T H o U N S L. A N D^ p BY o C H H G THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ENGLAND THROUGH CHINESE SPECTACLES. ENGLAND THROUGH CHINESE SPECTACLES. LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF WO CHANG. SIR ROBERT BRUCE COTTON. THE COTTON PRESS, GRANVILLE HOUSE, ARUNDEL STREET, W.C. IDA -T33 ^ 4- CONTENTS. $ PREFACE. CHAPTER I. FAMILY LIFE IN ENGLAND. The great Sacredness of Domestic Ties in China. The Relation between the Chinese Family and the State. CHAPTER II. EDUCATION IN ENGLAND. Radical errors about School and University Discipline in the West. English and French testimonies to the rational system pursued by the Chinese. CHAPTER III. "SOCIETY" IN ENGLAND. The Court. The Aristocracy. Their Ideas. The Evil Influence of Hereditary Dignities on Tastes and Morals. The Middle Classes. The Snobbery of the Wealthy Trading Classes. Morbid Social Excitement. The more wholesome character of Social Life in China. Except a very few descendants of Confucius, no Hereditary Nobility in China. The Chinese Gentleman at home. CHAPTER IV. ENGLISH DOCTORS. Doctors in England. Doctors in China in Contrast. 545232 Contents. CHAPTER V. ENGLISH LAWYERS. Lawyers a Danger to Society. Lawyers Unknown in China. CHAPTER VI. "BREACH OF PROMISE" AND "DIVORCE" IN ENGLAND. Chinese Ideas of Love and Marriage. Divorce extremely rare in China. CHAPTER VII. BACKSHEESH IN ENGLAND. Servants' Tips. Christmas Boxes. Trade Commissions. " Presents " to Government Officials. CHAPTER VIII. LIARS IN ENGLAND. What is a Lie ? Trade Lies. Social Lies. CHAPTER IX. THE LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE. Jobbers, Brokers, "Bulls," "Bears," "Stags," "Wild Cat" Bonds, "Puts," "Calls," "Options," "Margins." Disasters, effects of Stock Exchange Speculation. English Law makes constant raids on Betting Establishments, and leaves standing the biggest Gambling " Hell " in the world. CHAPTER X. DOWNTRODDEN ENGLISH TOILERS. The People Robbed by their Social Superiors. Free Trade and Unfair Wages. Contents. CHAPTER XL DOWNTRODDEN ENGLISH TOILERS Continued. Luxurious Capital and badly-housed Labour. Oppressive Labour Legislation. Brutalising Influence of English Industrialism. The dreadful past of the English Agricultural Labourer. CHAPTER XII. THE MANUFACTURE OF ENGLISH PAUPERS. Causes of Pauperism : (i) Demolition of Labourers' Cottages on large Estates. (2) Improvident Marriages. (3) Undiscrimina- ting Treatment of Applicants for Parish Relief. (4) Deserte Married Women can only compel Husbands to support them by first applying to the Workhouse. (5) Orphanhood. (6) Inadequate help and perfunctory alms from Private Benevo- lence. Who are Proper Recipients of Charitable Relief ? (7) Intemperance. (8) Land Monopoly. CHAPTER XIII. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN ENGLAND. British Criminals. The pickpocket. Burglar. Woeful story-teller. " Long Firm " Pretended Acquaintance. Fraudulent Rate collectors. Secretaries, Bankers. Trustees, Executors, Legal Advisers. - Hall Thief. Sham Syndicates and Companies. Bogus Mines Forger. Foreign Loan Robbers. Crimes of Violence. Effective Punishment must be Remedial as well as Deterrent and Retributive. Mere vindictiveness to offenders wors than useless. Prisoners should be Classified with the view of Saving Unconfirmed Criminals. Bribing Warders. Gross injustice of visiting Crimes against Property with severer punish- ment than Crimes against the Person. English Criminal Law contemptible. Death Punishment a preposterous anachronism, Laotze's view. The United States far ahead of England in Methods for Preventing Crime. Contents. CHAPTER XIV. THE LAND QUESTION IN ENGLAND. English Landed Monopolists. Ruin of English Agriculture by Land- lordism. Disproportionately light taxation of land. Appalling evils of protection in English Agriculture before 1846. Iniquity of (i) Primogeniture. (2) Law of Distress. (3) Game Laws. (4) Worst of all : Law of Entail and Settlement. Discouragement of Land Culture. Mischievous effects on Commerce. Population driven into Towns, causing Congestion and Misery. Hope of Improvement from Agricultural Labourers' Unions. Rural Parish Councils. The superior Land System of China. PREFACE. Without needlessly obtruding my personality and antece- dents upon my readers, I deem it convenient to state briefly the origin of the present work. Innumerable volumes by English authors have appeared during the past half century, containing criticisms of the institutions, customs, religion, laws, and people of China. In most instances these works are from the pens of the "globe- trotting " tribe, whose superficial impressions of a country and population so vast, ancient, and unique, must be regarded by every cultured Englishman as necessarily worthless. They are ignorant of the language and litera- ture of our great sages and guides in philosophy, history, and romance. They touch at one or two coast towns, and possibly extend their journeys to the capital, but are just as unfit to appreciate the inner life of the people as a blind man would be to comprehend the artistic master- pieces of the National Gallery, or as one who is deaf would be to enjoy the music of a Handel Festival. Among English- men who have committed to print their opinions of my great and much misunderstood country, there are some noble and generous exceptions to the rule just alluded to. But the writer would be glad if he could honestly include among the unbiassed authorities who have sought to enlighten England about China, such distinguished British Chinese scholars as Professor Legge, of Oxford, the translator of our " classics," and Professor Douglas, who fills the Chinese Preface. Chair at University College, London. Their ability and learning invest them with responsibility for denying justice to China in their criticisms of my country and people. Up to the present, among the number of educated China- men who know the language and literature of the United Kingdom, who have made a considerable stay in this country for diplomatic, educational, or trading pur- poses, and to whom ample opportunities have been afforded of closely studying its history, institutions, laws, and customs, there is not one who has ventured hitherto to publish in English any detailed account of his observations and experience in this part of the world. But surely, for once, a Chinaman may be pardoned for act- ing on the old British proverb, " What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." As English disquisitions on China have always been taken in good part by my countrymen, it is only reasonable to expect that the first analysis of British life ever published in English by a Chinaman should be received in the same spirit by Englishmen. The Scotch poet Burns prays that Heaven would grant us the gift " to see ourselves as ithers see us." A single practical acknow- ledgment by a Chinaman, in the way referred to, of the frequent services which British critics have rendered China in pointing out national weaknesses which might otherwise have escaped her notice, will not, it is hoped, be considered an officious return for such superabundant attentions. Though not an Englishman, I claim to have been a quiet but deeply interested student of English life and character in London for a quarter of a century. Owing to favourable social surroundings in my native land, I had the advantage not only of a sound Chinese education, but also of an Preface. extended training in the English language and literature, under a very learned and wise English tutor residing at one of the treaty ports. Although acquainted with Buddhism, Taoism, and other religious faiths professed in China, my father was brought up a follower of Confucius, and I imbibed the Chinese classics, including the " Analects " of the sage, the works of Mencius, the doctrine of Laou Keun, and the Doctors of Reason, almost with my mother's milk. Thus, I can hardly be accused of failing to bring to my adopted country a sound moral standpoint for my prolonged investi- gations concerning it In the " King of Books " I learned in early life that " golden rule " laid down by Confucius for the guidance of his disciples 1500 years before the Christian era. "My doctrine is simple and easy to be understood to have an upright heart, and to love one's neighbour as oneself." Even now I constantly find that noble saying of the disciple Tsentse coming to my recollection, " The supreme law, the law of moral conduct for man, which contains all others, is perfection. He who cannot distinguish good from evil, the true from the false, who knows not how to recognise in man the mandate from Heaven, he has not arrived at perfection." As regards politics, I have looked in vain in all the prominent European writings I have studied on that subject for such lofty ideals as I was happily obliged to lay to heart when a youth from the sayings of our sages. The battle cry of Western Democracies, vox populi vox Dei, is no mere cry with the mass of educated Chinamen, though it may sometimes be forgotten by corrupt officials, who are occasionally admitted to the public service of China. These words of Confucius are stamped on the minds of intelligent Chinamen in their tender years : " That which the people Preface. consider worthy of recompense or punishment must be that which Heaven or Divine Reason would also punish or recompense ;" and the leading principle in Chinese ethics, public and private, is "to be always in accord with that Divine essence from which ancient sages held that man derived his being." "The Master held ^hat government is epitomised in that which is just and right, that is to say, the realisation of those eternal laws which make for the happiness of humanity. Every family is a small State, and each nation or State a large family ; both the one and the other must be governed on the same principle of love, justice, honesty, and uprightness. A man who cannot control his own passions is not capable of governing his family j and he who cannot govern his family is equally incapable of governing a nation." It is with these time-honoured precepts of Chinese wisdom ever ringing in my ears that I have for many years endeavoured to qualify myself for presenting to Englishmen a Chinaman's views of British social, political, ethical, and economic life. I have been careful, in addition, to examine with the most competent aids at command, the various shafts, cogs, cranks, joints, chains, and pulleys com- prising the complicated mechanism of English national development. I frankly confess that in the following pages I have abstained from panegyric, which, coming from a foreigner, would savour of vulgarity. I have con- sidered it best for the most part to take for granted the countless virtues which adorn every department of English life, and have, with friendly candour, chosen to restrict myself to some of those defects which may perhaps be allowed to go too far in neutralising the nobler tendencies Preface. of the British nation. It will be observed that I have deliberately refrained from discussing the manifold varieties of religious faith and ceremony classified under the general head of Christianity. Nor have I allowed myself the satis- faction of delivering judgment upon the merits of the newspaper and periodical press, and other topics of Imperial interest. Should I find, however, that the present volume secures a fair share of public attention, the chapters held over on these and kindred topics can be published in a subsequent volume. W. C. CHAPTER I. FAMILY LIFE IN ENGLAND. I HAVE come to the belief, after a great deal of thinking and observation, that England is honeycombed with -disorganisation, and that this is due, in the first instance, to the lack of reverence for the institution of the family and the lack of wise domestic management so common in this country. I do not mean that bad laws and institutions have been set up purposely to breed mischiefs, or that the Parlia- ment or the Government are intentional workers of evil to family life. Nothing of the sort. There are many wise and good people, both high and low, in England. The different ranks of life and grades of position, many customs of society in business and in the family, the ways of " marrying and giving in marriage," of showing attention to the poor in the workhouse and to the sick in the hospital, the exchanges of feasting and dancing between family and family all this is very pretty, looked at and talked about from the outside. It is not the rules and arrangements which English society has made for itself, like storey above storey in a great and beautiful mansion, from the cellar where the " great unwashed " live from hand to mouth, up to the top flat where the royal family live in luxury and splendour ; it is not these things that are in my mind now. The building is very fine, and so is the ornamentation of it from foundation to roof; nothing disorganised about England in that sense. But knock at the door in each flat and take a good view of what goes on inside, and you will find, I much fear, that the state of the living inhabitants is B 2 Family Life in England. not to be judged by the brightness and harmony of the- colours on the gables, or the carving on the pillars of the house. The disorganisation is moral rather than political, and can only be called social in a qualified degree. It is a kind of dry-rot in the different sorts of life in each suite of apartments throughout the edifice ; though, when the ethical training of the people becomes as elaborate and systematic as their physical and intellectual discipline (defective though the latter be) and theological teaching now are, I believe there will be a very great difference for the- better. But how many centuries must pass before this- change takes place, Heaven only knows ! Take the case sadly too common of a certain kind of family life in England, in which the children get to know more of the fashionable world than their parents ever did. The father and mother began their struggles poor and untrained in knowledge. They made money and sent their boys and girls to " superior " schools, in the fashionable sense, where the children mixed with young folks of a higher social grade than their own. The children " finished " their education with conceited notions which never entered the heads of their plain, struggling parents. The father is- dubbed " guv'nor " or " pater " and the mother " mater " by their boys, and their notions of life are ridiculed by their promising offspring of both sexes as " antediluvian." The simple-minded parents get to think these bouncing young fools wonders in their way. Never having known the manners of " good society " themselves, they are perfectly awestruck to find their children talking with a fine accent and in grammatical phraseology which they never in their earlier days expected to be honoured with in their family. The parents think it a proud privilege to have begotten such a high-flown progeny. They are like the proverbial hen with her ducklings, which paddle where she cannot follow Family Life in England. 3 them. The youngsters soon find out how, metaphorically, the wind blows, and trim their sails to it. They feel that their gratified parents look up to them, and, as a natural consequence, the children are not long before they gather encouragement to look down on their parents. The old folks esteem it almost an honour to be pooh-poohed by .such sparkling young specimens of modern gentility. The chil- dren, inexperienced in the ways of well-bred old family life, strike out for themselves the path which they fancy will lead them straight to the notice of the so-called " upper " circles, in which by-and-bye they hope to be mercifully smitten with forgetfulness of the cheese and bacon out of which the family fortunes were made, and of the doubtful Queen's English familiar to their ears in the parental shop in their tender years. If they can't show the true ring of " birth " and " breeding," they must at least do all that the help of Birmingham electro-plating can accomplish to imitate the outward style and finish of the genuine article. The services of the most approved tailors, dressmakers, hair- cutters, dancing masters, French teachers, and West End jewellers are called in to polish their natural rawness away. Then comes what, in conventional parlance, is called their "introduction to society," with the usual complement of balls, parties, mincing, simpering, lisping, and other affected attitudes peculiar to " beggars on horseback." The family name has been Smith, Shufflebottom, or Snooks, and the aspiring generation of newly-rich fledglings smooth and soften these plebeianisms into De Smetti, Shalebolton, or Snefton, and cap the climax of folly with full-blown British tuft-hunting snobbery. The girls get caught up by some poor nephews of a lord's grandson or by some poorer baronet's descendants with all the virility worn out of them by roue-ism. ; the only faculty left to these spendthrift husbands of the rich tradesman's daughters in a state of B 2 4 Family Life in England. vigour being the faculty of wasting their wives' money as they had wasted their own. The sons take to the aristo- cratic pursuits of the turf, by which their purses become very sensibly lightened. So the worthy buttermonger's family goes up, socially, like a rocket, and comes down, morally, like a stick. A great gulf, as between Dives and Lazarus, is fixed between these new accessions to "Society" and their unkempt, clodhopping uncles and aunts and artisan cousins, never again to be crossed. A brand-new crest and a fine old Conservative pedigree are made expressly to order for these scions of classic grease, and the ladder by , which they rose is summarily kicked away. They conveniently discover or, rather, the crest-maker discovers for them that they had an ancestor who " came over with the Conqueror." They instinctively gravitate to Tory politics as becoming their sudden emergence from social obscurity, in common with most of the home candi- dates for the charmed circle of English "respectability," and with Colonial Knight Commanders of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, whose ambition lies towards the same refuge for British "cads," who want to throw the public off the scent as to their true origin. The virtues of filial reverence and obedience and affection for relatives are considered beneath their pompousness. And no wonder! when there is nothing in English family or social traditions to foster towards British parents a habitual sense of filial reverence. They have sowed the wind of pride, and they are in imminent danger of reaping the whirlwind of ruin. In many cases they become slaves to champagne and gambling, the prevailing weaknesses of over -fed, under- worked, and self-indulgent "Society" people. It is not long before they are found wallowing in the " horrible pit " of debt, and, ultimately, in the "miry clay" of insolvency. No sense of principle, no knowledge of the true laws of Family Life in England. 5 life, was ever instilled in them. From borrowing, perhaps, they advance to forging, and the next event in their history is either a leap from London Bridge or a trip to Dartmoor Prison all the result of no philosophic idea of filial duty enforced by father and mother or ever taught their Western ancestors. The complete absence in countless generations of English families of the sentiment that nature, family life, and the claims of national order required of parents any responsible line of conduct towards their children, except what their untamed and capricious frivolity should dictate this could hardly fail to produce disastrous con- sequences in the family and the State. The complexion of the latter as regards peace, contentment, thrift, and con- formity to law is inevitably determined by the virtues inculcated and practised in the former. Under a representative system of law-making and govern- ment the English Parliament must, on the whole, be the reflex of average Englishmen. Then, what serious friend of his country could hope for much wisdom in a body of legislative representatives sent to Parliament by a nation in which just and wise parental discipline was not enforced by State sanction, but was left at the mercy of ignorant and heartless whims in untrained fathers and mothers ? So with the vast brutalised masses in the United Kingdom, whom a very costly and abortive Education Act in opera- tion for twenty-seven years has thus far utterly failed to improve. By a quite unwarrantable measure of personal freedom accorded by law to multitudes of untutored men to marry wives and beget children ad libitum whether they are able to support a household or not to waste their wages on drunken frolics and extravagant pleasures, to land their families in starvation and cast them adrift on public or private benevolence, to have an almost unlimited host of temptations to vice and crime thrown around them, the 6 Family Life in England. State is practically manufacturing paupers and criminals, when its supreme efforts should be devoted to the prevention of both. Of what value can be the votes of millions having the parliamentary franchise, while hovering on the borders of domestic and social lawlessness, in the election of members of Parliament ? What possible chance is there of their sons, brought up under these conditions, choosing men qualified to make and administer laws likely to benefit and elevate the nations ? Fools, who are in the majority as voters, must elect a majority of fools as law-makers. The topsy-turvy system of law in England fails alike to prevent moral disorganisation, and to cure it when it has made headway. It does not touch ill-regulated subjects until they have done hopeless mischief to themselves and others. The law is so far behind the science of the age as only to use the antiquated and imaginary antitode for wrong- doing called punishment, whereas all modern law-reformers regard crime and vice as diseases to be diagnosed and treated pathologically. The infatuation of the English for what they confusedly rant about as liberty makes them con- tent to keep pruning the branches of the deadly upas of crime instead of aiming a blow at its root, by removing temptations to crime which arise from ignorance, poverty, want, drunkenness, constitutional indolence and sensuality, and by holding parents responsible for becoming acquainted with the duties they owe to the bodies, minds, and morals of their children, and by insisting under legal penalty on filial compliance with wise and good parental counsels. I am bound to admit that if the State is to have the power to effectually uproot lawlessness, there must either be a benevolent Despot at its head, as with us in China, or it must be ruled by a modified State socialism. Not other- wise can it successfully ward off threatened starvation, which so often tempts to theft, by creating employ- Family Life in England. 