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CHAPTER XIII

PEASANT REVOLTS (continued)

It remains now to refer to the attempts, legislative and voluntary, which have been made in modern. times to restore in some small way the connection of the labourer with the soil. The few and stinted efforts made to give back land to the rural population are in marked contrast to the continuous energy shown in depriving them of it. These efforts took the form of granting, at a rent, allotments of land to the rural population. The granting of allotments has always been described as a generous policy, and great credit is claimed for it. But looking at the question with labourers' eyes and from the labourers' standpoint, the practice after all is only a loan to the peasantry of an instrument which had originally been filched from them.

The question of allotments, which gained so much attention in the eighties of last century, was by no means a new one. By a return issued 1873 it was shown that, without reckoning land attached to cottages, there were about a quarter of a million allotments in England and Wales under one acre each, most of them below a quarter of an acre.1

An association of land and glebe owners was formed for the express purpose of extending the allotment system. Several Bills were introduced during last century for the purpose of supplying labourers with land,

1 "Return of Allotments and Small Holdings." Board of Agriculture, C. 6144.

See "Landlords and Allotments," by the Earl of Onslow, Hon. Sec. to the Association. (Longmans, 1886.)

but these and all other efforts were on the voluntary system. The policy of withholding from the labourers any rights in the land was steadily continued.1

Even those who were most liberal in granting allotments were opposed to any legislation which would give the labourer the shadow of a right to demand them. He was to be kept dependent, in this respect, on the goodwill of his employers, who, as a class, too often objected to his having land at all.

Even the Statute of Queen Elizabeth, which required that every cottage that was built should have four acres of land attached to it, had been quietly repealed.2

In 1845 Mr. Cowper (afterwards Lord Mount Temple) brought in a Field Gardens Bill for the legal provision of allotments, but it failed to pass. In introducing the Bill, Mr. Cowper put forward the old arguments at that time so well known and so fruitless. He referred to the time when, as he said, "all labourers above the condition of serfs had land in their own occupation, and in addition to this had common rights over the waste tracts." Referring to the voluntary system, he said, "A great number of non-resident landed proprietors did not take the trouble to establish allotments.' He stated his belief that a generation would pass away before there would be, by voluntary action, a general allotment of garden ground to the rural labourers.

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1 No notice is here taken of a number of allotment measures passed at different times in connection with the Poor-law.

2 Unrestrained by any measure of this kind, the speculative builder, by erecting rows of unsightly cottages with little or no land attached to them, has destroyed the beauty and rural character of many of our old English villages.

'Hansard, Vol. VII, p. 308.

The Bill was strongly opposed by the representatives of the manufacturing class, who held that the voluntary system was sufficient to supply all the allotments that were needed. In this opposition they were consistent. They had never lifted a voice against the spoliation of the peasantry. They taunted the landlords with the miserable condition of the rural labourers, and, at the same time, were, as a class, indifferent to the shocking state of things in their own factories, in which their workpeople were labouring long hours for small wages, under unhealthy conditions, while children of tender years were worked almost to death. Cheap labour, and plenty of it for the price paid, was the policy of the manufacturing classes during the free-trade agitation and after it. It was on this ground that the mill-owners, as a body, strongly opposed the Factory Acts.1

The territorial parties were notably inconsistent in the display of interest with regard to allotments. Their action was totally at variance with the interest shown. During the years when the fruitless discussion was going on in the House as to whether or not the labourers should have plots of land, generally at a good rent, to enable them to eke out the semistarvation rations which alone their miserable wages allowed, Parliament was year after year actively engaged in carrying inclosure acts which destroyed the remaining rights of the rural population in the soil.

"When children of the tenderest years were employed fourteen or fifteen hours a day, and often all night; when factory cripples were a specific class of deformities constantly to be seen in the manufacturing districts; and when human life was held in small comparison to commercial profits."-"Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury," Preface. (Chapman & Hall, 1868.)

The "Allotments Extension Act" was probably the first measure passed which contained direct compulsory clauses. The Bill was first introduced by Sir Charles Dilke in 1874, but it did not pass. It was again brought forward in 1875, when, after discussion, it was rejected.

The present writer introduced what was practically the same Bill in 1882, when it was fortunately passed into law. This piece of legislation was small, but it was important, because it gave the labourer for the first time certain legal rights in the land, though only to rent it. The Act provides that trustees of certain charity lands, held for the benefit of the poor, should offer them in allotments to cottagers and labourers at fair rents and terms. The Act gives the men a legal claim on these lands. But most of the local trustees were opposed to the measure; many of them put every difficulty in the way of its operation, and some ignored it altogether. it altogether. The Charity Commissioners of the time, whose duty it was to enforce the Act, showed themselves unfriendly to it, so unfriendly that they sanctioned the action of the trustees, who frequently preferred to sell the land rather than be forced to let it to the labourers.

Subsequently, however, largely by pressure, the Act became more operative; and as it was estimated that no less than a quarter of a million of acres came within its scope, the labourers and others were much benefited by it,2

1 The credit for this Act is due to Mr. Howard Evans and Mr. Theodore Dodd, who were ever in sympathy with the men. See also the writings of a man who has done yeoman's service in the labourer's cause, the present Dean of Ely. See specially "The Land and the Labourers" (C. W. Stubbs).

2 For particulars of the lukewarmness of the Charity Commissioners

Later on the present writer introduced a "Peasant Proprietary and Acquisition of Land by Occupiers Bill," and an "Allotments and Small Holdings Bill," but these measures made no progress in the House, though public opinion outside was rapidly strengthening in favour of the principle contained in them.1

The

The time had arrived, however, when the political status of the labourers was to be changed. The Franchise Bill, which became law in December, 1884, extended household franchise to the counties. labourers acquired the rights of citizenship, and henceforth became an object of attention on the part of different political parties. But the effect of the Act would have been nullified by the law which disqualified any man who had received from the parish medical relief of any kind for himself or his family. As the majority of the labourers-in some localities ninetenths of them—were compelled, through their extreme poverty, to receive this relief in some form or another, an alteration of the law was necessary if they

with regard to the Act and the opposition to the legal rights of the cottagers on the part of country trustees, see Report of Select Commission on the Charitable Trusts Acts, 1884, No. 306, and Report of Select Committee on Endowed Schools Acts, 1886-1887, No. 120.

1 It was in a speech in support of these Bills that the phrase "Three acres and a cow" was used. The exact words were that "He," the writer, "hoped that the day would come when every labourer who wanted them might have his three acres and a cow." All the statements made afterwards as to providing the labourers with cows, etc., were, of course, amusing political inventions. There was nothing original about the phrase. It was quite a natural one to use in support of a measure which provided, among other things, three acres of pasture land, that quantity being generally reckoned as sufficient to support a cow. But it attracted a great deal of attention. A large number of letters were received from home and foreign correspondents, some of them declaring that the phrase had been used by German writers; that its equivalent was to be bund in Virgil; that Sir John Sinclair had used it early in the century; Jeremy Bentham was the real author of it; etc. etc.

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