THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
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 VILLAGE POLITICS.
 
 VILLAGE POLITICS 
 
 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS 
 
 THE LABOUR QUESTION. 
 
 BV 
 
 CHARLES WILLIAM STUBBS, M.A., 
 
 VICAR OF GRANBOnOlTGH, BUCKS. 
 
 ^oniion : 
 
 MAC M I L L A N A N I) C O. 
 
 1878. 
 
 \_7 /le Rii^'/it of Translation and Reproduction is A'r.wn'cd.]
 
 K. CLAY, SONS. ANO TAYLOR, PRINTERS, 
 
 BREAD STREET HILL, 
 
 QUEEN VICTORIA STREET.
 
 
 gtbuat^b 
 
 TO THE FARM LABOURERS OF ENGLAND 
 
 IN SINCERE SYMPATHY 
 
 WITH THEIR STRUGGLE TOWARDS CITIZENSHIP 
 
 THROUGH SELF-RELIANCE AND ASSOCIATION. 
 
 9i^4-4-fif;
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I 
 
 PACK 
 
 THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872 I 
 
 II. 
 A STRIKE KOR WAIJES 69 
 
 III. 
 THE AKIJITKATOR 82 
 
 IV. 
 
 POVERTY AND RELIGION 95 
 
 V. 
 
 LIBERIY AND ASSOCIATION I06
 
 viii CONTENTS. 
 
 VI. 
 
 PAOK 
 
 EDUCATION 119 
 
 VII. 
 THE AGITATOR I3I 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE LANDLORD I48 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1877 169
 
 VILLAGE POLITICS.
 
 " If anything in the world is evident, surely it is evident that 
 a Christian minister ought to strive with all his power to render 
 the Lord's prayer something better than a mockery to the poor 
 labourers to whom he teaches it. Yet how can he teach them 
 to pray to a Father at all, with any feeling of sacredness attach- 
 ing to the name, if the only father they know is a beast of 
 burden — far dirtier and far worse housed than most of the 
 farmer's horses ? How can he teach them to pray that God's 
 name be hallowed, if the only bedroom in the house is crowded 
 with blasphemous and dissolute lodgers, whose small weekly 
 payment is essential to the very life of the household ? How 
 is he to teach them to pray that God's kingdom may come and 
 His will be done, while clergymen themselves seem to regard a 
 condition of things in which hunger and vice play into each 
 other's hands, as a very fair, though only ' gradual ' approxima- 
 tion to that kingdom and that will ? How is he to teach them 
 to pray for daily bread without helping them to get the wages 
 which alone can pay for it ? How is he to inculcate the prayer 
 for forgiveness in proportion as they have forgiven, on men who 
 have had to struggle like the beasts in the conflict for existence, 
 without moral room or opportunity for that comparison of their 
 own hearts with those of others on which even the sense of 
 justice, and much more the sense of mercy, must depend ? How 
 is he to teach young men and women to pray against being led
 
 into temptation, who are crowded into the grossest and most 
 degrading temptations by the mere conditions of their life and 
 sleep ? How is he to teach those to pray to be delivered from 
 evil, who are delivered soul and body to evil when they enter 
 their homes ? and how is he to teach them to believe that it is 
 God's kingdom, power, and glory under which they live, who 
 see the only beneficent power they can distinctly realise, ' the 
 Union' — visited with the grave displeasure of the Church, and 
 who are told that it is for God's glory that they should not 
 murmur against a lot that soils their very souls." — The Spectator, 
 September 20, 1873.
 
 VILLAGE POLITICS. 
 I 
 
 THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 
 (a village lectureJ) 
 
 ■' To him that worketh, reward is reckoned not of grace, 
 but of debt."— St. Paul. 
 
 When I happened to mention to a friend the 
 other day my intention of preparing the present 
 lecture on certain questions of agricultural 
 econom}', I was immediately met with the 
 caution, " You must be very careful what 
 }'ou say. Farmers, remember, are a very 
 
 ' Delivered in tlie Parish Schoolroom, Granboroiigh. Nov. 
 21, 1872. 
 
 B
 
 2 VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 ■ touchy race. You will find that they easily 
 take offence." 
 
 Now, although that caution has been uttered 
 to me in one form or another more than once 
 during the last few weeks, it has not succeeded, 
 you perceive, in warning me away from what so 
 many appear to consider a dangerous subject. 
 And it has not succeeded, for this reason 
 amongst others, — Because I am strongly of 
 opinion that the number of those men in an\' 
 class is becoming increasingly smaller who can- 
 not bear to listen to opinions contrary to their 
 own, provided that they are aware that the 
 speaker is honest in his convictions, states 
 them, however plainly, yet with due courtesy 
 and moderation, and above all, makes no 
 endeavour to thrust them dogmatically upon 
 those who are not willing to accept them. 
 With regard to those few% however, though 
 I trust it is not possible that such may be 
 present, who cannot tolerate any opinion con- 
 trary to their own, in whatever manner it may
 
 I,] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 3 
 
 be stated, well, perhaps the sooner they do 
 learn that lesson of toleration the better for 
 themselves and everybody else concerned. I 
 do not, however, anticipate giving offence to 
 any one at all. I think most of you know me 
 sufficiently well by this time to be aware that, 
 however strongly I may sometimes appear to 
 state opinions about which I feel strongly, yet 
 that I am at any rate anxious always to do so 
 in the spirit of fairness and impartiality. No 
 doubt I may have to say some things with which 
 the farmers will not be altogether disposed to 
 agree. If it should so happen, let me beg of 
 them to bear with me till the close of my lec- 
 ture, and then, if they will convince me of my 
 error, I trust I shall be honest enough to confess 
 that I have been so convinced. In the same 
 way, if I happen to say anything, as in all likeli- 
 hood I shall, with which the labourers may not 
 be altogether pleased, I promise them that, at 
 the close of the lecture, I shall be equally ready 
 to be by them convinced of my error likewise. 
 
 B 2
 
 4 VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 So much, then, by way of explanation of the 
 spirit in which I have endeavoured to come to 
 the consideration of this subject, and in which 
 I trust you are prepared to receive what I have 
 written. 
 
 Two other possible objections may perhaps 
 be best met here by way of preface to the main 
 subject. There arc those who, in addition to 
 the caution I have already alluded to, have also 
 called in question, firstly, the utility of raising 
 publicly this subject at all, and, secondly, even 
 granting the utility, they have questioned the 
 advisability of such a work being undertaken 
 by a clergyman. 
 
 I think those two objections are sufficiently 
 common to merit a word or two in reply. " Let 
 the subject alone and it will soon wear itself 
 out. If the flame were not fanned by med- 
 dlers outside it would soon die away. " To 
 some such phrases as those I think you will 
 all confess to have listened at one time or 
 another lately. " Whoever else may consider
 
 I.J THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 5 
 
 that they have a right to speak in this matter. 
 the parson at any rate has no call to interfere," 
 is the expression of a sentiment \vith which 
 the clergy themselves at any rate have been 
 more or less conversant lately. 
 
 Let me say a word or two upon those 
 opinions. And in answer to those who would 
 urge the advisability of stifling all public dis- 
 cussion of this question of Agricultural Labour, 
 I would ask them to consider whether in their 
 knowledge any great popular agitation was 
 ever yet smothered in that way ? From the 
 days when Gamaliel commanded the wise men 
 of Jerusalem to refrain from interfering with 
 those fishermen-agitators of Galilee, and " to 
 let them alone," to our own day, when the 
 Apostolic successor of those fishermen sug- 
 gested the horse-pond as a convenient mode 
 of drowning the opinions of union agitators, 
 I think you will find that the stifling course 
 has never succeeded. 
 
 Neither will you be able to put a .stop to this
 
 6 VILLAGE POLITICS. [f. 
 
 agitation by pretending to ignore it, an)- more 
 than the ostrich, according to the old story, 
 was able to escape its enemies by burying its 
 head in the sand, congratulating itself mean- 
 while that because it could not see them they 
 could not sec it. Believ-e mc, if any man has 
 a grievance, or, what is equally as bad, fancies 
 he has a grievance, the most effectual way to 
 put a stop to it is to let him speak it out, show 
 him that he is wrong if }-ou can, and at any 
 rate do not let him nurse the idea that you 
 can't prove him to be wrong, because you won't 
 listen to what he has got to say. If you are con- 
 fident of being in the right, it can certainly do 
 no harm to yourself or anybody else to be open 
 and straightforward. And if you happen even 
 to be proved to be mistaken, your open chal- 
 lenge will at least prove that you were honestly 
 unconscious of it. Nothing is ever lost by open 
 and fair discussion, and much is generall}^ 
 gained if not alwa}-s in the way of actual 
 settlement, at any rate in the encouragement
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IX 1S72. 7 
 
 of that spirit of toleration and charity which 
 tends to make future settlement possible. 
 Freedom of discussion, what is it, after all, 
 but the very spirit of England and English- 
 men ? And is it not simply because freedom of 
 discussion has been smothered in some other 
 countries that such social catastrophes as those 
 we have heard so much of lately have taken 
 place ? Nothing is to be lost, and ever)-thing 
 is to be gained, by open discussion. And 
 therefore in this agitation about the condition 
 of the Agricultural Labourer, nothing, in my 
 opinion, has done so much to foster ill-feeling 
 between employers and employed as the almost 
 general attempt on the part of the former, 
 either to ignore it as much as possible alto- 
 gether, or where that was not feasible, to resist 
 it as -Stubbornly as they could. I in.iy cite as 
 an instance of the folly of this course of action 
 a remark that was made to me by a member, 
 an active member, of the Agricultural Union 
 the other day. " 1 am glad, sir, wc have met
 
 8 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 with so much opposition. You see, persecution 
 only helps us on. Let the farmers turn off our 
 men. It will only increase our power in the 
 end." Now, however much you may regret the 
 spirit of that speech, I suppose you will allow 
 there is worldly wisdom at the bottom of it. 
 
 On the ground then of mere self-interest, if 
 for no other, I would maintain that attempts 
 to ignore or to stifle this agitation are mis- 
 taken. And, therefore, because I hold that 
 opinion I have ventured to call }-ou together 
 to-night, believing that it would be much better 
 that, when you have heard both sides of the 
 question, as far, that is, as I ma}- be able to 
 state them, you may express }-our opinions 
 openly, rather than that you should run the risk 
 of altogether misunderstanding one another be- 
 cause you had no means of really knowing what 
 each of you was possibly thinking in secret. 
 
 And now, one word in answer to those who 
 are of opinion that I, as a clergyman, had 
 better have left this matter alone. I suppose
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S72. 9 
 
 such an opinion is generally based on the idea 
 that the clergyman is departing from the true 
 conception of his office when he leaves the 
 purely spiritual teaching of his people to med- 
 dle with what is called their secular life. Now 
 without entering into a discussion of that ques- 
 tion, which would be out of place here, I will 
 merely state that I cannot accept such a con- 
 ception of the duties of the clerical office. 
 I am aware that my view is not shared b}' 
 perhaps even a majority of the clergy. But 
 I rejoice to think that the number of those is, 
 at any rate, not small, who though they con- 
 sider that the highest message which they arc 
 commissioned to bear to men is one having to 
 do essentially with another world than this, 
 yet believe that to this present world they arc- 
 ordained to carry the message of the righteous 
 government of a present God. If we all of us 
 carried this belief of ours to its logical conchi- 
 sion, we should seldom, I fancy, be in much 
 doubt as to what was, or what was not, Icgili-
 
 lo VILLAGE rOLITICS. [i. 
 
 mate for a clergyman to do for the merely 
 secular welfare, so to speak, of his parishioners. 
 Nothing surely which in any way is tending 
 towards the education of men, whether socially 
 or individually, can be without interest or in- 
 struction for the man who believes that God is 
 really the orderer and guide of human life ; no 
 subject that bears in any sense upon the re- 
 \elation of the laws of that Di\ine government, 
 whether for the moment those laws be called 
 laws of social science, or political economy, 
 of politics, of commerce, of agriculture, could 
 be without interest for him, or could be con- 
 sidered to be out of place in his teaching. 
 I know of no subject, in fact, which from its 
 nature can be excluded from the course of 
 clerical teaching, but only from its spirit. 
 
 And therefore, I sa)' boldl}', that it appears 
 to me not only the duty of the clerg}^ to 
 speak out wisely and clearly upon this subject 
 of Agricultural Labour, as it is their duty to 
 speak out in all social crises whate\'er, according
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION L\ 1872. 11 
 
 to their ability; but it is their duty to 
 study the laws of political economy — where 
 they do not already know them — so that they 
 may make such advice as they may give to 
 both sides not only earnest and well-intentioned, 
 but reasonable and wise. If the clergyman 
 will but take the trouble to study these ques- 
 tions carefully I am sure he need find himself 
 under no temptation to speak only to the one 
 side of the question. The right or the wrong- 
 is very seldom indeed, if ever, in class questions, 
 altogether on the one side. I am sure it is 
 not in this present agitation. If on the one 
 hand the clergyman may with perfect truth 
 point to the condition of the labourers, and 
 assert that it is certainly not an inevitable law 
 of nature that he should remain a mere append- 
 age to the land, a child in leading strings, who 
 has no rights of his own, taught to regard an}- 
 effort to combine for an advance in wages as 
 simply wicked, and contrary to the plain dcfmi- 
 tion of Scripture, on the other hand he may
 
 12 VILLAGE POLITICS. [r. 
 
 also warn the labourer that with the rights of 
 independence he must also be prepared to 
 accept its duties and responsibilities, to prove 
 that while he wishes to gain the fair day's 
 wage, he does not intend to withhold the fair 
 day's work; in a word, to prove himself 
 worthy of being called a free man, by practising 
 the free virtues — justice, honesty, thrift, self- 
 denial, self-reliance, self-government. 
 
 So much, then, by way of preface to our 
 main subject, " The Condition of the Agricul- 
 tural Labourer." What, then, is the condition 
 of the Agricultural Labourer ? That is a 
 question I think which may very naturally 
 furnish us with a starting-point. 
 
 The more usual plan, I believe, in any en- 
 deavour to arrive at an accurate description 
 of the present position of the farm labourer is 
 to begin by describing what his condition was 
 at a period as far removed as possible from 
 our own times. I might perhaps follow this 
 precedent with a certain amount of convenience
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S72. 13 
 
 to myself. I might go back as far then even 
 as the Domesday Book, and teU you of the 
 days when this parish of Granborough of ours 
 — Grenesberga, as they called it then, the green- 
 hill, that is to say — was dedicated to God and 
 St. Alban by Egelwyne the Swarte and Wyn- 
 flede his wife, in the time of Edward, the last 
 before the Conquest, how it was considered 
 that there was land enough for seven ploughs 
 and two teams, how, to quote the words of 
 Domesday Book itself, " In the demesne were 
 two hides, and two ploughs, and seven villeins 
 with four bordars had seven ploughs, one ser- 
 vant and pasture for two teams." I might 
 describe to you how the seven villeins men- 
 tioned there represent the seven agricultural 
 labourers of the Granborough of that day ; 
 and if you ask me what sort of condition was 
 theirs,- I might tell you how the villein, or 
 farm labourer of that day, was nothing more 
 than a serf, or slave, considered to be just 
 as much the property of the landowner as
 
 14 VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 the two teams which pulled the Grenesbergan 
 ploughs. If the landowner chose to sell his 
 land, his labourers were sold with it. If the 
 landowner was in want of pocket-money, he 
 had only to catch a few agricultural labourers, 
 and sell tJicin, and his purse was replenished, 
 though not, as it would appear, to any great 
 extent, for farm labourers don't seem to have 
 been of any great money value in the market 
 even then. Altogether the powers of the 
 master over his slave were very extensive : 
 the villein in fact had nothing which he could 
 call his own. Two principal privileges, indeed, 
 he did possess. If he happened to be killed 
 by his master, he had, at least, the satisfaction 
 of knowing that the King would be enriched 
 by the exaction of a certain fine. And if his 
 master should happen to knock out his eye or 
 his tooth, which appears to have been not alto- 
 gether an uncommon occurrence in those days, 
 the labourer had a right to claim his freedom 
 in exchange. From which facts I may leave
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 15 
 
 you to consider whether you may not have 
 reason for congratulation that you live in the 
 days of Queen Victoria, and not in the days 
 of Edward the last before the Conquest. 
 
 But perhaps I ought not to have gone back 
 quite so far as Domesday Book. The year 
 1685 may be far enough — the days of Charles 
 II. — that is more or less a favourite period 
 with those who are partial to those researches, 
 which go to prove what a paradise is England 
 now to all conditions of men, from the highest 
 to the lowest, compared with what it was a 
 couple of hundred years ago. Besides, Lord 
 Macaulay has devoted a whole chapter in his 
 History of England to the state of England in 
 the year 1685 ; and that you see is convenient 
 for those who are not partial to personal in- 
 vestigation. It is pleasant to have one's facts 
 all ready cut and dried for one, especially 
 when they fit in so well with our own precon- 
 ceived ideas. And Lord Macaulay has cer- 
 tainly in that chapter collected some very
 
 i6 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 interesting facts as to the condition and wages 
 of the Agricultural Labourer. And if you like 
 to read that chapter I am sure you will only 
 be too ready to agree that the condition of the 
 farm labourer in 1685 was very bad indeed, 
 and his wages shockingly low. Here is a fact 
 or two. " Sir William Petty informs us that 
 a labourer was by no means in the lowest state 
 who received for a day's work 4c/. with food, 
 or Sd without food ; 4^-. a week therefore were 
 fair agricultural wages." Again, "In i66r, 
 the justices at Chelmsford had fixed the wages 
 of the Essex labourer, who was not boarded, 
 at 6s. in the winter, and ys. in summer. This 
 seems to have been the highest remuneration 
 given in the kingdom for agricultural labour 
 between the Restoration and the Revolution ; 
 and it is to be observed that in the year in 
 which this order was made, the necessaries of 
 life were immoderately dear : wheat was at 
 yos. the quarter." 
 
 Now these of course are all very instructive
 
 I.] THE LABOUR OUESTIOX IX 1872. 17 
 
 facts ; but, on the whole, I am not very sure 
 that they actually affect the present condition 
 of the labourer at all. For, after all, the in- 
 teresting question to the labourer of our own 
 day is not so much whether his condition is so 
 much better than the condition of his ancestor 
 in the times of the Domesday Survey, or in 
 1685, or in 1785, or even twenty-five years 
 ago, but what is his condition to-day ? Is that 
 satisfactory ? If you leave him to answer that 
 question for himself, there is no doubt what 
 his answer will be. It is not satisfactory. 
 And if you ask me what my answer to that 
 question is, I answer: It is not satisfactory. 
 And if you ask me further what are my 
 grounds for such an opinion, I will answer 
 that I cannot consider the condition of any 
 man in England satisfactory who has nothing 
 to look forward to in sickness or in old age 
 but the workhouse : who, when he is willing 
 to work, and is starving for want of work, is 
 unable to procure it, except, perhaps, as a 
 
 C
 
 i8 VILLAGE POLITICS.' [i. 
 
 matter of charity : who is obliged to live, or 
 is willing to live in houses where the very 
 first principles of morality, cleanliness, decency, 
 modesty are impossible. I cannot consider 
 the condition of that man satisfactory of whose 
 sleeping-rooms it is possible in any case to 
 be able to say (I read the words only yester- 
 day), " In the thatch-covered roof of a single- 
 roomed cottage — a loft ten feet square — three 
 beds contained ten people ; there were no 
 curtains or divisions of any kind : one bed 
 held the father, mother, and infant son ; the 
 centre bed was occupied by three daughters, 
 of whom two were upwards of twenty years 
 of ' age ; and in the third bed lay the four 
 sons, aged respectively seventeen, fifteen, four- 
 teen, and ten." In a word, I cannot consider 
 the condition of that man satisfactory who 
 has no hope, no prospect, nothing to look for- 
 ward to, no chance of improving his position, 
 but must rest satisfied with such improvement 
 as may come to him from outside, from that
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S72. 19 
 
 common heritage of mankind, the progress of 
 civilisation. And this I consider to be a not 
 unfair picture of the condition of the agri- 
 cultural labourer in 1872. I will assume then, 
 if you please, that it is not satisfactory. 
 
 Now, having made that assumption, the next 
 question is evidently to ask : — Is anybody 
 responsible for this unsatisfactory state of things, 
 and, if so, who is .'' 
 
 Some of the labourers and their advisers have 
 a ready answer here. " Yes, the farmers are 
 responsible ; they are the cause of this bad state 
 of things. Let the farmers give us higher 
 wages, let them give us a fair day's wage for 
 a fair day's work, and everything will come 
 right." I wish I could think that that answer 
 was the true one. If it were so, the solution 
 of this question would be simple indeed. But, 
 unfortunately, it is not so. 
 
 Let me try to explain to you why it is not. 
 It is without doubt quite true that the condi- 
 tion of the labourer cannot be very materially 
 
 C 2
 
 20 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 improved unless his wages are increased ; and it 
 ii also undoubtedly true that the condition of the 
 labourer at present is very unsatisfactory ; but 
 it is not equally true that either of those con- 
 ditions is altogether tlie fault of the farmer or 
 of the employer of labour. And for this reason, 
 because the will or caprice of the farmer, or of 
 the employer of labour, is not the only thing 
 that regulates wages. I think it is most im- 
 portant that you should recognise this. For, in 
 these discussions and agitations that have been 
 going on lately, it has been too often assumed 
 that the rate of wages is altogether a matter 
 depending on the will or caprice of the employer 
 And so it has come about that the farmer has 
 been denounced as if he alone were to blame 
 for allowing his selfishness to rob the labourer of 
 his due reward. An amount of ilhfeeling on 
 both sides has thus been engendered, which must 
 always be a matter of deep regret to all right 
 thinking people, and which also tends both to 
 complicate and embitter any attempt to bring
 
 1.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 21 
 
 about a more satisfactory state of things. It is 
 important, therefore, that you should see that 
 the rate of wages depends upon something else 
 besides the caprice of the employer. 
 
 Consider for a moment. What is wages ? It 
 is the price at which you agree to sell your 
 labour. Farmers and labourers are simply 
 buyers and sellers of a certain commodity called 
 labour. The farmer has got a certain amount of 
 money. The labourer has got a certain amount 
 of labour. They desire to make a fair exchange. 
 The price which will be fixed upon as a fair 
 equivalent for the labour will be, or ought to be, 
 settled in exactly the same way as the price of 
 any commodity which is sold in a shop. The 
 fair price is just simply what it Avill fetch in the 
 open market. It will be regulated, that is to 
 say, by the law of supply and demand. 
 
 The farmer wants to get labour, and to get it 
 as cheaply as possible. The labourer wants to 
 get money, and to get as much as possible. 
 Now suppose that for any reason the demand
 
 22 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 for labour on the part of the farmers is very 
 active, rather than be deprived of the labour on 
 which his profits depend, the farmer will outbid 
 his fellows in order to secure as many men as 
 he wants. Wages will be high in consequence. 
 On the other hand, suppose, from any cause, the 
 supply of labourers is great, and the demand for 
 labour is small, the labourers, rather than go 
 without money, on which their living depends, 
 will underbid one another, and wages will be 
 low in consequence. Thus, when the demand is 
 great and the supply is small, wages will be 
 high. When the supply is great, and the demand 
 is small, wages will be low. And this is what 
 is meant by saying that the rate of wages is 
 regulated by the law of supply and demand. 
 
 Before I go any farther let me beg of you to 
 remember this fact. Since the employer of 
 labour is merely the buyer of a certain com- 
 modity called labour, he is no more obliged to 
 buy than is any other purchaser obliged to buy 
 eoods of which he is not in want. It rests
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 23 
 
 entirely with himself whether he chooses to buy 
 or not. Because a certain tradesman, in Win- 
 slow, for example, has a certain stock of goods, 
 say new hats, and I have a certain amount of 
 money, and am badly in want of a new hat, I 
 suppose you would not go so far as to say that 
 I ought to buy a hat from him against my will. 
 If I choose to go about in a shabby hat it may 
 be very foolish of me, and altogether inconsistent 
 with proper feelings of what is due to the 
 fashion ; but, after all, that is no reason why 
 the Winslow hatter should consider himself 
 aggrieved because I won't relieve him of his 
 surplus stock. Now I think it is import- 
 ant to recognise clearly this principle. For 
 working men too often argue quite contrary to 
 it. Because they happen to have certain labour 
 which they want to sell, and a certain farmer, 
 as they suppose, is very much in want of it, 
 they immediately rush to the conclusion — he 
 ought to employ mc. There is really no 
 ' ought ' in the matter.
 
 24 VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 It is quite possible that there may be some 
 present here who will not be altogether satisfied 
 with that explanation of things. I find that it 
 is common amongst those who are agitating 
 this question on the side of the labourer to call 
 in question altogether the teaching of Political 
 Economy, and the law of supply and demand. 
 I do not think, therefore, that we ought to con- 
 sider that we have settled the question when we 
 have told the labourer, " It is altogether a 
 matter of supply and demand. You must leave 
 it to settle itself." It was only the other day 
 that I read in the pages of the Farui Labourers 
 Chronicle, the organ of this present agitation, 
 the following statement of this feeling on the 
 part of the advisers of the Agricultural 
 Labourer : — " For some time we have been 
 bored with the words ' the law of supply and 
 demand.' No sooner had the farm labourer 
 made his cry of suffering heard by the public, 
 demonstrated that he was living at the edge of 
 starvation, that he was the victim of injustice,
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S72. 25 
 
 that he was down-trodden in the very mire of 
 degradation, and helpless under the heels of the 
 farmer, than we began to hear the cuckoo-cry 
 — ' It is the law of supply and demand.' So 
 then this law of supply and demand is a mere 
 bete noir to throw at a poor man's head — a sort 
 of charm to be said oracularly when you cannot 
 say anything else in reply to the short and 
 simple annals of the poor — their sad tale of 
 suffering, shame, and want." 
 
 Now, though of course I cannot admire the 
 tone of those words, I must confess there is a 
 certain amount of truth in the objection raised, 
 which is not always remembered by those who 
 urge the law of supply and demand as the sole 
 regulator of wages. It is too often forgotten 
 that the law of supply and demand is only a 
 fair regulator of wages when there is perfect 
 freedom of market on the side of both buyer 
 and seller of labour. 
 
 There are two sides to every bargain. And 
 no bargain can altogether be said to be a just
 
 26 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 one in which one or other of the parties to it has 
 not perfect freedom of choice. It is not to be 
 supposed that that can be considered a fair 
 bargain in which the price of the commodity is 
 fixed by the buyer, and the seller is allowed no 
 word in the matter. And this undoubtedly has 
 been the case, to a greater or a less extent with 
 the labour of the farm workman. It cannot be 
 quite justly said that he has been in a position to 
 make the best bargain open to him in the matter 
 of selling his labour. He has been prevented 
 from doing so, first, by the actual operation of 
 the Poor-laws, which, until lately, have practi- 
 cally tied him to one particular district and 
 prevented him from carrying his labour to the 
 best market ; and secondly, by the poverty of 
 his condition, which has prevented him from 
 acquiring the means necessary to change his 
 home, and has left him without the sense or the 
 spirit to do so, even if he had the means. In a 
 word, the conditions for the free exercise of the 
 law of supply and demand have in his case been
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S72. 27 
 
 wanting ; and he has been up to the present time 
 the victim of circumstances, chiefly the result of 
 mistaken legislation, from which there seemed 
 little chance of his extricating himself. 
 
 Twelve months ago, I suppose, that man 
 would have been laughed at who should have 
 dared to prophesy that, in the course of a few 
 months, the agricultural labourer should not only 
 have made an unexpected effort to change his 
 condition, but that the agitation which he should 
 thus have caused should have become one of the 
 most interesting and remarkable social events of 
 the year 1872. To-day, at any rate, it would 
 be idle to doubt the truth of what Mr. Arch 
 stated in a speech to certain agricultural 
 labourers at Fairford only last Thursday, — " At 
 the present moment you and I, as a body of 
 agricultural labourers, are talked about in Eng- 
 land more to-day than ever we were in the 
 previous history of the world. I believe the 
 reason why we are talked about at agriculturists' 
 dinners, in bishops' palaces, over the dinner
 
 28 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 tables of the aristocracy, and I may say by 
 members of Parliament, upon almost every 
 occasion when they meet, is because we hav^e 
 dared, in the year of our Lord 1872, to come 
 before the British public, whose chief causes we 
 so nobly serve, whose wealth we labour to pro- 
 duce and to protect, and assert our rights as 
 Englishmen by virtue of combination." 
 
