Part 53

The Gloucestershire people have no notion of dying with hunger; and it is with great pleasure that I remark that I have seen no woe-worn creature this day. The sub-soil here is a yellowish ugly stone. The houses are all built with this; and, it being ugly, the stone is made _white_ by a wash of some sort or other. The land on both sides of the valley, and all down the bottom of it, has plenty of trees on it; it is chiefly pasture land, so that the green and the white colours, and the form and great variety of the ground, and the water and altogether make this a very pretty ride. Here are a series of spots, every one of which a lover of landscapes would like to have painted. Even the buildings of the factories are not ugly. The people seem to have been constantly well off. A pig in almost every cottage sty; and that is the infallible mark of a happy people. At present, indeed, this valley suffers; and though cloth will always be wanted, there will yet be much suffering even here, while at Uly and other places they say that the suffering is great indeed.

_Huntley, Between Gloucester and Ross._

From Stroud I came up to Pitchcomb, leaving Painswick on my right. From the lofty hill at Pitchcomb I looked down into that great flat and almost circular vale, of which the city of Gloucester is in the centre. To the left I saw the Severn, become a sort of arm of the sea; and before me I saw the hills that divide this county from Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The hill is a mile down. When down, you are amongst dairy-farms and orchards all the way to Gloucester, and this year the orchards, particularly those of pears, are greatly productive. I intended to sleep at Gloucester, as I had, when there, already come twenty-five miles, and as the fourteen, which remained for me to go in order to reach Bollitree, in Herefordshire, would make about nine more than either I or my horse had a taste for. But when I came to Gloucester I found that I should run a risk of having no bed if I did not bow very low and pay very high; for what should there be here but one of those scandalous and beastly fruits of the system called a "Music-Meeting!" Those who founded the Cathedrals never dreamed, I dare say, that they would have been put to such uses as this! They are, upon these occasions, made use of as _Opera-Houses_; and I am told that the money which is collected goes, in some shape or another, to the Clergy of the Church, or their widows, or children, or something. These assemblages of player-folks, half-rogues and half-fools, began with the small paper-money; and with it they will go. They are amongst the profligate pranks which idleness plays when fed by the sweat of a starving people. From this scene of prostitution and of pocket-picking I moved off with all convenient speed, but not before the ostler made me pay 9_d._ for merely letting my horse _stand_ about ten minutes, and not before he had _begun_ to abuse me for declining, though in a very polite manner, to make him a present in addition to the 9_d._ How he ended I do not know; for I soon set the noise of the shoes of my horse to answer him. I got to this village, about eight miles from Gloucester, by five o'clock: it is now half past seven, and I am going to bed with an intention of getting to Bollitree (six miles only) early enough in the morning to catch my sons in bed if they play the sluggard.

_Bollitree, Wednesday, 13th Sept._

This morning was most beautiful. There has been rain here now, and the grass begins (but only begins) to grow. When I got within two hundred yards of Mr. Palmer's I had the happiness to meet my son Richard, who said that he had been up an hour. As I came along I saw one of the prettiest sights in the _flower_ way that I ever saw in my life. It was a little orchard; the grass in it had just taken a start, and was beautifully fresh; and very thickly growing amongst the grass was the purple flowered _Colchicum_ in full bloom. They say that the leaves of this plant, which come out in the spring and die away in the summer, are poisonous to cattle if they eat much of them in the spring. The flower, if standing by itself, would be no great beauty; but contrasted thus with the fresh grass, which was a little shorter than itself, it was very beautiful.

_Bollitree, Saturday, 23rd Sept._

Upon my arrival here, which, as the reader has seen, was ten days ago, I had a parcel of _letters_ to open, amongst which were a large lot from Correspondents, who had been good enough to set me right with regard to that conceited and impudent plagiarist, or literary thief, "Sir James Graham, Baronet of Netherby." One correspondent says that I have reversed the rule of the Decalogue by visiting the sins of the son upon the father. Another tells me anecdotes about the "Magnus Apollo." I hereby do the father justice by saying that, from what I have now heard of him, I am induced to believe that he would have been ashamed to commit flagrant acts of plagiarism, which the son has been guilty of. The whole of this plagiarist's pamphlet is bad enough. Every part of it is contemptible; but the passage in which he says that there was "no man of any authority who did not under-rate the distress that would arise out of Peel's Bill;" this passage merits a broom-stick at the hands of any Englishman that chooses to lay it on, and particularly from me.