7 merit for those able and willing to work. In order to separate those constitutionally habituated to vicious or criminal excesses of appetite, acquisitiveness, morbid imagi- nation, or homicidal mania, from those more fortunately organised and circumstanced, duly authorised officers of the -State should be armed with power not to drag to prison and the gallows, which are no remedy, but to exercise rather physiological and pathological vigilance, that subjects requiring rational treatment might be relegated to the different classes of hospitals set apart for dealing with their .respective cerebral ailments and ethical mistakes. Thus it would be found what cases might be restored with safety to society and what others might be deemed incurable and dangerous to society, and ought to be kept under moderate ' restraint for life. The English Government let as many as choose run straight in the way leading into the executioner's hands for want of a right and enforced view of the relative duties between parent and child. Having tolerated, and even encouraged, under the false plea of liberty, the career of a snob, the drunkard, the glutton, the sensualist, the wastrel, the thief, the liar, the forger, the seducer, the perpetrator of wanton cruelty, the poisoner, and the murderer, towards gaol and capital punish- ment, the State makes futile attempts to remedy the error it commits by imprisoning or hanging the wretches whom the idiotic usages of Society have transformed into what they .become. There are thousands who return to prison many scores of times after their release. The sapience of locking the stable door after the steed has been stolen is hopelessly eclipsed by this marvellous combination of philosophy and science in the nation which produced Bacon, Blackstone, Shakspeare, Godwin, and Robert Owen; the two latter having taught, long before the time of Mill, Bain, and Huxley, that the only liberty possessed by 8 Family Life in England. Englishmen was liberty to act in compliance with the strongest motives. A fundamental omission on the part of parents which is often responsible for the bodily, mental, and moral ruin of their posterity, is that the young people receive no instruction as to the physical conditions on which individual health is to be maintained, on which marriage may be safely undertaken,, and on which children, sound in mind and body, can alone be born. The parents have been taught by their parsons, if they go to an orthodox church, that the desire by which the sexes, on reaching puberty, are impelled to come into- the closest possible sexual relations, is latent sin inherited by humanity from the alleged " fall " of the first pair in the Garden of Eden ! Following their pulpit guides, they piously refrain from imparting the least information as to the ethics of these relations, either by books or in serious conversation- to their sons or daughters, under an absurd fear lest both might be driven by needful physiological knowledge to profligate courses. What is the result ? The sons are in risk of meeting reckless companions who have no theological scruples about initiating them in sexual mysteries, under degrading con- ditions ; and if they are amenable to the forbidden experi- ences placed within their reach by the tempter, they soon solve for themselves and often to the destruction of their health for life the sexual problem which priest-ridden parents fanatically refused to throw light upon for their guidance. They become afflicted with disease, which taints the blood of their posterity to the remotest ages. If the family keeps a female cocker-spaniel, Cochin hens,. Polled Angus cattle, or a full-blooded racehorse, the parents exercise the strictest care lest these pure breeds should deteriorate by contact with inferior kinds. But if a son be he virtuous or not has resolved to choose a wife, the anxious forethought shown in safeguarding purity of breed Family Life in England. p in their domestic animals is rarely, if ever, dreamt of in regard to the immunity of their grand-children from hereditary impurity or disease. On the contrary, the paramount question raised is : What is the social status of the family he proposes to marry into ? It may become known to the parents of the youth that several relatives of the young lady are scorbutic, or have been demented, or have succumbed to dipsomania, or have been swindlers or homicides. They must be fully aware that hereditary ail- ments or vices will, under inexorable law, re-appear in the children or grand-children of the married pair. But this consideration suddenly vanishes into thin air, and the all- absorbing inquiry is : What advantage is to be gained by the match, in position or fortune? as it was with the father of Jack Spiggot, who decided against his marriage with Letty Lovelace in Thackeray's "Book of Snobs." "It is the infernal snob tyrant who governs us all who says : 1 Thou shall not love without a lady's maid ; thou shall not marry without a carriage and horses; thou shalt have no wife in thy heart and no children on thy knee without a page in buttons and a French bonne ; thou shalt go to the devil unless thou hast a brougham ; marry poor, and Society shall forsake thee ; thy kinsmen shall avoid thee as a criminal ; thy aunts and uncles shall turn up their eyes and bemoan the sad, sad manner in which Tom or Harry has. thrown himself away.' You, young woman, may sell yourself to Croesus ; you, young man, may lie away your heart and your life for a jointure. But if you are poor, woe be to you ! Society, the brutal snob autocrat, consigns you to solitary perdition. Wither, poor girl in the garret ;. rot, poor bachelor in your club." Against all such insanity my countrymen have taken the necessary precautions for thousands of years. On the parents in China devolve the responsibility of choosing who- so Family Life in England. shall be the life-long companion of son or daughter. Nor is the inducement of any dowry held out by the bride or her parents as is the degrading custom in the rich middle and upper classes in England to aspirants for her hand. A dowry is withheld from her on principle that she may be loved by her husband for what she is, and not for what he might get with her. When a young Chinaman falls in love he must let the secret go out to his father before his heart goes out to his lady-love. If the parent permits preliminary matri- .monial negotiations he employs a go-between, and to this agent is entrusted a geneological tree of the young man's family. This is to protect persons of the same name from uniting in matrimony, and thus avoid the dangers of what is known as " breeding in and in." A mutual guarantee is also afforded both the contracting families against becoming -allied with hereditary madness or crime. If the young lady's family is disposed to respond, their geneological tree is like- wise forthcoming. But no such shameless outrages on reason and nature are ever committed, even by the poorest -Chinamen, under cover of marriage, as are of daily occur- rence in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and in other English-speaking communities. I am not going to refer at length to the monstrous in- justice committed by the vast majority of even middle-class husbands in occupying the best part of their leisure with pro- fessional or commercial friends, or in the smoke-rooms and -billiard-rooms of clubs, casting the burden of training their families on the mothers, who alone may take pains to .study the various dispositions of the children, and to adapt household discipline to their requirements. This is bad enough. But there is another abyss of British parental neglect still deeper, which produces an appalling crop of evils to the State, but which must also be passed over here without comment. I refer to the not infrequent habit of Family Life in England. n well-to-do English husbands and wives, when they become parents, in leaving their children absolutely under the control of governesses and tutors. Their natural protectors in that case simply look upon their children as bores in- terfering with their social freedom, to be shifted on the shoulders of professional hirelings. No such vicarious performance by parents, of duties to the family, is possible in China. There, the mother is the first and most fondly- earnest teacher of her children. Her ambition is to cherish them and prepare them for usefulness and obedience in a contented, peaceful, and happy life devoted to the family and to citizenship. By them she may be ennobled and honoured, and when such a sentiment takes possession of a wife's heart it becomes a living force. The father has inherited from ancestors, for thousands of years, the art of affectionate domestic discipline, and the sole aspiration of the mother is to be skilful in the adminis- tration of family government. She educates her children, and is content to live for their happiness. If the child .breaks the law it is not he but the parents that are punished. The State assumes that if the discipline of home were duly observed the child would be a good citizen. The motive power behind the high moral family system of China is the worship of ancestors, and this is universal. Death does not sever the bond of affection which unites the members of a family. It merely spiritualises and sanctifies it. Every spring and autumn religious ceremonies are held in honour -of the departed, and all the members of a family meet to share in these solemnities. Each village has its temple and -chapel dedicated to this purpose. All honours conferred by the State, as distinguished by the mode of bestowing nobility prevailing in England, are retrospective and not prospective in their operation. If a public functionary is -ennobled, his parents and ancestors participate in the 12 Family Life in England, dignity, but not his descendants. Hence, haughty,, pampered, lecherous wearers of hereditary titles are with us impossible. Look, if you please, at another interesting phase of British domestic relationships. When the brothers and sisters grow up and marry, how many cases appear of members of the same family becoming cold and estranged from each other as they grow older especially if they vary widely in pecuniary position when increasing age should draw them closer and make them more affectionate to each other ? Not only are the parents despised and forsaken if they are poor, but the brothers and sisters too often leave each other to struggle on without sympathy or help when they most need both, the rich ones turning their backs on those who have been unfortunate, as if honest poverty were a scandal and a dis- grace. Or, perhaps, life is spent by them in mutual bicker- ings all for want of properly established discipline on the part of the parents, and this again owing to the State Government being deficiently administered. The Chinese have been distinguished time immemorial by their regard for brothers, cousins, and more remote relatives from generation to generation. Then, in a humbler sphere of English society, the sons become mechanics, and take to browbeating their employers ; and .the daughters enter domestic service, and become so absurdly insubordinate that they assert their sup- posed rights by wronging their mistresses and spoiling the peace of the household in which they are sheltered, fed, clothed, and earn wages. I do not say that the heads of the home in which a servant labours are always faultless ; but anyhow chronic antagonism is constantly springing up in British households between those who rule and those who serve. Rightly or wrongly, complaints are heard on all sides that servants, in spite of all their elaborate Sunday-school training, are found to cheat, lie, and steal, and to be dirty,. Family Life in England. 13 lazy, and insolent. There exist no national regulations for bringing up people in the different ranks of life to rational obedience ; and the infectious spirit of disobedience spreads through every relation and grade. The English theory, I grant, is the opposite of all this ; but of what good is a fine theory as long as no adequate appliances are provided for 'bringing it into harmony with the practice of the nation ? The people may pride themselves on having the right medicine for the disease ; but it only reveals a state of national muddle, if they keep the medicine in a stoppered bottle on the shelf, as they do, instead of using it. Of what avail is it to learn by heart the words of the Christian Scrip- ture, " Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right," and "Servants, obey your masters," if the philosophy of these passages is not taught and their contents are not systematically enforced ? Disobedience means disorder, and disorder strengthens into a habit and disorganises the faculties, till truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and kindness get jumbled up in many minds. The indi- vidual badly brought up inoculates the family and the State with the germs of anarchy. In China filial piety is to the National Constitution what liberty is to the constitution of England. It is with all Chinamen the foundation of everything honourable, kind, sincere, brave, patriotic. They have a favourite proverb that " Of the hundred virtues, filial duty is the chief." To illustrate the nature and importance of this virtue and the rewards attending its cultivation is the object of a book which most young Chinamen read, called " Twenty-four Examples of Filial Piety." At the head of the celebrated "Twelve Sentences of Good Words" stand (i) "You should not disobey your parents," and (2) " You should not quarrel with your brothers." Hence, punishments for filial disrespect or neglect are among the heaviest inflicted by us. 14 Family Life in England. One of our classics is exclusively occupied with the exposition and enforcement of filial piety. In the Analects, of our matchless and ever-to-be-worshipped sage, Confucius,, we have these words: "Filial piety and fraternal submission- are they not the root of all benevolent actions ? A youth when at home should be filial, and abroad respectful to his elders." Teze-hea (one of the sage's eminent disciples, very learned in the She-King and Ch'un Ts'ew) said : "If a man applies his mind sincerely in serving his parents with his utmost strength ; if in serving his prince he can devote- his life ; if in intercourse with his friends his words are sincere, although men say that he is not learned, I' certainly say that he is. ... While a man's father is alive, look at the bent of his will ; when his father is dead' look at his conduct. If for three years he does not alter from the way of his father, he may be called filial. There- are few who, being filial and fraternal, are fond of offending their superiors. There have been none disliking to offend their superiors, who have been fond of stirring up confusion." (Book I. 2, 6, 7, n.) "In serving parents a son may remonstrate with them, but gently ; when he sees that they do not incline to follow his advice, he shows an increased degree of reverence, but does not abandon his purpose;; and should they punish him he does not allow himself to< murmur." " While parents are alive the son may not go abroad to a distance " (Book IV. 18, 19). Mang E asked what filial piety was. The Master said : " It is not being disobedient." Fan Ch'e asked : " What do you mean by filial piety ? " The Master replied : " That parents when- alive should be served with politeness ; that when dead they should be buried with devout ceremony; and that they should be sacrificed to with strict reverence." Teze-Yew asked what filial piety was. The Master said : " It means- the support of one's parents. But dogs and horses like wise- Family Life in England. 15 are able to do something in the way of support. Without- reverence, what is there to distinguish the one support given from the other ? .... If, when their elders have any troublesome affairs, the young take the toil of them, and if, when the young have wine and food they set them before their elders, is this to be considered filial piety? The Master taught that all depended on the spirit in which the- deed was done" (Book II. 4-8.) While his parents are alive a son, in China, must continue to obey them. This is the doctrine of the classics, the teaching of the laws, and the universal practice of the- people. No matter how old, educated, or wealthy the son may be unless he has become an official of the Govern- ment he is bound to render prompt and implicit obedience to his father and mother. While in the employ of the State he is subject to the commands of the Emperor, and his parents have no control over him, though he must always conform in every respect to the established laws and customs of the Empire in regard to his parents. But if a man be in a private station, and his parents are still living,, they must approve the trade or profession he chooses before he can engage in it ; he must account to them for all his earnings and the way in which he spends them. But the people so universally love this law as being the very bulwark of order, virtue, and happiness in the country, that magistrates are very rarely called upon to punish the transgression of it. Society has learned to adapt itself to this filial principle for thousands of years, and it has now become a second nature with us. Moreover, the very sense of the absolute prerogative to be obeyed, held by the parent,- impresses him with a corresponding feeling of responsibility in exercising that prerogative; and the prospect of wielding so much power in the family leads everyone who finds him self a parent to think about the duties he owes to his child 1 6 Family Life in England, .as much as about the duties the child owes him. Besides, the sages, the laws, and the daily practice of China, having for hundreds of generations all tended to the perfecting of family government among us, abuse in any way of his paternal right is the last thing that would enter any father's mind. Still the humane exercise of fatherly authority is not left merely to the accident of wisdom or folly in the parent. True, the Great Master said: "In regard to the young, I wish you to treat them tenderly " (" Analects of Confucius," Book V., 25). But in the rare and extreme case of unfilial conduct, should the father bring his son before a magistrate and demand his severe punishment, the maternal uncles of the disobedient son have a right to interfere ; and no magis- trate would dare to put to death a son charged by his father with continued disobedience without first obtaining the consent of the maternal uncles. But the crime of reckless and persistent contempt for wise parental authority is looked upon by my countrymen as being so fearful, considering the chaos it would lead to if tolerated among 400,000,000 of people, that we think it best for the good of the community that it should be punished with the cangue, and, where the son seems incorrigible, even with death. A man and his wife once joined in maltreating the husband's mother. To mark public abhorrence of such vile criminality as destructive of the fundamental principle of Chinese government, the authorities at Peking had the scene of the dreadful act openly cursed. The active agents in this outrage on the peace of the Empire were put to death ; the mother of the wife was bambooed, branded, and exiled for her daughter's crime; the scholars of the district for three years were not permitted to attend the public examinations, and their promotion was thereby stopped ; the magistrates were deprived of their office and banished. Family Life in England. 17 The house in which the offenders lived was dug up from the foundations. The edict adds : " Let the Viceroy make known this proclamation and let it be dispersed through the whole Empire, that the people may all learn it. And if there be any rebellious children who oppose, beat, or degrade their parents, they shall be punished in like manner. If ye people, indeed, know the renovating principle, then fear and obey the Imperial will, nor look on this as empty declamation. For now, according to the case of Teng-chen, wherever there are the like, I resolve to condemn them, and from my heart strictly charge you to beware. I instruct the magistrates of every province severely to warn the heads of families and elders of villages, and on the 2nd and 1 6th of every month, to read the sacred instructions, in order to show the importance of the relations of life, that persons may not rebel against their parents, for I intend to .render the Empire filial !" i8 CHAPTER II. EDUCATION IN ENGLAND. ORDINARY English ideas about Education, like- English ideas about many other social questions,, are at the Antipodes of those on similar questions held in China. The faculties of perception and memory are un- naturally and exclusively forced by the system falsely called education in England, and the reasoning and ethical faculties are often left quite untrained. In no country under heaven have I ever heard or read of the great goddess of Appearances being worshipped so generally as here by all classes of society. The frantic attempts of multitudes is to appear to be what they are not. There is one class who want to get credit by the quality of their dress and the size and appurtenances of their houses for being well off when they are really poor. They have a saying, " To be poor, and seem so, is the way to remain so." There is another class who want to appear upright, truthful, and correct in all the relations of life ; but, instead of sin- cerely striving to conform to the highest ideals in moral practice, they impose on the credulous by joining some popular church, and leave the impression to be drawn by the superficial multitude that, because they satisfy the cheap standard of goodness in singing hymns, reading prayers, hearing sermons and subscribing ostentatiously to religious institutions, they must necessarily be above suspicion in respect to everyday morals. So with the inconsistency connected with sending children to the costly schools, colleges, and universities scattered over Education in England, 19 the United Kingdom, which are at the disposal of wealthy families and of members of poor families who earn scholarships and exhibitions to these higher fountains of culture. But the regime followed in nearly all of these establishments is a semi-barbarous medisevalism which tests the benefits received by the mind not by the extent to which the thinking power has been quickened, expanded, and guided ; not by an enlarged and effective sense of duty, but by the farrago of crude and undigested acquirements with which the pupil is crammed for the sole purpose of undergoing a written examination a certain fulness and accuracy in which entitles him to a prize or a degree. Yet the possession of these distinctions can at best show not that his whole mind has been strengthened and developed by the knowledge he has gained and the discipline he has undergone, but only that, like a hogshead, his mind has passively received an olla podrida of facts, figures, and views, and that when the tap is turned on by the questions in the examination paper, the contents are readily transferable to the pages on which answers to these questions are to be written. Forthwith a man becomes a medallist at his college, and, in due course, an M.A. or B.A,, an LL.B. or D.Sc. With a small brain and a fifth-rate range of mental powers he may succeed in winning these coveted honours, while in all essentials he may go forth into life without real education. He has purchased the right to wear a degree which passes current as the accepted proof and badge of high British education ; a gullible public are hoaxed by what rarely proves to be the " outward and visible sign " of any "inward and invisible grace." The University imprimatur, sold for money, dooms its possessor, in too many cases, to life-long self-deception as to the extent of his ignorance. He argues thus with himself, " It is true I sometimes feel intellectually feeble and empty, but this cannot be my true state. Have I c 2 20 Education in England not been examined by duly qualified University examiners, and is not my official certificate of having ' passed ' complete evidence that I occupy the first rank in education, having taken my degree creditably?" To the average University graduate his degree becomes not so much a stimulus as a barrier to progress. British Society com- placently swallows the illusion. The great end of British life is gained a class is licensed to appear what they are not. The reasoning faculty remains, in most cases, twisted and dwarfed, and the ethical faculty grows utterly awry. Hence questions social, political, and religious, are fairly dealt with only by a small minority of Englishmen. Practically identical is the result of the elaborate and extensive network of Government Elementary Schools, which are supported at an enormous outlay by British rate- payers. Mr. Forster's Act of 1870, which was expected by its hysterical advocates of the old National Education League to usher in a millennium among the " lower classes," leaves the latter to-day as foul-mouthed, as ill- behaved, as brutal, as sensual, as selfish, as disobedient to parents and guardians, and therefore as truly uneducated as they were before the National Education League began its operations! In China the chief test of true education is that refined altruism which is always thinking of how it can avoid trenching on the rights of others, and can promote their convenience and comfort by unobtrusive, graceful, and delicate attentions suggested naturally by the circumstances of the moment, costing nothing, yet adding immensely to the sum of human happiness. There is probably not so large a proportion of crime to population as formerly in England. But the Courts of Justice bear witness to a sufficiently large amount of this still lingering in the great English cities; while commercial cheating is greatly on the Education in England. 21 increase. There is also a large overflow of the animal spirits of the masses in the agitations and occasionally the bloody feuds of Trades Unionists and Anarchists with non- unionists and employers of labour. Thieving, forgery, lying, and other forms of educated crime and vice have cast grosser forms of evil-doing into the shade. Mr. Keir-Hardie hit the mark when he said of city men, "They swindle each other and call it business." As for coarseness in taste, speech, and conduct in the rank and file of those who pass through the Government schools, it is apparent in the horseplay, the sanguinary epithets and the savagery of the streets, and the wretched weekly " penny dreadfuls " which crowd out from railway bookstalls the more solid reading of ante-School Board days. This remark applies to a very large section of young people schooled at the expense of the ratepayers. As regards the section having a more intellectual flavour about them, they leave the care of their teachers, in too many cases, with no reverence for parents or the parental office a full-orbed reflection of the ill-disguised contempt that is felt by John Bull, when he thinks he has risen a little in the world, for those who are obliged to " earn their bread by the sweat of their brow." The traditional British notion of a lady or a gentleman represents a person who, above all things, has means sufficient to dispense with the need of working for wages. Consequently, the first idea of a poor workman's son or daughter, as a rule, on completing their Board School course, is to affect educational superiority to their parents, and seek for a living in some occupation in which they may dress as like their social superiors as possible, and keep as far as they are able from soiling their hands. So much for the outcome of the great Education Act to multiply indefinitely the number of poorly paid dignified clerks and factory girls, whose wages are too small to cover 22 Education in England. the requirements of their position, to introduce an immense overplus of candidates for post and telegraph offices and for shops a large " educated " residuum taking the broad road of an idle life, to ruin. The supremely important thing of all is missed in their school career the subordina- tion of school knowledge to the making of obedient and respectful sons and daughters, and to the fitting of them for fulfilling, heartily and honourably, the duties belonging to every relation of life. Herbert Spencer says the first thing every one ought to learn is how to earn a living, and even for this end the boasted and tremendously expensive Act does not directly qualify young folks. Indeed, that is usually the last thing thought of by School Boards. A Chinaman who knows the ways of his own country cannot help being struck with the odd style in which law- breakers are dealt with in England in connection with the false educational system of that country. You see in the police news that two poor old women have tried to put an end to their starved, ill-used lives by drowning, but they are saved by the police, and are " run in " to the cells to await punishment. A boy, needy and forsaken, hungry and cold, is caught sleeping on a doorstep, in the dark, and the policeman locks him in a dismal prison, with nobody to speak to, and little to eat. A man is arrested for knocking down his neighbour, and, per- haps, killing him. A cashier is taken up for signing his master's name on a cheque, and applying the money to his own use. These wretched creatures, with many more, are huddled together and brought into court. Behind a desk, on a high bench, sits a judge in gown and wig, looking very thundery, as if he could stop the earth from going round, if its inhabitants did not behave them- selves. At this important-looking man I could not help laughing, when I got an insight into the irrational sort of Education in England. 