Part 12

The English Ambassador Extraordinary enjoyed certain privileges which were established on the precedent of the embassy of Lord Falconberg, Cromwell's son-in-law. Among these privileges was the right to lodging and maintenance at the cost of the Republic, a right which the ambassador usually compounded for the sum of five or six hundred ducats; a box at each theatre in Venice was placed at his disposal, and when he took his _conge_ the Senate voted him a gold chain and medal of the value of two thousand scudi. The ambassadors ordinary enjoyed certain exemptions from customs dues. These exemptions were frequently abused, and were the cause of constant friction between the Government and the representatives of the Powers. In the year 1763 Mr. John Murray's Istrian wine was seized, and he only recovered it after expressing himself _ben mortificato_. Mr. Murray was constantly in trouble on this subject. The year before he had addressed an indignant letter to the Government because 'a certain official of the Custom House had accused him of allowing his servants to sell wine and flour at the door of the Residency. It is but a poor satisfaction after so long a period of suspicion to know that that official is bankrupt and no proof of the accusation is forthcoming.' But by far the most curious episode of this nature was that which befell Tom Killigrew, the poet, grandfather of the Mrs. Anne Killigrew of Dryden's famous ode and a friend of Pepys, who recals him as 'a merry droll, but a gentleman of great esteem with the King, who told us many merry stories,' this, perhaps, among the number. Killigrew was sent to represent Charles II. at Venice in 1649, just after the execution of Charles I., and while his son was _a ramingo_, or knocking about, as the Venetian ambassador politely puts it. Killigrew was received in the usual way on February 10, 1650, and made his address 'in lingua cattiva,' as the report affirms. But the Republic soon tired of its alliance with an exiled king, and resolved to dismiss Killigrew as soon as possible. Killigrew was poor, and his master had little or nothing to give him, so he hit upon the expedient of keeping a butcher's shop, where he could sell meat, cheaper than any one else in Venice, by availing himself of his exemptions from octroi. The Senate resolved to fasten upon this illicit traffic as a pretext for dismissing Killigrew; and on the 22d of June, 1652, they sent their Secretary, Busenello, to tell Killigrew, _viva voce_, that he must go. Busenello went to San Fantin, and there found one of Killigrew's butchers, who told him that the Resident only kept his shop there, but lived himself at San Cassano. At San Cassano Busenello was told that Killigrew was dining at Murano, and would not be home till evening; but very soon after he saw the Resident at his window, and insisted on being announced. He explained 'with all possible delicacy,' as he says, the order of the Senate; but Killigrew received the message with every sign of anger and pain. With tears in his eyes he declared that it was the other ambassadors who robbed the customs, while he had all the blame. It was true that he did keep 'a little bit of a butcher's shop to support himself,' but that could not hurt the revenue; and he added that, under any circumstance he should leave Venice, for he had received his letters of recall from France, four days previously. The Senate no more than their secretary believed in the existence of this letter of recall; but Killigrew really had the letter, dated March 14th, and it was sent into the College, along with a brief exculpatory epistle from the Resident, on the 27th of June. Killigrew left Venice the same day as he was bound to do by ambassadorial etiquette; and Charles had not another recognized agent to the Republic until his restoration; for the Venetians definitely adopted the policy of courting Cromwell, in the vain hope that he would assist them against the Turk.

With the papers of the College we close this notice of the political documents in the archives at the Frari. The other departments of the Government had each their own series of papers, equally copious and valuable. The heraldic and genealogical archives of the Avvogadori di Commun, for example, the Charters of the German and Turkish Exchanges and the records of the Mint and the public Banks, offer a wide and a rich field for study; and in spite of the profound and extensive labours of such scholars as Thomas, Checchetti, Barozzi, Berchet, Fulin, Lamansky, Mas Latrie, and Rawdon Brown, it will be long before the materials in the vast storehouse of the Frari are exhausted or even adequately displayed.

Art. IV.--1. _Journal of a Residence in Norway during the years 1834, 1835 and 1836._ By Samuel Laing, Esq. London, 1837.

2. _Le Royaume de Norvege et le Peuple Norvegien._ Par le Dr. O. I. Broch. Christiania, 1878.

3. _Official Reports of Prefects on the Economic Condition of the Provinces of Norway in 1876-80._ Christiania, 1884.

4. _Publications of the Statistical Bureau, Christiania._

The advocates of a general redistribution of landed property in Ireland, as well as those who are holding out to the agricultural labours of other portions of the United Kingdom the Arcadian lure figuratively known as the 'three acres and a cow,' will find in the work cited at the head of this article the amplest materials for the justification of the views they are pressing for adoption partly as a remedy for agricultural distress, but essentially in application of the Socialist doctrine that the people of a country have an inherent right to an absolute, proportionate possession of its soil.

