Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet by Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

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"It would be well if you did. If you parsons would show yourselves at such
places as these a little oftener, you would do more to make the people
believe your mission real, than by all the tracts and sermons in the
world."

"But, my dear cousin" (and he began to snuffle and sink his voice), "there
is so much sanguinary language, so much unsanctified impatience, you
frighten away all the meek apostolic men among the priesthood--the very
ones who feel most for the lost sheep of the flock.

"Then the parsons are either great Pharisees or great cowards, or both."

"Very likely. I was in a precious fright myself, I know, when I saw you
recognized me. If I had not felt strengthened, you know, as of course one
ought to be in all trials, by the sense of my holy calling, I think I
should have bolted at once. However, I took the precaution of bringing my
Bowie and revolver with me, in case the worst came to the worst."

"And a very needless precaution it was," said I, half laughing at the
quaint incongruity of the priestly and the lay elements in his speech. "You
don't seem to know much of working men's meetings, or working men's morals.
Why, that place was open to all the world. The proceedings will be in the
newspaper to-morrow. The whole bench of bishops might have been there, if
they had chosen; and a great deal of good it would have done them!"

"I fully agree with you, my dear fellow. No one hates the bishops more than
we true high-churchmen, I can tell you--that's a great point of sympathy
between us and the people. But I must be off. By-the-by, would you like me
to tell our friends at D * * * * that I met you? They often ask after you
in their letters, I assure you."

This was a sting of complicated bitterness. I felt all that it meant at
once. So he was in constant correspondence with them, while I--and that
thought actually drove out of my head the more pressing danger of his
utterly ruining me in their esteem, by telling them, as he had a very good
right to do, that I was going to preach Chartism to discontented mobs.

"Ah! well! perhaps you wouldn't wish it mentioned? As you like, you
know. Or, rather," and he laid an iron grasp on my arm, and dropped his
voice--this time in earnest--"as you behave, my wise and loyal cousin! Good
night."

I went home--the excitement of self-applause, which the meeting had called
up, damped by a strange weight of foreboding. And yet I could not help
laughing, when, just as I was turning into bed, Crossthwaite knocked at
my door, and, on being admitted, handed over to me a bundle wrapped up in
paper.

"There's a pair of breeks for you--not plush ones, this time, old
fellow--but you ought to look as smart as possible. There's so much in a
man's looking dignified, and all that, when he's speechifying. So I've
just brought you down my best black trousers to travel in. We're just of
a size, you know; little and good, like a Welshman's cow. And if you tear
them, why, we're not like poor, miserable, useless aristocrats; tailors
and sailors can mend their own rents." And he vanished, whistling the
"Marseillaise."

I went to bed and tossed about, fancying to myself my journey, my speech,
the faces of the meeting, among which Lillian's would rise, in spite of all
the sermons which I preached to myself on the impossibility of her being
there, of my being known, of any harm happening from the movement; but I
could not shake off the fear. If there were a riot, a rising!--If any harm
were to happen to her! If--Till, mobbed into fatigue by a rabble of such
miserable hypothetic ghosts, I fell asleep, to dream that I was going to be
hanged for sedition, and that the mob were all staring and hooting at me,
and Lillian clapping her hands and setting them on; and I woke in an agony,
to find Sandy Mackaye standing by my bedside with a light.

"Hoolie, laddie! ye need na jump up that way. I'm no' gaun to burke ye the
nicht; but I canna sleep; I'm sair misdoubtful o' the thing. It seems a'
richt, an' I've been praying for us, an' that's mickle for me, to be taught
our way; but I dinna see aught for ye but to gang. If your heart is richt
with God in this matter, then he's o' your side, an' I fear na what men may
do to ye. An' yet, ye're my Joseph, as it were, the son o' my auld age, wi'
a coat o' many colours, plush breeks included; an' gin aught take ye, ye'll
bring down my grey haffets wi' sorrow to the grave!"

The old man gazed at me as be spoke, with a deep, earnest affection I
had never seen in him before; and the tears glistened in his eyes by the
flaring candlelight, as he went on:

"I ha' been reading the Bible the nicht. It's strange how the words o't
rise up, and open themselves whiles, to puir distractit bodies; though,
maybe, no' always in just the orthodox way. An' I fell on that, 'Behold
I send ye forth as lambs in the midst o' wolves. Be ye therefore wise as
serpents an' harmless as doves;' an' that gave me comfort, laddie, for ye.
Mind the warning, dinna gang wud, whatever ye may see an' hear; it's an
ill way o' showing pity, to gang daft anent it. Dinna talk magniloquently;
that's the workman's darling sin. An' mind ye dinna go too deep wi' them.
Ye canna trust them to understand ye; they're puir foolish sheep that ha'
no shepherd--swine that ha' no wash, rather. So cast na your pearls before
swine, laddie, lest they trample them under their feet, an' turn again an'
rend ye."

