A DISHOMED NATION.

THE

HE whole of the parish in which I reside, with some insignificant exceptions, belongs to an entailed estate. The exceptions are a small property of forty acres, another of half an acre, and a small glebe. The forty acres, had they been saleable, would any time during the last century have been absorbed by the estate: they have, however, been leased to it beyond the memory of any one now alive. The halfacre once, of late years, was on the point of coming into the market, but it happened that the then life-tenant of the estate was non-resident, and so did not become aware of the fact; it, therefore, escaped annexation, and was purchased by the son of the man who had lived in the house upon it. He had received a hint that it might be had, and so was enabled to secure it by private contract, but at such a price as those only can afford who intend to cultivate their land with their own hands. The purchaser, then, of this half-acre is the only man in the parish who resides in a house that is absolutely his own. He alone has a house, which he can alienate, or pull down, or improve, or deal with as he may please. This cannot be done by the life-tenant of the estate, by the incumbent, by any of the farming tenants or of the labourers. I have now been connected with the parish for thirty-nine years, and under our English system changes are so frequent that at this day only one man in the parish is residing in the house he occupied at the time I became acquainted with the place; and not one man, with the single exception of the fortunate owner of the half-acre, is living in a house at that time occupied by his father. We are often told that agricultural tenancies are almost as continuous in families as the hereditary transmission of the land such tenants occupy. But it is certainly not so, generally, in these days. And as to agricultural labourers, they are so entirely dependent for their cottages on the

VOL. XXXVIII.

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wants and caprices of others, that thirty years make great changes in the personnel of the working hands on most estates. Labourers are ever coming and going, and a generation changes almost all the names of that class in a multitude of parish registers. New tenants bring new hands; and the new hands, that take the places of the old ones, are in their turn not likely to be more permanently settled than their predecessors. Under the conditions of the system no one can strike

root in the soil.

The same state of things exists in other parishes in the neighbourhood, and, as everybody knows, exists, though of course not everywhere to the same degree, yet pretty generally, throughout the United Kingdom. If next year, in making our returns for the census, every householder had to state whether he lived in a freehold house of his own, or in a leasehold or rented house, it would be seen that in London, with its 4,000,000 of inhabitants, in all our large towns, and generally in our rural districts, alike in England, Scotland, and Ireland, the proportion of those who live in houses of their own, which they can spend moncy in improving for themselves and their families, would be so small as to oblige us to feel that in this matter we had sunk into a category occupied by ourselves alone, that of being, throughout all the world, whether civilized or uncivilized, the only dishomed nation.

What I see around me often reminds me of the deep feeling with which, now many years ago, a friend, whose professional avocations had obliged him to live a somewhat erratic life, so that he had only occupied a succession of hired houses, once remarked to me that I should have some difficulty in understanding how he yearned for a house of his own. "What a happiness," he said, "would it then be to me to toil and to deny myself in order to make it a commodious and beautiful abode for my family! How should I study to make it pleasant to behold on the outside, and pleasant to live in! How unwilling should I be to leave it, and how glad to return to it! If it had a garden, what loving care should I bestow upon it! If I had but one tree-a single oak, so noble a piece of Nature's handiwork-that I could call my own, I should become a stronger and a better man. should feel that a portion of God's earth had been given to me in trust for my family, and that I must be careful to maintain the position this conferred upon me, and not to fall short of the responsibilities it imposed."

The fluency with which he expressed these sentiments showed that they were not then stirring within him for the first time; and his fervour perhaps indicated a supposition that on this subject his feelings were not quite those of ordinary men. But in this, if such was his thought, he was mistaken. He was only putting into words what men in all times, and in all degrees of barbarism and of civilization, have acted on, and which he felt only because it is the common desire which Nature implants in us all. What launched man on his long career of

progress was precisely the creation and the possession of a house of his own. This it was that first made family life possible. And what called into being the first germ of family life is what, under all the advances that have since been made, has ever continued to be its prime necessity. In the order of Nature, however great the outward variety, there are never two ways of attaining the same end. For instance, growth is the same process, infinitely diversified, in everything that lives. The vertebrate skeleton is the only scheme of organization for all the myriad forms of higher life, whether of fish, reptile, bird, beast, or of man himself. No one of the myriad host of the heavenly bodies obeys a different law from any other one. So is it in Nature's moral order. The family it was, made possible by the possession of a house, which originated, organized, maintained, and advanced morality. It was so in the beginning; it has been so ever since; and, judging from the analogy of Nature, and from the requirements of morality itself, it will be so to the end. In the grand process the house that was one's own was the starting-point, and in every stage and form of civilization. it has been the essential condition of family life and of moral progress.

In the earliest fragments of European thought that have come down to us, this fact we find embodied in the fable of the troglodytic Cyclops. People who lived in caves were not yet men. They had not reached the starting-point-the house. Hardly human in form and aspect, they were still further removed from man's nature in their want of morality. Morality is the voluntary submission of natural impulses to what has come to be regarded as right. But in these houseless people the wild impulses of unregulated nature were everything. Each ruled his wife and children-in this case extremes have met-in the fashion of the English wife-kicker. The truth to nature and fact of the old fable has been confirmed in our times by what we have come to know of the Australian savage. Had he possessed a hut or a wigwam-the germ of a house-he would have lived less the life of a brute. Не would then have possessed a wife, and the germ of the moral life would have been quickened within him.

