Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/143

 the smallest price allowed by the custom of the neighbourhood, and quietly consigns him to the tender mercies of the workhouse, when old age or decrepitude overtake him. To the dwellers in great cities the peasant is scarcely known, always excepting the stage peasant, the favourite dolt and clodhopper of the dramatists, the incarnation of all that is stupid, if he is well disposed towards society, and the incarnation of all that is vicious and dangerous, if he has sense enough to forsake the paths of village virtue.

And the peasantry know as little of themselves as others know of them. They do not comprehend, like other labouring men, the value of union and brotherhood in preventing wages from being screwed down to the starvation point. They do not see the necessity—if labour fails them in their own district—of trying their fortunes elsewhere. The law does not make them serfs, but they make serfs of themselves by their ignorance and limpet-like tenacity in sticking to the parish in which they were born. Oliver Goldsmith may or may not have been right when he spoke of this class of a former day; but extinct in our own as "a bold peasantry, their country's pride;" but it is only too certain in our time, that if we are to look for a "bold" peasantry anywhere within the circuit of the British Isles, we must look to the border counties, to Scotland, and to Ireland, rather than to Saxon England. In the southern shires, more especially, the condition of the peasant is virtually that of the slave. He is tied to his parish by circumstances too formidable to be overcome by any such small and weak agencies as he can employ; and he can only escape from it, to run a worse risk of pauperism in the great cities, that do not need him, and that have no work to offer that he is capable of performing. By the hardest labour he cannot earn a decent subsistence, even in his youngest and strongest days. He is submissive to authority, because he is so snubbed, and buffeted, and preached at, and lectured at, as to have become hopeless of bettering himself morally or physically. He is what in the south of England is called a "droil," and what in the north of England and the southern shires of Scotland is called a "snool," i.e., one whose spirit is broken by oppression and continuous ill-treatment. He does sometimes, it is true, enter a protest against his life and its circumstances; and kindly fate sometimes takes pity on his misery and lifts him out of the ill-paid drudgery which is his normal state. In his wild young days, when his passions are strong, and he happens to entangle himself in a love affair, from which he has no other means of escape, he desperately enlists for a soldier, and if he be strong, well-behaved, fortunate, and has received as much education as enables him to read, write, and work up in arithmetic as far as the rule of three, he may rise in middle age to the dignity of a sergeant. A French peasant under similar circumstances may console himself with the idea of a marshal's baton, or a colonel's sash in his knapsack, but no such prospect exists for the British recruit. A broken constitution, and a pension of ninepence a day, are his prospects after forty, and if he return to his native village after this time, and is able to hedge or ditch or follow the plough, he is better off than his fellows by the ninepence aforesaid. If he be reckless in another direction, and takes the notion into his head, which he sometimes does, that the wild fowl and game generally belong of right as much to him as they do to the squire or other great landed proprietor of the neighbourhood, he gets into difficulties far more serious than love, however illicit and unfortunate, could bring upon him, and is lucky indeed if he do not find himself in jail, and still luckier if, when he is released from it, he is not possessed by seven times as many devils of desperation as possessed him when he and the law first came into conflict. Young peasants are to be considered particularly fortunate if they attract the attention of the squire or the squire's lady by their handiness or good looks, for they may in consequence be promoted from the paternal cottage to the stables or to the servants' hall of the great mansion. This is almost the only road of fortune that is really open to the agricultural masses. Once in this position the way is clear before them, if they are prudent, provident, ambitious, and not too honest, to amass from their savings, their "vails," their perquisites, and their "priggings," as much as will elevate them into that upper stratum of society which is occupied by greengrocers, beershop-keepers, and other small tradesmen who have capital enough to invest in business. But these are the exceptions, just as the manumitted slaves in the days of negro slavery in America were the exception to the otherwise universal bondage of the race. "Once a peasant always a peasant" seems to be the fate of the large majority of this useful and laborious class, leaving, perhaps, a margin of