Page:The English Peasant.djvu/75

 "The moral consequences are fearful to contemplate. &hellip; Modesty must be an unknown virtue, decency an unimaginable thing, where in one small chamber &hellip; two and sometimes three generations are herded promiscuously, &hellip; where the whole atmosphere is sensual, and human nature is degraded into something below the level of the swine. It is a hideous picture, and the picture is drawn from life."

In the summer 1864 a careful and elaborate inquiry was made by Dr H. J. Hunter into the house accommodation of rural labourers, and embodied in the seventh report of the medical officer of the Privy Council for presentation to Parliament. Every page testifies to its insufficient quantity and miserable quality. Summing up the results of the inquiry, the report says: "Even the general badness of the dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than their numerical insufficiency," a statement proved by the fact that in 821 separate parishes or townships in England a destruction of houses had been going on during the previous ten years notwithstanding increased local demand for them. "People," the report says, "do not desert villages, villages nowadays desert people."

Certain provisions of the Poor Law relating to chargeability and settlement rendered it the pecuniary interest of every parish to lessen the number of the poor residing within its boundaries. When, therefore, a parish was the sole property of two or three great landlords, "they had only to resolve that there should be no labourers' dwellings on their estates, and their estates were thenceforth free from half their responsibility for the poor." The Union Chargeability Act has changed all this, but the evil done remains. Other causes have doubtless been at work, but this has been the principal one. When we come to understand the wretched pauperism into which the agricultural labourers have drifted, we can see how powerful the temptation to shift the burden of the poor-rates must have been to large proprietors. "Agricultural labour," says this report, "instead of implying a safe and permanent independence for the hard-worked labourer and his family, implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism."

What are the causes which have brought agricultural labour into this wretched condition?

In feudal times land was held in great masses from the Crown,