Part 5 (1/2)

As a result, the former thrift of the village has been entirely subverted. For earning and spending are not the whole of economy. There is saving to be considered; and, in consequence of the turn-over of expenses from the occasional to the regular group, the cottagers have been obliged to resort to methods of saving specially adapted to the changed conditions. The point is of extreme importance. Under the old style, a man's chief savings were in the shape of commodities ready for use, or growing into use. They were, too, a genuine capital, inasmuch as they supported him while he replaced and increased them. The flitches of bacon, the little stores of flour and home-made wine, the stack of firing, the small rick of fern or gra.s.s, were his savings-bank, which, while he drew from it daily, he replenished betimes as he planted his garden, and brought home heath and turf from the common, and minded his pigs and his cow, and put by odd s.h.i.+llings for occasional need. Notice that putting-by of s.h.i.+llings. It was not the whole, it was only the completion, of the peasant's thrift. At a pinch he could even do without the money, paying for what he wanted with a sack of potatoes, or a day's work with his donkey-cart; but a little money put by was a convenience.

When it was wanted, it was wanted in lump sums--ten s.h.i.+llings now, say, for a little pig; and then fifteen s.h.i.+llings or so in six weeks' time for mending the donkey-cart, and so on; and, thanks to the real savings in the shape of food and firing ready for use, the s.h.i.+llings, however come by, could be h.o.a.rded up.

But under the new thrift they cannot be so h.o.a.rded up; nor, fortunately, are the little lump sums so necessary as before. The real savings now, the real stores of useful capital, are no longer in the cottager's home.

They are in shops. What the modern labourer chiefly requires, therefore, is not a little h.o.a.rd of money lying by, but a regular supply of money, a constant stream of it, flowing in, to enable him to go to the shops regularly. In a word, he wants an income--a steady income of s.h.i.+llings.

And since his earnings are not steady--since his income may cease any day, and continue in abeyance for weeks at a time, during which the shops will be closed against him, his chief economy is directed upon the object of insuring his weekly income. Most miserably for him, he has never been able to insure it against all reverses. Against trade depression, which throws him out of work and dries up the stream of money that should come flowing in, he has no protection. He has none if his employer should go bankrupt, or leave the neighbourhood, and dismiss him; none against the compet.i.tion of machinery. Still, the labourers do as much as they can. Sickness, at least, does not find them unprepared.

To cover loss of wages during sickness, they pay into a benefit society.

The more careful, indeed, pay into two--the Oddfellows or the Foresters, or some such society--and a local ”slate-club.” I have known men out of work living on tea and bread, and not much of that, so that they may keep up their club payments, and be sure of an income if they should fall sick; and I have known men so circ.u.mstanced immediately feel the advantage if sickness should actually fall upon them.

This is the new thrift, which has replaced that of the peasant. I do not say that there is no other saving--that no little sums are h.o.a.rded up; for, in fact, I could name one or two men who, after illness protracted to the stage when sick-pay from the club is reduced, have still fought off dest.i.tution with the small savings from better times. In most cases, however, no h.o.a.rding is possible. The club takes all the spare money; and the club alone stands between the labourer and dest.i.tution. And let this be clearly understood. At first it looks as if the member of a club had money invested in his society--money there, instead of perishable goods at home. Yet, in fact, that is not the case. His payments into the club funds are no investment. They bring him no profit; they are not a useful capital that can be renewed with interest. At the Christmas ”share-out” he does get back a part of the twenty-six s.h.i.+llings contributed to the slate-club during the year; but the two pounds a year paid to the benefit society are his no longer; they cannot be ”realized”; they are gone beyond reclaiming. Though he be out of work and his family starving, he cannot touch the money; to derive any advantage from it he himself must first fall ill. That is what the modern thrift means to the labourer. It does nothing to further--on the contrary, it r.e.t.a.r.ds--his prosperity; but it helps him in a particular kind of adversity. It drains his personal wealth away, and leaves him dest.i.tute of his capital; it robs his wife and children of his savings; but in return it makes him one of a brotherhood which guarantees to him a minimum income for a short time, if he should be out of health.

An oldish man, who had been telling me one evening how they used to live in his boyhood, looked pensively across the valley when he had done, and so stood for a minute or two, as if trying to recover his impressions of that lost time. At last, with appearance of an effort to speak patiently, ”Ah,” he said, ”they tells me times are better now, but I can't see it;” and it was plain enough that he thought our present times the worse. So far as this valley is concerned I incline to agree with him, although in general it is a debatable question. On the one hand, it may be that the things a labourer can buy at a shop for fifteen s.h.i.+llings a week are more in quant.i.ty and variety, if not better in quality, than those which his forefathers could produce by their own industry; and to that extent the advantage is with the present times.

