Part 72

The country from Spittal to Lincoln continued to be much about the same as from Barton to Spittal. Large fields, rather light loam at top, stone under, about half corn-land and the rest grass. Not so many sheep as in the richer lands, but a great many still. As you get on towards Lincoln, the ground gradually rises, and you go on the road made by the Romans. When you come to the city you find the ancient castle and the magnificent cathedral on the _brow_ of a sort of ridge which ends here; for you look all of a sudden down into a deep valley, where the greater part of the remaining city lies. It once had _fifty-two churches_; it has now only eight, and only about 9,000 inhabitants! The cathedral is, I believe, the _finest building in the whole world_. All the others that I have seen (and I have seen all in England except Chester, York, Carlisle, and Durham) are little things compared with this. To the task of describing a thousandth-part of its striking beauties I am inadequate; it surpasses greatly all that I had anticipated; and oh! how loudly it gives the lie to those brazen Scotch historians who would have us believe that England was formerly a _poor_ country! The whole revenue raised from Lincolnshire, even by this present system of taxation, would not rear such another pile in two hundred years. Some of the city gates are down; but there is one standing, the arch of which is said to be two thousand years old; and a most curious thing it is. The sight of the cathedral fills the mind alternately with wonder, admiration, melancholy, and rage: wonder at its grandeur and magnificence; admiration of the zeal and disinterestedness of those who here devoted to the honour of God those immense means which they might have applied to their own enjoyments; melancholy at its present neglected state; and indignation against those who now enjoy the revenues belonging to it, and who creep about it merely as a pretext for devouring a part of the fruit of the people's labour. There are no men in England who ought to wish for _reform_ so anxiously as the working clergy of the church of England; we are all oppressed; but they are oppressed and insulted more than any men that ever lived in the world. The clergy in America; I mean in free America, not in our beggarly colonies, where clerical insolence and partiality prevail still more than here; I mean in the United States, where every man gives what he pleases, and no more: the clergy of the episcopal church are a hundred times better off than the working clergy are here. They are, also, much more respected, because their _order_ has not to bear the blame of enormous exactions; which exactions here are swallowed up by the aristocracy and their dependents; but which swallowings are imputed to every one bearing the name of parson. Throughout the whole country I have maintained the necessity and the justice of resuming the church property; but I have never failed to say that I know of no more meritorious and ill-used men than the working clergy of the established church.

_Leicester, 26th April 1830._

At the famous ancient city of Lincoln I had crowded audiences, principally consisting of farmers, on the 21st and 22nd; exceedingly well-behaved audiences; and great impression produced. One of the evenings, in pointing out to them the wisdom of explaining to their labourers the cause of their distress, in order to ward off the effects of the resentment which the labourers now feel everywhere against the farmers, I related to them what my labourers at Barn-Elm had been doing since I left home: and I repeated to them the complaints that my labourers made, stating to them, from memory, the following parts of that spirited petition:

"That your petitioners have recently observed that many great sums of the money, part of which we pay, have been voted to be given to persons who render no services to the country; some of which sums we will mention here; that the sum of 94,900_l._ has been voted for disbanded _foreign_ officers, their _widows_ and _children_; that your petitioners know that ever since the peace this charge has been annually made; that it has been on an average 110,000_l._ a-year, and that, of course, this band of foreigners have actually taken away out of England, since the peace, one million and seven hundred thousand pounds; partly taken from the fruit of our labour; and if our dinners were actually taken from our table and carried over to Hanover, the process could not be to our eyes more visible than it now is; and we are astonished that those who fear that we, who make the land bring forth crops, and who make the clothing and the houses, shall swallow up the rental, appear to think nothing at all of the swallowings of these Hanoverian men, women, and children, who may continue thus to swallow for half a century to come.

"That the advocates of the project for sending us out of our country to the rocks and snows of Nova Scotia, and the swamps and wilds of Canada, have insisted on the necessity of _checking marriages_ amongst us, in order to cause a decrease in our numbers; that, however, while this is insisted on in your honourable House, we perceive a part of our own earnings voted away to encourage marriage amongst those who do not work, and who live at our expense; and that to your petitioners it does seem most wonderful, that there should be persons to fear that we, the labourers, shall, on account of our numbers, swallow up the rental, while they actually vote away our food and raiment to increase the numbers of those who never have produced, and who never will produce, anything useful to man.

