| Show dangen DANGER A nead AHEAD A SOLEMN WARNING TO buling BILLING CLASSES tiie THE agricultural LABORERS DESPERATE GRAVE apprehensions OF THE RESULT OF THE SOCIAL STRUGGLE THIS WINTER R we confess we look forward to the coming winter with grave apprehension we may underrate the conservative force at work that is always easy in a country like england but everything seems to us to tend towards a social struggle in the counties which must roust be disastrous and may not be altogether peaceful the agricultural laborers of the country more than adult males just excited by new now prospect of improved position and interested in a now activity will be exposed to a new hardship and irritated by a new form 0 of IX pressure dessure from above meat bread in and potatoes will all alike be dear and the farmers enriched and emboldened by their dearness are intending in some counties at all events to try conclusions clu with their laborers and see it if they cannot read them a lesson on the advantage of suffering quietly whatever it may suit employers to inflict the prices demanded for getting in the harvest have irritated the farmers beyond measure the speeches of the itinerant lecturers often imprudent and sometimes most reprehensible excite them still further and the sense that in future they will have to deal with strong corporations instead of isolated and therefore powerless seekers of bread drives them beyond all self control a control which indeed with dukes and bishops urging them on they do not feel it necessary to retain the kindly feeling as they call it in the counties that is the half contemptuous pity on one side and reverential deference on the other which has for centuries marked the semi feudal relations of village labor has already died away and the farmers are determined that the men shall kitow know what contract is like they will not take the bishop of Glouceste rs advice and duck the lecturers because the laborers being ten to one and being told by a bishop that physical violence is a proper weapon to employ might duck the farmers but they will jump at the counsel offered by mr soth eron estcourt a man of blood and mark and parliamentary capacity who advises the farmers of his three parishes to treat allsho join the union as strangers to withdraw alithe aalthe all ali the perquisites qui sites of which so much is made to take away the potato grounds to raise the rent of the cottages and to refuse to keep on men in winter when work is not wanted the advice is in the form of a barnin warning to the laborers my friends and neighbors in shipton newn ton and ashley Ash ley loy but as the laborers know that without union their only prospects are lives of monotonous toil on wages insufficient to provide meat and andin ending in the workhouse work house as they see that they are abandoned by the up pan par classes duke and bishop member and magistrate magistrates all alike threatening scolding and aud warning them s as they see that the half formed union unix has already raised the usual rate of wages Is ad a week mr Est courts advice will fall dead except upon the farmers they will endeavor this winter to put the unions down and we shall have all over the country villages in which ten or fifteen farmers angry unreasonable and well fed will stand face to face with a hundred or a hundred and fifty laborers angry unreasonable and without foell food the unions will bo be locked out in heaps and when they apply to the parish will be told by the guardians that as they can have work at will by merely givin giving gup up the union they must the work As we do not in the least believe in the submissiveness of the british laborer when taken out of his customary groove if he takes to the brickfield to railway work or to australia he becomes at once in a day the most most brutally independent and personally insufferable of mankind as we have a keen recollection of the way in which the introduction of machinery was resisted when a country side would be in a glare night after night and insurances could not be effected and as we believe the laborers in many districts to have been brooding and champine champing cham ping for some time past over wildly dangerous ideas we look forward to the struggle with a sickening dread of the misery it must produce the english laborer once excited Is the most sour of men obstinate scornful and for all his horror of bloodshed which is real and rises to a virtue capable of being cruel and he is excited now the man has been so to six months he has found no friend anywhere except in a press he can neither read nor understand the duke has deprived him of his allotment the bishop has recommended that his instructor should be ducked the squire has threatened him with dismissal in winter the mag istrate has fined him for quitting work which is just and scolded him for listening to lectures which is tyr rany the mayor at everham evesham has prohibited him from meeting on the greenard green gre enand and the lawyer witness a recent case near chelmsford has told him that any one who advises and help heip s him to emigrate emig aate is a hopeless rascal he has been denied the most ordinary privileges of freemen the right of listening to lectures he approves the right of emigrating e from county to county the right of c combining om bin to improve liis fils