Chapter XXII (8)

If we had Free Trade in reality, which we cannot have without national bankruptcy and the destruction of the empire, instead of the selfish and one-sided legislation called Free Trade, skilfully contrived to impoverish the many, and to aggrandise a select few, there would have been no ground for peculiar complaint. Even if rent and wages were so reduced as to meet the present prices, it must not be forgotten, that, under the potent influence of the great experiment, an immense amount of agricultural capital has disappeared. We have seen how the drainage money has evaporated; and according to a Free Trade authority—Earl Fitzhardinge, formerly quoted—“in stocking a farm, £600 will buy about as much stock as £1000 used to do!” That is to say, the existing tenant-farmers of the nation have been plundered of two-fifths of the capital which they had invested in stock! And yet Sir J. Graham fancies that he does a fair and generous thing in refusing all reduction of rent, and in offering sixty-six of his tenants twenty days to make up their mind to displenish and depart, (See _Carlisle Patriot_, 12th July 1851,) two-fifths of their means being likely to disappear in the displenishing process. Sir J. Graham had a prime hand in planning the experiment. Without the consent of his tenantry, he interpolated and altered the terms of their agreement. By an Act of Parliament he lowered prices thirty per cent, and destroyed two-fifths of their invested capital; and when his tenantry, under a calamity brought about by himself, ask some relief, he coldly refuses it, and gives them twenty days to resolve whether they shall remain and undergo a gradual impoverishment, or get out of the way with their wives and children, and their goods and chattels, as far as these are recoverable. Was there ever such bitter mockery—such insulting cruelty? He tells us in a heroic ecstasy, that he has girded on his armour, and is prepared for a great “struggle”—(_Times_, 10th February 1851.) He has determined to be a patriot of the first water, and to defend, at all hazards, the poor man’s cheap loaf; but lo! he has determined, too, to cheapen it at the sole expense of his tenantry, and out of the pockets of his neighbours. This is the magnanimous struggle in which he has embarked; and to aid him in this he treasonably invoked the British army to rebellion, and summoned the soldiery to mutiny. We have reason for heartfelt gratitude that the renegade statesman has exhibited himself in his true colours; and that all the world now knows the value of his cheap loaf, and of his fine speeches about the labouring poor. If the Free Trade journalists are sincere in believing that the only possible remedy of agricultural distress is a reduction of rent, why have they not exposed the selfish rapacity of Sir J. Graham, and gibbeted this mock friend of the poor to the detestation of all honourable and fair-dealing Free-traders? Are they not aware that their silence suggests the suspicion that, in spite of their benevolent professions, they, too, care not for the poor, but only for themselves? Is Sir J. Graham a true type of the Free Trade landlords of the kingdom? It is a remarkable fact, when compared with Conservative and Protectionist landlords, that very few of them have conceded any relief to their suffering tenantry; and yet the former class have fewer motives on the grounds of equity and honour to grant relief. They did not, by agitation and interference, alter the terms of their tenants’ bargains, and deteriorate their property, and they are innocent of the ruin which has followed in the wake of the experiment. If Sir J. Graham is a fair representative of his class, then the Free Trade lairds have resolved, in patriotic generosity, to cheapen the loaf, but not at their own personal expense, but exclusively and altogether out of the pockets of their tenantry and neighbours. Cheap loaf, and cheaper patriotism, and happy illustration of buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest! With the progress of the experiment the ruin of the tenant-farmers will proceed with rapid acceleration. But they are not the only parties who can be demonstrated to be suffering deeply. On one section of landowners the blow has fallen with unbroken effect. We mean those who farm their own properties. They constitute a very numerous and influential class of society. They lead the way in the path of agricultural improvement, and perform many important duties to the country, such as those of parochial boards and of the magistracy; they reside on their properties, and shed oftentimes around them the amenities of hospitality, and the light of cultivated life; at least they spend their income at home, and are the friends or counsellors of their poorer neighbours. The experiment has gone straight to the vitals of this interesting class, and they feel the full measure of its evil. It might be well of any of our landed potentates, who may fancy that the complaining farmer is an impostor, to ask a landowner, who farms his own soil, the effect of Free Trade on agriculture. He should be a competent and an impartial witness. Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, in his unanswered and unanswerable _Letters_, states the case of the parochial clergy of England, and makes a graceful appeal on their behalf. When the next septennial commutation of their tithes is fixed, there will be a large infringement on their income, and the day of their impoverishment approaches. But the parochial clergy of Scotland were at once seized upon by the experiment, as its immediate victims, and enclosed incontinently in its remorseless gripe. It may be necessary to inform our southern readers that the parochial clergy of this part of the kingdom are almost universally paid in grain: so many quarters are allocated by the Teind Court, and these are paid, not in kind, but according to the fiars prices of grain and meal annually struck in the several counties. The consequence is, that the Scotch clergyman has in the experiment lost nearly one-third of his stipend. This seems to us an act of unmitigated confiscation. Heretofore, when Parliament, for the general good, has thought meet to effect, by statute, some great fiscal change, they have scrupulously kept inviolate the rights of existing beneficiaries. If it is determined to reduce the emolument attached to a judgeship, the salary of the incumbent judge is held sacred. Why was this principle, at the very least, not acted upon in reference to the ministers of religion? By an expensive and prolonged curriculum of education they qualified themselves for the duties of their office, and they entered on the enjoyment of its meagre emoluments on the faith of Acts of Parliament as solemn and binding, they believed, as those that keep the State from bankruptcy, and give the fundholder his annuity. There are in the Scotch Church what are called small livings. These were cases in which there was a lack of teind, and by an annual grant from the Exchequer they are made up to £150 per annum; but, under the fatal pressure of Free Trade, many stipends not in this class have sunk far below £150—so low even as £100. It is most painful to hear, as we have heard, of the penury and difficulty into which many educated men have thus been plunged. The case of the parochial clergy is clear and disencumbered, and cannot be concealed or mystified by the specious plausibilities of the Free Trade press. It is very well for the Free Trade pamphleteer to attempt to palm upon the tenant-farmer what we believe to be a pernicious delusion—namely, that the landlord must be the sole sufferer, and that a reduction of rent will completely meet his loss; or for the shallow quack to call upon him to farm high, and to take to science. These remedies at least cannot reach the case we are now considering. What is the cheap loaf to the clergyman of a parish? His glebe acres provide the household with that. The wages of his domestic servants—his contribution to the Ministers’ Widows’ Fund—his life insurance—his doctor’s bill—the expense of educating his children—his taxes, are all undiminished; and how, with an income always small, but now so grievously dilapidated, any frugality can meet the unavoidable expenditure of his position, seems inexplicable. And, to quote language as justly applicable to the clergy of Scotland as of England, “When we remember how the income of these men is for the most part devoted, the unostentatious charity which they practise, the popular education they so liberally help to elevate and diffuse—compelled, by their residence in the country, to spend what they require for their wants chiefly among the neighbouring traders—I can conceive nothing more calculated to retard the prosperity and wellbeing of the rural districts than the impoverishment of that class of gentlemen, which applies means the most moderate to services the most useful.”—(Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s _Letters_, p. 88.)

