Crying for the Light Volume Iii Part 15

'Well, then,' said Wentworth, 'I will. A gentleman sends me a scheme of a cooperative home colony, which will give the settlers three good meals a day, a house, a full suit of clothing every year, education for their children, and an allotment of half an acre of land, which shall be entirely at the disposal of the head of the family so long as he makes a good use of it and renders proper service during the regular working hours. For the purchase of fuel or tea and coffee, and such things as cannot be grown in this climate, the director will sell in the public market any surplus produce such as eggs, b.u.t.ter and poultry, far too much of which we get from abroad. One-sixth of the harvest and other produce will be sold to pay the salaries of director and foremen. A farm of three hundred and forty acres in the Isle of Sheppey, for instance, can be had if it be deemed desirable. If we get a population of five hundred on it, fifty acres of wheat will supply the settlement with all the bread that can be eaten there. If the cows were stall-fed, one hundred acres of land would keep over a hundred head of cattle, and such a herd would supply all the requisite milk, cheese, b.u.t.ter, beef and hides every year in abundant quant.i.ties. Flax could be cultivated and linen woven. A flock of sheep could be tended on the estate sufficient to yield five pounds of wool every year per head of the population. There would be no expense for manure, as the settlement would provide it all. Are you weary?' said Wentworth.

'Not particularly. Pray proceed. But why not try it-why not begin a scheme of the kind at once?'

'All we have to do is to get the people back to the land. By the establishment of such home colonies work will be offered in rural districts to men and women who would otherwise be driven into our great cities to increase the pauperism which threatens our whole social edifice. The scheme, if carried out, will encourage habits of industry and thrift-unlike the work given in our workhouses, which demoralizes and degrades the recipients; it will help the societies inst.i.tuted to distribute charity, as it will offer strong men and women healthy labour rather than doles, which they are ashamed to accept, which they do not ask for, and which, when taken, have a tendency to break down that spirit of independence and self-reliance which lies at the foundation of all decent manhood; and lastly, and this is an immense benefit, it would prevent land now in cultivation from becoming a desert. It seems to me this of itself is no common recommendation of the plan, when farmers are giving up farming, and their farms either allowed to run to waste or farmed by the landlords at a heavy loss. Our great Free Traders never dreamt of this when they got Parliament and the people to destroy Protection, yet such are the facts we have to face.'

'And yet there are people who believe in Cobden still,' said Buxton.

'I knew him well,' said Wentworth, 'and a better man never lived. He was right in the main, though his enthusiasm led him astray, and no wonder.

Let me, in the language of Goldsmith remind you-

'"How wide the limits stand Between a splendid and a happy land."'

Buxton laughed when Wentworth had finished his rhapsody. Buxton was given to laughter. He was not a man who took life very seriously.

Perhaps he would have done better had he done so as far as his own personal interests were concerned. As Swift said of Arbuthnot, it might be said of him, that he knew his art better than his trade.

'Wait a moment,' he said, as he rushed out of the room to his own den, whence he returned with an old faded handbill, which was as follows:

SPENCE'S PLAN

for Parochial Partners.h.i.+ps in the Land is the only effectual remedy for the distress and oppressions of the people.

The Landholders are not Proprietors-in-Chief; they are but the _Stewards_ of the Public, for the LAND IS THE PEOPLE'S FARM.

The expenses of the Government do not cause the misery that surrounds us, but the enormous exactings of those _Unjust Stewards_, Landed monopoly is indeed equally contrary to the benign Spirit of Christianity, and destructive of the Independence and Morality of Mankind.

'The Profit of the Earth is for all.'

Yet how deplorably dest.i.tute are the great ma.s.s of the People!

Nor is it possible for their situations to be radically amended but by the establishment of a system founded on the immutable bases of Nature and Justice.

Experience demonstrates its necessity, and the Rights of Manhood require it for their presentation.

To obtain this important object by extending the knowledge of the above system, the Society of Spencean Philanthropies has been established. Further information of its principles may be obtained by attending any of its sectional meetings, where subjects are discussed calculated to enlighten the human understanding; and where, also, the regulations of the society may be procured, containing a complete development of the Spencean system. Every individual is admitted free of expense who will conduct himself with decorum.

'I never heard of Spence,' said Wentworth.

'Of course not,' said Buxton. 'In these days of boasted progress we know nothing of what has been. Radicals always ignore the past. You really need a little enlightenment. Shall I enlighten you?'

'By all means.'

'It was in 1775 Mr. Spence began his public career. Like most original thinkers, he commenced in the country. His political opinions were first p.r.o.nounced in the form of a lecture read before the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775, and printed immediately afterwards, from which time, he says, he went on continually publis.h.i.+ng them in some shape or other. They are fully explained in his "Const.i.tution of Spensonia: a Country in Fairy Land Situated Somewhere between Utopia and Oceana."