He went out, and I lay awake tossing till morning, making a thousand good
resolutions--like the rest of mankind.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE MEN WHO ARE EATEN.

With many instructions from our friends, and warnings from Mackaye, I
started next day on my journey. When I last caught sight of the old man,
he was gazing fixedly after me, and using his pocket-handkerchief in a
somewhat suspicious way. I had remarked how depressed he seemed, and my own
spirits shared the depression. A presentiment of evil hung over me, which
not even the excitement of the journey--to me a rare enjoyment--could
dispel. I had no heart, somehow, to look at the country scenes around,
which in general excited in me so much interest, and I tried to lose myself
in summing up my stock of information on the question which I expected to
hear discussed by the labourers. I found myself not altogether ignorant.
The horrible disclosures of S.G.O., and the barbarous abominations of
the Andover Workhouse, then fresh in the public mind, had had their due
effect on mine; and, like most thinking artizans, I had acquainted myself
tolerably from books and newspapers with the general condition of the
country labourers.

I arrived in the midst of a dreary, treeless country, whose broad brown and
grey fields were only broken by an occasional line of dark, doleful firs,
at a knot of thatched hovels, all sinking and leaning every way but the
right, the windows patched with paper, the doorways stopped with filth,
which surrounded a beer-shop. That was my destination--unpromising enough
for any one but an agitator. If discontent and misery are preparatives for
liberty--and they are--so strange and unlike ours are the ways of God--I
was likely enough to find them there.

I was welcomed by my intended host, a little pert, snub-nosed shoemaker,
who greeted me as his cousin from London--a relationship which it seemed
prudent to accept.

He took me into his little cabin, and there, with the assistance of a
shrewd, good-natured wife, shared with me the best he had; and after supper
commenced, mysteriously and in trembling, as if the very walls might have
ears, a rambling, bitter diatribe on the wrongs and sufferings of the
labourers; which went on till late in the night, and which I shall spare my
readers: for if they have either brains or hearts, they ought to know more
than I can tell them, from the public prints, and, indeed, from their own
eyes--although, as a wise man says, there is nothing more difficult than to
make people see first the facts which lie under their own nose.

Upon one point, however, which was new to me, he was very fierce--the
customs of landlords letting the cottages with their farms, for the mere
sake of saving themselves trouble; thus giving up all power of protecting
the poor man, and delivering him over, bound hand and foot, even in the
matter of his commonest home comforts, to farmers, too penurious, too
ignorant, and often too poor, to keep the cottages in a state fit for the
habitation of human beings. Thus the poor man's hovel, as well as his
labour, became, he told me, a source of profit to the farmer, out of which
he wrung the last drop of gain. The necessary repairs were always put
off as long as possible--the labourers were robbed of their gardens--the
slightest rebellion lost them not only work, but shelter from the elements;
the slavery under which they groaned penetrated even to the fireside and to
the bedroom.

"And who was the landlord of this parish?"

"Oh! he believed he was a very good sort of man, and uncommon kind to the
people where he lived, but that was fifty miles away in another country;
and he liked that estate better than this, and never came down here, except
for the shooting."

Full of many thoughts, and tired out with my journey, I went up to bed, in
the same loft with the cobbler and his wife, and fell asleep, and dreamt of
Lillian.

* * * * *

About eight o'clock the next morning I started forth with my guide, the
shoemaker, over as desolate a country as men can well conceive. Not a house
was to be seen for miles, except the knot of hovels which we had left,
and here and there a great dreary lump of farm-buildings, with its yard
of yellow stacks. Beneath our feet the earth was iron, and the sky iron
above our heads. Dark curdled clouds, "which had built up everywhere an
under-roof of doleful grey," swept on before the bitter northern wind,
which whistled through the low leafless hedges and rotting wattles, and
crisped the dark sodden leaves of the scattered hollies, almost the only
trees in sight.

