232 ‘ SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
not a pleasant country to travel in, except on horseback. Little progress 
had been made in the means of locomotion since the days of the Romans, 
It is true that Dr. Johnson declared that ‘If I had no duties, and no 
deference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post- 
chaise with a pretty woman.’ The Doctor was wrong; he would have 
found himself unpleasantly shaken and occasionally bogged, and he did 
well to stick to the neighbourhood of Fleet Street. But Macadam changed 
all this, and the new roads made travelling an enjoyment instead of an 
unwelcome necessity. We may perhaps recapture something of the spirit 
of the English countryside from Borrow’s‘ Lavengro’ and ‘ Romany Rye’ 
(1825), with its alehouses, its comfortable inns, the strange people on the 
roads, the swaggering coachmen, the love of horses and of boxing, the 
fear of Popery and of the French. 
This progress, however, was largely confined to the southern part of 
England, where wheat grew easily. Agriculture was much less advanced 
in the northern counties. As late as 1832, when Cobbett visited Durham 
and Northumberland, he was very scornful about the pursuit that was 
there called farming: ‘ The unnatural efforts,’ as he called them, ‘ to ape 
the farming of Norfolk and Suffolk; it is only playing at farming, as 
stupid and “loyal” parents used to set their children to play at soldiers 
during the last war.’ If they wanted to see the real thing they must come 
south : ‘ Tom Baring’s farmers at Micheldever had a greater bulk of wheat 
stacks standing now than in all the North Riding of Yorkshire and one 
half of Durham.’ For all that, however, Cobbett admired the Durham ox, 
the good pastures, the turnips, and the absence of potatoes, a crop he 
detested. 
Also the economic troubles which beset England after the close of the 
war in 1815 affected agriculture as well as industry. For the next fifteen 
years times were very bad. The great war debt entailed heavy taxation, 
which fell very largely upon the farming class; inflation came to an end — 
with the resumption of cash payments ; in spite of the Corn Laws, passed 
in 1815 to check this, there was a terrible slump of prices, except in times 
of scarcity, when farmers had little to sell. Select Committees of the 
House of Commons sat in 1820, 1821, 1822 and 1833 to inquire into agri- 
cultural distress, and their reports, especially the last, are depressing 
reading, far worse than anything we have to-day; there was scarcely a 
solvent tenant farmer left in the Wealds of Kent and Sussex, and many 
farmers had lost everything and were working on the roads. The condi- 
tion of the labourers was pitiable. A usual good rate of pay was 2s. per 
day of 10 hours for a man, 1s. for a youth, and 6d. for a child. Wages 
were subsidised out of the rates on the Speenhamland system, the subsidy 
depending on the price of bread and the number of children. Perhaps 
even worse than the poverty was the fear of doing anything to improve 
it. For there was real fear in the land—fear, born of the French Revolu- 
tion, that any relaxing of the firm hold of the governing classes might 
plunge England into the horrors of a revolution here. In November 1830 
some of the labourers had banded themselves together to try to secure 
2s. 6d. a day ; they had rioted but done little damage, and taken no life ; 
yet so great was the fear that several of them were hanged and 450 were 
transported to Australia. 
