In Darkest England and the Way Out Part 12

They must go upon the land!

The land is the source of all food; only by the application of labour can the land be made fully productive. There is any amount of waste land in the world, not far away in distant Continents, next door to the North Pole, but here at our very doors. Have you ever calculated, for instance, the square miles of unused land which fringe the sides of all our railroads? No doubt some embankments are of material that would baffle the cultivating skill at a Chinese or the careful husbandry of a Swiss mountaineer; but these are exceptions. When other people talk of reclaiming Salisbury Plain, or of cultivating the bare moorlands of the bleak North, I think of the hundreds of square miles of land that lie in long ribbons on the side of each of our railways, upon which, without any cost for cartage, innumerable tons of City manure could be shot down, and the crops of which could be carried at once to the nearest market without any but the initial cost of heaping into convenient trucks. These railway embankments const.i.tute a vast estate, capable of growing fruit enough to supply all the jam that Crosse and Blackwell ever boiled. In almost every county in England are vacant farms, and, in still greater numbers, farms but a quarter cultivated, which only need the application of an industrious population working with due incentive to produce twice, thrice, and four times as much as they yield to-day.

I am aware that there are few subjects upon which there are such fierce controversies as the possibilities of making a livelihood out of small holdings, but Irish cottiers do it, and in regions infinitely worse adapted for the purpose than our Ess.e.x corn lands, and possessing none of the advantages which civilization and co-operation place at the command of an intelligently directed body of husbandmen. Talk about the land not being worth cultivating! Go to the Swiss Valleys and examine for yourself the miserable patches of land, hewed out as it were from the heart of the granite mountains, where the cottager grows his crops and makes a livelihood. No doubt he has his Alp, where his cows pasture in summer-time, and his other occupations which enable him to supplement the scanty yield of his farm garden among the crags; but if it pays the Swiss mountaineer in the midst of the eternal snows, far removed from any market, to cultivate such miserable soil in the brief summer of the high Alps, it is impossible to believe that Englishmen, working on English soil, close to our markets and enjoying all the advantages of co-operation, cannot earn their daily bread by their daily toil. The soil of England is not unkindly, and although much is said against our climate, it is, as Mr. Russell Lowell observes, after a lengthened experience of many countries and many climes, "the best climate in the whole world for the labouring man."

There are more days in the English year on which a man can work out of doors with a spade with comparative comfort than in any other country under heaven. I do not say that men will make a fortune out of the land, nor do I pretend that we can, under the grey English skies, hope ever to vie with the productiveness of the Jersey farms; but I am prepared to maintain against all comers that it is possible for an industrious man to grow his rations, provided he is given a spade with which to dig and land to dig in. Especially will this be the case with intelligent direction and the advantages of co-operation.

Is it not a reasonable supposition? It always seems to me a strange thing that men should insist that you must first transport your labourer thousands of miles to a desolate, bleak country in order to set him to work to extract a livelihood from the soil when hundreds of thousands of acres lie only half tilled at home or not tilled at all.

Is it reasonable to think that you can only begin to make a living out of land when it lies several thousand miles from the nearest market, and thousands of miles from the place where the labourer has to buy his tools and procure all the necessaries of life which are not grown on the spot? If a man can make squatting pay on the prairies or in Australia, where every quarter of grain which he produces has to be dragged by locomotives across the railways of the continent, and then carried by steamers across the wide ocean, can he not equally make the operation at least sufficiently profitable to keep himself alive if you plant him with the same soil within an hour by rail of the greatest markets in the world?

The answer to this is, that you cannot give your man as much soil as he has on the prairies or in the Canadian lumber lands. This, no doubt, is true, but the squatter who settles in the Canadian backwoods does not clear his land all at once. He lives on a small portion of it, and goes on digging and delving little by little, until, after many years of Herculean labour, he hews out for himself, and his children after him, a freehold estate. Freehold estates, I admit, are not to be had for the picking up on English soil, but if a man will but work in England as they work in Canada or in Australia, he will find as little difficulty in making a livelihood here as there.