We have pleasure in directing attention to the case of the Scotch clergy, as affected by the Free Trade experiment; and not the less so, that not a syllable of complaint has as yet been uttered by them. The cause of their silence is to us not unintelligible. Were they to publish their suffering, they know that the Free Trade journals, in one harmonious howl, would denounce them as mercenary wolves, and as the enemies of the poor—an imputation painful to every generous nature, and one which, however false, Christian ministers must have felt an anxiety to avoid, as likely to prove injurious to the success of their pastoral duties. In silence, therefore, have they suffered; and the right of a plundered party to complain is with elaborate cruelty denied them. And will the respectable gentlemen who minister to our Dissenting congregations not soon be made to feel the pressure? In rural districts, especially, can the agricultural community be expected to pay their religious instructors as they did in more prosperous times? The Scottish people have proverbially a warm regard for their clergymen, and an earnest effort will be made not to abate their offering; but the insidious drain upon their resources which Free Trade has opened must ere long extinguish their means. There is another class, too, whose meritorious labours have proved of scarcely less value to the commonwealth, who will speedily be in the fangs of the Free Trade experimenters. The parochial schoolmasters of Scotland have their salaries paid according to the average value of oatmeal. By the Act 43 Geo. III. c. 54, the average price over all Scotland is struck once every twenty-five years, and by that average they are paid. The next average for the preceding twenty-five years falls to be taken in 1856; and it appears, from an interesting report on education laid before the last meeting of the General Assembly of the National Church, that if prices continue at their present rate, the maximum salary of £34—a miserable maximum, and disgraceful to the State that doles out such a driblet of pay to its public teachers—will be reduced in 1856 to £26 sterling! And thus it appears that the religious instructors and teachers of the people of this kingdom are to be crushed under the chariot-wheels of the Juggernaut of Free Trade. We believe that there are very many men who love their country, and hate injustice, who have never yet calmly considered the effects of Free Trade which can be proved now to have taken place, and have still less contemplated the coming and future results of the experiment. If they saw that the impoverishment of the farmer, the clergyman, and the teacher, had already been certainly accomplished, they would revolt at the legalised plunder.