"That your petitioners know that more than one-half of the whole of their wages is taken from them by the taxes; that these taxes go chiefly into the hands of idlers; that your petitioners are the bees, and that the tax-receivers are the drones; and they know, further, that while there is a project for sending the bees out of the country, no one proposes to send away the drones; but that your petitioners hope to see the day when the checking of the increase of the drones, and not of the bees, will be the object of an English Parliament.

"That, in consequence of taxes, your petitioners pay six-pence for a pot of worse beer than they could make for one penny; that they pay ten shillings for a pair of shoes that they could have for five shillings; that they pay seven-pence for a pound of soap or candles that they could have for three-pence; that they pay seven-pence for a pound of sugar that they could have for three-pence; that they pay six shillings for a pound of tea that they could have for two shillings; that they pay double for their bread and meat of what they would have to pay if there were no idlers to be kept out of the taxes; that, therefore, it is the taxes that make their wages insufficient for their support, and that compel them to apply for aid to the poor-rates; that, knowing these things, they feel indignant at hearing themselves described as _paupers_, while so many thousands of idlers, for whose support they pay taxes, are called _noble Lords_ and _Ladies_, _honourable Gentlemen_, _Masters_, and _Misses_; that they feel indignant at hearing themselves described as a nuisance to be got rid of, while the idlers who live upon their earnings are upheld, caressed and cherished, as if they were the sole support of the country."

Having repeated to them these passages, I proceeded: "My workmen were induced thus to petition in consequence of the information which I, their master, had communicated to them; and, Gentlemen, why should not your labourers petition in the same strain? Why should you suffer them to remain in a state of ignorance relative to the cause of their misery? The eye sweeps over in this county more riches in one moment than are contained in the whole county in which I was born, and in which the petitioners live. Between Holbeach and Boston, even at a public-house, neither bread nor meat was to be found; and while the landlord was telling me that the people were become so poor that the butchers killed no meat in the neighbourhood. I counted more than two thousand fat sheep lying about in the pastures in that richest spot in the whole world. Starvation in the midst of plenty; the land covered with food, and the working people without victuals: everything taken away by the tax-eaters of various descriptions: and yet you take no measures for redress; and your miserable labourers seem to be doomed to expire with hunger, without an effort to obtain relief. What! cannot you point out to them the real cause of their sufferings; cannot you take a piece of paper and write out a petition for them; cannot your labourers petition as well as mine; are God's blessings bestowed on you without any spirit to preserve them; is the fatness of the land, is the earth teeming with food for the body and raiment for the back, to be an apology for the want of that courage for which your fathers were so famous; is the abundance which God has put into your hands, to be the excuse for your resigning yourselves to starvation? My God! is there no spirit left in England except in the miserable sand-hills of Surrey?" These words were not uttered without effect I can assure the reader. The assemblage was of that stamp in which thought goes before expression; but the effect of this example of my men in Surrey will, I am sure, be greater than anything that has been done in the petitioning way for a long time past.

We left Lincoln on the 23rd about noon, and got to Newark, in Nottinghamshire, in the evening, where I gave a lecture at the theatre to about three hundred persons. Newark is a very fine town, and the Castle Inn, where we stopped, extraordinarily good and pleasantly situated. Here I was met by a parcel of the printed petitions of the labourers at Barn-Elm.

I shall continue to _sow these_, as I proceed on my way. It should have been stated at the head of the printed petition that it was presented to the House of Lords by his Grace the Duke of Richmond, and by Mr. Pallmer to the House of Commons.

The country from Lincoln to Newark (sixteen miles) is by no means so fine as that which we have been in for so many weeks. The land is clayey in many parts. A pleasant country; a variety of hill and valley; but not that richness which we had so long had under our eye: fields smaller; fewer sheep, and those not so large, and so manifestly loaded with flesh. The roads always good. Newark is a town very much like Nottingham, having a very fine and spacious market-place; the buildings everywhere good; but it is in the villages that you find the depth of misery.

