Das Kapital

EXPROPRIATION OF THE AGRICULTURAL POPULATION FROM THE LAND

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Twenty-Seven
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land
In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the
last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the
population
consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th
century, of free peasant proprietors, whatever was the
feudal title under which their right of property was hidden.
In the larger seignorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a
serf, was displaced by the free farmer.
The wage labourers
of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilised
their leisure time by working on the large estates, partly
of an independent special class of wage labourers,
relatively and absolutely few in numbers.
The latter also
were practically at the same time peasant farmers, since,
besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land
to the extent of 4 or more acres, together with their
cottages. Besides they, with the rest of the peasants,
enjoyed the usufruct of the common land, which gave pasture
to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood,
turf, &c.
In all countries of Europe, feudal
production is characterised by
division of the soil amongst the greatest possible number of
subfeudatories. The might of the feudal lord, like that of
the sovereign, depended not on the length of his rent roll,
but on the number of his subjects, and the latter depended
on the number of peasant proprietors.
Although, therefore, the English
land, after the Norman Conquest, was distributed in gigantic
baronies, one of which often included some 900 of the old
Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was bestrewn with small peasant
properties, only here and there interspersed with great
seignorial domains. Such conditions, together with the
prosperity of the towns so characteristic of the 15th
century, allowed of that wealth of the people which
Chancellor Fortescue so eloquently paints in his “Laudes
legum Angliae;” but it excluded the possibility of
capitalistic wealth.
The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of
the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last
third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century.
A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market
by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as
Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled
house and castle.” Although the royal power, itself a
product of bourgeois development, in its strife after
absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of
these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause
of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the
great feudal lords created an incomparably larger
proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from
the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as
the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands.
The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the
corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the
direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been
devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the
child of its time, for which money was the power of all
powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was,
therefore, its cry. Harrison, in his “Description of
England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles,” describes how
the expropriation of small peasants is ruining the country.
“What care our great encroachers?” The dwellings of the
peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the
ground or doomed to decay. “If,” says Harrison, “the old
records of euerie manour be sought... it will soon appear that
in some manour seventeene, eighteene, or twentie
houses are shrunk... that England
was neuer less furnished with people than at the present...
Of cities and townes either utterly decaied or more than a
quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little
increased here or there; of townes pulled downe for
sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in
them... I could saie somewhat.” The complaints of these old
chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they reflect
faithfully the impression made on contemporaries by the
revolution in the conditions of production. A comparison of
the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals
the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton
rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated
without any transition from its golden into its iron age.
Legislation was terrified at this revolution. It did not
yet stand on that height of civilization where the “wealth
of the nation” (i.e., the formation of capital, and the
reckless exploitation and impoverishing of the mass of the
people) figure as the ultima Thule of all
state-craft.
In his history of Henry VII., Bacon says:
“Inclosures at that time (1489) began to be more frequent,
whereby arable land (which could not be manured without
people and families) was turned into pasture, which was
easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years,
lives, and at will (whereupon much of the yeomanry lived)
were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people, and
(by consequence) a decay of towns, churches, tithes, and the
like... In remedying of this inconvenience the king’s
wisdom was admirable, and the parliament’s at that time...
they took a course to take away depopulating enclosures, and
depopulating pasturage.” An Act of Henry VII., 1489, cap.
19, forbad the destruction of all “houses of husbandry” to
which at least 20 acres of land belonged. By an Act, 25
Henry VIII., the same law was renewed. It recites, among
other things, that many farms and large flocks of cattle,
especially of sheep, are concentrated in the hands of a few
men, whereby the rent of land has much risen and tillage has
fallen off, churches and houses have been pulled down, and
marvellous numbers of people have been deprived of the means
wherewith to maintain themselves and their families.
The Act, therefore, ordains
the rebuilding of the decayed farmsteads, and fixes a
proportion between corn land and pasture land, &c. An
Act of 1533 recites that some owners possess 24,000 sheep,
and limits the number to be owned to 2,000.
The cry of
the people and the legislation directed, for 150 years after
Henry VII., against the expropriation
of the small farmers and peasants,
were alike fruitless. The secret of their inefficiency
Bacon, without knowing it, reveals to us. “The device of
King Henry VII.,” says Bacon, in his “Essays, Civil and
Moral,” Essay 29, “was profound and admirable, in making
farms and houses of husbandry of a standard; that is,
maintained with such a proportion of land unto them as may
breed a subject to live in convenient plenty, and no servile
condition, and to keep the plough in the hands of the owners
and not mere hirelings.” What the capitalist system
demanded was, on the other hand, a degraded and almost
servile condition of the mass of the people, the
transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means
of labour into capital. During this transformation period,
legislation also strove to retain the 4 acres of land by the
cottage of the agricultural wage labourer, and forbad him to
take lodgers into his cottage. In the reign of James I.,
1627, Roger Crocker of Front Mill, was condemned for having
built a cottage on the manor of Front Mill without 4 acres
of land attached to the same in perpetuity.
