It is a reflection that must have occurred to every one that the popular philosophy of the day, while in the region of speculation it has undermined ancient beliefs, has exerted in the practical world a distinctly conservative influence. The conception of slow development, according to definite laws, undoubtedly tends to strengthen the position of those who offer resistance to radical changes. It may, however, well be doubted whether the theory of evolution is really such a support as it seems to be to those who would uphold the existing framework of society. It is certainly remarkable that the most recent legislation has been at once revolutionary in its character and justified by appeals to historical experience. I do not forget that the most distinguished exponent of the doctrine of evolution as applied to politics has developed a theory of government opposed to recent legislative reforms, but that theory is an a priori one. Those, on the other hand, who have applied the historical method to political economy and the science of society, have shown an unmistakable disposition to lay bare the injustice to which the humbler classes of the community have been exposed, and to defend methods and institutions adopted for their protection which have never received scientific defence before.
The fact is, that the more we examine the actual course of affairs, the more we are amazed at the unnecessary suffering that has been inflicted upon the people. No generalities about natural law or inevitable development can blind us to the fact, that the progress in which we believe has been won at the expense of much injustice and wrong, which was not inevitable. Perhaps this is most conspicuous in our land system, and we shall find with regard to it, as with regard to some other matters, that the more we accept the method of historical inquiry, the more revolutionary shall we tend to become in practice, For while the modern historical school of economists appear to be only exploring the monuments of the past, they are really shaking the foundations of many of our institutions in the present. The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth. The historical method is supposed to prove that economic changes have been the inevitable outcome of natural laws. It just as often proves them to have been brought about by the self-seeking action of dominant classes.
It is a singular thing that no historian has attempted an adequate explanation of the disappearance of the small freeholders who, down to the close of the seventeenth century, formed with their families one-sixth of the population of England, and whose stubborn determination enabled Cromwell and Fairfax to bring the Civil War to a successful close. This neglect is the more remarkable, as economists have so emphatically dwelt upon the extraordinary difference between the distribution of landed property in England and in countries like Germany and France. The modern reformer is content to explain the facts by the existence in England of a law of primogeniture and a system of strict settlement, but the explanation is obviously a superficial one. To show why in England the small landed proprietors have vanished, whilst in Germany and France they have increased and thriven, it is necessary to carry our inquiries far back into the history of law, politics, and commerce. The result of a closer examination of the question is a little startling, for we find that the present distribution of landed property in England is in the main due to the existence of the system of political government which has made us a free people. And on the other hand, the distribution of landed property in France and Germany, which writer after writer points to as the great bulwark against revolution, is in the main due to a form of government that destroyed political liberty and placed the people in subjection to the throne.
Evidence in support of this conclusion is not difficult to adduce. The first fact which arouses our interest is that at the conclusion of the seventeenth century it was estimated by Gregory King that there were 180,000 freeholders in England, and that, less than a hundred years later, the pamphleteers of the time, and even careful writers like Arthur Young, speak of the small freeholders as practically gone. The bare statement of this contrast is in itself most impressive. A person ignorant of our history during the intervening period might surmise that a great exterminatory war had taken place, or a violent social revolution which had caused a transfer of the property of one class to another. But though the surmise in this particular form would be incorrect, we are nevertheless justified in saying that a revolution of incalculable importance had taken place, - a revolution, though so silent, of as great importance as the political revolution of 1831. 'The able and substantial freeholders,' described by Whitelock, 'the freeholders and freeholders' sons, well armed within with the satisfaction of their own good consciences, and without by iron arms, who stood firmly and charged desperately,' - this devoted class, who had broken the power of the king and the squires in the Civil Wars, were themselves, within a hundred years from that time, being broken, dispersed, and driven off the land. Numerous and prosperous in the fifteenth century, they had suffered something by the enclosures of the sixteenth; but though complaints are from time to time made in the seventeenth of the laying together of farms, there is no evidence to show that their number underwent any great diminution during that time. In the picture of country life which we find in the literature of the first years of the eighteenth century, the small freeholder is still a prominent figure. Sir Roger de Coverley, in riding to Quarter Sessions, points to the two yeomen who are riding in front of him, and Defoe, in his admirable Tour through England, first published a few years later, describes with satisfaction the number and prosperity of the Grey-coats of Kent (as they were called from their home-spun garments), whose political power forced the gentlemen to treat them with circumspection and deference. 'Of the freeholders of England,' says Chamberlayne, in the State of Great Britain, first published towards the close of the seventeenth century, 'there are more in number and richer than in any country of the like extent in Europe. *40 or *50 a year is very ordinary, *100 or *200 in some counties is not rare; sometimes in Kent, and in the Weald of Sussex, *500 or *600 per annum, and *3000 or *4000 stock.' The evidence is conclusive that up to the Revolution of 1688 the freeholders were in most parts of the country an important feature in social life.
