the smallest price allowed by the custom of
the neighbourhood, and quietly consigns
him to the tender mercies of the workhouse,
when old age or decrepitude overtake
him. To the dwellers in great cities the peasant
is scarcely known, always excepting the
stage peasant, the favourite dolt and clod-
hopper of the dramatists, the incarnation
of all that is stupid, if he is well disposed
towards society, and the incarnation of all
that is vicious and dangerous, if he has
sense enough to forsake the paths of village
virtue.

And the peasantry know as little of themselves
as others know of them. They do
not comprehend, like other labouring men,
the value of union and brotherhood in preventing
wages from being screwed down to
the starvation point. They do not see the
necessity—if labour fails them in their own
district—of trying their fortunes elsewhere.
The law does not make them serfs, but they
make serfs of themselves by their ignorance
and limpet-like tenacity in sticking to the
parish in which they were born. Oliver
Goldsmith may or may not have been right
when he spoke of this class of a former
day; but extinct in our own as " a bold
peasantry, their country's pride;" but it is
only too certain in our time, that if we are
to look for a "bold" peasantry anywhere
within the circuit of the British Isles, we
must look to the border counties, to Scotland,
and to Ireland, rather than to Saxon
England. In the southern shires, more
especially, the condition of the peasant is
virtually that of the slave. He is tied to
his parish by circumstances too formidable
to be overcome by any such small and weak
agencies as he can employ; and he can only
escape from it, to run a worse risk of pauperism
in the great cities, that do not need
him, and that have no work to offer that
he is capable of performing. By the hardest
labour he cannot earn a decent subsistence,
even in his youngest and strongest days.
He is submissive to authority, because he
is so snubbed, and buffeted, and preached
at, and lectured at, as to have become
hopeless of bettering himself morally or
physically. He is what in the south of
England is called a " droil," and what in the
north of England and the southern shires
of Scotland is called a "snool," i.e., one
whose spirit is broken by oppression and
continuous ill-treatment. He does sometimes,
it is true, enter a protest against his
life and its circumstances; and kindly fate
sometimes takes pity on his misery and lifts
him out of the ill-paid drudgery which is
his normal state. In his wild young days,
when his passions are strong, and he happens
to entangle himself in a love affair,
from which he has no other means of escape,
he desperately enlists for a soldier, and if
he be strong, well-behaved, fortunate, and
has received as much education as enables
him to read, write, and work up in arithmetic
as far as the rule of three, he may
rise in middle age to the dignity of a sergeant.
A French peasant under similar
circumstances may console himself with the
idea of a marshal's baton, or a colonel's
sash in his knapsack, but no such prospect
exists for the British recruit. A broken
constitution, and a pension of ninepence a
day, are his prospects after forty, and if he
return to his native village after this time,
and is able to hedge or ditch or follow the
plough, he is better off than his fellows by
the ninepence aforesaid. If he be reckless in
another direction, and takes the notion into
his head, which he sometimes does, that the
wild fowl and game generally belong of right
as much to him as they do to the squire or
other great landed proprietor of the neighbourhood,
he gets into difficulties far more
serious than love, however illicit and unfortunate,
could bring upon him, and is
lucky indeed if he do not find himself in
jail, and still luckier if, when he is released
from it, he is not possessed by seven times
as many devils of desperation as possessed
him when he and the law first came into
conflict. Young peasants are to be considered
particularly fortunate if they attract
the attention of the squire or the squire's
lady by their handiness or good looks, for
they may in consequence be promoted from
the paternal cottage to the stables or to
the servants' hall of the great mansion.
This is almost the only road of fortune that
is really open to the agricultural masses.
Once in this position the way is clear
before them, if they are prudent, provident,
ambitious, and not too honest, to amass
from their savings, their " vails," their perquisites,
and their " priggings," as much
as will elevate them into that upper stratum
of society which is occupied by green-
grocers, beershop-keepers, and other small
tradesmen who have capital enough to
invest in business. But these are the exceptions,
just as the manumitted slaves in
the days of negro slavery in America were
the exception to the otherwise universal
bondage of the race. "Once a peasant
always a peasant" seems to be the fate of
the large majority of this useful and laborious
class, leaving, perhaps, a margin of