As late as
Charles I.’s reign, 1638, a royal commission was appointed
to enforce the carrying out of the old laws, especially that
referring to the 4 acres of land. Even in
Cromwell’s time, the building of a house within 4 miles of
London was forbidden unless it was endowed with 4 acres of
land.
As late as the first half of the 18th century
complaint is made if the cottage of the agricultural
labourer has not an adjunct of one or two acres of land.
Nowadays he is lucky if it is furnished with a little
garden, or if he may rent, far away from his cottage, a few
roods. “Landlords and farmers,” says Dr. Hunter, “work here
hand in hand. A few acres to the cottage would make the
labourers too independent.”
The process of forcible expropriation
of the people received in the 16th century a new and
frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the
consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The
Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal
proprietor of a great part of the English land. The
suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their
inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were
to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites,
or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and
citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary
sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one.
The legally
guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the
church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated. “Pauper ubique
jacet,” cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through
England. In the 43rd year of her reign the nation was
obliged to recognise pauperism officially by the
introduction of a poor-rate. “The authors of this law seem
to have been ashamed to state the grounds of it, for
[contrary to traditional usage] it has no preamble
whatever.”
By the 16th of Charles I., ch. 4, it was declared perpetual,
and in fact only in 1834 did it take a new and harsher form.
These
immediate results of the Reformation were
not its most lasting ones. The
property of the church formed the religious bulwark of the
traditional conditions of landed property. With its fall
these were no longer tenable.
Even in the last decade of the 17th century, the
yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were more
numerous than the class of farmers. They had formed the
backbone of Cromwell’s strength, and, even according to the
confession of Macaulay, stood in favourable contrast to the
drunken squires and to their servants, the country clergy,
who had to marry their masters’ cast-off mistresses. About
1750, the yeomanry had disappeared, and so had, in the last decade
of the 18th century, the last trace of the common land of
the agricultural labourer. We leave on one side here the
purely economic causes of the agricultural revolution.
We
deal only with the forcible means employed.
After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed
proprietors carried, by legal means, an act of usurpation,
effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal
formality. They abolished the feudal tenure of land,
i.e., they got rid of all its obligations to the
State, “indemnified” the State by taxes on the peasantry and
the rest of the mass of the people, vindicated for
themselves the rights of modern private property in estates
to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed
those laws of settlement, which, mutatis mutandis,
had the same effect on the English agricultural
labourer, as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunof on the
Russian peasantry.
The “glorious Revolution” brought into power, along with
William of Orange, the landlord and
capitalist appropriators of surplus-value.
They inaugurated
the new era by practising on a colossal scale thefts of
state lands, thefts that had been hitherto managed more
modestly. These estates were given away, sold at a
ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by
direct seizure. All this happened without the
slightest observation of legal etiquette. The Crown lands
thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the robbery of
the Church estates, as far as these had not been lost again
during the republican revolution, form the basis of the
today princely domains of the English oligarchy.
The bourgeois
capitalists favoured the operation with the view, among
others, to promoting free trade in land, to extending the
domain of modern agriculture on the large farm-system, and
to increasing their supply of the free agricultural
proletarians ready to hand. Besides, the new landed
aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of
the newly-hatched haute finance, and of the large
manufacturers, then depending on protective duties. The
English bourgeoisie acted for its own interest quite as
wisely as did the Swedish bourgeoisie who, reversing the
process, hand in hand with their economic allies, the
peasantry, helped the kings in the forcible resumption of
the Crown lands from the oligarchy.
This happened since
1604 under Charles X. and Charles XI.
Communal property — always distinct from the State
property just dealt with — was an old Teutonic
institution which lived on under cover of feudalism. We have
seen how the forcible usurpation of this, generally
accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land,
begins at the end of the 15th and extends into the 16th
century. But, at that time, the process was carried on by
means of individual acts of violence against which
legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain.
The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this,
that the law itself becomes now the
instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the
large farmers make use of their little independent methods
as well.
The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for
enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the
landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private
property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M.
Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he
tries to represent communal property as the private property
of the great landlords who have taken the place of the
feudal lords, when he, himself, demands a “general Act of
Parliament for the enclosure of Commons” (admitting thereby
that a parliamentary coup d’état is
necessary for its transformation into private property), and
moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification
for the expropriated poor.

Whilst the place of the independent yeoman was taken by
tenants at will, small farmers on yearly leases, a servile
rabble dependent on the pleasure of the landlords, the
systematic robbery of the Communal lands helped especially,
next to the theft of the State domains, to swell those large
farms, that were called in the 18th century capital farms
or
merchant farms, and to “set free” the
agricultural population as proletarians for manufacturing
industry.
The 18th century, however, did not yet recognise as fully
as the 19th, the identity between national wealth and the
poverty of the people.