 It would be quite needless for me, if I could 
 spare the time, to describe to you the various 
 steps by which that agitation has gradually 
 assumed its present proportions. At the present 
 time branches in connection with the Agricul- 
 tural Labourers' Union are established in nearly 
 half the counties in England. At the half- 
 yearly meeting of the executive committee of 
 the Union, held at Leamington, it was stated 
 that the members are supposed to exceed 
 350,000. With this simple fact before us it 
 must be quite evident that to endeavour to put 
 a stop to this movement, even if it were desirable 
 to do so, by pretending to ignore its existence.
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 29 
 
 is simply ridiculous. The movement has not 
 only begun, but has already succeeded in 
 thoroughly establishing itself, and must go on 
 now, for good or evil, in spite of any and all 
 opposition. There are, of course, I am well 
 aware, those who consider that there is nothing 
 but unmixed evil in this agitation, who can only 
 consider the trade unions of our day as Lord 
 Bacon did the trade guilds of his, as simple 
 " fraternities of evil." There may possibly be 
 even present some who may hold that opinion. 
 I certainly cannot agree with them. The right 
 of the labourers to form unions is not only esta- 
 blished by law, but such a law is based upon 
 principles both of natural justice and common 
 sense. The labourers have naturally just as 
 much a right to join a union, if they think such 
 an organisation is likely to improve their condi- 
 tion, and to secure for them the conditions most 
 favourable for labour, as the masters have to 
 combine to improve or maintain their position^ 
 and to secure for themselves the conditions most
 
 30 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 favourable for capital. One class has just as 
 much, neither more nor less, right to combine 
 than has the other. And I suppose it will not 
 be maintained by anybody, that the right of 
 combination on the part of the employers of 
 agricultural labour has been, up to the present 
 time, a right which has remained in abeyance 
 and has never been put into practice. Although 
 the farmers may never have combined in any 
 actual organisation, which had for its object the 
 regulating of the rate of wages which they con- 
 sidered it advisable to pay for labour, there is no 
 doubt, I suppose, that such questions have often 
 been talked over amongst themselves at the 
 market dinner, and a tacit agreement, at any 
 rate, not to raise the wages for certain labour 
 above a certain rate has been come to. We 
 may not have often heard of these combinations 
 amongst the masters, and for this simple reason, 
 that it was just the natural state of things which 
 nobody does hear about. I would ask then 
 such of the farmers who may be inclined to
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S72. 31 
 
 resent any appearance of combination on the 
 part of their men, to remember that it is simply 
 the exercise of a right which belongs by the 
 English law to the labouring class just as much 
 as to any other. And in saying this I do not 
 wish to appear as an advocate simply of trade 
 unionism. I am quite well aware that the ways 
 and means by which trades unions have, in 
 some cases, endeavoured to gain their ends have 
 been such as were simply detestable. But not- 
 withstanding however, what I heard and saw 
 of the working of trade unions during the three 
 years I was in Sheffield, I certainly think it 
 would be unjust to argue, because in certain 
 cases means have been adopted which arc 
 indefensible by any honest and civilised man. 
 that therefore such means are necessary to be 
 considered as the natural and sole means of 
 working such organisations. As Mr. Arch i)ut 
 it the other day, it would be highly ridiculous 
 to kill the gosling because the old gander had 
 happened to kick out at your shins.
 
 32 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 I hold in my hands a copy of the Constitu- 
 tion and Rules of the National Agricultural 
 Labourers' Union, and I must honestly confess 
 that, having read those rules through as care- 
 fully as I could, I certainly can find in them 
 nothing to which any impartial reader could 
 seriously take objection. And I do not hesitate 
 to say that if the spirit of moderation and 
 fairness which characterises that paper be 
 adhered to by all who subscribe to the union 
 rules, we can expect nothing of any great 
 danger from this movement. And, as a fact, I 
 think it must be allowed on all hands that, as 
 far as the present agitation has gone as yet, the 
 agricultural labourer has conducted it in a 
 strictly peaceable and law-abiding manner. 
 
 Let me read to you a sentence or two from 
 the introduction, which bears the signature of 
 Joseph Arch, the President of the Union, the 
 founder and pioneer of the movement : — 
 
 Our movement (he says) has begun well. Success is, 
 under God, in our own hands. Let us cleave to and work
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 33 
 
 for the Union. Let peace and moderation mark all our 
 meetings. Let courtesy, fairness, and firmness charac- 
 terise all our demands. Act cautiously, and advisedly, 
 that no act may have to be repented or repudiated. Do 
 not strike unless all other means fail you. Try all other 
 means ; try them with firmness and patience ; try them in 
 the enforcement of only just claims ; and if they all fail, 
 then strike, and, having observed Rule 10, strike with a 
 will. Fraternise, Centralise ! With brotherly feeling, 
 with an united front, with every district welded into a 
 great whole, with a common fund to which all shall pay, 
 and on which all shall have the right to draw, the time 
 will not be distant when every agricultural labourer shall 
 have, what few, as yet, have enjoyed, a fair day's pay for 
 a fair day's work. Nine and a half hours, exclusive of 
 meal times, as a day's work, and i6s. as a week's pay 
 are not extravagant demands. Society supports you in 
 making them, and they will be met soon. Brothers, be 
 united, and you will be strong ; be temperate, and you 
 will be respected ; reahse a central capital, and you will 
 be able to act with firmness and independence. Many 
 eyes are upon you ; many tongues arc ready to reproach 
 you ; your opponents say that your extra leisure will be 
 passed in the public-house, and your extra pay spent in 
 beer. Show that their slander is untrue ! Be united, be 
 sober, and you will soon be free ! 
 
 The Rule 10 to which he aHudcs is tlic rule 
 which sets forth the mode which, in the opinion 
 
 D
 
 34 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 of the Union, should be adopted in the settle- 
 ment of all disputes between employers and 
 employed. It runs thus : — 
 
 All cases of dispute between the members of the 
 National Agricultural Union and their employers must 
 be laid before the branch committee to which such 
 members may belong ; and should the branch committee 
 be unable to arrange the question to the mutual satisfac- 
 tion of the parties interested, in conjunction with the 
 district committee, recourse shall be had to arbitration. 
 Should the district committee be unable to arrange for 
 such arbitration, an appeal shall be made to the National 
 Executive Committee for its decision. Any award made 
 by arbitration or by decision of the National Executive 
 shall be binding upon all members of the Union ; and in 
 no case shall a strike be resorted to, until the above means 
 have been tried and failed. 
 
 Having said so much, there may be perhaps 
 
 those who would be inclined to put this question 
 
 to me pointedly, " Do you consider that the 
 
 Agricultural Union is altogether a good thing ? 
 
 an organisation certain to bring about the best 
 
 interests of the labourer ? " I must honestly 
 
 confess that I find that a very difficult question 
 
 to answer.
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 35 
 
 I have already expressed to you plainly my 
 opinion that, as far as the right of joining the 
 Union is concerned, there can be no doubt. 
 The labourer has every bit as much right to join 
 a union, and, for the matter of that, to strike 
 for higher wages, as the farmer has to talk over 
 the matter of wages at the market dinner, or to 
 turn off one of his men if he thinks he has no 
 work for him to do. If the labourer thinks he 
 can improve his position, or insure the safety of 
 his present position, by joining a society for that 
 purpose ; he is simply following the same dic- 
 tate of common sense as the farmer is when he 
 thinks fit to insure his cow's life, or his own life in 
 an insurance society. There can be no doubt 
 about the right of joining the Union, the only 
 question is its wisdom. I am also disposed to 
 grant you this further. That under existing 
 circumstances, it may be quite possible that 
 no other means except the Union would be able 
 to give to the agricultural labourers what they 
 have certainly a right to demand — a free and 
 
 D 2
 
 36 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 open market for their labour. And as I said 
 just now, I do not certainly think that hitherto 
 the agricultural labourer has had altogether fair 
 play in that matter. He has not been, and in 
 many cases he is not even now, in such a 
 position that he can make the best bargain open 
 to him in the matter of selling his labour. It is 
 quite possible, therefore, that the Agricultural 
 Union, though not by any means the best 
 possible form by which social inequalities and 
 unfairness may be remedied, is yet nearly the 
 only means towards that end. 
 
 I have just stated, you see, my opinion that 
 the Union is not the best possible form by which 
 a better position might be insured to the labour- 
 ing man than that in which he is now placed. 
 You will expect me therefore to give my reasons 
 for that opinion. If I had time I think I could 
 easily give you several. I will give you one at 
 least, which is certainly with me the radical one. 
 It is this : — I consider it is not the best form, 
 for this very simple reason, because, from the
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 37 
 
 necessity of the case, the organisation of a trade 
 union, with its necessary concomitant the strike, 
 must necessarily foster a feeling of antagonism 
 between the employer and the employed. And 
 therefore I welcome with joy all those various 
 schemes of co-operation and industrial partner- 
 ship of which we are hearing so much lately, 
 because, as it seems to me, they are founded on 
 a true principle, where unionism is founded at any 
 rate on an unstable one, that the truest interests 
 of both employers and workpeople are identical. 
 In speaking of the trade union I always feel 
 that I am speaking doubtfully. I am speaking 
 of something which, with all the good it has 
 done, and I believe is still doing, has still always 
 in the background a certain amount of evil, 
 something which it is necessary to qualify, to 
 hesitate about, to find apologies for. In speaking 
 of co-operation, and the principle of industrial 
 partnership, I have no such doubt and no such 
 hesitancy. And I do not hesitate to say plainly 
 to the employers of labour, that if they arc not
 
 38 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 prepared to give in to the principles of the 
 Trade Union, they certainly must give in to the 
 principles of co-operation or industrial partner- 
 ship. I feel quite sure that as things go on the 
 farmers will find it to be to their best interests 
 to introduce their labourers to profits, not in the 
 accustomed shape of wages, but in the actual 
 unaccustomed shape of share in profits. But 
 before I enter into the consideration of how 
 far it would be possible for the farmer to adopt 
 some modification at any rate of the partnership 
 principle in his relations with his workpeople, 
 let me describe to you an actual scheme which 
 has been at work now successfully since the 
 year 1829, not on the principle of industrial 
 partnership between master and men, but on 
 the more advanced principle of co-operation 
 between the men themselves. I allude to the 
 co-operative farms established by the late Mr. 
 John Gurdon at Assington, in Sufiblk. I will 
 quote his own words, spoken before the Social 
 Science Congress at York in 1864 : —
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 39 
 
 He stated that in order to raise the condition of the 
 labourer in his class, and lift him above poverty and the 
 crime that springs from it, he was induced in the year 
 1829 to let an off-hand farm of 100 acres, more or less, to 
 twenty labourers of his parish; offering to lend them capital 
 without interest to cultivate the same, subject to rules and 
 regulations, as follows : — That each member should ad- 
 vance £,2 as guarantee ; that a manager, accountant, and 
 stock-keeper be elected for conducting the farm ; that the 
 capital be paid back as the profits arose ; that cjuarterly 
 meetings be held for transacting business, &c. ; that all 
 necessary articles be provided by the committee for the 
 use of the members ; that if any member be convicted of 
 fraud, or any other crime, he should forfeit his share, 
 which should be sold, and the moneys arising therefrom 
 should form a reserve fund for contingencies. Other 
 salutary rules were added as to advancing members — in 
 case of unforeseen misfortunes — loans upon their shares, 
 the disposal at death of such shares, filling up vacancies, 
 &c. Upon the members subscribing these rules (Mr. 
 Gurdon continued) I agreed to let the farm for the rent of 
 land letting at that time, to be altered every twelve years 
 during my life. . . . After a few years this society paid 
 me off all the capital I had lent them, which induced me 
 to let another isolated farm to thirty-four other members. 
 This society has also paid off the moneys I lent them ; 
 so there are now on the two farms fifty-four labourers 
 farming about 350 acres free of debt, and possessing, as
 
 40 VILLAGE POLITICS. [r. 
 
 their own property, all the stock and crops on the said 
 land ; and as each share has been valued at ;^5o, I have 
 bestOAved upon these fifty-four labourers the sum of ^2,700 
 at the only loss of the interest of some ^:,ooo for a few 
 years. Farmers at first were startled at m^ project ; but 
 when they found I was not taking their labourers out of 
 their former position, that they had the use of the men as 
 before, only a certain number being required for the culti- 
 vation of the farms, and that they, moreover, had men 
 they could depend upon, because conviction of any theft 
 would deprive them of their share in the farms, and also 
 that these labourers were exempt from any parish allow- 
 ance, they altered their tone, and were willing to confess 
 that the plan had every advantage without one drawback. 
 The societies have established a store shop, and I hear 
 tliey expect to pay their rents from their savings, by paying 
 ready money, and getting every article at cost price. From 
 the numberless letters I have received from practical 
 economists, not only in England but in many parts of the 
 Continent, I feel sure that the plan will be adopted. I 
 have frequently attended their annual meetings and been 
 much struck with their business habits and shrewd re- 
 marks, while their better mode of living gives them power 
 to fulfil their work with spi-rit and energy. I should add, 
 that no land is better farmed, or rents more punctually 
 paid, than by these labourers. — Transactions of Social 
 Science Association, 1864.
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 41 
 
 It is, I am sure, very much to be hoped that 
 other landlords will follow the example of IMr. 
 Gurdon, when they see how much good may be 
 done, at the expense of very little trouble and no 
 risk. Of one such example, at any rate, I have 
 heard within the last few days. Lord Nelson, in 
 an address which he issued a few weeks back to 
 the labourers working on his estate, expresses 
 his intention of following Mr. Gurdon's good 
 example. You will perhaps allow me to read 
 his words : — 
 
 I will also endeavour [he says] to start a co-operative 
 farm, and other means of investment for savings, as soon 
 as more of my people have saved money. The capital 
 should be all subscribed by the agricultural labourer, and 
 the farm managed by a foreman and committee, holding 
 a sufficient number of shares to secure their taking proper 
 interest in the work. This would raise money to stock 
 the farm, which the small farmer is so seldom able to get 
 without borrowing, and would give the labourer a further 
 interest in the land. Some of my tenants liave here also 
 shown their willingness to join me in helping their 
 labourers, by offering to take shares to make up the money 
 wanted, and selling them again to the labourers as they 
 find money enough to buy them.
 
 42 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 I have described this scheme to you, because 
 I think it will be interesting to you at least to 
 know what has already been done, and which 
 therefore can be presumably done again. At 
 the same time I am quite willing, if you please, 
 to allow that we may be not quite ripe as yet in 
 Granborough, though I trust we are looking up 
 in the world, to start a co-operative farm. 
 
 Now just let me glance rapidly at one or two 
 of the Avays by which I think it is really practi- 
 cally open to us to improve the condition of the 
 agricultural labourer in this parish. 
 
 INCREASED WAGES. 
 
 And first (I put it in the first place because 
 the labourer himself likes it to be there), his 
 condition may be improved by the farmer giving 
 him higher wages. Now, of course, the farmer 
 will tell me at once that that course is quite 
 absurd ; he simply can't afford to do that ; to 
 give higher wages to the labourer would mean 
 ruin to the farmer. Well, I am bound to believe
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 43 
 
 him, or at any rate I am bound to believe that 
 he is honest in his opinion. I am prepared to 
 pay all due deference to his honesty, I am not 
 prepared, however, to pay quite the same defer- 
 ence to his opinion, for I think it is a mistaken 
 one. Let me explain. I believe he could afford 
 to give his men higher wages, and I fancy he 
 will agree with me that he could ; but on this 
 one condition, that the men should do higher 
 work. And in order that he may bring about 
 that result, so satisfactory both to himself and 
 the men, I would ask him to consider this — 
 " Why is it that the men, as a rule, work so 
 much harder and better when they are working 
 on their own allotments or by the piece, than 
 they do when they are working on the day 
 system on his farm } " The answer of course 
 is very simple — because it is to their interest to 
 do so. And yet, simple as it is, that is the 
 true way to get good work, and therefore not to 
 grudge good pay. " Make it worth the man's 
 while to do his best." And there is another
 
 44 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 reason why higher wages will result in better 
 work. It will give the man an opportunity of 
 feeding better, and thereby becoming a stronger 
 man. I have no hesitation in saying, from what 
 I know of the food of the agricultural labourer, 
 that he is miserably underfed, and what is even 
 worse, his children are miserably underfed. 
 Now, raise the man's wages, and he will at least 
 have the opportunity of feeding better, and 
 therefore ultimately of becoming a stronger and 
 better workman. The following remark of Mr. 
 Brassey, the great railway contractor, whose 
 opinion is certainly worth something, is to the 
 point : " An agricultural labourer, with his wages 
 doubled, and thereby supplied with animal food, 
 may be trained into the navvy, when he will do 
 three or four times the work of the mere 
 labourer. 
 
 Now, of course, the farmer will very naturall}' 
 put this question to me, " What security shall I 
 have that by paying my labourers more, I shall 
 get more work out of them .'' " And it is a
 
 I] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 45 
 
 natural question. It may be perfectly true that 
 he cannot get more out of them unless he pa)'s 
 them better ; but it is by no means equally 
 obvious that by simply paying them better he 
 will get more work in return. You cannot buy 
 as good a horse for ^20 as you can for ^50, but 
 you don't make the ^20 horse a bit better or 
 more valuable by insisting on giving ^50 for it. 
 
 PAYMENT BY RESULTS AND INDUSTRL\L 
 PROFITS. 
 
 It seems to me that the only practical way of 
 getting increased work for increased wages is to 
 adopt the principle of payment by results. I 
 believe this principle may be adopted very much 
 more extensively than it has been hitherto. In 
 a pamphlet on the Farm Labourer, lately 
 published by Sir Baldwyn Leighton, this mode 
 of payment has been set out in detail. He has 
 kindly put several copies at my disposal, which 
 I shall be most ready at the close of the lecture 
 to give to any one who may care to have them.
 
 46 VILLAGE POLITICS. [r. 
 
 I will quote to you a sentence or two, by which 
 I think you may be able to judge pretty fairly 
 as to the practicability of the plan which he 
 suggests. He puts the words into the mouth of a 
 farmer who'is explaining to his labourers a system 
 by which he proposes that they should become 
 sharers in his profits: "Then as to the crops, 
 that is white crops (I don't reckon the others), 
 my land on an average produces twenty-five 
 bushels to the acre. Now for every extra 
 bushel which, by good cultivation, deep plough- 
 ing, or extra carefulness and labour, it may be 
 made to give, I shall divide one shilling per 
 bushel among the cropmen. Thus, if on my loo 
 acres of wheat next year I get twenty-eight 
 bushels instead of tvventy-five, that will be 300s., 
 or ;^i5,to divide among those four men; and as 
 I believe with better cultivation and care it may 
 be made to produce nearly thirty bushels to the 
 acre, there would be 500s., or £2^, to divide 
 among those four men, or £6 5s. each. " Now, 
 of course I do not mean to say that it would be
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 47 
 
 possible to adopt that plan exactly in every 
 district. Circumstances vary so much, not only 
 in the different districts of England, but in some 
 cases in different farms in the same district, that 
 any one cut-and-dried plan for all would be 
 quite impossible. But, at any rate, I think that 
 scheme may suggest to you plans which cer- 
 tainly might be made feasible if properly 
 adapted by each farmer to the peculiar circum- 
 stances of his own case. I would ask the farmers 
 therefore at least to make a point of considering 
 whether some plan might not be discovered by 
 which on each of their farms a system of pay- 
 ment by results might not be successfully 
 adopted without very great difficulty. And on 
 this point to the labourer himself I can give no 
 better advice than that contained in the address 
 of Lord Nelson, which I have already quoted. 
 " Instead of asking for a rise in the daily wage 
 rate, which must always, as I have tried to show 
 you, in the long run depend upon the law of 
 supply and demand, ask your master to give
 
 48 VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 you every chance of earning what you can at 
 piece-work in winter and summer, and having 
 the chance to do so, work as well and gain as 
 much as you can. It must be better for all, 
 when it can be done, that you should be working 
 with a will for a wage rate which you can 
 increase by extra work, rather than to try to 
 get through the day at the regular daily rate as 
 easily as you can." 
 
 CO-OFERATIVE COW-CLUBS. 
 
 Then there is another way by which the 
 condition of the labourer may be improved, and 
 one which I am surprised is not more generally 
 adopted in a county which is chiefly pastoral. 
 I mean by the granting of cow-runs. In the 
 north of England this system has been adopted 
 with the happiest results. 
 
 One eye-witness says of the men, " Although 
 they get higher wages they work far harder, and 
 are cheaper workmen than those in the south, 
 where I came from twenty years ago. We have
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 49 
 
 no pauperism or poor people. About two-thirds 
 of the labourers keep cows. I wish I could see 
 the same state of things in the south." On this 
 point perhaps you will allow me to quote a letter 
 which I wrote to the Daily News some months 
 back : — 
 
 Agricultural Co-operation.— Sir,— In a leading 
 article the other day, upon the Agricultural Labour 
 Question, you say, " Many a labourer feels that without 
 any change in his wages the possession of a bit of land 
 on which to keep a cow would make all the difference to 
 him between wealth and poverty, and in grazing districts 
 the allotment of such bits of land has already solved the 
 agricultural problem." In a paper on " Agricultural 
 Labour " read before the Social Science Congress, last 
 month, at Plymouth, Sir Baldwin Leighton quotes a 
 similar statement, " The concession of cow-land was the 
 solution of the whole question of the agricultural 
 labourer." At first sight this appears to be a very simple 
 solution. Upon further investigation, however, difficulties 
 are naturally found to arise. They differ, of course, very 
 much in different parts of the country. In some districts, 
 even where farmers or landowners would bo found 
 sufficiently liberal to grant cow-runs, cither as part pay- 
 ment of wages, or at a fair rent, labourers possessed of 
 sufficient capital to purchase the required stock wcnild be 
 
 E
 
 50 VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 but few in number ; on the other hand, in districts where 
 a considerable number of labourers might be found 
 possessing the required capital, the difficulty of procuring 
 sufficient land there would make itself felt. It is hardly 
 likely, moreover, nor is it to be desired, that landowners, 
 from merely charitable motives, would be willing to let 
 land to tenants whose personal security, in case of failure, 
 would be of a decidedly doubtful kind. Most of the 
 objections, in fact, that may be urged against any general 
 extension of such a scheme, are, ultimately, I think, 
 traceable to this one difficulty, viz., want of capital on 
 the part of the labourers themselves. That difficulty, as 
 it appears to me, can only be removed in one way — by the 
 adoption of the principle of association amongst labourers 
 themselves ; and the adoption of that principle will also, 
 I venture to think, meet all the other difficulties. Some 
 application of the principle of co-operation, if political 
 economists tell us rightly, is sure to be tried in the future, 
 in agriculture, as elsewhere. Why then, I would ask, 
 should not the experiment be made in the direction 
 of associations amongst the labourers, not only for 
 the purposes of strike, or a forced rise in wages, but 
 for purposes of direct production ? Would it not be 
 possible to establish in the agricultural districts, such 
 of them at any rate as are chiefly pastoral, societies 
 organised upon co-operative, or, more strictly speak- 
 ing, joint-stock principles, by which cow keeping, 
 dairy farming, in fact, on a small scale, might be success- 
 fully undertaken by the associated labourers .'' Such an
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 51 
 
 experiment, if carried out with success, would certainly be 
 most valuable, as tending to develop habits of self- 
 reliance and self-government in village communities. It 
 is by experiment only that the final and satisfactory 
 solution of any problem is ultimately reached. And for 
 this reason, if for no other, it appears to me the experi- 
 ment I have suggested is, at least, worthy of trial. 
 
 CO-OPERATIVE STORES. 
 
 Then again, I rate very highly indeed amongst 
 the various methods of improving the condition 
 of the agricultural labourer the establishment of 
 co-operative stores. There can be no doubt, I 
 suppose, in the minds of those who know any- 
 thing of village life, of the immense evils of 
 which the system of credit is the originator. I 
 do not think it is too much to say that, in most 
 of our villages, there is scarcely a single 
 labourer's family that is not, at one time or 
 another during every year, in debt to the village 
 shops ; very many families indeed who are 
 never out of debt at all. The evils of this state 
 of things cannot well be exaggerated. The 
 owner of the village shop is generally, too, a 
 
 E 2
 
 52 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 person without capital, very little better off, 
 sometimes not at all, than his customers. In 
 the majority of cases he is himself in turn largely 
 in debt to the retail shopkeeper at the nearest 
 market town. As a consequence the village 
 customer has not only to pay very high prices 
 for what he buys, to compensate the shopkeeper 
 for long credit, but he must put up with very 
 inferior goods. Now the very principle of a 
 co-operative store strikes at once at this source 
 of evil. Cash payment is the very first principle 
 of the system of co-operative stores, as it is the 
 great secret of their success. Two such stores 
 have been most successfully established In this 
 neighbourhood, at Swanbourne and Botolph 
 Claydon. The first has now been started some 
 years, and its success is established ; the other 
 was inaugurated only in May of the present 
 year. The following statement of the committee 
 of management, I think, will be interesting to 
 you, showing how much may be done in a short 
 time, and with how good and real a result. The
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 53 
 
 store was opened on the 21st of May, and the 
 committee report the result of its working up to 
 the 30th of September. The cash receipts 
 during that period amounted to £2C)i ijs. 8|c/. 
 The balance of profit, after the discharge of all 
 debts, the payment of wages, and interest at the 
 rate of 5 per cent, on the paid-up capital, 
 amounts to ^15 ys. oyi Out of the net 
 balance thus obtained the committee were able to 
 pay to all the members a bonus of is. 6d. in 
 the pound on the value of their purchases. The 
 cash receipts for the first week of establishment 
 amounted to £8 6s. g^d., May 25th ; highest 
 ditto, i^20 14s., Aug, 31st; £iy IS., Nov. i6th. 
 
 ALLOTMENTS. 
 
 Again, there is the system of granting allot- 
 ments. I am quite well aware that there is a 
 certain amount of jealousy on the part of tenant 
 farmers of seeing the labourers in possession of 
 allotments. I am certainly of opinion that that 
 jealousy, where it exists, is founded on an error
 
 54 VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 of judgment. There are many instances which 
 go to prove that it is so. Take one out of many, 
 A short time ago " an Oxfordshire squire, struck 
 with the miserable character and low morality 
 of the people in one of the villages which 
 constitutes part of his estate, determined, as a 
 farm of rather more than a hundred acres fell 
 into his hands, to try the experiment of a liberal 
 allotment among his labourers. He divided the 
 farm therefore into plots of three or four acres, 
 and let these plots at the old rent to the agri- 
 cultural labourers in the village. The plan was 
 followed by the happiest results. The labourers 
 had something to w^ork for, from which they 
 could gather fruit for themselves. Their 
 condition was demonstrably improved, for the 
 rate of wages in this village is 3^-. or 4s. a week 
 higher than it is in the neighbouring places, the 
 farmers finding no reason to grumble at the 
 change, and the public-house in the village 
 being shut up for want of custom." 
 
 A quite similar instance was told to me only
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 55 
 
 the other evening by Mr. Henley, one of the 
 Poor-law inspectors. There are two villages not 
 a hundred miles from this place : one of which 
 is noted as being perhaps the most pauperised 
 village in Buckinghamshire, the other contains 
 absolutely no pauperism. This result he con- 
 sidered was brought about entirely by a system 
 of liberal allotments.^ 
 
 ^ I am glad to be able to add my own experience to these 
 instances. Soon after the delivery of this lecture, the farmer 
 who had for some years occupied the Glebe Land endeavoured 
 to express his resentment at the enunciation of the sentiments of 
 my lecture by announcing his determination to quit tlie tenancy. 
 I was thus enabled at the close of 1873 to divide 22 acres of 
 glebe land in half acre allotments among my labouring parish- 
 ioners at an annual rental of 66^. an acre. The remaining 12 
 acres of grass land, failing for the time in an attempt to form 
 a co-operative cow club, I let at the same rental to a labourer, 
 in whose integrity and honesty of purpose I had every confidence, 
 and whose industry and thrift, I was glad in this small way to be 
 able to encourage. The success of these allotments has been 
 most remarkable. I only wish I could persuade those country 
 parsons who are complaining so bitterly just now in the pages 
 of the Guardian newspaper, of their difficulty in letting their 
 glebe lands, to accept as tenants their labouring parishioners. I 
 feel sure they would find, as I have found, that there would be 
 few acts of their parochial administration upon which they 
 could look back with more sincere and unmixed satisfaclion. I
 
 56 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 There is just one remark I should hke to make 
 here. There are those who, while allowing the 
 advisability of granting allotments, are still 
 strongly of opinion that such allotments should 
 be limited to a small extent, say a quarter of an 
 acre. Now, although I am inclined to think 
 that the men themselves are the best judges of 
 the size of allotment which they are able to 
 work, I must still allow that there is something 
 to be said on the other side. It is a very general 
 opinion on the part of the landowners, founded 
 no doubt on practical experience, that the 
 granting of such allotments as shall release the 
 
 ought perhaps, to add this in answer to questions which have 
 been put to me continually during the last four years. " How 
 about the rents ? Can you depend upon getting them regularly ? 
 Have you had any bad debts ? " The rents are due on the first 
 Monday after the 25th of June, and the 25th of December. 
 With scarcely a single exception they have all been paid, not 
 only during the week after they became due, much less, according 
 to farmers' custom during the two months after they became 
 due, but at the very hour on the Monday night which I had 
 appointed to receive them myself at the Vicarage. During the 
 four years I have only had one ^bad debt, and that not from a 
 labourer, but from a small tradesman in the village.
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 57 
 
 man from the necessity of selling his labour to 
 others, is a very miserable state of things, 
 resulting on the side of the man in a life which 
 is little better than starvation ; and on the side 
 of the landlord in the starving of his land. 
 Now, though again I would say that perhaps 
 the man is the best judge as to whether he 
 likes starving or not ; to the other objection 
 commonly brought forward, viz., that the small 
 holder of land is unable to do justice to the 
 land, and will ultimately impoverish it, I 
 would ask the landlord to investigate whether 
 that result is altogether the actual experience of 
 existing facts. One grain of fact is after all 
 worth a bushel of theory. The following is the 
 statement of an eye-witness of the effect pro- 
 duced by a system of small holdings on the 
 estate of Mr. Hope Johnson, in Dumfriesshire 
 (one of the most celebrated of scientific agri- 
 culturists). " What we value chiefly in the 
 system is its marked effect in producing and 
 perpetuating an orderly, respectable, and well-
 
 58 VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 conditioned peasantry. The problem which is 
 generally looked upon as so difficult of solution 
 is here solved with eminent success. It has been 
 shown to be quite practicable to elevate the 
 labouring man, not only without burdening the 
 landlord or farmer, but to the manifest benefit 
 of both ; to foster small holdings without 
 depressing agriculture or retarding improve- 
 ments ; and to combine permanence with pro- 
 gress." It seems to me further that in com- 
 paring the results of what is known as " petite 
 culture," the working of very small holdings, 
 with the ordinary culture of the tenant farmer, 
 it is too often forgotten that the tenant farmer, 
 in very many cases, is not by any means farming 
 his land up to the best of its power. There can 
 be perhaps little doubt of the relative advantages 
 of high scientific farming and the working of 
 small holdings. But in the majority of cases it 
 is not a question of which shall do most justice 
 to the land — the farmer who works with all the 
 newest improvements in machinery, and the
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872, 59 
 
 latest knowledge of the science of agriculture, 
 or the peasant proprietor ; but it is a question 
 between the small holder and the tenant farmer, 
 who is tied for want of capital, who may be 
 holding too many acres for the capital he has at 
 command, or whose energy and enterprise is 
 hampered for want of tenant right and better 
 land laws. 
 