Mr. Laing's 'Journal' is, indeed, not a record of travel and adventure, but a treatise, admirably written and replete with facts, in demonstration of the great superiority of the Norwegian system of land tenure over that of any other part of civilized Europe. His views have, moreover, been to a great extent adopted in the numerous works that have since been produced by British travellers who, after a rapid drive over the main routes of Norway, have described in terms equally glowing the happy and enviable condition of the _Bonde_ or yeoman farmer of that country.

Considering there is much in common in regard to race, religion, language, character, and civilization, between the inhabitants of that interesting little country and its maritime neighbours--the populations, more especially, of England and Scotland, it will be instructive, on the eve of the agrarian revolution with which the United Kingdom is threatened, to study and analyse the statements and conclusions of Mr. Laing, and to trace the subsequent and present operation of the peculiar land laws which he so highly extolled in the earlier part of this century.

With that object we proceed to describe, almost in Mr. Laing's own words, the condition of the peasant proprietors of Norway at a period (1835) when, out of a population of 1,194,827, only about eleven per cent. inhabited towns, the land in rural districts being held by 103,192 proprietors and tenants, the proportion of the two latter being respectively seventy and thirty per cent.

'The Norwegians,' wrote Mr. Laing, 'are the most interesting and singular group of people in Europe. They live under ancient laws and social arrangements totally different in principle from those which regulate society and property in the feudally constituted states. Their country is peculiarly interesting to the political economist. It is the only part of Europe in which property from the earliest ages has been transmitted upon the principle of partition among all the children. The feudal structure of society with its law of primogeniture, and its privileged class of hereditary nobles, never prevailed in Norway. In this remote corner of the civilized world we may therefore see the effects upon the condition of society of the peculiar distribution of property; it will exhibit, on a small scale, what America and France will be a thousand years hence.... Here are the Highland glens without the Highland lairds.... If there be a happy class of people in Europe it is the Norwegian _Bonde_, king of his own land, and landlord as well as king.'

This state of happiness is, according to Mr. Laing, the result of the still existing _Odels ret_ or Allodial Right, under which, he asserts, the land of Norway was always the property of the people, not of a feudal class of high nobility. But although this assertion does not much affect the main and practical object of our enquiry, it may be as well to point out at once that, whatever might have been the inherent right of every Norwegian to a portion of the soil on which he was born, Dr. Broch, an eminent native authority, maintains that a considerable portion of the land belonged anciently to the kings of Norway, and had been acquired, as in other countries, partly by confiscation from nobles. Those lands were leased and, gradually, to a certain extent, sold. In the days of Roman Catholicism, the Church also held great landed estates, which the State appropriated at the Reformation. No inconsiderable part of the State domains was then leased, and, in short, before the middle of the seventeenth century, leases comprised a little more than half of the landed property of the country; while even in 1814, they constituted one-third of it. Later, the State lands, and those which had been distributed among nobles at the Reformation, were repartitioned among the bulk of the population or sold.

But to return to the _Odels ret_. It gives, Mr. Laing shows,

'to all the kindred of the Odelsmand in possession, in the order of consanguinity, a certain interest in it. If the Odelsmand should sell or alienate his land, the next of kin is entitled to redeem it on paying the purchase-money; and should he decline to do so, it is in the power of the one next to him to claim his _Odelsbaarn ret._'

At the present time, the allodial right is acquired only by the uninterrupted possession of the same person, his descendants or his wife, during a period of at least twenty years, and it is lost if the property has been in strange hands for three years. Testamentary dispositions, in the case of persons leaving issue, are now limited to one quarter of the testator's property; whereas before 1854, a testator could not bequeath anything individually. Since the year 1860, also, there is perfect equality between the two sexes in the division of real and personal property. At the period when Mr. Laing visited Norway, the division of land among children had

'not had the effect of reducing properties to the minimum size that would barely support human existence. One sells to the other and turns his capital and industry to pursuits that would enable him to acquire the necessaries of life. The heirs who sell, very often, instead of a sum of money, which is seldom at the command of the parties, take a life-rent payment or annuity of so much grain, the keep of so many cows, so much firewood, a dwelling-house on the property, or some equivalent of that kind. Few properties have no such burthens.' He argued that 'in a country where land is held, not in tenancy merely, as in Ireland, but in full ownership, its aggregation by the death of co-heirs, and by the marriages of female heirs,[5] will balance its subdivision by the equal succession of children; and also, that in such a condition of society, the whole mass of property would be found in such a State to consist of as many estates of 1000l., as many of 100l., as many of 10l. a year, at one period as at another.'

