Part 48

was another of them. There was no harm in them that I know of, beyond that of living upon the public; but where were their merits? They had none, to distinguish them, and to entitle them to the great sums they received; and, under any other system than such a system as this, they would, in all human probability, have been gentlemen's servants or little shopkeepers. I dare say there is some of the _breed_ left; and, if there be, I would pledge my existence, that they are, in some shape or other, feeding upon the public. However, thus it must be, until that change come which will put an end to men paying _fourpence_ in tax upon a pot of beer.

This Deptford Inn was a famous place of meeting for the _Yeomanry Cavalry_, in glorious anti-jacobin times, when wheat was twenty shillings a bushel, and when a man could be crammed into gaol for years, for only _looking_ awry. This inn was a glorious place in the days of Peg Nicholson and her Knights. Strangely altered now. The shape of the garden shows you what revelry used to be carried on here. Peel's Bill gave this inn, and all belonging to it, a terrible souse. The unfeeling brutes, who used to brandish their swords, and swagger about, at the news of what was called "a victory," have now to lower their scale in clothing, in drink, in eating, in dress, in horseflesh, and everything else. They are now a lower sort of men than they were. They look at their rusty sword and their old dusty helmet and their once gay regimental jacket. They do not hang these up now in the "parlour" for everybody to see them: they hang them up in their bedrooms, or in a cockloft; and when they meet their eye, they look at them as a cow does at a bastard calf, or as the bridegroom does at a girl that the overseers are about to compel him to marry. If their children should happen to see these implements of war twenty or thirty years hence, they will certainly think that their fathers were the greatest fools that ever walked the face of the earth; and that will be a most filial and charitable way of thinking of them; for it is not from ignorance that they have sinned, but from excessive baseness; and when any of them now complain of those acts of the Government which strip them, (as the late Order in Council does), of a fifth part of their property in an hour, let them recollect their own base and malignant conduct towards those persecuted reformers, who, if they had not been suppressed by these very yeomen, would, long ago, have put an end to the cause of that ruin of which these yeomen now complain. When they complain of their ruin, let them remember the toasts which they drank in anti-jacobin times; let them remember their base and insulting exultations on the occasion of the 16th of August at Manchester; let them remember their cowardly abuse of men, who were endeavouring to free their country from that horrible scourge which they themselves now feel.