 MIGRATION AND EMIGRATION. 
 
 You will expect that I shall not omit from 
 the list of means by which the condition of the 
 labourer may be improved that of migration 
 and emigration. With regard to emigration 
 I must confess I sympathise greatly with the 
 complaint of the labourer on this point. " There 
 are none too many of us, as it is. There is 
 plenty of work for us to do in England, if 
 things were only as they ought to be." (That 
 is, of course, in the long run, if the land were 
 only worked up to its maximum of production.) 
 " I assert fearless of contradiction," said Mr.
 
 6o VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 Arch, the other day, at Bury St. Edmunds, 
 " that we have not labourers enough in England 
 to cultivate the land as it ought to be." There 
 can of course be no doubt at all that land is 
 by no means in this country worked up to its 
 limit of production. An immense amount is 
 not under cultivation at all — to what extent it 
 is hard to form an accurate estimate. Accord- 
 ing to Mr. Syme there are "32,000,000 acres 
 of waste land, of which fully one half is capable 
 of cultivation ; " say even one third, and that 
 would leave more than 10,000,000 uncultivated 
 acres, or more than three times the extent under 
 wheat at present. It is surely not a matter of 
 surprise that the agricultural labourer, when he 
 becomes aware of this fact, should be in many 
 cases slow to recognise the necessity of carrying 
 to the other side of the globe labour which he 
 knows might be so profitably applied at home. 
 At the same time, since he has no present 
 power of compelling that higher cultivation of 
 land which would of necessity ensure him em-
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S72. 61 
 
 ployment, it is not likely that when a tempting 
 offer of improving himself even in a foreign 
 land is held out, that he will be long restrained 
 from accepting it. We have certainly had 
 practical enough illustration of that fact during 
 the last month or two. Every week almost we 
 have seen announcement in the papers of the 
 embarkation of large batches of agricultural 
 emigrants bound for the Brazils, for Queens- 
 land, for New Zealand. This exodus will tell 
 its ow^n tale, I am afraid, next Spring and 
 Harvest. There are, of course, many places 
 where there is a real overplus of labour. Such, 
 however, are cases of local congestion, best 
 met, not by emigration, which is certainly 
 amongst agricultural labourers an exceptional 
 remedy, but by the natural cure, migration. 
 The difficulty which the agricultural labourer 
 has chiefly felt, of ignorance as to where his 
 labour would be most in demand, and where 
 therefore he would be justified in transferring 
 it, a difficulty in most cases almost insui)crable
 
 62 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 — the Canon Girdlestones being but few, — has 
 lately been nobly grappled with by the union. 
 If some general and trustworthy system of 
 registration could be devised, by means of 
 which men might learn where their labour was 
 in demand, there is no doubt that it would be 
 a great advantage not only to them but to the 
 employers of labour also ; and certainly much 
 valuable material (and from the nature of the 
 case unfortunately the best of its kind), which 
 is now by means of emigration lost to the 
 country, might be retained, 
 
 INCREASED KNOWLEDGE OF AGRICULTURAL 
 ECONOMY. 
 
 After all, however, the means which I rate 
 the highest amongst those which tend to the 
 amelioration of the condition of the farm 
 labourer, because it really would include all the 
 rest, is increased education. And, by education 
 I do not mean the mere increase of book learn- 
 ing (desirable as of course that may be), upon
 
 1.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 63 
 
 the part of the agricultural labourer, but the 
 increase of practical intelligence, and know- 
 ledge, and skill, upon the part of all concerned 
 with the tillage of the ground — labourer, tenant 
 farmer, and land-owner. For it is certainly not 
 the labourer alone who is in need of education. 
 There can be no doubt to my mind of the 
 immense advantages that might be reaped by 
 both labourer and farmer, if the same amount 
 of intelligence and enterprise was brought to 
 the production of food as is now brought to 
 all our manufacturing industries. There are 
 those indeed who tell us that the tenant farmer, 
 over-weighted with the many troubles, that are 
 increasing and to increase upon him, must very 
 shortly collapse, and give place to the manu- 
 facturer of food, who will bring to his business 
 large capital, high scientific skill, and commer- 
 cial enterprise. It may be some time, perhaps, 
 before that change actually comes about. In 
 the meantime, however, there can be no doubt 
 of the "■Qod which would accrue if the tenant
 
 64 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 farmer brought a little more intelligent force to 
 the direction of that practical experience, which 
 at present he is too often satisfied to consider 
 sufficient for him, because it was sufficient for 
 his father before him. If it were so, I am 
 sure we should not much longer be suffered 
 to hear that although the principle, for ex- 
 ample, of the subsoil drainage of land, has 
 been demonstrated in practice for more than 
 a quarter of a century, yet that of the land 
 requiring drainage, not one half has yet been 
 drained. It has been estimated that the neces- 
 sary outlay would bring in a return of fifteen 
 per cent. Manufacturing economy would not 
 long delay to avail itself of such a result. 
 
 Much has, of course, been done of late years 
 to increase the knowledge of agricultural 
 economy, by the establishment of chambers 
 of agriculture, and in some isolated cases 
 of schools of agriculture. Much, however, 
 remains to be done. I can imagine that 
 the ordinary tenant farmer will be secretly
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1873. 65 
 
 much in doubt when he is assured that increased 
 economy on his part is what is really most 
 wanted to bring about a satisfactory solution 
 of this question of agricultural labour. But true 
 it is, nevertheless. Using the term economy, 
 for a moment or two, even in its narrowest 
 sense, there can be no doubt of the enormous 
 waste that is suffered to go on by many 
 farmers, not, we may be sure, from intentional 
 carelessness, but from ignorance of facts which 
 ought nowadays certainly to be the common 
 maxims of their trade. To take only a single 
 instance. So general on the part of the ordi- 
 nary farmer is the almost total waste of the 
 liquid farm-yard manures, as also nearly two- 
 thirds of the effect of the solid manures, from 
 defective application, that it is calculated by 
 good agriculturists that the waste in this one 
 direction alone is equivalent to another rental 
 of the land. Here, then, is an evident oppor- 
 tunity for the exercise of direct economy. But 
 in order that such economy may be exercised, 
 
 F
 
 66 VILLAGE POLITICS. [l. 
 
 two things are required : increased knowledge 
 and increased enterprise, the former in most 
 cases, however, implying the latter. It is, in 
 fact, in the long run in agriculture, as it has 
 been in manufacture, to the increase of know- 
 ledge, to science, in a word, that we must look 
 for the much needed improvement. The time 
 is not far distant, let us hope, when the tilling 
 of the ground by intelligent forces, guided by 
 intelligent directors of force, shall no longer 
 remain the dream of the few, but shall be 
 realised as a fact by a nation, which is de- 
 termined to procure the maximum of produc- 
 tion from British soil, in strong reliance on its 
 own enterprise and industry, in firm faith of the 
 teachings of that science, which is God's great 
 gift to man. And if, in the moulding of that 
 future of labour, the spirit of co-operation and 
 industrial partnership should prove to be a 
 principal agent, I, for one, shall certainly not 
 be surprised. Indeed if I could dare to hope 
 that, as a result of this lecture, one or two of
 
 I.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1872. 67 
 
 you could be led to think how the principle 
 of co-operation could be practically applied to 
 agriculture, I should consider myself amply 
 rewarded. If it should so happen that there 
 may be those present who may be moved to 
 make experiment in that direction, I would 
 commend to them the following words of Mr. 
 Mill. I can conclude my lecture, I am sure, 
 with no more fitting words : — " Co-operation 
 tends to increase the productiveness of labour, 
 in the vast stimulus given to productive ener- 
 gies, by placing the labourers, as a mass, in 
 a relation to their work which would make it 
 their principle and their interest — at present 
 it is neither — to do the utmost instead of the 
 least possible in exchange for their remunera- 
 tion. It is scarcely possible to rate too highly 
 this material benefit, which yet is as nothing 
 compared with the moral revolution in society 
 that would accompany it; the healing of the 
 standing feud between capital and labour; the 
 transformation of human life, from a conflict of 
 
 F 2
 
 68 VILLAGE POLITICS. [i. 
 
 classes struggling for opposite interests, to a 
 friendly rivalry in the pursuit of a good common 
 to all ; the elevation of the dignity of labour, 
 a new sense of security and independence in 
 the labouring class, and the conversion of each 
 human being's daily occupation into a school 
 of the social sympathies and the practical 
 intelligence."
 
 II. 
 
 A STRIKE FOR WAGES.'^ 
 
 " There be many servants nowadays that break away 
 every man from his master." — i Samuel xxv. io. 
 
 These are the words of an angry farmer. 
 Angry because he was asked for wages whicli 
 he thought were not earned. If you will turn 
 to the chapter in the Bible from which the 
 verse is taken you can read the whole story 
 for yourselves. It is the only account that 
 I know in the Bible of what we should call 
 nowadays a strike for wages. 
 
 The circumstances seem to have been briefly 
 these. There lived in a certain part of the 
 country of Judaea a large farmer called Nabal, 
 
 1 rreached durhiir the Eastern Counties Lock-out in 1874.
 
 70 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ll- 
 
 or rather, perhaps, we ought to call him a 
 large sheep-master. For this man was very 
 much more like the great sheep-farmers of 
 Australia and New Zealand than any of the 
 men we call farmers in Buckinghamshire now. 
 Anyhow he was a very wealthy man, being, 
 as we read, the owner of some 3,000 sheep 
 and 1,000 goats. These it was the custom, 
 just as it is in Australia and New Zealand now, 
 to leave to wander for the greater part of the 
 year over the wide common lands, or wilderness 
 as it is called in the Bible, of Carmel. These 
 common lands, however, though they afforded 
 excellent pasturage for the sheep, were by no 
 means very pleasant places for the shepherd. 
 There was, in fact, a good deal of danger of 
 one kind or another. Danger, not only from 
 wild beasts, lions, and wolves, and such like, 
 but danger also from the robbers, who took 
 refuge in that wild place to be out of the reach 
 of the laws of the land which they had broken. 
 These shepherds, however, of Nabal succeeded
 
 II.] A STRIKE FOR WAGES. 
 
 71 
 
 in gaining the protection of a certain chief or 
 captain of freebooters, who dwelt in these 
 lonely hill pastures, and had made for himself 
 there a certain name and fame. This chief was 
 David, the man who in after years rose to be 
 king of all that country. Just at present, 
 however, he was leading the wild life of an 
 outlaw, surrounded by some 600 men, whose 
 daring excesses he probably in some degree 
 exercised his influence in restraining. At any 
 rate he and his robber band appear to have 
 shown unusual kindness to the shepherds of 
 the farmer Nabal. " They were a wall unto 
 us," as the shepherds told their master after- 
 wards, "both by night and day, all the while 
 we were with them keeping the sheep. 
 
 For these services of protection David con- 
 sidered he deserved some reward from Nabal. 
 One good turn at least, he thought, deserved 
 another. That his sheep were safe, Nabal might 
 thank his shepherds. That his shepherd svvcre 
 safe he might certainly thank David.
 
 72 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ii. 
 
 At the time of the sheep-shearing accord- 
 ingly, when it was Nabal's custom to make 
 a great feast for all his labourers, David sent 
 ten of his men, with a message to the farmer, 
 telling him what services they had rendered 
 to his servants and flocks, and claiming some 
 reward, "whatever cometh to thy hand for 
 thy servants, and for thy son David." This 
 demand, courteously put, the great sheep- 
 master was by no means disposed to allow. 
 Directly he hears the request he breaks out 
 into a rage, " Who is David, and who is the 
 son of Jesse .-* There be many servants now- 
 adays who break away every man from his 
 master ! " 
 
 It was very much as if he said, "And who 
 is David, I should like to know, that he should 
 come here, dictating to me and telling me what 
 I ought to do. I don't want any third parties 
 interfering between me and my labourers. 
 Helping the labourers, you say. Humbug ! 
 Helping themselves, you mean. How did the
 
 II.] A STRIKE FOR WAGES. 77, 
 
 labourers get on some years back .? Talk about 
 wolves prowling about their tents. Stuff and 
 nonsense ! The labourers are quite able to 
 keep the wolf from the door, without calling 
 in outsiders to help them. We didn't hear 
 much of the wolves, and the dangers and 
 hardships of living, before this David came 
 putting notions into the men's heads. It is 
 these Davids that are the real wolves ; they 
 are the men who do all the mischief. Lazy, 
 idle, good-for-nothing fellows, turned off by 
 their own masters, no doubt, coming here 
 agitating and upsetting the country. If I had 
 my will they should be hung, every one of 
 them, for a pack of meddling mischief-makers." 
 That, or something like it, I take to be the 
 meaning of Nabal's words. Put, however, no 
 doubt, in coarser and more insulting language, 
 for he was evidently a foul-mouthed man — or, 
 as the Bible terms it, "Such a son of Iklial 
 that a man cannot speak unto him." One of 
 those cowardly, vulgar souls to be met with
 
 74 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ii. 
 
 occasionally, who think no word too ill, and 
 no language too foul, for those whom necessity- 
 compels to work for them, and whom on 
 that account they are pleased to call their 
 " inferiors." 
 
 To David there appeared to be but one 
 course open now. The farmer had refused to 
 listen to proposals fairly and respectfully made, 
 had refused contemptuously, had insulted those 
 who made the demand. There was nothing 
 left now but strife by force. The only question 
 possible between the two men was — which was 
 the strongest ? David with his band of needy 
 followers, trusting to union for their strength, 
 and smarting under the sense of wrong ; or 
 Nabal, the overbearing selfish farmer, thinking 
 that his wealth gave him the right to lord it 
 over those who were poor and to grind down 
 those who were needy. Altogether it is an 
 ugly enough story, this struggle between 
 David and Nabal, between the rights of 
 labour, that is to say, and the duties of capital.
 
 ir.] A STRIKE FOR WAGES. 75 
 
 How the struggle is brought to a peaceable 
 solution you shall hear next week. In the 
 meantime there are plenty of lessons to be 
 learnt from what we have read already. In 
 the first place, we ought to notice that in this 
 quarrel, as in all such quarrels probably, 
 neither side was quite in the right. It is 
 natural, of course, to sympathise with David. 
 That we all do, I do not doubt, farmers as well 
 as labourers. And that is curious. He was 
 the weakest. And we know him to be the 
 noblest. But then something is to be said 
 for Nabal, too. Not for his bearishness or 
 bad language, of course. But perhaps for this 
 reason. His refusal to pay David's wages arose 
 from a belief that he was being unjustly treated. 
 And that belief was part of his general opinions 
 and views on the rights and duties of property. 
 They were wrong views. At least wrong, held 
 in the way he held them. But then we must 
 remember he had had small chance of finding 
 out that they were wrong views. They were
 
 76 VILLAGE POLITICS. [il. 
 
 part of the creed of his class, which he would 
 no more dare to doubt than he would doubt 
 his own existence. It was the creed of his 
 father before him ; it was the creed held by- 
 all the farmers in the country round. You 
 may conceive, therefore, from your own ex- 
 perience how difficult it would be to believe 
 that what he had been accustomed all his life 
 to consider right was, after all, quite wrong. 
 Again David was wrong too. Almost more 
 wrong, perhaps, in his own way, than Nabal. 
 But then there were excuses for him too. His 
 blood was up. And he made a grievous mis- 
 take. But I do not call him a bad man for 
 his mistake. You must take into account his 
 position. He was an outcast and a rebel, it 
 is true. But then we must remember he had 
 been driven into rebellion by injustice. From 
 no fault of his own, but from the mere caprice 
 and jealousy of the ruling despot, he had been 
 obliged to fly from the court and the society 
 of his equals. Unjustly cast out and neglected
 
 II.] A STRIKE FOR WAGES. 77 
 
 by society, we could hardly expect him to 
 show superhuman virtue towards Nabal, who 
 for the moment represented to him society. 
 The whole blame, in fact, we see of this quarrel 
 could not be justly given to either Nabal or 
 David. One cause of the dispute, at least, is 
 to be found in the social circumstances of the 
 time, in the unhealthy state in which the 
 relations of labour and capital happened to be. 
 It was a period ot change and adjustment. 
 The patriarchal system was dying out, and 
 giving place to a better social organisation. 
 And as in all such times, social difficulties 
 and conflicts took place. For this quarrel, 
 therefore, society, as we should say nowadays, 
 was responsible. Social prejudices on Nabal's 
 part resulted in a false conception of the 
 rights of labour. Hence the conflict between 
 them. 
 
 Now all this story is 3,000 years old. And 
 yet here are we in our country to-day, appa- 
 rently not a bit nearer the solution of the
 
 78 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ii. 
 
 problem of labour and capital than they were 
 all those years ago. This lock-out of the 
 agricultural labourers in the Eastern counties 
 is the old story over again. The outward 
 form is slightly altered. But the actual cause 
 of the dispute is very little different. These 
 East country farmers with their 4,000 locked- 
 out labourers are pretty much in the position 
 of Nabal and David. And in this conflict, 
 as in the other, our sympathies naturally 
 go with the weaker, even perhaps more un- 
 hesitatingly than in the old story. With 
 David, because he was the noblest, we sym- 
 pathise of course. But it would have been 
 nobler we think, had he not rushed to his sword 
 quite so hastily. In the present case, how- 
 ever, the positions are somewhat reversed. It 
 is the farmer, who not only refuses the de- 
 mand, but who is the first to declare war. 
 And that no doubt makes it more difficult 
 to divide our sympathies impartially. At 
 present, however, I think you will do well to
 
 II.] A STRIKE FOR WAGES. 79 
 
 consider rather what are the reasons most pro- 
 minently in the way of a peaceful settlement, 
 than those which are tending to embitter the 
 dispute. For example, nothing to my mind 
 so much stands in the way of settlement as 
 the false conceptions which both sides have 
 with regard to what justice requires. You 
 hear both sides equally crying out against the 
 injustice of their opponents. The farmer says 
 that it is unjust of the labourers to ask 
 higher wages than he can afford to give. 
 The labourer says that it is unjust of the 
 farmer to offer him lower wages than he can 
 manage to live upon. There is no injustice in 
 either case. The labourer has a perfect right 
 to ask for any sum he likes — 30^". a week, if 
 he pleases. And the farmer has a perfect 
 right to refuse to give him more than he likes. 
 It is a mere matter of bargain. And neither 
 farmer nor labourers have the least right to 
 lose their tempers if they can't agree upon 
 a bargain. Both sides arc bound to fight out
 
 8o VILLAGE POLITICS. [il. 
 
 their differences temperately and with good 
 humour, and to remember that while the 
 oppressor is condemned in Scripture, so also is 
 the thief. This then I would venture to say- 
 to you finally. If you, as the labourer, join 
 the Union, which you have a perfect right to do, 
 and which I, for one, think you are perfectly wise 
 to do, you must remember that with the rights 
 of independence you must be prepared also to 
 accept its duties and responsibilities. By join- 
 ing the Union, which enables you to make a 
 fair commercial bargain with your employer, 
 you must be prepared to find that you have 
 knocked on the head the old system of alms 
 and gratuities — and I hope you will rejoice to 
 discover it. And, on the other hand, you, as 
 a farmer, must also recognise that if you lock 
 out your men, it is the strongest step you can 
 take to abolish that old system of so-called 
 " kindliness," upon which you have hitherto re- 
 lied, and to establish the system of commercial 
 bargaining, with no obligation on either side.
 
 II.] A STRIKE FOR WAGES. 8i 
 
 And this I believe will be best for both of 
 you. Let us hope, therefore, that the final 
 result of the present debate between labour 
 and capital will be a speedy establishment of 
 friendliness and good-will, based, however, not 
 on gratuities and gifts on one side, and grati- 
 tude and servility on the other, but upon a 
 wholesome feeling of mutual self-respect and 
 equal independence.
 
 TIT. 
 THE ARBITRATOR. 
 
 " Blessed be thy advice, and blessed be thou, which hast 
 kept me from avenging myself with mine own hand." 
 — I Samuel xxv. 33. 
 
 You remember that struggle between David 
 and the rich farmer Nabal, of which I was 
 speaking to you. We had reached that point 
 in the narrative where David, upon hearing 
 of the scornful and insulting answer that the 
 farmer had sent back to his request, had 
 determined to make trial for what he con- 
 sidered his rights by force of arms. " Gird 
 ye on every man his sword," he had said to 
 his followers. 
 
 It was an ugly sight, this appeal to force, 
 where the matter, one might have thought,
 
 in.] THE ARBITRATOR. S3 
 
 could have been so easily settled if there had 
 only been a little more courtesy on one side 
 and a little less hastiness on the other. 
 
 But the story ends with a scene which we 
 must not omit. The farmer, we read, had a 
 wife, who was as beautiful and wise as he was 
 the reverse. To her, as to the good angel of 
 the house, one of Nabal's servants tells the 
 state of affairs. " Now, therefore, know and 
 consider," he says, " what thou wilt do ; for evil 
 is determined against our master." Abigail 
 did not hesitate for a moment. She loads 
 her husband's asses with gifts, and hurries off 
 to David's encampment. She is only just in 
 time. She hasted and lighted oft" the ass, 
 and fell before David on her face, and bowed 
 herself to the ground and fell at his feet, and 
 said, " Upon me, my lord, upon me let this 
 iniquity be ; and let thine handmaid, I pray 
 thee, speak in thine audience, and hear the 
 words of thine handmaid." 
 
 Defiant and haughty towards the self-asscr- 
 
 G 2
 
 84 VILLAGE POLITICS. [in. 
 
 tion of the farmer, David has nothing but 
 deference and respect for the moral influence 
 of a woman. His purpose of wild revenge is 
 turned aside by graceful compliment and frank 
 sympathy. He recants his vow, and thanks 
 God for sending Abigail to meet him. ''Blessed 
 be thy advice, and blessed be thou, which hast 
 kept me from avenging myself with mine own 
 hand." " Go up in peace to thy house ; I have 
 hearkened to thy voice." 
 
 Now I have no doubt there are those who 
 will say that this was all wrong; conflicts 
 between capital and labour are not to be 
 settled in that way ; sound ideas of business 
 and political economy are what are wanted in 
 cases like these, not fine words and compli- 
 ments. If David was in the right, he should 
 not have given way an inch because some one 
 smoothly told him that submission was a noble 
 thing; and if he was not quite sure he was 
 right, he should just as little have given way, 
 until he was obliged by force of circumstances
 
 III.] THE ARBITRATOR. 85 
 
 to do so, success in matters of business being, 
 after all, the truest test of right. 
 
 Now I do not agree with such people. Not 
 because I do not think that sound political 
 economy is not wanted. Just the reverse. In 
 this lock-out in the Eastern counties, for ex- 
 ample, it seems to me that that is just what 
 is wanted. But what I do object to is this ; 
 to hear people assert, as so many do, that 
 because commercial principles ought to take 
 the place of the semi-feudal ideas at present 
 existing, and wages be settled by competition 
 and not by favour, that therefore there is abso- 
 lutely no room at all for a spirit of Christian 
 kindliness and conciliation. I am as staunch a 
 believer in the teaching of political economy as 
 any one ; but I am, I hope, a stauncher believer 
 in Jesus Christ, and, as such, I hold that Christian 
 principles, so far from standing in the way of an 
 equitable adjustment of wage disputes, on sound 
 economical principles, will rather be found 
 eminently conducive to such an adjustment.
 
 86 VILLAGE POLITICS. [iii. 
 
 If you will consider again, for a moment or 
 two, this contest between farmers and labourers, 
 which has been going on now for more than 
 a month, I think } ou will agree with me 
 that there is plenty of room for the application 
 of Christian principles. 
 
 I wish the farmers could be got to learn 
 something of a principle which the conduct of 
 Abigail in this story might suggest to them, 
 I am sure they would find it valuable just now. 
 It is this : that class distinction should not be 
 allowed to warp our conceptions of justice. 
 
 That principle, if you will read Abigail's 
 words of conciliation to David carefully, you 
 will perceive to have been the secret of her 
 success. Do not forget that in the eyes of the 
 world she was the rich high-born lady, and 
 David but a social outlaw. Yet mark how 
 she addresses him. Her husband, fool and 
 churl as he was, had had nothing but ill-words 
 and insult for David. She is all frankness and 
 courtesy. Nabal had taunted him with his
 
 III.] THE ARBITRATOR. 87 
 
 low origin. "Who is David, and who is the son 
 of Jesse .'' " Her word was, — " The Lord will cer- 
 tainly make my lord a sure house : because m.y 
 lord fighteth the battles of the Lord, and evil 
 hath not He found in thee all thy days." 
 
 And why was this, but because she had dis- 
 covered a truth which Nabal had missed, 
 a truth which ive know to have been a 
 Christian one, that the true worth of a man 
 is not to be estimated by the cut of his coat, 
 or the depth of his purse, " consistcth not in the 
 abundance of the things which he possesses," 
 but in the life which he leads. Judged by 
 that standard, David and not Nabal was the 
 man of worth, and as such Abigail recognised 
 him, and sympathised with his cause. 
 
 Now can it be fairly said that in this 
 Ea.stern Counties Lock-out the princij)lc of 
 Christian justice has been very prominently 
 visible in the conduct of the employers.'' 
 
 I am really afraid we must say No. A 
 fortnight ago there seemed some hope that
 
 88 VILLAGE POLITICS. [in. 
 
 the dispute might have been brought to an 
 end. Mr. Mundella, the Member of ParHa- 
 ment for Sheffield, a man who has proved 
 himself on more than one occasion in trade 
 disputes a true missionary of conciliation 
 between class and class, proposed that the 
 questions at issue between farmers and men 
 should be submitted to arbitration. He put 
 to the contending parties two propositions : — 
 
 (i) Let the farmers agree that the labourers 
 shall immediately resume work, without any 
 conditions as to their being Unionists or Non- 
 unionists. 
 
 (2) Let all questions in dispute as to wages 
 and conditions of working be submitted to 
 a conference of an equal number of farmers 
 and labourers. Should they fail to agree upon 
 any point submitted to them, let them call 
 in some person of weight and authority to 
 act as friendly Arbitrator between them. 
 
 These propositions were at once accepted 
 on behalf of the labourers by the secretary
 
 III.] THE ARBITRATOR. 89 
 
 of the N.A.L.U. The farmers, however, 
 rejected the proposal with indignation. And 
 why ? Because there was nothing, they said, 
 to arbitrate about. They were not contending 
 for a mere question of wages. It was the 
 right of their men to join the Union which 
 they denied. And there could be no question 
 of arbitration until the labourers renounced 
 that right. With regard to the right of join- 
 ing the Union, that is a matter of civil law, 
 and before the law in England farmers and 
 labourers are on an equal footing. And with 
 regard to the interference of third parties, 
 suppose the labourers should insist upon such 
 interference. What then ? 
 
 " Insist ! " cries the farmer. 
 
 " Yes ; why not ? " 
 
 " But to be in a position to insist a man 
 must be on a footing of equalit)-. " 
 
 "Exactly. That is just it. Hitherto the 
 labourer has not been in that position. As 
 an individual he was powerless before capital.
 
 90 VILLAGE POLITICS. [iii. 
 
 By combination he has gained that position 
 which places him on a level with his master. 
 The bargain which is to settle his rate of wages 
 is no longer to be a one-sided one. In the 
 name of common justice, what is there to com- 
 plain of in this .-' " 
 
 " But he may use his power to ask for higher 
 wages than I can afford." 
 
 " It is too true he may. But is it not also 
 true that your landlord occasionally asks you 
 for a higher rent than you think you can afford. 
 And yet I do not hear of your denying his 
 right to do so if he pleases ; at any rate, you 
 do not think that the best answer, in his case, 
 to such a request would be to call him oppro- 
 brious names. Nor do you resent, I believe, 
 in his case, the interference of the third party, 
 in the person of his steward, to whom he 
 generally refers you in any difference that may 
 arise about the question of rents. And yet in 
 reality where is the difference between his case 
 and that of the labourers, unless indeed you
 
 HI.] THE ARBITRATOR. 91 
 
 do acknowledge that class distinctions affect 
 your conceptions of justice?" 
 
 But by this time I fancy I hear some one 
 exclaiming-, These surely are not principles 
 to which we ought to listen from a Christian 
 pulpit ! Christianity teaches obedience to those 
 in authorit}', teaches meekness and submission, 
 not insubordination and rebellion. My friends, 
 it is true, Christianity does preach meekness 
 and submission. But did it ever strike you 
 to ask on whom it is that Christianity enjoins 
 these virtues .-' Do you suppose it means that 
 the poor are to be meek and submissive 
 towards the rich ? It is the rich and great and 
 strong whom the Gospel specially requires to 
 be humble and meek. " All of you be subject 
 one to another," says the Gospel ; and which 
 needs this witness sounded in his ears most 
 loudly .'' 
 
 It is here, I think, that the influence of the 
 Christian Church might be so beneficially 
 exerted. We have heard a good deal lately
 
 92 VILLAGE POLITICS. [in. 
 
 about the duties of the Church, and of the 
 position that she has most generally taken 
 up in this matter. I am one of those, I con- 
 fess, who think she has been mistaken in her 
 so-called principle of non-intervention. 
 