If, however, we ask whether they had possessed, as a class, any political initiative, we must answer in the negative. In the lists of the Eastern Counties' Association, formed in the Civil War (the eastern counties were the districts, perhaps, where the freeholders were strongest), we find no name which has not appended to it the title of gentleman or esquire. The small landed proprietor, though courageous and independent in personal character, was ignorant, and incapable himself of taking the lead. There was little to stimulate his mind in his country life; in agriculture he pursued the same methods as his forefathers, was full of prejudices, and difficult to move. The majority of this class had never travelled beyond their native village or homestead and the neighbouring market-town. In some districts those freeholders were also artisans, especially in the eastern counties, which were still the richest part of the country, and the most subject to foreign influence. But, on the whole, if we may judge from the accounts of rather later times, the yeomen, though thriving in good seasons, often lived very hard lives, and remained stationary in their habits and ways of thinking from generation to generation. They were capable in the Civil War, under good leadership, of proving themselves the most powerful body in the kingdom; but after constitutional government had been secured, and the great landowners were independent of their support, they sank into political insignificance. The Revolution of 1688, which brought to a conclusion the constitutional struggle of the seventeenth century, was accomplished without their aid, and paved the way for their extinction. A revolution in agricultural life was the price paid for political liberty.
At first, however, the absorption of the small freeholders went on slowly. The process of disappearance has been continuous from about 1700 to the present day, but it is not true to say, as Karl Marx does, that the yeomanry had disappeared by the middle of the eighteenth century. It was not till the very period which we are considering, that is to say about 1760, that the process of extinction became rapid. There is conclusive evidence that many were still to be found about 1770. There were at that time still 9000 freeholders in Kent.
Even as late as 1807, estates in Essex, if divided, were bought by farmers at high prices, and there was some prospect of landed property coming back to the conditions of a century before, 'when our inferior gentry resided upon their estates in the country'; and about the same date there were in Oxfordshire 'many proprietors of a middling size, and many small proprietors, particularly in the open fields.' They were especially strong in Cumberland, the West Riding, and parts of the East Riding. In the Vale of Pickering in 1788 nearly the whole district belonged to them, and no great landowner had been able to get a footing. But in 1788 this was already an exceptional case, and in other writers of that period we find a general lament at the disappearance of the yeoman. Arthur Young 'sincerely regrets the loss of that set of men who are called yeomen... who really kept up the independence of the nation,' and is 'loth to see their lands now in the hands of monopolising lords;' and in 1787 he admits that they had practically disappeared from most parts o* the country. And with the yeomen went the small squires, victims o* the same causes.
These causes, as I stated above, are to be sought less in economical than in social and political facts. The chief of them was our peculiar form of government. After the Revolution the landed gentry were practically supreme. Not only national but local administration was entirely in their hands, and, as a natural consequence, land, being the foundation of social and political influence, was eagerly sought after. We may contrast France and Prussia, where the landowners had no political power as such, and where, in consequence, small properties remained unassailed. The second fact is the enormous development of the mercantile and moneyed interest. The merchants could only obtain political power and social position by becoming landowners. It is true that Swift says that 'the power which used to follow land had gone over to money,' and that the great Turkey merchants, like Addison's Sir Andrew Freeport, occupied a good position; but few mere merchants were in Parliament, and Dr Johnson made the significant remark that 'an English merchant is a new species of gentleman.' To make himself a gentleman, therefore, the merchant who had accumulated his wealth in the cities, which, as we have seen, were growing rapidly during the first half of the eighteenth century with an expanding commerce, bought land as a matter of course. Hence the mercantile origin of much of our nobility. James Lowther, created Earl of Lonsdale in 1784, was great-grandson of a Turkey merchant; the ancestor of the Barings was a clothier in Devonshire; Anthony Petty, father of Sir W. Petty, and the ancestor on the female side of the Petty-Fitzmaurices, was a clothier at Romsey, in Hampshire; Sir Josiah Child's son became Earl of Tilney. The landowners in the West of England, 'who now,' in Defoe's words, 'carry their heads so high,' made their fortunes in the clothing trade. And not only did a new race of landowners thus spring up, but the old families enriched themselves, and so were enabled to buy more land by intermarriage with the commercial magnates. The Fitzmaurices, for instance, inherited the wealth of the Pettys: Child's daughter married the Marquis of Worcester, and, by a second marriage, Lord Grenville of Potheridge; Lord Conway and Walpole married daughters of John Shorter, merchant of London. 'I think I remember,' said Sir R. Temple between 1675 and 1700, 'the first noble families that married into the City for money.' 'Trade,' said Defoe, 'is so far here from being inconsistent with a gentleman, that, in short, trade in England makes gentlemen; for, after a generation or two, the tradesmen's children, or at least their grandchildren, come to be as good gentlemen, statesmen, parliament-men, privy-councillors, judges, bishops, and noblemen, as those of the highest birth, and the most ancient families.' Contrast this fusion of classes with the French society of the last century, with its impoverished nobility, living often on the seignorial rights and rent-charges of their alienated estates, but hardly ever intermarrying with the commercial classes; or that of Prussia, where the two classes remained entirely separate, and could not even purchase one another's land.
