Page:The English Peasant.djvu/58

 soul which awoke in the cowherd Cœdmon, which touched the conscience of Norman kings, which appeared in Plantagenet times as the prophet and guide of the people, which stood forth boldly in the fourteenth century to claim our common rights, and in the sixteenth century to recall a government of adventurers to its duty; —that soul finally gathered on itself all the penalties due to national sin, until, exceedingly filled with contempt, it sank lower and lower in the mire, uttered a plaintive cry and entered the tomb. Do not say this is rhetoric, each phrase represents various facts, and a still more cruel story has to come, for the soul of the English labourer has not only passed through those stages fittingly described by the words "crucified, dead and buried," but in our own age, it has "descended into hell."

When the war closed, the glory of Trafalgar and of Waterloo was soon forgotten in the collapse which followed the inflation of trade, caused by the extravagance which had spent £625,000,000 in order to overthrow the French Revolution. And not only were the people of this country saddled for ever with this overwhelming debt, but the Nemesis also came in an ever-widening estrangement of classes.

The war found the farmer and his men living and working together in a somewhat patriarchal fashion; it left the master a gentleman, the labourer a pauper. The latter, no longer an inmate at the farm, lodged in some hovel and took his meals at the alehouse. But the widespread ruin the collapse produced led to the consolidation of farms in fewer hands. The separation between master and men became more complete; financial success the one end aimed at—"buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest"—the one principle that prevailed. But such was the state of things that the masters were able not only to take full advantage of this law, but to go beyond it. For not only did one large farm require less labourers than the same area divided into several smaller ones, not only was the labour market abnormally increased by the stimulus given to human production by the Poor Law System, but that same system rendered the men careless of the amount of wages they received, since they knew the deficiency would be made up by the parish. Wages were accordingly given which, without this parochial dole, could not have kept the labourer