Hence the most vigorous polemic, in
the economic literature of that time, on the “enclosure of
commons.” From the mass of materials that lie before me, I
give a few extracts that will throw a strong light on the
circumstances of the time. “In several parishes of
Hertfordshire,” writes one indignant person, “24 farms,
numbering on the average 50-150 acres, have been melted up
into three farms.” “In Northamptonshire and
Leicestershire the enclosure of common lands has taken place
on a very large scale, and most of the new lordships,
resulting from the enclosure, have
been turned into pasturage, in consequence of which many
lordships have not now 50 acres ploughed yearly, in which
1,500 were ploughed formerly. The ruins of former
dwelling-houses, barns, stables, &c.,” are the sole
traces of the former inhabitants. “An hundred houses and
families have in some open-field villages dwindled to eight
or ten.... The landholders in most parishes that have been
enclosed only 15 or 20 years, are very few in comparison of
the numbers who occupied them in their open-field state. It
is no uncommon thing for 4 or 5 wealthy graziers to engross
a large enclosed lordship which was before in the hands of
20 or 30 farmers, and as many smaller tenants and
proprietors. All these
are hereby thrown out of their livings with their families
and many other families who were chiefly employed and
supported by them.” It was not only the land that
lay waste, but often land cultivated either in common or
held under a definite rent paid to the community, that was
annexed by the neighbouring landlords under pretext of
enclosure. “I have here in view enclosures of open fields
and lands already improved. It is acknowledged by even the
writers in defence of enclosures that these diminished
villages increase the monopolies of farms, raise the prices
of provisions, and produce depopulation ... and even the
enclosure of waste lands (as now carried on) bears hard on
the poor, by depriving them of a part of their subsistence,
and only goes towards increasing farms already too large.”
“When,”
says Dr. Price, “this land gets into the hands of a few
great farmers, the consequence must be that the little
farmers” (earlier designated by him “a multitude of little
proprietors and tenants, who maintain themselves and
families by the produce of the ground they occupy by sheep
kept on a common, by poultry, hogs, &c., and who
therefore have little occasion to purchase any of the means
of subsistence”) “will be converted into a body of men who
earn their subsistence by working for others, and who will
be under a necessity of going to market for all they
want.... There will, perhaps, be more labour, because there
will be more compulsion to it....
Towns and manufactures
will increase, because more will be driven to them in quest
of places and employment. This is the way in which the engrossing of
farms naturally operates. And this is the way in which, for
many years, it has been actually operating in this kingdom.”
He sums up
the effect of the enclosures thus: “Upon the whole, the
circumstances of the lower ranks of
men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From
little occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of
day-labourers and hirelings; and, at the same time, their
subsistence in that state has become more difficult.” In fact,
usurpation of the common lands and the revolution in
agriculture accompanying this, told so acutely on the
agricultural labourers that, even according to Eden, between
1765 and 1780, their wages began to fall below the minimum,
and to be supplemented by official poor-law relief. Their
wages, he says, “were not more than enough for the absolute
necessaries of life.”
Let us hear for a moment a defender of enclosures and an
opponent of Dr. Price. “Not is it a consequence that there
must be depopulation, because men are not seen wasting their
labour in the open field.... If, by converting the little
farmers into a body of men who must work for others, more
labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation” (to
which, of course, the “converted” ones do not belong)
“should wish for ... the produce being greater when their
joint labours are employed on one farm, there will be a
surplus for manufactures, and by this means manufactures,
one of the mines of the nation, will increase, in proportion
to the quantity of corn produced.”
The stoical peace of mind with which the political
economist regards the most shameless violation of the
“sacred rights of property” and the grossest acts of
violence to persons, as soon as they are necessary to lay
the foundations of the capitalistic mode of production, is
shown by Sir F. M. Eden, philanthropist and tory to boot.
The whole series of thefts,
outrages, and popular misery, that accompanied the forcible
expropriation of the people, from the last third of the 15th
to the end of the 18th century, lead him merely to the
comfortable conclusion: “The due proportion between arable
land and pasture had to be established. During the whole of
the 14th and the greater part of the 15th century, there was
one acre of pasture to 2, 3, and even 4 of arable land.
About the middle of the 16th century the proportion was
changed of 2 acres of pasture to 2, later on, of 2 acres of
pasture to one of arable, until at last the just proportion
of 3 acres of pasture to one of arable land was attained.”
In the 19th century, the very memory of the connexion
between the agricultural labourer and the communal property
had, of course, vanished.
To say nothing of more recent
times, have the agricultural population received a farthing
of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which
between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by
parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the
landlords?
The last process of wholesale expropriation of the
agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the
so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping
men off them. All the English methods hitherto considered
culminated in “clearing.” As we saw in the picture of modern
conditions given in a former chapter, where there are no
more independent peasants to get rid of, the “clearing” of
cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers do not
find on the soil cultivated by them even the spot necessary
for their own housing. But what “clearing of estates” really
and properly signifies, we learn only in the promised land
of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland. There the
process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the
magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one
blow (in Ireland landlords have gone to the length of
sweeping away several villages at once; in Scotland areas as
large as German principalities are dealt with), finally by
the peculiar form of property, under which the embezzled
lands were held.