According to his scheme, the land belongs to the people, and individuals should rent the land from their respective parishes, the rent const.i.tuting the national revenue, and the surplus, after all expenses were paid, was to be divided equally amongst all the paris.h.i.+oners. The larger estates were to be let for one-and-twenty years, and at the expiration of that term relet by public auction, the smaller ones by the year, and the larger ones sub-divided according to the increase of population. The legislative power was to be vested in an annual Parliament elected by universal suffrage, women voting as well as men.

The executive was to be in the hands of a council of twenty-five, half of which was to be renewed annually. Every fifth day there was to be a Sabbatical rest, not a Sabbath, for no provision was made for public wors.h.i.+p, and in the new world no mention was to be made of parsons, though the const.i.tution was to be proclaimed in a more or less religious form. At the end of the pamphlet, as it was published, was an epilogue, intimating the flight of poverty and misery from this lower world, and there was an appeal:

'"Let us all join heart and hand Through every town and city, Of every age and every s.e.x, Young men and maidens pretty, To haste this golden age's reign On every hill and valley, Then Paradise shall greet our eyes Through every street and alley."'

'Ah,' said Wentworth, 'I see there is nothing new under the sun.'

'But the taxes?' said Buxton. He continued: 'This scheme was published long before the French Revolution broke out. Up in the north there had risen a solitary and original thinker who advocated female voting, universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, and had got hold of the idea-which has led many of our modern apostles to fame and fortune-that the land lay at the root of the Condition of England question, that all private property in land must be destroyed, and that it must be done at once.

'Spence, then, was, to use the cant of the present day, a Progressist.

To him belongs the honour of having first presented the land question in all its bearings to the general public. What was his reward?-a Government prosecution with a fine of 20 and a year's imprisonment at Shrewsbury. Well might a n.o.bleman, as Wilberforce tells us, show him the picture of crucified Christ, and bid him mark the end of a Reformer.

'One cause of Spence's failure is obvious-he tried to do too much. "When I began to study," says he, "I found everything erected on certain unalterable principles. I found every art and science a perfect whole.

Nothing was in anarchy but language and politics. But both of these I reduced to order; the one by a new alphabet, the other by a new const.i.tution." Of what he called his natural or philosophical orthography we know but little, save that one of his works was printed in it. Had he aimed at less he would have accomplished more. He was no vulgar demagogue; that trade was not a paying one when Spence proclaimed himself "the unpaid advocate of the disinherited seed of Adam." "This, gentlemen," he exclaimed when on his trial-he was too poor to retain attorney or counsel for his defence-"this, gentlemen, is the Rights of Man; and upon this Book of Nature have I built my commonwealth, and the Gates of h.e.l.l shall not prevail against it." He added, as well he might: "I solemnly avow that what I have written and published has been done with as good a conscience and as much philanthropy as ever possessed the heart of any prophet-philosopher or apostle that ever existed."

'It was all in vain. The Government of the day feared the result of his teaching. Had he set up for a philosopher and clothed his ideas in mystic language, perhaps he might have been overlooked; but he published what he called "Pig's Meat" for the people, and that made him dangerous.

He had no friends and became an easy prey. He was poor, he stood alone, and was generally held to be little better than a lunatic; even the professed friends of liberty kept aloof from him. Well might be exclaim, as he did before his judges, "Perhaps, my lords, I have entertained too high an opinion of human nature, for I do not find mankind very grateful clients." After his trial and imprisonment Spence became an itinerant vendor of books and pamphlets, chiefly his own works, which he carried about in a vehicle constructed for the purpose. He died somewhere about 1812, while Britons were hard at work on sea and in every land in Europe setting right public matters according to their fas.h.i.+on-paying foreigners to fight for their own independence, singing all the while that they never would be slaves.'

'We are wiser now,' said Wentworth.

'Perhaps,' was the cynical reply. 'You are everlastingly talking,' he continued, 'of an outcast London; but, after all, it is on outcast London that the chief blame of its misery lies. Let us have an Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and at once, in outcast London, where boys and girls become fathers and mothers before they are out of their teens, and when they have no chance of earning a living, and know not and care not for the little ones they bring into the world. In respectable London a man does not marry till he fancies he can keep a wife. In outcast London it is the reverse. In such a case population represents the thoughtlessness of the nation. In many cases it represents the most brutal selfishness. Men and women can't complain if they reap what they have sown; but have not we a right to say a word on behalf of the children? For men and women to bring up their children in the way in which it is done in outcast London is a crime. To bring a baby into the world to lead a diseased and wretched life where it can never get a mouthful of wholesome food, a ray of sunlight, a particle of fresh air, to curse a young life that G.o.d meant to be so full of bliss, is a crime so awful that we can see no fitting punishment. To improve outcast London the first thing is to stop the supply. There is no remedy if reckless pauperism is to be allowed to grow rampant in our midst.