But, on the other hand, the fifteen s.h.i.+llings are not every week forthcoming; and whereas the old-time cottager out of work could generally find something profitable to do for himself, the modern man, having once got his garden into order, stands unprofitably idle.

Perhaps the worst is that, owing to the lowness of their wages, the people have never been able to give the new thrift a fair trial. After all, they miss the lump sums laid by against need. If their earnings would ever overtake their expenses and give a little margin, they might do better; but buying, as they are obliged to do, from hand to mouth, they buy at extravagant prices. Coal, for instance, which costs me about twenty-six s.h.i.+llings for a ton, costs the labourer half as much again as that, because he can only pay for a hundredweight or so at a time. So, too, the boots he can get for four or five s.h.i.+llings a pair are the dearest of all boots. They wear out in a couple of months or so, and another pair must be bought almost before another four or five s.h.i.+llings can be spared. In its smaller degree, a still more absurd difficulty handicaps the people in dealing with their own fruit-crops. To make raspberry or gooseberry jam should be, you would think, an economy delightful to the cottage women, if only as a piece of old-fas.h.i.+oned thrift; yet they rarely do it. If they had the necessary utensils, still the weekly money at their disposal will not run to the purchase of extra firing and sugar. It is all too little for everyday purposes, and they are glad to eke it out by selling their fruit for middle-cla.s.s women to preserve, though in the end they have to buy for their own families an inferior quality of jam at a far higher price.

Wherever you follow it up, you will find the modern thrift not quite successful in the cottages. It is not elastic enough; or, rather, the people's means are not elastic enough, and will not stretch to its demands. There is well-being in it--variety of food, for instance, and comfort of clothing--as soon as both ends can be made to meet and to lap over a little; but it strains the small incomes continually to the breaking-point, so that every other consideration has to give way under it to a pitiful calculation of pence. For the sake of pence the people who keep fowls sell the eggs, and feed their children on bread and margarine; and, on the same principle, they do not even seek to produce other things which are well within their power to produce, but are too luxurious for their means. ”'Twouldn't be no use for me to grow strawberries,” a man explained; ”my children'd have 'em.” It sounded a strange reason, for to what better use could strawberries be put? But it shows how tightly the people are bound down by their commercial conditions. In order to make the Sat.u.r.day's shopping easier, they must weigh the s.h.i.+llings and pence value of everything they possess and everything they attempt to do.

These considerations, however, though showing that present times are not good, do not prove that they are worse than past times. It may be that there was poverty in the valley before the enclosure of the common quite as severe as there is now; and, so far as concerns mere economics, that event did but change the mode of the struggle for existence, without greatly affecting its intensity. People are poor in a different way now, that is all. Hence, in its more direct results, the loss of the common has not mattered much, and it might be forgotten if those results were the only ones.

But they are not the only ones. The results have spread from the economic centre outwards until the whole life of the people has been affected, new influences coming into play which previously were but little felt. So searching, indeed, has the change been, and so revolutionary, that anything like a full account of it would be out of the question. The chapters that follow, therefore, do not pretend to deal with it at all exhaustively; at most they will but draw attention to a few of its more striking aspects.

X

COMPEt.i.tION

When the half-peasant men of the valley began to enter the labour market as avowed wage-earners, a set of conditions confronted them which we are apt to think of as established by a law of Nature, but which, in fact, may be almost unknown in a peasant community. For the first time the importance of a ”demand for labour” came home to them. I do not say that it was wholly a new thing; but to the older villagers it had not been, as it is now to their descendants, the dominating factor in their struggle for life. On the contrary, in proportion as their labour was bestowed immediately on productive work for their own uses, the question whether there was a demand for labour elsewhere did not arise. The common was indifferent; it wanted none of them. It neither asked them to avail themselves of its resources, nor paid them money for doing so, nor refused employment to one because another was already engaged there. But to-day, instead of going for a livelihood to the impartial heath, the people must wait for others to set them to work. The demand which they supply is their own no longer, and no longer, therefore, is their living in their own hands. Of all the old families in the village, I think there are only two left now who have not drifted wholly into this dependent state; but I know numbers of labourers, often out of work, whose grandfathers were half independent of employers.

In theory, no doubt the advantage ought to be with the present times.

Under the new system a far larger population is able to live in the parish than could possibly have been supported here under the old; for now, in place of the scanty products of the little valley and the heaths, the stores of the whole world may be drawn upon by the inhabitants in return for the wages they earn. Only there is the awkward condition that they must earn wages. Those limitless stores cannot be approached by the labourer until he is invited--until there is ”a demand” for his labour. Property owners, or capitalists, standing between him and the world's capital, are able to pick and choose between him and his neighbours as the common never did, and to decide which of them shall work and have some of the supplies.