The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which
was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The
representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was
only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen
of England is the titular owner of all the national soil.
When the English government succeeded in suppressing the
intestine wars of these “great men,” and their constant
incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans
by no means gave up their time-honored trade as robbers;
they only changed its form. On their own authority they
transformed their nominal right into a right of private
property, and as this brought them into collision with their
clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king
of England might as well claim to
drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman.
This
revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of
the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its
first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart
and James
Anderson.
In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to
emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by
force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. As an example of
the method
obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the
Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well
instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her
government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole
country, whose population had already been, by earlier
processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000,
into a sheep-walk.
From 1814 to 1820 these
15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were
systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages
were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into
pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came
to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to
death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave.
Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that
had from time immemorial belonged
to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about
6,000 acres on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family. The
6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in
no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of
her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an
average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for
centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of
the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms,
each inhabited by a single family, for the most part
imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000
Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of
the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to live by
catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an
English author says, half on land and half on water, and
withal only half on both.
But the brave Gaels must expiate yet more bitterly their
idolatry, romantic and of the mountains, for the “great men”
of the clan. The smell of their fish rose to the noses of
the great men. They scented some profit in it, and let the
sea-shore to the great fishmongers of London. For the second
time the Gaels were hunted out.
But, finally, part of the sheep-walks are turned into
deer preserves. Every one knows that there are no real
forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are
demurely domestic cattle, fat as London aldermen.
Scotland
is therefore the last refuge of the “noble passion.” “In the
Highlands,” says Somers in 1848, “new forests are springing
up like mushrooms. Here, on one side of Gaick, you have the
new forest of Glenfeshie; and there on the other you have
the new forest of Ardverikie. In the same line you have the
Black Mount, an immense waste also recently erected. From
east to west — from the neighbourhood of Aberdeen to
the crags of Oban — you have now a continuous line of forests; while in other parts of the
Highlands there are the new forests of Loch Archaig,
Glengarry, Glenmoriston, &c.
Sheep were introduced into
glens which had been the seats of communities of small
farmers; and the latter were driven to seek subsistence on
coarser and more sterile tracks of soil. Now deer are
supplanting sheep; and these are
once more dispossessing the small tenants, who will
necessarily be driven down upon still coarser land and to
more grinding penury. Deer-forests and the people cannot co-exist.
One or other of the two must yield. Let the forests be
increased in number and extent during the next quarter of a
century, as they have been in the last, and the Gaels will
perish from their native soil... This movement among the
Highland proprietors is with some a matter of ambition...
with some love of sport... while others, of a more
practical cast, follow the trade in deer with an eye solely
to profit. For it is a fact, that a mountain range laid out
in forest is, in many cases, more profitable to the
proprietor than when let as a sheep-walk. ...
The huntsman who wants a deer-forest limits
his offers by no other calculation than the extent of his
purse.... Sufferings have been inflicted in the Highlands
scarcely less severe than those occasioned by the policy of
the Norman kings. Deer have received extended ranges, while
men have been hunted within a narrower and still narrower
circle....
One after one the liberties of the people have
been cloven down.... And the oppressions are daily on the
increase.... The clearance and dispersion of the people is
pursued by the proprietors as a settled principle, as an
agricultural necessity, just as trees and brushwood are
cleared from the wastes of America or Australia; and the
operation goes on in a quiet, business-like way, &c.”

The spoliation of the church’s
property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains,
the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal
and clan property, and its transformation into modern
private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism,
were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation.
They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made
the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the
town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and
outlawed proletariat.
Footnotes
1. “The petty proprietors who
cultivated their own fields with their own hands, and
enjoyed a modest competence.... then formed a much more
important part of the nation than at present. If we may
trust the best statistical writers of that age, not less
than 160,000 proprietors who, with their families, must have
made up more than a seventh of the whole population, derived
their subsistence from little freehold estates. The average
income of these small landlords... was estimated at between
£60 and £70 a year. It was computed that the
number of persons who tilled their own land was greater than
the number of those who farmed the land of others.”
Macaulay: “History of England,” 10th ed., 1854, I. pp. 333,
334. Even in the last third of the 17th century, 4/5 of the
English people were agricultural. (l. c., p. 413.) I quote
Macaulay, because as systematic falsifier of history he
minimises as much as possible facts of this kind.
2. We must never forget that even the serf was
not only the owner, if but a tribute-paying owner, of the
piece of land attached to his house, but also a co-possessor
of the common land. “Le paysan (in Silesia, under Frederick
II.) est serf.” Nevertheless, these serfs possess common
lands. “On n’a pas pu encore engager les Silésiens au
partage des communes, tandis que dans la Nouvelle Marche, il
n’y a guère de village où ce partage ne soit
exécuté avec le plus grand succès.” [The peasant ... is a serf. ... It has not yet been possible to persuade the Silesians to partition the common lands, whereas in the Neumark there is scarcely a village where the partition has not been implemented with very great success]
(Mirabeau: “De la Monarchie Prussienne.” Londres, 1788, t.
ii, pp. 125, 126.)
