whether he shall have the little space of garden that so vastly lessens the pressure of his poverty—all this does not depend on his willingness and ability to pay reasonable rent for the decent accommodation he requires, but depends on the use which others may see fit to make of their ‘right to do as they will with their own.’ However large may be a farm, there is no law that a certain proportion of labourers’ dwellings (much less of decent dwellings) shall be upon it; nor does any law reserve for the labourer ever so little right in that soil to which his industry is as needful as sun and rain.… An extraneous element weighs the balance heavily against him the influence of the Poor Law in its provisions concerning settlement and chargeability.[1] Under this influence, each parish has a pecuniary interest in reducing to a minimum the number of its resident labourers:—for, unhappily, agricultural labour instead of implying a safe and permanent independence for the hard-working labourer and his family, implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism—a pauperism which, during the whole circuit, is so near, that any illness or temporary failure of occupation necessitates immediate recourse to parochial relief—and thus all residence of agricultural population in a parish is glaringly an addition to its poor rates.… Large proprietors[2] … have but to resolve that there shall be no labourers’ dwellings on their estates, and their estates will thenceforth be virtually free from half their responsibility for the poor. How far it has been intended, in the English constitution and law, that this kind of unconditional property in land should be acquirable, and that a landlord, ‘doing as he wills with his own,’ should be able to treat the cultivators of the soil as aliens, whom he may expel from his territory, is a question which I do not pretend to discuss.… For that (power) of eviction … does not exist only in
- ↑ In 1865 this law was improved to some extent. It will soon be learnt from experience that tinkering of this sort is of no use.
- ↑ In order to understand that which follows, we must remember that “Close Villages” are those whose owners are one or two large landlords. “Open villages,” those whose soil belongs to many smaller landlords. It is in the latter that building speculators can build cottages and lodging-houses.