 Do not, however, misunderstand me. In 
 expressing my opinion that the clergy of the 
 Church of England, as a rule, are mistaken 
 in holding aloof from this labour movement, 
 I do not wish to be understood that I 
 consider it to be their duty to interfere 
 between master and man in the settlement 
 of the rate of wages. Far from it. But what 
 I do mean is this. I, for example, as vicar 
 of this parish, have, I consider, not the smallest 
 right to interfere between any of you, whether 
 farmer or labourer, in the settlement of the 
 amount of wage that one of you has agreed 
 to give and the other to take. That is a 
 mere matter of bargain between you, with 
 which I, as your minister, have nothing what- 
 ever to do.
 
 III.] THE ARBITRATOR. 93 
 
 But with this I have a great deal to do — 
 that bargains between my parishioners should 
 be honestly made and honestly kept. That 
 is a moral question, not only a commercial one, 
 and I, as a professed teacher of morality, cannot 
 ignore it. 
 
 Moreover, if in the arrangement of those 
 wage bargains of yours, either one side or the 
 other were of opinion that joining a class 
 Union would enable you to make a better 
 bargain, I do not see that that fact in itself 
 would be any particular business of mine. 
 
 But if I found that this mere fact of joining 
 a Union, of itself a perfectly legal matter, 
 was exalted, by either one side or the other, 
 into a cause of bitter dispute, creating angry 
 feelings and unchristian conflict between two 
 classes of my parishioners, then I consider 
 that I should be altogether failing in my 
 duty as a Christian minister if I kept silence. 
 
 " Alas ! we, the clergy of the Church of 
 England, have been only too ready to preach
 
 94 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ill. 
 
 submission to the powers that be, as if that were 
 the only text in Scripture bearing on the rela- 
 tions between the ruler and the ruled. Rarely 
 have we dared to demand, of the powers that 
 be, justice ; of the wealthy man and the titled, 
 duties. Yet for one text in the Bible which 
 requires submission and patience for the poor, 
 you will find a hundred which denounce the 
 vices of the rich. Woe to us in the great day 
 of God if we have been the sycophants of the 
 rich instead of the redressers of the poor man's 
 wrongs ; woe to us if we have been tutoring 
 David into respect to his superior Nabal, and 
 forgotten that David's cause, not Nabal's, is 
 the cause of God."
 
 IV. 
 POVERTY AND RELIGION. 
 
 " Godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise 
 of the life that now is, and of that which is to come." 
 — I Timothy iv. 8. 
 
 Let me begin by asking you to consider for 
 a moment or two this question, " Can a poverty- 
 stricken people be a religious people ? " 
 
 I do not know what answer you would be 
 inclined to give to that question, but my answer 
 would be an emphatic " No 1 " I am very 
 strongly of opinion that wherever you find a 
 low state of well-being in a countr}-, there you 
 also find a low state of religion. And that 
 is a state of affairs, I think, that wc find in 
 England. It is true that we are generally said 
 to be a very wealthy people, and also a very
 
 96 VILLAGE POLITICS. [iv. 
 
 religious people. That depends a good deal, 
 however, upon what you mean by wealth, and 
 what you mean by religion. If national wealth 
 is to be measured by the amount of money 
 there is in the country, and national religion 
 by the number of churches and chapels, then 
 no doubt England is very religious and very 
 wealthy. 
 
 That some people are very wealthy there 
 can be no doubt. I read the other day a list 
 of the names of a number of wealthy English- 
 men who had died during the last ten years. 
 In that list there were ten men who had died 
 worth more than ;^ 1,000,000; fifty-three who 
 were worth more than ^500,000, and 161 who 
 were worth more than ^^ 100,000. That would 
 appear to give a startling proof of the wealth 
 existing in this country. But then put this 
 other fact by the side of it, and we shall 
 perhaps be inclined to change our opinion as 
 to national wealth. There were in England 
 last year more than 890,372 persons receiving
 
 IV.] POVERTY AND RELIGION. 97 
 
 poor relief. The population of the country is 
 about 22,000,000. That is to say, then, that 
 taking the country all through, one person 
 out of every twenty you meet in England 
 is a pauper. Now, although you cannot test 
 religion by statistics in quite the same way, 
 yet there are plenty of considerations patent 
 to everybody which lead to doubt as to whether 
 our real religion is to any extent proportionate 
 to our nominal. Let us go back to our ques- 
 tion, "Can a poverty-stricken people be a 
 religious people .-* " You may have thought 
 perhaps that in putting that question I was 
 about to prove to you that because you were 
 poor, therefore you were irreligious ; and that 
 would be possible, no doubt. But my object 
 is rather the reverse of that. I want to prove 
 to you that poverty is to a great extent caused 
 by irreligion, that great want of wealth is 
 partly to be accounted for by great want of 
 religion. Don't mistake me, however. I don't 
 want to insult you either by telling you that 
 
 II
 
 98 VILLAGE POLITICS. [iv. 
 
 you are not religious, or not rich. The blame 
 in either case is not altogether yours. 
 
 It might, perhaps, be very much pleasanter 
 for me if I could get rid of this question, 
 which has been tormenting me a good deal 
 lately, by saying, " There is no doubt you 
 are very irreligious people. You don't come 
 to church half as much as you ought. You 
 don't pay half the attention you ought to my 
 sermons. In fact, you are very bad people 
 indeed. And that is the reason you are so 
 poor. Bad people can't expect to be rich. 
 Your poverty is your own fault. If you are 
 ill-off in the world there can be no doubt 
 you have nobody to blame for that but 
 yourselves." 
 
 That would be an off-hand way of settling 
 the matter, no doubt. But I confess it does 
 not satisfy me. In fact, it does just the 
 reverse. And for this reason. I have begun 
 to suspect lately that this poverty of yours is 
 partly my fault. I can't help thinking that
 
 IV.] POVERTY AND RELIGION. 99 
 
 we clergy and teachers of religion generally 
 are a good deal to blame, not only for the 
 low state of religion, but also for the low 
 state of well-being amongst the members of 
 our congregations and in our parishes. 
 
 For look at it in this way. What is religion .' 
 Some people perhaps would say, " It is the 
 art of getting to heaven." And if they are 
 right, then I know I am wrong in what I have 
 just been saying to you about irrcligion and 
 poverty. But I don't think they are right. 
 Religion, as I regard it, is the art of living 
 well, not only of dying well. It is the science, 
 if I may use the term, of being and doing 
 good. And the man who teaches that science, 
 the religious teacher or clergyman, as we call 
 him, is one who teaches men how to be and 
 do good. 
 
 It is because the clergy and ministers of 
 religion have too often omitted to do that, 
 that it appears to me they are grcatlx' to 
 blame for the bad state of things in which 
 
 II 2
 
 loo VILLAGE POLITICS. [iv. 
 
 many of their parishioners find themselves. 
 I am quite well aware that there are a great 
 many sermons preached in England every 
 Sunday telling people that they ought to do 
 good, and to be good, a great many telling 
 them also why they ought to be and do good. 
 But then, as it appears to me, there are not 
 half enough sermons telling people what is 
 good, and Junv to be and do it. But then 
 perhaps you say, Everybody knows what is 
 good and right, if they would only do it. But 
 that is just what I doubt, and I will tell 
 you what has made me doubt it more than 
 anything else lately. 
 
 It is this labour agitation. If there is one 
 social principle more than another upon which 
 Christianity ought to lay stress, it is surely 
 this. Under God's law no man or class can 
 exist solely for itself. "We are all members 
 one of another. The eye cannot say unto 
 the hand, I have no need of thee, nor again 
 the head to the foot, I have no need of you.
 
 IV.] POVERTY AND RELIGION. loi 
 
 If one member suffers, all the members suffer 
 with it." The welfare of all is wrapped up 
 with the well-being of each. 
 
 It requires no words, surely, to prove that 
 if every one who called himself a Christian 
 really acted up to this principle of their reli- 
 gion, the existing relations between capital 
 and labour, employers and employed, would 
 not be what they are to-day in England. 
 
 This principle it is the duty of the religious 
 teacher to press upon every member of his 
 congregation. Why is it, then, we ask, that 
 there is so great a failure in bringing about 
 the required result.^ I think chiefly, perhaps, 
 for this reason — because the religious teacher 
 has been satisfied too often with merely telling 
 the various classes of which his congregation 
 was formed that their interests were identical, 
 and has not been careful to give them the 
 reasons by which the truth of his statement 
 might be proved. 
 
 Those reasons, no doubt, are mainly ccono-
 
 I02 VILLAGE POLITICS. [iv. 
 
 mical. It would be necessary, therefore, that 
 the clergyman should know something of 
 political econom^y as well as theology. And 
 it is that fact which has caused him to hesitate. 
 He is restrained by certain conventional notions 
 as to what the dignity of the pulpit required. 
 Here is the grand mistake. The pulpit, in 
 fact, is dying of dignity. 
 
 Religion has to do with everything that 
 affects the conduct of life. And the teacher 
 of religion, if he has any function at all, has 
 surely this — to be the authorised expositor to 
 men of their duties. Those duties, it cannot 
 be denied, press upon every action and instant 
 of life. Wherever men are acting their part 
 in life human responsibility is involved. Con- 
 science is not limited to any one sphere of 
 action. In politics, in commerce, in the mar- 
 ket, in the farm, men still remain responsible 
 beings. Consciences are daily shipwrecked in 
 all these regions of thought and life. And 
 wherever conscience goes to work out its
 
 IV.] POVERTY AND RELIGION. 103 
 
 perilous problem, there the pulpit must not 
 hesitate to follow. 
 
 " What ought I to do ? " is a question never 
 to be trifled with, whatever the emergency- 
 may be which occasions it. And who shall 
 say that this labour agitation is not such an 
 
 emergency 
 
 Labourer^ farmer, landlord, are all asking 
 this question, What ought I to do in the 
 present emergency .'' 
 
 How is it to be answered in each case ? 
 Good intentions alone will not be sufficient to 
 help them to the right answer. Only specific 
 knowledge will be. And that knowledge, fail- 
 ing other teachers, I say it is the duty of those 
 who claim to be the accredited teachers of 
 morality to inculcate. 
 
 Let the clergy, I would say, speak out clearly 
 upon this question of agricultural labour. It 
 is their duty to do so, as it is in all social 
 crises whatever. Let them study the laws of 
 political economy, where "they do not already
 
 104 VILLAGE POLITICS. [iv. 
 
 know them, so that they may make such 
 advice as they may give, not only earnest and 
 well-intentioned, but reasonable and wise. Let 
 them not be such sticklers for pulpit dignity. 
 Our Master did not allow convention to stand 
 in the way of doing good. 
 
 Suppose Christ were to come again now to 
 our country, as He did in days gone by to Pales- 
 tine. Suppose He were suddenly to appear 
 as a teacher in the middle of London, or any 
 of our large towns, as He did of old in the 
 middle of Jerusalem, do you think He would 
 hesitate to speak out boldly on all questions, 
 be they what they might, which He saw 
 were affecting the inmost character of man ? 
 I think not. Rather, I am sure, would He be 
 found tearing away the flimsy veil of conven- 
 tion and hypocrisy with which we strive to 
 hide our social evils, denouncing our system 
 of caste as the greatest perhaps of those evils, 
 attacking, as He did of old, our most cherished 
 maxims about the rights of property and the
 
 IV.] POVERTY AND RELIGION. 105 
 
 duties of labour, satirising things grey with 
 the dust of ages, and letting in the light of 
 truth once more to the free souls of men. 
 
 There is truth, though not perhaps the whole 
 truth, in the quotation with which I will con- 
 clude. 
 
 "The modern Christ would be a politician. 
 His aim would be to raise the whole platform 
 of modern society ; He would not try to make 
 the poor contented with a lot in which they 
 cannot be much better than savages or brutes. 
 He would work at the destruction of caste, 
 which is the vice at the root of all our creeds 
 and institutions. He would not content Him- 
 self with denouncing sin as merely spiritual 
 evil ; He would go into its economic causes, 
 and destroy the flower by cutting at the roots 
 — poverty and ignorance. He would accept 
 the truths of science, and He would teach that 
 a man saves his soul best by helping his 
 neighbour. "
 
 V. 
 
 LIBERTY AND ASSOCIATION. 
 
 " Brethren, ye have been called unto liberty : only use 
 not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love 
 serve one another." — Galatians v. 13. 
 
 There was a very curious notice placed on our 
 church door a few weeks ago. Probably very 
 few of you paid much attention to it. It was 
 the announcement by the Steward of the Lord 
 of the Manor of his intention to hold a Court 
 Leet. Some of you, perhaps, have a general 
 notion that that Court has to do with certain 
 old-fashioned customs connected with the buy- 
 ing and selling of land, the closing of foot-paths, 
 and things of that kind, with which you are not 
 greatly concerned. I believe there are very few 
 places in England where this institution still
 
 v.] LIBERTY AND ASSOCIATION. 107 
 
 exists. I suppose it only lingers on in Bucking- 
 hamshire because, from one cause or another, 
 we are very tenacious of our old customs. 
 
 But although the Court Leet of the Lord of 
 the Manor is now a matter of a very small 
 practical interest to any of us, it has an histo- 
 rical value which is very great. I forget who it 
 was who said " A nation's true bible is its own 
 history." For once, at any rate, I should like 
 to take my text from that bible. It is good, 
 I am sure, sometimes " to look to the rock 
 whence we were hewn, and to the hole of the 
 pit whence we were digged," to trace the source 
 of that freedom of which we so often boast as 
 our country's noblest possession, and of 
 
 " Those old laws of England, they 
 Whose reverend heads with age are grey — 
 Children of a wiser day — 
 And whose solemn voice must be 
 Thine own echo, Liberty." 
 
 No people, I am sure, can long keep its national 
 self-respect and patriotism which docs not take
 
 io8 VILLAGE POLITICS. [v. 
 
 a proper pride in its own history. We, at any 
 rate, who are lovers of popular freedom and 
 popular progress, need never fear to look back 
 into the earliest days of England's history, for 
 everywhere we shall find, as far at least as our 
 English forefathers are concerned, freedom to be 
 older than bondage, progress to be older than 
 stagnation. 
 
 This Leet Court of the Lord of the Manor 
 takes us back to the early days of England's 
 childhood. Some writers have seen in it the 
 germ of all our political life, the very kernel of 
 our representative system. Certainly it is the 
 most ancient court of justice in England. It 
 is the Leods, or people's court, the assembly of 
 the old village commonwealths, in which each 
 freeman had his vote and place. For the primi- 
 tive constitution of our old English forefathers 
 was a true democracy, a government, that is to 
 say, of the whole people, and not only of a 
 part ; a government in which every freeman 
 had a voice, though not necessarily an equal
 
 v.] LIBERTY AND ASSOCIATION. 109 
 
 voice, in the affairs of the commonwealth. In 
 that old time, more than a thousand years ago, 
 it was the custom of the freemen of each little 
 village community to meet together under the 
 shade of some ancient tree, or on the village 
 green, to regulate the various rights over the 
 common lands, and to pass yearly bye-laws 
 for the common good. Once a year, or 
 oftener, an oath of mutual fidelity, the Peace- 
 pledge, was taken by the members of the 
 community. " For the nourishing of brotherly 
 love " — they swore — " they would be good and 
 true loving brother to the fraternity, helping 
 and counselling with all their power if any 
 brother that hath done his duties well and truly 
 come or fall to poverty, as God them help." 
 " Another peace, the greatest of all there is," ran 
 the law of the last king of the English before 
 the Conquest — " whereby all are maintained in 
 firmer state, to wit, in the establishment of a 
 guarantee, which the English call Frithborgas 
 with the exception of the men of York, who call
 
 no VILLAGE POLITICS. [v. 
 
 it Tenmannetale, that is, the number often men. 
 And it consists in this, that in all the villages 
 throughout the kingdom, all men are bound to 
 be in a guarantee by tens, so that if one of the 
 ten men offend, the other nine may hold him to 
 right." " Let all share the same lot," they said ; 
 " if any misdo, let all bear it." Such in those 
 old times, long before the days of policemen and 
 magistrates and Parliaments, was the Govern- 
 ment of the people by the people, their system 
 of Frank-pledge, or free engagement of neigh- 
 bour for neighbour, being in fact the base of all 
 their social and political order. 
 
 We cannot bring back those old times, my 
 friends, nor if we could do I think we should 
 greatly wish it. But we shall never do well 
 to forget the old spirit, the spirit of individual 
 freedom, of social charity, of faith in law- 
 abidingness, in which our forefathers met to- 
 gether, prayed together, aided one another, 
 and which they have bequeathed to us their 
 children as their most precious legacy. God
 
 v.] LIBERTY AND ASSOCIATION. in 
 
 grant that that spirit may never die out 
 among us. Personal independence, mutual re- 
 sponsibility, the rights of liberty, the duties of 
 association, these are the essential qualities of 
 the English character in the earliest time of 
 which history has anything to tell us. They 
 still lie at the root, believe me, of all that is 
 best in our national character. Cherish, I be- 
 seech you, labouring brothers, that spirit. Let 
 no man take from you the birthright of your 
 English Freedom. Without freedom, I do not 
 merely say that you cannot be good citizens, I 
 say you cannot be good men. Without liberty 
 there can be no true morality, for there can be 
 no free choice between good and evil ; and liberty 
 means just that. The right to choose what is 
 good. Not, mark you, the right to choose wJiat 
 one likes ; but perfect freedom to do zvJiat one 
 ought. Liberty, remember, is very often most 
 liberty when it is another word for obedience- 
 I call that man truly free who has learnt that 
 hardest of all lessons to learn, to do the thing he
 
 112 VILLAGE POLITICS. [v. 
 
 doesn't like, fj'oni a sense of duty. The greatest 
 slave is not the man who is ruled by a despot, 
 but the man who is the thrall of his own pas- 
 sions. Some people think that it is only neces- 
 sary to have good institutions to make good 
 men ; but that is far from true. It is not only 
 bad laws, you very well know, which make men 
 bad. It is not only good laws which make 
 men good. History does, indeed, teach us that 
 the good and noble peoples have almost always 
 had good laws and noble governors, while the 
 ignorant and servile people have been ruled 
 by despots and tyrants. But that is much 
 more because good people make good laws, 
 and bad people bad laws, than that good laws 
 make good people, and bad laws bad people. 
 Good men can work good out of an evil organi- 
 sation, and bad men can work evil out of a 
 good organisation. True liberty in fact is quite 
 as much a moral as a political growth. National 
 character is after all the surest guarantee of 
 national progress, and all that is best in our
 
 v.] LIBERTY AND ASSCCIATIOX. 113 
 
 English political character is, as I said, the 
 result of free individual action, energy, and 
 independence. We are free, not merely be- 
 cause we live under free institutions, but because 
 each Englishman has to a lesser or greater 
 extent the root of the matter within himself. 
 Like the true Christian, the true Englishman is 
 " a law unto himself." Truly sang Sir Henry 
 Wotton long ago : — 
 
 " How happy is he born and taught 
 
 Who serveth not anothci-'s will, 
 Whose armour is his honest thought, 
 
 And simple truth his only skill ! 
 Whose passions not his masters are, 
 
 Whose soul is still prepared for death. 
 Untied to this vain world by care 
 
 Of public fame or private breath ! 
 This man is freed from servile bands 
 
 Of hope to rise or fear to fall : 
 Lord of himself, though not of lands, 
 
 And having nothing, yet hath all." 
 
 The principle of liberty, however, requires the 
 regulation of the principle of association. With- 
 out that correction personal independence, the 
 
 I
 
 114 VILLAGE POLITICS. [v. 
 
 sense of the rights due to the individual, has its 
 dangers. Personal liberty is indeed a sacred 
 thing, a birthright which you may not yield up to 
 any ; but after all you must not forget it is only 
 a means, not aji end, in itself. Woe unto you 
 and your future, working men, should the 
 respect you owe to Individual Rights ever blind 
 you to the higher reverence which is due to 
 Social Duty. Do not misunderstand me. I do 
 not ask you to renounce your rights ; God 
 forbid ! The struggle for liberty is sacred, 
 maintain it to the last. But I do ask you to 
 remember that rights can only exist as a 
 consequence of duties fulfilled. 
 
 When Christ came and changed the face of 
 the world, foremost amongst the truths he 
 taught was this : " That he who would be first 
 among all, must be the servant of all." He 
 spoke not of rights only, but of duty, of love, 
 of self-sacrifice, of communion. And still, after 
 1800 years of labour and experience, the lesson 
 of His Communion Supper, that Sacrament of
 
 v.] LIBERTY AND ASSOCIATION. 115 
 
 Brotherhood, is not half spelt out. " We being 
 many are one body in Christ, and every one 
 members one of another." 
 
 We have yet to convince men of this. We 
 have yet to convince men that each is bound to 
 live, not for himself only, but for others ; that 
 the well-being of each is to be sought in the 
 well-being of all. Some of you, I know, think 
 that this Labourers' Union of yours is doing 
 much towards teaching you that lesson. I 
 cannot deny it — for I think so, and I thank God 
 for it. I do believe most earnestly, that if you 
 will but use it rightly, this Trade Union of yours 
 may bring home to you many a religious lesson 
 which we ministers of Christ have failed to teach 
 you. For my part I confess I have always felt 
 that there is much in the principle of unionism 
 " which is not far from the kingdom of Heaven." 
 A society in which the fundamental rule is that 
 the members shall not consider each man his 
 own, but every man another's wealth, of which 
 the central spirit is that each shall contribute to 
 
 I 2
 
 ii6 VILLAGE POLITICS. [v. 
 
 the common welfare, and shall at all costs post- 
 pone his own advantage to the common good, 
 cannot fail to do much towards helping you to 
 realise the new law of self-sacrifice enunciated 
 by the Divine Communist of Nazareth. 
 
 I am not unaware, of course, nor are you, that 
 the aims of unionism have not always been 
 noble, or its motives pure. "What crimes have 
 been wrought in thy name ! " alas, we must say 
 of unionism, as Madame Roland said of liberty. 
 Yet liberty is sacred, and so is association. The 
 history of unionism has had doubtless its evil 
 chapters. I cannot forget, however, that other 
 great causes, not excepting the holiest, have 
 had evil chapters in their history too. There 
 never was a good principle yet probably which 
 did not triumph through much evil. 
 
 Be it yours, however, labouring men, to see 
 that }'our society, of whose history as yet you 
 have no reason to be otherwise than justly 
 proud, shall have no cause to blush for any act 
 or speech of yours. " Let not our liberty be
 
 v.] LIBERTY AND ASSOCIATION. 117 
 
 a cloak for maliciousness," The record of the 
 Labourers' Union cannot but take a prominent 
 place in any future history of popular procuress ; 
 be it yours to see that that record shall be one 
 of honour and not of shame. "Ye have been 
 called unto liberty, brethren, only use not your 
 liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love 
 serve one another." Suffer no one to teach you 
 that your union is a mere collection of individuals 
 whom circumstances have for a time brought 
 together for selfish ends, which, therefore, cir- 
 cumstances may again divide. Learn rather to 
 regard yourselves as a community of freemen 
 and equals, bound together in brotherly concord 
 to labour towards a common aim. Show to the 
 world that your Union is no unworthy successor 
 of those old English brotherhoods whose law 
 ran, " Let all share the same lot ; if any niisdo, 
 let all bear it," nay, rather let me say of that 
 Christian brotherhood of which an apostle has 
 written, " The members should have the same 
 care one for another ; and whether one member
 
 Ii8 VILLAGE POLITICS. [v. 
 
 suffer, all the members suffer with him ; or one 
 member rejoice all the members rejoice with 
 him." 
 
 Cherish then, I beseech you, the spirit of 
 association, the spirit of liberty. Cherish liberty, 
 not that you may be free to do what you like, 
 but free to do what you ought. Cherish 
 association, that you may help yourselves 
 indeed, but not yourselves without others, much 
 less at their expense. So shall you realise not 
 only how noble and glorious a privilege it is 
 to be an English freeman, but something, God 
 grant, of the higher blessing of " those who are 
 called to be Christ's freemen " in that kingdom 
 concerning whose citizens it is written, "If the 
 Son shall make you free ye shall be free 
 indeed."
 
 VI. 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 " In knowledge and wisdom shall be the stability of our 
 times." — Isaiah. 
 
 We have been hearing a good deal in our 
 village lately about the working of the new 
 Education Act. Some of you, I know, thought 
 the other day, when the School Attendance 
 Officer went round to your cottages that you 
 did not like that Act at all One or two of 
 you, I am sorry to say, were barely civil to him, 
 and told him that you had no intention of 
 obeying it. I don't think you quite meant what 
 you said. But will you let me say one or two 
 words to you about it, and if I may, I will take 
 as a sort of second text, the first clause of the
 
 I20 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vi. 
 
 Act itself. The words are these : " It is 
 expedient to make further provision for the 
 education of children, and for securing the 
 fulfilment of parental authority in relation 
 thereto." 
 
 Here we have two principles stated. First, 
 that it is the duty of the State to make provi- 
 sion for the education of its citizens. Second, 
 that it is the duty of every parent to see that 
 his children are properly educated. I shall 
 divide what I have to say under these two 
 heads — the duty of the State, and the duty of 
 the parent. I am afraid there are still some 
 people who are not at all satisfied about this 
 first principle, who are not ready to accept 
 the truth of that sentiment of Isaiah, " that in 
 knowledge and wisdom is the stability of our 
 times." There are people who say, "No, 
 Education, at least too much of it, for labouring 
 people, is a bad thing. It gives people notions 
 above their place. It teaches them their power, 
 and makes it difficult to keep things quiet and
 
 VI.] EDUCATION. 121 
 
 orderly. So far from being the 'stability of 
 our times ' it is a great cause of social unsettle- 
 ment." I have even been assured by foolish and 
 ignorant persons that since the country has been 
 somewhat better educated there has been a 
 great increase of crime. 
 
 Now that is all wrong. Of course it is very 
 easy to point to the newspapers and the police 
 reports in proof of such an idea. There is 
 undoubtedly a great deal of crime in the 
 country. But if you w^ant to find out whether 
 crime is increasing in proportion to the popula- 
 tion, you must not trust merely to your memory 
 of police reports and startling instances of crime 
 which you have read in the newspaper. There 
 are proper places to go to for facts of that kind. 
 Mr. John Bright, not long ago, speaking to a 
 large number of working men at Rochdale, 
 recommended all his hearers to procure for 
 themselves the Financial Reform Almanac. 
 Now, if you were to take his advice and buy 
 that book, which you can do for a shilling, you
 
 122 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vi. 
 
 will find in it a great deal of interesting informa- 
 tion, and amongst other things the statistics of 
 crime in this country. And you will find this, 
 that so far from crime being on the increase it 
 is exactly the reverse ; that in fact the inmates 
 of our borough and county gaols are steadily on 
 the decrease, so much so that it was publicly 
 stated by Mr. Pell in the House of Commons 
 last year, that there are no less than sixty 
 prisons in England that might be closed. 
 
 But then some people say, " Crime generally 
 perhaps may be diminishing, but the propor- 
 tion of educated criminals is increasing." And 
 if that was true it would be to some extent 
 possibly an argument against education. But 
 then it is not true. In our prison statistics we 
 have the following account of the educational 
 condition of the prisoners : — 
 
 That 97 out of every lOO could neither read 
 nor write. 
 
 That a fraction under 3 in every 100 could 
 read and write well.
 
 VI.] EDUCATION. 123 
 
 That only i in 600 had superior education. 
 
 For those, however, whose minds are more 
 impressed by sensational facts than argument, 
 take this instance on the other side which came 
 across my notice the other day. A dreadful 
 murder was committed last year in a village 
 called Mailing, in Kent. In that village there 
 have been no less than six dreadful murders 
 within the last twenty years ! Now mark this. 
 Up to the time of the passing of the Education 
 Act of 1870 there was no school in the neigh- 
 bourhood, the result being that in the last trial 
 none of the various witnesses examined could 
 write their names, except the policeman and 
 the publican. I leave you to draw your own 
 conclusion. 
 
 Seven years ago the Government of this 
 country took up the question of Education, and 
 passed the Act of 1870. As early as 1736, 
 Prussia had declared the elementary education 
 of the people to be an essential part of state 
 policy, and in 18 10 passed a law, which, in most
 
 134 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vi. 
 
 of its provisions, anticipated by sixty years 
 Mr. Forster's Act. During the last few years 
 great efforts have been made and much has 
 been done to overtake these arrears of educa- 
 tional work. Last year, however, it was felt 
 that a further step in advance must be made. 
 The provisions of the new Act I have already 
 explained to you elsewhere. A very excellent 
 summary of its main provisions was given in 
 the Labourers Chronicle a few weeks back. 
 
 One most important provision of that Act is 
 the power which it gives to enforce the regular 
 attendance of children at school. I do not 
 wish, however, to dwell upon that side of the 
 matter in this place; I prefer rather to press 
 upon you the deep responsibility which every 
 parent incurs in withholding education from 
 his child. I would wish rather to help you to 
 realise the Christian duty of Parenthood. 
 
 I know scarcely any subject more solemn 
 than this. There is a text in the Bible — a very 
 terrible text — yet our Master's own word, which
 
 VI.] EDUCATION. 125 
 
 I wish I could brand upon the conscience of 
 every father and mother here. It occurs three 
 times in the Gospels. It is this, " It were 
 better that a millstone were hanged about a 
 man's neck, and he cast into the sea, than 
 that he should offend one of these little 
 ones." 
 
 Perhaps you do not quite see the awful signi- 
 ficance of those words — how they bear upon 
 you. Perhaps you say, " No, those words do 
 not touch me ; I do not offend any of my little 
 ones ; I do not willingly teach them evil." God 
 grant that it may be so. But remember what 
 the poet says : — 
 
 " More evil is -wrought 
 By want of thought 
 Than even by want of heart." 
 