Just close by this Deptford Inn is the farm-house of the farm where that Gourlay lived, who has long been making a noise in the Court of Chancery, and who is now, I believe, confined in some place or other for having assaulted Mr. Brougham. This fellow, who is confined, the newspapers tell us, on a charge of being insane, is certainly one of the most malignant devils that I ever knew anything of in my life. He went to Canada about the time that I went last to the United States. He got into a quarrel with the Government there about something, I know not what. He came to see me, at my house in the neighbourhood of New York, just before I came home. He told me his Canada story. I showed him all the kindness in my power, and he went away, knowing that I was just then coming to England. I had hardly got home, before the Scotch newspapers contained communications from a person, pretending to derive his information from Gourlay, relating to what Gourlay had described as having passed between him and me; and which description was a tissue of most abominable falsehoods, all having a direct tendency to do injury to me, who had never, either by word or deed, done anything that could possibly have a tendency to do injury to this Gourlay. What the vile Scotch newspapers had begun, the malignant reptile himself continued after his return to England, and, in an address to Lord Bathurst, endeavoured to make his court to the Government by the most foul, false and detestable slanders upon me, from whom, observe, he had never received any injury, or attempt at injury, in the whole course of his life; whom he had visited; to whose house he had gone, of his own accord, and that, too, as he said, out of _respect_ for me; endeavoured, I say, to make his court to the Government by the most abominable slanders against me. He is now, even now, putting forth, under the form of letters to me, a revival of what he pretends was a _conversation_ that passed between us at my house near New York. Even if what he says were true, none but caitiffs as base as those who conduct the English newspapers, would give circulation to his letters, containing, as they must, the substance of a conversation purely private. But I never had any conversation with him: I never talked to him at all about the things that he is now bringing forward. I heard the fellow's stories about Canada: I thought he told me lies; and, besides, I did not care a straw whether his stories were true or not; I looked upon him as a sort of gambling adventurer; but I treated him as is the fashion of the country in which I was, with great civility and hospitality. There are two fellows of the name of Jacob and Johnson at Winchester, and two fellows at Salisbury of the name of Brodie and Dowding. These reptiles publish, each couple of them, a newspaper; and in these newspapers they seem to take particular delight in calumniating me. The two Winchester fellows insert the letters of this half crazy, half cunning, Scotchman, Gourlay; the other fellows insert still viler slanders; and, if I had seen one of their papers, before I left Salisbury, which I have seen since, I certainly would have given Mr. Brodie something to make him remember me. This fellow, who was a little coal-merchant but a short while ago, is now, it seems, a paper-money maker, as well as a newspaper maker. Stop, Master Brodie, till I go to Salisbury again, and see whether I do not give you a _check_, even such as you did not receive during the late run! Gourlay, amongst other whims, took it into his head to write against the poor laws, saying that they were a bad thing. He found, however, at last, that they were necessary to keep him from starving; for he came down to Wyly, three or four years ago, and threw himself upon the parish. The overseers, who recollected what a swaggering blade it was, when it came here to teach the moon-rakers "hoo to farm, mon," did not see the sense of keeping him like a gentleman; so they set him to crack stones upon the highway; and that set him off again, pretty quickly. The farm that he rented is a very fine farm, with a fine large farm-house to it. It is looked upon as one of the best farms in the country: the present occupier is a farmer born in the neighbourhood; a man such as ought to occupy it; and Gourlay, who came here with his Scotch impudence to teach others how to farm, is much about where and how he ought to be. Jacob and Johnson, of Winchester, know perfectly well that all the fellow says about me is lies; they know also that their parson readers know that it is a mass of lies: they further know that the parsons know that they know that it is a mass of lies; but they know that their paper will sell the better for that; they know that to circulate lies about me will get them money, and this is what they do it for, and such is the character of English newspapers, and of a great part of the readers of those newspapers. Therefore, when I hear of people "suffering;" when I hear of people being "ruined;" when I hear of "unfortunate families;" when I hear a talk of this kind, I stop, before I either express or feel compassion, to ascertain _who_ and _what_ the sufferers are; and whether they have or have not participated in, or approved of, acts like those of Jacob and Johnson and Brodie and Dowding; for if they have, if they have malignantly calumniated those who have been labouring to prevent their ruin and misery, then a crushed ear-wig, or spider, or eft, or toad, is as much entitled to the compassion of a just and sensible man. Let the reptiles perish: it would be injustice; it would be to fly in the face of morality and religion to express sorrow for their ruin. They themselves have felt for no man, and for the wife and children of no man, if that man's public virtues thwarted their own selfish views, or even excited their groundless fears. They have signed addresses, applauding everything tyrannical and inhuman. They have seemed to glory in the shame of their country, to rejoice in its degradation, and even to exult in the shedding of innocent blood, if these things did but tend, as they thought, to give them permanent security in the enjoyment of their unjust gains. Such has been their conduct; they are numerous: they are to be found in all parts of the kingdom: therefore again I say, when I hear of "ruin" or "misery," I must know what the conduct of the sufferers has been before I bestow my compassion.

_Warminster (Wilts), Friday, 1st Sept._

I set out from Heytesbury this morning about six o'clock. Last night, before I went to bed, I found that there were some men and boys in the house, who had come all the way from Bradford, about twelve miles, in order to get _nuts_. These people were men and boys that had been employed in the _cloth factories_ at Bradford and about Bradford. I had some talk with some of these nutters, and I am quite convinced, not that the cloth making is at _an end_; but that it _never will be again what it has been_. Before last Christmas these manufacturers had full work, at one shilling and threepence a yard at broad-cloth weaving. They have now a quarter work, at one shilling a yard! One and three-pence a yard for this weaving has been given at all times within the memory of man! Nothing can show more clearly than this, and in a stronger light, the great change which has taken place in the _remuneration of labour_. There was a turn out last winter, when the price was reduced to a shilling a yard; but it was put an end to in the usual way; the constable's staff, the bayonet, the gaol. These poor nutters were extremely ragged. I saved my supper, and I fasted instead of breakfasting. That was three shillings, which I had saved, and I added five to them, with a resolution to save them afterwards, in order to give these chaps a breakfast for once in their lives. There were eight of them, six men and two boys; and I gave them two quartern loaves, two pounds of cheese, and eight pints of strong beer. The fellows were very thankful, but the conduct of the landlord and landlady pleased me exceedingly. When I came to pay my bill, they had said nothing about my bed, which had been a very good one; and, when I asked why they had not put the bed into the bill, they said they would not charge anything for the bed since I had been so good to the poor men. Yes, said I, but I must not throw the expense upon you. I had no supper, and I have had no breakfast; and, therefore, I am not called upon to pay for them: but _I have had_ the bed. It ended by my paying for the bed, and coming off, leaving the nutters at their breakfast, and very much delighted with the landlord and his wife; and I must here observe that I have pretty generally found a good deal of compassion for the poor people to prevail amongst publicans and their wives.