his condition an and athis this by men who as he sees listen to every lecture on their own side who emigrate whenever they please to the ends of the earth and w who ho form open and strict combinations to keep him in bib his place not one of all those to whom he ought in county belief to look u upon pon with reverence has frankly stood up on his behalf no peer has gone further than lord ebury who advocates a rise of wages but declares that combination which alone can placa place the laborer on an equality I 1 y with his employer destroys his in dependence de pen dence 11 independence exactly equivalent to the independence of a worm under a roller a right to wring gle at discretion no basli bishop p has come forward to say that christs church knows nothing of grades or classes or persons with acres save in so far as it sy sympathizes pat izes most strongly with the humble and oppressed I 1 no county member has argued for the freedom of the non electors whom he is supposed to represent above all no statesman of either side has deemed the most serious social struggle of our day worth a speech or even even a remark has attempted to th guide the people or has so much as endeavored to explain to them the economic laws they are supposed in same some respects rightly supposed to be defying to the laborers congregating in their beer houses and their cottages halkia talking over the agitators 21 sp speeches eeles and athe the reports from the neighboring villages and the bitter broadsheets broad sheets the j do not see it must seem as if they were abandoned by all the world except their own order for them it is the poor that endless and strictly bound corporation against the world we percele perc elv from the language of the guardian and we perceive it with a deep sense of relief that a very considerable section of the clergy are disposed to take a moderate and conciliatory view of the movement to justify the men and to acknowledge that the feudal system under which men sweat for duty not for meed 1 11 is dying out and to deprecate that degrading de grad kind of alms aims of which mr estcourt who would think a gift ofa of a ten pound note from a duke a delak erate insult is so fond but we fear the clergy scarcely speak out as frankly as their newspaper does that they are unwilling to annoy farmers to whom they must look for fon help heip at the boards of guardians that the temptation to preach res ignation as the crowning virtue of christianity overcomes their knowledge that resignation is not the virtue by which civilization is advanced theia thele the laborers in their own eyes stand alone we believe that this is a most dangerous position of affairs hopeless and hungry englishmen are veny very formidable persons and if the idea now prevailing of a lockout lock out of union men in the winter is carried out wo we shall have englishmen lish men a fourth of all our laborers hopeless and hungry and filled besides with a sense of the bitter luj injustice ustice of all above them who ask them to toil twelve hours a day for six days a week and then denounce them as wicked for kom com combining binin to make mako their labor as profit profitable able abie as they can it is high time that the statesmen among us if we have any who comprehend agricultural questions should intervene and endeavor if it may be to guide a and nd control bo both th parties to suggest some terms of compromise to soothe the bitterness of the farmers and above all to inspire something of hope in the masses of the hinds it is hope they want iffe if we are to have continued order in the counties and we cannot imagine a higher end to which mr Glad stones power of sympathetic oratory or lord derbys hard incisive sense or mr Fortes ques minute knowledge of all that relates to agricultural tenure or mr foresters eor Por extraordinary faculty for sympathizing with men with whom he be does not agree could be more beneficially applied let mr gladstone just inquire into the truth of the position of affairs in herefordshire Hereford shire or Oxford shire the real truth not the truth as squires or laborers see it and he will speak out fast enough we know perfectly well how hard it will be to speak how great may be the influence of a rash sentence on the electors how injurious unfounded hope must always be but english laborers are as deserving of consideration erat ionas as irish peasants though they do not extort it with the bullet and it is I 1 time this reticence and absence of guidance should come to an end let the elections take care of themselves and iet lot the politicians of both sides for on this subject tories are as deeply concerned as liberals show us if th they e y have any wise message to deliver it is a strange proof of the unmarked dislocation which exists in our society that no trade could fall into confusion without attracting the attention of statesmen except the most important of all there was scarcely a member in england who did not deliver himself upon the cattle plague yet in the presence of an indefinitely greater danger of areal a real and permanent schism between employ era and employed they are all silent and appear determined either to remain so or to content them tham themselves selves with soothing platitudes which as they perfectly y understand guide nobody london londo n spectator aug 24 |