I may be wrong, but when I travel abroad and see the desperate struggle on the part of peasant proprietors and the small holders in mountainous districts for an additional patch of soil, the idea of cultivating which would make our agricultural labourers turn up their noses in speechless contempt, I cannot but think that our English soil could carry a far greater number of souls to the acre than that which it bears at present. Suppose, for instance, that Ess.e.x were suddenly to find itself unmoored from its English anchorage and towed across the Channel to Normandy, or, not to imagine miracles, suppose that an Armada of Chinese were to make a descent on the Isle of Thanet, as did the sea-kings, Hengist and Horsa, does anyone imagine for a moment that Kent, fertile and cultivated as it is, would not be regarded as a very Garden of Eden out of the odd corners of which our yellow-skinned invaders would contrive to extract sufficient to keep themselves in st.u.r.dy health? I only suggest the possibility in order to bring out clearly the fact that the difficulty is not in the soil nor in the climate, but in the lack of application of sufficient labour to sufficient land in the truly scientific way.

"What is the scientific way?" I shall be asked impatiently. I am not an agriculturist; I do not dogmatize. I have read much from many pens, and have noted the experiences of many colonies, and I have learned the lesson that it is in the school of practical labour that the most valuable knowledge is to be obtained. Nevertheless, the bulk of my proposals are based upon the experience of many who have devoted their lives to the study of the subject, and have been endorsed by specialists whose experience gives them authority to speak with unquestioning confidence.

SECTION 1.--THE FARM PROPER.

My present idea is to take an estate from five hundred to a thousand acres within reasonable distance of London. It should be of such land as will be suitable for market gardening, while having some clay on it for brick-making and for crops requiring a heavier soil. If possible, it should not only be on a line of railway which is managed by intelligent and progressive directors, but it should have access to the sea and to the river. It should be freehold land, and it should lie at some considerable distance from any town or village. The reason for the latter desideratum is obvious. We must be near London for the sake of our market and for the transmission of the commodities collected by our Household Salvage Brigade, but it must be some little distance from any town or village in order that the Colony may be planted clear out in the open away from the public house, that upas tree of civilisation.

A sine qua non of the new Farm Colony is that no intoxicating liquors will be permitted within its confines on any pretext whatever.

The doctors will have to prescribe some other stimulant than alcohol for residents in this Colony. But it will be little use excluding alcohol with a strong hand and by cast-iron regulations if the Colonists have only to take a short walk in order to find themselves in the midst of the "Red Lions," and the "Blue Dragons," and the "George the Fourths," which abound in every country town.

Having obtained the land I should proceed to prepare it for the Colonists. This is an operation which is essentially the same in any country. You need water supply, provisions and shelter. All this would be done at first in the simplest possible style. Our pioneer brigade, carefully selected from the competent Out-of-Works in the City Colony, would be sent down to layout the estate and prepare it for those who would come after. And here let me say that it is a great delusion to imagine that in the riffraff and waste of the labour market there are no workmen to be had except those that are worthless.

Worthless under the present conditions, exposed to constant temptations to intemperance no doubt they are, but some of the brightest men in London, with some of the smartest pairs of hands, and the cleverest brains, are at the present moment weltering helplessly in the sludge from which we propose to rescue them.

I am not speaking without book in this matter. Some of my best Officers to-day have been even such as they. There is an infinite potentiality of capacity lying latent in our Provincial Tap-rooms and the City Gin Palaces if you can but get them soundly saved, and even short of that, if you can place them in conditions where they would no longer be liable to be sucked back into their old disastrous habits, you may do great things with them.

I can well imagine the incredulous laughter which will greet my proposal.

"What," it will be said, "do you think that you can create agricultural pioneers out of the sc.u.m of c.o.c.kneydom?" Let us look for a moment at the ingredients which make up what you call "the sc.u.m of c.o.c.kneydom."

