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  Before I conclude, let me ask the reader to take a look at the singularity of the tone and tricks of this Six-Acts Government. Is it not a novelty in the world to see a Government, and in ordinary seasons, too, having its whole soul absorbed in considerations relating to the price of corn. There are our neighbours, the French, who have got a Government engaged in taking military possession of a great neighbouring kingdom to free which from these very French we have recently expended a hundred and fifty millions of money. Our neighbours have got a Government that is thus engaged, and we have got a Government that employs itself in making incessant ‘inquiries in all the qualified quarters’ relative to the price of wheat! Curious employment for a Government! Singular occupation for the Ministers of the GREAT GEORGE! They seem to think nothing of Spain, with its eleven millions of people, being in fact added to France. Wholly insensible do they appear to concerns of this sort, while they sit thinking, day and night, upon the price of the bushel of wheat!

  However, they are not, after all, such fools as they appear to be. Despicable, indeed, must be that nation, whose safety or whose happiness does, in any degree, depend on so fluctuating a thing as the price of corn. This is a matter that we must take as it comes. The seasons will be what they will be; and all the calculations of statesmen must be made wholly independent of the changes and chances of seasons. This has always been the case, to be sure. What nation could ever carry on its affairs, if it had to take into consideration the price of corn? Nevertheless, such is the situation of our Government, that its very existence, in its present way, depends upon the price of corn. The pretty fellows at Whitehall, if you may say to them: Well, but look at Spain;7 look at the enormous strides of the French; think of the consequences in case of another war; look, too, at the growing marine of America. See, Mr JENKINSON, see, Mr CANNING, see, Mr HUSKISSON, see, Mr PEEL, and all ye tribe of GRENVILLES, see, what tremendous dangers are gathering together about us! ‘Us! Aye, about you; but pray think what tremendous dangers wheat at four shillings a bushel will bring about us!’ This is the jut. Here lies the whole of it. We laugh at a Government employing itself in making calculations about the price of corn, and in employing its press to put forth market puffs. We laugh at these things; but we should not laugh, if we considered, that it is on the price of wheat that the duration of the power and the profits of these men depends. They know what they want; and they wish to believe themselves, and to make others believe, that they shall have it. I have observed before, but it is necessary to observe again that all those who are for the System, let them be Opposition or Opposition not, feel as Whitehall feels about the price of corn. I have given an instance, in the ‘tall soul’; but it is the same with the whole of them, with the whole of those who do not wish to see this infernal System changed. I was informed, and I believe it to be true, that the MARQUIS OF LANSDOWNE said, last April, when the great rise took place in the price of corn, that he had always thought that the cash-measures had but little effect on prices; but that he was now satisfied that those measures had no effect at all on prices! Now, what is our situation; what is the situation of this country, if we must have the present Ministry, or a Ministry of which the MARQUIS of LANSDOWNE is to be a Member, if the MARQUIS of LANSDOWNE did utter these words? And again, I say, that I verily believe he did utter them.

  Ours is a Government that now seems to depend very much upon the weather. The old type of a ship at sea will not do now, ours is a weather Government; and to know the state of it, we must have recourse to those glasses that the Jews carry about. Weather depends upon the winds, in a great measure; and I have no scruple to say, that the situation of those two RIGHT HONOURABLE youths, that are now gone to the Lakes in the North; that their situation, next winter, will be rendered very irksome, not to say perilous, by the present easterly wind, if it should continue about fifteen days longer. PITT, when he had just made a monstrous issue of paper, and had, thereby, actually put the match which blowed up the old She Devil in 1797 – PITT, at that time, congratulated the nation, that the wisdom of Parliament had established a solid system of finance. Any thing but solid it assuredly was; but his system of finance was as worthy of being called solid, as that System of Government which now manifestly depends upon the weather and the winds.

