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be driven to them in quest of places and employment. This is the way in which the engrossing of
farms naturally operates. And this is the way in which, for many years, it has been actually
operating in this kingdom.”
22
He sums up the effect of the enclosures thus: “Upon the whole, the
circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From
little occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of day-labourers and hirelings; and, at the
same time, their subsistence in that state has become more difficult.”
23
In fact, usurpation of the
common lands and the revolution in
agriculture accompanying this, told so acutely on the
agricultural labourers that, even according to Eden, between 1765 and 1780, their wages began to
fall below the minimum, and to be supplemented by official poor-law relief. Their wages, he
says, “were not more than enough for the absolute necessaries of life.”
Let us hear for a moment a defender of enclosures and an opponent of Dr. Price. “Not is it a
consequence that there must be depopulation, because men are not seen wasting their labour in
the open field.... If, by converting the little farmers into a body of men who must work for others,
more labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation” (to which, of course, the
“converted” ones do not belong) “should wish for ... the produce being greater when their joint
labours are employed on one farm, there will be a surplus for manufactures, and by this means
manufactures, one of the mines of the nation, will increase, in proportion to the quantity of corn
produced.”
24
The stoical peace of mind with which the political economist regards the most shameless
violation of the “sacred rights of property” and the grossest acts of violence to persons, as soon as
they are necessary to lay the foundations of the capitalistic mode of production, is shown by Sir
F. M. Eden, philanthropist and tory to boot. The whole series of thefts, outrages, and popular
misery, that accompanied the forcible expropriation of the people, from the last third of the 15th
to the end of the 18th century, lead him merely to the comfortable conclusion: “The due
proportion between arable land and pasture had to be established. During the whole of the 14th
and the greater part of the 15th century, there was one acre of pasture to 2, 3, and even 4 of arable
land. About the middle of the 16th century the proportion was changed of 2 acres of pasture to 2,
later on, of 2 acres of pasture to one of arable, until at last the just proportion of 3 acres of pasture
to one of arable land was attained.”
In the 19th century, the very memory of the connexion between the agricultural labourer and the
communal property had, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more recent times, have the
agricultural population received a farthing of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common
land which between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by parliamentary devices
presented to the landlords by the landlords?
The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally,
the so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping men off them. All the English methods hitherto
considered culminated in “clearing.” As we saw in the picture of modern conditions given in a
former chapter, where there are no more independent peasants to get rid of, the “clearing” of
cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers do not find on the soil cultivated by them even
the spot necessary for their own housing. But what “clearing of estates” really and properly
signifies, we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland.
There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on
which it is carried out at one blow (in Ireland landlords have gone to the length of sweeping away
several villages at once; in Scotland areas as large as German principalities are dealt with), finally
by the peculiar form of property, under which the embezzled lands were held.
The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it
was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was only the titular owner of
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this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the
English government succeeded in suppressing the intestine wars of these “great men,” and their
constant incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their
time-honoured trade as robbers; they only changed its form. On their own authority they
transformed their nominal right into a right of private property, and as this brought them into
collision with their clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king of England might
as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman.
25
This revolution, which
began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through
its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart
26
and James Anderson.
27
In the 18th century
the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by
force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns.
28
As an example of the method
29
obtaining in
the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person,
well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure,
and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like
kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about
3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and
burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to
blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she
refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time
immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on
the sea-shore – 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in
no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let
these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood
for her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each
inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835
the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on
the sea-shore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English
author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.
30
But the brave Gaels must expiate yet more bitterly their idolatry, romantic and of the mountains,
for the “great men” of the clan. The smell of their fish rose to the noses of the great men. They
scented some profit in it, and let the sea-shore to the great fishmongers of London. For the second
time the Gaels were hunted out.
31
But, finally, part of the sheep-walks are turned into deer preserves. Every one knows that there
are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat
as London aldermen. Scotland is therefore the last refuge of the “noble passion.” “In the
Highlands,” says Somers in 1848, “new forests are springing up like mushrooms. Here, on one
side of Gaick, you have the new forest of Glenfeshie; and there on the other you have the new
forest of Ardverikie. In the same line you have the Black Mount, an immense waste also recently
erected. From east to west – from the neighbourhood of Aberdeen to the crags of Oban – you
have now a continuous line of forests; while in other parts of the Highlands there are the new
forests of Loch Archaig, Glengarry, Glenmoriston, &c. Sheep were introduced into glens which
had been the seats of communities of small farmers; and the latter were driven to seek subsistence
on coarser and more sterile tracks of soil. Now deer are supplanting sheep; and these are once
more dispossessing the small tenants, who will necessarily be driven down upon still coarser land
and to more grinding penury. Deer-forests
32
and the people cannot co-exist. One or other of the
two must yield. Let the forests be increased in number and extent during the next quarter of a
century, as they have been in the last, and the Gaels will perish from their native soil... This