23 business he was paid to transact for the State. He hears the charges against the accused men, women, and children. If a jury be impanelled, they listen as solemnly to his sum- ming up as if the verdict to which he is guiding them would lead to the miraculous reformation of the prisoners. But such an object is probably very remote from the minds of both judge and jury. The twofold end, exclusively kept in view, is the proving of the charges and the meting out of appropriate legal punishment. If the culprits are convicted, they go back to herd for days, weeks, months, or years, with a body of criminals in most cases worse than themselves. They are sentenced to hard labour and poor fare, which must inevitably tend to weaken their intellectual and ethical, as well as their physical fibre, and disqualify them from being good citizens on their release. This is the stupid and irrational end that comes of police, bewigged and begowned barristers, and judges and long-suffering juries. The real cause of the bad deeds committed is ignored. The wrongdoers complete their Tespective terms of imprisonment, and return at length to freedom, without the question receiving a moment's attention whether the State had ever methodically taught them, when young, the laws and the art of obeying them, and saw that they were surrounded with influences calculated to prevent them from falling into the temptations which had previously ensnared them. The fact that imprisonment makes them worse, and that they are more likely to go to jail a second time from having been there before, is never discussed. The poor women caught jumping into the Thames had bad husbands, whose brutality drove them to attempted self-destruction. Are the husbands to go unpunished, and is nothing to be done to prevent the manufacture of such husbands ? The wretched boy suspected of being a robber sleeping on the doorstep ! Why not lay hold of those who 24 Education in England. should be responsible for his neglected condition parents or guardians of the poor who stand towards him in loco parentis? Why not take Members of Parliament and punish them for not passing a law to ensure such a waif being brought up rightly ? Then the forger ! Why does not the State enact sumptuary laws to make it criminal for wastefully extravagant people not to live plainly, and not to set a proper example to those having smaller means whom they are tempting by their vain follies to live beyond their income and go deeply in debt or commit fraud ? Why not have a Parliament and Government (if both are thought needful) that will educate the people in those laws most urgent for loyal subjects to know ; that will educate them according to the different shapes of their brains, to develop the good parts, and repress the bad ones, and have them put in situations in which their dangerous organs and tendencies will not be quickened by temptations ? No ; all are treated alike, no matter how divergent their natural tendencies or the paths which lead them severally astray. Doctors are not content to say, " Pain is pain," and treat all pain by the same method. They find out the cause of the pain, for then only can they intelligently prescribe the right cure. The English way of dealing with criminals is as ridiculous when all the imposing ceremony of law and law- courts is taken into account as it would be to attempt to cure heart disease by tying a red rag on one's great toe. To give these unhappy individuals meals of bread and water, and harden their fingers by teasing hemp, does not touch the root of their evil doings. They are disobedient to the laws, either because they have been starved into moral as well as physical feebleness, or because they have been neg- lected by ignorant or indifferent parents or other relatives, or because they have never been taught by the Government,, or because their organisation is innately abnormal, or because Education in England. 25; the Government has not removed them out of surroundings which ensure their moral degradation. The wiseacres who rule over the English let the moral dung-heaps stand, and punish the people for catching fever from them. If the British Parliament were to adapt, as far as possible, outward circumstances to the moral health and well-being of the population, many judges, magistrates, and barristers might be dispensed with ; many policemen might be relieved of duty ; many jails and workhouses might be closed. I cannot sufficiently emphasise the diametrical difference between criminal procedure in England and in China. In, the former children are punished for the neglect of their parents and guardians. In the latter parents, guardians, and local officers of the State are punished for the neglect of children. As for lawyers, they are even, less known and tolerated in my country than they were in the ideal settle- ment inhabited by the " Birds " of Aristophanes. The result is that we have far fewer bad citizens in China in proportion to our vast numbers than there are in England. Everybody has the chance to work for a living ; very few of my countrymen are lazy, and, as our wants are few, they are easily satisfied; except when a province is visited with a pro- tracted drought, we are a contented as well as an industrious people. To keep the citizens from ever forgetting the laws there is a " Book of Sacred Instructions," drawn from the great ancient writings, and read in public by the chief magistrates on the new and full moon days. Part of this book says (I give a translation, as elsewhere, when quoting from our classics) : " In our general conduct, not to be orderly is to fail in filial duty ; in the intercourse of friends,, not to be sincere is to fail in filial duty ; in arms and in war, not to be brave is to fail in filial duty." "He who can be a pious son will prove an obedient younger brother ; and he who is both will, while at home, prove an honest and 26 Education in England, orderly subject, and in active service from home, a coura- geous and faithful soldier. . . . Mencius has said : ' Were all men to honour their kindred and respect their 'elders, the world would be at peace.' " Of the sixteen discourses read at new and full moon to the people, to guide them and save them from disobedience, the eighth requires especially from them a careful study of the penal laws, and these are published in a cheap form that nobody may be ignorant of them. What a yawning gulf in this respect separates us from the example of " barbarian " England, where the masses have for ages, from a moral and law-abiding point of view, been allowed to grow up anyhow, under vague ecclesiastical sentimentalism, in which many of the clergy only half believe, and towards which the laity hold increasingly an attitude of sceptical indifference. In China we govern on the principles of reason, humanity, and justice. In the Confucian philosophy the relation of princes and people, of government and governed, is penetrated by the grand idea of an intimate relationship and communion between Divinity (supreme reason) and mankind. The leading principle of Chinese morality is to be always en rapport with that Divine essence from which our ancient sages held that man derived his 'being. Legal punishments in England, viewed in the light of the writings of Confucius, are not even just, and if English judges had studied the four books of the sage as deeply as they have studied the contradictory medley of .English laws, they would "strike," and not again assume their anachronous costume till the duties of their office had been placed on a rational basis. But the answer to all this from the orthodox English Christian is that it is the glory of his country to promote morality and respect for law by teaching religion. If that Jt>e so, it is only to be regretted that better success does not Education in England. 27 attend his efforts. Indeed, Bible reading where allowed in .Board Schools, and comments on the Bible when practised in Sunday Schools, are, as a rule, as incapable of making obedient children and trustworthy citizens (as the Chinese are) as water poured on the face is of curing lumbago. Our classics appeal to reason. Two- thirds of the English Bible appeals to blind and senseless faith. Nearly all criminals, and lazy servants, and dishonest cashiers, and cheating tradesmen have been instructed in Sunday Schools or in religiously-conducted day schools without being educated in the Chinese sense, /. I GSS a trifle given in charity. This considerable amount, in an age when money went farther than it does now, equals the wages of 1825 labourers, the daily wages of a thatcher at that date being only 3^d. per day. In 1349 the Black Death swept away about half the population and that terrible visitation doubled the wages of farm hands at a bound. The Leicesters and other noble vultures took alarm at what they termed the " malice " and " singular covitise of servants," and gave the rein to their vindictiveness in a series of legislative enactments of incredible barbarity. By the Statutes of Labourers (1349, 1350, and 1360) they condemned the helpless and long-suffering labourer to work for the wages prevailing before the time of the pestilence, under atrocious penalties of imprisonment and branding. All combination among agricultural toilers was strictly forbidden. If a man fled from one county to another a 216 Downtrodden English Toilers. writ for his recovery was sent to every sheriff in England. If he was taken, the letter F was burnt into his forehead " for falsity." The labourers were sworn twice a year to observe these unbearable regulations. Any child brought up to agricultural pursuits till twelve years of age must adhere to them for life. Should Nature have endowed a labourer's son with intellectual gifts qualifying him for service as a teacher or a priest, the doors of the school and church were barred against him. After the rising led by John Ball and Wat Tyler martyrs to the grossest inhumanity and injustice from the upper classes penalties were greatly increased. The Tudors and the middle class rose to power together, but so far from the lot of the ill-used peasant being improved, he sank to a lower and lower depth of suffering and degradation. The extensive lands held by the Church in trust for the poor were ruthlessly plundered by that blood- thirsty monster, Henry VIIL, and his rapacious fellow- conspirators, and were knocked down to the highest bidders, regardless of the bitter distress of the evicted peasant tenants who had no recourse but beggary and robbery. The sole response to supplicants for justice and mercy was the halter. The labourers were eaten up by the gallows. Henry alone sent 72,000 of them to death, literally decimating the population. His daughter Elizabeth " was content with a modest holocaust of 300 or 400 ' vagabonds' per annum." But this fearful blood-letting left the evil uncured. The " Reformation," which kindled the enthusiasm of the English Puritans and the Scotch Presbyterians, was, economically, an unmitigated curse to the English agricultural labourer. According to Richard Heath in his thrilling volume " The English Peasant : " " By the ist Edward VI. c. 3, men and women able to work and who lived idly for three days, were to be branded with a red - hot iron on the breast with the Downtrodden English Toilers. 217 letter V, and to be slaves for two years to the informer. The master was to feed his slave with bread and water, with small drink, and such refuse meat as he thought proper, and to cause his slave to work by beating, chaining, or otherwise, in any work or labour, however vile it might be. If the slave ran away from his master for the space of fourteen days he was to be his slave for life, and to be branded on the forehead or cheek with the letter S ; if he ran away a second time he was to suffer the pains of death as a felon. The master could put a ring of iron on the neck, arm, or leg of his slave ; he could sell, bequeath, or let out his slave after the like sort or manner he might do with any other of his moveable goods or chattels. Any attempt to maim or wound such masters or mistresses, either during or after the time of slavery, or any conspiracy to burn their houses or corn, was to be deemed felony, unless some person would take such offender as a slave for ever." There was still, however, enough spirit left in the downtrodden labourer to attempt resistance, and revolts against the wanton and unprovoked cruelty he endured were led by the brothers Ket, of Norwich, and others. Indeed, so brave and powerful were the Norfolk insurgents that they could only be put down by German and Italian mercenaries. Coming down to within sixty years of the date at which I write, Lord Suffield then frankly said that it was perfectly natural for an English agricultural labourer to be a poacher. His wages then were only from pd. to is. a day, while an expert gang of poachers had been known to bag three sacks of game in a night. Under the diminished severity of the Game Law regime, introduced in the first year of William IV., there were between 1833 and 1846 fifty inquests on gamekeepers found dead, twenty-nine of the cases being returned as wilful murder. In the years 1844-46 there were 11,392 convictions for offences against the Game 218 Downtrodden English Toilers. Laws in England and Wales. What, then, must have been the amount of crime under the old cruel regime^ with its starvation wages to agricultural labourers and shameless inhumanity which lasted from 400 to 500 years ! When we consider how practically familiar the British " masses " were with the gallows and the block in those " good old times," it cannot be thought surprising that so many Englishmen should be cruel now to one another in " glove rights," in drunken brawls, in wife-beating, in outrages upon children and animals. There were 168 offences for which hanging was the penalty, and it was rare to pass Newgate or Tyburn any week day morning without witnessing a host of wretched British subjects sent from the gallows, the block, or the pyre to their long home. Of the total number of capital offences named no fewer than four-fifths were put on the Statute Book in the reigns of the first three Georges. "The gentlemen of England " (whose aristocratic descendants are now so faithfully served by the ex-Radicals, Messrs. Joseph Chamberlain and Jesse Ceilings) in the days of which I write, who were responsible for these savage enactments, included some of the most disgusting brutes and ruffians that ever held the lives of hapless social inferiors at their mercy. It was no wonder that " the gentlemen of England " were much scared by the French Revolution a century ago, especially Mr. Pitt. An English writer remarks : " He knew that the English peasant had quite as good cause for revolt as had Jaques Bonhomme ; but truth to tell ' our old nobility ' had done their work of oppression and degradation much more effectually than the French noblesse. The English peasant was so cowed and brutalised that hardly a thought of insurrection entered his darkened soul. The 'gentlemen of England' spent ^625, 000,000 which they had never earned in order to overthrow the French Revolu- tion, and spilt, to boot, the blood of English labourers like Downtrodden English Toilers. 219 water in the unhallowed achievement." Even after the warning signalled to the English landed aristocracy by that momentous and far-reaching event, the " gentlemen of England " continued to give the English agricultural labourers wages so miserable that without parish relief, which the landowners worked in their own interest, at the expense of the community the labourers could not have been kept alive. Seven, eight, nine, or ten shillings a week, when the quartern loaf averaged eighteen pence simply meant wholesale murder by the owners of broad acres. In Northamptonshire the magistrates fixed the parish allowance at 55. a single man, 6s. a man and wife, and 25. each child whatever the family earned to be deducted from the allowance ! When the French war was over, and landlords thought they could once more breathe freely, they subjected the unhappy labourers to treatment which was nothing short of infamous. Again the cup of poor Hodge's grievances was full to the brim. Made desperate by the unmerited wrongs he endured, he rose in many districts in the year 1830, burning ricks and smashing machinery, as the only way open to him to vent his justifiable resentment. The " classes " were alarmed, but without the faintest sign of repentance for the heartless cruelty they had unceasingly perpetrated on the starving human beasts of burden who worked on their lands. Truculent judges on the bench, infected with bitter aristocratic prejudice against the labourers, mercilessly imprisoned, banished, and hanged multitudes of them without finding the least excuse for their violence in the diabolical persecution they had suffered at the hands of the "gentlemen of England." Nor could the Times, in its issues of December 2yth, 1830, repress the righteous indignation it felt against the bloody outrages com- mitted upon wretched labourers, with which the robes 22o Downtrodden English Toilers. of peers and judges were sullied. " We do affirm," said that journal, "that the actions of this pitiable class of men are a commentary on the treatment experienced by them at the hands of the upper and middle classes ; the gentlemen, clergy, who ought to teach and instruct them, and the farmers, who ought to pay and feed them, are disgraceful to the British name. The present population must be provided for in body and spirit on more liberal principles, or the whole mass of labourers will start into legions of banditti banditti less criminal than those who have made them so than those who by a just but fearful retribution will soon become their victims" About three years later a Parliamentary Commission reported that " the condition of the rural labourers in too many districts was brutal and wretched ; their children during the day were struggling with the pigs for food, and at night were huddled down on damp straw under a roof of rotten thatch." The "blue blood" of the great landlords of England instantly starts into their faces when they hear of working men agitating against enormous " perpetual pensions " which some of the former have for generations wrung from the bone and sinew of labour on account of certain real or sup- posed services rendered to weak or despotic monarchs by ancestors in the semi-barbarous past. If their right to transmit to eldest sons real family property, from age to age, be called in question, if anyone should advocate that all the cultivatable and pastoral land of the country ought to revert, as it formerly did, to the trusteeship of the State, and be rented off to tenants of the crown, who will make the best use of it for the public good, subject to fair compensation to deprived hereditary owners, a wailing outcry is heard from luxurious peers and the landed gentry of "confiscation," "robbery," and so forth. But has there ever been equal solicitude on the part of the Downtrodden English Toilers. 221 landlords of " noble " and " gentle " blood to disgorge their ill-gotten landed legacies from ancestral robbers, who them- selves in many cases were only tenants of the Crown, who, nevertheless, induced their respective sovereigns to make them freeholders without paying for the land, who in addition fenced in " commons " belonging by law to the poor, and who afterwards reposed securely on the accepted principle of every burglar, " possession is nine points of the law"? When rents have been raised by land monopolists to their farming tenants, when farm labourers have been ground down to semi-pauperism by the starvation wages paid them, has corresponding zeal been displayed by the " upper ten " to secure justice to the oppressed toilers of the land ? Again, I am tired of hearing the English people boast of the great prosperity of their country. There's its vast wealth. Yes, but how many get the benefit of it ? How can ever a poor man in this so-called prosperous country get hold of a bit of land for himself? 12,000 persons own 30 out of the 37 million acres in England and Wales. About twenty big Dukes or Lords own the half of all Scotland. Seventeen persons in England and Wales own more than 50,000 acres each, and three of these own more than 100,000 acres each. There is a Duke whose estate has 186,397 acres; and he receives a rental from it of ji 76,044. There are thirty-two landlords whose rent-rolls are more, in the case of each of them, than ^50,000 a year ; and of these twelve get over ; 100,000. The Duke of Norfolk has ^264,564 a year from land ! This is how the wealth and greatness of England is reckoned. One man, because his father happened to have a title and an estate, sticking to both to all eternity, heaps up his enormous money where nobody but his own family can touch it; while millions are living on the brink of starvation, not once or twice in their lives, but every day as it comes. If these 222 Downtrodden English Toilers. great nobles, who are the nodding plumes on the helmet of England, and who draw off the notice of the world from the rags and dirt and want that gather about her feet, would just keep some of the great love they are always talking about being in their hearts to " God the Father and God the Son " for those poor tattered and hungry brethren and sisters near their doors, and use their united influence in raising them a little nearer to the comfort they enjoy themselves, their religion would be more rational and con- sistent. The agricultural labourers, who are close to plenty of wheat, meat, potatoes, and milk, ought to have all they want easily in this great country. But no, the " prosperity " of England is not after that fashion. If there be only a larger amount of cash than there is in any other country, even if it should only be in fifty hands, the wealth and grandeur of England is said to be astounding. But while champagne and turtle soup, hounds, hunters, beasts, and plants from all parts adorn the great palaces, the poor labourer in Dorsetshire has to con- tent himself with vegetables flavoured with bacon fat, or bread and cheese ; in Somersetshire with brown bread dipped in cider; in Cheshire with potatoes or gruel thickened with treacle ; and in the winter time, when work is scarce, even this wretched supply fails, and he is obliged to fall back on the parish for help. Why, considering how little is done by the rich and the titled to strike a blow at this curse of life-long distress I should be ashamed to be known as belonging to the landed gentry and the aristocracy, if I had been so descended. The 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 agricultural labourers whom the Americans call " English serfs," up to a few years since, had no rights which their social superiors felt obliged to respect. They could not generally elect members to Parlia- ment, for they paid too small a rent to have a county vote. Downtrodden English Toilers. 223 Bound to the soil, underpaid and underfed for the most part, they began their career in a hovel and closed it in a poorhouse. In the United Kingdom there are nearly a million who are paupers, and another million hovering on the border line of pauperism one-twentieth of the people living on charity ! Yeomen, on their own snug little pro- perties, used to be the chief cultivators of the land in Eng- land and Wales. With no outgoing for rent, and none for wages, this sturdy and ruddy race was the most independent of mankind. This pride and glory of the English nation is now almost extinct. The system of land tenure that has prevailed for centuries has had the effect of enabling the rich lord to crush out the small proprietor. In the United States, in the greater part of Western Europe and in China, persons of small means can become proprietors of home- steads and small farms ; but it is impossible for a peasant, except in rare instances, to buy a piece of land in England, for the value is beyond him. Why should the right of the lordly legislator to his estates and title in perpetuity be more sacred than the right of the poor man to his tools, furniture, and wages, in perpetuity ? A mortgagee of household goods can sell them to recoup himself, but the law of primogeniture forbids the present entailed owner of land to sell it, absolutely, to pay his law- ful debts. No original inventor be the advantages of his brain products ever so great can secure an interest in these beyond fourteen years. But the land is of immensely greater importance to the sustenance of the whole population than the best book that ever was written, and the most useful invention ever patented. Yet a few nobles and squires claim that their title to the land they have inherited, and to whatever im- provements their tenants may have made upon it at. their own expense, is sacred, perpetual, and inalienable. 