 You may offend the little ones not onl_\- by 
 doing to them what you ought not to do, but 
 also by leaving undone what you might do. 
 Are you guiltless in that matter ? Have you 
 really done all that you can for your children .''
 
 126 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vi. 
 
 You would, I know, think it a disgraceful thing 
 if you suffered your children to starve when 
 you had the means to nourish them. You 
 would rightly cry shame on any one who 
 neglected to give food to his children. You 
 would sacrifice everything yourself rather than 
 that they should starve. But what of the 
 children's minds. What right have you to 
 starve them .'' Do you say, " That is all very 
 well ; but we know we can't live without food, 
 and we can live without education. We parents 
 have got on very well without it, and our chil- 
 dren must do the same." I was marrying two 
 people not very long ago, and when it came to 
 signing their names in the register I found as, 
 alas, I too often do find, that neither of them 
 could write. I said to the man, " You ought to 
 come to the night school to learn to read and 
 write, and then you could teach your wife. His 
 answer was this, " I've got to work. What's the 
 good of education to me ? " 
 
 I am glad to think, however, that a great
 
 VI.] EDUCATION. 127 
 
 many of you who hav^e to work are beginning 
 to find that education is a very great good 
 indeed. You are beginning to find that the 
 difference between an educated and an unedu- 
 cated workman is as the difference between 
 comfort and misery. An educated workman, 
 a man whose faculties are trained, has ever so 
 much better chance of getting on. The un- 
 educated workman gets left behind in the race, 
 and rightly so. An employer of labour was 
 complaining to me the other day of the stupidity 
 of one of our village lads. He had had occa- 
 sion, he said, to stop his waggon half-way down 
 the hill, and he told the boy to scotch the wheel. 
 The lad put a half brick "at the back of the 
 wheel." Now uneducated workmen, it appears 
 to me, are always doing things of that kind. 
 They are continually scotching the wheel at the 
 wrong side. Their work may be all very well 
 up to a certain point, but sooner or later the 
 want of brain-teaching is sure to make itself 
 felt, in some piece of stupidity which may very
 
 128 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vi. 
 
 likely spoil in a moment the results of a whole 
 week's drudgery. 
 
 But it is not only in matter of work that 
 education is of use. It is of use in play. 
 People are complaining a great deal, as you 
 know, nowadays, about the fearful evil of 
 drunkenness, and are trying all kinds of 
 methods to stop it. But after all, education re- 
 mains as one of the most effective of its anta- 
 gonists. And for this reason. Education opens 
 out to a man infinitely better ways of getting 
 recreation, and even excitement, than through 
 the agency of strong drink. The educated man 
 can get his drunkenness, so to speak, out of 
 books. I don't say, of course, that education 
 will do away with drunkenness, or that no 
 educated man ever gets drunk. But I do say 
 that education supplies an additional means of 
 escape from low and degrading tastes. The 
 agricultural labourer on a winter's evening, who 
 can't read, what is he to do .-' His only choice 
 lies between the public-house and bed !
 
 VI.] EDUCATION. 129 
 
 I tell you, my friends, and I speak most 
 seriously, if I, knowing the value of education 
 as I do, had the choice given me, between life, 
 without education — life, such as, God help them, 
 many a man lives in England with his mind 
 closed to everything but eating and drinking, 
 and drudging — and death : I tell you plainly, 
 I should choose death. Oh, it is sad to see ! I 
 know no sight more sad than a human being, 
 gifted by God with reason and intellect, sunk, 
 for want of due training, into the condition 
 of a mere brute — 
 
 '• The moving glory of the heavens, their pomp and 
 pageantry, 
 
 Flame in his shadowed face, but no soul comes up to 
 see ; 
 
 He sees no angels lean to him, he feels no spirit 
 hand ; 
 
 Melodious beauty sings to him, he cannot under- 
 stand." 
 
 Fathers and mothers, you who have children, 
 and who do not do your duty by them, do 
 
 K
 
 30 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vi. 
 
 not forget those words of your Master, " It were 
 better that a millstone were hanged about a 
 man's neck and he were cast into the sea, than 
 that he should offend one of these little ones."
 
 VII. 
 THE AGITATOR. 
 
 " Prophesy not again any more at Bethel : for it is the 
 king's chapel, and it is the king's court." — Amos vii. 13. 
 
 It was hardly likely that such a plea as this 
 would dissuade a prophet of God from denounc- 
 ing- wrong. Respect for established authorities 
 where established authorities are not on the 
 side of right can be no characteristic of a true 
 teacher. Not for a moment will the preacher of 
 righteousness give way to that vilest of all vile 
 opinions that " the king's chapel or the king's 
 court," that high position or worldly rank, can 
 give license to wickedness or sin. 
 
 The prophet Amos, at least, is not the man 
 to be shaken, by either kingly smile or priestly 
 
 K 2
 
 132 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vii. 
 
 frown, from steadfast adherence to the right. 
 A man of that class to whom Abraham, and 
 Moses, and David had belonged, a keeper of 
 sheep on the wild uplands of Judah, a plain 
 labouring man, familiar, as all his words imply, 
 with the common sights and sounds of country- 
 life, sharing in all the hard life, the wrongs and 
 sufferings of the country poor, " the Lord had 
 taken him as he followed the flock, and had said 
 unto him, Go prophesy unto my people Israel." 
 A true child of nature, schooled in that wisdom 
 which a poet of our own has taught us, may 
 come to the plainest labouring man from the 
 common incidents of his daily life — 
 
 " Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed 
 The common air : the hills which he so oft 
 Had climbed with vigorous steps, which had impressed 
 So many incidents upon his mind, 
 Of hardship, skill, or courage, joy or fear." 
 
 Originally no prophet, neither a prophet's son, 
 he had yet succeeded in catching the popular 
 ear by the boldness with which he had de-
 
 VII.] THE AGITATOR. 133 
 
 nounced the vices of his time. On the hill-side 
 of Samaria he had taken up his burden against 
 the oppressors of the poor. In broad shepherd 
 language he had addressed the nobles of his 
 people as " those who put away the evil day . . . 
 They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and 
 abhor him that speaketh rightly. Forasmuch, 
 therefore, as your treading is upon the poor, 
 and ye take from him burdens of wheat ; ye 
 have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall 
 not dwell in them ; ye have planted pleasant 
 vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine in them. 
 I know your manifold transgressions and your 
 mighty sins — they afflict the just, they take a 
 bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate 
 from their right." 
 
 With his soul full of disgust and horror at 
 the licentiousness and drunkenness of the nobles, 
 their luxury and insolence, at the bribery prac- 
 tised in the judgment seats, at the narrowness, 
 the fanaticism, the hypocrisy of the priesthood, 
 the robbery, the folly, and the oppression on all
 
 34 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vii. 
 
 sides, no wonder the rustic prophet was tempted 
 to cry, " The prudent shall keep silence in that 
 time, for it is an evil time." But it was a temp- 
 tation to which for himself, at any rate, he did 
 not yield. In the very sanctuary of Bethel 
 itself, in the sacred and royal precincts, the 
 fearless shepherd utters the impending doom 
 of the nation. 
 
 The high priest cannot endure the rebuke. 
 He drives away the prophet as an intruder and 
 heretic. " Prophesy not again any more," he 
 cries, " at Bethel, for it is the king's court, it 
 is the king's chapel." The experience of the 
 shepherd prophet is no exceptional one in 
 history. Popular reformers in all ages and all 
 countries, from Amos down to Joseph Arch, 
 have rarely met with much favour from the 
 established authorities in either Church or 
 State. 
 
 Dean Milman once spoke of the Hebrew 
 prophets as " the constitutional patriots of the 
 Jewish state." Patriots undoubtedly they were,
 
 VII.] THE AGITATOR. 135 
 
 but patriots very often who, in virtue of their 
 patriotism, were directly in opposition to the 
 more regularly constituted authorities. They 
 were, in fact, the champions of popular libert}^ 
 and popular justice at a time when those virtues 
 met with little regard from either priests or 
 kings. They furnished — as Mr. Mill has truly 
 shown — that antagonistic element in the na- 
 tional life which is, after all, the truest guarantee 
 of progress. With the Jews, it is true that 
 progress was in the main religious and social, 
 not political. But compare the history of the 
 Jews with that of any other Eastern nation, and 
 bearing this hint in mind, you will see why 
 it was that possessing in ^common with other 
 Orientals an absolute monarchy and an or- 
 ganised priesthood, that great nation never 
 became stationary and stagnant, but was con- 
 tinually progressive. The prophets, indeed, far 
 more than the priesthood, were the true reli- 
 gious leaders of the people. They, rather than 
 the priests, were always the first to hit the blots
 
 136 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vii. 
 
 of the present, and to grasp the new truths of 
 the future. I think you will understand me 
 when I say that they were in many respects 
 the equivalent of the modern so-called " Agita- 
 tor. " They represented, that is to say, for 
 the Jewish nation, that element of free and 
 open discussion without which it is possible 
 indeed to have order and industry, but not 
 possible to have either improvement or pro- 
 gress. 
 
 Now, here we have a principle which I Avish 
 I could impress upon those who are always so 
 ready to denounce all popular agitation as 
 mischievous and evil. 
 
 Take this labour agitation, for example, of 
 the last few years. One would imagine, to hear 
 some people talk, that an Agitator was of 
 necessity an incendiary, or a rogue. That a 
 man should have deliberately set himself to 
 question in any way the absolute beneficence 
 of the existing relations between capital and 
 labour, much more to make men dissatisfied
 
 VII.] THE AGITATOR. 137 
 
 with such relations, to have taught labouring' 
 people to think, to speak, to act for themselves, 
 to regard sharply their own interests, not merely 
 to accept placidly whatever according to the 
 old customs those interests by others were 
 considered to be, in a word, — not to be content 
 with that state of life in which they found them- 
 selves, especially if it appeared likely that it was 
 a state of life into which man and not God had 
 called them, were grounds quite sufficient for 
 any such belief 
 
 Few rural crimes, in fact, would appear to be 
 more heinous than that of open criticism of the 
 old customs ; and this, quite apart from the 
 question as to whether the customs criticised 
 are good or bad. It is the criticism itself that 
 constitutes the crime. 
 
 Old things need not be therefore true 
 O brother men, nor yet the new ; 
 Ah, still a while the old thought detain, 
 And ) ct consider ii again.'
 
 138 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vii. 
 
 But that is unfortunately exactly what the 
 employer of rural labour will not as a rule 
 consent to do, much less, if he could avoid it, 
 consent that his labourers should learn to do. 
 And it is because that word, " consider it 
 again," is, so to speak, always the Agitator's 
 last word, which makes him so objectionable. 
 
 The fact is, it is very difficult for the farmer 
 to get rid of the idea that the labourer in com- 
 bining to raise wages is committing an act of 
 insubordination, for which he ought to be 
 punished like a soldier under the Mutiny Act. 
 The old idea that custom and not competition 
 regulates wages, it is true, is almost exploded ; 
 but the true action of the law of supply and 
 demand is not as yet quite clearly apprehended. 
 That convenient phrase of the political econo- 
 mists the farmer has not been slow to learn ; 
 but he has put his own interpretation upon it. 
 Wages, he says, are regulated by the law of 
 supply and demand, but that is a law, he thinks, 
 of which the buyer of labour and not the seller
 
 vn.] THE AGITATOR. 139 
 
 is the sole administrator. He recognises that 
 the price of labour is a question of bargain, but 
 he does not quite so clearly see that the bargain 
 must be made in open market, and, to be fair and 
 just, must allow of perfect freedom of choice on 
 both sides. 
 
 To the labourer, until the advent of the 
 Union, that freedom of choice was practically 
 denied. It was the Union in fact which first 
 gave free play to the action of the law of supply 
 and demand, and which, by providing, by 
 means of migration and emigration, an outlet for 
 the surplus labourers of an overstocked market, 
 put the seller of labour in some degree on a fair 
 level with the buyer, 
 
 I am not at all sure whether even now the 
 farmers are quite ready to acknowledge how 
 legitimate is this action of the Union, and how 
 reasonable for such a purpose is agitation. 
 
 It is a grievance, they say, that agitation 
 should have been fostered by outsiders. It is 
 the "/rt/<^ agitator" who is disliked so bitterly
 
 140 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vii. 
 
 And yet, once grant the cause for which agita- 
 tion is promoted to be just, where is the stigma 
 in being an agitator ? If the cause is bad, so 
 also is the agitator ; but if it is good, the office 
 of agitator is good also. And as to the fact 
 that he is paid for his work, there is surely no 
 necessary antagonism between a salary and 
 sincerity. " The labourer is worthy of his hire," 
 whether his labour be the ploughing of a 
 field, the digging of a drain, the shoeing of a 
 horse, or the organising of a society, the stirring 
 up of enthusiasm, or the making of speeches. 
 Again, it is said, " It is the duty of the labourers' 
 delegate to foster class strife." If that were 
 true, it is not likely that I, as vicar of the parish, 
 would be found ready to give the agitation my 
 sympathy. But in the fiirst place, I deny em- 
 phatically that it is the office of the agitator to 
 foster class strife. I am equally ready, however, 
 to acknowledge that that has too often been the 
 unfortunate result of his action. I hope you do 
 not think that the two assertions are inconsistent.
 
 VII.] THE AGITATOR. 141 
 
 There is a saying of our Lord's containing a 
 somewhat similar apparent contradiction in 
 terms, of which, as it bears in principle directly 
 on this question, I will venture to remind you. 
 The words are these — you will find them in 
 Matt. X. 34, and Luke xii. 49 — " Suppose ye 
 that I am come to send peace on earth .'' I tell 
 you nay ; but rather division. Think not that 
 I am come to send peace on earth ; I came 
 not to send peace, but a sword." 
 
 Now I do not think that many of you have 
 been much perplexed or distressed by the ap- 
 parent contradiction between these words of 
 Christ and the expressed object of his coming. 
 You have said very truly — " We must distin- 
 guish here between the object of Christ'^ coming 
 and the effect of Christ's coming. Jesus Christ 
 was indeed the Prince of Peace, who came ' to 
 guide our feet into the way of peace.' We 
 acknowledge love, brotherhood, goodwill 
 amongst men, to have been the master-note 
 of his Gospel. We cannot, however, conceal
 
 142 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vii. 
 
 from ourselves that one result of that message 
 has often been disunited households, broken 
 friendship, religious hatred, discord, disunion, 
 division of all kinds. Yet here we know the 
 sword was the sign of Peace. If the mes- 
 sage of Christ divided men, it was at least a 
 sign that some men were in earnest about it. 
 If it brought division into a house, it also 
 brought energy and activity, it put an end to 
 the fatal lethargy, to the numbing stupor of 
 indifference which was eating out the life of 
 men's souls. The division must needs have 
 come, but it came not of the Gospel, but tJuviigh 
 the Gospel. We must distinguish between the 
 intention and the consequence, between the 
 object and the result." 
 
 Now it is exactl}^ this principle which I 
 would wish you to bear in mind when you are 
 speaking of the class strifes which have been 
 the occasional results of labour agitation. 
 
 God forbid that I should for a moment 
 seem to speak, from this place especially, of
 
 VII.] THE AGITATOR. 143 
 
 class strife as a slight thing, or to regard it 
 as other than a most lamentable evil. In this 
 venerable House of God, at any rate, sacred to 
 all of you I doubt not, to poor as well as rich, 
 to labourer as well as farmer, by many hallowed 
 memories and cherished associations, I should 
 indeed fail in my duty if I suffered myself to 
 forget that I am Christ's ambassador, not to 
 one class or another of my parishioners, but to 
 all classes equally. To endeavour to knit men 
 together " in one communion and fellowship in 
 the mystical body " of God's Son, must ever, I 
 hold, be the highest privilege of a Christian 
 minister. I trust I may never forget it. 
 
 But you would not, I am sure, think I was 
 rightly fulfilling the duties of my office as the 
 authorised teacher of morality in this parish if 
 in any moral difficulty or social emergency my 
 first question should always be — " Is the dis- 
 cussion of this matter likely to unsettle the 
 parish ? What will be the result of out-spoken 
 opinion as to the right or wrong of this question ?
 
 144 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vii. 
 
 Shall I run the risk of offending some of my 
 leading parishioners ? Will it make it very 
 difficult to live peaceably with any of them ? 
 Will my advocacy of what appears to me to be 
 right and reasonable lead to class division and 
 social heart-burning ? " These are not surely 
 the first questions you would desire to see a 
 clergyman putting to himself in any circum- 
 stances of moral difficulty. Rather, I trust, you 
 w^ould desire him to ask first of all, " What are 
 the conditions which in this parish make right 
 conduct, the ' good and holy living,' of my 
 parishioners most difificult ? Are there any 
 purely material obstacles in the way of ' pure 
 religion breathing household laws ' ? What, for 
 example, are the physical conditions under 
 which the distinctively home virtues find their 
 nourishment — parental love, filial obedience, 
 household thrift, cleanliness, modesty, chastity, 
 self-respect, purity and simplicity of heart ? 
 Is the meagre growth of these virtues due 
 entirely to failure of individual will, or can it be
 
 VII.] THE AGITATOR. 145 
 
 said that the circumstances of the labourer's 
 life and sleep are so degrading that there is 
 no moral room for their growth ? What provi- 
 sion is there for the three essentials of physical 
 life — pure air, pure water, pure food ? What for 
 the three essentials of spiritual life — 'admiration 
 hope, love ' ? What groundwork is there upon 
 which to build the social virtues — generosity, 
 justice, mercy ? What soil in the day-labourer's 
 life for those root-virtues of a manly character — 
 self-reliance, self-help, independence, ambition ? 
 Does a life of steady industry lead to any other 
 result than that of an old age of penury and 
 want ? " 
 
 I think if a clergyman will honestly ask 
 himself such questions as these, he will not long 
 hesitate on which side his sympathies ought 
 to lie, or his duty to call him. He will not, I 
 think, much longer care to preach that the 
 moral conditions of life should be conformed to 
 the economical rather than that the economical 
 should be conformed to the moral. 
 
 L
 
 146 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vii. 
 
 For myself, at any rate, I desire to say with 
 St. Jerome of old, " If an offence come out of 
 truth, better is it that the offence come than 
 that the truth be concealed." 
 
 One word, and I will conclude. Do not 
 suppose that because I am ready to defend 
 sympathy with social agitation, that I am at all 
 blind to the dangers to which, wdien guided by 
 evil hands, it may lead. But I think that 
 even the most timid observer of the signs of 
 the times cannot but allow that few things have 
 been more remarkable about the conduct of 
 the farm-labourers' agitation than the anxious 
 moderation and sober judgment of its'promoters. 
 
 It is evident that the peasantry of England 
 have advanced many a long step from the days 
 of Luddism and Jack Straw. No generous 
 mind, I am sure, can listen to the sturdy com- 
 mon-sense, the manly independence, the graphic 
 eloquence of Joseph Arch, without feeling a 
 new pride in the country whose lowest ranks 
 can produce such a man.
 
 VII.] THE AGITATOR. 
 
 H7 
 
 If words of caution are needed, I know of 
 none more forcible than those which you may 
 read in the first address issued by the President 
 of the Labourers' Union, and whose echo has 
 seldom been absent from any succeeding speech 
 of his: "Let peace and moderation," he said, 
 " mark all our meetings. Let courtesy, fairness, 
 and firmness, characterise all our demands. 
 Brothers, be united, and you will be strong ; be 
 temperate, and you will be respected." 
 
 L 2
 
 VIII. 
 THE LANDLORD. 
 
 '' Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead 
 of barley." — Job xxxi. 40. 
 
 This is a good landlord's idea of bad farming. 
 Of the patriarch Job, as a pattern of patience, 
 you have all, I doubt not, often heard, I take 
 him, however, this morning as the type of a 
 model landlord. 
 
 Critics tell us that it is very difficult to deter- 
 mine exactly during what age of the world the 
 patriach Job lived. But there appears to be 
 little doubt that it was somewhere between the 
 times of Abraham and Moses. The quaint sim- 
 plicity of manners, the archaic language, the 
 free, vigorous life of the desert, everything in 
 fact which we call local colouring, point to the
 
 VIII.] THE LANDLORD. 149 
 
 patriarchal rather than any later age, as the 
 period to which the story of the book of Job 
 belongs. There is an undoubted social advance, 
 it is true, upon the time of Abraham, but 
 nothing which may not be accounted for by the 
 progress of events in the intervening period. 
 
 The patriarch is described as living in con- 
 siderable splendour and dignity, surrounded by 
 a large number of servants and retainers. In 
 the early part of the speech which ends with 
 the words I have taken as my text he is spoken 
 of as being received with the highest honour 
 and respect when he came to take his seat in 
 the Town Gate to dispense justice and judgment. 
 Altogether it is plain that he is a man of very 
 high rank and immense wealth ; a warrior and 
 chieftain, successful in war, prosperous in peace ; 
 an upright man also, blameless in all the rela- 
 tions of life, declared by God himself to be 
 "without his like in all the earth ; a perfect man, 
 — one who fearcth God and escheweth evil." 
 
 If it were not for the Eastern name and the
 
 ISO VILLAGE POLITICS. [viii. 
 
 Eastern colouring, there is not a little in the 
 outward circumstances of the patriarch which, 
 notwithstanding the long interval of probably 
 forty hundred years or more, would remind us 
 of some feudal chieftain of our own land a few 
 centuries ago. 
 
 Indeed, if you will read carefully with me 
 the most important parts of Job's concluding 
 speech, you cannot, I think, fail to see how 
 natural is that interchange of the words " patri- 
 archal " and " feudal," which I dare say you may 
 have often noticed in the speeches of those who 
 have been talking to you about the relations of 
 the modern English landlord with those who 
 till the soil. 
 
 At any rate, there arc lessons of duty and 
 responsibility I think to be learnt from the'words 
 of the patriarch Job, uttered nineteen centuries 
 before Christ, even by our modern Squires living 
 in the nineteenth century after Christ. Let me 
 read from the eleventh verse of the twenty-ninth 
 chapter:
 
 VIII.] THE LANDLORD. 151 
 
 " When the ear heard me, then it blessed .me ; 
 when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me : 
 because I delivered the poor that cried, and 
 the fatherless, and him that had none to help 
 him. The blessing of him that was ready to 
 perish came upon me : and I caused the widow's 
 heart to sing for joy 
 
 " I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to 
 the lame. 
 
 " I was a father to the poor : and the cause 
 which I knew not I searched out 
 
 " If I did despise the cause of my man-ser- 
 vant or of my maid-servant, when they contended 
 with me : what then shall I do when God riseth 
 up .'' and when he visiteth, what shall I answer 
 him .'* Did not he that made me in the womb, 
 make him .? and did not one fashion us .-^ . . . . 
 
 "If I have made gold my hope, or have said 
 to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence ; if I 
 rejoiced because my wealth was great, and 
 because my hand had gotten much ; this also 
 was an iniquity to be punished. . . .
 
 152 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vill. 
 
 "Did I fear a great multitude, or did the 
 contempt of families terrify me, that I kept 
 silence ? , . 
 
 " If my land cry against me, or that the 
 furrows thereof complain ; if I have eaten the 
 fruits thereof without money, or have caused 
 the owners to lose their life : let thistles grow 
 instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley ■ ' 
 
 Now this in many respects I think you will 
 agree with me is a very remarkable summary 
 of the duties of a good landlord. It is notable 
 especially, I think, for its assertion of tvv'o impor- 
 tant principles, which, put into modern form, 
 may fairly stand thus : — 
 
 (i) That the cause of the poor should be 
 treated not merely with mercy, but with justice. 
 
 (2) That production of food for the people 
 is the primary trust upon the land. 
 
 Let me say a word or two upon each of these 
 two principles, for it is mainly, I think, in his 
 neglect of these that the modern English land- 
 lord fails in his conception of social duty.
 
 Mil.] THE LANDLORD. I53 
 
 I. — It would be possible, I am aware, to draw 
 a picture of a vicious, selfish landlord, living in 
 absolute idleness and luxury, callous to every 
 •social obligation which his property imposes. 
 That there are such men, I fear, cannot be 
 denied. I cannot forget that it was no " blatant 
 demagogue" or noisy agitator, but a true- 
 hearted philanthropist and tender parish priest, 
 who wrote, 
 
 " You have sold the labouring man. Squire, 
 Body and soul to shame, 
 To pay for your seat in the House, Squire, 
 And to pay for the feed of your game. 
 
 " When packed in one reeking chamber, 
 Man, maid, mother and little ones lay; 
 While the rain pattered in on the rotting bride bed, 
 And the walls let in the day ; 
 
 " We quarrelled like brutes — and who wonders ? 
 What self-respect could we keep ? 
 W^orse housed than your hacks and your pointers, 
 Worse fed than your hogs and your sheep." 
 
 But the "bad squires," I am willing to allow, 
 are the exceptions and not the rule. It is not 
 so much, as it appears to me, in wilful viciousness
 
 154 VILLAGE POLITICS. [viii. 
 
 or wastefulness of living that our typical English 
 squire is apt to fail. It is rather in his ignorance, 
 entirely vicious in its action, I grant, of what 
 modern industrial society requires of him, that 
 he is wanting. He is still too often clinging in 
 the nineteenth century to conceptions of landed 
 property and its social duties which are more 
 worthy of the twelfth. The straggling relics 
 of feudal manners still nang about him. His 
 principles of government are those of " the 
 beneficent-paternal-despotism " character. His 
 theory of the true relations of rich and 
 poor is that of protection on the one side, 
 obedience on the other. Condescending bene- 
 ficence and affectionate patronage on his part 
 are to be met with grateful deference and loyal 
 submission on the part of his dependents. It 
 is not in the quantity of his sympathy, but in 
 its quality, that he fails. He would do many 
 excellent things for his labourers, it is true ; he 
 would build them cottages, he would educate 
 their children, he would clothe the needy,
 
 vm.] THE LANDLORD. 15J 
 
 he would feed the hungry, — but all these he 
 does not do in the most excellent way. 
 The mercy of the squire's gift he zvill not 
 forego. It is the Justiee of the labourer s right 
 that he cannot admit. 
 
 I have no desire to depreciate altogether the 
 graciousness of the feudal ideal. It has much 
 about it, I do not deny, which is very seductive. 
 Gratitude and devotion, obedience, docility, 
 deferential awe, meekness, personal subjection, — 
 all these are doubtless very excellent qualities 
 in their place. But their place is not in the 
 minds of the labouring class in an industrial 
 age. Personal energy and self-help, independ- 
 ence, enterprise, vigour, thrift, — these are rather 
 the qualities and the virtues upon which for 
 the future we should wish popular well-being 
 and well-doing to depend. The working men 
 of our towns have long since come out of 
 leading-strings. If their rural brethren are 
 not yet quite so far advanced on the path 
 of popular progress and freedom, they are
 
 -156 VILLAGE POLITICS, [viii. 
 
 certainly no longer children over whom paternal 
 rights can with safety be asserted. More and 
 more every day is it becoming evident, that if 
 advice or sympathy or assistance is to be offered 
 to them it must come, not as from the patron, 
 but as from the friend. It will be some little 
 time yet, no doubt, before the squire can alto- 
 gether feel that he is valued not for his gifts, 
 but for his sympathy — not for what he can do, 
 but for what he is. Yet nothing short of this, 
 I venture to say, ought to be the ideal with 
 which a good landlord is satisfied. 
 
 There are those, I am aware, among our 
 landed proprietors, Avho repudiate altogether 
 the industrial ideal. Strangers by their whole 
 life and tradition to the habits of industrial 
 activity, it is perhaps excusable that the sub- 
 stitution of economic for semi-feudal conditions 
 should be regarded by them with a certain 
 degree of suspicion. The commercial system, 
 it is said, is devoid of human sympathies. The 
 principle of " kindliness," always so pleasing an
 
 VIII.] THE LANDLORD. 157 
 
 element in the relation between farmer and 
 man, must, they complain, entirely disappear 
 before the regime of " cash payment " and hard 
 bargains. Commercial contract will kill Chris- 
 tian charity. 
 
 To that I answer — first, the breaking up of the 
 old feudal relations is inevitable. It would be 
 useless, it would be impossible, to re-invigorate 
 them. 
 
 " The old order changes, giving place to the new ; 
 And God fultills Himself in many ways, 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 
 
 The old feudal order is giving place to the 
 new economic one. The very basis and ground- 
 work of this labour struggle of the last (q\v 
 years is that the epoch of charity in the rural 
 districts is closed, and the industrial age has 
 begun. It is useless, I say, to resist this change. 
 The sensible course, as it appears to me, for 
 a just landlord, is to accept that change as 
 inevitable, and to use such moderating influence
 
 158 VILLAGE POLITICS. [viii. 
 
 as he niciy possess to make the transition from 
 the old to the new conditions as easy and gentle 
 as possible. 
 
 And secondly, I would protest most strongly 
 against the assumption that there is anything 
 in strictly economic principles which need in 
 any sense stand in the way of the exhibition of 
 the most generous and sympathetic feelings 
 between master and man. If there is any one 
 who disputes that statement, I would ask him 
 to read carefully such a book as the Life and 
 Letters of Thomas Brassey, the great Railway 
 Contractor, and then say whether he considers 
 that the strictest economic conditions, leading to 
 complete industrial success, are in any degree 
 inconsistent with the kindliest relations between 
 master and man — the most absolute trustfulness 
 and generosity on the part of the employer met 
 by the most chivalrous devotion on the part of 
 the employed. 
 
 IL — We must pass, however, to our second
 
 VIII.] THE LANDLORD. 159 
 
 principle ; that production of food for the 
 people is the peculiar burden upon the land. 
 
