What do my readers think of such a state of things in the quiet, idyllic country districts of England? Is this social war, or is it not? Is it a natural state of things which can last? Yet here the landlords and farmers are as dull and stupefied, as blind to everything which does not directly put money into their pockets, as the manufacturers and the bourgeoisie in general in the manufacturing districts. If the latter promise their employees salvation through the repeal of the Corn Laws, the landlords and a great part of the farmers promise theirs Heaven upon earth from the maintenance of the same laws. But in neither case do the property-holders succeed in winning the workers to the support of their pet hobby. Like the operatives, the agricultural labourers are thoroughly indifferent to the repeal or non-repeal of the Corn Laws. Yet the question is an important one for both. That is to say—by the repeal of the Corn Laws, free competition, the present social economy is carried to its extreme point; all further development within the present order comes to an end, and the only possible step farther is a radical transformation of the social order.134 For the agricultural labourers the question has, further, the following important bearing: Free importation of corn involves (how, I cannot explain here) the emancipation of the farmers from the landlords, their transformation into Liberals. Towards this consummation the Anti-Corn Law League has already largely contributed, and this is its only real service. When the farmers become Liberals, i.e., conscious bourgeois, the agricultural labourers will inevitably become Chartists and Socialists; the first change involves the second. And that a new movement is already beginning among the agricultural labourers is proved by a meeting which Earl Radnor, a Liberal landlord, caused to be held in , near Highworth, where his estates lie, to pass resolutions against the Corn Laws. At this meeting, the labourers, perfectly indifferent as to these laws, demanded something wholly different, namely small holdings, at low rent, for themselves, telling Earl Radnor all sorts of bitter truths to his face. Thus the movement of the working-class is finding its way into the remote, stationary, mentally dead agricultural districts; and, thanks to the general distress, will soon be as firmly rooted and energetic as in the manufacturing districts.135 As to the religious state of the agricultural labourers, they are, it is true, more pious than the manufacturing operatives; but they, too, are greatly at odds with the Church—for in these districts members of the Established Church almost exclusively are to be found. A correspondent of the Morning Chronicle, who, over the signature, “One who has whistled at the plough,” reports his tour through the agricultural districts, relates, among other things, the following conversation with some labourers after service: “I asked one of these people whether the preacher of the day was their own clergyman. ‘Yes, blast him! He is our own parson, and begs the whole time. He’s been always a-begging as long as I’ve known him.’ (The sermon had been upon a mission to the heathen.) ‘And as long as I’ve known him too,’ added another; ‘and I never knew a parson but what was begging for this or the other.’ ‘Yes,’ said a woman, who had just come out of the church, ‘and look how wages are going down, and see the rich vagabonds with whom the parsons eat and drink and hunt. So help me God, we are more fit to starve in the workhouse than pay the parsons as go among the heathen.’ ‘And why,’ said another, ‘don’t they send the parsons as drones every day in Salisbury Cathedral, for nobody but the bare stones? Why don’t they go among the heathen?’ ‘They don’t go,’ said the old man whom I had first asked, ‘because they are rich, they have all the land they need, they want the money in order to get rid of the poor parsons. I know what they want. I know them too long for that.’ ‘But, good friends,’ I asked, ‘you surely do not always come out of the church with such bitter feelings towards the preacher? Why do you go at all?’ ‘What for do we go?’ said the woman. ‘We must, if we do not want to lose everything, work and all, we must.’ I learned later that they had certain little privileges of firewood and potato land (which they paid for!) on condition of going to church.” After describing their poverty and ignorance, the correspondent closes by saying: “And now I boldly assert that the condition of these people, their poverty, their hatred of the church, their external submission and inward bitterness against the ecclesiastical dignitaries, is the rule among the country parishes of England, and its opposite is the exception.”
If the peasantry of England shows the consequences which a numerous agricultural proletariat in connection with large farming involves for the country districts, Wales illustrates the ruin of the