We trudged on, over wide stubbles, with innumerable weeds; over wide
fallows, in which the deserted ploughs stood frozen fast; then over clover
and grass, burnt black with frost; then over a field of turnips, where we
passed a large fold of hurdles, within which some hundred sheep stood, with
their heads turned from the cutting blast. All was dreary, idle, silent;
no sound or sign of human beings. One wondered where the people lived, who
cultivated so vast a tract of civilized, over-peopled, nineteenth-century
England. As we came up to the fold, two little boys hailed us from the
inside--two little wretches with blue noses and white cheeks, scarecrows of
rags and patches, their feet peeping through bursten shoes twice too big
for them, who seemed to have shared between them a ragged pair of worsted
gloves, and cowered among the sheep, under the shelter of a hurdle, crying
and inarticulate with cold.

"What's the matter, boys?"

"Turmits is froze, and us can't turn the handle of the cutter. Do ye gie us
a turn, please?"

We scrambled over the hurdles, and gave the miserable little creatures the
benefit of ten minutes' labour. They seemed too small for such exertion:
their little hands were purple with chilblains, and they were so sorefooted
they could scarcely limp. I was surprised to find them at least three years
older than their size and looks denoted, and still more surprised, too, to
find that their salary for all this bitter exposure to the elements--such
as I believe I could not have endured two days running--was the vast sum
of one shilling a week each, Sundays included. "They didn't never go to
school, nor to church nether, except just now and then, sometimes--they had
to mind the shop."

I went on, sickened with the contrast between the highly-bred, over-fed,
fat, thick-woolled animals, with their troughs of turnips and malt-dust,
and their racks of rich clover-hay, and their little pent-house of
rock-salt, having nothing to do but to eat and sleep, and eat again, and
the little half-starved shivering animals who were their slaves. Man
the master of the brutes? Bah! As society is now, the brutes are the
masters--the horse, the sheep, the bullock, is the master, and the labourer
is their slave. "Oh! but the brutes are eaten!" Well; the horses at least
are not eaten--they live, like landlords, till they die. And those who are
eaten, are certainly not eaten by their human servants. The sheep they fat,
another kills, to parody Shelley; and, after all, is not the labourer, as
well as the sheep, eaten by you, my dear Society?--devoured body and soul,
not the less really because you are longer about the meal, there being an
old prejudice against cannibalism, and also against murder--except after
the Riot Act has been read.

"What!" shriek the insulted respectabilities, "have we not paid him his
wages weekly, and has he not lived upon them?" Yes; and have you not given
your sheep and horses their daily wages, and have they not lived on them?
You wanted to work them; and they could not work, you know, unless they
were alive. But here lies your iniquity: you gave the labourer nothing but
his daily food--not even his lodgings; the pigs were not stinted of their
wash to pay for their sty-room, the man was; and his wages, thanks to your
competitive system, were beaten down deliberately and conscientiously
(for was it not according to political economy, and the laws thereof?)
to the minimum on which he could or would work, without the hope or the
possibility of saving a farthing. You know how to invest your capital
profitably, dear Society, and to save money over and above your income of
daily comforts; but what has he saved?--what is he profited by all those
years of labour? He has kept body and soul together--perhaps he could
have done that without you or your help. But his wages are used up every
Saturday night. When he stops working, you have in your pocket the whole
real profits of his nearly fifty years' labour, and he has nothing. And
then you say that you have not eaten him! You know, in your heart of
hearts, that you have. Else, why in Heaven's name do you pay him poor's
rates? If, as you say, he has been duly repaid in wages, what is the
meaning of that half-a-crown a week?--you owe him nothing. Oh! but the man
would starve--common humanity forbids? What now, Society? Give him alms, if
you will, on the score of humanity; but do not tax people for his support,
whether they choose or not--that were a mere tyranny and robbery. If the
landlord's feelings will not allow him to see the labourer starve, let
him give, in God's name; but let him not cripple and drain, by compulsory
poor-rates, the farmer who has paid him his "just remuneration" of wages,
and the parson who probably, out of his scanty income, gives away twice as
much in alms as the landlord does out of his superfluous one. No, no; as
long as you retain compulsory poor-laws, you confess that it is not merely
humane, but just, to pay the labourer more than his wages. You confess
yourself in debt to him, over and above an uncertain sum, which it suits
you not to define, because such an investigation would expose ugly gaps and
patches in that same snug competitive and property world of yours; and,
therefore, being the stronger party, you compel your debtor to give up the
claim which you confess, for an annuity of half-a-crown a week--that being
the just-above-starving-point of the economic thermometer. And yet you say
you have not eaten the labourer! You see, we workmen too have our thoughts
about political economy, differing slightly from yours, truly--just as the
man who is being hanged may take a somewhat different view of the process
from the man who is hanging him. Which view is likely to be the more
practical one?