224 Downtrodden English Toilers. It is this outrageous dogma of the " divine right " of British nobles to territorial monopoly ; to eject stalwart cottars in favour of sheep, to supplant sheep by deer, to neglect their responsibilities as to the most productive cultivation of the soil, and to keep their labourers in ignor- ance and want, which has disorganised every department of the labour market for three centuries, contributed mainly to the congestion of the town populations, and forced the pestiferous workhouse system into its present gigantic dimensions. Thanks to the Agricultural Labourers' Union, under the leadership of Joseph Arch, for any mitigation which has taken place of late years in the condition of the labourer first crushed to the dust by his social superiors, and then by a natural transition, hated by them. But for trades unions also, established for regulating the sale of labour in the various branches of skilled industry, who can tell to what deeper abyss the heartless tyranny of capital and the unscrupulous despotism of oligarchical monopolists would have condemned the artizan ! " The produce of labour " says Mill, " is redistributed at the present time in an almost inverse ratio to the labour supplied ; the greatest return falls to the lot of those who never work ; after them, to those whose work is only nominal, and thus, in a descending scale wages are reduced in proportion as the labour becomes more onerous and more disagreeable, until at last, that which is the most fatiguing and pernicious to the body, can scarcely secure with certainty the acquisition of the immediate necessities of existence." The direct out- come of this iniquitous system of primogeniture and entail on the one hand and of industrial competition on the other is the ghastly array of paupers, combined with those on the border-line of pauperism. At length, however, the day is dawning for the English Agricultural labourers. In the face of stern Tory opposi- Doiuntrodden English Toilers. 225 tion they have obtained the franchise. The Democratic mandate has gone forth that they shall henceforth admin- ister their own affairs in their Parish Councils, though the squire may squirm, and the parson be ever so disgusted. 226 CHAPTER XII. THE MANUFACTURE OF ENGLISH PAUPERS. WE have beggars in China, but no institution resembling that of pauperism. The degrading Poor Law system of England, by which the deserving poor are often left to starve, while lazy vagabonds who make a mere profession of destitution, or who prefer drink to work, are cared for, is happily unknown in the great Empire to which I have the honour to belong. Want, in the case of able-bodied Chinamen, is rare, because their habits are abstemious and thrifty, their mode of living simple, and their diet, while sufficient for their physical support, is inexpensive, being mostly of a vegetarian character. Among the begging fraternity of China who are always kindly dealt with by native shop- keepers and householders, if their case is seen to be genuine by far the larger number are mendicants, either because they are under the monastic vows of Buddhism, or because they trade on the fact of their being halt, maimed, blind, or leprous. Only a small proportion includes persons who beg from wilfully indolent or intemperate habits. Heaven be thanked ! We are spared the ghastly spectacle to which English eyes have been accustomed for hundreds of years a system of public and, to some extent, of private charity, by which millions of the comparatively small population of England are demoralised, lost to self-respect, turned into cringing sneaks, confirmed loafers, snivelling hypocrites idle, shift less, filthy, skulking, lying dependents. The countless The Manufacture of English Paupers. 227 " doles " and other annual gifts, left to so-called " poor " of England, by well-meaning, priest-ridden, pious ancestors, as a means of " saving their souls," have degenerated in too many instances into baits, to tempt worthless impostors and their families to take up their abode in the districts in which these abused religious and charitable endowments are founded, and to intrigue in order to secure unjust advantages from them. In common with the misguided parish workhouse regime and its wholesale manufacture of pauperism, this false philanthropy has done more to crush high-mindedness in its too willing victims than centuries of compulsory Board School education can effectually overcome. The transition is both easy and natural from pauperism to crime. The former is the foster-parent of the latter ; and the prevalence of both in England is due, though by no means exclusively, to the demoralising conditions under which charitable relief is too often administered. The British tramp has been encouraged in his roving, stealthy, and aimless life by parish alms. The habitual tippler, among the " lower orders," very generally spends his closing years upon the rates. The workhouse, with its system of outdoor and indoor relief, supported by the ratepayers, has become a standing refuge for effete workmen, whom capitalist employers have drained the spirit out of by hard work and by wages so low as to be barely equal to keeping together the bodies and souls of themselves and their families. The same institution, so destructive of true manhood and womanhood, has been heartlessly made use of by county landlords and their farm- tenants, as a final resort for their miserably remunerated and worn-out labourers to close their days in, at the expense of the parish. How weighty are the words of Admiral Maxse, R.N., in his "Causes of the Social Revolt " : " When we examine this matter honestly and without class bigotry and Q 2 228 The Manufacture of English Paupers. conceit, we discover that our boasted prosperity is logically based upon a deliberate calculation of a fixed and extensive element of human misery and helplessness ; and that without the fulfilment of this essential condition of its being, society, as at present constituted, must dissolve." But despite the provision liberally made for the destitute, it is estimated that there are, every year, over 100 deaths from starvation in London alone the wealthiest capital in the world. If that number were drowned in a single acci- dent, what a sensation would be caused ! Out of a popula- tion of 38,000,000 in the United Kingdom, 750,000 are found on the melancholy roll of paupers, in the receipt of workhouse relief on the ist of January in each year, and it is stated by competent authorities that an equal number is mainly dependent on the same source for subsistence, while a third proportion, not smaller than either of the two pro- portions just enumerated, is always found hovering on the boundary line of pauperism. The cost of this pernicious system of parish relief in London alone is close upon ^7,000,000 a year. What a commentary on the social disorganisation and social disparity under which England the great stronghold of foreign missionary societies struggles ! The causes of this overwhelming but preventible wreck- age call for somewhat detailed notice. If we begin with rural districts, it will be found that not a few landowners in Scotland, as well as in England, have swept away the cottages formerly set apart for their labourers, and driven these peasants into overcrowded villages. In these they are compelled, by the miserable pittance they earn, to rent wretched hovels too small for the decent accommodation of themselves and their families. They are crowded like rabbits in a warren, and modesty in sexual relations soon takes its departure. If, in the state of hunger which their The Manufacture of English Paupers 229 insufficient wages prevent them from even moderately appeasing, they are found by the squire's gamekeeper trapping a hare or shooting a pheasant, they are sent for trial before magistrates belonging to the very class which has denied them an adequate supply of the bare necessaries of life in return for their labour ; and their wives and families are left to pine in want, while vindictive punish- ment is meted out to them in a long gaol sentence, by the landed gentry who have largely helped to make them what they are through the agency of the nefarious social system which prevails in the rural parishes of England. " Hodge," forced by the squire to work for starvation wages, is impelled, for the purpose of allaying the pangs of hunger, to appropriate game which a shamelessly partial law pre- serves to the sole use of the occupant of the mansion. When the ill-fed, underpaid cottager, has suffered the penalty of what the law ironically calls theft, in this instance (the representative of land monopoly and inhumanl) selfish luxury being the real criminal) he returns to the society of the village an outcast, and flees to some populous town where he may bury himself in the crowd. Here he can receive no quarter from the Union authorities, as his claim to assistance is confined to his own parish ; yet from this he has been driven by a criminal act for which a selfish local squirearchy is mainly responsible. It would, indeed, be miraculous, if, under such circumstances, the man being consciously manufactured into a pauper, did not in his bitterness against feelingless social superiors, become an habitual criminal. He first sinks through inadequate means of subsistence, and he is kicked for falling by the class that starved him. This is an illustration of that strange anomaly in human nature, which shows men and women to be most pitiless towards those whom they have injured. For once in its long career of subserviency to Upper Class 230 The Manufacture of English Paupers. interests, the Times spoke the truth about the gross injustice shown in the treatment of downtrodden English serfs by their haughty and heartless superiors, when on October ipth, 1864, it said: "The English live under squires, territorial potentates, extensive employers, and local oligarchs, and under this regime they endure an amount of positive tyranny or negative neglect that they would not find surpassed under the most despotic system of the Continent." Even Tennyson, though in far closer affinity, by nature, with the pompous rich than with the humble poor, in a moment of true inspiration wrote : " 'Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steals, Them as 'as coats to their backs an' taakes their regular meals, Noa, but it's them as niver knows wheer a meal's to be 'ad, Taake my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad." Reckless marriages, with the improvidence which usually accompanies them, must be credited with a large share of British pauperism. This was the view taken by J. Stuart Mill, who said, "Poverty only exists in such industrious countries as this because mankind follow their instincts of reproduction without due consideration." A reference to the birth-rate of the London sanitary districts confirms Mr. Mill's judgment in a convincing manner. In a table of vital statistics of these districts for the first quarter of 1893, we have distinct evidence of the less restrained breeding power of the poor as compared with that of those living in a higher grade of comfort. The wealthy districts of Kensington, St. George's, Hanover Square, St. James', Westminster, and Hampstead, with a collective population of 340,000 inhabitants, had in the three months specified 1816 births. On the other hand, in the poor districts of Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, and St. George's- in-the-East, with a collective population of 372,000, there were in the same period 3855 births. Here it is demon- The Manufacture of English Paupers. 231 strated that very nearly twice as many children are born in the poor districts per icoo inhabitants as in metropolitan districts which are rich. Hampstead has a birth-rate of 19 '9 per 1000, while the birth-rate in Whitechapel is 44 '8 per looo. But excessive as the size of families is among the poor of England in proportion to their means, their case in this respect is materially improved since 1877 the year of the celebrated Bradlaugh-Besant trial for publishing an American book on the population question. To make matters worse especially in the metropolis some parishes are crowded with paupers, and were until lately overwhelmed with poor rates which they were unable to bear and can with great difficulty bear even now just in proportion as they were burdened with pauperism, while rich parishes, able to contribute liberally to the rates without feeling the burden, were rated lightly. The Bill of Mr. Fowler for equalising London poor rates, however, should have the effect of mitigating this glaring and long-standing injustice. Pauperism tends to increase from the undiscriminating treatment of applicants for poor-law relief when they appear before Boards of Guardians. Enough time is not allowed for proper inquiry into each case. Hence imposture passes too often undetected, while applicants, unaccustomed to dependence on charity, feel so keenly the position into which they have been forced by want, that the very genuine character of their shyness and sensitiveness is apt to be misinterpreted by the rough-minded men sitting in judgment on them as if based on misrepresentation. The time usually occupied in disposing of applications for relief by guardians is at the rate of eleven cases in four minutes, or nearly three cases per minute. If a system were specially invented for the express purpose of fostering charlatanism at the public expense, involving the yearly waste of millions sterling, it 232 The Manufacture Oj English Paupers. could not possibly prove more effective. It is this laxity in dispensing public as well as private charity which has led to the formation of charity organisation societies, which, how- ever, are prone to err as much in austerity as the institutions whose administrations they seek to improve err in leniency and indifference. Another cause of British pauperism consists of the facilities given by English law which is often perverse and contradictory to mothers of illegitimate children to obtain support from men with whom they cohabit, compared with the difficulties experienced by respectable married women, whose children are legitimate, in getting support from cruel husbands. Under the law as it stands, a faithful wife can only extort support from a reluctant husband who neglects or deserts her, by applying to the guardians for relief. As there are so large a number of women so circumstanced in " Christian England," it is obvious that multitudes are com- pelled to come upon the rates who would otherwise be glad to look to sources less humiliating for aid in times of need. But as if the law were meant to give direct encouragement to concubinage, it happens that if a man keeps a mistress she could compel him to give her from 25. 6d. to 55. per week for every illegitimate child, although the only way in which a virtuous wife can coerce an unwilling husband to avert starvation from herself and her children is through application, in forma pauperis^ to the workhouse authorities. A man living illegally with a deceased wife's sister, can be compelled by the strong arm of the law, without the intervention of the guardians being invoked, to afford sustenance and shelter to his partner in illegality and her children, while the children of the woman's deceased sister have no such recourse. If the union between the man and his deceased wife's sister could be made legal, the children of the living wife would at once be in as bad a plight as those The Manufacture of English Paupers. 233 of the dead one. If British citizens cannot be made decent, honest, and law-abiding by Act of Parliament, it is only too plain that there is at least distinct provision made for a section of them becoming paupers by Act of Parliament. Orphanhood is a fruitful cause of English pauperism, and it is distressing for a "heathen " like myself to contemplate that there should exist throughout the whole of the United Kingdom an institution, under the name of a " workhouse," which dooms helpless orphans, through no fault of their own, to the lowest social abyss, in which hopeless degrada- tion is worked in mind and character, and in which the pauper spirit becomes hereditary. An English lady some time ago adopted a workhouse child eighteen months old, and it was completely ignorant of the most familiar European mark of affection known among children and adults of both sexes. In China we never have practised kissing. So it would be no sign of barbarism there for a child of the age mentioned to be unacquainted with that act. But for an English child, even so young, not to know how to kiss, betrays, not unnaturally in the eyes of English people, a truly savage condition. Passing from the workhouse to the workhouse school, the orphan inmates of refined parents are obliged to mingle with the depraved children of depraved parents. When the former are ill, they must share sick wards with the refuse of the population and the worst of characters. The atmosphere of workhouse schools is hopelessly pauperising, but when there is added the fact that these establishments contain children of thieves, tramps, and of women of ill fame, they can only be regarded as moral Pandemoniums. A workhouse matron once said : " Of 300 orphan children who have left the house, I do not believe one is doing well." Abandoned pauper women have been known 234 The Manufacture of English Paupers. in workhouses to strip to the waist and dance madly, shout- ing accompaniments of obscenest songs. A workhouse master says : " These were the children of paupers, and brought up themselves in the workhouse." Of 165 girls apprenticed from a certain workhouse, only 18 have done well, and within three years 73 returned to the workhouse as the only home ever known to them. In another case, "out of 165 young paupers provided with clothes to enable them to get employment, 58 found their way back to the workhouse in 2^ months." "Out of 180 who went out into the world from Cork workhouse, 60 returned soon." The history of 80 prostitutes which could be traced, showed them for the most part to have been children of the same institution. An officer of a Lancashire workhouse school remarks : " The number of girls who fell after leaving is painful to think of." Some asylums for the rescue of fallen women positively object to receive any who have been brought up in a workhouse, as such cases were mostly found to be utterly incorrigible. When we Chinamen calmly think of an arrangement existing in England, for hundreds of years, having the palpable effect of demoralising a very large portion of its population, it cannot be wondered at that Buddhists have sometimes considered whether it was not their duty to send missionaries to convert this benighted country from the error of its ways. Except prison, no place can possibly be worse for infants and half-grown children. A lady, on a certain occasion, hired a girl of 13 from one of these pauper refuges. Soon she ran away, exclaiming " Oh ! I couldn't stay, ma'am. They scorned me so." "Who scorned you so?" asked the lady. "The children of the town," she replied ; and from that time she began to droop, and died of a broken heart ! For a number of years past the unfavourable results of the workhouse system for children has led to the develop- The Manufacture of English Paupers. 235 merit of a plan for boarding out workhouse children, which has been attended with highly satisfactory results. Out of 923 children placed under the care of foster-parents in Glasgow, only forty were lost sight of, and less than 5 per cent, of the remainder turned out badly. Results equally satisfactory can be traced all over the kingdom where the system has been tried. Inadequate help to the deserving poor or alms per- functorily given by sympathetic individuals and charitable institutions without proper investigation paralyses the spirit of honest independence, and infallibly swells the ranks of pauperism. There is infinitely more money devoted yearly to the cause of charity in England than is necessary to place all the destitute who have to provide for themselves alone, or for their families in addition, if only the amount was dispensed with care and reasonable economy. But not a few kind-hearted people give, under a mere blind benevolent impulse, which has been suddenly aroused by some effectively told sham tale of woe. They selfishly take the quickest way open to them of escaping any further discomfort inflicted on them by the story of the applicant by dropping a coin into his hand, without the smallest regard to the case being investigated and proved to be genuine, or to the sum given being sufficient not only to allay present distress, but to set the supposed subject of it, with his household, permanently on their feet. So with many of the " Dorcas " and "Benevolent Societies" connected with the legion of religious bodies in England It is evident from the com- parative trifles contributed to them by all classes in Christian congregations, Catholic and Protestant, that they have become, for the most part, nominal tests of affected self- sacrifice for the good of others in Church members. The tacit understanding in the congregation is that if no sub- scription is made to these charitable funds, even by those 236 The Manufacture of English Paupers. who are able to contribute, the omission will not be deemed fatal to a safe profession of religion, although one's name in the charity list is useful in keeping up one's reputation for combined devoutness and philanthropy. The doling out of these funds to those believed to be in need of them is too often entrusted to members usually ladies of the congregation, who welcome the opportunity thus afforded of airing their self-importance and patronage towards their social inferiors. But it is extremely rare that alleged cases of destitution are dealt with by the organisa- tions referred to so thoroughly that the reality of these cases is placed beyond all doubt, and that the help given is so adequate as to supersede the necessity of rendering any further assistance. It would be a blessing for the social welfare of England if a miracle should level such ecclesias- tical barriers to industry and thrift, since by their heedless pottering they operate largely as premiums on hollow pre- tence and indolence. A city missionary states that two ladies used to visit, in a quiet way, a depraved family in a densely populated court, and always made a point of relieving them. Prior to the settlement of this family in the court, the occupiers were fairly sober and industrious. But observing how much better the proteges of these two Ladies Bountiful fared by practising deception as to their needs, they became discontented, and immediately began to attract the notice of these unintentional patronesses of sham want to themselves. As they found that filth and rags in the case of their envied neighbours were stepping- stones to relief, the whole court combined to reject Christian ministrations which were unaccompanied with alms, and soon became a nest of squalid vice and drunken pauperism, under the influence of misdirected charity. This is but a typical instance out of thousands that might be quoted. The charity bestowed, whether out of pity or ostentation, The Manufacture of English Paupers, 237 into the hand of the chance applicant for relief, is often an encouragement to debauchery and pauperism, and creates one half of the misery it seeks to relieve, but cannot relieve one half of the misery it creates. Who, then, are the proper recipients of charitable relief? All who, from no fault of their own, sink into a helpless state. Orphans or deserted children ; men or women rendered destitute by illness or accident; artisans out of work, compelled to part with their all for bread ; men and women who have lost their character, and with it the em- ployment by which they earned a living. Such aid as will place them in a position to rise again, and as will enable them to retrieve their honour, that is, in some respects, the most divine charity of all. But if the voluntary relief given be indiscriminate, we have, sooner or later, a repetition of the mendicant orgies which usually result from the lax administration of charity. In New York some years ago a large number of soup kitchens and free lodgings were pro- vided in the fashion I have just condemned. This reckless benevolence attracted the professional beggars of the whole State. The streets of the city swarmed with them. Ladies were robbed by impostors on their own doorsteps. Labourers in the receipt of good wages, impelled by their low and dependent natures, forsook work in the hope of being henceforth supported in idleness ; domestics left houses where work was required of them and applied for quarters in free lodging-houses, in which they were supplied with free meals, being at the same time left at liberty to roam in the streets at night. The result, as might be expected, was that many of them were ruined. Not long since at Darlington a rogues' holiday took place under similar conditions. Large processions of claimants of charity marched through the streets, and charitable -citizens with the guardians were literally besieged by the 238 The Manufacture of English Paupers mob's importunity. The advice of the Local