After careful examination and close cross-questioning of the Out-of-Works, whom we have already registered at our Labour Bureau, we find that at least sixty per cent. are country folk, men, women, boys, and girls, who have left their homes in the counties to come up to town in the hope of bettering themselves. They are in no sense of the word c.o.c.kneys, and they represent not the dregs of the country but rather its brighter and more adventurous spirits who have boldly tried to make their way in new and uncongenial spheres and have terribly come to grief. Of thirty cases, selected haphazard, in the various Shelters during the week ending July 5th, 1890, twenty-two were country-born, sixteen were men who had come up a long time ago, but did not ever seem to have settled to regular employ, and four were old military men.

Of sixty cases examined into at the Bureau and Shelters during the fortnight ending August 2nd, forty-two were country people; twenty-six men who had been in London for various periods; ranging from six months to four years; nine were lads under eighteen, who had run away from home and come up to town; while four were ex-military. Of eighty-five cases of dossers who were spoken to at night when they slept in the streets, sixty-three were country people. A very small proportion of the genuine homeless Out-of-Works are Londoners bred and born.

There is another element in the matter, the existence of which will be news to most people, and that is the large proportion of ex-military men who are among the helpless, hopeless dest.i.tute. Mr. Arnold White, after spending many months in the streets of London interrogating more than four thousand men whom he found in the course of one bleak winter sleeping out of doors like animals returns it as his conviction that at least 20 per cent. are Army Reserve men. Twenty per cent! That is to say one man in every five with whom we shall have to deal has served Her Majesty the Queen under the colours. This is the resource to which these poor fellows come after they have given the prime of their lives to the service of their country. Although this may be largely brought about by their own thriftless and evil conduct, it is a scandal and disgrace which may well make the cheek of the patriot tingle.

Still, I see in it a great resource. A man who has been in the Queen's Army is a man who has learnt to obey. He is further a man who has been taught in the roughest of rough schools to be handy and smart, to make the best of the roughest fare, and not to consider himself a martyr if he is sent on a forlorn hope. I often say if we could only get Christians to have one-half of the practical devotion and sense of duty that animates even the commonest Tommy Atkins what a change would be brought about in the world!

Look at poor Tommy! A country lad who gets himself into some sc.r.a.pe, runs away from home, finds himself sinking lower and lower, with no hope of employment, no friends to advise; him, and no one to give him a helping hand. In sheer despair he takes the Queen's shilling and enters the ranks. He is handed over to an inexorable drill sergeant, he is compelled to room in barracks where privacy is unknown, to mix with men, many of them vicious, few of them companions whom he would of his own choice select. He gets his rations, and although he is told he will get a shilling a day, there are so many stoppages that he often does not finger a shilling a week. He is drilled and worked and ordered hither and thither as if he were a machine, all of which he takes cheerfully, without even considering that there is any hardship in his lot, plodding on in a dull, stolid kind of way for his Queen and his country, doing his best, also, poor chap, to be proud of his red uniform, and to cultivate his self-respect by reflecting that he is one of the defenders of his native land, one of the heroes upon whose courage and endurance depends the safety of the British realm.

Some fine day at the other end of the world some prancing pro-consul finds it necessary to smash one of the man-slaying machines that loom ominous on his borders, or some savage potentate makes an incursion into territory of a British colony, or some fierce outburst of Mahommedan fanaticism raises up a Mahdi in mid-Africa. In a moment Tommy Atkins is marched off to the troop-ship, and swept across the seas, heart-sick and sea-sick, and miserable exceedingly, to tight the Queen's enemies in foreign parts. When he arrives there he is bundled ash.o.r.e, brigaded with other troops, marched to the front through the blistering glare of a tropical sun over poisonous marshes in which his comrades sicken and die, until at last he is drawn up in square to receive the charge of tens of thousands of ferocious savages.

