large village , and engage a butcher and assistant " to dress the fat stock , to superintend the shambles on market days , and to dispose of the meat , assisted by the owners of the slaughtered stock . " "Were this done , he is of opinion that the agriculturists would get the ordinary market price for their produce , while the public would ob . tain " sound English-fed meat . " We know not what favour this scheme may find in the eyes of the farmers , but it does not seem to have much attraction for the public . This

      landowner wishes to put down the competitive system so far as middlemen are concerned , but he would put all the butcher ' s profits into his own pocket . What would the public gain by such a change ? They want some new method by which they can reap the full benefit of free-trade in food , and this method would only enable them , to buy from one butcher instead of another . What should hinder the consumers of " beef from forming associations to purchase cattle at wholesale prices , by which , if the landowner ' s statements be correct , they might have their butcher ' s meat at little more than half the price they now pay for it ?

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      THE RESULT OF CIVILIZATION . The reporter of the Times , in his notice of the leavetaking dinner of the Canterbury Colonists , speaks of the voluntary exiles as leaving their native land to seek at the Antipodes , " a better reward for their labour than the competition which is the inevitable result of civilization will enable them to obtain in the place of their birth . " Only too correct . But , is it not a very natural question for any curious enquirer to ask , whether our enterprising , industrious classes cannot escape this melancholy result of civilization without going to the Antipodes ? We cannot help fancying that it might be so , unless poor old England is doomed .

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      SOCIAL REFORM . EPISTOLJE OBSCUROR . UM VIRORUM . VII . —The Land : its Bondage . To David Masson . Scptembei 12 , 1850 . My dear Masson , —Your brief note puts new heart into me , like a draught of wine drunk in the saddle . Not the less because I was in tolerably good heart before . As a nation we have made grievous mistakes , but I do think that we are awakening to a sense of our aberrations—like the somnambulist awakening in the night and turning to his home again .

      Perhaps there never was a time when dogma , whether of bigotry or scepticism , was less stiffnecked . In matters of opinion , we are learning that it is safe to talk freely , and that really welldisposed persons , even " respectable " persons , are not pledged to exile us from society because we take counsel frankly . We are learning to see through that trick of the ceconomists which , when you ask the condition of a people , shows you the nourishing multiplication and high condition of the goods in the country : we are learning to ask for a

      sight of the men , and women , and their children ; not at all content with the dictum of the quack who makes his examination of the shop , surveys the piecegoods rather than the tongue , feels the master ' s till in lieu of the workman's pulse , and pronounces the labourer in robust , comfortable health , because the shop looks well . The men and women , we now ask , how are they ? And this subject of the land of England and its embezzlement by a party is fastening upon the public mind . Symptoms of it are seen everywhere—signs that

      the public mind has got hold of the right thing . We have not to make a movement , but only to stimulate it , and to develop its self-reliance by developing its attention . The Chartists were among the first to seize that strictly practical and national idea , and , although no final success has attended Mr . O'Connor ' s experiments , the error lies in the details rather than the main idea—that the

      people must renew their hold on the land , gradually taken from them . The Reformers of the somewhat old-fashioned " Radical" school have got hold of the idea—hence their Freehold Land Societies , and their organ the Freeholder ; a project in the mind of its authors not political but ceconomical , yet not the less social , nor the less

      showing the current of thought . I say the working classes and the middle classes are thinking of these things , actively , independently , earnestly , concurrently—the two largest sections of the people . Do not you and I know what such tendencies of thought mean ; especiall y when the hundreds of thousands , and the millions are thinking against the supine possession of the few thousands , the land- " owners " ?

      For their possession is supine : they are doing nothing to strengthen their position , either by strenuously exerting themselves to perform their " trust , " and so to supersede the necessity of revoking it ; nor by amending the condition of the people , and thus superseding the desire for change . I do not forget exceptions , like that of the Duke of Bedford ; but , though honourable in their degree , they scarcely affect the moral state of their class ; as the pure drops from Heaven scarcely dilute the stagnant pool corrupting for years , but rather stir up its noisomeness the more .

      The " owners" of the land of the English people perform their trust in such style that , while some few quietists are talking feebly about amending the state of the poor by " home colonization , " the owners are continuing that process of home exile which is driving the labourer off the land to dwell in towns—returning only to labour upon itneither to rest upon the bosom of his mother earth , nor to feed upon it ; not to breathe or sleep upon it ; but only to draw the food of its bosom into the cornucopia of the landlord , and then to go back "to earn a settlement" in the town .