Government Board in London was asked. The reply returned was : "None must starve, apply the workhouse test." The test, accordingly, was applied, and the seeming cloud of distress in Darlington was quickly dispelled. The 1500 or 2000 persons who were said to be starving suddenly vanished, nobody knew where or how. Darlington successfully met the crisis by forcing the idle to work, and their pretence collapsed like a pricked bubble. Had New York adopted the same course, and assisted the really distressed to emigrate where work was plentiful, true charity would have been exercised. The unwise plan followed only had the effect of destroying the self-respect of thousands, and enticing them to degradation. The German township of Elberfeld furnishes a striking example of the success of the sifting process which has been mentioned. By that plan the number of local paupers was reduced in twelve years from 4800 to 1800, though during that period the population increased from 50,000 to 60,000, and great commercial depression existed. One neighbourhood was infested with beggars. The next district was a nest of impostors. A charitable relief com- mittee was established (i) to repress vagrancy by the strict enforcement of the Vagrancy Laws, (2) to investigate thoroughly each application for relief, and (3) to bestow adequate relief wherever cases were proved to be deserving. The officers appointed by the relief committee put them- selves in communication with the police, the poor law authorities, and all charitable societies in the neighbourhood. The result was magical. In twelve months the streets were freed from beggars, and impostors fled. Yet the action of the committee was liberal. During a severe frost of eight weeks ,18 to ^"25 a week was distributed. Every case was exhaustively known. Within a fortnight from the break-up of the frost, only 53. a week was required to be given away in relief. The Manufacture of English Paupers, 239 Not the least prolific cause of British pauperism is intemperance, which is one of the most notorious plague spots of English life. That vice, again, is largely due to the filth, want, neglect, and insensibility to intellectual influences in which the masses have been allowed to wallow for many centuries; their condition, in these respects, only quite recently having begun to undergo amelioration. To realise how deeply the British physical constitution is saturated with alcohol from past national habits, it is necessary to glance at the history of the enthralling power of intoxicating liquors over the English which has lasted for many centuries. The Saxon King Edgar decreed that there should not be more than one alehouse in a parish. The first parliamentary enactment relating to the control of drink shops was passed in 1504 in the reign of Henry VII. It empowers justices to close any house for selling ale in towns, and to take securities for the good behaviour of all innkeepers. Up to the beginning of the i8th century A.D., ale was of low alcoholic strength. Until 1688, the British appetite for drink seems to have been fairly moderate. Only 527,500 gallons of spirits were distilled annually for the supply of a population of 5,700,000, while the quantity of beer brewed was 6,000,000 barrels. But in 1689 an Act was passed which opened the flood gates of evil and misery from which the country has not yet recovered. In that year the importa- tion of foreign spirits was prohibited, and the trade of distilling was opened up to all English subjects on payment of a trifling duty. This laid the foundation of brutal drinking habits, which in thirty-five years acquired the force and prevalence of a violent epidemic. Lecky " History of England in the i8th Century " tells us that liquor was sold at the corner of every street, and boards were hung out announcing that customers could be made drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and 240 The Manufacture of English Paupers, could have "straw for nothing." So destructive had the drink demon become to the manhood and womanhood of England, that on zoth February, 1736, the Justices of Middlesex petitioned the House of Commons, affirming that drink had ruined thousands, rendered multitudes in- capable of labour ; that, in great part, poverty, murders, and robberies in London might be traced to this cause, and that if the disaster was not checked the kingdom would be ruined. The majority were wedded to their degrading habits , and an attempt to enforce an act for reducing and regulating the gin traffic caused riots ; so overpowering had the taste^ for strong drink become, and the illicit sale of spirits apparently could not be stopped. It was found needful to pass another Bill to mitigate the evil in 1737, but the effect of the new measure was inappreciable. A dozen years afterwards, no less than 17,000 unlicensed houses flourished within the radius of the metropolitan bills of mortality. An eminent Bishop of the Anglican Church about this time wrote, " There is no safety of living in town or country ; robbery and murders are frequent. Our people have become what they never were before, cruel and in- human. These accursed spirituous liquors have changed their very nature." New and more rigorous measures were passed which, in thirty years, reduced the consumption of spirits to 2,000,000 gallons. But, down to thirty years ago, licences were granted according to magisterial discretion or free trade principles, without reference to the wish of the inhabitants. Even now the number of public houses is altogether disproportionate to the wants of the people. The Gladstone Ministry (1893) brought in a Veto Bill authorising the number of licensed houses in any district to be decided by a local plebiscite, but the public house interest was too strong for the desired reform to be carried. More than sixty years ago, that distinguished philan- The Manufacture of English Paupers. 241 thropist, Lord Brougham, was strangely but unconsciously induced with a view to the diminution of drunkenness to "do evil that good might come." As a means of weaning intemperate Englishmen from drinking spirits he passed a law for the establishment of beershops. Unhappily, no precaution was taken that the beer allowed to be drunk on the premises should be comparatively unintoxicating, and the result has been disastrous, adding fuel to the flame of the drunkard's appetite instead of quenching it. Worse still, a large number of beershops afterwards obtained licences for the sale of spirits, and the beer sold to customers, as a rule, had been of great alcoholic strength. This mischief is exceedingly aggravated by Excise regula- tions. It is estimated that the amount of duty charged is only is. 6d. to is. 8d. per gallon on alcohol contained in beer, against los. per gallon on that contained in spirits. An eminent statistician has stated that 75 per cent of the alcohol consumed in the United Kingdom is used in the form of beer. Recently 180,000 persons in one year were proceeded against in England and Wales. Of these 10,000 were habitual drunkards. Yet the number prosecuted form a small proportion of the whole, for a man must be " inca- pable " as well as drunk, before he is liable to apprehension by the police. Judges, governors of gaols, chaplains, clergymen, and superintendents of asylums, are unanimous in the belief that the great bulk of pauperism comes from intemperance, as also 20 per cent, of insanity, according to eminent doctors, and 60 per cent, according to the late Lord Shaftesbury. Reckoning that for every single drunken man arrested two escape, we have considerably over half a million habitual drunkards in England and Wales alone. Assuming that not more than two-thirds are heads of families, and that ach head represents a family of five, we have 2,000,000 R 242 The Manufacture of English Paupers. men, women, and children who are members of drunkards* families. Out of 780,000 persons classed as paupers, between 500,000 and 600,000 are made so through in- temperance. Out of 71,000 lunatics in England and Wales, 14,000 are insane from the same cause. It is one of the countless inconsistencies of English law that the State enacts prohibitory laws against absolute illiteracy, vending ex- plosives, the publication and sale of indecent books, the discharge of fire-arms in public places, and even against the establishment of betting and gambling houses. Why should not the liquor traffic of the United Kingdom, which is admittedly fraught with public danger, be placed under much stricter regulation in the interests of public morality and happiness? One thing is proved beyond the possibility of doubt the number of drunkards in each locality is determined by the number of places devoted to the sale of intoxicating liquors, especially those licensed to sell ardent spirits. It will, indeed, be an enormous material, as well as moral benefit to England, Scotland, and Ireland, if Mr. Fowler's Bill should become law, and tend to bring the number of liquor houses into fairer proportion to the requirements of the nation. With all the ingenuity of missionary detractors of China, they are able to bring no such accusations of habitual drunkenness against the Chinese as are brought by the English against themselves. My countrymen are essentially a sober and quiet people. Even the use of opium the soother of ruffled minds among the poor of my country which may here and there be carried to excess, is not a drug indigenous to China, but has been forced upon my countrymen at the point of the bayonet, and with the aid of naval guns, by the English nation, who wanted to compel us to buy this noxious product of British India for the enrichment of British vendors, even at the cost of The Manufacture of English Paupers, 243 Chinese demoralisation. The Government at Pekin pro- tested against the introduction of opium into the Imperial Dominions, as likely to be followed by moral havoc among Chinese subjects. All the redress we got was, first cannon balls, then continuous and increasing shipments of opium, accompanied with the peculiar English antidote of poisonous whisky, bibles, prayer-books, and missionaries, ignorant of the Chinese language, and of the old and philosophical religions they had come to combat But the only practical solution I can see of the drink problem in England is that which has so effectually sup- pressed drunkenness in Sweden. In the latter country formerly the annual production of spirits was 26,000,000 gallons, with the result of causing unparalleled degradation among the inhabitants. Laing, the traveller in Scandinavia, says: "No other 3,000,000 of beings in Europe appeared to commit within a given time so large a number of crimes and moral transgressions." The material condition of the country was correspondingly bad. Thriftlessness and reck- less poverty were conspicuous everywhere. More than half a century ago the Swedish Diet passed a licence reform Act enabling parochial and municipal authorities, subject to confirmation by the Governor of the province, to fix the number of retail shops and public-houses. The result was to reduce the number of distilleries from 44,000 in 1850 to 457 in 1862, and the production of spirits to no less than one-fourth. After an experience of a quarter of a century a trustworthy writer states that " the tone of thrift, honesty, and contentment is everywhere apparent, and the very garments of the poorer classes show self-respect, and there is an utter absence of drunken persons." Improvement has steadily continued down to the present time. Gothenberg, the second city of Sweden, with 60,000 inhabitants, was long the most drunken city in the world. In 1855 appre- R 2 244 The Manufacture of English Paupers. hensions for drunkenness amounted to one in ten of the population, and in a published report of the city's condition it was said that " probably in no community were brutish coarseness and deep poverty so common." In the same year the greatest part of the licences were purchased by the representatives of the municipality, who first reduced the number of bars, and then placed the remainder in charge of persons who, it was intended, should derive no benefit from the sale of intoxicating drinks. Drinking establishments were made comfortable, and not only dealt in intoxicants, but also in the supply of food and non-intoxicating drinks. From the sale of the two articles last named, the person in charge derived considerable profit. He had, consequently, every motive to encourage the sale of them, while it was in no sense his interest to promote the sale of intoxicants. Class legislation on the subject was eschewed. Customers could get drink without being tempted to drink too much. All profit of the sale of intoxicating liquors belongs to the town. Rates have fallen to a very marked extent under the new arrangement. Reform would have been more rapid had the licences of 400 beershops, music saloons, and grocers' licences been acquired at the same time. The town, how- ever, has prospered wonderfully under the regulative system. Artisans and labourers are better paid. In twenty years the streets were completely cleared from drunken persons ; the behaviour ofthe people was proper ; the houses of the working classes were well kept ; there was no poverty visible. Some reformers, ignoring the physio- logical diagnosis of intemperance, look for a remedy to higher education ; but such an expectation has ever been, and ever will be, doomed to disappointment. Education, so called, was as common among unskilled as among skilled labourers in Sweden prior to the adoption of summary measures for the regulation of the liquor traffic, when the The Manufacture of English Paupers. 245 people were degraded, despite their possession of educational advantages. There may be good houses, parks, an ample water supply, innocent recreation, strict police, better ad- ministration of the poor laws ; improvidence, too, especially when due to intemperance, may be stamped as a crime. Yet all these inducements to the culture of social and domestic virtue may easily be neutralised by 140,000 publicans and beer sellers. As I have remarked in another chapter, the darkest aspect of the drink question in England is that it claims among its victims a large and increasing number of women the mothers of future generations of British who must in con- sequence be the bearers of a deteriorated progeny. In Liverpool in a single year 10,000 women, against 12,000 men, have been arrested for drunkenness. The proportion is not much smaller in other great British and Irish centres. The amount of cruelty maiming of children and wounding of innocent infants in the drunken fury of parents divorce cases, and the numberless accidents directly traceable to intemperance in the weaker sex it is impossible fully to estimate. Above all, the bearing of this agency on the production of pauperism must be at once self-evident. There is only one other active cause of British pauperism that I will cite, and I shall do no more here than allude to it, as I shall have occasion to enter fully into a subject which is germane to it in another chapter. I refer to the compulsory alienation of the yeomen and peasants of England from the soil, when these small agricultural tenants of the Crown had the land, which they were careful to cultivate, taken from them by corrupt sovereigns, who paid it over to their hireling retainers as the price of unscrupulous service rendered to the King or his dynasty ; the new occupants keeping it more for ornamental and speculative purposes than for agriculture, horticulture, grazing, or timber-growing. This 246 The Manufacture of English Paupers. cruel divorce of the peasant proprietors of England from the soil has probably been more potent in producing pauperism than all other causes put together. By it a vast number of the people were cut off, gradually, from the employment to which they and their forefathers had been accustomed for centuries. As their living failed in the country they were impelled by dire necessity to seek for the means of support for themselves and their families in the towns, which had already become burdened with population, in most cases beyond their capacity to furnish sufficient wage-earning employment for the inhabitants. The only alternative left for the new comers, unless indeed they were willing to commit suicide, was to live by crime or by charity. Is it surprising that highway robbery should have become chronic in suburbs, and petty larceny in populous centres ? What more natural than that, on the other hand, the country from east to west and from north to south should swarm with beggars whose numerous posterity has known no other occupation ? The latter class, after spending a great part of their lives in dependence on outdoor relief or as workhouse "casuals," in old age, as might be expected, become permanent inmates of that institution. An effectual blow cannot be struck at pauperism, I am convinced, until, as in China, the land returns to State ownership, and systematic efforts are made compulsion where hereditary laziness stands in the way to place on the soil, under effective supervision and guidance, the mass of the unem- ployed. In a generation or two, the yawning gulf which now exists between the overfed rich, who revel in sensuality, and the underfed poor, who must inevitably be criminals or paupers, would almost disappear. The other remedies which have been proposed would, of course, have to be put concurrently in operation. 247 CHAPTER XIII. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN ENGLAND. IT has been stated in a previous chapter that England and China radically differ in their respective theories of crime, and consequently in their treatment of it. In England, the custom for ages and generations has been for judges to look upon transgressions of the law simply as external acts verified by approved evidence without regard to their specific causes, the conditions under which they are committed, or the effect of the punishment inflicted on the characters of offenders. The law as administered in England for centuries, and until law reform associations set to work in earnest, has been an active agent in fostering into activity those very criminal tendencies it was expressly framed to discourage. It makes no inquisition, as a rule, into the circumstances under which crime of any kind is committed whether resulting from constitutional defect, heredity, the pressure of want, the associations of habitually bad companions, in which the criminal may have been born, bred, or moulded, or from some other irresistible force. Yet every intelligent observer of human life and conduct knows that nothing is more obvious than the difference between one temperament and another as a predisposing cause of actions. Some anaemic and phlegmatic persons are hardly capable of feeling excited about anything, while others, full-blooded, robust, mercurial, and generally impul- sive, are roused to uncontrollable passion on the smallest provocation. Innocence of crimes of violence, in some cases, is due to a lack of intense feeling, while in others 248 Crime and Punishment in England. they spring naturally out of a fiery, if ill-regulated, organisation. As Charles Kingsley truly says though the spirit of his words have a much wider application than the words them- selves "There are drunkards from birth, harlots from the breast, and men and women damned before they are born." Or to modify the words of Shakspeare, some are born criminals, some achieve crime, and some have crime thrust upon them. In order to secure the Christian Deity, whom His worshippers reverence as perfect in wisdom, justice, and goodness, from all suspicion of blame for the short- comings of His intelligent creatures, English theologians have always laid the greatest possible stress on the absurd doctrine of equal personal responsibility in all cases of wrong-doing by human beings. But the manifest drift of European science and philosophy, during the past thirty years, has been to minimise the bearing of individual re- sponsibility, to make every man "a creature of circum- stances," and to throw the onus of responsibility for the failure of the stray units of society to keep within the bounds which the law prescribes, upon an inherited, badly- shaped brain, combined with the gross neglect shown by society itself to make the path of right much easier for every man, woman, and child to tread. It is the utterly false dogma of equal personal responsibility a stock dogma of the priesthood alike in Catholic and Protestant churches which is accountable for that most preposterous attribute of legal punishment in England vindictiveness, a heritage handed down from our anthropoidal ancestors, to which we are reconciled under the soothing name of " deterrent." Up to a short time ago all other considerations were made subservient to this. No matter if the criminal were the product of generations of evildoers, confirmed bad example and diabolical misdirection, and therefore more to be pitied Crime and Punishment in England. 249 than blamed, the law simply narrowed the question as to whether or not he had or had not been proved to have done something held to be legally punishable by the magistrate. No matter if the prisoner was young and reclaimable under a different sort of penal discipline, from that to which he was sentenced, his restoration to a law-abiding life was treated as quite secondary to his condemnation to herd with malefactors possibly ten times worse than himself, and under whose influence, combined with a purposely insufficient diet, he was simply qualifying for greater proficiency in crime. As the phrase went, " the law must be satisfied," which, translated into other language, simply means that it must have its " pound of flesh " out of him in degradation and suffering, even if the penal course appointed by the law should render his return to correct habits hopeless, and swell infinitely the criminal ranks, which its aim should above all things be to thin. Happily, the old lex talionis derived from the blood- exacting penal code of the ancient Hebrew tribal God, Jahveh, is being discredited in proportion as the influence of science, philosophy, and humanity is coming to the front. Still, however, much has to be done before the true theory of the origin of crime is practically recognised by Parlia- ment, the bench, and the bar, and its punishment is made, as far as possible, corrective, instead of retaliatory. At the same time, it is readily admitted that there will always be numerous cases which, from one cause or another, are im- pervious to remedial agency. There need be no difficulty in permanently separating such cases from those which are reclaimable. China is entitled to the merit, as distinguished from Christian nations, who saddle the wrongdoer himself with the blame of his conduct and character being what they are, of tracing crime to causes outside the offender. Hence the authorities in my country, as previously remarked, 250 Crime and Punishment in England. hold parents who might have done more to keep the criminal in check liable to punishment for neglect of parental duty. I do not say that my people have as yet fully comprehended the true view of crime and the normal relation between crime and punishment, and how punish ment should be adapted to the varying circumstances of criminals. But if we take a period of, say, the last thousand years, as a whole it will be found that the Chinese have been more rational in their punitive administration than the English have been. For centuries, day by day, Newgate and Tyburn were like human slaughter-houses, capital punishment being in force for what would now be deemed comparatively small offences, and the number of victims would be considered absolutely appalling by Chinamen. So completely was the element of retribution paramount in the punishment of crime. The grim humour of the position was that certain crimes, such as sheep stealing, which were punished with death, increased under the extreme penalty of the law and diminished when they ceased to be visited with the death penalty ! But, with all its boasted religion and civilisation, the United Kingdom still requires the patrol of 30,000 policemen, costing an annual expenditure of ^2,000,000, apart from ^6,000,000 devoted to gaols. Many scores of thousands every year are convicted in the United Kingdom of crime and sent to prison for various terms or to the gallows ; and this is only a single regiment of the full stand- ing army of criminals who prey on English society, invade by day and by night the peace of homes, and make con- tinual attacks with more or less success on life and property. With provoking apathy the countless sufferers from crime stand by and witness the farce of scores of thousands of chronic offenders against criminal law being allowed to commit larceny and burglary, obtain money Crime and Punishment in England. 