3. Japan, with its purely feudal
organisation of landed property and its developed petite
culture, gives a much truer picture of the European
middle ages than all our history books, dictated as these
are, for the most part, by bourgeois prejudices. It is very
convenient to be “liberal” at the expense of the middle
ages.
4. In his “Utopia,” Thomas More says,
that in England “your shepe that were wont to be so meke and
tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so
great devourers and so wylde that they eate up, and swallow
downe, the very men themselfes.” “Utopia,” transl. by
Robinson, ed. Arber, Lond., 1869, p. 41.
5. Bacon shows the
connexion between a free, well-to-do peasantry and good
infantry. “This did wonderfully concern the might and
mannerhood of the kingdom to have farms as it were of a
standard sufficient to maintain an able body out of penury,
and did in effect amortise a great part of the lands of the
kingdom unto the hold and occupation of the yeomanry or
middle people, of a condition between gentlemen, and
cottagers and peasants.... For it hath been held by the
general opinion of men of best judgment in the wars.... that
the principal strength of an army consisteth in the infantry
or foot. And to make good infantry it requireth men bred,
not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and
plentiful manner. Therefore, if a state run most to noblemen
and gentlemen, and that the husbandman and ploughmen be but
as their workfolk and labourers, or else mere cottagers
(which are but hous’d beggars), you may have a good cavalry,
but never good stable bands of foot.... And this is to be
seen in France, and Italy, and some other parts abroad,
where in effect all is noblesse or peasantry.... insomuch
that they are inforced to employ mercenary bands of Switzers
and the like, for their battalions of foot; whereby also it
comes to pass that those nations have much people and few
soldiers.” (“The Reign of Henry VII.” Verbatim reprint from
Kennet’s England. Ed. 1719. Lond., 1870, p. 308.)
6. Dr. Hunter, l. c., p.
134. “The quantity of land assigned (in the old laws) would
now be judged too great for labourers, and rather as likely
to convert them into small farmers.” (George Roberts: “The
Social History of the People of the Southern Counties of
England in Past Centuries.” Lond., 1856, pp. 184-185.)
7. “The right of the
poor to share in the tithe, is established by the tenour of
ancient statutes.” (Tuckett, l. c., Vol. II., pg.
804-805.)
8. William Cobbett: “A
History of the Protestant Reformation,” § 471.
9. The “spirit” of
Protestantism may be seen from the following, among other
things. In the south of England certain landed proprietors
and well-to-do farmers put their heads together and
propounded ten questions as to the right interpretation of
the poor-law of Elizabeth. These they laid before a
celebrated jurist of that time, Sergeant Snigge (later a
judge under James I.) for his opinion. “Question 9 —
Some of the more wealthy farmers in the parish have devised
a skilful mode by which all the trouble of executing this
Act (the 43rd of Elizabeth) might be avoided. They have
proposed that we shall erect a prison in the parish, and
then give notice to the neighbourhood, that if any persons
are disposed to farm the poor of this parish, they do give
in sealed proposals, on a certain day, of the lowest price
at which they will take them off our hands; and that they
will be authorised to refuse to any one unless he be shut up
in the aforesaid prison. The proposers of this plan conceive
that there will be found in the adjoining counties, persons,
who, being unwilling to labour and not possessing substance
or credit to take a farm or ship, so as to live without
labour, may be induced to make a very advantageous offer to
the parish. If any of the poor perish under the contractor’s
care, the sin will lie at his door, as the parish will have
done its duty by them. We are, however, apprehensive that
the present Act (43rd of Elizabeth) will not warrant a
prudential measure of this kind; but you are to learn that
the rest of the freeholders of the county, and of the
adjoining county of B, will very readily join in instructing
their members to propose an Act to enable the parish to
contract with a person to lock up and work the poor; and to
declare that if any person shall refuse to be so locked up
and worked, he shall be entitled to no relief. This, it is
hoped, will prevent persons in distress from wanting relief,
and be the means of keeping down parishes.” (R. Blakey: “The
History of Political Literature from the Earliest Times.”
Lond., 1855, Vol. II., pp. 84-85.) In Scotland, the
abolition of serfdom took place some centuries later than in
England. Even in 1698, Fletcher of Saltoun, declared in the
Scotch parliament, “The number of beggars in Scotland is
reckoned at not less than 200,000. The only remedy that I, a
republican on principle, can suggest, is to restore the old
state of serfdom, to make slaves of all those who are unable
to provide for their own subsistence.” Eden, l. c., Book I.,
ch. 1, pp. 60-61, says, “The decrease of villenage seems
necessarily to have been the era of the origin of the poor.
Manufactures and commerce are the two parents of our
national poor.” Eden, like our Scotch republican on
principle, errs only in this: not the abolition of
villenage, but the abolition of the property of the
agricultural labourer in the soil made him a proletarian,
and eventually a pauper. In France, where the expropriation
was effected in another way, the ordonnance of Moulins,
1571, and the Edict of 1656, correspond to the English
poor-laws.