  Since my return home (it is now Thursday, nth September), I have received letters from the EAST, from the NORTH and from the WEST. All tell me that the harvest is very far advanced, and that the crops are free from blight. These letters are not particular, as to the weight of the crop; except that they all say that the barley is excellent. The wind is now coming from the EAST. There is every appearance of the fine weather continuing. Before Christmas, we shall have the wheat down to what will be a fair average price in future. I always said that the late rise was a mere puff. It was, in part, a scarcity rise. The wheat of 1821 was grown and bad. That of 1822 had to be begun upon in July. The crop has had to last thirteen months and a half. The present crop will have to last only eleven months, or less. The crop of barley, last year, was so very bad; so very small; and the crop of the year before so very bad in quality, that wheat was malted, last year, in great quantities, instead of barley. This year, the crop of barley is prodigious. All these things considered, wheat, if the cash-measures had had no effect, must have been a hundred and forty shillings a quarter, and barley eighty. Yet the first never got to seventy, and the latter never got to forty! And yet there was a man who calls himself a statesman to say that that mere puff of a rise satisfied him, that the cash-measures had never had any effect! Ah! they are all afraid to believe in the effect of those cash-measures: they tremble like children at the sight of the rod, when you hold up before them the effect of those cash-measures. Their only hope, is, that I am wrong in my opinions upon that subject; because, if I am right, their System is condemned to speedy destruction!

  I thus conclude, for the present, my remarks relative to the harvest and the price of corn. It is the great subject of the day; and the comfort is, that we are now speedily to see whether I be right or whether the MARQUIS of LANSDOWNE be right. As to the infamous London press, the moment the wheat comes down to forty shillings; that is to say, an average Government Return of forty shillings; I will spend ten pounds in PLACARDING this infamous press, after the manner in which we used to placard the base and detestable enemies of the QUEEN.8 This infamous press has been what is vulgarly called ‘running its rigs’, for several months past. The Quakers have been urging it on, underhanded. They have, I understand, been bribing it pretty deeply, in order to calumniate me, and to favour their own monopoly; but, thank GOD, the cunning knaves have outwitted themselves. They won’t play at cards; but they will play at Stocks; they will play at Lottery Tickets, and they will play at Mark-lane. They have played a silly game, this time. SAINT SWITHIN, that good old Roman Catholic Saint, seemed to have set a trap for them; he went on, wet, wet, wet, even until the harvest began. Then, after two or three days’ sunshine, shocking wet again, the ground soaking, the wheat growing, and the ‘Friends’;9 the gentle Friends, seeking the Spirit, were as busy amongst the sacks at Mark-lane as the devil in a high wind. In short they bought away, with all the gain of Godliness, and a little more, before their eyes. All of a sudden, Saint Swithin took away his clouds; out came the sun; the wind got round to the East; just sun enough and just wind enough; and as the wheat ricks every where rose up, the long jaws of the Quakers dropped down; and their faces of slate became of a darker hue. That sect will certainly be punished, this year; and, let us hope, that such a change will take place in their concerns as will compel a part of them to labour, at any rate; for, at present, their sect is a perfect monster in society; a whole sect, not one man of whom earns his living by the sweat of his brow. A sect a great deal worse than the Jews; for some of them do work. However, GOD send us the easterly wind, for another fortnight, and we shall certainly see some of this sect at work.

  FROM KENSINGTON, ACROSS SURREY, AND ALONG THAT COUNTY

  Reigate, Wed
nesday Evening, 19 th October, 1825

  Having some business at Hartswood, near Reigate, I intended to come off this morning on horseback, along with my son Richard, but it rained so furiously the last night, that we gave up the horse project for to-day, being, by appointment, to be at Reigate by ten o’clock to-day: so that we came off this morning at five o’clock, in a post-chaise, intending to return home and take our horses. Finding, however, that we cannot quit this place till Friday, we have now sent for our horses, though the weather is dreadfully wet. But we are under a farm-house roof, and the wind may whistle and the rain fall as much as they like.

