"Our Fathers Have Told Us"

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Title:     "Our Fathers Have Told Us"
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

We have forgotten, else it would be impossible they should try to befool us. We have forgotten the terrible years when England lay cold and starving under the clutch of the landlords and their taxes on food. Terror is soon forgotten, for otherwise life could not endure. Not seventy years have gone since that clutch was loosened, but the iron which entered into the souls of our fathers is no more remembered. How many old labourers, old operatives, or miners are now left to recall the wretchedness of that toiling and starving childhood before the corn-tax was removed? Few are remaining now, and they speak little and will soon be gone. The horror of it is scattered like the night, and we think no more of it, nor imagine its reality. It seems very long ago, like Waterloo or the coach to York--so long ago that we can almost hope it was not true.

And yet our fathers have told us of it. They and their fathers lived through it at its worst. Only six years have passed since Mrs. Cobden Unwin collected the evidence of aged labourers up and down the country, and issued their piteous memories in the book called _The Hungry 'Forties_. Ill-spelt, full of mistakes, the letters are stronger documents than the historian's eloquence. In every detail of misery, one letter agrees with the other. In one after another we read of the quartern loaf ranging from 7_d_. to 11-1/2_d_., and heavy, sticky, stringy bread at that; or we read of the bean porridge or grated potato that was their chief food; or, if they were rather better off, they told of oatmeal and a dash of red herring--one red herring among three people was thought a luxury. And then there was the tea--sixpence an ounce, and one ounce to last a family for a week, eked out with the scrapings of burnt crusts to give the water a colour. One man told how his parents went to eat raw snails in the fields. Another said the look of a butcher's shop was all the meat they ever got. "A ungry belly makes a man desprit," wrote one, but for poaching a pheasant the hungry man was imprisoned fourteen years. Seven shillings to nine shillings a week was the farm labourer's wage, and it took twenty-six shillings then to buy the food that seven would buy now. What a vivid and heartrending picture of cottage life under the landlord's tax is given in one old man's memory of his childish hunger and his mother's pitiful self-denial! "We was not allowed free speech," he writes, "so I would just pull mother's face when at meals, and then she would say, 'Boy, I can't eat this crust,' and O! the joy it would bring my little heart."

We have forgotten it. Wretched as is the daily life of a large part of our working people--the only people who really count in a country's prosperity--we can no longer realise what it was when wages were so low and food so dear that the struggle with starvation never ceased. But in those days there were men who saw and realised it. The poor die and leave no record. Their labour is consumed, their bodies rot unnamed, and their habitations are swept away. They do not tell their public secret, and at the most their existence is recorded in the registers of the parish, the workhouse, or the gaol. But from time to time men have arisen with the heart to see and the gift of speech, and in the years when the oppression of the landlords was at its worst a few such men arose. We do not listen to them now, for no one cares to hear of misery. And we do not listen, because most of them wrote in verse, and verse is not liked unless it tells of love or beauty or the sticky pathos of drawing-room songs. But it so happens that two of the first who saw and spoke also sang of love and beauty with a power and sweetness that compel us to listen still. And so, in turning their well-known pages, we suddenly come upon things called "The Masque of Anarchy" or "The Age of Bronze," and, with a moment's wonder what they are all about, we pass on to "The Sensitive Plant," or "When We Two Parted." As we pass, we may just glance at the verses and read:

"What is Freedom?--ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well--
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs....

'Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak--
They are dying whilst I speak."

Or, turning on, perhaps, in search of the "Ode to the West Wind," we casually notice the song beginning:

"Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay you low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat--nay, drink your blood?"

And so to the conclusion:

"With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre."

Or else, in looking once more for that exquisite scene between Haidee and Don Juan on the beach, we fall unawares upon these lines:

"Year after year they voted cent. per cent.,
Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions--why? for rent!
They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant
To die for England--why then live?--for rent!

* * * * *

And will they not repay the treasures lent?
No; down with everything, and up with rent!
Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent,
Being, end, aim, religion--rent, rent, rent!"

The men who uttered such lines were driven from their class, their homes, and their country. They were despised and hated, like all who protest against oppression and remind the smug world of uncomfortable things. But they were great poets. One of them was our sweetest singer, the other was, when he wrote, the most conspicuous figure in Europe, and the most shattering force. Even England, which cares so little for her greatest inheritance of passionate intellect, cannot yet forget them. But others who sang the same terrible theme she has long forgotten, or she keeps them only on the shelves of curious and dusty investigators. Such men, I mean, as Ebenezer Elliot, Ebenezer Jones, Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper, William James Linton, and Gerald Massey, who so lately died.

