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labourers, almost every page of Dr. Hunter’s report bears testimony. And
gradually, for many years past, the state of the labourer in these respects has been
deteriorating, house-room being now greatly more difficult for him to find, and,
when found, greatly less suitable to his needs than, perhaps, for centuries had been
the case. Especially within the last twenty or thirty years, the evil has been in very
rapid increase, and the household circumstances of the labourer are now in the
highest degree deplorable. Except in so far as they whom his labour enriches, see
fit to treat him with a kind of pitiful indulgence, he is quite peculiarly helpless in
the matter. Whether he shall find house-room on the land which he contributes to
till, whether the house-room which he gets shall be human or swinish, whether he
shall have the little space of garden that so vastly lessens the pressure of his
poverty – all this does not depend on his willingness and ability to pay reasonable
rent for the decent accommodation he requires, but depends on the use which
others may see fit to make of their ‘right to do as they will with their own.’
However large may be a farm, there is no law that a certain proportion of
labourers’ dwellings (much less of decent dwellings) shall be upon it; nor does
any law reserve for the labourer ever so little right in that soil to which his
industry is as needful as sun and rain.... An extraneous element weighs the balance
heavily against him ... the influence of the Poor Law in its provisions concerning
settlement and chargeability.
100
Under this influence, each parish has a pecuniary
interest in reducing to a minimum the number of its resident labourers: – for,
unhappily, agricultural labour instead of implying a safe and permanent
independence for the hardworking labourer and his family, implies for the most
part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism – a pauperism which,
during the whole circuit, is so near, that any illness or temporary failure of
occupation necessitates immediate recourse to parochial relief – and thus all
residence of agricultural population in a parish is glaringly an addition to its poor-
rates .... Large proprietors
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... have but to resolve that there shall be no
labourers’ dwellings on their estates, and their estates will thenceforth be virtually
free from half their responsibility for the poor. How far it has been intended, in the
English constitution and law, that this kind of unconditional property in land
should be acquirable, and that a landlord ‘doing as he wills with his own,’ should
be able to treat the cultivators of the soil as aliens, whom he may expel from his
territory, is a question which I do not pretend to discuss.... For that (power) of
eviction ... does not exist only in theory. On a very large scale it prevails in
practice – prevails ... as a main governing condition in the household
circumstances of agricultural labour.... As regards the extent of the evil, it may
suffice to refer to the evidence which Dr. Hunter has compiled from the last
census, that destruction of houses, notwithstanding increased local demands for
them, had, during the last ten years, been in progress in 821 separate parishes or
townships of England, so that irrespectively of persons who had been forced to
become non-resident (that is in the parishes in which they work), these parishes
and townships were receiving in 1861, as compared with 1851, a population 5 1/3
per cent. greater, into houseroom 4½ per cent. less... When the process of
depopulation has completed itself, the result, says Dr. Hunter, is a show-village
where the cottages have been reduced to a few, and where none but persons who
are needed as shepherds, gardeners, or game-keepers, are allowed to live; regular
servants who receive the good treatment usual to their class.
102
But the land
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requires cultivation, and it will be found that the labourers employed upon it are
not the tenants of the owner, but that they come from a neighbouring open village,
perhaps three miles off, where a numerous small proprietary had received them
when their cottages were destroyed in the close villages around. Where things are
tending to the above result, often the cottages which stand, testify, in their
unrepaired and wretched condition, to the extinction to which they are doomed.
They are seen standing in the various stages of natural decay. While the shelter
holds together, the labourer is permitted to rent it, and glad enough he will often
be to do so, even at the price of decent lodging. But no repair, no improvement
shall it receive, except such as its penniless occupants can supply. And when at
last it becomes quite uninhabitable – uninhabitable even to the humblest standard
of serfdom – it will be but one more destroyed cottage, and future poor-rates will
be somewhat lightened. While great owners are thus escaping from poor-rates
through the depopulation of lands over which they have control, the nearest town
or open village receive the evicted labourers: the nearest, I say, but this “nearest”
may mean three or four miles distant from the farm where the labourer has his
daily toil. To that daily toil there will then have to be added, as though it were
nothing, the daily need of walking six or eight miles for power of earning his
bread. And whatever farm work is done by his wife and children, is done at the
same disadvantage. Nor is this nearly all the toil which the distance occasions
him. In the open village, cottage-speculators buy scraps of land, which they throng
as densely as they can with the cheapest of all possible hovels. And into those
wretched habitations (which, even if they adjoin the open country, have some of
the worst features of the worst town residences) crowd the agricultural labourers
of England.
103
.... Nor on the other hand must it be supposed that even when the
labourer is housed upon the lands which he cultivates, his household
circumstances are generally such as his life of productive industry would seem to
deserve. Even on princely estates ... his cottage ... may be of the meanest
description. There are landlords who deem any stye good enough for their
labourer and his family, and who yet do not disdain to drive with him the hardest
possible bargain for rent.
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It may be but a ruinous one-bedroomed hut, having no
fire-grate, no privy, no opening window, no water supply but the ditch, no garden
– but the labourer is helpless against the wrong.... And the Nuisances Removal
Acts ... are ... a mere dead letter ... in great part dependent for their working on
such cottage-owners as the one from whom his (the labourer’s) hovel is rented....
From brighter, but exceptional scenes, it is requisite in the interests of justice, that
attention should again be drawn to the overwhelming preponderance of facts
which are a reproach to the civilisation of England. Lamentable indeed, must be
the case, when, notwithstanding all that is evident with regard to the quality of the
present accommodation, it is the common conclusion of competent observers that
even the general badness of dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than their
mere numerical insufficiency. For years the over-crowding of rural labourers’
dwellings has been a matter of deep concern, not only to persons who care for
sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent and moral life. For, again and
again in phrases so uniform that they seem stereotyped, reporters on the spread of
epidemic disease in rural districts, have insisted on the extreme importance of that
over-crowding, as an influence which renders it a quite hopeless task, to attempt
the limiting of any infection which is introduced. And again and again it has been