  Reigate, Thursday Evening, 20th October, 1825

  Having done my business at Hartswood to-day about eleven o’clock, I went to a sale at a farm, which the farmer is quitting. Here I had a view of what has long been going on all over the country. The farm, which belongs to Christ’s Hospital, has been held by a man of the name of CHARINGTON, in whose family the lease has been, I hear, a great number of years. The house is hidden by trees. It stands in the Weald of Surrey, close by the River Mole, which is here a mere rivulet, though just below this house the rivulet supplies the very prettiest flour-mill I ever saw in my life.

  Every thing about this farm-house was formerly the scene of plain manners and plentiful living. Oak clothes-chests, oak bedsteads, oak chest of drawers, and oak tables to eat on, long, strong, and well supplied with joint stools. Some of the things were many hundreds of years old. But all appeared to be in a state of decay and nearly of disuse. There appeared to have been hardly any family in that house, where formerly there were, in all probability, from ten to fifteen men, boys, and maids: and, which was the worst of all, there was a parlour! Aye, and a carpet and bell-pull tool One end of the front of this once plain and substantial house had been moulded into a ‘parlour’; and there was the mahogany table, and the fine chairs, and the fine glass, and all as bare-faced upstart as any stock-jobber in the kingdom can boast of. And, there were the decanters, the glasses, the ‘dinner-set’ of crockery ware, and all just in the true stock-jobber style. And I dare say it has been ’Squire Charington and the Miss Charingtons; and not plain Master Charington, and his son Hodge, and his daughter Betty Charington, all of whom this accursed system has, in all likelihood, transmuted into a species of mock gentle-folks, while it has ground the labourers down into real slaves. Why do not farmers now feed and lodge their work-people, as they did formerly? Because they cannot keep them upon so little as they give them in wages. This is the real cause of the change. There needs no more to prove that the lot of the working classes has become worse than it formerly was. This fact alone is quite sufficient to settle this point. All the world knows, that a number of people, boarded in the same house, and at the same table, can, with as good food, be boarded much cheaper than those persons divided into twos, threes, or fours, can be boarded. This is a well-known truth: therefore, if the farmer now shuts his pantry against his labourers, and pays them wholly in money, is it not clear, that he does it because he thereby gives them a living cheaper to him; that is to say, a worse living than formerly? Mind he has a house for them; a kitchen for them to sit in, bed rooms for them to sleep in, tables, and stools, and benches, of everlasting duration. All these he has: all these cost him nothing; and yet so much does he gain by pinching them in wages that he lets all these things remain as of no use, rather than feed labourers in the house.1 Judge, then, of the change that has taken place in the condition of these labourers! And, be astonished, if you can, at the pauperism and the crimes that now disgrace this once happy and moral England.

  The land produces, on an average, what it always produced; but, there is a new distribution of the produce. This ‘Squire Charington’s father used, I dare say, to sit at the head of the oak-table along with his men, say grace to them, and cut up the meat and the pudding. He might take a cup of strong beer to himself, when they had none; but, that was pretty nearly all the difference in their manner of living. So that all lived well. But, the ’Squire had many wine-decanters and wine-glasses and ‘a dinner set’, and a ‘breakfast set’, and ‘desert knives’; and these evidently imply carryings on and a consumption that must of necessity have greatly robbed die long oak table if it had remained fully tenanted. That long table could not share in the work of the decanters and the dinner set. Therefore, it became almost untenanted; the labourers retreated to hovels, called cottages; and, instead of board and lodging, they got money; so little of it as to enable the employer to drink wine; but, then, that he might not reduce them to quite starvation., they were enabled to come to him, in die king’s name, and demand food as paupers. And, now mind, that which a man receives in the king’s name, he knows well he has by force; and it is not in nature that he should thank any body for it, and least of all the party from whom it is forced. Then, if this sort of force be insufficient to obtain him enough to eat and to keep him warm, is it surprising, if he think it no great offence against God (who created no man to starve) to use another sort of force more within his own controul? Is it, in short, surprising, if he resort to theft and robbery?