From Heytesbury to Warminster is a part of the country singularly bright and beautiful. From Salisbury up to very near Heytesbury, you have the valley, as before described by me. Meadows next the water; then arable land; then the downs; but when you come to Heytesbury, and indeed a little before, in looking forward you see the vale stretch out, from about three miles wide to ten miles wide, from high land to high land. From a hill before you come down to Heytesbury, you see through this wide opening into Somersetshire. You see a round hill rising in the middle of the opening; but all the rest a flat enclosed country, and apparently full of wood. In looking back down this vale one cannot help being struck with the innumerable proofs that there are of a decline in point of population. In the first place, there are twenty-four parishes, each of which takes a little strip across the valley, and runs up through the arable land into the down. There are twenty-four parish churches, and there ought to be as many _parsonage-houses_; but seven of these, out of the twenty-four, that is to say, nearly one-third of them, are, in the returns laid before Parliament (and of which returns I shall speak more particularly by-and-by), stated to be such miserable dwellings as to be unfit for a parson to reside in. Two of them, however, are gone. There are no parsonage-houses in those two parishes: there are the scites; there are the glebes; but the houses have been suffered to fall down and to be totally carried away. The tithes remain, indeed, and the parson sacks the amount of them. A journeyman parson comes and works in three or four churches of a Sunday; but the master parson is not there. He generally carries away the produce to spend it in London, at Bath, or somewhere else, to show off his daughters; and the overseers, that is to say, the farmers, manage the poor in their own way, instead of having, according to the ancient law, a third-part of all the tithes to keep them with.

The falling down and the beggary of these parsonage-houses prove beyond all question the decayed state of the population. And, indeed, the mansion-houses are gone, except in a very few instances. There are but five left, that I could perceive, all the way from Salisbury to Warminster, though the country is the most pleasant that can be imagined. Here is water, here are meadows; plenty of fresh-water fish; hares and partridges in abundance, and it is next to impossible to destroy them. Here are shooting, coursing, hunting; hills of every height, size, and form; valleys, the same; lofty trees and rookeries in every mile; roads always solid and good; always pleasant for exercise; and the air must be of the best in the world. Yet it is manifest that four-fifths of the mansions have been swept away. There is a parliamentary return, to prove that nearly a third of the parsonage houses have become beggarly holes or have disappeared. I have now been in nearly threescore villages, and in twenty or thirty or forty hamlets of Wiltshire; and I do not know that I have been in one, however small, in which I did not see a house or two, and sometimes more, either tumbled down, or beginning to tumble down. It is impossible for the eyes of man to be fixed on a finer country than that between the village of Codford and the town of Warminster; and it is not very easy for the eyes of man to discover labouring people more miserable. There are two villages, one called Norton Bovant, and the other Bishopstrow, which I think form, together, one of the prettiest spots that my eyes ever beheld. The former village belongs to Bennet, the member for the county, who has a mansion there, in which two of his sisters live, I am told. There is a farm at Bishopstrow, standing at the back of the arable land, up in a vale, formed by two very lofty hills, upon each of which there was formerly a Roman Camp, in consideration of which farm, if the owner would give it to me, I would almost consent to let Ottiwell Wood remain quiet in his seat, and suffer the pretty gentlemen of Whitehall to go on without note or comment till they had fairly blowed up their concern. The farm-yard is surrounded by lofty and beautiful trees. In the rick-yard I counted twenty-two ricks of one sort and another. The hills shelter the house and the yard and the trees, most completely, from every wind but the south. The arable land goes down before the house, and spreads along the edge of the down, going, with a gentle slope, down to the meadows. So that, going along the turnpike road, which runs between the lower fields of the arable land, you see the large and beautiful flocks of sheep upon the sides of the down, while the horn-cattle are up to their eyes in grass in the meadows. Just when I was coming along here, the sun was about half an hour high; it shined through the trees most brilliantly; and, to crown the whole, I met, just as I was entering the village, a very pretty girl, who was apparently going a gleaning in the fields. I asked her the name of the place, and when she told me it was Bishopstrow, she pointed to the situation of the church, which, she said, was on the other side of the river. She really put me in mind of the pretty girls at Preston who spat upon the "individual" of the Derby family, and I made her a bow accordingly.