10. Professor Rogers,
although formerly Professor of Political Economy in the
University of Oxford, the hotbed of Protestant orthodoxy, in
his preface to the “History of Agriculture” lays stress on
the fact of the pauperisation of the mass of the people by
the Reformation.
11. “A Letter to Sir
T. C. Bunbury, Bart., on the High Price of Provisions. By a
Suffolk Gentleman.” Ipswich, 1795, p. 4. Even the fanatical
advocate of the system of large farms, the author of the
“Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price of
Provisions,” London, 1773, p. 139, says: “I most lament the
loss of our yeomanry, that set of men who really kept up the
independence of this nation; and sorry I am to see their
lands now in the hands of monopolising lords, tenanted out
to small farmers, who hold their leases on such conditions
as to be little better than vassals ready to attend a
summons on every mischievous occasion.”
12. On the private
moral character of this bourgeois hero, among other things:
“The large grant of lands in Ireland to Lady Orkney, in
1695, is a public instance of the king’s affection, and the
lady’s influence... Lady Orkney’s endearing offices are
supposed to have been — fœda labiorum
ministeria.” (In the Sloane Manuscript Collection, at the
British Museum, No. 4224. The Manuscript is entitled: “The
character and behaviour of King William, Sunderland, etc.,
as represented in Original Letters to the Duke of Shrewsbury
from Somers Halifax, Oxford, Secretary Vernon, etc.” It is
full of curiosa.)
13. “The illegal
alienation of the Crown Estates, partly by sale and partly
by gift, is a scandalous chapter in English history... a
gigantic fraud on the nation.” (F. W. Newman, “Lectures on
Political Economy.” London, 1851, pp. 129, 130.) [For
details as to how the present large landed proprietors of
England came into their possessions see “Our Old Nobility.
By Noblesse Oblige.” London, 1879. — F. E.]
14. Read,
e.g., E. Burke’s Pamphlet on the ducal house of
Bedford, whose offshoot was Lord John Russell, the “tomtit
of Liberalism.”
15. “The farmers
forbid cottagers to keep any living creatures besides
themselves and children, under the pretence that if they
keep any beasts or poultry, they will steal from the
farmers’ barns for their support; they also say, keep the
cottagers poor and you will keep them industrious, &c.,
but the real fact I believe, is that the farmers may have
the whole right of common to themselves.” (“A Political
Inquiry into the Consequences of Enclosing Waste Lands.”
London, 1785, p. 75.)
16. Eden, l. c.,
preface.
17. “Capital Farms.”
Two letters on the Flour Trade and the Dearness of Corn. By
a person in business. London, 1767, pp. 19, 20.
18. “Merchant Farms.”
“An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of
Provisions.” London, 1767, p. 11.
Note.— This excellent
work, that was published anonymously, is by the Rev.
Nathaniel Forster.
19. Thomas Wright: “A
Short Address to the Public on the Monopoly of Large Farms,”
1779, pp. 2, 3.
20. Rev. Addington:
“Inquiry into the Reasons for or against Enclosing Open
Fields,” London, 1772, pp. 37, 43 passim.
21. Dr. R. Price, l.
c., v. ii., p. 155, Forster, Addington, Kent, Price, and
James Anderson, should be read and compared with the
miserable prattle of Sycophant MacCulloch in his catalogue:
“The Literature of Political Economy,” London, 1845.
22. Price, l. c., p.
147.
23. Price, l. c., p.
159. We are reminded of ancient Rome. “The rich had got
possession of the greater part of the undivided land. They
trusted in the conditions of the time, that these
possessions would not be again taken from them, and bought,
therefore, some of the pieces of land lying near theirs, and
belonging to the poor, with the acquiescence of their
owners, and took some by force, so that they now were
cultivating widely extended domains, instead of isolated
fields. Then they employed slaves in agriculture and
cattle-breeding, because freemen would have been taken from
labour for military service. The possession of slaves
brought them great gain, inasmuch as these, on account of
their immunity from military service, could freely multiply
and have a multitude of children. Thus the powerful men drew
all wealth to themselves, and all the land swarmed with
slaves. The Italians, on the other hand, were always
decreasing in number, destroyed as they were by poverty,
taxes, and military service. Even when times of peace came,
they were doomed to complete inactivity, because the rich
were in possession of the soil, and used slaves instead of
freemen in the tilling of it.” (Appian: “Civil Wars,” I.7.)
This passage refers to the time before the Licinian
rogations. Military service, which hastened to so great an
extent the ruin of the Roman plebeians, was also the chief
means by which, as in a forcing-house, Charlemagne brought
about the transformation of free German peasants into serfs
and bondsmen.
24. “An Inquiry into
the Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions,
&c.,” pp. 124, 129. To the like effect, but with an
opposite tendency: “Working-men are driven from their
cottages and forced into the towns to seek for employment;
but then a larger surplus is obtained, and thus capital is
augmented.” (“The Perils of the Nation,” 2nd ed. London.,
1843, p. 14.)