'Norway,' our author urges, 'affords a strong confutation of the dreaded excessive subdivision of land. Notwithstanding, the partition system, continued for ages, it contains farms of such extent that the owner possesses forty cows.'

On the whole, the farms appeared to him to be of various sizes: many so large that a bell was used to call the labourers to or from their work; while some were so small as to have only a few sheaves of corn, or a rig or two of potatoes, scattered among the trunks of the trees. These, however, were occupied by the farm servants, or cotters, paying for their houses and land in work (_Husmoena_). Twenty to forty cows could be counted on the large farms. In the district of Verdal (Trondhjemsfiord) Mr. Laing saw beautiful little farms of forty to fifty acres, each having a pasturage or grass tract in the mountains, where the cattle were kept during the summer until the crops were taken in, and upon each such out-farm, or _Soeter_, there was a house and regular dairy, to which, he informs us, 'the whole of the cattle and the dairy-maids, with their sweethearts, are sent to junket and to amuse themselves for three or four months of the year.[6] We can well believe that, in such circumstances, Mr. Laing found 'this class of _Boender_ the most interesting people in Norway,' and that 'there are none similar to them in the feudal countries of Europe.' He appears to have been more particularly impressed with

'the farms large enough to keep a score of cows, six horses and a small flock of sheep and goats, and to maintain a family and servants in all that land usually produces, leaving a surplus for sale sufficient to pay taxes, wages, and to provide the comforts and necessaries of life to a fair extent,' all which could be bought 'for 1000l. or 1200l., or even less.'

As regards the agricultural labourer, or cotter, Mr. Laing conceived 'his average condition to be that of holding land on which he could sow three-quarters of an imperial quarter of corn and three imperial quarters of potatoes, and which would enable him to keep two cows, or an equivalent number of sheep or goats.' His wages are stated to have been 4-1/2d. to 6d. per diem, in addition to his food. It was consequently 'amusing to recollect the benevolent speculations in our Agricultural Reports, of the Sir Johns and Sir Thomases in our midland counties of England, for bettering the condition of labourers in husbandry, by giving them, at a reasonable rent, a quarter of an acre of land to keep a cow on, or by allowing them to cultivate the slips of land on the roadside, outside of their hedges.' He also derides 'the agricultural writers' who 'tell us, indeed, that labourers in agriculture are much better off as farm servants, than they would be as small proprietors,' for 'if property is a good and desirable thing, the very smallest quantity of it is good and desirable.' It was obvious to Mr. Laing that the forty families of two or three Norwegian highland glens, 'each possessing and living on its own little spot of ground and farming well or ill, as the case might be, were in a better and happier state, and formed a more rationally constituted society, than if the whole belonged to one of these families (and it would be no great estate), while the other thirty-nine families were tenants and farmers.'

Mr. Laing found the happy agricultural population of Norway 'much better lodged than our labouring and middling classes, even in the south of Scotland;' and that no nation was at that period either better housed, or so well provided with fuel. The standard of living appeared to be higher in Norway than in most of our Scotch highland districts, although the materials were the same, namely, oatmeal, barley meal, potatoes, fish--fresh and salted--cheese, butter, and milk. He understood that it was even usual for the yeoman farmers to have animal food--'salt beef and black-puddings'--at least twice a week. At all events, he says, four meals a day formed the regular fare, and with two of those meals even the labourers had a glass of home-made brandy, distilled from potatoes by the yeoman, who 'could malt and distil in every way he pleased,' and thereby 'make free use of his agricultural produce,' with the result of 'increasing the general prosperity, improving the condition of the people, and promoting the increase of their numbers.'[7]

There was, at the time of Mr. Laing's residence in Norway, 'small difference in the way of living between high and low, because every man lived from the produce of his farm, and observed the utmost simplicity and economy with regard to everything that took money out of his pocket.' Furniture and clothes, except the yeoman's Sunday hat, were all home-made. 'Here was a whole population, in an old European country, dealing direct with Nature, as it were, for every article, without the intervention of money, or even of barter.' It was only the small yeomen on the verge of the Fjeld, or in the glens, far above the level of the land producing corn, and the inhabitants of districts less favoured by nature, 'whose common bread consisted of the bark of trees, mixed and ground up with ill-ripened oats; but even in their case, trout, dried and salted for winter, was no inconsiderable part of their provision, their houses being, at the same time, comfortable, though small, with wooden floors and glass windows.

Apart from these exceptionally situated proprietors, Mr. Laing found there really was 'no difference between the residence of a public functionary, of a clergyman, or of a gentleman of larger property and that of a _Bonde_, or peasant. The latter are as well, as commodiously and even showily, lodged as the former can be, and the properties are as good.' Mr. Laing, however, makes a reservation under this head in respect of the 'cultivated classes,' as being indisputably superior in mental acquirements to the yeoman farmer, and who lived in the same manner as the corresponding classes in England.

