AN OLD EXPLANATION OF DISTRESS 347 



tracting areas of arable cultivation, diminishing stock, decreasing 

 expenditure on land improvement. 



In 1837 the farming industry had passed through a quarter of a 

 century of misfortunes, aggravated by a disordered currency, bank 

 failures, adverse seasons, labour difficulties, agrarian discontent. 

 During times of adversity it has always been the practice to charge 

 landowners, farmers, and even labourers with extravagance, to trace 

 distress to their increased luxury, to attribute their domestic diffi- 

 culties to their less simple habits. The explanation is as old as the 

 hills. Arthur Young, writing in 1773 On the Present State of 

 Waste Lands, remarks that the landed gentry were beggared by 

 their efforts to rival their wealthier neighbours who had amassed 

 fortunes in trade. The rural frog burst in his efforts to equal the 

 proportions of the civic ox. " The antient prospect which afforded 

 pleasure to twenty generations is poisoned by the pagodas and 

 temples of some rival neighbour ; some oilman who builds on the 

 solid foundation of pickles and herrings. At church the liveries 

 of a tobacconist carry all the admiration of the village ; and how 

 can the daughter of the antient but decayed gentleman stand the 

 competition at an assembly with the point, diamonds and tissues 

 of a haberdasher's nieces ? " Their tenants did not escape from 

 similar charges. In 1573 Tusser had alluded to farmers with " hawk 

 on hand " who neglected their business for sport ; in the nineteenth 

 century it was said to be the hunting-field or the racecourse which 

 attracted them from the farm or the market. In 1649 Walter Blith 

 had attributed the rural depression of that day to the " high 

 stomachs " of the farmers. So in 1816 the wiseacres of the London 

 clubs vehemently contended that farmers had only to return from 

 claret to beer, and their wives from the piano to the hen-house, 

 and agricultural distress would be at an end. It was reserved for 

 an imaginative versifier in 1801 to charge them with soaking five- 

 pound notes instead of rusks in their port wine. Somewhat similar 

 in tone was the outcry against labourers. "We hear," writes 

 Borlase, the Cornish antiquary, in 1771, " every day of murmurs of 

 the common people ; of want of employ ; of short wages ; of dear 

 provisions. There may be some reason for this ; our taxes are heavy 

 upon the necessaries of lif e ; but the chief reason is the extravagance 

 of the vulgar in the unnecessaries of life" Among the tinworkere 

 in his parish were three-score snuff-boxes at one time ; of fifty girls 

 above fifteen years old, forty-nine had scarlet cloaks. " There is 