As to _crops_ in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, they have been very bad. Even the wheat here has been only a two-third part crop. The barley and oats really next to nothing. _Fed off_ by cattle and sheep in many places, partly for want of grass and partly from their worthlessness. The cattle have been nearly starved in many places; and we hear the same from Worcestershire. In some places one of these beautiful calves (last spring calves) will be given for the wintering of another. Hay at Stroud was six pounds a ton: last year it was 3_l._ a ton: and yet meat and cheese are lower in price than they were last year. Mutton (I mean alive) was last year at this time 7-1/2_d._; it is now 6_d._ There has been in North Wilts and in Gloucestershire half the quantity of cheese made this year, and yet the price is lower than it was last year. Wool is half the last year's price. There has, within these three weeks or a month, been a prodigious increase in the quantity of cattle food; the grass looks like the grass late in May; and the late and stubble-turnips (of which immense quantities have been sown) have grown very much, and promise large crops generally; yet lean sheep have, at the recent fairs, fallen in price; they have been lessening in price, while the facility of keeping them has been augmenting! Aye; but the paper-money has not been augmenting, notwithstanding the Branch-Bank at Gloucester! This bank is quite ready, they say, to take deposits; that is to say, to keep people's spare money for them; but to lend them none, without such security as would get money, even from the claws of a miser. This trick is, then, what the French call a _coup-manque_; or a missing of the mark. In spite of everything, as to the season, calculated to cause lean sheep to rise in price, they fell, I hear, at Wilton fair (near Salisbury) on the 12th instant, from 2_s._ to 3_s._ a head. And yesterday, 22nd Sept., at Newent fair, there was a fall since the last fair in this neighbourhood. Mr. Palmer sold, at this fair, sheep for 23_s._ a head, rather better than some which he sold at the same fair last year for 34_s._ a head: so that here is a falling off of a third! Think of the dreadful ruin, then, which must fall upon the renting farmers, whether they rent the land, or rent the money which enables them to call the land their own! The recent Order in Council _has_ ruined many. I was, a few days after that Order reached us, in Wiltshire, in a rick yard, looking at the ricks, amongst which were two of beans. I asked the farmer how much the Order would take out of his pocket; and he said it had already taken out more than a hundred pounds! This is a pretty state of things for a man to live in! The winds are less uncertain than this calling of a farmer is now become, though it is a calling the affairs of which have always been deemed as little liable to accident as anything human.

The "best public instructor" tells us, that the Ministers are about to give the _Militia-Clothing_ to the poor Manufacturers! Coats, waistcoats, trousers, shoes and stockings! Oh, what a kind as well as wise "envy of surrounding nations" this is! Dear good souls! But what are the _women_ to do? No _smocks_, pretty gentlemen! No royal commission to be appointed to distribute smocks to the suffering "females" of the "_disturbed_ districts!" How fine our "manufacturing population" will look all dressed in _red_! Then indeed will the farming fellows have to repent, that they did not follow the advice of Dr. Black, and fly to the "_happy_ manufacturing districts," where employment, as the Doctor affirmed, was so abundant and so permanent, and where wages were so high! Out of evil comes good; and this state of things has blown the Scotch _poleeteecal ecoonoomy_ to the devil, at any rate. In spite of all their plausibility and persevering brass, the Scotch writers are now generally looked upon as so many tricky humbugs. Mr. Sedgwick's affair is enough, one would think, to open men's eyes to the character of this greedy band of _invaders_; for invaders they are, and of the very worst sort: they come only to live on the labour of others; never to work themselves; and, while they do this, they are everlastingly publishing essays, the object of which is, to keep the Irish out of England! Dr. Black has, within these four years, published more than a hundred articles, in which he has represented the invasion of the Irish as being ruinous to England! What monstrous impudence! The Irish come to help do the work; the Scotch to help eat the taxes; or, to tramp "_aboot mon_" with a pack and licence; or, in other words, to cheat upon a small scale, as their superiors do upon a large one. This tricky and greedy set have, however, at last, overreached themselves, after having so long overreached all the rest of mankind that have had the misfortune to come in contact with them. They are now smarting under the scourge, the torments of which they have long made others feel. They have been the principal inventors and executors of all that has been damnable to England. They are _now_ bothered; and I thank God for it. It may, and it must, finally deliver us from their baleful influence.