I have established two facts: the special reason for desiring land after the Revolution as a condition of political power and social prestige, and the means of buying land on the part of the wealthy merchants or of the nobility and greater gentry enriched by matrimonial alliances with the great commercial class. Now here is a piece of evidence to show that it was the accepted policy of the large landowners to buy out the yeoman. The land agent, whom I have so often quoted, lays down as a maxim for the model steward that he 'should not forget to make the best inquiry into the disposition of the freeholders, within or near any of his lord's manors, to sell their lands, that he may use his best endeavours to purchase them at as reasonable a price as may be for his lord's advantage and convenience.'
On the other hand, as a result of the supremacy of the great landowners in Parliament, their own estates were artificially protected. The system of strict settlements, introduced by Sir Orlando Bridgman in 1666, though not so important as it is often made out to be, prevented much land from coming into the market, though it did not prevent merchants from buying when they wished. The custom of primogeniture checked the division of estates by leading to the disuse of inheritance by gavelkind, and similar customs. In Cumberland primogeniture was introduced among the freeholders in the sixteenth century. In Kent there was, in 1740, nearly as much gavelkind as before the disgavelling Acts began, but thirty years later it was being superseded by primogeniture. It was during these thirty years that the process of concentration in that county first assumed formidable proportions. In Pickering, on the other hand, where the law of equal division still held its own, small landowners al so, as we have seen, survived after their extinction in most parts of England.
A third result of landlord supremacy was the manner in which the common-field system was broken up. Allusion has already been made to enclosures, and enclosures meant a break-up of the old system of agriculture and a redistribution of the land. This is a problem which involves delicate questions of justice. In Prussia, the change was effected by impartial legislation; in England, the work was done by the strong at the expense of the weak. The change from common to individual ownership, which was economically advantageous, was carried out in an iniquitous manner, and thereby became socially harmful. Great injury was thus done to the poor and ignorant freeholders who lost their rights in the common lands. In Pickering, in one instance, the lessee of the tithes applied for an enclosure of the waste. The small freeholders did their best to oppose him, but, having little money to carry on the suit, they were overruled, and the lessee, who had bought the support of the landless 'house-owners' of the parish, took the land from the freeholders and shared the spoil with the cottagers. It was always easy for the steward to harass the small owners till he forced them to sell, like Addison's Touchy, whose income had been reduced by lawsuits from *80 to *30, though in this case it is true he had only himself to blame. The enclosure of waste land, too, did great damage to the small freeholders, who, without the right of grazing, naturally found it so much the more difficult to pay their way.
Though the economical causes of the disappearance of the yeomen were comparatively unimportant, they served to accelerate the change. Small arable farms would not pay, and must, in any case, have been thrown together. The little farmers, according to Arthur Young, worked harder and were to all intents and purposes as low in the comforts of life as the day-labourers. But their wretchedness was entirely owing to their occupying arable instead of grass lands. And apart from this, undoubtedly, the new class of large farmers were superior, in some respects, to the too unprogressive yeomen, - 'quite a different sort of men... In point of knowledge and ideas,' with whose improved methods of agriculture the yeomen found it difficult to compete. A further economic cause which tended to depress many of the yeomen was the gradual destruction of domestic industries, which injured them as it injures the German peasant at the present day, in Cumberland the yeomen began to disappear when the spinning-wheel was silenced. The decay of the home manufacture of cloth seems to have considerably affected the Grey-coats of Kent. And finally, as the small towns and villages decayed, owing to the consolidation of farms and of industry, the small freeholders lost their market, for the badness of the r made it difficult for them to send their produce far. Hence the small freeholders survived longest where they owned dairy-farms, as in Cumberland and the West Riding, and where domestic industry flourished, and they had a market for their products in their own neighbourhood.
When once the ranks of the yeomanry had been appreciably thinned, the process of extinction went on with ever-growing rapidity. The survivors became isolated. They would have no one of their own station to whom they could marry their daughters, and would become more and more willing to sell their lands, however strong the passion of possession might be in some places. The more enterprising, too, would move off to the towns to make their fortunes there, just as at the present day the French peasants are attracted to the more interesting and exciting life of the town. Thus Sir Robert Peel's grandfather was originally a yeoman farming his own estate, but being of an inventive turn of mind he took to cotton manufacturing and printing. This was particularly the case with the small squires, who grew comparatively poorer and poorer, and found it increasingly difficult to keep pace with the rise in the standard of comfort. Already, at the end of the seventeenth century, the complaint had been raised that the landowners were beginning to live in the county towns. Afterwards, the more wealthy came up to London; Sir Roger de Coverley had a house in Soho Square. The small country gentleman felt the contrast between him and his richer neighbours more and more; and as he had none of the political power attaching to land-for the great landowners had the whole administration in their hands-there was every inducement for him to sell and invest his money in a more profitable manner.
To summarise the movement: it is probable that the yeomen would in any case have partly disappeared, owing to the inevitable working of economic causes. But these alone would not have led to their disappearance on so large a scale. It was the political conditions of the age, the overwhelming importance of land, which made it impossible for the yeoman to keep his grip upon the soil.
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