No More Learning

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. 12 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. 13 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. 14 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
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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. 15 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'e? tat is necessary for its transformation into private property), and moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification for the expropriated poor. 16
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 farms17 or merchant farms,18 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. ? 19 --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. ? 20 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. ? 21 --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
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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. ? 22 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. ? 23 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. ? 24
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.
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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-honoured 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. 25 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 Steuart26 and James Anderson. 27 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. 28 As an example of the method29 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. 30
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. 31
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-forests32 and the people cannot co-exist. One or other of the
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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. ? 33
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.
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 Sile? siens au partage des communes, tandis que dans la Nouvelle Marche, il n'y a gue`re de village ou` ce partage ne soit exe? cute? avec le plus grand succe`s. ? [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.
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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
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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 -- foeda 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.