251 under false pretences, and perpetrate murder, go to prison, finish their term, be liberated, resume their old tricks, and come up again for trial, to be again sentenced at frequent intervals. In this shameful and monotonous round of folly these hardened evil-doers often spend their days, until they have no more strength left to defraud the public. Having lived most of their lives as predatory animals and guests of the Queen, they spend their remaining years in the workhouse, at the cost of the ratepayers of their parish. Nevertheless, if that house of " irresponsible chatter," most fitly called Parliament^ were to decree to-morrow that all habitual criminals convicted four times after the age of twenty-one should be deprived of their liberty for life, and that all the members of their families should be banished to a remote part of the British Empire, where they would be vigorously trained to follow an industrious and honest life, far away from the temptations that have overpowered their parents, the bulk of coarse offences would gradually cease, a number of gaols might safely be closed, and rates and taxes reduced. The police have already a sufficient acquaintance with the haunts of criminals to root them out, with the greatest possible advantage to their posterity. All that is needed is that the Laputan statesmen of England should rescue a little time from their accustomed solemn law mangling, party wrangling, and bungling foreign diplomacy to apply their minds to this social problem in earnest. There is no want of knowledge as to the main causes of crime, and how these may be reduced to a minimum. Statesman- ship alone is awaited to apply the spark to the fuel ready to be kindled. Among the prevailing types of British criminals is the pickpocket who dexterously relieves people of their purses, watches, chains, and scarf pins in crowded thoroughfares, omnibuses, tramcars, and railway carriages. The name ot 252 Crime and Punishment in England. burglar is a familiar household word. He may pay an untimely visit through the roof, the window, or by forcing the back door, as best suits his convenience. The begging-letter impostor sometimes imposes on benevolent ladies in the "evening of unmarried life," and on kind- hearted clergymen. The concocted tale of woe which is the stock-in-trade of this pretender usually describes misfor- tune which has overtaken the writer or his family by the recent failure ' of some well-known bank, or the occurrence of a fire which has rendered him houseless, or continued illness in his family which has consumed his all in doctors' bills. Sometimes, after a parade of past trials, he winds up his appeal to the charitable with the encouraging state- ment that a situation is awaiting him in another part of the country, but he cannot avail himself of it for want of funds to convey him to the place. In cases where he thinks a personal application and a suave address will be most effectual he adjusts his appliances accordingly. The "Long Firm " is a favourite device by which a certain class of robbers misappropriate the property of others. It is repre- sented by conspiracy. Several criminals combine and order various kinds of goods to be sent to places appointed for their reception. The men in attendance inform the man delivering the goods to them that they are only clerks, and that the partners are not in. If the senders are weak enough to leave the goods without receiving payment, no time is lost by the " Long Firm " in turning them into cash, and a hasty removal is made to fresh premises. When a number of partners are actively engaged in this fraudulent business in different parts of a large town at the same time, the amount of plunder put in their power is considerable. A very plausible way of imposing on people of rustic simplicity is for a deceitful expert to come up with a bland face to a stranger from the country, and claim to have known him Crime and Punishment in England. 253 many years ago, regretting, however, that he himself should have grown out of the recollection of the person he is addressing. The impostor, if he thinks his course safe, pro- ceeds to ask about the health of certain imaginary relatives of the country cousin. The moral of this extemporised friend- ship is not long deferred. An accident has befallen the intruder which has left him without funds, and a polite request is made for a loan which, of course, would never be repaid. There are umbrella thieves who pay professional visits to churches, libraries, and other public places, their speciality being to snatch off umbrellas, which are pawned as promptly as possible. A class of shrewd criminals feign illness, and fall down in the street, in the hope that some kindly-dis- posed people may take compassion on their apparent dis- tress, which they are not unmindful to say as part of their scheme is due to want of food and shelter. A very common form of British crime is defaulting by rate collectors, secretaries, and bank cashiers, whose salaries are not equal to their expenditure. They may occasionally be tempted to deviate from the straight path by misfortune of some kind, but more frequently, I fear, by extravagant living, gambling, betting, or Stock Exchange speculation. With temptations to ruinous ventures of the kinds named, England is honeycombed, and a large section of her people demoralised. It too often happens that trustees, executors, and trusted legal advisers apply to their own use securities entrusted to their care, and are obliged to live for lengthened periods in quarters far removed from their families, set apart for them by the State. An advertisement for a servant sometimes brings a female who only wants to be allowed a few minutes by herself in the drawing-room while the lady of the house is preparing to see her. She skilfully tucks under her waterproof, when 254 Crime and Punishment in England. nobody is looking, one or two " unconsidered trifles," not likely to be readily missed. For the nonce she talks of taking the situation, but really her mission is already accomplished. An interesting variety in these plundering manceuvres consists of a visit paid to a house by a man who wants to see the occupant on important business, but he always takes care to call when he is pretty sure the master is absent. He only wishes to be left in the hall or the drawing-room for a brief period, to allow of his escape with what portable articles he can easily run away with before he can be laid hold of. Or the lady of the house is informed by the intriguer that her husband has just met with an accident in the street, and that he requires a cab fare to convey him to the hospital. There is a class of thieves who cleverly place network inside the opening of street post-office pillar boxes for the purpose of intercepting letters when posted, in the hope of finding enclosures of money or valuables. It is painful to have to say that detectives have, now and then, been met with in England who accept bribes to connive at crime. It is estimated that there are 40,000 thieves and depre- dators always at large in the United Kingdom, and that 23,000 are apprehended annually on suspicion of indict- able crimes. Of the latter number about 12,000 are annually committed for trial. The miscellaneous category of thieves given above does not include the class who too often pursue their calling with impunity as fraudulent promoters of limited liability companies, endorsers to banks of false securities, people who knowingly and deliberately contract debts to landlords, tradesmen and others, which they never had the remotest prospect of paying. The false and reckless way in which they live makes their whole career a prolonged unprincipled gamble. There have been merchants in London who, Crime and Punishment in England. 255 when they were unable to hypothecate with the banks honest securities against advances, manufactured bills and shipping documents on which they deceived bankers into advancing to them large amounts, while the alleged securities, thus accepted, were not worth the paper they were written upon. I have known the secretary of a bank in London, who fell into the hands of stockbrokers, who dragged him into the huge speculative quagmire in Throg- morton-street, London, where he was tempted by the sirens who haunt the place to part not only with all his own money, but with securities valued at ^60,000 belonging to the bank in which he was employed, and which he "melted." His crime the first with which he was ever chargeable was expiated by a very long imprisonment. Another species of crime frequently practised is the mis- representation of mining property in a prospectus which is afterwards discovered to be bogus. They offer it to the public as genuine, and induce investors to take shares, who, they well know, must lose their money. I have known a large firm of London merchants conspire with the resident ambassador in England of a foreign State, in order to render defective accounts of the pro- duct which they sold on behalf of the Government of that foreign State, that the amount of unlawful spoil shared between the firm and the ambassador might be hidden from the Government. Had a criminal action been undertaken against the firm there was ample evidence to commit them ; but their reputation was saved by bribery. Investors in England have lent more than ^1,000,000,000 to foreign countries, the greater part of which the lenders will never see again, the mass of the borrowing States having become bankrupt. In many cases the interest on the loans remains unpaid. The millions of money which have mysteriously disappeared, in commis- 256 Crime and Punishment in England. sions and charges under false representations, when the net amounts due to the borrowing Governments, in each instance, came to be paid over to them, has often been astounding to the uninitiated. Philip of Macedon used to say that there was no cranny too small for a bag of gold to go through, and leakage has occurred in connection with foreign loans, enriching beyond the bounds of honesty, as well as beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, the contractors and syndicates by whom these loans were raised had it always formed the subject of a lawsuit, would have blighted many a flourishing reputation and added considerably to the inmates of Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville, and Holloway Prisons. The " pickings " out of some Colonial loans, too, though incomparably smaller, have not always redounded to the credit of some of the agents concerned. It cannot be denied that certain crimes of violence have for some years been declining in proportion to population, but the condition of England in respect to crime for centuries previously was fearful beyond description; and although the ignorance of the population was not less remarkable than the moral wickedness, the peers, squires, and bishops conspired to oppose the intellectual and moral elevation of the poor by education and cheap literature. Lord Melbourne, the confidential adviser of Queen Victoria before as well as after her marriage, " questioned the advan- tage of general education as a means of promoting know- ledge in the world, since people got on very well without it." The Bishop of Durham, half a century ago, " believed that education was not likely to make its way among the poor." The Bishop of Exeter said that " if, when rector, he had started a school in his parish, the squire would have laughed in his face." It is between sixty and seventy years since, for the first time, private voluntary English education Crime and Punishment in England. 257 societies received subsidies from the Government. And it is significant the opinion of the upper classes of that day notwithstanding that it was not until edu- cational agencies had been established that crime, at least of the violent sort, showed any signs of abatement. Between 1805 and 1841 the population of the United Kingdom grew at the rate of 79 per cent, and the criminal increased sixfold greater, 12*482 per cent. Between 1842 and 1855 population increased by 2,500,000, but there was no increase in the ratio of crime. From 1855 to 1875 population increased 4,475,000, with a decrease of 2298 in committals, 2074 in convictions, and 1140 in secondary sentences, and 935 in penal sentences. This improvement, equally with what has taken place in the decade following 1875, and subsequently, coincides with the period when libraries, play -grounds, and public schools were extended. But our felicitations on this encouraging transformation are somewhat damped by the reflection that the decrease which has been noted in the more violent kinds of crime among the lower orders has been concurrent with a marked rise in suicide, murder, and crime associated with business transactions, such as embezzlement, forgery, falsification of balance-sheets, and other misdemeanours which could only be committed by persons having had a fair amount of school training. To be at once just and effective, punishment should be remedial as well as deterrent and retributive. Perpetrators of outrages on the person ought to be whipped. Indeed the success of this kind of punishment in reducing garotte robbery from the dimensions of a terrible epidemic to a small minimum is generally acknowledged. It is necessary that punishments, to be deterrent, should be extremely dis- tasteful to offenders. As the thief and the swindler are usually characterised by laziness, they can best be punished s 258 Crime and Punishment in England. and reformed by hard labour, coupled with useful instruction and improving companionship. Crime of every sort may be traced to a three-fold cause passion, covetousness, and want. The first-named cause always and sometimes the second is answerable for crimes against the person, murder included. It cannot be said that three or six months' imprisonment to a low-minded wretch, who has maimed a helpless woman for life, is likely to be deterrent, or affords time for the reform of the criminal. As English law is administered up-to-date, brutal persons might well suppose that it lightly esteems personal security, and accounts it a more serious crime to steal a few shillings than to injure a limb for life. Nothing could impress a thief with a sense of his offence against the neighbour he had wronged, than his being compelled, to a reasonable extent, to make restitution of what he has stolen. Inveterate prisoners often indulge the savage satisfaction that the community is taxed to keep them. But if they were forced to earn their own keep in prison, this, while a wholesome exercise for many, would add bitterness to the restriction of their liberty. In the United States the expenses of some prisons are entirely met by the labour of prisoners. The chief evil of the English prison system is the want of classification of prisoners. All who are sentenced to five years can reduce their term to four years and three months by good conduct. The first nine months they have to pass in solitary confinement. Then they are removed to convict prisons and are mixed up indiscriminately with prisoners, many of whom are utterly irreclaimable dead to shame and to all reforming influences. The more innocent inmates, who are the victims of a single and sudden temp- tation, are contaminated, taught by practice in many a prison that labour is valueless. The result is that they go- Crime and Punishment in England. 259 back to freedom ten times more the children of hell than before. It is the professional and incorrigible class of criminals which forms by far the largest number, and they wield a disastrous power over inmates of prisons more open to good influence. The remaining portion of prisoners is very diversified. Some of them are educated and bearing the penal consequences of one step astray. A large class have crossed the dividing line between right and wrong, impelled by the drink demon. A few have been brought by poverty to crime. Many are very young men who ought never to have been in a convict prison at all. The law which should enable a judge, at his discretion, to save a culprit from the degradation of going to gaol on his first conviction could not fail to preserve many a man and woman from graduating as habitual " gaol birds." Numbers enter as mere novices in crime, but if sentenced for a long term they are brought into close relations with the lowest and most abandoned, among whom they learn for years the trade of law breaking. In the prison school, the children of couples whose ancestors have been denizens of slums and companions of prostitutes, paupers, and criminals for ages, while mumbling lessons they are engaged in ribald conversation; if silent, they are making filthy, licentious drawings on slates. In work-rooms there are fifty old thieves to two novices. Grossly immoral and obscene intercourse does its natural work. Even warders of prisons are sometimes discovered to be far from immaculate in their relations with those under their charge. There is a tacit understanding between many old thieves and some of the prison officials set over them. Warders, being as a rule badly paid, have been known to take bribes from friends of convicts to secure for them some relaxation of prison rules and a fictitious character, while they often report un- favourably of men obnoxious to them for some selfish S 2 260 Crime and Punishment in England. reason, whose constitutions are ruined by bread and water diet. The usual topics discussed by the rank and file of inmates are the art of thieving, the causes of failure in burglaries, the newest inventions for picking locks, opening safes, robbing on railways, and the best districts for shop- lifting. The more abominable the language the more it is enjoyed by some of those who superintend the convicts and are supposed to assist in their reformation. It cannot be doubted that a large number of the prisoners are quite re- claimable, and should be kept apart from old offenders. Those whose training has been totally neglected ought to be taught a trade in their cells, and, if neccessary, should receive instructions from schoolmasters. There should be more care exercised in the selection of prison officers, and the warders should have their duties made definite to their understanding by the governor and chaplain. The gravest cause of the miscarriage of justice in England is the unjust spirit of the criminal law which holds offences against property to be immeasurably more serious than offences against the person. This distorted view is only too patent in the influence it has, perhaps unconsciously, upon the minds of judges. Even for offences of the same nature the inequality of the sentences pronounced by different magistrates, and sometimes by the same magistrates at different times, is nothing short of scandalous. But the contrast in punishments awarded for offences against the person, as compared with those against property, is constantly thrust on public notice, and invariably shocks the sense of justice in every well-balanced mind. Every time proofs of this public and shameless outrage on justice occurs a terribly immoral lesson is brought home to the large class who take their notions of what conduct is venal and what is trivial from decisions of the law. The harm thus done is incalculable. To this unavowed but sinister influence of the Crime and Punishment in England. 261 law in imbuing the mind with confused ideas of morality is to be attributed much of the brutality which exists among the lowest classes in England. No improvement can possibly be expected in the manners and habits of the English people so long as the administra- tion of law is so uncertain and unfair as to excite public contempt. It is not surprising that M. E. de Laveleye describes the English as " a great people under bad laws." Again he says, " If honesty were not the general rule of English life, the imperfections of its judicial system would induce a state of affairs only comparable to that of Turkish civilisation." Punishments as too often enforced are destitute alike of deterrent and remedial virtue. A woman before a Dublin magistrate had been imprisoned 200 times; another at York had been in gaol 150 times. A man before a London police-court was sentenced to one month's imprison- ment, who had been in prison 100 times. Innumerable cases of the same sort might be adduced to show the mere automatic movement of the police and the court, and their total insensibility to the gross caricature of law, justice, and criminal reformation. The marvel is that the ratepayers do not rise en masse and demand the admission of the light of reason into criminal court and prison administration, if only on the score of economy. Why should the money of the ratepayers be squandered purposelessly in heavy costs of apprehending many scores of times the same offenders on the same kind of charge, especially as prison discipline had long ceased to have the smallest effect in deterring or reforming them ? Such "habit and repute " transgressors before they have been convicted six times ought to be considered as having forfeited their liberty for life, and be compelled, in perpetual seclusion, to earn their living so long as their strength permits, under the control of prison officials. 262 Crime and Punishment in England. In no department of English criminal law is there more judicial uncertainty than in regard to murder. The law on that head is well described as " most evasive and sophis- tical," often involving a grievous miscarriage of justice. Within a given period, out of 281 sentenced to death, only 142, or about one-half, were hanged. English juries are not unfrequently influenced by bias of some sort in finding a verdict in cases of capital crime. When a juryman once was asked why he and his colleagues brought in a verdict so distinctly against the evidence and the ruling of the judge, he replied: " Did you think we were going to hang a hand- some man like that ? " If capital punishment is to remain in the criminal code, why should not an English jury, like a Scotch one, have an alternative verdict between guilty and not guilty not proven ? Why should there not be murder in the second degree, or " aggravated manslaughter," with some penalty short of death, but justly proportionate to the offence ? Only thus can the consciences of some juries be protected in giving their verdict. I say nothing of China in this connection, which, with all her wisdom, may have still something to learn in regard to capital punishment, except that this is inflicted rarely when the stupendous size of her population is taken into account. But in the face of the punishment of death, which is supposed to follow convic- tions of murder, that crime has a tendency to increase in in England, while most other serious crimes diminish in proportion to the growth of British population. I believe the continuance of the death penalty in England is a barbarous relic of old Hebrew times, when a tribal God was worshipped who thirsted for the sacrificial blood of man and beast. My countrymen, unfortunately, have also derived the same fetish of vengeance from a pre-historic savage source, but more sparingly devote victims on its altars. The great Chinese sage, Lao-tse, who was contemporary Crime and Punishment in England. 263 with Confucius, condemns capital punishment. His words are, " Be strictly correct yourself, but do not cut and carve other people." It is reasonable to expect that ere many more decades pass all great nations, both of ancient and modern civilisation, will abandon alike the knife, the halter, and the electric battery, now wielded by the public execu- tioner. Whether the object of the " life-for-life " principle be regarded as the prevention of murder or the reform of the murderer, it is equally futile. Murder is either pre- meditated or unpremeditated. If it is premeditated it is a fixed madness, for it is quite as contrary to soundness of mind to deliberately take another's life as to take one's own. If it is unpremeditated and the outcome of intense passion suddenly provoked, it may be termed a short madness with which the most humane and high-minded of men might at any time be uncontrollably fired. Up to the present, how- ever, stupendous inconsistency appears in the English verdict of proved murder as distinguished from that of proved suicide. On the former the offender is held to be fully compos mentis^ and wholly responsible for his actions. But if he kills himself the verdict pronounces him irresponsible and of "unsound mind." Ye shades of Mill, Huxley, and Darwin ! what an outrage on modern scientific psychology ! It is just as absurd to do away with murder by death punishment as to cure rheumatism by shaving off one's moustache.. There is no congenital relation whatever between the two things, and the day must come when hanging or decapitation for murder will seem as ridiculous as burning was as a penalty for the superstition of witchcraft. The following timely and forcible remarks from an influential London daily make plain how very far behind the United States of America England is in preventing the spread of crime by the reform of the criminal before he 264 Crime and Punishment in England. reaches an age when he has become hardened beyond recovery. " Imprisonment is not the only method of dealing with young offenders over the age of sixteen. Large numbers of offenders who have passed that age are committed for a lengthened period to the State Reformatory at Elmira, where really serious attempts are made, and in the majority of cases successfully made, to fit them for the duties of life. In all cases where the offender is physically feeble and unfit to earn a living he is subjected to a course of bodily treat- ment and bodily exercise calculated to invigorate him, and to bring him as near as possible to the physical condition of the normal man. Very frequently crime is merely a product of physical incapacity to endure the unremitting strain of an industrial career. The feeble and decadent children in our large cities are of too degenerate an organisation to respond punctually and continuously, day by day and month by month, to the inexorable call of the factory whistle. They too often come of diseased and enfeebled parentage, badly nurtured in infancy and childhood, often orphaned and homeless at the most critical period of life, it is no wonder that numbers of these juveniles utterly break down when compelled to take a part in working the modern industrial machine. This collapse is not the consequence of an idle and vicious disposition. In many cases it is the outcome of sheer physical incompetence. Dismissed from the ranks of industry, a youth of this description readily drifts into the standing army of crime. What is required for this class of offender is not the quack specific of seven days' solitude on bread and water; this nostrum only aggravates and intensifies the disease. It still further reduces an already emaciated frame, and makes it literally a physical impossibility for the offender to earn a living when his term of punishment has expired. Crime and Punishment in England. 