To return to the kind and pretty gentlemen of Whitehall, and their _Militia-Clothing_: if they refuse to supply the women with smocks, perhaps they would have no objection to hand them over some petticoats; or at any rate, to give their husbands a _musket_ a piece, and a little powder and ball; just to amuse themselves with, instead of the employment of "digging holes one day and filling them up the next," as suggested by "the great statesman, now no more," who was one of that "noble, honourable, and venerable body" the Privy Council (to which Sturges Bourne belongs), and who cut his own throat at North Cray, in Kent, just about three years after he had brought in the bill, which compelled me to make the Register contain two sheets and a quarter, and to compel printers to give, before they began to print, bail to pay any fines that might be inflicted on them for anything that they might print. Let me see: where was I? Oh! the muskets and powder and ball ought, certainly, to go with the red clothes; but how strange it is, that the _real relief_ never seems to occur, even for one single moment, to the minds of these pretty gentlemen; namely, _taking off the taxes_. What a thing it is to behold poor people receiving taxes, or alms, to prevent them from starving; and to behold one half, at least, of what they receive, taken from them in taxes! What a sight to behold soldiers, horse and foot, employed to prevent a distressed people from committing acts of violence, when the _cost_ of the horse and foot would, probably, if applied in the way of relief to the sufferers, prevent the existence of the distress! A cavalry horse has, I think, ten pounds of oats a day and twenty pounds of hay. These at present prices, cost 16_s._ a week. Then there is stable room, barracks, straw, saddle and all the trappings. Then there is the wear of the horse. Then the pay of them. So that one single horseman, with his horse, do not cost so little as 36_s._ a week; and that is more than the parish allowance to five labourers' or manufacturers' families, at five to a family; so that one horseman and his horse cost what would feed twenty-five of the distressed creatures. If there be ten thousand of these horsemen, they cost as much as would keep, at the parish rate, two hundred and fifty thousand of the distressed persons. Aye; it is even so, parson Hay, stare at it as long as you like. But, suppose it to be only half as much: then it would maintain a hundred and twenty-five thousand persons. However, to get rid of all dispute, and to state one staring and undeniable fact, let me first observe, that it is notorious, that the poor-rates are looked upon as enormous; that they are deemed an insupportable burden; that Scarlett and Nolan have asserted, that they threaten to swallow up the land; that it is equally notorious that a large part of the poor-rates ought to be called _wages_; all this is undeniable, and now comes the damning fact; namely, that the whole amount of these poor-rates falls far short of the cost of the standing army in time of peace! So that, take away this army, which is to keep the distressed people from committing acts of violence, and you have, at once, ample means of removing all the distress and all the danger of acts of violence! _When_ will this be done? Do not say, "_Never_," reader: if you do, you are not only a slave, but you ought to be one.

I cannot dismiss this _militia-clothing_ affair, without remarking, that I do not agree with those who _blame_ the Ministers for having let in the foreign corn _out of fear_. Why not do it from that motive? "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And what is meaned by "fear of the Lord," but the fear of doing wrong, or of persevering in doing wrong? And whence is this fear to arise? From thinking of the _consequences_, to be sure: and, therefore if the Ministers did let in the foreign corn for fear of popular commotion, they acted rightly, and their motive was as good and reasonable as the act was wise and just. It would have been lucky for them if the same sort of motive had prevailed, when the Corn Bill was passed; but that _game-cock_ statesman, who at last, sent a spur into his own throat, was then in high feather, and he, while soldiers were drawn up round the Honourable, Honourable, Honourable House, said, that he did not for his part, care much about the Bill; but, since the mob had clamoured against _it_, he was resolved to support it! Alas! that such a _cock_ statesman should have come to such an end! All the towns and cities in England petitioned against that odious Bill. Their petitions were rejected, and that rejection is _amongst_ the causes of the present embarrassments. Therefore I am not for blaming the Ministers for acting from _fear_. They did the same in the case of the poor Queen. Fear taught them wisely, then, also. What! would you never have people act from _fear_? What but fear of the law restrains many men from committing crimes? What but fear of exposure prevents thousands upon thousands of offences, moral as well as legal? Nonsense about "acting from fear." I always hear with great suspicion your eulogists of "_vigorous_" government; I do not like your vigorous governments; your game-cock governments. We saw enough of these, and _felt_ enough of them too, under Pitt, Dundas, Perceval, Gibbs, Ellenborough, Sidmouth and Castlereagh. I prefer governments like those of Edward I. of England and St. Louis of France; _cocks_ as towards their enemies and rivals, and _chickens_ as towards their own people: precisely the reverse of our modern "country gentlemen," as they call themselves; very lions as towards their poor, robbed, famishing labourers, but more than lambs as towards tax-eaters, and especially as towards the fierce and whiskered _dead-weight_, in the presence of any of whom they dare not say that their souls are their own. This base race of men, called "country gentlemen" must be speedily changed by almost a miracle; or they, big as well as little, must be swept away; and if it should be desirable for posterity to have a just idea of them, let posterity take this one fact; that the tithes are now, in part, received by men, who are Rectors and Vicars, and who, at the same time receive half-pay as naval or military officers; and that not one English "country gentleman" has had the courage even to complain of this, though many gallant half-pay officers have been dismissed and beggared, upon the ground, that the half-pay is not a reward for past services, but a retaining fee for future services; so that, put the two together, they amount to this; that the half-pay is given to church parsons, that they may be, when war comes, ready to serve as officers in the army or navy! Let the world match that if it can! And yet there are scoundrels to say, that we do not want a _radical reform_! Why there must be such a reform, in order to prevent us from becoming a mass of wretches too corrupt and profligate and base even to carry on the common transactions of life.