25. l. c., p. 132.
26. Steuart says: “If
you compare the rent of these lands” (he erroneously
includes in this economic category the tribute of the
taskmen to the clanchief) “with the extent, it appears very
small. If you compare it with the numbers fed upon the farm,
you will find that an estate in the Highlands maintains,
perhaps, ten times as many people as another of the same
value in a good and fertile province.” (l. c., vol. i., ch.
xvi., p. 104.)
27. James Anderson:
“Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National
Industry, &c.,” Edinburgh, 1777.
28. In 1860 the people
expropriated by force were exported to Canada under false
pretences. Some fled to the mountains and neighbouring
islands. They were followed by the police, came to blows
with them and escaped.
29. “In the Highlands
of Scotland,” says Buchanan, the commentator on Adam Smith,
1814, “the ancient state of property is daily subverted....
The landlord, without regard to the hereditary tenant (a
category used in error here), now offers his land to the
highest bidder, who, if he is an improver, instantly adopts
a new system of cultivation. The land, formerly overspread
with small tenants or labourers, was peopled in proportion
to its produce, but under the new system of improved
cultivation and increased rents, the largest possible
produce is obtained at the least possible expense: and the
useless hands being, with this view, removed, the population
is reduced, not to what the land will maintain, but to what
it will employ. “The dispossessed tenants either seek a
subsistence in the neighbouring towns,” &c. (David
Buchanan: “Observations on, &c., A. Smith’s Wealth of
Nations.” Edinburgh, 1814, vol. iv., p. 144.) “The Scotch
grandees dispossessed families as they would grub up
coppice-wood, and they treated villages and their people as
Indians harassed with wild beasts do, in their vengeance, a
jungle with tigers.... Man is bartered for a fleece or a
carcase of mutton, nay, held cheaper.... Why, how much worse
is it than the intention of the Moguls, who, when they had
broken into the northern provinces of China, proposed in
council to exterminate the inhabitants, and convert the land
into pasture. This proposal many Highland proprietors have
effected in their own country against their own countrymen.”
(George Ensor: “An Inquiry Concerning the Population of
Nations.” Lond,. 1818, pp. 215, 216.)
30. When the present
Duchess of Sutherland entertained Mrs. Beecher Stowe,
authoress of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” with great magnificence in
London to show her sympathy for the Negro slaves of the
American republic — a sympathy that she prudently
forgot, with her fellow-aristocrats, during the civil war,
in which every “noble” English heart beat for the
slave-owner — I gave in the New York Tribune
the facts about the Sutherland slaves. (Epitomised in part
by Carey in “The Slave Trade.” Philadelphia, 1853, pp. 203,
204.) My article was reprinted in a Scotch newspaper, and
led to a pretty polemic between the latter and the
sycophants of the Sutherlands.
31. Interesting
details on this fish trade will be found in Mr. David
Urquhart’s Portfolio, new series. — Nassau W. Senior,
in his posthumous work, already quoted, terms “the
proceedings in Sutherlandshire one of the most beneficent
clearings since the memory of man.” (l. c.)
32. The deer-forests
of Scotland contain not a single tree. The sheep are driven
from, and then the deer driven to, the naked hills, and then
it is called a deer-forest. Not even timber-planting and
real forest culture.
33. Robert Somers:
“Letters from the Highlands: or the Famine of 1847.” London,
1848, pp. 12-28 passim. These letters originally appeared in
The Times. The English economists of course
explained the famine of the Gaels in 1847, by their
over-population. At all events, they “were pressing on their
food-supply.” The “clearing of estates,” or as it is called
in Germany, “Bauernlegen,” occurred in Germany especially
after the 30 years’ war, and led to peasant-revolts as late
as 1790 in Kursachsen. It obtained especially in East
Germany. In most of the Prussian provinces, Frederick II.
for the first time secured right of property for the
peasants. After the conquest of Silesia he forced the
landlords to rebuild the huts, barns, etc., and to provide
the peasants with cattle and implements. He wanted soldiers
for his army and tax-payers for his treasury. For the rest,
the pleasant life that the peasant led under Frederick’s
system of finance and hodge-podge rule of despotism,
bureaucracy and feudalism, may be seen from the following
quotation from his admirer, Mirabeau: “Le lin fait donc une
des grandes richesses du cultivateur dans le Nord de
l’Allemagne. Malheureusement pour l’espèce humaine,
ce n’est qu’une ressource contre la misère et non un
moyen de bien-être.
Les impôts directs, les
corvées, les servitudes de tout genre,
écrasent le cultivateur allemand, qui paie encore des
impôts indirects dans tout ce qu’il achète....
et pour comble de ruine, il n’ose pas vendre ses productions
où et comme il le veut; il n’ose pas acheter ce dont
il a besoin aux marchands qui pourraient le lui livrer au
meilleur prix. Toutes ces causes le ruinent insensiblement,
et il se trouverait hors d’état de payer les
impôts directs à l’échéance sans
la filerie; elle lui offre une ressource, en occupant
utilement sa femme, ses enfants, ses servants, ses valets,
et lui-même; mais quelle pénible vie,
même aidée de ce secours.