Every improvement in the house is an improvement in morality. If it contain only one room decency and modesty are still only dormant possibilities. So construct the house as to separate the parents from the children, and an advance will be effected. Separate the boys from the girls, and this advance will be carried further. Let the house, that is continuously being improved, be his own, and it becomes, of all that man can acquire, or that the imagination can conceive his acquiring, the one possession that is most continuously suggestive and stimulative of morality. The efforts to acquire, to maintain, and to improve it are a daily lifelong schooling of morality. Industry, forethought, and self-denial are then the natural growths of his condition. And in the train of these virtues, and akin to them, comes the sense of the beautiful. The man so far advanced, and partly conscious of what

He ornaments

He studies

And in this

it is that has advanced him, wishes to adorn what is his own, and which he loves dearly because it is so precious to him. his doors and windows. He paints his walls and ceilings. the form of his furniture and of his domestic utensils. way is quickened within him the germ, also, of the fine arts. The house, the home that is one's own, is as potent as it is simple and unfailing in working these humanizing effects.

We see evidence of this in what remains to us of the domestic archi

tecture of the middle ages. Men then bestowed much thought on the designing and decoration of their houses, because they were their own. Doorposts and lintels were carved; ceilings were moulded; windows were mullioned; walls were wainscoted. Here was universal training for design, invention, and execution. The fine arts school was then in every house. This is Nature's plan. That Nature's plan was not then suppressed by law accounts for the beauty of the parish churches, the abbeys, the cathedrals of those times. The skill and sense of beauty they display had been called into being and widely disseminated by the designing and decoration of dwelling-houses that belonged to those who dwelt in them.

And there are other human requirements which cannot exist properly or fully except in the true home, that is to say, a house of one's own and in these times it must be one that is not inadequate to the wants of a family in the present stage of civilization; whose head, too, is an enfranchised citizen of what we have so often of late been told is this great empire of ours. The mind needs for its healthy exercise certain conditions of environment; and of these the chief is the dwelling-house. It cannot, for instance, be directed to profitable objects, or profitably employed, by one who grew up, and afterwards had to pass his days and to maintain his family, in an urban cellar, or a rural pigstye. Even in cases where the body is not enfeebled by such a habitation the mind must become a "scockered scrinchling" product, not of kindly nature but of the violation and degradation of nature. But, however, body and soul are so intimately united that if one is injured the other suffers with it. And the effects of this degradation are, by the law of heredity, transmitted to successive generations of citizens. This is enough to account for the dwarfed and stunted and perverted intelligence of, at all events for the nil contribution to the intellectual stores of the nation made by, the ill-lodged millions of London, of the manufacturing towns, and of the agricultural districts, or generally by the working classes of this country. If this state of things is ever to be changed, if their minds are ever to be of any use to themselves and to the country, if ever a source of human enjoyment, it can only be by enabling them to acquire homes in which thought may sometimes be possible, in which a few objects of instruction or interest of some kind

In the dialect of Suffolk a "scockered" branch means one that is diseased, and a "serinchling" is the small, hard, sour, undeveloped fruit such a branch produces.

or other may be preserved, or in which, at all events, a book might occasionally be read. This is not asking much for a citizen of England. As long as labourers and workmen were only drudges, nothing more, our common humanity was the only ground on which such considerations could have been urged. In those times, however, considerations of humanity in this matter did not occur to many. How could they? Did the idea that slavery was a monstrous wrong occur to a single mind throughout all the range, both in space and time, of the old civilization? In times, still not very remote, we all used to think that in this matter things were as they should be, and that intellectual improvement was not for those whose lot it was to labour; indeed, that they could hardly be too ignorant, too unaspiring, too dependent. But now that the progress of events, which rulers and statesmen are impotent to control, are making them numerically the virtual rulers of the country, capable of becoming its actual rulers, there is beginning to spread amongst us a feeling that we must look on this matter in a different way. That a working man should have a fixed and cherished dwelling of his own on English soil is not merely the stake in the country we used to hear a great deal of before household suffrage was conceded, it is something more it is a guarantee to no inconsiderable extent for some little exercise of thrift, and for some little sobriety of thought.

We

Social intercourse is another necessity of man's inner health; first the society of his family, and then the society of his fellow men. But everybody knows that there must be hundreds of thousands of so-called houses and of workmen's lodgings in this country, in which neither the society of a man's family nor of his fellow men is possible. may, or we may not, be the richest, but we certainly are the worst-housed people in the world. Hundreds of thousands of us can have no society except in the public-house. A man from among these hundreds of thousands who feels any mental movements within him, who has any desire to say anything to his fellows, or to hear anything they may have to say, must go there is no alternative for him-to the public-house. This is the cause amongst us of the enormous amount of drunkenness, and of drinking that does not reach the point of drunkenness, and of all their grievous attendant evils. Drinking cannot be checked, the publichouses will not cease to attract, the evil must go on, and it will go on increasing as education gives rise to more mental stir amongst us, until there be opened to the people of this country the acquisition of houses of their own which they will love, and on which they will spend money, the money they are now compelled by the proper and natural yearning every man has for society to spend in the public-house. Houses of their own, upon the improvement of which it would be happiness to them to spend money, and in which they could enjoy the society of their family and of a friend, would save them from the public-house. Meetings, lectures, tracts, societies, Permissive Acts, sermons, will never do it. If we choose to inquire of experience and observation what it is that makes.