_Ryall, near Upton on Severn (Worcestershire), Monday, 25th Sept._

I set off from Mr. Palmer's yesterday, after breakfast, having his son (about 13 years old) as my travelling companion. We came across the country, a distance of about 22 miles, and, having crossed the Severn at Upton, arrived here, at Mr. John Price's, about two o'clock. On our road we passed by the estate and park of _another Ricardo_! This is Osmond; the other is David. This one has ousted two families of Normans, the Honeywood Yateses, and the Scudamores. They suppose him to have ten thousand pounds a year in rent here! Famous "watching the turn of the market"! The Barings are at work down in this country too. They are everywhere, indeed, depositing their eggs about, like cunning old guinea-hens, in sly places, besides the great, open showy nests that they have. The "instructor" tells us, that the Ricardos have received sixty-four thousand pounds Commission, on the "Greek Loans," or, rather, "Loans to the Greeks." Oh, brave Greeks, to have such patriots to aid you with their financial skill; such patriots as Mr. Galloway to make engines of war for you, while his son is making them for the Turks; and such patriots as Burdett and Hobhouse to talk of your political relations! Happy Greeks! Happy Mexicans, too, it seems; for the "best instructor" tells us, that the Barings, whose progenitors came from Dutchland about the same time as, and perhaps in company with, the Ricardos; happy Mexicans too; for, the "instructor" as good as swears, that the Barings will see that the dividends on your loans are paid in future! Now, therefore, the riches, the loads, the shiploads of silver and gold are now to pour in upon us! Never was there a nation so foolish as this! But, and this ought to be well understood, it is not _mere_ foolishness; not mere harmless folly; it is foolishness, the offspring of _greediness_ and of a _gambling_, which is little short of a _roguish_ disposition; and this disposition prevails to an enormous extent in the country, as I am told, more than in the monstrous Wen itself. Most delightfully, however, have the greedy, mercenary, selfish, unfeeling wretches, been bit by the _loans_ and _shares_! The King of Spain gave the wretches a sharp bite, for which I always most cordially thank his Majesty. I dare say, that his sponging off of the roguish Bonds has reduced to beggary, or caused to cut their throats, many thousands of the greedy, fund-loving, stock-jobbing devils, who, if they regard it likely to raise their "securities" one per cent., would applaud the murder of half the human race. These vermin all, without a single exception, approved of, and rejoiced at, Sidmouth's _Power-of-Imprisonment Bill_, and they applauded his _Letter of Thanks to the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry_. No matter what it is that puts an end to a system which engenders and breeds up vermin like these.

Mr. Hanford, of this county, and Mr. Canning of Gloucestershire, having dined at Mr. Price's yesterday, I went, to-day, with Mr. Price to see Mr. Hanford at his house and estate at Bredon Hill, which is, I believe, one of the highest in England. The ridge, or, rather, the edge of it, divides, in this part, Worcestershire from Gloucestershire. At the very highest part of it there are the remains of an encampment, or rather, I should think, citadel. In many instances, in Wiltshire, these marks of fortifications are called castles still; and, doubtless, there were once castles on these spots. From Bredon Hill you see into nine or ten counties; and those curious bubblings-up, the Malvern Hills, are right before you, and only at about ten miles' distance, in a straight line. As this hill looks over the counties of Worcester, Gloucester, Hereford and part of Warwick and the rich part of Stafford; and, as it looks over the vales of Esham, Worcester, and Gloucester, having the Avon and the Severn, winding down them, you certainly see from this Bredon Hill one of the very richest spots of England, and I am fully convinced, a richer spot than is to be seen in any other country in the world; I mean _Scotland excepted_, of course, for fear Sawney should cut my throat, or, which is much the same thing squeeze me by the hand, from which last I pray thee to deliver me, O Lord!