'One word more,' said Wentworth. 'Suppose we think more of the decent poor, and less of the outcast. Suppose we give the respectable working man as much sympathy as we give his good-for-nothing brother. Suppose we take the sober operative as much by the hand as we do the inebriate.

Suppose we act on the idea that industry is honourable, and that the men who live by it are men to be honoured; that the world with all its blessings is for the worker, whether he tills the soil or ploughs the deep, whether he builds the loftiest viaduct or burrows in the deepest mine.'

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

CONSULTATION.

They were sitting one morning at breakfast-that pleasantest of meals, unless you have to be up at an unusually early hour to catch the train and be off to London. Modern life is not such an improvement on that of the past as we are apt to fancy. The breakfast was the one meal at which people could meet and discuss matters-private, local, political, literary, or religious, in an informal way. We have no pleasant breakfast in these more ostentatious days, when society is too large to admit of friends.h.i.+p; but it seems to me that in my younger days we got a good deal more pleasure out of life. No wonder, then, that we sigh for the good old times, and long for their revival; that we have Queen Anne furniture, and houses built in what is called the Elizabethan style, and an effort to do away with the rail, and to revive the far-famed coaches with four horses which were the delight of the nation in the Georgian days.

I can call well to mind the time when I held the coachman of a certain Royal Mail, which made its appearance in our benighted village about breakfast-time, to have been one of the most eminent men of the day, and felt at least a foot taller when, as was his wont, he gave me, boy as I was, a friendly nod of recognition. As to seeing the horses changed, that was a scene I would not have missed on any account. How we all stood admiring as the panting steeds, which had galloped gloriously their stage, were led sweating away, and the fresh team, with cloths on, and their hoofs newly-cleaned, and everything about them bright and s.h.i.+ny, took the vacant places! What a pleasure it was to see them as they stood pawing the ground, impatient to be off! How glad we were when the coachman, as he climbed up into his lofty seat, and gathered up the reins in his capacious hand, gave the signal, 'Let 'em go!' How beautiful it was to us lads to see the coach bound off like a thing of life, while the guard blew a farewell flourish on his horn, and the horses settled down steadily to their work after a playful flourish or two!

Woe is me! I, and other miserable sinners like unto me, come to town through tunnels, and over the tops of houses, or along cuttings in which one gets an unlovely view of the backs of dirty houses and slovenly yards, in a closely-packed railway carriage, where we can neither talk, nor hear, nor read, and grow nervous as the engine screams and shrieks on all occasions, while the railway porters close the doors with a bang sufficient to send one into a fit. Life in our railway age is hard for us all.

Wentworth and his wife were at breakfast, as I have said. London had been disturbed by rumours as to the claim to the t.i.tles and estates of the deceased Baronet. Newspapers were not so full of twaddle as they are now; that sp.a.w.n of the press, the newspaper interviewer, had not as yet sprung into existence. But still then, as now, there was a great deal of unmeaning gossip that did manage to find its way into the columns of the weekly and daily journals. It has ever been so. Apparently, it seems as if it ever will be so. The fas.h.i.+on originated in the servants' hall. 'A chambermaid to a lady of my acquaintance,' writes Dean Swift, 'when talking with one of her fellow-servants, said: "I hear it is all over London already that I am going to leave my lady."' In this respect she resembled the footman who, being newly married, desired his comrade to tell him freely 'what the town really thought of it.' From the servants'

hall the habit spread to Grub Street, and thence to the West-End, to become the leading feature in journals only written for men, or gentlemen, or ladies, as circ.u.mstances required. We laugh at the old divine who wrote a threepenny pamphlet against France, and who, being in the country, hearing of a French privateer hovering along the coast, fled to town and told his friends that they need not wonder at his haste, which he accounted for from the fact that the King of France, having got intelligence of his whereabouts, had sent a privateer on purpose to carry him away. How ridiculous was good Dr. Gee, Prebendary of Westminster, who wrote a small paper against Popery! Being ordered to travel on the Continent for his health, he disguised his person and a.s.sumed another name, as he fancied he would be murdered, or put into the Inquisition.

But are we less ridiculous, or rather has not that ridiculous exaggeration of the personal, which is the foundation of newspaper twaddle, become more of a nuisance than ever?