With some such thoughts I walked across the open down, toward a circular
camp, the earthwork, probably, of some old British town. Inside it, some
thousand or so of labouring people were swarming restlessly round a single
large block of stone, some relic of Druid times, on which a tall man stood,
his dark figure thrown out in bold relief against the dreary sky. As we
pushed through the crowd, I was struck with the wan, haggard look of all
faces; their lacklustre eyes and drooping lips, stooping shoulders, heavy,
dragging steps, gave them a crushed, dogged air, which was infinitely
painful, and bespoke a grade of misery more habitual and degrading than
that of the excitable and passionate artisan.

There were many women among them, talking shrilly, and looking even more
pinched and wan than the men.

I remarked, also, that many of the crowd carried heavy sticks, pitchforks,
and other tools which might be used as fearful weapons--an ugly sign, which
I ought to have heeded betimes.

They glared with sullen curiosity at me and my Londoner's clothes, as, with
no small feeling of self-importance, I pushed my way to the foot of the
stone. The man who stood on it seemed to have been speaking some time. His
words, like all I heard that day, were utterly devoid of anything like
eloquence or imagination--a dull string of somewhat incoherent complaints,
which derived their force only from the intense earnestness, which attested
their truthfulness. As far as I can recollect, I will give the substance of
what I heard. But, indeed, I heard nothing but what has been bandied about
from newspaper to newspaper for years--confessed by all parties, deplored
by all parties, but never an attempt made to remedy it.

--"The farmers makes slaves on us. I can't hear no difference between a
Christian and a nigger, except they flogs the niggers and starves the
Christians; and I don't know which I'd choose. I served Farmer * * * *
seven year, off and on, and arter harvest he tells me he's no more work
for me, nor my boy nether, acause he's getting too big for him, so he gets
a little 'un instead, and we does nothing; and my boy lies about, getting
into bad ways, like hundreds more; and then we goes to board, and they bids
us go and look for work; and we goes up next part to London. I couldn't
get none; they'd enough to do, they said, to employ their own; and we
begs our way home, and goes into the Union; and they turns us out again
in two or three days, and promises us work again, and gives us two days'
gravel-picking, and then says they has no more for us; and we was sore
pinched, and laid a-bed all day; then next board-day we goes to 'em and
they gives us one day more--and that threw us off another week, and then
next board-day we goes into the Union again for three days, and gets sent
out again: and so I've been starving one-half of the time, and they putting
us off and on o' purpose like that; and I'll bear it no longer, and that's
what I says."

He came down, and a tall, powerful, well-fed man, evidently in his Sunday
smock-frock and clean yellow leggings, got up and began:

"I hav'n't no complaint to make about myself. I've a good master, and
the parson's a right kind 'un, and that's more than all can say, and the
squire's a real gentleman; and my master, he don't need to lower his wages.
I gets my ten shillings a week all the year round, and harvesting, and a
pig, and a 'lotment--and that's just why I come here. If I can get it, why
can't you?"

"Cause our masters baint like yourn."

"No, by George, there baint no money round here like that, I can tell you."

"And why ain't they?" continued the speaker. "There's the shame on it.
There's my master can grow five quarters where yourn only grows three; and
so he can live and pay like a man; and so he say he don't care for free
trade. You know, as well as I, that there's not half o' the land round here
grows what it ought. They ain't no money to make it grow more, and besides,
they won't employ no hands to keep it clean. I come across more weeds in
one field here, than I've seen for nine year on our farm. Why arn't some of
you a-getting they weeds up? It 'ud pay 'em to farm better--and they knows
that, but they're too lazy; if they can just get a living off the land,
they don't care; and they'd sooner save money out of your wages, than save
it by growing more corn--it's easier for 'em, it is. There's the work to
be done, and they won't let you do it. There's you crying out for work,
and work crying out for you--and neither of you can get to the other. I
say that's a shame, I do. I say a poor man's a slave. He daren't leave his
parish--nobody won't employ him, as can employ his own folk. And if he
stays in his parish, it's just a chance whether he gets a good master or
a bad 'un. He can't choose, and that's a shame, it is. Why should he go
starving because his master don't care to do the best by the land? If they
can't till the land, I say let them get out of it, and let them work it as
can. And I think as we ought all to sign a petition to government, to tell
'em all about it; though I don't see as how they could help us, unless
they'd make a law to force the squires to put in nobody to a farm as hasn't
money to work it fairly."