 It was Mr. Mill, I think, who once said, that 
 one of the most " peculiar burdens " upon the 
 land in England was the landlord. In all pro 
 bability that remark may seem to some of you 
 a somewhat strange one. We are so accustomed 
 to think of the landlord, the farmer, and the 
 labourer, as the three indispensable requisites in 
 connection with the cultivation of land, that the 
 very idea of a state of affairs in which these 
 three should not exist is almost inconceivable. 
 And yet the way in which land is held and 
 cultivated in England, at the present time, is 
 no indication at all of the way in which it was 
 held in days gone by, or of the way in which 
 it is held now in other countries of Europe, 
 or in the United States or even in our English 
 colonies, Canada or Queensland. Land tenure 
 is in fact a mere matter of custom, varying 
 in different countries and different times. 
 
 It is not the landlord, the farmer, and the
 
 i6o VILLAGE POLITICS. Lvm. 
 
 labourer, who are the three indispensable re- 
 quisites of production ; but land, labour, and 
 capital. And these three things, it is evident, 
 may be brought together in a variety of ways. 
 They may be all furnished by one person, or 
 they may be furnished by many persons. In 
 our English system of land tenure the three 
 requisites of production are distributed un- 
 equally between the three classes — of proprietor, 
 farmer, and labourer ; the proprietor furnish- 
 ing land and capital ; the farmer, capital and 
 superintending labour ; the labourer, labour 
 only. In this arrangement we have many ad- 
 vantages, but we have many disadvantages 
 also. Few things in fact are more in need of 
 revision and reform than the English land laws. 
 It is very natural that this should be so. For 
 the laws which regulate the tenure of English 
 land have come down to us from a time when 
 the land-holding class were the sole governing 
 class in the country, contriving therefore, per- 
 haps, naturally enough, that the laws which
 
 VIII.] THE LANDLORD. i6i 
 
 regulated the tenure of their lands should con- 
 tribute to the permanence and power of their 
 own class rather than to the general welfare 
 of the people. 
 
 It is very customary to hear our land laws 
 denounced as feudal in character. This is 
 hardly just. The evils which are characteristic 
 of our present system are really much more 
 that outcome of legislation dating from Tudor 
 times, than of feudal principles. The feudal 
 system had, at least, this for its main principle ; 
 t4iat tenure of property is dependent on the due 
 fulfilment of social obligation. Under that 
 system the landlords of England were not, 
 strictly speaking, landowners at all, but land- 
 holders, tenants in fee, holding the soil from the 
 State, under conditions of military service. The 
 land was held in trust for the nation under that 
 obligation, and burdened with the support of 
 soldiery for the national defence. It was to the 
 jealousy of the Tudor kings for the great nobles, 
 and their fear of the material power which the 
 
 u
 
 i63 VILLAGE POLITICS. [vill. 
 
 maintenance of independent soldiery gave, that 
 the land was relieved from this obligation and 
 the burden of military expenditure thrown on 
 fhe industrial classes by means of a general 
 excise. 
 
 The evil effect of this policy, not only upon 
 the system of land-holding, but upon the gene- 
 ral social condition of England, can hardly 
 be exaggerated. The new idea of land-owning 
 rather than land-holding, of the abstract right, 
 that is to say, of private property in land, soon 
 became fertile of mischief. At the close of the 
 fifteenth century the owner of land, discovering 
 that it would be more profitable to himself to feed 
 sheep than men, proceeded to convert wholesale 
 arable land into pasture. Villages were de- 
 stroyed, tenants were turned adrift from their 
 holdings, peasants from their homes, to make 
 room for sheep. This deplorable policy of the 
 Tudor landlords, however, brought its own 
 punishment in a terrible increase of popular 
 distress and crime. The necessary supplement
 
 VIII.] THE LANDLORD. 163 
 
 soon followed in the permanent establishment 
 of taxation for the support of the poor. 
 English pauperism and the English Poor Law 
 are, in fact, the legacy of Tudor landlords to 
 the English people. 
 
 To this same principle also of private pro- 
 perty in land may be traced the appropriation 
 to the sole use of the landlord class of vast 
 quantities of common land, over which the 
 public possessed invaluable rights. Those rights 
 have been gradually absorbed, in the majority 
 of cases by means of private Acts of Parlia- 
 ment ; in not a few cases, however, by direct 
 usurpation. The enclosing of common land 
 began in the reign of Queen Anne, and has 
 continued down to the present time. Between 
 the passing of the first Enclosure Act in 1709 
 and 1845, when the system of enclosing by 
 private Bills nominally ceased, it has been 
 calculated that more than seven million acres 
 of land were enclosed. It is true that some 
 pretence of compensation to the people for
 
 i64 VILLAGE POLITICS. [viii. 
 
 their rights of common was occasionally made. 
 In some cases the poor man received a small 
 bit of land in lieu of his right to graze cow or 
 goose on the common. But the bit of land was 
 soon sold, the money spent, and his children, 
 at any rate, none the better for the concession. 
 They would have been distinctly the better for 
 the cow and the goose. In many cases, how- 
 ever, the poor man got no compensation at all. 
 " This I know," said the late Duke of Newcastle 
 once in an Enclosure debate in the House of 
 Commons, — " this I know, that in nineteen cases 
 out of twenty, Committees of this House sitting 
 on Private Enclosure Bills neglected the rights 
 of the poor." 
 
 It is urged, of course, that the enclosure of 
 common land was necessitated by the interest 
 which the general community has in the pro- 
 ductive powers of the soil being put to the 
 most effective use. It cannot be denied that 
 without enclosed fields improved management 
 of the land would have been impossible. It is
 
 VIII.] THE LANDLORD. 165 
 
 true, of course, that a great improvement of 
 agriculture has been the result of the system 
 of enclosure. But it is not equally true that 
 no measure could have been devised other 
 than one which resulted in the direct enrich- 
 ment of one class and the direct impoverish- 
 ment of another. The plan adopted was to 
 give the newly-enclosed land to the few rich, 
 with some miserable pretence of compensation 
 to the many poor. It would have been 
 possible, I venture to think, and in all proba- 
 bility quite as much for the happiness and 
 prosperity of the nation at large, if the land 
 had been given to the many poor, with just 
 compensation for the existing rights of the few 
 rich. Certainly few things are more sad in the 
 pages of our popular history than the story of 
 the divorce of the English peasantry from the 
 soil. Mr. Cliffe Leslie, in his very excellent 
 book on the English land system, in telling that 
 story once again, says very truly, " Once, from 
 the meanest peasant to the greatest noble, all
 
 i66 VILLAGE POLITICS. [viii. 
 
 had land, and he who had least might hope for 
 more. Now, there is being taken away from 
 him even that which he has. Once there was 
 an ascending movement from the lowest grade 
 towards the highest ; now there is a descending 
 movement in every grade below the highest. 
 Every grade of the rural population has sunk ; 
 the landed yeomanry have almost gone; the 
 tenant-farmers have lost their ancient inde- 
 pendence and interest in the soil ; the labourers 
 have lost their separate cottages and plots of 
 ground, and their share of a common fund of 
 land ; and whereas all these grades were once 
 rising, the prospect of the landed yeomanry is 
 now one of total extinction; that of the tenant- 
 farmers increasing insecurity ; that of the agri- 
 cultural labourer, to find the distance betvveen 
 his own grade and that of the one above him 
 wider and more impassable than ever, while the 
 condition of his own grade is scarcely above 
 that of the brutes." 
 
 It would not be difficult, I think, to trace to
 
 VIII.] THE LANDLORD. 167 
 
 this same Tudor principle of the abstract right 
 of private property in land, most of the other 
 evils which are characteristic of our present 
 system of agricultural economy. But I must 
 conclude. I have endeavoured to lay stress upon 
 the two principles which appear to me ought 
 to be most prominent in an English landlord's 
 conception of social duty. There is little doubt 
 that at no very distant date the English land 
 laws must undergo revision. The method of 
 that revision cannot but depend in a large 
 measure upon the manner in which the land- 
 owning class have put into practice those two 
 principles. For the rest, I do not know that 
 that " Prayer for Landlords " which is to be 
 found in the last Primer of Edward VI. has 
 become even now too archaic for modern use : — 
 " The earth is Thine, and all that therein is, 
 notwithstanding Thou hast given the possession 
 thereof to the children of men. We heartily 
 pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the 
 hearts of them that possess the grounds and
 
 i6S VILLAGE POLITICS. [viii. 
 
 pastures of the earth ; that they, remembering 
 themselves to be Thy tenants, may not rack 
 and stretch out the rents of their houses and 
 lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and 
 incomes., after the manner of covetous world- 
 lings ; but so let them out, that the inhabitants 
 thereof may be able to pay the rents, and to 
 live and nourish their families, and to relieve 
 the poor."
 
 IX. 
 THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1877. 
 [a ruridecanal address.] 
 
 " In the rural controversy between capital and labour, 
 even apart from one past and unforgotten offence in 
 a higher rank, the parochial clergy have not always 
 been able to abstain from partisanship, and, where 
 they have been partisans, it has not commonly been 
 on the side of labour. Notwithstanding their general 
 and exemplary devotion to parochial duty, this has 
 tended to stimulate a feeling in favour of the dis- 
 establishment of the Church. Of this sentiment I 
 cannot measure the breadth or depth ; but it may be 
 found to form a real ingredient in the general 
 question."— Mr, Gladstone. 
 
 There are few things, at the present moment, 
 the significance of which, to my mind, Church- 
 men are more constrained to recognise than
 
 170 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 the attitude of the labouring population 
 towards the Established Church. Signs of 
 the times are monitors which we, as Christians, 
 cannot ignore without disloyalty. The popu- 
 larity of the Church in the rural districts has 
 been, until quite lately, a fact which few 
 people have been disposed to challenge. It 
 was well known, of course, that amongst the 
 working men of our large manufacturing 
 towns the policy of Disestablishment had 
 numerous supporters, but that policy was con- 
 fidently regarded as having few adherents 
 among the cultivators of the soil. To-day 
 I am afraid we have no such ground for con- 
 fidence. In the November number of the 
 Liberator, the organ of the Liberation Society, 
 there are a series of reports from the authorised 
 agents of the Labourers' Union, purporting to 
 give the feeling of the labourers throughout 
 the various counties of England, on the sub- 
 ject of Disestablishment. That feeling is 
 asserted to be almost entirely antagonistic to
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IxN 1877. 171 
 
 the Church. I will quote from only one 
 report, which is however a fair sample both 
 of the tone and of the opinion of the rest. 
 The delegate in the Norfolk district writes 
 thus : — " I have no doubt but that there are 
 some who would stick to the parsons for 
 blankets and broth, but my opinion is the 
 majority go in for Disestablishment." 
 
 Discount as you may these reports as the 
 evidence of prejudiced witnesses, there will 
 yet remain much which is only too easily 
 corroborated in quite other directions. The 
 columns of the Guardian newspaper have 
 during this last year or two, been continually 
 open to the complaints of country parsons on 
 the alienation of their labouring parishioners 
 and discussions as to the best means of 
 bringing them back into the true fold. In- 
 deed, if our bishop himself had been present 
 to-day, as some of us had ventured to wish, 
 I have little doubt that he would have been 
 able to show us how amply justified was his
 
 172 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 own very evident uneasiness on this subject, 
 by the answers which he had received from 
 his Rural Deans last year, in reply to his 
 own direct inquiries. 
 
 The importance of the subject, therefore, 
 which somewhat reluctantly, at the request of 
 the Committee, I have undertaken to introduce, 
 I think you will agree with me is undeniable. 
 There are few of us, I suppose, who would argue 
 that the Establishment should be maintained 
 other than for the good of the persons who 
 compose it. It is not an end in itself, but a 
 means. When once it can be proved that as a 
 means towards an end,— the general good of the 
 country, — it has ceased to be beneficial, it will 
 be of little use to prove that the end for which 
 it was originally designed was well intentioned. 
 Final judgments are always by actual results, 
 not by original purposes. To prove, therefore, 
 that the only class for whom of all others the 
 Established Church has so often been upheld 
 as a necessity are ceasing to accept her good
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1877. 173 
 
 offices, is to make Disestablishment a question 
 of the very near future indeed. 
 
 I confess, however, I am somewhat ashamed 
 to press the importance of this subject on your 
 attention by such arguments as these. We 
 are indeed members of the Church of England, 
 loyal, I trust, to the principles of the Establish- 
 ment. But we are members also, do not let us 
 forget it, of the Church of Christ. And it 
 would be, indeed, disloyalty to Him did we ever 
 cease to remember that his Church must be the 
 Church of the Poor. When Christ came He 
 came as a poor man in the outward rank of an 
 artisan, whom the common people heard gladly. 
 He distinctly took the social side of the poor as 
 against the rich. There is no fact more removed 
 from controversy than this, that Christianity 
 arose out of the common people, and was 
 intended in their interest. In theory, at least, 
 the Christian Church is essentially democratic, 
 " Democracy being indeed," as has been truly 
 said, "only Christianity applied to the principles
 
 174 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 of our every-day life." More than all other 
 dogmas I am tempted almost to say the articu- 
 liis stantis ant cadentis Ecclesia; is the Champion- 
 sJiip of the Poor. That as a body the country 
 clergy have been benevolent, kindly and chari- 
 table goes, of course, without saying. Their 
 philanthropic intentions have been for the most 
 part admirable. Coal clubs, blankets, tracts, 
 soup, castor oil, doles of all kinds, these have 
 been given with a free hand. But what has been 
 the nett result .'' I confess myself to some em- 
 barrassment when I am asked by Joseph Arch 
 this question, "You clergy of the Established 
 Church have had the agricultural labourers in 
 hand at any rate for 300 years to do pretty 
 much what you liked with, and what have you 
 made of them } " Until quite lately could the 
 answer be anything but this — A class of men, 
 the stolid helplessness of whose ignorance has 
 become proverbial. I know very well that there 
 is a good deal of literarj' cant in the kind of 
 Saturday Review description of " the wretched,
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1877. 175 
 
 uncared-for, untaught clod of bovine gaze, and 
 clouded mind, living manifestly in fear of God 
 and the squire." Yet I am afraid there is some 
 truth at the bottom of it. At least, there is this 
 vmdeniable fact, that the agricultural labourer 
 had come to be a man without independence 
 and without aspiration, doomed as the Corn 
 Law rhymer sings, 
 
 " To slave while there is strength — in age the workhouse, 
 A parish shell at last, and the little bell 
 Tolled hastily for a pauper's funeral." 
 
 Now I would not for a moment seem to 
 imply that the country clergy have not sym- 
 pathised deeply with this unhappy state of 
 affairs, and have honestly wished to improve 
 it. But on the whole, surely we cannot but 
 acknowledge that as regards any general 
 amelioration in the condition of the labourers 
 we country clergy have miserably failed. And 
 failed, as it appears to me, for this reason, that 
 we have been too much busied in trying to
 
 176 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 alleviate particular symptoms of social distress 
 rather than dealing with its general causes. 
 "Blankets and broth," as our delegate in the 
 alliterative rudeness of his ingratitude terms it, 
 we perhaps did not always remember are not 
 the only factors of social regeneration. Our 
 philanthropic intentions, as I said, have been 
 most admirable. But then, it is so often in 
 philanthropy the good intentions, the blunders 
 perpetrated in the excess of our philanthropic 
 zeal that do so much harm. It was not benevo- 
 lence but justice that was mainly wanted. 
 Doles too often only make beggars, and relief 
 hypocrites. 
 
 It is true it may be said that there was no- 
 thing but charity possible, inasmuch as any- 
 thing else would imply an interference with 
 economic laws, with which we as clergy are not 
 concerned. Well, even grant that (which I do 
 not), for that very reason, I venture to think, 
 when a great spontaneous movement did arise 
 among the labourers themselves, making possible
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1877. ^11 
 
 the revision of those wide economic and 
 social conditions which lie at the root of the 
 evils we have so long and so unavailingly 
 deplored, should we have welcomed it heartily 
 and generously. 
 
 But, as I say, I do not grant that the 
 clergy have no concern with the economic 
 side of the question ; and for this reason, 
 that the economic side is a distinctly moral 
 side. The question of wages is a moral ques- 
 tion. I do not, of course, mean to say that 
 we, as clergy, ought to have anything to do 
 with the mere higgling of the market, but we 
 have every right, I think, to protest, and that 
 not only in general terms, against a rate of 
 wages which imperils the decency, and the 
 order, and the civilisation of our parishes. As 
 things go at present, I cannot at all understand 
 how it is in any way possible to live a moral 
 life on anything less than 20s. a week. I doubt 
 very much whether I could do it myself on ^os. 
 How any clergyman knowing, as he cannot fail 
 
 N
 
 178 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 to know, the " total defiance of even savage 
 notions of decency and health" which the 
 existing cottage accommodation in most of 
 our villages implies, can rest satisfied to wait 
 patiently for the slow action of the so-called 
 natural laws of supply and demand, passes my 
 comprehension. 
 
 " The question for a moral and spiritual teacher 
 is not, Will this unsettle the community ? or 
 Will it stir up heartburning, and render it very 
 difficult to live in peace ? — for we have all of us 
 heard of a Teacher 'who came not to bring 
 peace on earth but a sword.' The question 
 for a moral and spiritual teacher is, Must there 
 be a radical change of some kind before a better 
 life can be lived at all ? If so, at any risk of 
 setting class against class, of social heart- 
 burnings, of disturbed social conditions, the 
 change must be attempted." 
 
 For my own part then I desire to say dis- 
 tinctly, that the question of more wages in our 
 country districts is a moral question, and that
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S77. 179 
 
 it is the duty of the Church to sympathise at 
 least with any agency which is Hkely to make 
 that sine qua non of a higher moral condition 
 possible. 
 
 There is much I should have thought in the 
 idea of the Labourers' Union which ought to 
 gain the sympathy of a minister of Christ. An 
 association in which the fundamental rule is 
 that the members shall not consider each man 
 his own, but every man another's wealth, of 
 which the central spirit is that each shall con- 
 tribute to the common welfare, and shall at all 
 costs postpone his own advantage to the com- 
 mon good, has at least some elements which are 
 not far from the principles of the kingdom of 
 God. I am quite well aware that the ways and 
 means by which Trades' Unions have in some 
 cases endeavoured to gain their ends have been 
 such as to be simply detestable. I could not 
 live for three years in Sheffield without hearing 
 something of the bad side of Unionism. But 
 friendship with many trades' unionists made me 
 
 N 2
 
 i8o VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 also conversant with the fact that the bad side 
 was by no means the only side. There is a 
 good side too ; and one which in my opinion 
 largely predominates. In the case of the Agri- 
 cultural Union the absence of all illegitimate 
 and disorderly action has been most remarkable. 
 I do not mean to say that there has not been 
 a certain amount of soreness and even strife 
 created between employers and employed. 
 That is of course to be regretted, and where in 
 any case it has been the result of virulent and 
 immoderate language either on one side or the 
 other, it is our duty openly and fearlessly to 
 denounce it. But to some extent the collision 
 of interests was inevitable. We can have no 
 good in this world without evil. It is idle and 
 childish to shut our eyes to the light, because 
 we cannot have it without shadow. It is sheer 
 nonsense to remind us, as so many do, that to 
 set class against class is an evil. Of course 
 it is. Nobody in their senses would deny it, 
 least of all I hope would a Christian minister,
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1877. i8r 
 
 whose highest social ambition it must ever be 
 to Aveld all classes of his parishioners together 
 in a bond of common fellowship. But it. may 
 be an evil which at times is inevitable. A 
 thunderstorm sets element against element, and 
 to that extent is distinctly an evil, but it leaves 
 results behind which are in the majority of cases 
 most beneficent There have been few reforms 
 in fact, whether in Church or State, from the 
 first preaching of Christianity itself down to 
 the last Reform Bill, which have not been 
 obnoxious to this argument. There is nothing 
 in the Bible, remember, nothing certainly in our 
 Master's example, which would teach his minis- 
 ters to be peace-at-any-price men ; and there- 
 fore, for my part, I cannot but cordially rejoice 
 at the progress of the Labourers' Union, and 
 give it such humble countenance as I am able ; 
 while, at the same time, I deeply regret that so 
 many of my brethren — men, I am ready to 
 confess, before whose earnestness and devotion 
 in other ways I must bow my head for shame —
 
 i82 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 can regard it with nothing but dishke and 
 suspicion. 
 
 But I must not forget that I am addressing 
 others besides my brother clergy. I fear I may 
 have already trespassed too far upon the pro- 
 verbially vast good nature of the British farmer. 
 At least he may very fairly ask me, Can you 
 give me any proof that the Labourers' Union, 
 which to me individually at least has been a 
 most disagreeable experience, has during the 
 five years of its existence been of any prac- 
 tical material benefit to the country at 
 large .-* 
 
 Well, If I were to say that the N.A.L.U. 
 had during five years reduced pauperism and 
 crime in this country more than all that Govern- 
 ments have done during the last thirty years, 
 I suppose you would not believe me, but I 
 really should like to ask you to consider a piece 
 of evidence, which you may find in the Times 
 newspaper of Saturday last (December 8th, 
 1877), I allude to the review of the sixth
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1877. 183 
 
 annual report of the Local Government Board. 
 You see I am not proposing to refer you to 
 either the assertion of some blatant demagogue 
 or even some able philanthropist, but to the 
 incontestable witness of dry figures. If you 
 will examine those returns you will find that 
 for fifteen years prior to the year 1872 there 
 was a steady annual increase in the number of 
 paupers in almost every county of England. In 
 the year 1872 the number had reached a total 
 of 1,081,926, In that year however, which I 
 beg you to mark was also the year which saw 
 the birth of the labour agitation, the tide com- 
 menced to set in the other direction. Last year 
 the numbers were 749,593, making a total re- 
 duction in five years of nearly 400,000. During 
 the same period there has been a steady de- 
 crease in the number of inmates of our county 
 prisons. It was stated in the House of Com- 
 mons last year by Mr. Pell, that there were no 
 less than sixty prisons which could be closed. 
 There is one thing, however, which strikes me
 
 i84 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 as a little remarkable about these statistics, that 
 the diminution in the poor-rates is in no degree 
 proportionate to the diminution in the number 
 of paupers. The paupers have decreased 40 
 per cent. ; the cost of relieving them only 4 per 
 cent. If I claim the 40 per cent, reduction to 
 the beneficent action of the Labourers' Union, 
 I may fairly leave you, I think, to apportion in 
 the proper quarters the comparative blame 
 which is implied in only 4 per cent. 
 
 I might speak of other results in the growth 
 of a spirit of independence, of self-reliance, 
 energy, enterprise, which the Union has directly 
 tended to foster, but I leave these figures to 
 speak for themselves. 
 
 There is another question, however, which we 
 who are interested in promoting good Church- 
 manship among our labouring fellow-parishioners 
 ought not to leave out of consideration. During 
 the last two years the labourers have shown 
 considerable interest in the conduct of the parish 
 vestries. In many parishes they have attended
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1877. 185 
 
 in large numbers, and have claimed to vote in 
 the election of parish officers. In several in- 
 stances they have succeeded in carrying their 
 own candidates. In the great majority of cases, 
 however, I am afraid their attempt to exercise 
 the parish franchise has received but scanty 
 welcome from the old-established authorities. 
 In some cases their right has been openly con- 
 tested. Two notorious cases of this kind, in 
 which the labourers were eventually victorious, 
 occurred in our own county last year. I con- 
 fess few things have been more humiliating 
 to me to read than the reports of the Easter 
 Vestries of this year, given in the columns of 
 the English Labourer, and headed, "The Battle 
 of the Vestries — Parsons on Guard ; " knowing, 
 as I did, that the battle was one in which the 
 poor were fighting in defence of their most 
 undoubted rights against the rich, and that 
 the enemies against which the parsons were 
 supposed to be on guard were their own parish- 
 ioners. Now I would venture to ask whether
 
 i86 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 such an attitude is not altogether most mistaken 
 and unfortunate ? 
 
 As to their legal right to the parish franchise 
 there is absolutely no doubt. It will be in the 
 recollection probably of most of you, that at 
 the beginning of this year the Committee of 
 the Church Defence Institution, seeing, as they 
 expressed it, " the great interest that existed in 
 the country respecting the approaching elec- 
 tion of churchwardens at the Easter Vestries," 
 procured a counsel's opinion on the subject. 
 The decision of Messrs. Stephens and Greene 
 was this : " That householders whose rates are 
 paid for them by their landlords are, by 
 the 32nd and 33rd Vic. cap. 41, in the like 
 position in respect of their qualification to 
 vote as if they paid the full rates themselves, 
 and are entitled to have their names on the 
 rate-book, and, whether their names are on the 
 rate-book or not, are qualified to vote." 
 
 But surely a mandamus from the Court of 
 Queen's Bench ought not to be necessary to
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION LN 1877. 187 
 
 compel Churchmen to welcome this new-born 
 interest of the labourers in public affairs I There 
 was a time in the history of the Church of 
 England when she played no unimportant part 
 in the development of popular liberty. Shall it 
 be said that the memory of those early days has 
 entirely departed .-* 
 
 But if the parish franchise, the exercise of 
 which is already the labourer's legal right, is 
 distinctly a Church question, there are not those 
 wanting to tell us that the county franchise, 
 concerning which we have heard so much lately, 
 is rapidly becoming a Church question too. I 
 remember reading not very many weeks ago in 
 the Guardian newspaper a letter from a Norfolk 
 Vicar, in which he stated plainly his opinion 
 that " the agitation for the franchise was simply 
 to overturn the Church and the parson." His 
 letter was followed by many others from dif- 
 ferent parts of the country, clearly proving that 
 there were not a few country parsons who shared 
 his opinion. To any one, however, who was
 
 i88 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 present, as I was, both at the magnificent de- 
 monstrations of agricultural labourers last year 
 at Exeter and St. James's Halls, and at the 
 debate in the House of Commons, followed by 
 the almost unanimous vote of the Liberal part}' 
 in support of Mr. Trevelyan's motion, will hardl}- 
 accept that as a fair account of the Count)- 
 Franchise agitation. I listened with great 
 attention to all the speeches made on those 
 occasions, and certainly I heard nothing which 
 argued that the prospect of Church Disestab- 
 lishment was the sole, or even the prominent 
 element, in the demand for the county vote. I 
 heard much in Mr. Bright's speech about the 
 results in previous years of the extension of the 
 borough franchise, about the logical injustice of 
 withholding the borough and county vote from 
 a million and a half of voters whose fellows 
 are within the constitution, about the Tenure of 
 Land, about County Boards, about the election of 
 Magistrates and Poor Law Guardians, about the 
 Burials Bill, — but I did not hear one word about
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S77. 1S9 
 
 overturning the Church and the parson. These 
 were the subjects, and not Disestablishment, 
 which furnished the chief arguments of the 
 speakers both at the Demonstration meetings and 
 also in ParUament ; and these are the subjects 
 which give strength to the County Franchise 
 agitation. It is true that at the Exeter Hall 
 meeting some expression was given to the feel- 
 ing that the country clergy are as a rule out 
 of sympathy with the aims and objects of the 
 Labourers' Union. On the other hand, there was 
 much also to show, that where the clergy had 
 made an effort to understand and sympathise 
 with the social and political aspirations of the 
 men, they had ever met with cordiality and 
 good feeling. For myself, at any rate, I do not 
 wish for warmer or more devoted friends than 
 I am happy to possess among my labouring 
 parishioners, and certainly the" generous wel- 
 come which the 2,000 delegates gave me — an 
 unknown country parson — when I supported 
 Mr. Trevelyan's motion at St. James's Hall last
 
 I90 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 May, did much to convince me that mine need 
 be no exceptional case. 
 
 I have Httle time, even if this were quite 
 the place, to answer the objections usually 
 advanced against granting the county vote to 
 the labourers. One question only, which is 
 very commonly asked, I will briefly answer. 
 It is said, How do you expect the condition 
 of the labourers is likely to be improved by 
 the exercise of the county vote .'' I am quite 
 well aware that improvement by means of self- 
 education is infinitely more solid than improve- 
 ment forced on by outside legislation. But 
 I hold that this great movement during the last 
 four years is one of the most splendid instances 
 of self-education that the country has ever seen. 
 And that is also, I think, the telling answer to 
 those who say that the labourer is not suffi- 
 ciently educated to be put into possession of 
 the county vote. The only fair educational test 
 is political activity and intelligent appreciation 
 of his own class needs. A Tory farmer friend
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S77. 191 
 
 of mine the other day summed up his objections 
 to county franchise with quaint shrewdness, 
 thus — " If I teaches my 'orses their power, 
 who's to drive the team ? " My answer to that 
 was twofold. In the first place, I endeavoured 
 to show my friend that horses and agricultural 
 labourers w^ere not quite the same kind of 
 creature. And secondly, I pointed out to him 
 that if his horses were not taught to use their 
 power aright he would not be able to drive the 
 team. And that would still be my answer to 
 those who, like Mr. Goschen, put the same 
 argument in rather more refined form. I think 
 we should welcome the enfranchisement of the 
 agricultural labourer, in the first place, because 
 in giving him the vote we increase his self- 
 respect, which is the first step in raising him 
 from the condition of an eating, drinking, and 
 toiling animal to the true dignity of a working 
 viaji ; and secondly, because we believe that the 
 worth, tenacity, endurance, sobriety of judgment, 
 and law-abiding spirit which he has nianifestcd
 
 192 VILLAGE POLITICS. [ix. 
 
 so conspicuously during tlie course of the last 
 five years' agitation, will be a source of national 
 strength, when once he is brought within the 
 pale of the constitution, as it is an undoubted 
 source of danger while he is left outside. 
 