      The town and the land-owner are contending with each other to repudiate the liability on behalf of the people—trade and agriculture deny the people . " Am I my brother's keeper ? " asks the landowner , speaking of the tiller of the land . And the more intelligent ceconomists sanction this reverting of the public mind to the land . See what John Stuart Mill says of small holdings ; how in his pages the state of the Tuscan peasant—who is small farmer and labourer mixed in one—

      contrasts with that of the English Abel . Now , I know something of this Tuscan peasant , for I have lived with him and his family as familiarly as with any others of my friends , and I know him to be a healthy , contented , well conducted , intelligent man , though as ignorant as sin ; he does not " improve , " but he has the faculty , if a priestly blight did not suppress all movement ; and meanwhile the Tuscan peasant lives his life—the servant of nature , not the slave of a land- " owner" or

      farmer , with the scourge of a workhouse test at his back . But I shall recur to this subject when I deal with the bondage of industry , essentially tied up with the bondage of the land : I now only mention it , to show how the most distinguished English oeconomist is impressed with the real human part of this matter . Again , see the admirable letter of Harriet Martineau , in a recent number of the Leader , averring that social reform must rest on the land as its basis . See the general current of the matter-of-fact reports in the Morning Chronicle , showing the bondage of industry divorced from the land .

      It is not only because the land must be better served than it can be while its " owner " or trustee is content , by the present system , to get out of it for his own share enough to support many men , so that he cares not that it shall produce all it can ; for , if he has more than he can want , why should he desire yet more ? To him , satiated with the

      produce of the abundant carse , a desert Glen Tilt is a piquant variety—all the better for being desert . It is not only that " the system , " which the land" owner " maintains lest his own fat lot should go with it , induces the farmer to take manifold more land than he can serve ; making him keep up the perpetual cry that he has not enough capital [ or " stock" ] to work it all , and so making him act the dog in

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      No . VIII . — Religion : its Unity . To Thornton Hunt . September 12 , 1850 . Dear Thornton , — "Will you give me leave to offer a few words of comment on a sentence in your Social Reform Letter , No . IV . "We apply to it" ( the notion of a Supreme Deity ) " the operations of our reason , and that" ( our reason ) , "following our senses only part way—for the senses have a greater scope than the reason- — we fall back on the material idea of Pantheism . " * The proposition , that our senses have a greater scope than our reason , will set all our

      metaphysicians of the old school into a state of highly rarified indignation ; but it is nevertheless true . I can see a very remote fixed starK faintly glancing its rays , "pinnacled dim in the intense inane , " as Shelley says in his Prometheus , I can actually see the star . My reason can make nothing of it ; and my reason knows , by virtue of its own best exercise , that to sit scowling over a slate full of figures and calculations of distance , and time that would be required for passing through that distance , is not reasoning about the star at all , but merely trying to bring it within the range of astronomical knowledge—a doubtful result in all cases , within mil-

      Untitled Article

      the manger to all that he holds in surplusage . It is not only that the agriculture of England so far needs improvement that , actually abiding in the richest market of the world , it gets on ill and perpetually clamours about " distress . " It is not only that the industry of England is divorced from the land of England ! , and merely allowed to touch it for the pleasure and profit of the land- " owner . " But besides all these things—and you , Masson , will recal the many instances with which I might burden this letter , if it were well to jjause instead of proceeding with my duty of bringing well-known

      ideas together—besides all these things , the race of Englishmen loses its moral vigour by being divorced from the soil of England : we have bul a dwindled and degenerate nationality , because , of the millions of Englishmen , very few are bound to the soil . To the largest section of labouring English it is the heavy raw material of a drudging , hungry , ill-paid , ungrateful toil ; alien ; more hateful than the grudging " union . " No : if you arouse the son of the English race henceforth to resist the invader , you must call upon him to defend his native slum , and resist the desecration of

      his workhouse . You cannot have a national feeling alienated from the soil ; and that is one among many things which make our commercial prosperity , such as it is , a very uncertain index of our national soundness and safety . Do not suppose that I would seek to arouse the labouring classes to a seizure of the land , or would incite a revolution for the purpose of general confiscation . I would , indeed , arouse the race of Englishmen to a sense of its alienage from their land in bondage to the ' * owner ; " but only that I

      might help in adding the weight of national numbers to that same process of gradual restoration which dictates the efforts of the Chartist founding his little colonies with unfamiliar tillage , of the Freehold Associations , of the new ceconomists , and even of Lord Campbell and the Crown lawyers facilitating "the transfer" of land . It is the land" owner " and " trustee " class that has been guilty of confiscation , for such is the encroachment on common or park ; since , as man cannot live by

      bread alone , he needs those reserves of natural recreation-land . At present I onl y insist that the land of England is not doing its duty—it is alienated from the English race and given up to a clique ; it is not freely accessible to the industry of England ; it does not produce a fraction of what it might for the English ; it does not afford a free standing-place for the foot of the Englishmanwho is a " trespasser " on his own soil ; it does not afford a domain in possession of the race , the ground of its nationality , the land of its love .

      Among free races , the race of England is a landless race . How a prompt and practical commencement may be made in the restoration of the soil embezzled from its native race , without harm to the embezzlers , I will discuss when we have glanced at the bondage of industry in the trading town . I am grateful , Masson , for your attention to these letters , which can be no more than suggestions of problems to be worked out elsewhere . Perhaps not with the pen . Thornton Hunt .

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      • In the original this sentence was rendered unintelligible by a misprint-- " a way" for way . ' *

      Untitled Article

      Sept . 14 , 1850 . ] W&t fLeatfCV * 589

  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), Sept. 14, 1850, page 589, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1853/page/13/