The whole of the population of the twenty-four parishes down this vale, amounts to only 11,195 souls, according to the Official return to Parliament; and, mind, I include the parish of Fisherton Anger (a suburb of the city of Salisbury), which contains 893 of the number. I include the town of Heytesbury, with its 1,023 souls; and I further include this very good and large market town of Warminster, with its population of 5,000! So that I leave, in the other twenty-one parishes, only 4,170 souls, men, women, and children! That is to say, a hundred and ninety-eight souls to each parish; or, reckoning five to a family, thirty-nine families to each parish. Above one half of the population never could be expected to be in the church at one time; so that here are one-and-twenty churches built for the purpose of holding two thousand and eighty people! There are several of these churches, any one of which would conveniently contain the whole of these people, the two thousand and eighty! The church of Bishopstrow would contain the whole of the two thousand and eighty very well indeed; and it is curious enough to observe that the churches of Fisherton Anger, Heytesbury, and Warminster, though quite sufficient to contain the people that go to church, are none of them nearly so big as several of the village churches. All these churches are built long and long before the reign of Richard the Second; that is to say, they were founded long before that time, and if the first churches were gone, these others were built in their stead. There is hardly one of them that is not as old as the reign of Richard the Second; and yet that impudent Scotchman, George Chalmers, would make us believe that, in the reign of Richard the Second, the population of the country was hardly anything at all! He has the impudence, or the gross ignorance, to state the population of England and Wales at _two millions_, which, as I have shown in the last Number of the Protestant Reformation, would allow only twelve able men to every parish church throughout the kingdom. What, I ask, for about the thousandth time I ask it; what were these twenty churches built for? Some of them stand within a quarter of a mile of each other. They are pretty nearly as close to each other as the churches in London and Westminster are.

What a monstrous thing, to suppose that they were built without there being people to go to them; and built, too, without money and without hands! The whole of the population in these twenty-one parishes could stand, and without much crowding too, in the bottoms of the towers of the several churches. Nay, in three or four of the parishes, the whole of the people could stand in the church porches. Then the _church-yards_ show you how numerous the population must have been. You see, in some cases, only here and there the mark of a grave, where the church-yard contains from half an acre to an acre of land, and sometimes more. In short, everything shows that here was once a great and opulent population; that there was an abundance to eat, to wear, and to spare; that all the land that is now under cultivation, and a great deal that is not now under cultivation, was under cultivation in former times. The Scotch beggars would make us believe that _we_ sprang from beggars. The impudent scribes would make us believe that England was formerly nothing at all till they came to enlighten it and fatten upon it. Let the beggars answer me this question; let the impudent, the brazen scribes, that impose upon the credulous and cowed-down English; let them tell me _why_ these twenty-one churches were built; what they were built FOR; why the large churches of the two Codfords were stuck up within a few hundred yards of each other, if the whole of the population could then, as it can now, be crammed into the chancel of either of the two churches? Let them answer me this question, or shut up their mouths upon this subject, on which they have told so many lies.

As to the produce of this valley, it must be at least ten times as great as its consumption, even if we include the three towns that belong to it. I am sure I saw produce enough in five or six of the farm-yards, or rick-yards, to feed the whole of the population of the twenty-one parishes. But the infernal system causes it all to be carried away. Not a bit of good beef, or mutton, or veal, and scarcely a bit of bacon is left for those who raise all this food and wool. The labourers here _look_ as if they were half-starved. They answer extremely well to the picture that Fortescue gave of the French in his day.