 If I had not already exhausted your patience 
 I should have attempted to say something 
 about the more ordinary agencies by which 
 the Church seeks to influence the labour- 
 ing population. This one word only will I 
 venture to say finally : The first step in all plans 
 for the luclfare, social, economic, or religions, of the 
 rnral poor, is to make possible to them, before all 
 else, the exercise of that most democratic, yet most 
 Christian virtne. Hopefulness. "Village life is 
 dull ; " — I quote the words of Dr. Brydges in 
 a recent lecture published in TJie Fortnightly 
 Reviezu : "in London, with its vile lodgings 
 and precarious struggle for existence, there is 
 excitement — there is life for the brain. There is 
 a rich multiform drama every Saturday night in 
 the Whitechapel road — flaring gas-lights, strong
 
 IX.] THE LABOUR QUESTION IN 1S77. I93 
 
 lights and shadows, carts of vegetables and cheap 
 fruits, variety of strongly-seasoned food, toys, 
 colours, shop-windows, street-cries, collisions, 
 medleys of all sorts, and stimulating social in- 
 tercourse. What is there in countr}- villages to 
 compare with this ? In the interests of town and 
 country alike, is there not some reasonable per- 
 centage among the twelve thousand gentlemen 
 who possess two-thirds of the soil of England, 
 who are ready to become great citizens, who are 
 prepared to stop the velocity of the exodus from 
 villages by making village life more bright, 
 more free, more strong — in one word, more 
 healthy ? Some slight restoration of the twenty- 
 acre freeholds of former times, some fixed 
 ownership of house and garden, some genial, 
 stimulating culture — difficult of attainment 
 though all this be, is it so chinicrically im- 
 possible } Must the whole work of rural pro- 
 gress be left to Joseph Arch, and other subse- 
 quent antagonisms far more fierce and far less 
 manly ? " 
 
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 cursion. IJythellon. Di;dli:v Cami'Iiell, M.A. With Coloured 
 Map. Crown 8vo. is. Gd. 
 
 Carstares.— WILLIAM CARSTARES : a character .and Career 
 of the Revolutionary Epoch (1649-1715). By ROBERT bloRY, 
 Minister of Rosncath. 8vo. 12^.
 
 6 MACMILLAN'S CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 Chatterton : A biographical study. By Daniel 
 Wilson, LL.D., Professor of Histor>' and English Literature in 
 University College, Toronto. Crown 8vo. bs. 6d. 
 77;^ Examiner thinks this "the most complete and the purest bio- 
 graphy of the poet which has yet appeared. " 
 
 Chatterton: a STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. By Professor 
 Massun, LL.D. Crown 8vo. 5^. 
 
 Cooper. — ATHENyE CANTABRIGIENSES. By Charles 
 Henry Cooper, F. S.A., and Thompson Cooper, F.S.A. 
 Vol. I. 8vo., 1500—85, iSs. ; Vol. IL, 1586— 1609, i8j-, 
 
 Correggio.— ANTONIO ALLEGRI DA CORREGGIO. From 
 the Gemian of Dr. Julius Meyer, Director of the Royal Gallery, 
 Berlin. Edited, with pn Introduction, by Mrs. Heaton. Con- 
 taining Twenty Woodbury-type Illustrations. Royal 8vo. Cloth 
 elegant. 3IJ. 6d. 
 " The best and most readable biography of the master at p7-esent to be 
 
 found in the English lafiguage." — Academy. ^' By its pictures alone 
 
 the book forms a worthy tribute to the painters genius. " — Pall Mall 
 
 Gazette. 
 
 Cox (G. V.)— RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD. By G. 
 V. Cox, M.A., New College, late Esquire Bedel and Coroner 
 in the University of Oxford. Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. ds. 
 "An amusing farrago of anecdote, and 7oill pleasantly recall in many 
 a country parsonage the memory of youthful days." — Times. 
 
 "Daily News." — the daily news' CORRESPOND- 
 ENCE of the War between Germany and France, 1870 — i. Edited 
 with Notes and Comments. New Edition. Complete in One 
 Volume. With Maps and Plans. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 THE DAILY NEWS' CORRESPONDENCE of the War between 
 Russia and Turkey, to the fall of Kars. Including the letters of 
 Mr. Archibald Forbes, Mr. J. E. McGahan, and other Special 
 Correspondents in Europe and Asia, Second Edition, enlarged. 
 Crown 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 Davidson. — the LIFE OF A SCOTTISH PROBATIONER ; 
 being a Memoir of Thomas Davidson, with his Poems and 
 Letters. By James Brown, Minister of St. James's Street 
 Church, Paisley. Second Edition, revised and enlarged, with 
 Portrait. Crown 8vo. 7^. 6d. 
 
 Deas.— THE RIVER CLYDE. An Historical Description of the 
 Rise and Progress of the Harbour of Glasgow, and of the Im- 
 provement of the River from (Glasgow to Port Glasgow. By J. 
 Deas, M. Inst. C.E. 8vo. 10^. 6d.
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, TRAVELS, ETC. 7 
 Denison. — a history of cavalry from thf kar- 
 
 LIEST TIMES. With Lessons for the Future. By Lieut. -Col. 
 George DtNisox, Commanding; the Governor-General's Body 
 Guard, Canada, Author of " Modern Cavalry." With Maps and 
 Plans. 8vo. i8j. 
 
 Dilke. — GREATER BRITAIN. A Record of Travel in Ent,'lish- 
 
 speaking Countries during 1866-7. (America, Australia, India.) 
 
 iiy Sir CHARLES Wentworth Dilke, M.P. Sixth Edition. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6j. 
 
 " Maity of the subjects discussed in these pages," savs the Daily News, 
 
 " are of the widest interest, and such as no man who cares for the futtirt 
 
 of his race and of the world can afford to treat with indifference." 
 
 Doyle. — HISTORY OF AMERICA. By J. A. Doyle. With 
 Maps. i8mo. 4J. (3d. 
 "Mr. Doyle's style is clear and simple, his facts are accurately stated, 
 and his hook is Tncritoriously free from prejudice on qui-stions where 
 partisanship runs high a»io)!gst us.'" — Saturday REVii:w. 
 
 Drummond of Hawthornden : THE STORY OF IIIS 
 LIFE AND WRITINGS. By Professor Masson. With Por- 
 trait and Vignette engraved by C. II. Jeens. Crown Svo. \os. 6d. 
 " Around his hero, Projessor Masson groups national and individual 
 episodes and sketches of character, which are of the greatest interest, and 
 which add to the value of a biographical work which we warmly recom- 
 mend to the lovers of thoroughly healthy books."— KoTES AND QUERIES. 
 
 Duff. — NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. By M. E. Grant- 
 Duff, M.P., late Under Secretary of State for India. With Map. 
 Svo. loy. 6d. 
 " These notes arc full of pleasant remarks and illustrations, borroiued 
 
 from every kind of source."— Skivv-HW Review. 
 
 Elliott.— LIFE OF HENRY VENN ELLIOTT, of Brighton. 
 
 By TOSIAH Bateman, M.A., Author of "Life of Daniel N\ ilson. 
 
 Bishop of Calcutta," &c. With Portrait, engraved by Jki.N.s. 
 
 Extra fcap. Svo. Tiiird and Cheaper Edition, with Appendix. (>s. 
 
 "A very charming piece of religious biography; no one can read it 
 
 without both pleasure and profit."— ]iKvn^H Quarterly Review. 
 
 Elze.— ESSAYS ON SHAKESPEARE. By Dr. Karl Elzr. 
 Translated with the Author's sanction by L. Doka Sciimit/„ 
 
 8vo. I2s. ... , , J .. 
 
 "A more desirable contribution to cuticism has not recently been made. 
 
 — Athenteum. 
 
 Eton College, History of. By n. c. Maxwfll Lmi. 
 
 MA With numerous Illustrations by T'rofcssor DklaMOITE, 
 Coloured Plates, and a Steel Portrait of the Pounder, engraved
 
 8 MACMILLAN'S CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 by C. H. Jeens. New and cheaper Issue, with Corrections. 
 
 Medium 8vo. Cloth elegant, zis. 
 
 " Hiihei'to no account of the College, -with all its associations, has 
 
 appeared which can compare either in completeness or in interest with 
 
 this. . . . It is indeed a book worthy of the ancient renoivn of King 
 
 Henry s College.'" — DAILY News. 
 
 " We are at length presented with a work on England's greatest public 
 school, 7i'orthy of the subject of which it treats. . . . A really valuaole and 
 authentic histoiy of Eto>i College." — Guardian. 
 
 European History, Narrated in a Series of Historical 
 
 Selections from the best Authorities. Edited and arranged by 
 
 E. M. Sewell and C. M. Yonge. First Series, crown 8vo. 6j. ; 
 
 Second Series, 1088-1228, crown 8vo. 6^. Third Edition. 
 
 " ]Ve know of scarcely anything" says the Guardian, of this volume, 
 
 "which is so likely lu raise to a higher level the average standard of 
 
 English education." 
 
 Faraday. — MICHAEL FARADAY. By J. H. Gladstone, 
 Ph.D., F. R.S. Second Edition, with Portrait engraved by Jeens 
 from a photograph by J. Watkins. Crown 8vo. 4J-. 6d. 
 PORTRAIT. Artist's Proof. 5^-. 
 
 Contents : — I. The Story of his Lije. II. Study of his Character. 
 III. Fruits of his Experience. IV. His Method of Writing. V. The 
 I'alue of his Discoveries. — Supplemefitary Portraits. Appendices : — List 
 of Honorary Fellowships, etc. 
 
 Fisher. — the CALIFORNIANS. By Walter M. Fisher. 
 Crown Svo. 6s. 
 "His volume is of great intei-est and value" — ^YESTMINSTER Review. 
 
 Forbes.— LIFE AND letters of JAMES DAVID 
 FORBES, F.R.S., late Principal of the United College in the 
 University of St. Andrews. By J. C. Shairp, LL.D., Principal 
 of the United College in the University of St. Andrews ; P. G. 
 Tait, M.A., Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University 
 of Edinburgh; and A. Adams-Reilly, F.R.G.S. Svo. with 
 Portraits, Map, and Illustrations, \6s. 
 "Not only a biography that all should read, but a scientific treatise, 
 without which the shelves of no physicist's library cati be deemed com- 
 plete. '■' — Standard. 
 
 Freeman. — Works by Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L.,LL.D. :— 
 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. Third Edition. Svo. iCf. dd. 
 Contents: — /. "The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early 
 
 English History" II. "The Continuity of English History;" III. 
 
 ' ' The Relations bettueen the Crmuns of England and Scotland ; " IV. 
 
 " St. Thomas of Canterbury and his Biographers ;" V. " The Reign oj 
 
 Edward the Third:" VI. "The Holy Roman Empire;" VII. "The
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, TRAVELS, ETC. 9 
 
 Franks and the Gauls;" VIII. "The Early Sieges 0/ Paris;" IX. 
 ^* Frederick the lirst. King of Italy ;" X. ^ The Emperor Frederick the 
 Second:" XI. "Charles the Bold ;" XII. '' Presidential Gozernment." 
 
 A SECOND SERIES OF HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 8vo. 
 los. 6d. 
 
 The principal Essays are: — "Ancient Greece and Mediin'al Italy:" 
 " Mr. Gladstone's Homer and the Homeric Ages : '' " The Historians 
 of Athens:'" "The Athenian Democracy:" ^'Alexander the Great:" 
 ' ' Greece dining the Macedonian Period :" ' ^Mommsen's History of Rome :" 
 ^''Lucius Cornelius Sulla :" " The Flavian Cccsars." 
 
 COMPARATIVE POLITICS.— Lectures at the Royal Institution. 
 To which is added the " Unity of History," the Rede Lecture at 
 Cambridge, 1872. 8vo. I4f. 
 
 THE HISTORY AND CONQUESTS OF THE SARACENS. 
 Six Lectures. Third Edition, with New Preface. Crown 8vu. 
 y. 6d. 
 '■^ Mr. Freeman opportunely reprints his erudite and valuable lee- 
 tttres." — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 HISTORICAL AND ARCHITECTURAL SKETCHES: 
 chiefly ItaUan. With Illustrations by the Author. Crown 8vo. 
 
 IOj-. dd. 
 
 '''Mr. Fteeman may here be said to give us a series oj * notes on the 
 spot ' in illustration oj the intimate 7'elations of History and Architecture, 
 and this is done in so masterly a manner — there is so much freshness, so 
 much kno'wledge so admirably condensed, that ive are almust tempted to 
 say that %ve prefer these sketches to his tnore elaborate studies." — Noncon- 
 formist. 
 
 HISTORY OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, from the Foun- 
 dation of the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United 
 Stales. Vol. I. General Introduction. History of the Greek 
 Federations. 8vo. zis. 
 
 OLD ENGLISH HISTORY. W\ih Fi7/e Coloured Maps. Fourth 
 Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo., half-bound. 6s. 
 
 " The book indeed is full of instruction and interest to students of all 
 af^es, and he must be a well-infoi med ?nan indeed who will not rise 
 fromHts perusal tvith clearer and more accurate ideas oJ a too much 
 neglected portion of English history." — Si'ECTATOK. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF WELLS, 
 
 as illustrating the History of the Cathedral Churches of tlie Old 
 
 Foundation. Crown 8vo. 3J-. (id. 
 
 •' The history assumes in Mr. Freeman's hands a significance, and, ve 
 
 may add, a practical value as suggestive of what a cathedral ought to be, 
 
 which make it well worthy of mention." — SPECTATOR.
 
 lo MACMILLAlSrS CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 Freeman — co7itimicd. 
 THE GROWTH OF THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION 
 FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES. Crown 8vo. 55. Third 
 Edition, revised. 
 
 GENERAL SKETCH OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. Being 
 Vol. I. of a Historical Course for Schools edited by E. A. 
 Freeman. Fifth Edition, enlarged. With Maps, Chronological 
 Table, Index, &c. i8mo. 35. bd. 
 "It stipplies the great want of a good foundation for historical teach- 
 ing. The scheme is an excellent one, and this ittstahnent has been 
 accepted in a ■way that promises much for the volumes that are yet 
 
 to appear^ — EDUCATIONAL TiMES. 
 
 THE OTTOMAN POWER IN EUROPE : its Nature, its Growth, 
 and its Decline. With Three Coloured Maps. Crown 8vo. 
 ']s. bd. 
 
 Galileo. — the private life of Galileo. Compiled 
 
 principally from his Correspondence and that of his eldest 
 daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, Nun in the Franciscan Convent of 
 S. Matthew in Arcetri. With Portrait. Crown 8vo. 7^-. bd. 
 
 Gladstone — W'orks by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, 
 M.P. :— 
 
 JUVENTUS MUNDI. The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age. 
 Crown 8vo. cloth. With Map. \os. bd. Second Edition. 
 
 "Seldom " says the AtheNv^UM, " otct of the great poems themselves, 
 have these Divinities looked so majestic and respectable. To read these 
 brilliant details is like standing on the Oly??ipian threshold and gazing at 
 the ineffable brightness withitt." 
 
 HOMERIC SYNCHRONISM. An inquiry into the Time and 
 Place of Homer. Crown 8vo. bs. 
 
 " It is impossible not to admire the iminense range of thozight and 
 inquiry which the author lias displayed." — BRITISH QUARTERLY 
 Review. 
 
 Goethe and Mendelssohn (1821— 1831). Translated from the 
 
 German of Dr. Karl Mendelssohn, Son of the Composer, by 
 M. E. Von Glehn. From the Private Diaries and Home 
 Letters of Mendelssohn, M'ith Poems and Letters of Goethe never 
 before printed. Also with two New and Original Portraits, Fac- 
 similes, and Appendix of Twenty Letters hitherto unpublished. 
 Crown 8vo. 5^. Second Edition, enlarged. 
 " . . , Every page is full of interest, not merely to the musi- 
 cian, but to the general reader. The book is a very charming one, on 
 a topic of deep and lasting interest. " — Standard.
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, TRAVELS, ETC. ii 
 
 Goldsmid. — telegraph and travel, a Narrative of 
 
 the Formation and Development of Telegraphic Communication 
 between England and India, under the orders of Her Majesty's 
 Government, with incidental Notices of the Countries traversed by 
 the Lines. By Colonel Sir Frederic Goldsmid, C.B., K.C.S.L, 
 late Director of the Government Indo-European Telegraph. With 
 numerous Illustrations and Maps. 8vo. 2ls. 
 " l^he merit of the work is a total absence of cxaggercitivtt, which Joes 
 
 not, however, preclude a vividness atid vigour of style not always character' 
 
 istic of similar narratives." — STANDARD. 
 
 Gordon. — last LETTERS FROM EGYPT, to which are added 
 
 Letters from the Cape. By Lady Duff Gordon. With a 
 
 Memoir by her Daughter, Mrs. Ross, and Portrait engraved by 
 
 Jeens. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. ()s. 
 
 ' ' The intending tourist who wishes to acquaint himself with the country 
 
 he is about to visit, stands emlarrasscd amidst the riches presented for his 
 
 choice, and in the end probably rests contented with the sober us fulness of 
 
 Murray. He will not, ho^vever, if he is well advised, grudge a place in 
 
 his portmanteau to this book." — TIMES. 
 
 Gray. — china, a History of the Laws, Manners, and Customs 
 of the People. By the Ve.nkrahle John Henry Gray. I.L. D., 
 Archdeacon of Hong Kong, formerly H.H. .M. Consular Chaplain 
 at Canton. Edited by W. GowGregor. Wiih 150 Full-page llholra- 
 tions, being Facsimiles of Drawings by a Chinese Artist. 2 Vols. 
 Demy 8vo. 32J. 
 
 Green. — Works by John Richard Green:— 
 
 history of the ENGLISH PEOPLE. Vol. I.— Early 
 
 England— Foreign Kings— The Charter— The Parliament. With 
 
 8 C^oloured Maps. 8vo. ids. Vol. H.— To the end of I-liizabcth's 
 
 Reign. 8vo. l6s. \To l>e completed in i, Vols. 
 
 "■Mr. Green has done a luork which probably no one but himself could 
 
 have done. lie has read and assimilated the results of all the labours of 
 
 students during tlie last tialf century in tfie field of English history, and 
 
 has given them a fresh meaning by liis own independent study. He has 
 
 fused togetlier by the force of sympatlietic imagination all that lie has so 
 
 collected, and lias s^tven us a vivid and forcible sketch of tlie march of 
 
 English liistoiy. His book, both in iU aims and its accomphshmails, 
 
 rises far bevond any of a similar kind, and it will t^ive the colouring to the 
 
 popular view to English Jiidury for some time to nw^."— Examiner. 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. With 
 
 Coloured Maps, (ienealogical Tables, and Chronological Annals. 
 
 Crown 8vo. is. U. Fifty-second Thousand. 
 
 " To say t/iat Mr. Green's book is better than those which have pre- 
 
 ceded it, would be to convey a zery inadequate impression of its merits. It
 
 12 MACMILLAN'S CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 stands alone as the one general history of the country, for the sake of 
 which all others, if young and old are wise, will be speedily and surely set 
 aside." 
 
 STRAY STUDIES FROM ENGLAND AND ITALY. Crown 
 8vo. 8j. 6d. Containing : Lambeth and the Archbishops — The 
 Florence of Dante — Venice and Rome — Early History of Oxfoi^d 
 — The District Visitor — Capri — Hotels in the Clouds — Sketches 
 in Sunshine, &c. 
 
 " One and all of the papers are eminently readable." — Athen^ITM. 
 
 Hamerton. — Works by p. G. Hamerton:— 
 
 THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. With a Portrait of Leonardo da 
 Vinci, etched by Leopold^ Flameng. Second Edition. Crown 
 loj-. bd. 8vo. 
 " We have read the whole book tvith great pleasure, and ^ve can re- 
 commend it sttongly to all who can app7-eciate grave reflections on a very 
 important subject, excellently illustrated from the resources of a mind 
 stored with much reading atid much keen obse>~vation of real life." — 
 Saturday Review. 
 
 THOUGHTS ABOUT ART. New Edition, revised, with an 
 Introduction. Crown 8vo. 8j. 6d. 
 
 "A manual of sound and thorough criticism on art." — STANDARD. 
 " The book is full of thought, and worthy of attentive consideration." — 
 Daily News. 
 
 Hill.— WHAT WE SAW IN AUSTRALIA. By Rosamond 
 and Florence Hill. Crown 8vo. lo^. bd. 
 ^^ May be recommended as an interesting and truthful picture cf the 
 condition of those lands which are so distant and yet so much like ho?ne." 
 — Saturday Review. 
 
 Hole. — A GENEALOGICAL STEMMA OF THE KINGS 
 OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE. By the Rev. C. Hole, 
 M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge. On Sheet, is. 
 
 A BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY. Compiled and 
 Arranged by the Rev. Charles Hole, M.A. Second Edition. 
 i8mo. ^f. 6d. 
 
 Hozier (H. M.) — Works by Captain Henry M. Hozier, 
 late Assistant Military Secretary to Lord Napier of Magdala : — 
 
 THE SEVEN WEEKS' WAR ; Its Antecedents and Incidents. 
 
 Neiv and Cheaper Edition. With New Preface, Maps, and Plans. 
 
 Crown 8vo, 6j. 
 
 " All that Mr. Hozier saw of the great events of the war — and he saw 
 
 a large share of them — he describes in clear and vivid language," — 
 
 Saturday Review.
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, TRAVELS, ETC. 13 
 
 Hozier (H. M.) — continued. 
 
 THE BRITISH EXPEDITION TO ABYSSINIA. Compiled 
 from Authentic Documents. 8vo. gj. 
 
 " This," says the Spectator, ^^ will be the account oj the Abys- 
 sinian Expedition for professional rejerence, if not for professional 
 reading. Its literary merits are really vety great." 
 
 THE INVASIONS OF ENGLAND : a History of the Past, with 
 Lessons for the Future. Two Vols. 8vo. 28f. 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says : — ".-^j- to all invasions executed, or 
 deliberately projected but not carried out, from the landing oJ fuUus 
 CcBsar to the raising of the Boulogne camp. Captain Hozier furnishes 
 copious and most interesting particulars. Nor is his manner infei ior to 
 his matter. He writes xvith admirable lucidity. His narrative, too, in 
 addition to its clearness and animation, is favoured luith much delicate 
 humour, often of a very significant kind." 
 
 Hiibner. — a ramble round the world in 1871. By 
 
 M. Le Baron Hiibner, formerly Amliassador and Minister. 
 Translated by Lady Herbert. 2 vols. 8vo. 25^. 
 " // is difficult to do a7nple justice to this pleasant narrative of travel 
 . ... it does not contain a single dull paragraph T — MORNING Post. 
 
 Hughes. — Works by Thomas Hughes, Q.C, Author of "Tom 
 Brown's School Days." 
 MEMOIR OF A BROTHER. With Portrait of George Hughes, 
 after Watts. Engraved by Jeens. Crown 8vo. 5^. Sixth 
 Edition. 
 " The boy ivho can read this book without deriving from it some addi- 
 tional impulse towards honourable, manly, and independent conduct, hat 
 no good stuff in him." — Daily News. 
 
 ALFRED THE GREAT. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6j. 
 
 Hunt. — HISTORY OF ITALY. By the Rev. W. Hunt, M.A. 
 
 Being the Fourth Volume of the Historical Course for Schools. 
 
 Edited by EuwARD A. Freeman, D.C.L. iSnio. 3^. 
 " Air. Hunt gives us a most compact but very readable little hook, con- 
 taining in small compass a very complete outline of a complicated and 
 perplexing subject. It is a book which may be safely recommended to 
 others besides schoolboys." — JoHN Bull. 
 
 Irving.— THE ANNALS OF OUR TIME. A Diurnal of Events, 
 
 Social and Political, Home and Foreign, from the Accession of 
 
 Queen Victoria to the Peace of Versailles. By Joseph Irvini;. 
 
 lourth Edition. 8vo. half-bound. i6j-. 
 
 ANNALS OF OUR TIME. Supplement. From Feb. 28, 1S71, 
 
 to March 19, 1874. 8vo. 4J. bd. 
 " We have before us a trusty and ready guide to the efents of the 
 past thirty years, available equally for the statesman, th-e politician, tite 
 public writer, and the general reader." — TlMts.
 
 14 MACMILLAN'S CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 Killen.— ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF IRELAND, from 
 the Earliest Date to the Present Time. By W. D. Killen, D.D., 
 President of Assembly's College, Belfast, and Professor of Eccle- 
 siastical History. Two Vols. 8vo. 25^-. 
 " Those who have the leisure will do well to read these two volumes. 
 
 They are fiill of interest, and are the restdt of great research. . . . We 
 
 have no hesitation in recjnimending the work to all who wish to i7nprove 
 
 their acquaintance with Irish history." — Spectator. 
 
 Kingsley (Charles).— Works by the Rev. Charles Kingsi.ey, 
 M.A., Rector of Eversley and Canon of Westminster. (For 
 other Works by the same Author, see Theological and Belles 
 Lettres Catalogues. ) 
 
 ON THE ANCIEN RliGIME as it existed on the Continent before 
 the French Revolution. Three Lectures delivered at the 
 Royal Institution. Crown 8vo. 6j. 
 
 AT LAST : A CHRISTMAS in the WEST INDIES. With nearly 
 Fifty Illustrations. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6^. 
 
 Mr. Kingsley' s dream, of foi'ty years was at last fulfilled, when he 
 started on a Christmas expedition to the West Indies, for the purpose of 
 beccjuing personally acquaititcd ivith the scenes which he has so vividly 
 described iti " Westwai-d Ho !" These two volumes ai'e the journal of his 
 voyage. Records of natural history, sketches of tropical landscape, chapters 
 on education, views of society, all find their place. " We can only say 
 that Mr. Kingsley s account of a ' Christmas in the West Indies ' is in 
 every zvay worthy to be classed among his happiest productions." — 
 Standard. 
 
 THE ROMAN AND THE TEUTON. A Series of Lectures 
 delivered before the University of Cambridge. New and Cheaper 
 Edition, with Preface by Professor Max Muller. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 PLAYS AND PURITANS, and other Historical Essays. With 
 Portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 
 
 In addition to the Essay mentioned in the title, this volume contains 
 other tivo — one on "Sir Walter Raleigh and his Ti?ne," and one on 
 Froude's ^'History of England." 
 
 Kingsley (Henry). — tales OF OLD travel. Re- 
 narrated by Henry Kingsley, F.R.G.S. With Eight Illus- 
 trations by Huard. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 " We knoiu no better book for those who want kiioivlcdge or seek to 
 
 refresh it. As for the ^ sensaticnal,' most novels are tatne compared with 
 
 these narratives." — ATHENAEUM. 
 
 LaOCOOn. — Translated from the Text of Lessing, with Preface and 
 Notes by the Right Hon. SiR Robert J. Phillimore, D.C.L. 
 With Photographs. Svo. I2J-.
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, TRAVELS, ETC. \\ 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci and his Works. — Consisting of a 
 
 Life of Leonardo Da Vinci, by Mrs. Charles W. Heaton, 
 
 Author of "Albrecht Diirer of Niirnberg," &c., an Essay on his 
 
 Scientific and Literary Works by Charles Chris iophek 
 
 Black, M. A., and an account of his more important Paintings 
 
 and Drawings. Illustrated with Permanent Pholograplis. Royal 
 
 8vo. cloth, extra gilt. 31^. dd. 
 
 " A beautiful vohime, both linthout and within. Messrs. Macmillan 
 
 are conspicuous ainong publishers for the choice binding and printing of 
 
 their books, and this is got up in their best style. . . , A'o English 
 
 publication that we know of has so thorous^hly and attractively collected 
 
 together all that is known of Leonardo." — TlMES. 
 
 Liechtenstein, — Holland house. By Princess Marip. 
 
 Liechtenstein. With Five Steel Engravings by C. H. Jeens, 
 
 after Paintings by Watts and otiier celebrated Artists, and 
 
 numerous Illustrations drawn by Professor P. H. Dei.amotte, and 
 
 engraved on Wood by J. D. Cooper, W. Pal.mer, and Jewitt & 
 
 Co. Third and Cheaper Edition. Medium 8vo. cloth clcganL 
 
 i6j-. 
 
 Also, an Edition containing, in addition to the above, about 40 
 
 Illustrations by the Woodbury-type process, and India Proofs of 
 
 the Steel Engravings. Two vols, medium 4to. half morocco 
 
 elegant. 4/. 41. 
 
 •' When every itrictly just exception shall have been taken, she may be 
 
 conscientiously congratulated by the most scrupulous critic on the prodiw 
 
 tion of a useful, agreeable, beatilifully -illustrated, and attractive book." — 
 
 Times. " // would take up more room than we can spare to enumerate 
 
 all the interesting suggestions and notes which are to be found in these 
 
 volumes The woodcuts are admirable, and some of the autographs 
 
 are very interesting."— V K\.\. Mall Gazette. 
 
 Lloyd. — THE AGE OF PERICLES. A Ilistoiy of the Arts and 
 
 Politics of Greece from the Persian to the Pc'oponncsiau War. 
 
 By W. Wat KISS Li.oyd. Two Vols. 8vo. 2\s 
 
 " No such account of Greek art of the best period has yet been brought 
 
 tozether in an English 7Vork. .... Mr. Lloyd has /» educed a book of 
 
 unusual excellence and interest.''^ —^l^VX. Mall GAZETTE. 
 
 Macarthur.— HISTORY of SCOTLAND, By Marcauet 
 
 Macarthur. Being the 1 hird Volume of the Historical Course 
 
 for Schools, Edited by Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L. Second 
 
 Edition. i8mo. 2s. 
 
 '■'■ It is an excellent summary, unimpeachable as io facts, and puttiHt> 
 
 them in the clearest and most impartial light attainable."— GVAKDIAN. 
 