265 "The proper method of dealing with our degenerate juvenile offenders is to put them through a course of discipline which will develope their enfeebled bodies, and, if possible, render them capable of earning an honest liveli- hood. That this can be done is abundantly proved by the results of the system for treating this class of delinquent in the State of New York. Let us select one case as an example. In the ' Reformatory Year Book ' we are shown the photograph of a juvenile offender at the time of his admission, and another set of photographs of the same youth some time before his discharge. At the time of his admission, it is easy to see from the photograph, even if we were not also told in the letterpress, that this youth was in a state of general deterioration. The doctor of the institu- tion reports upon him as being badly nourished, greatly reduced physically, in an anaemic condition, with feeble circulation and shortness of breath. Had this feeble lad been subjected to our penal methods he would have gone down several stages lower in the scale of physical decrepi- tude. In America it was seen that his criminal life was probably attributable to his inability to work, and he was accordingly subjected to a regimen which transformed him in a few months from a puny weakling to a sturdy boy overflowing with life." 266 CHAPTER XIV. THE LAND QUESTION IN ENGLAND. NOTHING in my whole experience as a Chinese sub- ject long resident under the British flag more forcibly convinces me that the country of my adoption is barbarous than a study of its land laws, which embody the grossest favouritism to great landlords and corresponding injustice to the bulk of the people. In contrast with the equitable and beneficent regulations affecting land in my own country which I propose to describe towards the close of this chapter the English land laws clearly point to a savage origin. The most hasty glance at their practical operation shows them to be the most direct and active cause of the destitution, squalor, pauperism, and crime, which brood over the United Kingdom like a hideous nightmare. In England and Wales alone 4500 persons own 17,500,000 acres, and in Scotland 1700 persons own 17,000,000 acres; 8142 landlords in Great Britain and Ireland own 46,500,000 acres. These landlords hold among them 9,000,000 more acres than the entire area of England and Wales put to- gether, or 8,000,000 acres more than twice the total acreage of Scotland. If the land brings in 155. per acre per annum, which is believed to be an under-estimate, this small group of persons receive about ^35,000,000 a year, without doing any work for it. Then let us take the incomes of the ground landlords in centres of population at ^100,000 each one of them receives , 1,000,000 a year or more and this will give a yearly revenue of ^10,000,000 to 100 The Land Question in England. 267 ground landlords. This, added to the return just stated from pastoral and agricultural lands, will represent ^45, 000,000 per annum, abstracted annually by 8142 persons out of the industry, wealth, and enterprise of the Kingdom. Setting aside .10,000,000 a year for the main- tenance of the 8142 costly pensioners, we have ,35,000,000 a year available by them for investment In three years, after paying .35,000,000 to prevent them from suffering hardships, the following undertakings, as Mr. Michael Davitt has shown, might be provided out of the balance : Six national galleries for the fine arts at .500,000 each ; 50 technical schools with scholarships for poor children at ^50,000 each ; 50 schools of agriculture at .50,000 each; 20 reformatory schools at .50,000 each; 200 public gymnasiums and playgrounds at .5000 each ; 300 public parks of 500 acres at .50 per acre or ,25,000 each park ; 200 mechanics' institutes at .5000 each ; 500 working men's clubs and halls at ,2000 each ; 200 public baths and wash-houses at .5000 each ; 20 orphan asylums at .50,000 each; 10 asylums for the blind at .50,000 each ; 10 asylums for the deaf and dumb at .50,000 each ; 20 ophthalmic hospitals at .50,000 each; 50 lying-in- hospitals at .10,000 each ; 20 public hospitals at .50,000 each ; 20 fever hospitals at .50,000 each ; 20 hospitals for consumption at .50,000 each ; 100 floating hospitals for sailors at i o, ooo each ; 5 o convalescent hospitals at .5 0,000 each; 20 sea-bathing infirmaries at .50,000 each ; 20 peni- tentiaries for females at .50,000 each ; 50 temporary refuges for discharged prisoners at ,10,000 each; 500 soup kitchens at .2000 each; 1000 lifeboats at .500 each; 1000 fishing boats for poor fishermen at .500 each; i ooo sets of nets for the same at .500 each ; 25,000 pen- sioners (enfeebled workmen) at .40 each ; the reclamation and purchase of 1,000,000 acres waste land at .13 per acre. 268 TJu Land Question in England. The land so reclaimed, besides producing and cheapening food, if let by the State at ^i per acre, would yield the nation a total rental of ^1,000,000 per annum. All this splendidly beneficial work would cost ^50,000,000, or one and a-half year's reserved portion of the income of the 8142 landlords, after allowing ^5,000,000 for their adequate support, for which they return no benefit. For the remaining half of the ; 100,000,000, to the good, after deducting the amount necessary for their maintenance viz., ^50,000,000 more than 250 artisans' dwellings could be built at a cost of 200 each, where slums now exist. In this calculation I have not taxed more than one-fourth of the revenues derived from the nation's property by this small privileged class who claim a share of it worth more than ^3,000,000,000. If, moreover, the enormous amount of "unearned increment" which these land monopolists appropriate despite its being produced solely by the labour and outlay of others could be recovered from them, further valuable additions might be made to public institutions for the benefit of the poor and the needy. " When the ' sacredness of property ' is talked of," said Mr. J. Stuart Mill, " it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient it is unjust. The essential principle of property being to assure to all persons what they have produced by their labour and accumulated by their abstinence, this principle cannot apply to that which is not the produce of labour, the raw material of the earth [property in land] is only valid in so far as the pro- prietor of the land is its improver. In no sound theory was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should be merely a sinecurist quartered upon it." The Land Question in England. 269 Yet, against 180,000 families owning freehold estates in the United Kingdom 200 years ago, less than 160 persons own half England and three-fourths of Scotland now, and these landowners treat their freehold rights as of infinitely greater importance than the happiness of the peasantry in their neighbourhood. So far are these non-productive parasites of the soil from discharging the responsibilities inseparable from ownership so unique, that in Great Britain and Ireland no less than about 29,000,000 acres of land are left in an uncultivated state, of which 11,000,000 at least, are capable of profitable cultivation. At the same time 7,000,000 acres of public commons have been illegally annexed, to increase the already large estates of adjoining proprietors, during the last 200 years. Twenty-five years before the accession of the House of Brunswick, land paid nearly two-thirds of all the Imperial taxes in the United Kingdom, the rents received by the landed aristocracy being then only the seventh part of what they are to-day. Now that the yearly national expenditure of the United Kingdom is over ^100,000,000 a year, less than one- seventieth portion of the burden falls on land. How different the case in France, where land bears one-sixth ; in India, where land bears nearly one-half of the total taxation ; and in China, where land is wholly national property, and the rent it yields is almost the sole tax in the Empire. With a land system descended from feudal times which has created in the United Kingdom the two social extremes of an idle and pampered class ' on the hand, and an over- worked and under-paid class on the other, it is not surprising that misery so appalling and widespread should be bred among the latter. When the late Dr. Eraser, before his elevation to the Episcopal bench, served as a Joint Com- missioner, and reported on the condition of the agricultural labourers in the rural districts he was deeply impressed with 270 The Land Question in England. the startling extent of their wretchedness, although the delicacy of his position as a clergyman unfortunately apparently prevented him from boldly assigning the effect to its true cause. He tells us, however, that under the very shadow of lordly mansions and abounding wealth in Gloucestershire "type after type of social life was almost degraded to the level of barbarism " ; that near Lavenham, " the cottages are unfit for human habitation " ; that in Norfolk, the dwellings were "miserable," "deplorable," " detestable," and a " disgrace to a Christian community " ; that near Docking, " the whole atmosphere is sensual and human nature is degraded into something below the level of the swine." The Marquis of Salisbury one of the class whose neglect of poor rustics, impoverished under the English land laws generously proposes to build better dwellings for the people at the public expense. But let the land be first re-valued and taxed at its current market value ; then, but not till then, will rates and taxes have an equitable incidence and distribution and the nation's property be taxed for the nation's good. Then, but not till then, may people who inherit poverty and suffering hope to be lifted above their present demoralising surroundings. The main point to bear in mind in considering the ruined condition of agriculture, of agricultural villages, and of agricultural labourers in England, is that even before the hated Stuart dynasty had passed away the great feudal lords were in reality tenants of the Crown, paying rent. But in the reign of Charles II. (1660) the landed classes succeeded in converting that profligate monarch to a scheme by which they and their heirs should become absolute freeholders without paying rent and without purchasing the land of which they had only been previously recognised as tenants. By the same arrangement they were also confirmed in the right of forcing others who might become their tenants to The Land Question in England. 271 pay to them rents which they petitioned should be remitted to themselves by the Crown. To make up to the Exchequer the loss of revenue consequent on lordly occupants ceasing to pay rent, an excise duty was levied on all liquors brewed or distilled for sale. The Act which, under forms of law, perpetrated this gigantic fraud, inflicted a terrible blow, under which England groans and staggers to this day. The Act was passed by the narrow majority of 151 to 149, from which it appears that the landlords could not command so so large a parliamentary majority in 1660 as they can in 1897. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that the present landed aristocracy, 10,200 of whom now hold two-thirds of England, are still, by law, tenants of the Crown, although they and their ancestors have, by the fraud of 1660 and other Acts passed by landowning Parliaments, managed almost ever since to evade payment of rent. In the reign of William and Mary, however, a Land Tax on the annual value was imposed of 43. in the pound. This tax, by the notorious Act of 1798, was made per- manent on the gross annual value of all landed property, including mines, quarries, ironworks, &c. But mirabile dictu! in order to accommodate lordly interests at a cruelly heavy and perpetual sacrifice of revenue to the country, by which all other interests suffer, the valuation of the taxed lands, made as far back as 1692, was the one adopted, and it continues to be acted upon until now, though the average value of the land has increased fifteen to twenty-fold, in the interval of two hundred years. In 1693 the land tax, thus fixed, produced two millions sterling. After allowing for the redemption of a portion of this tax, it ought at the present time to be producing over twenty millions sterling per annum. But it has been so deliberately tampered with and whittled down by successive Parliaments of landowners who were masters of the situation, owing to the ignorance 272 The Land Question in England, of the population on the subject, that the proceeds of the tax now do not exceed ;t, 129,000, though it is still repre- sented as a tax of 45. in the . The 1942 persons who own two-thirds of Ireland contrived to secure exemption from the land tax altogether. Meanwhile the public expenditure kept increasing, owing to great, useless, and often preventible wars, and other causes. An enormous national debt was incurred. To meet annual interest charges on this, amounting still to about ^27,000,000, with other increasing public burdens, fresh taxes and duties had to be created. But as the land which ought to be the chief source of national wealth had failed to contribute more than a merely nominal share to the taxation of the country under the unrighteous policy of landowning law-makers, new taxes and duties were levied on articles of consumption, which were and still are paid by the masses, who were and still are by far the largest buyers of these articles. The result is that when poor wage-earners drink their glass of beer, spirits, or wine, or their cup of tea, they have the melancholy satisfaction of knowing that they are helping to pay to the crown the main part of the rent of the vast estates of the landed aristocracy and gentry, and of making up for their flagrant shortcomings as tax- payers. No wonder landowners have discouraged the education of the artisan and labouring classes. Their re- tention of the people in a state of mental darkness has ever been to their privileged order a matter of life and death. It is only very recently that the patient multitude in England have begun to wake up to the wholesale robberies which have been practised upon them by their social superiors in the manner indicated above. How far the peers and other English landowners were animated by patriotism in passing such Acts as I have named may be judged by other specimens of their legislative skill The Land Question in England. 273 which may be quoted. About the year 1663 an Act was passed levying i6s. 6d. a quarter on foreign wheat. In 1814, however, protective duties culminated in England, and the same upper classes carried an Act prohibiting the import of foreign wheat whenever the home average market value was under the famine prices of 8os. per quarter, and also prohibiting the import of foreign flesh meat or fish, living or dead, excepting turtle, turbot, and sturgeon, which were admitted duty free. It needs no extraordinary perception to see that the sole object of landlord Parliaments in bringing about such artificially high prices of food was to enable the farmers to pay landlords high rents. Even the "sliding scale" of 1829, which imposed an import duty of only 245. 8d. per quarter when wheat was at 623., was a concession extorted by the ruinous consequences of their previous exacting measures. But so far from the " sliding scale" mitigating the hardships entailed by the legislative oppression already inflicted, it had the effect of completing the ruin of English manufactures, and of often compelling starving millions to pay is. and upwards for a 4lb. loaf. Popular agitation could no longer be repressed. The landlords had fiercely resisted all efforts made by the downtrodden people to cancel the heartless legislation under which they were perishing. In 1826 many thousands of working men both in England and Ireland had died of starvation under the iniquitous corn laws. Manufacturers were in many cases forced to close their establishments and seek refuge in the insolvency court. The national anger under this inhumanity of an avaricious ruling minority had reached the exploding point Bristol was goaded on by distress to desperation, and Birmingham threatened to march on London. Not till the throes of a bloody revolu- tion were imminent would the landlords submit to take the taxes off the bread of the suffering multitude. In further T 274 The Land Question in England. illustration of the greed of the landlords it may be noticed that while in the eighty-two years ending 1879 collec- tively, the probate, legacy, and succession duties on personal property amounted to 180 millions sterling, the far larger value of landed property transferred to heirs during the same period was let off with total duties amounting to only twenty millions sterling. The land laws, by some of which the United Kingdom is still socially afflicted to an appalling extent, may now be briefly alluded to : There is (i) the law of primogeniture, which enacts that when a landlord dies without having disposed of his land by deed or will, the whole of it goes to his eldest son, leaving the other members of the family without part or lot in the inheritance. But as this law only takes effect when a landlord omits to make a will, which very rarely happens, the inconvenience caused by it is trifling com- pared with that resulting from some of the other land laws referred to. (2) The unjust object and aim of the law of distress is directly to give the landlord a preferential claim to distrain for rent before other creditors can receive a farthing. Indeed, after the landlord has recovered all his arrears of rent, not infrequently there is nothing left for other credi- tors. So exceptionally privileged is the landlord as against all others who have claims on the estate of an insolvent farming tenant, that if flocks and herds belonging to another farmer on their way to market should chance to be depas- tured for a single night on the lands of the farmer financially embarrassed, the animals can be seized by the landlord for rent. (3) The injustice and cruelty of the game laws carried out with atrocity by landowning and game-preserving magis- trates have ever and anon been severely commented on. The Land Question in England. 275 If a wretched, hungry labourer kills a hare on the roadside, which has been destroying the scanty produce of his patch of ground, he is liable to a term of imprisonment, so long as to ensure the dispersion and ruin of his family. Mr. Kay, in his " Free Trade in Land," states he was told by a country squire that when men are brought before the magisterial bench accused of other offences which the evidence was, in the opinion of Mr. Kay's informant, quite insufficient to prove to the satisfaction of his brother justices, he said : "Oh! you musn't let him off, he's a d d poacher!" It is proverbial in the country districts that a poacher has no chance of mercy even when tried for another crime altogether. Nor is this surprising when it is remembered that the game preserver is both plaintiff and judge where poaching is concerned. This offence against a revolting law has still a distinct tendency to make patient and well-meaning sufferers from grasping landlord law-makers into habitual and misanthropic criminals, who, under just land laws, would be contented and law-abiding citizens. There is still an annual crop of convictions for poaching running into many thousands. (4) The core and root of landlord evils by which the United Kingdom is cursed are contained in the law of entail and settlement. By this relic of barbarism a landlord is enabled to make a deed or will to prevent his estate from being seized, sold or reduced in size during his own lifetime and for many years after his death. Let us suppose that Lord Smith comes into possession of a quarter of a million acres at the age of 30, and that he afterwards marries. The law under consideration gives him power by deed or will to direct that after his death his estates shall pass successively to A, B, and C, his children or nephews or friends, and that after the death of A, B, and C, the property shall go to the eldest son of C, if, and when he attains the age of 21. T 2 276 The Land Question in England. If, at the date of the deed or will, C is an infant of a year old, and marries at 21, his eldest son will attain his majority in 21 years more. Thus the estates will have been securely tied up for 42 years at least. But should A and B be long lived, and C marries late in life, it may easily happen that no part of the estates can be sold for 70 or 80 years. No matter whether Lord Smith may have lived long or died early, the estates throughout the whole period specified must be administered according to the instructions contained in his will. If the deed should authorise that part of the rents shall be applied to enlarging the estates, or should empower the trustees to sell part of the land and invest the proceeds of sale in other land to be tied up as already described, the instructions in the document must be carried out to the letter. Before the expiration of 60 or 80 years, C and his eldest son may make another deed or will of a similar kind, pro- tecting the estate from sale, seizure, or division for another period of from 50 to 80 years, and so this mischievous law of entail and settlement may lock up uncultivated or culti- vated land from sale or division for centuries. In great families the sole object of this perversion of justice is to hand down their names and keep up their landed wealth and influence from generation to generation, and each fresh barrier to power of sale is often raised just when the land would be liable to seizure in satisfaction for debt, and thus thrown open to purchase. The ambition of great land- owning families, moreover, is to increase their territorial possessions, wealth, and power, by many ing in their own circle. Thus one accumulation of vast estates in time becomes added to another, till earldoms develope into duke- doms. North of the Tweed, twelve persons own 4,340,000 acres, or an average of 362,000 acres each. To the lot of each of these fortunate magnates there falls an average of The Land Question in England. 277 565 square miles, or an aggregate to the twelve owners of 6780 square miles. Thirty-six owners in the United King- dom hold 290 square miles each, or 6,700,000 acres among them, in the aggregate. The case in Scotland and Ireland is worse than in Eng- land. Nine-tenths of the former country is owned by 1700 persons, and two-thirds of the latter by 1942. Two-thirds of the whole land of the United Kingdom is held by 12,479 owners. At the termination of leases of ninety-nine years and upwards these enormous tracts revert to the same owners or their descendants, with all the buildings erected and other improvements effected on the land at the expense of the leaseholders. (5) The next evil land law to be mentioned is one which is the fitting complement of the law which has just been com- mented upon. I refer to the statute regulating the sale and transfer of land. This statute was purposely framed to place hindrances in the way of small buyers competing with wealthy landlords. The purchase of small or moderate- sized lots is made virtually prohibitory by the heavy legal and other charges permitted by law, since these are so excessive as to greatly increase the cost of each acre or quarter of an acre. England lags far behind nearly every civilised country, including China and the British Colonies, as regards equitable arrangements for the sale and transfer of land. Dealings in land in most other nationalities are registered at a public office, where the state of the title can be ascertained in half an hour, and the whole transaction of buying and selling completed at a trifling cost, instead of tens and hundreds of pounds and many months of delay, as in Great Britain. Even after the records have been searched and the purchaser has paid for the land, the title cannot be absolutely relied on. Sometimes oppressive claims crop up which the best conveyancers and solicitors 278 The Land Question in England. had failed to discover after examining a cartload of documents. Not many years ago a British Parliamentary Committee decided that there could not be such a cheap and easy registration of titles in England as exists elsewhere so long as the great body of landowners object to it ! The words of their report are : " For an institution to flourish in a free country it must offer to people the thing they want ! " The committee practically express the opinion that 12,000 land- lords may override with impunity the wishes of the whole population. Who can doubt, after a statement so audacious from representatives of a landowning Parliament, that defiant land monopolists are " riding for a fall." It will be at once apparent that the concentration of the land of the United Kingdom in a few hands greatly tends to diminish its producing power, and to affect adversely all other national interests. Mr. Kay quotes a typical case, which forcibly illustrates this point. Lord - came into possession of his estates, which were unencumbered, at twenty-one years of age, when he settled them on his family. As soon as his only son reached twenty-one another deed was prepared, settling the property on any lawful heirs that might be born to the latter. Lord turned out to be a reckless gambler, and, as might be expected, sustained heavy losses. He raised a loan on the security of his life interest in the estates to pay off part of his foolish liabilities. In order to escape the importunity of his creditors he fled from England. Neither the money lender, to whom the remainder of his life interest was sold nor the tenants would expend money on necessary improvements. They knew not how soon Lord might die, and their interest in the property would then cease. Such was the state of affairs in connection with this property for forty years. The parish church the schools, the farm buildings, and the labourers The Land Question in England. 