Far away from all who love him or care for him, foot-sore and travel weary, having eaten perhaps but a piece of dry bread in the last twenty-four hours, he must stand up and kill or be killed. Often he falls beneath the thrust of an a.s.segai or the slashing broadsword of the charging enemy. Then, after the fight is over his comrades turn up the sod where he lies, bundle his poor bones into the shallow pit, and leave him without even a cross to mark his solitary grave.

Perhaps he is fortunate and escapes. Yet Tommy goes uncomplainingly through all these hardships and privations, does not think himself a martyr, takes no fine airs about what he has done and suffered, and shrinks uncomplainingly into our Shelters and our Factories, only asking as a benediction from heaven that someone will give him an honest job of work to do. That is the fate of Tommy Atkins. If in our churches and chapels as much as one single individual were to bear and dare, for the benefit of his kind and the salvation of men, what a hundred thousand Tommy Atkins' bear uncomplainingly, taking it all as if it were in the day's work, for their rations and their shilling a day (with stoppages), think you we should not transform the whole face of the world? Yea, verily. We find but very little of such devotion; no, not in Israel.

I look forward to making great use of these Army Reserve men.

There are engineers amongst them; there are artillery men and infantry; there are cavalry men, who know what a horse needs to keep him in good health, and men of the transport department, for whom I shall find work enough to do in the transference of the mult.i.tudinous waste of London from our town Depots to the outlying Farm. This, however, is a digression, by the way.

After having got the Farm into some kind of ship-shape, we should select from the City Colonies all those who were likely to be successful as our first settlers. These would consist of men who had been working so many weeks or days in the Labour Factory, or had been under observation for a reasonable time at the Shelters or in the Slums, and who had given evidence of their willingness to work, their amenity to discipline, and their ambition to improve themselves.

On arrival at the Farm they would be installed in a barracks, and at once told off to work. In winter time there would be draining, and road-making, and fencing, and many other forms of industry which could go on when the days are short and the nights are long.

In Spring, Summertime and Autumn, some would be employed on the land, chiefly in spade husbandry, upon what is called the system of "intensive" agriculture, such as prevails in the suburbs of Paris, where the market gardeners literally create the soil, and which yields much greater results than when you merely scratch the surface with a plough.

Our Farm, I hope, would be as productive as a great market garden.

There would be a Superintendent on the Colony, who would be a practical gardener, familiar with the best methods of small agriculture, and everything that science and experience shows to be needful for the profitable treatment of the land. Then there would be various other forms of industry continually in progress, so that employment could be furnished, adapted to the capacity and skill of every Colonist.

Where farm buildings are wanted, the Colonists must erect them themselves. If they want gla.s.s houses, they must put them up.

Everything on the Estate must be the production of the Colonists.

Take, for instance, the building of cottages. After the first detachment has settled down into its quarters and brought the fields somewhat into cultivation, there will arise a demand for houses.

These houses must be built, and the bricks made; by the Colonists themselves. All the carpentering and the joinery will be done on the premises, and by this means a sustained demand for work will be created. Then there would be furniture, clothing, and a great many other wants, the supply of the whole of which would create labour which the Colonists must perform.

For a long time to come the Salvation Army will be able to consume all the vegetables and crops which the Colonies will produce. That is one advantage of being connected with so great and growing a concern; the right hand will help the left, and we shall be able to do many things which those who devote themselves exclusively to colonisation would find it impossible to accomplish. We have seen the large quant.i.ties of provisions which are required to supply the Food Depots in their present dimensions, and with the coming extensions the consumption will be enormously augmented. On this Farm I propose to carry on every description of "little agriculture."

I have not yet referred to the female side of our operations, but have reserved them for another chapter. It is necessary, however, to bring them in here in order to explain that employment will be created for women as well as men. Fruit farming affords a great opening for female labour, and it will indeed be a change as from Tophet to the Garden of Eden when the poor lost girls on the streets of London exchange the pavements of Piccadilly for the strawberry Beds of Ess.e.x or Kent.

Not only will vegetables and fruit of every description be raised, but I think that a great deal might be done in the smaller adjuncts of the Farm.