Towards the end of his stay in Norway, Mr. Laing often heard 'from the most intelligent men in the country' that the yeoman farmer lived too high; indulged too much in expensive luxuries, as coffee and sugar; in frequent and expensive entertainments at each other's houses; in carrioles, sledges, and harness of a costly kind; and even in a horse or two more than the farm work required; and he certainly thought this had resulted in a general want of money among them to pay even the most trifling taxes and other sums. A man with land worth three or four thousand dollars, and with horses, cows, and all sorts of products in abundance, was often at a loss for five or ten dollars. Nevertheless, he was of opinion that 'the increase of the tastes and habits which belong to property tended to keep population within the bounds of what can be comfortably subsisted, and without which the increase of subsistence would tend to evil rather than good.' It was, indeed, 'a good thing that they all had the ideas, habits, and character of people possessed of independent property upon which they were living without any care about increasing it, and free from the anxiety and fever of money making or money losing.'

Their subsistence, Mr. Laing exultingly and repeatedly points out, was derived mainly from husbandry, carried on under less favourable conditions of soil, climate, crops, and pasturage than in the Scotch highlands;--

'but on the simple Norwegian system, to live on the produce of the land being the main object, and the labourer (the cotter) being paid chiefly in land, a good crop would be an unmingled blessing; whereas in countries where agriculture is carried on as a manufacture, a succession of good crops may glut the markets, ruin the tenant, and even reduce the money wages of the labourer. In Norway neither good nor bad crops can affect the proportion of population to the land that could in ordinary seasons subsist on it. Paying no rent, the Norwegian yeoman farmer is not usually employed in prospective improvements, but simply in raising food, so that he can see at once whether the land is sufficient to produce subsistence for himself and his labourers. If grain and potatoes for the use of the farm, and a little surplus for sale to pay the land-tax and buy luxuries with, can be raised by the farm, all the purposes of farming in Norway are answered.

On the subject of pauperism, Mr. Laing alleges that 'the dread of poverty was less influential in Norway, where extreme destitution is as rare as great wealth, and where there is so much less difference in the comforts and consideration of the richer and poorer classes.' The indigent were farmed out for a week or so at a time among the yeomen farmers, 'whose poor-rate like the tithes of the Church, was too inconsiderable to mention.' The state of property, and its general diffusion throughout the social body, had also, he had no doubt, a beneficial effect on the moral condition of the people. 'The desire for wealth being considerably blunted, it was not the same actuating, engrossing principle of human action, the spring of much that was evil and immoral being thus removed.' Only one case of downright drunkenness--that of a Laplander--had come under his personal observation, and it was only on special occasions that the yeoman farmer could be seen a little elated. His theory, however (we may remark in passing), respecting the influence of property on the moral condition of the people is not supported by other facts which he quotes, namely, that owing to the restraints upon marriage, 'exercised as in Paris or London, by a high standard of living,' the 'proportion of illegitimate to legitimate children in Norway was 1 in 5,' while in a parish he specifies, it was (between 1826 and 1830) 'as high as 1 in 3-26/136.' He mentions that engagements between couples lasted generally one, two, and often several years, especially in the case of servants in husbandry waiting for a house and land to settle in as cotters. In such cases, he says, 'it too often happened that the privileged kindness between betrothed parties was carried too far,' and 'the betrothed became a mother before she was a wife.'

We quit this painful phase of peasant proprietorship with the observation that, notwithstanding a still wider diffusion of property and of moral qualities which, according to Mr. Laing, that diffusion is calculated to engender, 8.38[8] per cent. of the live children born in Norway between 1866 and 1870 were born out of wedlock, the corresponding proportion in 1836 having been 7.07 per cent. It is natural to find, under these circumstances, that the marriage rate was 6.84 per 1000 of the population in 1866-75 against 7.31 per 1000 between 1834 and 1836, with a fractional decrease of the total number of births in the former period, the average per family remaining slightly over four.

The ancient Allodial Right and the happy social system based upon it, Mr. Laing found jealously guarded by the yeomanry, 'who have not only the legislative power and the election of the Storthing' (or Parliament) 'almost entirely in their own hands, but also the whole civil business of the community.' He may, therefore, well say, without fear of contradiction, that 'the Norwegian people enjoy a greater share of liberty, have the framing and administering of their own laws more entirely in their own hands, than any European nation of the present time;' and, further, that 'it is not a little extraordinary that almost the only result' of the universal delirium of 1790,[9] 'which approaches in reality to the theories of that period, has been the Norwegian Constitution.'