character of landlords or magistrates, have so acted as to lose the confidence and even gain the hatred of the poor. We look in vain among priests and bishops of the Established Church for any real comprehension of what this land-question is to the poor; but we find it in the following words of a dignitary of the older Church, that good man and true follower of Christ, the late Cardinal Manning: "The land-question means hunger, thirst, nakedness, notice to quit, labour spent in vain, the toil of years seized upon, the breaking up of houses; the misery, sicknesses, deaths of parents, children, wives; the despair and wildness which spring up in the hearts of the poor, where legal force, like a sharp harrow, goes over the most sensitive and vital rights of mankind. All this is contained in the land-question.” But our archbishops and bishops know or care nothing whatever of all this! They are truly blind guides; and, as pastors of a Church which should be pre-eminently the Church of the poor, how applicable are the words of Isaiah : "They are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain!" And now, in conclusion, I will give one or two extracts from a book written by a self-taught worker for workers, to show how workers feel on the questions we have touched upon. "At present the working people of this country live under conditions altogether monstrous. Their labour is much too heavy, their pleasures are too few; and in their close streets and crowded houses, decency and health and cleanliness are well-nigh impossible. It is not only the wrong of this that I resent, it is the waste. Look through the slums, and see what childhood, girlhood, womanhood, and manhood have there become. Think what a waste of beauty, of virtue, of strength, and of all the power and goodness that go to make a nation great, is being consummated there by ignorance and by injustice. For, depend upon it, every one of our brothers or sisters ruined or slain by poverty or vice, is a loss to the nation of so much bone and sinew, of so much courage and skill, of so much glory and delight. Cast your eyes, then, over the RegistrarGeneral's returns, and imagine, if you can, how many gentle nurses, L good mothers, sweet singers, brave soldiers, clever artists, inventors and thinkers, are swallowed up every year in that ocean of crime and sorrow which is known to the official mind as 'the high deathrate of the wage-earning classes.' Alas! the pity of it." And again, from the same writer: "A short time ago a certain writer, much estemed for his graceful style of saying silly things, informed us that the poor remained poor because they show no efficient desire to be anything else. Is that true? Are only the idle poor? Come with me, and I will show you where men and women work from morning till night, from week to week, from year to year, at the full stretch of their powers, in dim and fetid dens, and yet are poor, ay, destitute-have for their wages a crust of bread and rags. I will show you where men work in dirt and heat, using the strength of brutes, for a dozen hours a day, and sleep at night in styes, until brain and muscle are exhausted; and fresh slaves are yoked to the golden car of commerce, and the broken drudges filter through the union or the prison, to a felon's or a pauper's grave! And I will show you how men and women thus work and suffer, and faint and die, generation after generation, and I will show you how the longer and harder these wretches toil, the worse their lot becomes; and I will show you the graves and find witnesses to the histories of brave and noble industrious poor men, whose lives were lives of toil and poverty, and whose deaths were tragedies. And all these things are due to sin; but it is to the sin of the smug hypocrites who grow rich upon the robbery and the ruin of their fellow-creatures." These extracts are from a small but weighty book called Merrie England, by Nunquam. In the form of a series of letters on Socialism to a working man, it contains more important facts, more acute reasoning, more conclusive argument, and more good writing, than are to be found in any English work on the subject I am acquainted with. When such men--and there are many of them are returned to Parliament, and are able to influence the government of the country, the dawn of a new era, bright with hope for the long-suffering workers, will be at hand. CHAPTER XXV RALAHINE AND ITS TEACHINGS 1 THE successful and most instructive experiment made at Ralahine in 1831-33 is very little appreciated except by a few advanced reformers; but it attracted great attention at the time, and deserves to be better known, because it affords a practical and conclusive answer to many of the objections now made to the possibility of successful co-operation, especially in agriculture. The adviser and organizer of this great experiment, Mr. E. T. Craig, exhibited a marvellous tact and knowledge of human nature, and has shown us how to avoid the rocks and pitfalls which have led to failure in many other cases, and this was especially remarkable in so young a man (then under thirty), and