Secretary, at the Fabian Office, 3 Clement's Inn, London, W.C. FABIANISM AND THE EMPIRE: A Manifesto. Edited by BERNARD SHAW. 4d. post free. FABIAN ESSAYS IN SOCIALISM. (35th Thousand.) Tracts, each 16 to 52 pp., price 1d., or 9d. per doz., unless otherwise stated. Leaflets, 4 pp. each, price 1d. for six copies, 1s. per 100, or 8/6 per 1000. The Set of 84, 3s.; post free 3/5. Bound in Buckram, 4/6; post free for 58. I.-On General Socialism in its various aspects. TRACTS.-113. Communism. By WM. MORRIS. 107. Socialism for Millionaires. By BERNARD SHAW. 79. A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich. By JOHN WOOLMAN. 78. Socialism and the Teaching of Christ. By Dr. JOHN CLIFFORD. 87. The same in Welsh. 42. Christian Socialism. By Rev. S. D. HEADLAM. 75. Labor in the Longest Reign. By SIDNEY WEBB. 72. The Moral Aspects of Socialism. By SIDNEY BALL. 69. Difficulties of Individualism. By SIDNEY WEBB. 51. Socialism: True and False. By S. WEBB. 45. The Impossibilities of Anarchism. 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Question Leaflets, containing Questions for Candidates for the following bodies:-20, Poor Law Guardians. 24, Parliament. 27, Town Councils. 28, County Councils, Rural. 56, Parish Councils. 57, Rural District Councils. 59, Urban District Councils. 102, Metropolitan Borough Councils BOOK BOXES lent to Societies, Clubs, Trade Unions, for 6s. a year, or 2/6 a quarter Printed by G. Standring, 7 Finsbury St., London, E.O., and published by the Fabian Society, 3 Clement's Inn, Strand, London, W.C. THE SECRET OF RURAL DEPOPULATION. By LIEUT.-COL. D. C. PEDDER, OF OGBOURNE ST. GEORGE, WILTSHIRE. PUBLISHED AND SOLD BY THE FABIAN SOCIETY. PRICE ONE PENNY. LONDON: THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 3 CLEMENT'S INN, STRAND, W.C. JULY 1904. The Secret of Rural Depopulation. A paper read to the Fabian Society on February 26th, 1904. THE question "Why do I stay where I am?" is one that interests all of us. Its answers range between that of Sterne's starling with the simple "I can't get out" and that of the happy few who can say "It is well for us to be here." But most people who are what in the country we call "fixters" have to confess that they are the prisoners of habit. The more regular our life the harder it is to break away from its rule. Now of all occupations that of the tiller of the soil is perhaps the most regular. He is hitched on to the zodiac. Every action of his working life is as recurrent as the seasons themselves. Ploughing is a step towards ploughing, sowing is a step towards sowing again. And so it goes round. The son of a field laborer, in the ordinary course of things, goes to field work as soon as the school will let him. By the time he is getting "man's money" he has little volition left. Habit has taken its place. The odds would seem to be long in favor of his remaining a field laborer for the term of his natural life. But there is something more than habit to fasten him to the land. By the time he is sixteen he is specialized for field work. That is the only skilled labor for which he will ever be fit. Off the land he is only so much horse-power. He can dig-under direction -in a drain, or he can carry bales at the docks. He is past learning another craft. He is moored head and stern to the land by two hawsers, habit and hopelessness. And yet his breaking away from the land is becoming so common as to constitute a national danger. Why is this? We must go back, I think, to a period before rustic unrest began distinctly to take the form of escape. The Fauna of the Country. Up to some thirty odd years ago agricultural laborers were regarded as a quite permanent factor in the sum of English life. They were part of the fauna of the country-like pheasants and partridges; only there is no getting a good head of game without preserving, and there was no need to preserve country laborers. Sergeant Kite was almost the only poacher to be feared, and the toll he took was trifling. Now and then typhus or an emigration agent would descend upon a village, and a cottage would be empty for a month or so. But that was only a momentary inconvenience to an individual employer. The real difficulty was not how to breed laborers, like pheasants, but how to keep down their numbers, like rabbits. No more cottages were allowed upon an estate than would just supply roofage to the laborers it employed. Increase was not allowed for. Infant mortality was high. Overcrowding and sanitary neglect did their work. Semi-starvation helped. Still, however, the supply of labor exceeded the demand. Those were the days in which a great farmer is said to have offered a friend a guinea if he could find a weed in his wheat-field. With men's wages at six or seven shillings a week, women glad to take what they could get for field work, and corn at 50s. a quarter, the land could be well "done," as they say. The employer could be well "done," too. A great agriculturist's recollections of about this period were published a few years ago. They were a record of good living, menus of dinners, reminiscences of hunting breakfasts, conversations with admiring noblemen. "Hey, the green holly. This life is most jolly," ought to have been the motto of the book. The world went very well then -with squires and farmers. I do not think the idea of what we call a "rural exodus" occurred seriously to anyone before the early