The evil has not reached them, and they may have been bewildered by the mendacious statistics and specious sophistry of the Free Trade press, and, with heedless indifference to the ruin of others, they conclude that the cheap loaf is an excellent thing. The lawyer’s fee and the doctor’s are as yet unimpaired, and, intact themselves, they may not have taken time to consider that they are eating their cheap loaf at the expense of the unoffending agriculturist, and to the impoverishment of the members of the two other learned professions. The sleek citizen, with his snug money income, approves of the wisdom of the cheap loaf, and marvels that there should be any difference on a question so plain. In the mean time, this may be all very well. But if the laird and the farmer, the parson and the teacher, are to be compelled to retrograde to the primitive habits and diminished income of their grandfathers, they will certainly refuse to proceed alone in the backward path. They are of too kindly a nature to think for a moment of parting with their friends. They will insist upon going arm in arm in this journey of declension with their legal and medical advisers—with the agreeable annuitants and the comfortable owners of house property. The plaintive morality and music of the old song _must_ find a response in every bosom:—

“John Anderson my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither,
And mony a canty day, John,
We’ve had with ane anither;
Now we maun totter doun, John,
_But hand in hand we’ll go_,
John Anderson my jo.”

If the cheap loaf is indispensable, then, for its production, we must have an impartial and equitable confiscation of all property and of all income. If it is a national boon, then, in the name of fair play and common justice, let the nation pay for it. But while we believe that many benevolent and just men, from sheer inconsiderateness, remain blind to the bitter fruits of Free Trade, there are some for whom even such a poor apology cannot be offered. There are many burning with a hatred, not only of what is called landlordism, but of the institutions of the country. They are wise in their generation, and they see that the experiment is insidiously but surely sapping the foundations of the empire. To the liberal laird, too, who repudiates the idea of readjustment, and who extorts from his tenant an undiminished rental, and pays to his parish minister a third less stipend, Free Trade has brought clear and unequivocal gain. The day, however, of his retribution draws near. Nor do we despair of his conversion to sound views regarding the protection due to our native industry. Sequestrated tenants, deteriorated farms, and a diminished rental, will purge his “visual orb,” and dispel the delusive mist in which he has fondly enveloped himself. We believe that he will not remain insensible to the potent influence of that text which the great master of satire has thus celebrated—

“What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
About two hundred pounds a-year.
And that which was proved true before
Prove false again? Two hundred more.”