Again, we all of us think too much of money and money-making. Is it not time that we utter a word of warning in the matter? It is inconvenient to have no money, most of us know by practical experience; but the possession of much of it is not after all a guarantee of respectability of character, or individual capacity. We call ourselves a Christian people, we profess to be actuated by Christian principles. The Master was a poor man-a carpenter's son-His disciples were poor men. If any cla.s.s are particularly referred to in the New Testament as far from the kingdom, they are the rich. All modern society is based on the opposite idea. We give the rich man the chief place in the synagogue. The society journals delight to do him honour. He has even made church-going the fas.h.i.+on. This is no age of poor geniuses. Our artists, our poets or teachers are all of the well-to-do. A Burns, or a Bloomfield, would be thought nothing of in our time. The modern woman is impossible in a poor community. When a lady writer is described in our magazines and newspapers, the writer dwells at painful length on the costliness of her surroundings; her dresses, her parties, the expensiveness of her furniture, and the signs of wealth she everywhere displays. The millions-how they toil and how miserably they live! The rich-what an idle life they lead! And then think of the way in which that wealth, which is often a curse to them, is obtained! Far away indeed is the new heaven and the new earth in which dwelleth righteousness; infamous as are the means by which the wealth we envy and admire is obtained, how ready we are to do homage to its possessor, poor as he may be in spirit, and unclean and unlovely in his life! Wentworth saw, as we all do, this unsatisfactory side of all human affairs. The time had come, he thought, for an effort for something better, for a state in which the wealth earned by the labourer should be more equitably distributed. There was a divine order in life, he believed, which had been lost sight of, and forgotten, and the result was unmitigated poverty and wretchedness. For this society was responsible, and especially its rulers, who had increased the sufferings of the poor, who had trampled on the weak, who had played into the hands of the rich and the strong; he did not believe, as some of our modern lights do, that the ma.s.ses were always right and the cla.s.ses always wrong. It seemed to him that there were good and bad amongst them all, that circ.u.mstances were such, that there was little hope of change for the better. Circ.u.mstances were too strong for the individual to conquer. Take intemperance, for instance, the main cause of England's wretchedness; how is it possible to grapple with that in society, where intoxicating drink is deemed, in most circles, a daily necessity of life?

'You must form new social conditions,' said Buxton as he entered: 'I have just left,' he said, 'a friend of mine. We were fellow students. He was the leader in all the cla.s.ses, and graduated with high honours. He took his doctor's degree and then became a clergyman, acquired great popularity, was the means of drawing together a large congregation, became one of the ornaments of the temperance platform, was for awhile a power in Exeter Hall, had everything that heart could wish, a charming wife, a comfortable income, a large family; and now he has become a sot and a drunkard, and I see no hope for him as long as he lives. I can only believe that he was born with a hereditary taint-and that after fighting against it all his life, it has broken out at last and proved his master.'

'Then you think drunkenness is a disease, and that a man is not responsible for it?'

'In many cases I do, and I smile when I hear the parson denounce him as guilty of a heinous sin, or the judge brand him as a criminal offender.

Examine the drunkard's body after death, and you see in the stomach, in the liver, in the heart and brain signs of a diseased condition. At the same time, I am ready to admit that there are many who drink out of mere cussedness or who are so wretched that they take to it for temporary relief; or who just drink because they live in a drunken set, and like to do as others around them do. Whatever the immorality, the vice, or the sin of drunkenness, in a very large number of cases the drunkard is more to be pitied than blamed, as the subject of disease. If you get him to take the pledge, the chances are that he will break it, and that the last state of that man will be worse than the first.'

'Ah! that helps me to what I have been long thinking of,' replied Wentworth.

'What is that-a community planted where no drink can be had? That is all very well; but while you are about it, you may as well go a step further.

There are other hereditary diseases besides drunkenness: why permit them?

Man is an animal,' said Buxton. 'I am, of course, speaking only from a medical point of view. What do we do with animals? Why, we stamp out the disease, and thus we get a new generation. It is thus we battle with lung disease in bullocks, swine fever and glandered horses. We must stamp out disease in men and women as we stamp it out of other animals.'

'And then pay compensation to the owner. That would be rather a costly matter.'

'No; I would put it the other way. Take, for instance, a consumptive couple in humble life. They marry early. The mother has a large family.

The father dies of consumption before he has reached middle age, after being in a hospital for months, supported at the public expense, and he leaves his children, if they live, to be supported by the parish. If there is to be compensation, it is not the State that ought to be asked to pay it. If drink be one cause of poverty, surely hereditary disease is another. In a perfect community neither should be allowed to exist.

Think of such awful things as epilepsy and insanity, and cancer and scrofula, none of which science can cure! Why not ask society to stamp them out? It is downright wickedness to allow them to be propagated in our midst.'