And as a consequence of this picking and choosing, compet.i.tion amongst the labourers seeking to be employed has become the accepted condition of getting a living in the village, and it is to a great extent a new condition. Previously there was little room for anything of the kind.

The old thrift lent itself to co-operation rather. I admit that I have never heard of any system being brought into the activities of this valley, such as I witnessed lately in another part of England, where the small farmers, supplying an external market, and having no hired labour, were helping one another to get their corn harvested, all being solicitous for their neighbours' welfare, and giving, not selling, their labour. Here the conditions hardly required such wholesale co-operation as that; but in lesser matters both kindliness and economy would counsel the people to be mutually helpful, and there is no reason to doubt that the counsel was taken. Those who had donkey-carts would willingly bring home turfs for those who had none, in return for help with their own turf-cutting. The bread-ovens, I know, were at the disposal of others besides the owners. At pig-killing, at thatching, at clearing out wells (where, in fact, I have seen the thing going on), the people would put themselves at one another's service. They still do so in cases where there is no question of earning money for a living. And if the spirit of friendly co-operation is alive now, when it can so rarely be put in practice, one may readily suppose that it was fairly vigorous fifty years ago.

But no spirit of co-operation may now prompt one wage-earner to ask, or another to proffer, a.s.sistance in working for wages. As well might one shopkeeper propose to wait on another's customers for him. Employers would not have it; still less would those who are employed. A man may be fainting at his job, but none dare help him. He would resent, he would fear, the proposal. The job is, as it were, his property; as long as he can stand and see he must hold it against all comers, because in losing hold he loses his claim upon the world's supplies of the necessaries of life.

In spite of all the latent good-will, therefore, and in spite of the fact that the cottagers are all on the same social level, intimacies do not thrive amongst them. If there was formerly any parochial sentiment in the village, any sense of community of interest, it has all been broken up by the exigencies of compet.i.tive wage-earning, and each family stands by itself, aloof from all the others. The interests clash. Men who might be helpful friends in other circ.u.mstances are in the position of rival tradesmen competing for the patronage of customers. Not now may their labour be a bond of friends.h.i.+p between them; it is a commodity with a market value, to be sold in the market. Hence, just as in trade, every man for himself is the rule with the villagers; just as in trade, the misfortune of one is the opportunity of another. All the maxims of compet.i.tive commerce apply fully to the vendor of his own labour. There must be ”no friends.h.i.+p in business”; the weakest must go to the wall.

Each man is an individualist fighting for his own hand; and to give as little as he can for as much as he can get is good policy for him, with precisely the same limitations as those that govern the trading of the retail merchant, tormented with the conflicting necessities of overcharging and underselling.

It follows that the villagers are a prey to jealousy and suspicion--not, perhaps, when they meet at the public-house or on the road, but in the presence of employers, when any question of employment arises. At such times one would think that labouring men have no critics so unkindly as their own neighbours and equals. It is true those who are in constant work are commended; but if you ask about a man who is ”on the market”

and open for any work that may be going, his rivals are unlikely to answer generously. ”So-and-So?... H'm!... He do's his best; but he don't seem to get _through_, somehow.” ”Old Who-is-it? Asked _he_ to come and help me, have ye? Well, you'll judge for yourself; but I don't hardly fancy he'll suit.” Or, again: ”Well, we all knows how 'tis with What's-his-name. I don't say but what he keeps on work right enough; but he'll have to jump about smarter 'n what I've ever knowed 'n, if he's to work 'long o' me.” So, too often, and sometimes in crueller terms, I have heard efficient labourers speak of their neighbours. Certainly it is not all envy. An active man finds it penance to work with a slow one, and worse than penance; for his own reputation may suffer, if his own output of work should be diminished by the other's fault. That neighbour of mine engaged at hop-drying doubtless had good grounds for exasperation with the helper sent into the kiln, when he complained to the master: ”Call that a _man_ you sent me? If that's what you calls a man, I'd sooner you let me send for my old woman! Blamed if she wouldn't do better than that feller!” Detraction like this, no doubt, is often justified; but when it becomes the rule, the only possible inference is that an instinctive jealousy prompts men to it, in instinctive self-preservation.

Yet there are depths of dishonour--depths not unknown amongst employers--into which the village labourers will rarely condescend to plunge, acute though the temptation may be. Not once have I met with an instance of one man deliberately scheming to get another man's job away from him. A labourer unable to keep up with his work will do almost anything to avoid having a helper thrust upon him--he fears the introduction of a possible rival into his preserve. But this is not the same thing as pus.h.i.+ng another man out; it has no resemblance to the behaviour of the hustling capitalist, who opens his big business with the definite intention of capturing trade away from little businesses.