  This is not only the natural progress, but it has been the progress in England. The blame is not justly imputed to ’SQUIRE CHARINGTON and his like: the blame belongs to the infernal stock-jobbing system. There was no reason to expect, that farmers would not endeavour to keep pace, in point of show and luxury, with fund-holders, and with all die tribes that war and taxes created. Farmers were not the authors of the mischief; and now they are compelled to shut the labourers out of their houses, and to pinch them in their wages, in order to be able to pay their own taxes; and, besides this, the manners and the principles of die working class are so changed, that a sort of self-preservation bids the farmer (especially in some counties) to keep them from beneath his roof.

  I could not quit this farm house without reflecting on the thousands of scores of bacon and thousands of bushels of bread that had been eaten from the long oak-table which, I said to myself, is now perhaps, going, at last, to the bottom of a bridge that some stock-jobber will stick up over an artificial river in his cockney-garden. ‘By — it shant,’ said I, almost in a real passion: and so I requested a friend to buy it for me; and if he do so, I will take it to Kensington, or to Fleet-street, and keep it for the good it has done in the world.

  When the old farm-houses are down (and down they must come in time) what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now erected are mere painted shells, with a Mistress within, who is stuck up in a place she calls a parlour, with, if she have children, the ‘young ladies and gentlemen’ about her: some showy chairs and a sofa (a sofa by all means): half a dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up: some swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon them: a dinner brought in by a girl that is perhaps better ‘educated’ than she: two or three nick-nacks to eat instead of a piece of bacon and a pudding: the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to come into; and every thing proclaiming to every sensible beholder, that there is here a constant anxiety to make a show not warranted by the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too clever to work: they are all to be gentlefolks. Go to plough! Good God! What, ‘young gentlemen’ go to plough! They become clerks, or some skimmy-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty work as cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What a mass of materials for producing that general and dreadful convulsion that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing and enslaving and starving system to atoms!

  I was going, to-day, by the side of a plat of ground, where there was a very fine flock of turkeys. I stopped to admire them, and observed to the owner how fine they were, when he answered, ‘We owe them entirely to you, Sir; for, we never raised one till we read your COTTAGE ECONOMY.’2 I then told him, that we had, this year, raised two broods at Kensington, one black and one white, one of nine and one of eight; but, that, about three weeks back, they appeared to become dull and pale about the head; an
d, that, therefore, I sent them to a farm house, where they recovered instantly, and the broods being such a contrast to each other in point of colour, they were now, when prowling over a grass field amongst the most agreeable sights that I had ever seen. I intended of course, to let them get their full growth at Kensington, where they were in a grass plat about fifteen yards square, and where I thought that the feeding of them, in great abundance, with lettuces and other greens from the garden, together with grain, would carry them on to perfection. But, I found that I was wrong; and that, though you may raise them to a certain size, in a small place and with such management, they then, if so much confined, begin to be sickly. Several of mine began actually to droop: and, the very day they were sent into the country, they became as gay as ever, and, in three days, all the colour about their heads came back to them.

  This town of Reigate had, in former times, a PRIORY, which had considerable estates in the neighbourhood; and this is brought to my recollection by a circumstance which has recently taken place in this very town. We all know how long it has been the fashion for us to take it for granted, that the monasteries were bad things; but, of late, I have made some hundreds of thousands of very good Protestants begin to suspect, hat monasteries were better than poor-rates, and that monks and nuns, who fed the poor, were better than sinecure and pension men and women, who feed upon the poor. But, how came the monasteries? How came this that was at Reigate, for instance? Why, it was, if I recollect correctly, founded by a Surrey gentleman, who gave this spot and other estates to it, and who, as was usual, provided that masses were to be said in it for his soul and those of others, and that it should, as usual, give aid to the poor and needy.