The experiment proceeds, but not without falsifying every promise held out by its authors. We have had the curiosity to re-peruse the debates in Parliament when the Corn Laws were abolished; and not only has not one of their predictions been verified, but, to the stultification of the speakers, the very reverse of every one of them has been realised. The other nations would follow our example, another golden age of reciprocity would commence, said Sir R. Peel. Our folly has only confirmed France and America in a course of equitable protection; and, by the mouths of their greatest statesmen, they have told us that we are madmen, and are “digging our own graves.” In Prussia, the government of Dantzig, looking upon Free Trade agitators apparently as enemies of the country, has lately performed summary justice on some of them, by committing them to the mercy of the minister of justice. The nation was to enjoy universal prosperity. The prices of grain would not fall, and landlords and tenants would not suffer—(Sir R. Peel, Sir J. Graham, Messrs Villiers, Milner Gibson, Cobden, and Bright.) The fulfilment of the promise is thus recorded in the Queen’s Speech of 1851: “I have to lament, however, the difficulties which are still felt by that important body among my people who are owners and occupants of soil.” And are the other industrious classes prospering? The income-tax returns, according to the _Times_, are the infallible test of national prosperity, and they give the lie to the alleged prosperity. Since the commencement of Free Trade, the taxable profits of the nation have decreased about one and a half millions. The labouring poor were promised more abundant employment and better wages—(Sir R. Peel, Mr Sydney Herbert, and Sir C. Wood.) The labouring poor are rushing in shiploads from the shores of their native land, as if it were infested with pestilence and plague. Infatuated men, thus to flee from prosperity! “The necessity for emigration altogether is created by the landlords and their Corn Laws,” said the _Anti-Bread-Tax Circular_, (No. 27, Dec. 1841.) And again, in a subsequent number: “But, apart from individual suffering, this is a subject of high and serious import to the State; it betokens a disease which threatens to end in the permanent weakness, if not destruction, of the State. We have a remarkable expression on this point in the writings of John Milton. That great man says, ‘I shall believe there cannot be a more ill-boding sign to a nation, (God turn the omen from us,) than when the inhabitants, to avoid insufferable grievances at home, are forced, by heaps, to forsake their native country,’”—(No. 87, April 1842.) The divine Milton quoted in the _Anti-Bread-Tax Circular_! Horrid profanation! But the disastrous portent which “the old man eloquent” so devoutly deprecated, Free Trade has shed upon the nation. During the four years immediately preceding Free Trade, the annual average number of emigrants was 87,000, and the annual average of the last four years of Free Trade has been 271,000! Nor, since the experiment was originated, have the seers been more happy in their vaticinations. So adverse is fortune to the soothsayers, and so unpropitious the stars to the Free Trade astrologers, that they cannot now venture upon a prediction without being startled with its prompt refutation. The Industrial Exhibition in Hyde Park was to be the inaugurating festival of Free Trade, according to the _Morning Chronicle_; and the _Times_ is constrained to confess that there is scarcely an article exhibited that does not enjoy the benefit of protection. Sir J. Graham quotes, as a proof of the agricultural prosperity, the thriving condition of his tenantry, and the punctual payment of his rents; and forthwith his tenantry publish their suffering to the world, and ask a reduction of rent. The time seems to have arrived when the Free Trade sages should doff the prophet’s mantle. ’Tis a pity they did not think of prefacing their prophecies as good old Tiresias did—_Quid dico, aut erit aut non_.

It seems undeniable, then—and indeed, according to their own confession, this is in a great measure admitted—that the planners and promoters of the experiment were originally in a state of the profoundest ignorance regarding its effects, and have been most signally mistaken regarding its results. If there is any patriotism in them, or any sense of honour, one course only is open to them—to do justice, namely, to the victims of their temerity, and to retrace their steps. To talk of a mere fiscal arrangement as unalterable, as an irrevocable finality—an arrangement, too, ruinous to agriculture and other branches of home trade—that is pauperising the educational and religious instructors of the nation, and expatriating the poor, is a ridiculous mockery, and is contradicted by all our Parliamentary history. The only measure of importance passed in last session of Parliament—the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill—was the retracing of a false step, and the correction of a grave blunder. In his speech on the bill, the Duke of Wellington, with heroic magnanimity, admitted this; and the great majority of the Liberal journals have in this matter retraced their steps, and are writing, and many of them with great power, in the teeth of the opinions and policy which they advocated in 1829.

It may be necessary to wait a little longer, that all reasonable men, who have their country’s welfare at heart, may see more fully the failure of the experiment. Our past patience has not been without its reward. The millers of England and Ireland, once enthusiastically Free Traders, have seen reason to alter their opinions. The shipowners, once greatly indifferent to the encroachments of Free Trade, have changed their mind, and have proclaimed the change in no uncertain accents at Scarborough. The glowing editorials of the great journalist of Free Trade are pointedly refuted by his income-tax returns, his trade reports, and his import tables. Intimidation, the last refuge of baffled demagogues, is now resorted to. Free Trade, it seems, cannot be trusted to the care of the present electoral body, (humiliating confession!) and the agricultural constituencies and the electors of our maritime towns are to be swamped by a new reform bill, that the experiment may proceed undisturbed. The trumpet of terror was first blown by that false knight who proposed rebellion to the British soldier, and the smaller terrorists have taken the key-note from Netherby. The Edinburgh Reviewer of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton with laughable solemnity mutters dark threats in the ears of the owners of land. Their apathetic indifference has doubtless encouraged the strain, and suggested to him that they must be men of a craven spirit. Our yeomen at least are not cowards, and suffering gives courage even to timid men.