279 dwellings fell into decay, while the drainage and cultivation of the land were utterly neglected. Meanwhile the law of entail prevented the land, during this whole period, from being sold as it otherwise would have been, to one buyer or to many, who would have invested money in developing its resources. The young heir to a great estate is exposed to flattery by sycophantic competitors for his friendship and favour. He knows that his father cannot prevent him, if he lives, from succeeding to the property, and he is consequently tempted to be impatient of parental control. On attaining majority he is besieged with artful money-lenders always spreading their nets to catch such prey. Alas ! how many English territorial heirs are demoralised by a premature sense of independence begotten of the British land laws ! They come into their estates overwhelmed with debts contracted by their wanton extravagance, and so they are rendered incapable of doing their duty to their land or their tenantry. Their sons after them even generations of successors may continue to be embarrassed by heavy half-yearly interest on mortgages and innumerable other burdens which have to be discharged before a shilling of income is available for personal use. During this long period the estate is doomed by law to lingering ruin, without the smallest prospect of being put in a state of repair. Twenty years ago, a committee of the House of Lords, consisting of four great landowners, reported that three-fourths of the land of England was tied up in this shameful manner ; that of twenty million acres requiring drainage, less than a seventh part had been drained, and that only one-third of the land had been properly dealt with. Is it surprising that authorities on the subject should tell us that under treatment so criminal, the production of which the land is easily capable, should be diminished by a third 280 The Land Question in England. to a half? Besides, tenants, groaning under rents which would make farmers in China stand aghast, are powerless to correct agrarian evils so deep-seated as to be beyond their control. This pernicious system of class legislation has been the most potent factor in causing the loss of one-third of the harvest that, on a fair estimate, might have been reaped but for its blighting influence. It is not difficult to see how grievous must be the effects of the system on manufactures and trade by the check it puts on the gains of the tenant farmer, and the reduction it causes in the labourers' wage fund. When, added to all these penalties, which the English people have long been paying for their toleration of so gross an outrage on economic wisdom and justice, there happens to be a bad harvest, the collective injury suffered by all classes is simply incalculable. It is absurd to suppose that boasted Land Improvement Acts, which are so impracticable in their operation, and under which not one-twentieth of the amount needed is borrowed under their provisions, can, even remotely, remedy the evils complained of. The supreme aim of the framers of these Acts obviously was to protect existing abuses in the interest of entailed heirs, present and future. The Agricultural Holdings Act, and, still more recent, facilities granted by Parliament to agricultural labourers for cultivating small allotments, must be regarded as mere tinkering expedients so long as the axe is not laid to the root essential of the evil the law of entail and settlement. In France three-fifths, in Belgium seven-eighths, in Sweden eleven-twelfths, and in China a vast proportion of the whole population live by cultivating the land. In England less than a fifth is devoted to this occupation. Mr. Caird ("The Landed Interest," page 143), who cannot rank as an extreme land law reformer, admits that England is becoming The Land Question in England. 281 every ten years " more and more of a meadow, a garden, and a playground." Nor can this be wondered at when it is considered that the land laws directly produce and maintain in their positions as legislators members of the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament who make the laws, and magistrates who administer them. And, as a well-informed writer says: "More than any other class of men, they set an example of self-indulgence, extravagance, frivolity, and vice, which vast numbers of the thoughtless and weak- minded among their social inferiors, think it grand to ape and follow. . . . The continual spectacle of the mag- nificence, extravagance, wealth and power of the landed nobility and gentry a spectacle unparalleled by any class in any other civilised country has aroused such a vehement spirit of envy and simulation, that for many years after a German or a Frenchman would have retired to a country life, our wealthy middle-class merchants and manufacturers continue working hard at their business, fiercely competing with, and too often successfully crushing, their less wealthy struggling neighbours, which is all the easier on account of these last being also tempted to imitation of the extravagant show constantly before their eyes, while, at the same time, they lose, as customers, the 15 or 20 millions of well-to-do agricultural population which would exist but for our land laws. In no other civilised country does the middle-class work so hard and enjoy the simple and real pleasures of life so little as in England."* It is doubtless this insane desire of traders and manufacturers to copy the luxurious display of the land-owning class, which incites them to beat down the wages of their employe's to -the very lowest point that they may have the means of approaching more nearly the upper classes in their modes of living. * "The English Land Laws," by J. Marshall. 282 The Land Question in England. Working men in towns suffer owing to the competition caused by starving labourers, driven by the land laws from the country to the already overcrowded towns. This continual migration has the natural effect of raising rents by increasing the demand for house accommodation. Workmen, unable to meet the additional cost of living so forced upon them, are compelled to seek quarters in insanitary slums and alleys. But the worst effects of this regime, by which the welfare of all other classes is subordinated to that of landowners, fall on the peasantry. The retrograde land policy of England begun in the time of the Stuart dynasty, and relentlessly pursued up till now has completely effaced from the English population that large class of independent yeoman proprietors whom England boasted as " their country's pride." Their lands have been swallowed up by wealthy landowners in order to swell their already overgrown power and influence. Their successors are the poor, downtrodden agricultural labourers whose wretched condition is proverbial. In Ireland this melan- choly product of landlordism earns 8s. to 93. a week. They are condemned by their employers to live not uncommonly with their families, and sometimes the pig, in a single- roomed hovel under a leaky roof, with the earth for their floor. Here they and their families eat, drink, and sleep ! Even from these miserable cabins, however, the occupants are evicted in thousands, and left to starve or beg on the roadside ; the cause, too often, being that the unfortunate peasant has improved his patch of bog or moor, and thus given the landlord's agent ground for raising the rent to a price which he cannot pay. Thanks to the exertions of the Agricultural Labourers' Unions, the wages of the class are higher in England, although still at a low figure, with correspondingly in- adequate dwellings. The author of " Alton Locke," after The Land Question in England. 2^3 describing an average English peasant's hovel, with a father, mother, and six children, with a newly-married couple ten persons in all, sleeping in one room, asks, " Are men likely to be healthy when they are worse housed than a pig, worse fed than a hound, and packed together to sleep like pilchards in a barrel ? " It is significant that the lowest ebb of the labourer's supply of the bare necessaries of life was Dorset, the county honoured with the seat of the late arch-philanthropist and Tory, Lord Shaftesbury, whose distinction was not at all associated with the improvement of the condition of the un- happy agricultural labourers of his own county, but with shortening the hours of factory labour for children and adults in Lancashire and Yorkshire, the chief centres of the Anti-Corn Law leaguers. How far this choice of a sphere for the manifestation of his Lordship's "Enthusiasm of Humanity," so distant from " home," where the English proverb says, truly, " charity begins," arose from his loving the factory operatives more, or from loving their employers less, must, under the peculiar circumstances, be left to each reader's own conjecture. But even at the time referred to the state of the agricul- tural labourer was considerably more in need of amelioration than that of the factory operative, for whose special benefit Lord Shaftesbury and his quondam co-abettors of the Corn Laws carried the ten hours Bill. But is it not fair to ask if a land system can have a spark of humanity in it or be to the advantage of society, as a whole, which has reduced the peasantry of England below the level of Russian serfs? And to what end ? As a writer already quoted says : "Solely to support in enormous wealth and luxury a very small class of landowners." It cannot be doubted that among the landed classes there are not a few who are more thoroughly animated by kindly feelings towards their tenants and labourers than the majority in their circles. Indeed, 284 2 'he Land Question in England. where upper class feeling is supercilious and apathetic to the claims of farm labourer our censure should be some- what tempered with pity, as those born and bred under a regime so selfish and so unfavourable to fairness and delicacy of mind towards " the lower classes " have strong tempta- tions to heartless arrogance. Englishmen can well afford to reserve for a class of their own countrymen some of their occasional indignation against the colossal "rings" of American speculators who, by " bulling " or " bearing," realise a few millions of dollars. These syndicates are Liliputians compared with the Leviathan British "ring" the great English land octopus, whose prodigious coils embrace the three kingdoms, which has lived for centuries on the blood and sweat of its victims, and counts its ill- gotten gains by thousands of millions of pounds. A late British peer once said that what emperors, grand dukes, and personages of that sort want, is not a well-to-do population, but " a peasantry hungry enough at home to prefer the life of a private soldier, and submissive enough to shoot their own brothers if ordered, without asking why." This was meant as a thrust at the bulk of continental rulers. But it would be satisfactory to be assured that the class to which the noble speaker himself belonged were more exemplary than they are generally reputed to be in promoting the well-being of the millions of their poorer fellow subjects whom they regard as infinitely their social inferiors. The English feudal land laws, to which attention has been directed, have been abolished in other countries with the happiest results. The law permits no landlord in Prussia France, America, Holland, Belgium, Lombardy, Switzerland, Denmark, or Norway, to prevent the sale of his property after his own death. In these and other countries, the first French Revolution led to the abolition of primogeniture The Land Question in England. 285 entails, long settlements, and intricate methods of devising land which were expressly designed to maintain the power of a feudal aristocracy, and to keep the lands from becoming the property of workmen peasants and other citizens of small means. Deeds of transfer in all these countries are brief and simple, and the whole process of land conveyance is easy and inexpensive. The greatly improved condition of the Prussian people is directly due to their emancipation from the feudal bondage which still oppresses the masses in England. The peasantry of Saxony, too, are prosperous, pauperism being very rare among them. The agricultural labourer, both in Prussia and Saxony, can buy land at a reasonable price, and with the aid of his family increase his savings by raising produce. He is thus enabled to extend his holding until he advances to the position of an employer of labourers. But one has only to enter Bohemia, in which feudal land laws still prevail in order to realise the very different influence of the latter system on the population. But China, most enlightened of all the nations on this question, has long been delivered from private landlordism and all its attendant evils to the greatest possible advantage of its teeming millions. After long and painful efforts extend- ing from the third to the seventh century of the " Christian Era," the land of China was freed from the insupportable tyranny of individual ownership, and still remains the common property ot the nation, and is available on the most reasonable terms to all who are willing to render it produc- tive to the utmost. To understand aright the basis on which land nationalisation stands in China, it is necessary to con- sider the idea of humanity and its solidarite entertained by the people, and the grave responsibilities springing out of that idea which they regard as devolving upon them. They do not, as the inhabitants of Western Countries, view 286 The Land Question in England. humanity as grouped into separate and independent genera- tions, past, present, and future. With my countrymen these divisions of the race are practically disregarded, so absorb- ing is their conception of the race as an indestructible and eternal unity, in respect to which birth and death, past, present, and future, are but trivial accidents. Indeed, one of their phrases strikingly illustrates the powerful hold this conception has upon them. Their supreme veneration is for ancestors, whom they solemnly and periodically worship. Ancestors are held to be entitled to their worship as a sort of apotheosis of parentage, on reverence for the claims, commands, and cares of which rests the entire social and national edifice. They describe the present and future generations of their race as " the future antiquity " ; and in consonance with this sentiment, which has all the strength of a second nature in them when a Chinaman receives the patent of nobility, as already stated, it is his ancestors, not his posterity, who are ennobled with him. This sense which they have of the unbroken continuity of humanity, and which lies at the root of the duties they recognise as owing to "the future antiquity," as well as the links of humanity which are in the past and the present is strikingly shown in a survival still to be met with in some parts of the country. Death is represented by a child, to whom they pay all the honours offered to the deceased whose place it fills as if he were re-incarnated. As an inseparable correlate of the idea I have explained, they hold that the earth does not belong to the living only, for they do not believe that the work by which an increased value is put on the land gives sole right of possession to it. They believe the living to be an ephemeral part of humanity, which has no right to spoil the good things come to them from the past, and therefore they disavow the right to use or abuse any portion of the land The Land Question in England. 287 which belongs to the whole community. The living are rather looked upon by Chinamen as trustees for posterity. Hence they formerly confiscated neglected lands. In reality, the only property in the soil known in China is the right to the fruits of it ; and it is only that right which can be trans- mitted or alienated. This right is called in China tienu-mienu. The property of the land itself, known as tienu-ti, remains in the hands of the nation, as represented by the Government, which affirms its right in fixing a rent it alone can legally receive. When a landholder sells or lets an estate during part of the currency of tenure, the price paid never represents more than the value which he and his ancestors have by their labour put in it, and added to it. On the other hand, the State never claims the right to increase the rent in proportion as the value of the land is increased by the labour of the tenants. The rent of the land has been established, not from its value, but from its area, and this, once fixed, has never been changed. This rent is nearly the only tax in China. The other resources of the Empire comprise .the revenues from the Customs, mines, and salt monopoly. The Emperor's civil list is made up partly from the salt duties, from his mongolian flocks, and from the tribute paid by the vassals of China. " Such," writes a fair-minded old Consul of France in China, " is the respect for labour and for its products, that the State will not, on any consideration, augment the rent, nor create new taxes which may tend to diminish industry. It is true that the rent be it little or much is paid out of the produce of labour, and it is with this that the State has been able to carry out and maintain its great works, canals, sewers, &c., which have since permitted and facilitated the development of private labour." While rent is fixed on the amount of area and not on the value of the land, the lands of the plains and the non- 288 The Land Question in England. irrigable mountain lands pay a smaller rent than those easily watered. Lands recovered from water are, for a while, exempt from taxation until they enter one of the four great classes, but there is no other principle of classification, owing to climatic differences between the North and South of China, the State insists on crops being raised precisely suited to location, that the production of the North may balance those of the South. The Chinese State ministers its territory for the greatest good of the greatest number. It acts as a landlord, who, after dividing his building into floors, fixes his rent, according to the respective advantages of these floors, without troubling himself about the means or occupations of those to whom he lets them. The rent of land varies in a classification ranging from yd. to 25. per acre. This includes repairs of highways, land tax, and other payments. The average land rent, inclusive of one or two other incidental public payments, does not average over the whole population more than 25. 6d. per head. When this small sum is paid, every Chinaman is absolutely free to undertake any form of industry or trade, and to go where he pleases. There are no taxes on doors or windows ; no licence or excise, no police invasion of personal or domestic sanctity to be feared by law-abiding subjects. It is not surprising that he should religiously submit to pay this single tax, which is the instrument of securing his com- plete personal, social, and political freedom. All other taxes are considered by the Chinese as unlawful inroads on the rights of labour, and nothing astonishes them more than to hear that they exist in other countries. As long as a tenant cultivates the land the State cannot demand from him a higher rent than the one which was originally fixed. If the tenant, for any reason, leaves the land, the State, as landlord, must pay him the increased value which his labour has added to it. The Chinese The Land Question in England. 289 system has the highly beneficial effect of facilitating access to the soil for those who are willing to work it themselves, while repelling those who wish to make it simply a medium of investment or speculation. As the impost is solely on the superficial area, the soil is depreciated in the hands of those who are idle proprietors, while its full value is main- tained for those who personally farm it. The tax or rent is but a very small fixed charge paid by the tenant to the State, instead of an exorbitant rent paid by him to super- fluous and exacting landlords. At the same time the benefit of whatever increased value has been added to the soil by his labour is assured to the occupant. Thus his industry is stimulated concurrently with the productiveness of the land, which is often made to produce several crops in the year, its value being augmented by 80 to ^300 or ^400 per acre. The Chinese system attaches the inhabitants to the soil instead of alienating them from the culture of it and driving them into the towns, as the English system does. It is especially favourable to small proprietors. The estimated number of families in China is 90,000,000. If by this number the total area of the country 600,000,000 acres is divided, the average extent of each holding is found not to exceed seven acres. There is, however, a large number of families who have only three acres, or only one acre. There are not many properties to be met with of more than 40 acres. Those of 200 acres are exceedingly rare, and there are scarcely any that exceed this in extent In those provinces of China having an average population of 30 or 40 millions of inhabitants there are but three or four properties of 600 to 1000 acres. Throughout the country, as a whole, the most extensive farms scarcely exceed 24 acres. Hardly a family exists in China without a patrimonial field, which is inviolable. The individual by whom any v 290 The Land Question in England. intruder gains an entrance to it is guilty of sacrilege. So sacred are the hearths and homes of China deemed, that the governor or general who has allowed any of these to fall into the hands of the enemy commits suicide. His patrimonial field not only assures to each Chinaman his liberty, but prevents any return of despotism to the country. One of the sacred books of China contains the words: " The worship of Heaven has in view the spiritualism of earth." The Chinese are farther than any nation I know on the way to reach that end, the bulwark of their rights and liberties being this institution of the patrimonial field, inalienable and inviolable no more capable of being sold than the people themselves are. It is on this basis that the house is erected. It is there the family vault is constructed, if they be rich enough to have one. There is the hall in which, twice a month, the family meet to celebrate the worship of their ancestors and to judge the faults committed by themselves. There are preserved the archives and civil registers. There are established for all the children of the family and the neighbourhood a school and a library. Every hamlet, every group of cottages, is a complete system. Yet everyone feels himself perfectly at home, as much isolated as he pleases, his own master, as proud of his home, as independent of the State and of his neighbours as the most powerful European lord was in the middle ages, while the Chinaman is more secure in his inviolable little cottage than the feudal chief was in his castle. Nor is the landscape suggestive of bare utility. On the contrary, here and there, the gentle hill slopes are picturesque with the light and graceful foliage of bamboo groves. Everywhere are to be seen flowers in endless variety. Purple azaleas, rhododendrons, sweet-smelling gaidenias, carpetted abrupt declivities, roses, chrysanthe- mums, and many other flowers, which are only known in The Land Question in England. 291 Europe as coming from China, adorn and perfume, at all seasons, the approaches to the cottages. In the songs to be heard in passing through the hamlets in the evening, there are never found the sad, resigned, and sometimes even despair- ing notes which too often mark the favourite airs of European workmen. The Sin-fa, the most popular song in China, is soft, breathing forth peace and security. In none of the national songs of China is there any trace of struggles with the implacable elements, the yoke of serf- dom, or the tortures of religious gloom. For 1200 years at least have the people enjoyed a degree of quietude for which Europe will have a long time to wait, while the most correct public morals have been built up, assuring to one and all an amount of happiness from which, I fear, England is still a long way off.* * This view is fully corroborated by M. Eug. Simon, a distinguished Frenchman long resident in China. GRANVILLE HOUSE, ARUNDEL STREET, LONDON. W.C. Selections SIR ROBERT BBUCB COTTON. FROM THE COTTON PRESS PUBLICATIONS. i. England Through Chinese Spectacles. Being Extracts from the Journal of Wo CHANG. Contents: I. Family Life in England; II. Education in England: III. Society in England; IV. English Doctors; V. English Lawyers; VI. Breach of Promise and Divorce in England; VII. Backsheesh in England; VIII. Liars in England; IX. The London Stock Exchange; X. Downtrodden English Toilers; XI. The Manufacture of English Paupers; XII. Crime and Punishment in England; XIII. The Land Question in England. 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