It is quite certain that amongst the ma.s.s of people with whom we have to deal there will be a residual remnant of persons to some extent mentally infirm or physically incapacitated from engaging in the harder toils. For these people it is necessary to find work, and I think there would be a good field for their benumbed energies in looking after rabbits, feeding poultry, minding bees, and, in short doing all those little odd jobs about a place which must be attended to, but which will not repay the labour of able-bodied men.

One advantage of the cosmopolitan nature of the Army is that we have Officers in almost every country in the world. When this Scheme is well on the way every Salvation Officer in every I and will have it imposed upon him as one of the duties of his calling to keep his eyes open for every useful notion and every conceivable contrivance for increasing the yield of the soil and utilising the employment of waste labour. By this means I hope that there will not be an idea in the world which will not be made available for our Scheme. If an Officer in Sweden can give us practical hints as to how they manage food kitchens for the people, or an Officer in the South of France can explain how the peasants are able to rear eggs and poultry not only for their own use, but so as to be able to export them by the million to England; if a Sergeant in Belgium understands how it is that the rabbit farmers there can feed and fatten and supply our market with millions of rabbits we shall have him over, tap his brains, and set him to work to benefit our people.

By the establishment of this Farm Colony we should create a great school of technical agricultural education. It would be a Working Men's Agricultural University, training people for the life which they would have to lead in the new countries they will go forth to colonise and possess.

Every man who goes to our Farm Colony does so, not to acquire his fortune, but to obtain a knowledge of an occupation and that mastery of his tools which will enable him to play his part in the battle of life.

He will be provided with a cheap uniform, which we shall find no difficulty in rigging up from the old clothes of London, and it will go hardly with us, and we shall have worse luck than the ordinary market gardener, if we do not succeed in making sufficient profit to pay all the expenses of the concern, and leave something over for the maintenance of the hopelessly incompetent, and those who, to put it roughly, are not worth their keep.

Every person in the Farm Colony will be taught the elementary lesson of obedience, and will be instructed in the needful arts of husbandry, or some other method of earning his bread. The Agricultural Section will learn the lesson of the seasons and of the best kind of seeds and plants. Those belonging to this Section will learn how to hedge and ditch, how to make roads and build bridges, and generally to subdue the earth and make it yield to him the riches which it never withholds from the industrious and skilful workman. But the Farm Colony, any more than the City Colony, although an abiding inst.i.tution, will not provide permanently for those with whom we have to deal. It is a Training School for Emigrants, a place where those indispensably practical lessons are given which will enable the Colonists to know their way about and to feel themselves at home wherever there is land to till, stock to rear, and harvests to reap. We shall rely greatly for the peace and prosperity of the Colony upon the sense of brotherhood which will be universal in it from the highest to the lowest. While there will be no systematic wage-paying there will be some sort of rewards and remuneration for honest industry, which will be stored up, for his benefit, as afterwards explained. They will in the main work each for all, and, therefore, the needs of all will be supplied, and any overplus will go to make the bridge over which any poor fellow may escape from the horrible pit and the miry clay from which they themselves have been rescued.

The dulness and deadness of country life, especially in the Colonies, leads many men to prefer a life of hardship and privation in a City slum. But in our Colony they would be near to each other, and would enjoy the advantages of country life and the a.s.sociation and companionship of life in town.

SECTION 2.--THE INDUSTRIAL VILLAGE.

In describing the operations of the Household Salvage Brigade I have referred to the enormous quant.i.ties of good sound food which would be collected from door to door every day of the year. Much of this food would be suitable for human consumption, its waste being next door to sinful. Imagine, for instance, the quant.i.ties of soup which might be made from boiling the good fresh meaty bones of the great City!

Think of the dainty dishes which a French cook would be able to serve up from the sc.r.a.ps and odds and ends of a single West End kitchen.

Good cookery is not an extravagance but an economy, and many a tasty dish is made by our Continental friends out of materials which would be discarded indignantly by the poorest tramp in Whitechapel.