They were not high-born, nor were they shining poets like the twin stars of freedom whom I have quoted. Little scholarship was theirs, little perfection of song. Some had taught themselves their letters at the forge, some in the depths of the mine, some sang their most daring lines in prison cells where they were not allowed even to write down the words. Nearly all knew poverty and hunger at first hand; nearly all were persecuted for righteousness' sake. For maintaining the cause of the poor and the helpless they were mocked and reviled; scorn was their reward. The governing classes whose comfort they disturbed wished them dead; so did the self-righteous classes whose conscience they ruffled. That is the common fate of any man or woman who probes a loathsome evil, too long skimmed over. The peculiarity of these men was that, when they were driven to speak, they spoke in lines that flew on wings through the country. Indignation made their verse, and the burning memory of the wrongs they had seen gave it a power beyond its own expression. Which shall we recall of those ghostly poems, once so quick with flame? Still, at moments of deep distress or public wrong-doing, we may hear the echo of the Corn-law Rhymer's anthem:

"When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy! when?
Not kings and lords, but nations!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!"

Or if we read his first little book of rhymes, that may be had for twopence now, we shall find the pictures of the life that was lived under Protection--the sort of life the landlords and their theorists invite us to enact again. From his "Black Hole of Calcutta" we take the lines:

"Bread-tax'd weaver, all can see
What that tax hath done for thee,
And thy children, vilely led,
Singing hymns for shameful bread,
Till the stones of every street
Know their little naked feet."

Or let us take one verse from the lines, "O Lord, how long?"

"Child, what hast thou with sleep to do?
Awake, and dry thine eyes!
Thy tiny hands must labour too;
Our bread is tax'd--arise!
Arise, and toil long hours twice seven,
For pennies two or three;
Thy woes make angels weep in Heaven--
But England still is free."

Or we might recall "The Coming Cry," by Ebenezer Jones, with its great refrain:

"Perhaps it's better than starvation,--once we'll pray, and then
We'll all go building workhouses, million, million men!"

Or we might recall Ernest Jones and his "Song of the 'Lower Classes,'" where the first verse runs:

"We plow and sow, we're so very, very low,
That we delve in the dirty clay;
Till we bless the plain with the golden grain
And the vale with the fragrant hay.
Our place we know, we're so very, very low,
'Tis down at the landlord's feet;
We're not too low the grain to grow,
But too low the bread to eat."

Or shall we take one verse from the terrible "Easter Hymn," written by the same true-hearted prisoner for freedom:

"Like royal robes on the King of Jews,
We're mocked with rights that we may not use;
'Tis the people so long have been crucified,
But the thieves are still wanting on either side.

_Chorus_--Mary and Magdalen, Peter and John,
_______ Swell the sad burden, and bear it on."

The iteration of the idea throughout the poem is tremendous in effect, and the idea comes close to Swinburne's ode, "Before a Crucifix":

"O sacred head, O desecrate,
O labour-wounded feet and hands,
O blood poured forth in pledge to fate
Of nameless lives in divers lands,
O slain and spent and sacrificed
People, the grey-grown speechless Christ."

Time would fail to tell of Linton's "Torch-Dance of Liberty," or of Massey's "Men of Forty-eight," and there are many more--the utterance of men who spoke from the heart, knowing in their own lives what suffering was. But let us rather turn for a moment to the prose of a man who, also reared in hardship's school, had learnt to succour misery. Speaking at the time when Protection was biting and clawing the ground in the last death-struggle, as all men but the landlords hoped, Carlyle asked this question of the people:

"From much loud controversy, and Corn-law debating, there rises, loud though inarticulate, once more in these years, this very question among others, Who made the Land of England? Who made it, this respectable English Land, wheat-growing, metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let readily, hand over hand, for seventy millions or upwards, as it here lies: who did make it? 'We,' answer the much-consuming Aristocracy; 'We!' as they ride in, moist with the sweat of Melton Mowbray: 'It is we that made it, or are the heirs, assigns and representatives of those who did!'--My brothers, You? Everlasting honour to you, then; and Corn-laws many as you will, till your own deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of Human pity for our famine bids you Hold!"

So our fathers have told us, and we have forgotten. It is all very long ago, and the Protectionist says that times have changed. Certainly times have changed, and it was deliverance from Protection that changed them most. But if landowners have changed, if they are now more alien from the people, and richer from other sources than land, we have no reason to suppose them less greedy or more pitiful; nor can a nation live on the off-chance of pity. Seventy years ago the net encompassed the land. We have seen how the people suffered under its entanglement. In the sight of all, landowners and speculators are now trying to spread that net again. Are we to suppose the English people have not the hereditary instinct of sparrows to keep them outside its meshes?

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: "Our Fathers Have Told Us"

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