There are venerated names which once were a tower of strength in the land. We wait for an avowal from them that an experiment, to the support of which unparalleled treachery may have originally seduced them, has totally disappointed their just expectations. With trembling anxiety we wait for their return to their natural and rightful position, for delay may be continued until retractation becomes worthless, and until character and influence are alike shipwrecked. The Newark election, and, more lately, the conduct of the Suffolk farmers rushing blindfold, in the bitterness of intolerable suffering and blighted hope, into the arms of democracy, should teach Conservative landlords a lesson which, if not bereft of reason, they will speedily improve. But there are some for whom we cannot wait. We may wait to the Greek Kalends ere the economists of the Cobden school shall be satisfied of the undeniable and intolerable suffering of the agricultural community. If the tenant-farmers of the nation fancy that these men may yet relent, and extend to them some measure of justice, they are indulging in a fond imagination. With as much hope of being heard may the sailor sue the angry surge for safety, or the bleating lamb bespeak the butcher’s pity. This class of experimenters has so mastered the weakness of humanity, that they will cut and carve upon their patient until the last drop of blood has oozed from his tortured body. For the conversion of these ardent devotees to experimental science, who will proceed until their victim drops exhausted from the operator’s table, we cannot wait. Nor can we wait for him who once told us[10] “that the Corn Laws would never be abolished;” that, if they were, “this was the last country he would wish to inhabit;” that “despotism itself could not inflict a greater cruelty on the poor than the system of Free Trade;” and who, nevertheless, did repeal the Corn Laws, and does now inhabit the country, and did lately despotically inflict cruelty on his tenantry at Netherby. For the arch-experimenter we cannot wait. The traitorous presence would poison even the pleasure of recovered prosperity.

_Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh._

-----

Footnote 1:

1. _Essays written in the Intervals of Business._

2. _The Claims of Labour; an Essay on the Duties of the Employers to
the Employed. To which is added an Essay on the Means of Improving the
Health, &c., of the Labouring Classes._

3. _Friends in Council; a series of Readings, and Discourse thereon._

4. _Companions of my Solitude._

5. _The Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen._

Footnote 2:

Further Papers relative to the Affairs of New Zealand, presented to
Parliament, by command of Her Majesty, 26th August 1846, p. 15.

Footnote 3:

_Eight Years in Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor, from 1842 to 1850._
By F. A. NEALE, Esq., late attached to the Consular Service in Syria.
2 vols. London, 1851.

_Scènes de la Vie Orientale._ Par GERARD DE NERVAL. 2 vols. Paris,
1851.

Footnote 4:

_Golden Dreams and Waking Realities; being the Adventures of a
Gold-Seeker in California and the Pacific Islands._ By WILLIAM SHAW.
London: 1851.

Footnote 5:

_Blackwood’s Magazine_, No. CCCCXI., for January 1850.

Footnote 6:

The Continental nations, however, have perfectly appreciated “the
experiment,” and have earnestly set themselves to take advantage of
our folly. Contrary to the ignorant expectations of our economic
_pundits_, France has already shown what she can do in supplying us
with flour; and from the private correspondence of the _Standard_,
it appears that an unusual breadth of ground in the United States
has, during the past season, been laid under cultivation, and with
the especial view of meeting the demands of the British
market.—(_Standard_, 1st Sept.) And while cultivation is rapidly
advancing abroad, it is receding as rapidly at home. Upwards of a
million of fertile acres in Ireland (the weak limb of the empire,
where the effects of the experiment might naturally be expected
first to appear) have gone out of cultivation under the desolating
influence of our new commercial policy. The candle is thus burning
at both ends!

Footnote 7:

The expense of certain criminal prosecutions, by one of these
measures, has been transferred from the owners of land in Scotland to
the Crown. This is a boon to the landlords. By the other, a tenant is
now liberated from paying income-tax when he has no income. This is a
boon to the tenants!

Footnote 8:

_Edinburgh Review_, July 1850, p. 163.

Footnote 9:

The following table of comparative statistics, taken from the _New
Statistical Account_ of a parish in Perthshire, is instructive.—See
Perthshire, pp. 1191–2.

In 1843. In 1796. Total rent of parish, £7087, 0s. Total rent of parish, £2460, 14s. 8d. 0d. Ploughman’s wages, £12; 6½ bolls Ploughman’s wages, with board, per oatmeal per annum; and 1 Scotch annum, £10. pint sweet milk per day. Woman’s wages, with board, £6. Woman’s wages, with board, £4 per annum. Price of new cart, £10. Price of new cart, £6. Harness for do., £3, 10s. Harness for do., £2, 10s. New plough wood, £3. New plough, £2. New harrow, 10s. New harrow, 7s.

Footnote 10:

See _Hansard_, 3d series, vol. xlvi.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.