 " Mo previous History oj Scotland of the same bulk is anythin.; like 10 
 
 trust-worthy, or deserves to be so extinsivcly ustd as a text-book" — GluBE.
 
 i6 MACMILLAN'S CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 Macmillan (Rev. Hugh). — For other Works by same Author, 
 see Theological and Scientific Catalogues. 
 
 HOLIDAYS ON HIGH LANDS ; or, Rambles and Incidents in 
 
 search of Alpine Plants. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. 
 
 Globe 8vo. cloth. 6s. 
 
 " Botankal knowledge is blended with a love of nature, a pious en- 
 
 thtisiasrn, and a rii'h felicity of diction not to he ?net with in any zvorks 
 
 of kindred character, if we except those of Hugh Miller." — Telegraph. 
 
 "Mr. Macmillan' s glozuing pictures of Scandinavian scenay." — 
 
 Saturday Review. 
 
 Macready. — macready's reminiscences and se- 
 lections FROM his diaries AND LETTERS. Edited 
 by Sir F. Pollock, Bart., one of his Executors. With Four 
 Portraits engraved by Jeens. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 
 8vo. 7^. 6d. 
 " As a careful and for the most part just estimate of the stage dnrins; 
 a very bi-illiant period, the attraction of these volumes can scarcely be 
 stirpassed. .... Readers who have no special interest in theatrical 
 matta's, but enjoy tniscellaneous gossip, will be allured from page to page, 
 attracted by familiar names and by observations upon popular actors and 
 authors. " — SPECTATOR. 
 
 Mahaffy.— Works by the Rev. J. P. Mahaffy, M.A., Fellow of 
 Trinity College, Dublin : — 
 SOCIAL LIFE IN GREECE FROM HOMER TO MENAN- 
 DER. Third Edition, revised and enlarged, with a new chapter 
 on Greek Art. Crown 8vo. 9-C 
 " // should be in the hands of all who desire thoroughly to understand 
 and to enjoy Greek literature, and to get an intelligent idea of the old Greek 
 life, political, social, and religious.'''' — Guardian. 
 
 RAMBLES AND STUDIES IN GREECE. W^ith Illustrations. 
 
 Crown 8vo. New and enlarged Edition in the Press. 
 *' A singularly instructive aiid agreeable volume." — Athen.^UM. 
 
 Margary. — THE JOURNEY OF AUGUSTUS RAYMOND 
 
 MARGARY FROM SHANGHAE TO BHAMO AND BACK 
 
 TO MANWYNE. From his Journals and Letters, with a brief 
 
 Biographical Preface, a concluding chapter by Sir Rutherford 
 
 Alcock, K.C.B., and a Steel Portrait engraved by Jeens, and 
 
 Map. 8vo. loj. (id. 
 
 '* There is a manliness, a cheerful spirit, an inherent vigour xvhich 
 
 was never overcome bv sickness or debility, a tact ivhich conquered the 
 
 prejjtdices of a strange and suspicious population, a quiet self-reliance, 
 
 always combined zuith deep religious feeling, utialloyed by either priggish- 
 
 ness, cant, or superstition, that ought to commend this volume to readers 
 
 sitting quietly at home who feel any pride in the high estimation accorded 
 
 to men of their race at Yarkand or at Khiva, in the heart of Africa, or 
 
 on the shores of Lake Seri-kid." — Saturday Review.
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, TRAVELS, ETC. 17 
 
 Martin.— THE HISTORY OF LLOYD'S, AND OF MARINE 
 
 INSURANCE IN GREAT BRITAIN. With an Appcn.lix 
 
 containing Statistics relating to Marine Insurance. By Kredkrick 
 
 Martin, Author of "The Statesman's Year Book." Svo. i^s. 
 
 " We have in the editor of the 'Statesman's Year Book' an in- 
 
 dust) ions and conscienlious guide, and 7ve can ccrlijy that in his ' History 
 
 of Lloyds' he has produced a work of more tlian passinj^ interest." — 
 
 Times. 
 
 Martineau. — BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, 1852— 1875. 
 By Harriet Martineau. With Additional Sketches, and Auto- 
 biographical Sketch. Fifth Edition. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 " Miss Martineau' s large literary po-wers and her fine intellectmU 
 
 training make these little sketches more instructive, and constitute tlietn 
 
 more genuinely works of art, than many more atnbiiious and diffuse 
 
 biographies. "— FoRTN IGIITLY REVIEW. 
 
 MaSSOn (David)— For other Works by same Author, see Phiuj- 
 
 SOPHICAL and Belles Lettres Catalogues. 
 CHATTERTON : A Story of the Year 1770. By DavidMasson. 
 
 LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the L ni- 
 
 versity of Edinburgh. Crown Svo. 5^. 
 " One of this popular -writer's best essays on the English poets."— 
 Standard. 
 THE THREE DEYILS : Luther's, Goethe's, and Milton's ; and 
 
 other Essays. Crown Svo. 5-^- 
 W^ORDSWORTH, SIIELJ.EY, AND KEATS ; and oilier 
 
 Essays. Crown SvQ. 5j^. 
 
 Maurice.— THE FRIENDSHIP OF BOOKS; AND OTHER 
 LECTURES. By the Rev. V. D. Maurice. Editeil with Pre- 
 face, by Thomas Hughes, (^.C. Crown Svo. los. 6</. 
 " The high, pure, sympathetic, and truly charitable natute of Mi . 
 
 Maurice is delightfully visible throughout tJuse lectures, ivhich """f*- 
 
 celUntly adaptea to spread a luve of literature amongst the f'eople."— 
 
 Daily News. 
 
 Mayor (J. E. B.)— WORKS edited by John E. H. Mavok, 
 M.A., Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge : — 
 CAMBRIDGE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. Pari H. 
 
 Autobiography of Matthew Robinson. Fcap. Svo. 5x. td. 
 LIFE OF BISHOP BEDELL. By his So.\. Fcap. Svo. y. (>d 
 
 Melbourne.— MEMOIRS of Tin; kt. iion wiluam. 
 
 Si:< OND VISCOUNT MELI50LKNE. By W. M, Iukkkns, 
 M.P. With Portrait after Sir. T. Lawrence. 2 VoU. Svo. 3a/. 
 
 B
 
 tS macmillan's catalogue of works in 
 
 " As might be expected, he has produced a book which will command 
 and reivard attention. It contains a great deal of valuable matter and 
 a great deal of animated, elegattt writing." — Quarterly Review. 
 
 Mendelssohn.— LETTERS and RECOLLECTIONS. By 
 Ferdinand Hiller. Translated by M. E. Von Glehn. Witli 
 Portrait from a Drawing by Karl jMuller, never before pub- 
 lished. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 'Js. 6d. 
 " This is a very interesting addition to our knotvledge of the great 
 German composer. It reveals him to us under a new light, as the warm- 
 hearted comrade, the musician whose soul was in his work, and the home- 
 loving, domestic 7nan" — STANDARD. 
 
 Merewether. — by SEA AND BY LAND. Being a Trip 
 through Egypt, India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, and 
 America — all Round the World. By Henry Alworth Mere- 
 wether, one of Her Majesty's Counsel. Crown 8vo. ?>s. 6d. 
 
 Michael Angelo Buonarotti ; Sculptor, Painter, Architect. 
 
 The Story of his Life and Labours. By C. C. Black, M.A. 
 
 Illustrated by 20 Permanent Photographs. Royal 8vo. cloth 
 
 elegant, 31^'. 6d. 
 
 " The story of Michael Angelo s life remains interesting whatever be the 
 
 manner of telling it, and supported as it is by this beautiful series of photo- 
 
 seraphs, the volume must take rank among the most splendid of Christmas 
 
 books, fitted to se7-ve and to outlive the season." — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 Michelet— A SUMMARY OF MODERN HISTORY. Trans- 
 lated from the French of M. Michelet, and continued to the 
 present time by M. C. M. Simpson. Globe 8vo. 4^. 6a. 
 " We are glad to see one of the ablest and most useful sumtnaries of 
 European history put into the hands of English readers. The transla- 
 tion is excellent." — Standard. 
 
 Milton, — LIFE OF JOHN MILTON. Narrated in connection 
 with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. 
 By David Masson, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and 
 English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. With Portraits. 
 Vol. I. i8j-. Vol. IL, 1638— 1643. 8vo. xds. Vol IIL 
 1643 — 1649. 8vo. \Zs. Vols. IV. and V. 1649— 1660. 325. 
 This work is not only a Biography, but also a continuous Political, Eccle- 
 siastical, and Literary History of England through Miltoiis whole time. 
 
 Mitford (A. B.)— TALES OF OLD JAPAN. By A. B. 
 
 MiTFORD, Second Secretary to the British Legation in Japan. 
 
 With upwards of 30 Illustrations, drawn and cut on Wood by 
 
 Japanese Artists. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 6j-. 
 
 " These very original volumes will ahvays be interesting as memorials 
 
 of a most exceptional societv, while regarded simply as tales, they are 
 
 sparkling, sensational, and dramatic, and the originality of their idea
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, TRAVELS, ETC. 19 
 
 and the quaintness of their language give them a most captivating 
 piquancy. The illustrations are extremely interesting, and for the 
 curious in such matters have a special and particular value." — Pall 
 Mall Gazette. 
 
 Monteiro. — angola and the river congo. By 
 
 Joachim Monteiro. With numerous Illustrations from Sketches 
 taken on the spot, and a Map. Two Vols, crown Svo. 2i,.-. 
 " Gives the first detailed account of a part of tropical Africa -.chick is 
 
 little knoivnto Etiglishmen The remarks on the geo^riifhy aud 
 
 zoology of the country and the manners and. customs of the I'arious races 
 inhabiting it, are ext7-e7nely curious and interesting." — SATURDAY Re- 
 view. ^'' Full of valuable information and much picturesque description." 
 Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 Morison. — the life and times of saint BERNARD, 
 Abbot of Clairvaux. By James COTTER MoRiso.v, M.A. New 
 Edition. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 The Pall Mall Gazette calls this " A delightful aiui instructive 
 
 'co'.ume, and one of the best products of the modern historic spirit." 
 
 Napoleon.— THE history of napoleon I. By P. 
 
 Lanfrey. a Translation with the sanction of the Author. Vols. 
 
 I. II. and HI. Svo. price 125. each. 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says it is " one of the most striking 
 pieces of historical composition of which France has to boast," and the 
 Saturday Review calls it ^^ ajt excellent translation of a ivork on aery 
 ground deso ving to be t7-anslated. It is unquestionably and immeasurably 
 the best that has been produced. It is mfact the only -work to -which wt 
 can turn for an accurate and trustworthy fiarrative of that extraordinary 
 career. . . . The book is the best and indeed the only trustworthy history 
 of Napoleon which has been written." 
 
 Nichol. — TABLES OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND 
 HISTORY, A.I). 200—1876. By J. Niciioi., LL.I>.. 
 Professor of English Language and Literature, Glasgow. 410. 
 6j. 6d. 
 TABLES OF ANCIENT LITERATURE AND HISIORV, 
 I5.C. 1500 — A.D. 200. By the same Author. 4I0. 4^. dd. 
 
 Oliphant (Mrs.).— the makers of FLORENCE : Dante 
 
 Giolto, SiLVonarola, and their City. By Mrs. OnriiANT. Willi 
 numerous Illustrations from drawings l>y I'rofessor DKl.AMorTE, 
 and portrait of Savonarola, engr.ived by Jeens. Second Ivlilion. 
 Medium Svo. Cloth extra. 2U. 
 " Mrs. Oliphant has made a beautiful addition to the mass of literature 
 already piled round the records of the Tuscan capital."— Tmn^ 
 
 h 2
 
 20 MACMILLAN'S CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 " We are grateful to Mrs. Oliphant for her eloquent and beautiful 
 sketches of Dante, Fra Angelico, and Savonarola. They are picturesque, 
 full of life, and rich in detail, and they are charmingly illustrated by the 
 art of the engraver." — Spectator. 
 
 Oliphant. — the duke and the scholar; and othe 
 Essays. By T. L. Kington Oliphant. 8vo. -js. 6d. 
 " This volume contains one of the most beautiful biographical essays we 
 have seen since Macaula/s days." — Standard. 
 
 Otte.— SCANDINAVIAN HISTORY. By E. C. Otte. With 
 Maps. Extra fcap. 8vo. ds. 
 " We have peculiar pleasure in recommending this intelligent resuwi 
 of Northern history as a book essential to every Englishman -who interests 
 himself in Scandinavia."— SVKCTXTOK. 
 
 Owens College Essays and Addresses. — By Pro- 
 fessors AND Lecturers of Owens College, Manchester. 
 Published in Commemoration of the Opening of the New College 
 Buildings, October 7th, 1873. 8vo. I4f. 
 
 Palgrave (Sir F.) — history of Normandy and 
 
 OF ENGLAND. By Sir Francis Palgrave, Deputy Keeper 
 of Her Majesty's Public Records. Completing the History to the 
 Death of William Rufus. Vols. II.— IV. 2is. each. 
 
 Palgrave (W. G.) — A NARRATIVE OF A YEAR'S 
 
 JOURNEY THROUGH CENTRAL AND EASTERN 
 
 ARABIA, 1862-3. By William Gifford Palgrave, late of 
 
 the Eighth Regiment Bombay N. I. Sixth Edition. With Maps, 
 
 Plans, and Portrait of Author, engraved on steel by Jeens. Crown 
 
 8vo. 6x. 
 
 " He has not only tvritten one of the best books on the Arabs and one 
 
 if the best books on Arabia, but he has done so in a manner that must 
 
 commatid the respect no less than the admiration of his felhnv-country- 
 
 men. " — FORTNIGHTLY RE.VIE\V. 
 
 ESSAYS ON EASTERN QUESTIONS. By W. Gifford 
 Palgrave. 8vo. 105. 6c/. 
 
 " These essays are fill of anecdote and interest. The book is dccidedlv 
 a valuable additio?t to the stock of literature on which ?nen must 
 base their opinion of the difficult social and political problems sug- 
 gested by the designs of Russia, the capacity of Mahometans for 
 swereignty , and the good government and retention of India." — 
 Saturday Review. 
 
 DUTCH GUIANA. With Maps and Plans. Svo. gj. 
 
 '■'■His pages are nearly exhaustive as far as facts and statistics go, 
 vihile they are lightened by graphic social sketches as well as sparkling 
 descriptions of scenery ." —'^K\\5'ss>tci Review.
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRArHY, TRAVELS, ETC. 21 
 
 Patteson.— LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN COLERIDGE 
 
 PATTESON, D.D., Missionaiy Bishop of the Melanesian Islands. 
 
 By Charlotte M. Vonge, Aiithor of " The Heir of Redclvffe." 
 
 With Portraits after Richmonii and from Photograph, engiaved by 
 
 Jeens. With Map. Fifth Edition. Two Vols. Crown 8vo. I2j. 
 
 ' ' Miss Yo7isrt''''s work is in otie respect a model biop-afhy. It is made 
 
 ■up almost entire'y of Fatteson's own letters. Aware that he had left his 
 
 home once and J or all, his correspondence took the form of a diary, and 
 
 as we read on we come to know the man, and to loz'e him almost as if wt 
 
 had seen him." — AtheN/EUM. "Such a life, with its grand lessons oj 
 
 unselfishness, is a blessing and an honour to the age in which it is lived ; 
 
 the biography cannot be studied without pleasure and profit, and indted 
 
 we should think little of the man who did not rise from the study of it 
 
 better and wiser. Neither the Church nor th, nation which produces 
 
 such sons need ever despair of its future.^' — Saturd.w Review. 
 
 Pauli.— PICTURES OF OLD ENGLAND. By Dr. Ri-.iMi.>i.n 
 Pauli. Translated, with the approval of ilic .Vuthor, by E. C. 
 Otte. Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. ds. 
 
 Payne.— A history OY EUROPEAN COLONIE.S. By 
 E. J. Payne, M. A. With Maps. i8nio. \s. dd. 
 The 'J'lMES says: — " We have seldom met with a historian capable 0j 
 forming a more comprehensive, far-seeino, and unprejudiced estimate of 
 events and peoples, and we can commend this little work as one certain to 
 prove of the highat interest to all thoughtful readers." 
 
 Persia. — eastern PERSIA. An Account of the Journeys of 
 the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870-1 -2.— Vol. I. The Geo- 
 graphy, with Narratives by Majt)rs St. J<_)HX, Lovett, and Euan 
 Smith, and an Introduction by Major-C.eneral Sir Fkkderic 
 GoLDSMin, C.B., K.C.S.I., British Commissioner and Arl)itr.itor. 
 * With Maps and Illustrations.— Vol. II. The Zooloj^y an.l ticolo-y. 
 
 By W. T. B1.ANFORD, A.R.S.M., F.R.S. Witii Coh.ured lllus- 
 trations. Two Vols. 8vo. 42J. , . ^ • l . 
 
 " The volumes largely increase our store of information atioul 
 
 countries with which Eni^lishmcn ought to be familiar 
 
 7 hey throw into the shade all that hitherto has appeared in our toiijpie 
 rcspecline the local features of Persia, its scenery, its resimree', r.-en Us 
 social condition. They contain also abundant midence oJ J-.ngluli 
 iudurance, daring, and spirit."— Tisii:^. 
 
 Prichard.— THE ADMINISTRATION OF INDIA. From 
 lS;o to 1868. The First Ten Vears uf Adminisiration un.ler the 
 Ciown. By I. T. Brichakh, Barristeral-Law. '1 wo \ ols. 
 Demy 8vo. With Map, 21s.
 
 22 MACMILLAN'S CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 Raphael. — RAPHAEL OF URBINO AND HIS FATHER 
 GIOVANNI SANTI. By J. D. Passavant, formerly Director 
 of the Museum at Frankfort. With Twenty Permanent Photo- 
 graphs. Royal 8vo. Handsomely bound. 31^. dd. 
 The Saturday Review says of them, " PVe have seen not a feiu 
 
 elegant specimens of Air. Woodbury s neiv process, but we have seen 
 
 none that equal these." 
 
 Reynolds.— SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS AS A PORTRAIT 
 PAINTER. AN ESSAY. By J. Churton Collins, B.A. 
 Balliol College, Oxford. Illustrated by a Series of Portraits of 
 distinguished Beauties of the Court of George III. ; reproduced 
 in Autotype from Proof Impressions of the celebrated Engravings, 
 by Valentine Green, Thomas Watson, F. R. Smith, E. 
 Fisher, and others. FoHo half-morocco. £'^ 'jyS. 
 
 Robinson (H. Crabb). — THE DIARY, REMINISCENCES, 
 AND CORRESPONDENCE, OF HENRY CRABB ROBIN- 
 SON, Barrister-at-Law. Selected and Edited by Thomas 
 Sadler, Ph.D. With Portrait. Third and Cheaper Edition. 
 Two Vols. Crown 8vo. \2s. 
 The Daily News says: " The two books which are most likely to 
 survive change of literary taste, and to char7n while instritcting generation 
 after generation, are the ^ Diary ^ of Pepys and Boswell's ^ life of 
 yohnson. ' The day will come when to these many luill add the ' Diary of 
 Heniy Crabb Robinson.' Excellences like those which render the personal 
 revelations of Pepys and the observations of Boswell such pleasant reading 
 abound in this ivoj'k." 
 
 Rogers (James E. Thorold). — HISTORICAL GLEAN- 
 INGS : A Series of Sketches. Montague, Walpole, Adam Smith, 
 Cobbett. By Prof. Rogers. Crown 8vo. 4?. 6d. Second Series. 
 Wiklif, Laud, Wilkes, and Home Tooke. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 Routledge. — chapters in THE HISTORY OF POPULAR 
 
 PROGRESS IN ENGLAND, chiefly in Relation to the Freedom 
 of the Press and Trial by Jury, 1660 — 1820. With apijlication to 
 later years. By J. Routledge. Svo. 16s. 
 " The volume abounds in facts and information, almost always useful 
 and often cztrious."—TiMKS. 
 
 Rumford.— COUNT RUMFORD'S COMPLETE WORKS, 
 with Memoir, and Notices of his Daughter. By George Ellis. 
 Five Vols. 8vo. 4/. 145-. 6d. 
 
 Seeley (Professor). — lectures and ESSAYS. By 
 
 J. R. Seeley, M.A. Professor of Modem History in the 
 University of Cambridge. Svo. los. 6d. 
 Contents: — Roman Imperialism: i. Tlie Great Roman Rei'olu- 
 tion;2. The Proximate Cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire;
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, TRAVELS, ETC. 23 
 
 The Later Empire. — Milton's Political Opinions — Milton's Poetty 
 — Eleinentary Principles in Art — Liberal Education in L'niversiliis 
 — English in Schools — The Church as a Teacher of Morality — The 
 Teaching of Politics : an Inaugural Lecture delivered at Cambridge. 
 
 Shelburne.— LIFE OF WILLIAM, EARL OF SHELBURNE. 
 
 AFTERWARDS FIRST MARQUIS OF LANSDOWNE. 
 
 With Extracts from his Papers and Correspondence. By Lord 
 
 Edmond FiTZMAURicE. In Three \'ols. 8vo. Vol. I. 1737 — 
 
 1766, \2s. ; Vol. II. 1766— 1776, \Zs. ; Vol. III. 1776— 1805. 
 
 i6j-. 
 
 "Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice has succeeded in placing before us <i 
 
 wealth of new matter, which, luhile casting valuable and much-needed 
 
 light on several obscure passages in thj; political history of a hundred 
 
 years ago, has enabled us for the first time to form a clear and consistent 
 
 idea of his ancestor." — Spectator. 
 
 Sime. — HISTORY OF GERMANY. By James Sime, M.A. 
 
 iSmo. y. Being Vol. V. of the Historical Course for Schools, 
 
 Edited by Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L. 
 
 " This is a reinarkably clear and impressive History of G,-rmany. Its 
 
 ^rcat events are wisely kept as central figures, and the smaller ivents are 
 
 carefully kept not only subordinate and subsenient, but most skilfully 
 
 woven into the texture of the historical tapestry presented to the eye." — 
 
 Standard. 
 
 Squier.—PERU : INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL AND EX- 
 PLORATION IN THE LAND OF THE INCAS. By E. (i. 
 Squier, M.A., F.S.A., late U.S. Commissioner to Peru. 8v«. 
 With 300 Illustrations. z\s. 
 77i£? Times says: — " No ?nore solid and trustworthy contribution has 
 been made to an accurate knowledge of what are among the most wonderful 
 ruins in the world. .... TJie work is really what its title implies. 
 While of the greatest importance as a contribution to Peruvian archeology, 
 it is also a thoroughly entertaining and instructive narrative of travel. 
 Not the least important feature must be considered the numerous 
 well executed illustrations ." 
 
 Strangford.— EGYPTIAN SHRINES ANDSVKL\N SEPUL- 
 CHRES, including a Visit to Palmyra. By Emily A. Bkaukort 
 (Viscountess Strangford), Author of "The Eastern Shores of 
 the Adriatic." New Edition. Crown 8vo. Ts. bd. 
 
 Thomas.— THE LIFE OF JOHN THOMAS, Surgeon of llic 
 "Earl of Oxford" East Indiaman, and First Baptist Missionary to 
 Bengal. By C. B. Lewis, Baptist Missionary. 8vu. los. (ai.
 
 24 MACMILLANS CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 Thompson. — HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By Edith Thomp- 
 son. Being Vol. II. of the Historical Course for Schools, Edited 
 by Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L. New Edition. i8mo. 2s. dd. 
 
 ^^ Freedom from prejudice, simplicity of style, and accuracy of state- 
 vient, are the characteristics of this volume. Ic is a triistworthy text-book, 
 and likely to be generally sei-viceable in schools." — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 " In its great accuracy and corj-ectness of detail it stands far ahead of the 
 general run of school manuals. Its arrangement, too, is clear, and its 
 style simple and straightforward." — Saturday Review. 
 
 Todhunter. — THE CONFLICT OF STUDIES ; AND 
 OTHER ESSAYS ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH 
 EDUCATION. By Isaac Todhunter, M.A., F.R.S., late 
 Fellow and Principal Mathematical Lecturer of St. John's College, 
 Cambridge. 8vo. lOi'. bd. 
 Contents :— /. The Conflict of Studies. II. Competitive Exa- 
 minations. III. Private Study of Mathematics. IV. Acadejnical 
 Reform. V. Elementary Geometry. VI. The Mathematical Tripos. 
 
 Trench (Archbishop).— For other Works by the same Author, 
 ue Theological and Belles Lettres Catalogues, and 
 page 30 of this Catalogue. 
 
 GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS IN GERMANY, and other Lectures 
 on the Thirty Years' War. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 4J. 
 
 PLUTARCH, HIS LIFE, HIS LIVES, AND HIS MORALS. 
 Five Lectures. Second Edition, enlarged. Fcap. 8vo. "^s. 6d. 
 
 LECTURES ON MEDL'EVAL CHURCH HISTORY. Being 
 the substance of Lectures delivered in Queen's College, London. 
 8vo. I2J-. 
 
 Trench (Maria). — the life OF ST. TERESA. By Maria 
 Trench. With Portrait engraved by Jeens. Crown 8vo. cloth 
 extra. Sj. 6d. 
 " A book of rare iriterest." — ^JOHN BuLL. 
 
 Trench (Mrs. R.)— REMAINS OF THE LATE MRS. 
 RICHARD TRENCH. Being Selections from her Journals, 
 Letters, and other Papers. Edited by Archbishop Trench. 
 New and Cheaper Issue, with Portrait. 8vo. bs. 
 
 Trollope. — a history of the commonwealth OF 
 
 FLORENCE FROM THE EARLIEST INDEPENDENCE 
 OF THE COMMUNE TO THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC 
 IN 1831. By T. Adolphus Trollope. 4 Vols. 8vo. Half 
 morocoo. 21 J.
 
 HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, TRAVELS, ETC. 25 
 
 Wallace.— THE Malay archipelago.- the Land of the 
 Orang Utan and the Bird of Paradise. By Alfred Ri'sskl 
 Wallace. A Narrative of Travel with Studies of Man and 
 Mature. With Maps and numerous Illustrations. Fifth Edition. 
 Crown 8vo. "Js. dd. 
 
 " The result is a tnvid picture of tropical life, which may be read -with 
 unflagging intei'est, atid a sufficient arroiint of his scientific conclusions to 
 stimulate our appetite without wearying us by detail. In short, we may 
 safely say that we have never read a more agreeable book of its kind." — 
 Saturday Review. 
 
 Waller,— SIX weeks in the saddle : a painter's 
 
 JOURNAL IN ICELAND. By S. E. Walllk. Willi lllu>- 
 trations by the Author. Crown 8vo. 65. 
 
 '^ An exceedingly pleasant and naturally written little book. . . . 
 Mr. Walter has a cle-dcr pencil, and the text is well illustrated with his 
 own sketches." — Times. '■^ A very lively and readable book." — Atiie- 
 Ni^UM. " A bright little book, admirably illustrated." — SPECTATOR. 
 
 Ward.- A HISTORY OF ENGLISH DRAMATIC LITKKA- 
 
 TURETO the DEATH OF QUEEN ANXE. By A. W. 
 
 Ward, M.A., Professor of History and English Literature in 
 
 t;wens College, Manchester. Two Vols. Svo. 32J. 
 
 '* As full of interest as of information. To students of aromatic 
 
 literature invaluable, and may be equally recommended to readers lor 
 
 mere pastime.^' — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 Ward (J.)— EXPERIENCES OF A DIPLOMATIST. Being 
 recollections of Germany founded on Diaries kepi during the yc.irs 
 1840—1870. By John Wakd, C.15., late 11. M. Mhiiskt- 
 Resident to the Ilanse Towns. Svo. los. bd. 
 
 Wedgwood. — toiin wesley and the evangelical 
 
 REACTION of the Eighteenth Century. By JULIA WtUGWoou. 
 Crown Svo. 8.f. 6d. 
 "/« style and intellectual po^ver, in breadth of vie7v and clearness 0/ 
 insight, Miss Wedgwood's book far surpasses all nrv/A."— A t mhn,-i im. 
 
 Whewell.— WILLIAM WHEWELL, D.D., laic Ma,lcr .-I 
 Trinity College, Cambridge. An Account of his WrinngH. w.lh 
 Selections from his Literary and Scienlilic Concspomlence. liy 
 I.Touiiu.NTEK, M.A., F.R.S. Two Vols. bvo. 251.
 
 26 MACMILLAN S CATALOGUE OF WORKS IN 
 
 White. — THE NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITH^S 
 OF SELBORNE. By (iiLBERX White. Edited, with Memoir 
 and Notes, by Frank Buckland, A Chapter on Antiquities by 
 Lord Selborne, Map, &c., and numerous Illustrations by 
 P. H. Delamotte. Royal 8vo. Cloth, extra gilt. Cheaper 
 Issue. 2 1 J. 
 Also a Large Paper Edition, containing, in addition to the above, 
 upwards of Thirty Woodburytype Illustrations from Drawings by 
 Prof. Delamotte. Two Vols. 410. Half morocco, elegant, aj.a^s. 
 ^^ Mr. Delaniotti s charming illustratioiis are a worthy decoration 0/ so 
 
 dainty a book. They bring Selborne before us, and really help us to 
 
 understand why Whitens love for his native place never g7-ew cold." — 
 
 Times. 
 
 Wilson. — A MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON, M. D., 
 F. R. S.E., Regius Professor of Technology in the University of 
 Edinburgh. By his Sister. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6j-. 
 " An exquisite and touching p07-trait of a rare and beautiful spirit. " — 
 
 Guardian. 
 
 Wilson (Daniel, LL.D.) — Works by Daniel Wilson, 
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 30 MACMILLAlSrS CATALOGUE OF 
 
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 36 MACMILLAN'S CATALOGUE. 
 
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