1831.] , Affairs in General 77 



the labourer, when his day's work was done, would have had no refuge 

 but the alehouse, or some miserable lodging, where, without comforts or 

 any other association but with men in his own situation, equally discon- 

 tented, equally without connection with the land, and equally exposed 

 to the suggestions of every low tempter, whether poacher, smuggler, or 

 incendiary ; in time the rebel would have found him fit for his pur- 

 pose, and* we might see this body, which forms the strength of the British 

 population, converted into the readiest instrument of public ruin. 



But what a striking difference there must be in the habits, as there is 

 in the condition, of the labourer returning, after his day's work on his 

 master's grounds, to a little holding of his own, where the hours be- 

 tween his regular employment and his going to rest may be given to 

 some labour in his own little portion of ground, and where every hour 

 not merely employs him healthfully, but is turned to eventual benefit. 

 The difference is actually as broad as between the honest, kind-hearted, 

 and virtuous peasant, and the sullen, brutal, and vicious serf; between 

 the industrious labourer of old times, and the Captain Swing of the 

 present. We are glad to see that the cottage system is beginning to be 

 adopted ; and we are scarcely less pleased to see that its commence- 

 ment has been made, and peculiarly sanctioned, by an English prelate. 

 It is only justice to the Bishop of Bath and Wells to acknowledge, that 

 from him the idea has derived its chief and earliest support ; that he 

 has allotted gardens, of about half an acre each, or in some instances 

 more, to the cottages of his labourers. The plan is so obviously good, 

 that it is almost unnecessary to say it has succeeded. The example has 

 been followed. The Earl of Roseberry, with a view to better the con- 

 dition of the cottagers on his estate at Postwick, Plumstead, and Sax- 

 lingham, twenty-three in number, has allotted half an acre to each in 

 addition to what they previously occupied. The truth is, that a new 

 principle of treatment must be adopted to the people by their superiors. 

 A landlord must no longer consider his tenantry merely as machines 

 working for his profit, and to be disposed of in whatever way that profit 

 can be most expeditiously made. This infamous and inhuman system 

 originally began in the Highlands, where the old tenants of the lairds, 

 the poor peasantry, whom it should have been the pride and honour of 

 their masters to encourage, civilize, and make happy, were driven like 

 brutes from the soil on which their fathers had lived from time imme- 

 morial, to which all their natural feelings were bound, and of which, in 

 the eye of Heaven, and of man where man was not the slave of Mam- 

 mon they were as justly entitled to the undisturbed possession as their 

 cruel masters. We have not now to learn that avarice is a blinding 

 passion as well as a base and criminal one. But a stronger proof of its 

 blindness cannot be asked than in the results of this odious monopoly 

 in both Scotland and England. In Scotland, the old tenantry, driven 

 away in bitterness and disgust to find a refuge in the colonies, have been 

 succeeded by a population which scorns those masters ; and the masters 

 themselves have, in a crowd of instances, decayed away, and seen their 

 hereditary estates given into the hands of strangers and manufacturers. 

 In England, the extinction of the cottage holdings and the property of 

 the labourers, has been followed by the scourge of the poor rates, and 

 that scourge by the more direct one of agricultural insurrection, roh- 

 beries, and burnings. 



The only cure for this tremendous evil is an instant return to the old 