seventies. There was the land, and that there should be men to till it seemed a law of nature. That the men might possibly one day turn their backs on the land in sufficiently large numbers to seriously inconvenience squires and farmers generally-this idea never entered the head of the average employer. Where were they to go? The land of Egypt, the house of bondage, was pretty secure in the deserts and seas that surrounded it. The prison was hard to break. Looking at the wages and the housing of the laborer in those days, it really seems as though physical laws were all that prevented the process of degradation and deprivation of which he was the victim from being continued indefinitely. Men cannot work unless they eat something. The proverbial straw a day had very nearly been reached. Out of English countrymen, the descendants of the men who rose in arms with Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, had been evolved by the sheer greed and selfishness of squires and farmers, a race so reduced by long continued starvation and oppression that they seemed, generally, as incapable of resistance as their tyrants were, generally, incapable of ruth. "Hunger will tame a lion," says Robinson Crusoe. The British farmer put the maxim to proof. Froissart called the English common people of his day the haughtiest and most overweening that the world could show. That was in the fourteenth century. This is what Joseph Arch said at the end of the nineteenth: "I had seen my brother laborers stand and tremble like an aspen leaf at the dark look of the employer simply because they had not the pluck of men." You may see the same thing to-day. Nothing is sadder than the abjectness of the laborer before the scowl of his master. The laborer who was to be hanged the other day and who said "Thank ye, sir," to Jack Ketch on his adjusting the rope is a fair instance of the attitude of his class to any Jack-in-office or authority. They are descended from generations of half-starved parents, and they show "the mettle of their pasture." The farmer seemed to have done his work thoroughly. He had produced what he wanted, a submissive drudge who cost little, did his work and gave no trouble whatever. The laborer's hand had not yet lost its cunning. In the Days of the Corn Laws. The work was done and done well. The farmers ate, drank and enjoyed themselves. That the laboring population had any "rights" as against the "masters" was a notion dismissed with contempt as part of the professional agitator's stock-in-trade. "The country" meant the landlord and the farmer. When we think of Athens in the days of Pericles, we hardly give a thought to the slave population. They are below the notice of history. And so it practically was with our rural laborers until the days of the Agricultural Laborers' Union. The Church knew them as "the poor." To the employers they were "the men." Charles Kingsley, in Alton Locke, gives a vivid description of an agricultural riot, its aimless despair, its impotent violence. I have here a reprinted report of a more peaceful demonstration in 1846. It is sad reading. But there is nothing in it to frighten anybody. The word "rising" cannot be applied to these pitiful wrigglings of the great invertebrate earthworm upon which the classes then recognized as England were so light-heartedly treading. Its head was never reared to strike. Its demonstrations demonstrated nothing but its own feebleness. The repeal of the Corn Laws left the laborer morally much where he Bread was cheaper, but the hand of the employer was perhaps heavier than before. From 1855 to the days of Joseph Arch was perhaps as black a time as any the laborers had to pass. The price of wheat was high, the squires raised their rents, the farmers recouped themselves by cutting down wages. The prosperity of squires and farmers was thus squeezed out of the already abject poverty of the poor. Any appearance of discontent was sternly repressed. To quote the words of a great agricultural authority, "It was a state of things disgraceful to all concerned." Except to laborers, I think. But it created no commotion. The Church, represented in every country parish, raised no protest. The parson had long ceased to be the "persona" of his flock. He thought more of the hurdles than of the sheep, as they say. The souls of squires and farmers rotted in the cradle of an easy conscience. They were good Churchmen to a man. Then, all at once, a bolt from the blue, came The Agricultural Laborers' Union. I need not dwell upon the history of that great movement. Opposed though it was by the landed interest in every form, denounced by too many of the country clergy and unhelped by the rest, it went on triumphantly until it had raised agricultural wages almost throughout the whole of England to a point at which the existence of the laborer was no longer intolerable. That much obtained, it collapsed. It is a remarkable instance of a great rising against longendured oppression which contented itself with a bare rectification of the immediate wrong complained of. There was no violence, no resentment. This was undoubtedly due in great measure to the personal character and influence of the leader of the movement, Joseph Arch, a man of whom it is impossible to think without gratitude and respect. But it is no less true that the moderation shown by the men, both in their struggle and their success, argues a |