Having appointed positively to be at Leicester in the evening of Saturday, the 24th, we could not stop either at Grantham or at Melton Mowbray, not even long enough to view their fine old magnificent churches. In going from Newark to Grantham, we got again into Lincolnshire, in which last county Grantham is. From Newark nearly to Melton Mowbray, the country is about the same as between Lincoln and Newark; by no means bad land, but not so rich as that of Lincolnshire, in the middle and eastern parts; not approaching to the Holderness country in point of riches; a large part arable land, well tilled; but not such large homesteads, such numerous great stacks of wheat, and such endless flocks of lazy sheep.

Before we got to Melton Mowbray the beautiful pastures of this little verdant county of Leicester began to appear. Meadows and green fields, with here and there a corn field, all of smaller dimensions than those of Lincolnshire, but all very beautiful; with gentle hills and woods too; not beautiful woods, like those of Hampshire and of the wilds of Surrey, Sussex and Kent; but very pretty, all the country around being so rich. At Mowbray we began to get amongst the Leicestershire sheep, those fat creatures which we see the butchers' boys battering about so unmercifully in the streets and the outskirts of the Wen. The land is warmer here than in Lincolnshire; the grass more forward, and the wheat, between Mowbray and Leicester, six inches high, and generally looking exceedingly well. In Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire I found the wheat in general rather thin, and frequently sickly; nothing like so promising as in Suffolk and Norfolk.

We got to Leicester on the 24th at about half-after five o'clock; and the time appointed for the lecture was six. Leicester is a very fine town; spacious streets, fine inns, fine shops, and containing, they say, thirty or forty thousand people. It is well stocked with jails, of which a new one, in addition to the rest, has just been built, covering three acres of ground! And, as if _proud_ of it, the grand portal has little turrets in the castle style, with _embrasures_ in miniature on the caps of the turrets. Nothing speaks the want of reflection in the people so much as the self-gratulation which they appear to feel in these edifices in their several towns. Instead of expressing shame at these indubitable proofs of the horrible increase of misery and of crime, they really boast of these "improvements," as they call them. Our forefathers built abbeys and priories and churches, and they made such use of them that jails were nearly unnecessary. We, their sons, have knocked down the abbeys and priories; suffered half the parsonage-houses and churches to pretty nearly tumble down, and make such uses of the remainder, that jails and tread-mills and dungeons have now become the most striking edifices in every county in the kingdom.

Yesterday morning (Sunday the 25th) I walked out to the village of Knighton, two miles on the Bosworth road, where I breakfasted, and then walked back. This morning I walked out to Hailstone, nearly three miles on the Lutterworth road, and got my breakfast there. You have nothing to do but to walk through these villages, to see the cause of the increase of the jails. Standing on the hill at Knighton, you see the three ancient and lofty and beautiful spires rising up at Leicester; you see the river winding down through a broad bed of the most beautiful meadows that man ever set his eyes on; you see the bright verdure covering all the land, even to the tops of the hills, with here and there a little wood, as if made by God to give variety to the beauty of the scene, for the river brings the coal in abundance, for fuel, and the earth gives the brick and the tile in abundance. But go down into the villages; invited by the spires, rising up amongst the trees in the dells, at scarcely ever more than a mile or two apart; invited by these spires, go down into these villages, view the large, and once the most beautiful, churches; see the parson's house, large, and in the midst of pleasure-gardens; and then look at the miserable sheds in which the labourers reside! Look at these hovels, made of mud and of straw; bits of glass, or of old off-cast windows, without frames or hinges, frequently, but merely stuck in the mud wall. Enter them, and look at the bits of chairs or stools; the wretched boards tacked together to serve for a table; the floor of pebble, broken brick, or of the bare ground; look at the thing called a bed; and survey the rags on the backs of the wretched inhabitants; and then wonder, if you can, that the jails and dungeons and tread-mills increase, and that a standing army and barracks are become the favourite establishments of England!