shows him to have been a born organizer and leader of men. Yet his great powers, which might have benefited the nation and the human race, were forbidden their full expansion through the influence of the money interests and religious prejudices of the ruling and landed classes. A brief sketch will now be given of the difficulties he overcame, the results he achieved, and the lessons to be learnt from his experience. Ireland in 1830. In 1830 the state of Ireland, especially in the south and west, was deplorable. The potato crop had failed and 200,000 people were starving. Agrarian outrages, murder, robbery, and intimidation were prevalent. Houses were broken open to obtain arms; midnight meetings were held; and neither the armed police nor the military could cope with the situation. County Clare, where Ralahine is situated, was in the very centre of the disturbed area. Many of the landlords left their houses in charge of the police, and went to Dublin or to England. Rents at this time were enormously high, often £10 or £12 an acre for small plots of land of average quality, so that all the produce, except potatoes enough to keep life in the cultivator's family, went into the landlords' pockets. The crisis had been aggravated by extensive evictions of the peasantry in order to form large grazing farms, the rents of which were more easy to collect and less likely to fail than those of small holdings. The excitement was intense, and hatred and suspicion of landlords and of all agents and stewards was at its height; and it was at this inopportune moment that Mr. Craig first came to Ralahine, on the invitation of its owner, Mr. Vandeleur, to see if he could establish a cooperative farm and thus restore peace to this one estate in a time of general anarchy. 1 The Irish Land and Labour Question illustrated in the History of Ralahine and Co-operative Farming. By E. T. Craig. London: Trübner and Co. 1882. The steward who managed the farm had just been murdered, and the owner's family had gone away for safety; and it was under these adverse circumstances, that a stranger from England, a Saxon who knew not a word of Irish, and a Protestant who, it was thought, would probably interfere with their religion, was brought over by the landlord, presumably in his own interest and to get all that was possible out of themselves, the labourers. The former steward had been a tyrant, a cruel and unfeeling one, and they naturally supposed that the new man from England would be as bad or even worse, and that the talk about their working for themselves was merely a pretence to get more work out of them and to rob them completely than before. Within the first six weeks after Mr. Craig's arrival at Ralahine there were four murders in the immediate neighbourhood, and he himself received a letter with a sketch of a death's head and cross-bones and a coffin on which was written, "Death to the Saxon." He lodged in a poor cottage, which was sometimes in the middle of the night surrounded by a howling mob, which kept him in expectation of violence or death. Once he was warned to return home after dark by a different route from that he was following, and once a stone was thrown at him from behind and struck him on the head. In addition to his other troubles, the proprietor's family and most of the gentry around were entirely opposed to the new system he was preparing to introduce, and their servants made jests upon him to his face, and still further prejudiced the people against him. more Mr. Vandeleur, who had been struck by the example of co-operation he had seen at New Lanark under Robert Owen, had already made some preparations for the scheme by building several cottages, sheds, and a large building suitable for a dining hall, with a lecture or reading room above, as well as a store-room and some dormitories, and Mr. Craig was at first engaged in superintending the completion of these, getting in necessary stores, and making the acquaintance and endeavouring to gain the confidence of such of the mechanics and labourers as could speak English. He also arranged with Mr. Vandeleur the terms on which the farm, buildings, implements and stock should be taken, and drew up the rules and regulations which seemed to him most suitable for the success of the undertaking. The people who had been hitherto working on the farm lived scattered about the country, some of them three or four miles away, so that a long walk was added to their daily labour. But so wedded are the Irish peasantry to their homes that it was difficult to get them to come to live on the farm in the new houses, and still more difficult for them to agree to take their meals together. But when at length the more intelligent among them were satisfied that under the new plan they would have all surplus profits to divide among themselves, they saw that to live together and to have their meals in common would be a great saving, and would enable them to give more work to the farm; and as the benefit of all economies of this kind would not as heretofore go to the landlord but be really all their own, they soon persuaded |