But after all that is done there will remain a ma.s.s of food which cannot be eaten by man, but can be converted into food for him by the simple process of pa.s.sing it through another digestive apparatus.

The old bread of London, the soiled, stale crusts can be used in foddering the horses which are employed in collecting the waste.

It will help to feed the rabbits, whose hutches will be close by every cottage on the estate, and the hens of the Colony will flourish on the crumbs which fall from the table of Dives. But after the horses and the rabbits and poultry have been served, there will remain a residuum of eatable matter, which can only be profitably disposed of to the voracious and necessary pig. I foresee the rise of a piggery in connection with the new Social Scheme, which will dwarf into insignificance all that exist in Great Britain and Ireland. We have the advantage of the experience of the whole world as to the choice of breeds, the construction of sties, and the rearing of stock. We shall have the major part of our food practically for the cost of collection, and be able to adopt all the latest methods of Chicago for the killing, curing, and disposing of our pork, ham, and bacon.

There are few animals more useful than the pig. He will eat anything, live anywhere, and almost every particle of him, from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, is capable of being converted into a saleable commodity. Your pig also is a great producer of manure, and agriculture is after all largely a matter of manure. Treat the land well and it will treat you well. With our piggery in connection with our Farm Colony there would be no lack of manure.

With the piggery there would grow up a great bacon factory for curing, and that again would make more work. Then as for sausages they would be produced literally by the mile, and all made of the best meat instead of being manufactured out of the very objectionable ingredients too often stowed away in that poor man's favourite ration.

Food, however, is only one of the materials which will be collected by the Household Salvage Brigade. The barges which float down the river with the tide, laden to the brim with the cast-off waste of half a million homes, will bring down an enormous quant.i.ty of material which cannot be eaten even by pigs. There will be, for instance, the old bones. At present it pays speculators to go to the prairies of America and gather up the bleached bones of the dead buffaloes, in order to make manure. It pays manufacturers to bring bones from the end of the earth in order to grind them up for use on our fields.

But the waste bones of London; who collects them? I see, as in a vision, barge loads upon barge loads of bones floating down the Thames to the great Bone Factory. Some of the best will yield material for knife handles and b.u.t.tons, and the numberless articles which will afford ample opportunity in the long winter evenings for the acquisition of skill on the part of our Colonist carvers, while the rest will go straight to the Manure Mill. There will be a constant demand for manure on the part of our ever-increasing nests of new Colonies and our Co-operative Farm, every man in which will be educated in the great doctrine that there is no good agriculture without liberal manuring. And here will be an unfailing source of supply.

Among the material which comes down will be an immense quant.i.ty of greasy matter, bits of fat, suet and lard, tallow, strong b.u.t.ter, and all the rancid fat of a great city. For all that we shall have to find use. The best of it will make waggon grease, the rest, after due boiling and straining, will form the nucleus of the raw material which will make our Social Soap a household word throughout the kingdom.

After the Manure Works, the Soap Factory will be the natural adjunct of our operations.

The fourth great output of the daily waste of London will be waste paper and rags, which, after being chemically treated, and duly manipulated by machinery, will be re-issued to the world in the shape of paper. The Salvation Army consumes no less than thirty tons of paper every week. Here, therefore, would be one customer for as much paper as the new mill would be able to turn out at the onset; paper on which we could print the glad tidings of great joy, and tell the poor of all nations the news of salvation for earth and Heaven, full, present, and free to all the children of men.

Then comes the tin. It will go hard with us if we cannot find some way of utilizing these tins, whether we make them into flowerpots with a coat of enamel, or convert them into ornaments, or cut them up for toys or some other purpose. My officers have been instructed to make an exhaustive report on the way the refuse collectors of Paris deal with the sardine tins. The industry of making tin toys will be one which can be practised better in the Farm Colony than in the City.

If necessary, we shall bring an accomplished workman from France, who will teach our people the way of dealing with the tin.