At the village of Hailstone, I got into the purlieu, as they call it in Hampshire, of a person well known in the Wen; namely, the Reverend Beresford, rector of that fat affair, St. Andrew's, Holborn! In walking through the village, and surveying its deplorable dwellings, so much worse than the cow-sheds of the cottagers on the skirts of the forests in Hampshire, my attention was attracted by the surprising contrast between them and the house of their religious teacher. I met a labouring man. Country people _know everything_. If you have ever made a _faux pas_, of any sort of description; if you have anything about you of which you do not want all the world to know, never retire to a village, keep in some great town; but the Wen, for your life, for there the next-door neighbour will not know even your name; and the vicinage will judge of you solely by the quantity of money that you have to spend. This labourer seemed not to be in a very great hurry. He was digging in his garden; and I, looking over a low hedge, _pitched him up_ for a gossip, commencing by asking him whether that was the parson's house. Having answered in the affirmative, and I, having asked the parson's name, he proceeded thus: "His name is Beresford; but though he lives there, he has not this living now, he has got the living of St. Andrew's, Holborn; and they say it is worth a great many thousands a year. He could not, they say, keep this living and have that too, because they were so far apart. And so this living was given to Mr. Brown, who is the rector of Hobey, about seven miles off." "Well," said I, "but _how comes Beresford to live here now_, if the living be given to another man?" "Why, Sir," said he, "this Beresford married a daughter of Brown; and so, you know (smiling and looking very archly), Brown comes and takes the payment for the tithes, and pays a curate that lives in that house there in the field; and Beresford lives at that fine house still, just as he used to do." I asked him what the living was worth, and he answered twelve hundred pounds a year. It is a rectory, I find, and of course the parson has great tithes as well as small.

The people of this village know a great deal more about Beresford than the people of St. Andrew's, Holborn, know about him. In short, the country people know all about the whole thing. They will be long before they act; but they will make no noise as a signal for action. They will be moved by nothing but actual want of food. This the Thing seems to be aware of; and hence all the innumerable schemes for keeping them quiet: hence the endless jails and all the terrors of hardened law: hence the schemes for coaxing them, by letting them have bits of land: hence the everlasting bills and discussions of committees about the state of the poor, and the state of the poor-laws: all of which will fail; and at last, unless reduction of taxation speedily take place, the schemers will find what the consequences are of reducing millions to the verge of starvation.

The labourers here, who are in need of parochial relief, are formed into what are called _roundsmen_; that is to say, they are sent round from one farmer to another, each maintaining a certain number for a certain length of time; and thus they go round from one to the other. If the farmers did not pay three shillings in taxes out of every six shillings that they give in the shape of wages, they could afford to give the men four and sixpence in wages, which would be better to the men than the six. But as long as this burden of taxes shall continue, so long the misery will last, and it will go on increasing with accelerated pace. The march of circumstances is precisely what it was in France, just previous to the French revolution. If the aristocracy were wise, they would put a stop to that march. The middle class are fast sinking down to the state of the lower class. _A community of feeling_ between these classes, and that feeling an angry one, is what the aristocracy has to dread. As far as the higher clergy are concerned, this community of feeling is already complete. A short time will extend the feeling to every other branch; and then, the hideous consequences make their appearance. Reform; a radical reform of the Parliament; this reform _in time_; this reform, which would reconcile the middle class to the aristocracy, and give renovation to that which has now become a mass of decay and disgust; this reform, given with a good grace, and not taken by force, is the only refuge for the aristocracy of this kingdom. Just as it was in France. All the tricks of financiers have been tried in vain; and by-and-by some trick more pompous and foolish than the rest; Sir Henry Parnell's trick, perhaps, or something equally foolish, would blow the whole concern into the air.

_Worcester, 18th May, 1830._

In tracing myself from Leicester to this place, I begin at Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, one of the prettiest country towns that I ever saw; that is to say, prettiest _situated_. At this place they have, in the church (they say), the identical _pulpit_ from which Wickliffe preached! This was not his birth-place; but he was, it seems, priest of this parish.

I set off from Lutterworth early on the 29th of April, stopped to breakfast at Birmingham, got to Wolverhampton by two o'clock (a distance altogether of about 50 miles), and lectured at six in the evening. I repeated, or rather continued, the lecturing, on the 30th, and on the 3rd of May. On the 6th of May went to Dudley, and lectured there: on the 10th of May, at Birmingham; on the 12th and 13th, at Shrewsbury; and on the 14th, came here.