En
été, il travaille comme un forçat au
labourage et à la récolte; il se couche
à 9 heures et se lève à deux, pour
suffire aux travaux; en hiver il devrait réparer ses
forces par un plus grand repos; mais il manquera de grains
pour le pain et les semailles, s’il se défait des
denrées qu’il faudrait vendre pour payer les
impôts. Il faut donc filer pour suppléer
à ce vide.... il faut y apporter la plus grande
assiduité.
Aussi le paysan se couche-t-il en hiver
à minuit, une heure, et se lève à cinq
ou six; ou bien il se couche à neuf, et se
lève à deux, et cela tous les jours de la vie
si ce n’est le dimanche. Ces excès de veille et de
travail usent la nature humaine, et de là vient
qu’hommes et femmes vieillissent beaucoup plutôt dans
les campagnes que dans les villes.” [Flax represents one of the greatest sources of wealth for the peasant of North Germany. Unfortunately for the human race, this is only a resource against misery and not a means towards well-being. Direct taxes, forced labour service, obligations of all kinds crush the German peasant, especially as he still has to pay indirect taxes on everything he buys, ... and to complete his ruin he dare not sell his produce where and as he wishes; he dare not buy what he needs from the merhcants who could sell it to him at a cheaper price. He is slowly ruined by all those factors, and when the dirct taxes fall due, he would find himself incapable of paying them without his spinning-wheel; it offers him a last resort, while providing useful occupation for his wife, his children, his maids, his farm-hands, and himself; but what a painful life he leads, even with this extra resource! In summer, he works like a convict with the plough and at harvest; he goes to bed at nine o’clock and rises at two to get through all his work; in winter he ought to be recovering his strength by sleeping longer; but he would run short of corn for his bread and next year’s sowing if he got rid of the products that he needs to sell in order to pay the taxes. He therefore has to spin to fill up this gap ... and indeed he must do so most assiduously. Thus the peasant goes to bed at midnight or one o’clock in winter, and gets up at five or six; or he goes to bed at nine and gets up at two, and this he does every day of his life except Sundays. These excessively short hours of sleep and long hours of work consume a person’s strength and hence it happens that men and women age much more in the country than in the towns] (Mirabeau, l. c., t.III.
pp. 212 sqq.)
Note to the second edition. In April 1866, 18
years after the publication of the work of Robert Somers
quoted above, Professor Leone Levi gave a lecture before the
Society of Arts on the transformation of sheep-walks into
deer-forest, in which he depicts the advance in the
devastation of the Scottish Highlands. He says, with other
things: “Depopulation and transformation into sheep-walks
were the most convenient means for getting an income without
expenditure... A deer-forest in place of a sheep-walk was a
common change in the Highlands. The landowners turned out
the sheep as they once turned out the men from their
estates, and welcomed the new tenants — the wild beasts
and the feathered birds.... One can walk from the Earl of
Dalhousie’s estates in Forfarshire to John O’Groats, without
ever leaving forest land.... In many of these woods the fox,
the wild cat, the marten, the polecat, the weasel and the
Alpine hare are common; whilst the rabbit, the squirrel and
the rat have lately made their way into the country. Immense
tracts of land, much of which is described in the
statistical account of Scotland as having a pasturage in
richness and extent of very superior description, are thus
shut out from all cultivation and improvement, and are
solely devoted to the sport of a few persons for a very
brief period of the year.” The London Economist of
June 2, 1866, says, “Amongst the items of news in a Scotch
paper of last week, we read... ’One of the finest sheep
farms in Sutherlandshire, for which a rent of £1,200 a
year was recently offered, on the expiry of the existing
lease this year, is to be converted into a deer-forest.’
Here we see the modern instincts of feudalism ... operating
pretty much as they did when the Norman Conqueror...
destroyed 36 villages to create the New Forest.... Two
millions of acres... totally laid waste, embracing within
their area some of the most fertile lands of Scotland. The
natural grass of Glen Tilt was among the most nutritive in
the county of Perth. The deer-forest of Ben Aulder was by
far the best grazing ground in the wide district of
Badenoch; a part of the Black Mount forest was the best
pasture for black-faced sheep in Scotland. Some idea of the
ground laid waste for purely sporting purposes in Scotland
may be formed from the fact that it embraced an area larger
than the whole county of Perth. The resources of the forest
of Ben Aulder might give some idea of the loss sustained
from the forced desolations. The ground would pasture
15,000 sheep, and as it was not more than one-thirtieth part
of the old forest ground in Scotland ... it might, &c.,
... All that forest land is as totally unproductive.... It
might thus as well have been submerged under the waters of
the German Ocean.... Such extemporised wildernesses or
deserts ought to be put down by the decided interference of
the Legislature.”
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