"I says," said the next speaker, a poor fellow whose sentences were
continually broken by a hacking cough, "just what he said. If they can't
till the land, let them do it as can. But they won't; they won't let us
have a scrap on it, though we'd pay 'em more for it nor ever they'd make
for themselves. But they says it 'ud make us too independent, if we had an
acre or so o' land; and so it 'ud for they. And so I says as he did--they
want to make slaves on us altogether, just to get the flesh and bones off
us at their own price. Look you at this here down.--If I had an acre on it,
to make a garden on, I'd live well with my wages, off and on. Why, if this
here was in garden, it 'ud be worth twenty, forty times o' that it be now.
And last spring I lays out o' work from Christmas till barley-sowing, and
I goes to the farmer and axes for a bit o' land to dig and plant a few
potatoes--and he says, 'You be d--d! If you're minding your garden after
hours, you'll not be fit to do a proper day's work for me in hours--and I
shall want you by-and-by, when the weather breaks'--for it was frost most
bitter, it was. 'And if you gets potatoes you'll be getting a pig--and then
you'll want straw, and meal to fat 'un--and then I'll not trust you in
my barn, I can tell ye;' and so there it was. And if I'd had only one
half-acre of this here very down as we stands on, as isn't worth five
shillings a year--and I'd a given ten shillings for it--my belly wouldn't a
been empty now. Oh, they be dogs in the manger, and the Lord'll reward 'em
therefor! First they says they can't afford to work the land 'emselves, and
then they wain't let us work it ether. Then they says prices is so low they
can't keep us on, and so they lowers our wages; and then when prices goes
up ever so much, our wages don't go up with 'em. So, high prices or low
prices, it's all the same. With the one we can't buy bread, and with the
other we can't get work. I don't mind free trade--not I: to be sure, if
the loaf's cheap, we shall be ruined; but if the loafs dear, we shall be
starved, and for that, we is starved now. Nobody don't care for us; for my
part, I don't much care for myself. A man must die some time or other. Only
I thinks if we could some time or other just see the Queen once, and tell
her all about it, she'd take our part, and not see us put upon like that, I
do."

"Gentlemen!" cried my guide, the shoemaker, in a somewhat conceited and
dictatorial tone, as he skipped up by the speaker's side, and gently
shouldered him down--"it ain't like the ancient times, as I've read off,
when any poor man as had a petition could come promiscuously to the King's
royal presence, and put it direct into his own hand, and be treated like a
gentleman. Don't you know as how they locks up the Queen now-a-days, and
never lets a poor soul come a-near her, lest she should hear the truth
of all their iniquities? Why they never lets her stir without a lot o'
dragoons with drawn swords riding all around her; and if you dared to go
up to her to ax mercy, whoot! they'd chop your head off before you could
say, 'Please your Majesty.' And then the hypocrites say as it's to keep her
from being frightened--and that's true--for it's frightened she'd be, with
a vengeance, if she knowed all that they grand folks make poor labourers
suffer, to keep themselves in power and great glory. I tell ye, 'tarn't
per-practicable at all, to ax the Queen for anything; she's afeard of
her life on 'em. You just take my advice, and sign a round-robin to the
squires--you tell 'em as you're willing to till the land for 'em, if
they'll let you. There's draining and digging enough to be done as 'ud keep
ye all in work, arn't there?"

"Ay, ay; there's lots o' work to be done, if so be we could get at it.
Everybody knows that."

"Well, you tell 'em that. Tell 'em here's hundreds, and hundreds of ye
starving, and willing to work; and then tell 'em, if they won't find ye
work, they shall find ye meat. There's lots o' victuals in their larders
now; haven't you as good a right to it as their jackanapes o' footmen? The
squires is at the bottom of it all. What do you stupid fellows go grumbling
at the farmers for? Don't they squires tax the land twenty or thirty
shillings an acre; and what do they do for that? The best of 'em, if he
gets five thousand a year out o' the land, don't give back five hundred in
charity, or schools, or poor-rates--and what's that to speak of? And the
main of 'em--curse 'em!--they drains the money out o' the land, and takes
it up to London, or into foreign parts, to spend on fine clothes and fine
dinners; or throws it away at elections, to make folks beastly drunk, and
sell their souls for money--and we gets no good on it. I'll tell you what
it's come to, my men--that we can't afford no more landlords. We can't
afford 'em, and that's the truth of it!"