CHAPTER XI

The Poor in Smith's Day

"The penury in which the people live, will perhaps account for a remarkable fact mentioned by Dr. A. Smith in his Wealth of Nations, viz. That in the Highlands it is not uncommon for a woman who has borne twenty children, not to have two alive! It will account also for the emigrations from that country." 183

HE writer of the above paragraph is David Davies,

temporary of Adam Smith, Davies set out to show the actual conditions of the poor in England in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The result of his investigations were laid before Parliament. His narrative is wonderfully simple and informing. The reader should have the substance of Davies' story at his command. Possibly Davies was acquainted with a very heartfelt wish of Bishop Butler's which the latter had never been able to put into practice:-"I have often wished, that it had been the custom to lay before people nothing in matters of argument but premises, and leave them to draw conclusions themselves; which, though it could not be done in all cases, might in many."

Democracy is suffering for want of such custom. For want of the knowledge of facts and premises peoples perish. 184 We should therefore hail David Davies as one of the great spirits of the eighteenth century. From his first words we behold a man among

men:

"In visiting the labouring families of my parish, as my duty led me, I could not but observe with concern their mean and distressed condition. I found them in general but indifferently fed; badly clothed; some children without shoes and stockings; very few put to school; and most families in debt to little shopkeepers ... I found the women, when not working in the 108

The necessity on the part of married women to find gainful occupation to keep the family above starvation was well known to the writers of the eighteenth century.

Adam Smith assumes that both husband and wife will be found thus at work: "The labour of the husband and wife together must be able to earn something more than what is precisely necessary for their own maintenance; but in what proportion I shall not take upon me to determine." 185

David Davies took it upon himself to find out. He continues:

"These poor people, in assigning the cause of their misery, agreed in ascribing it to the high prices of the necessaries of life. Every thing (they said) is so dear, that we can hardly live.' In order to assure myself, whether this was really the case, I enquired into the particulars of their earnings and expences; and wrote the same down at the time, just as I received them from each family, guarding as well as I could against error and deception." p. 6.

Facts run upon facts, as Davies continues:

"If any one should think that the women's earnings are stated too low in these accounts, he will be convinced they are not, on considering that these women commonly begin the world with an infant, and are mere nurses for ten or twelve years after marriage, being always either with child, or having a child at the breast; consequently incapable of doing much work besides the necessary business of their families, such as baking, washing and the like." p. 14.

Of the diet we have these facts:

"Few poor families can afford themselves more than 1 lb. of meat weekly. Soft sugar 14 to 15 cents per pound. Suckling of calves is here so profitable (to furnish veal for London) that the poor can seldom either buy or beg milk. Poor people reckon cheese the dearest article they can use. Malt is so dear. To eke out soap, they burn green Fern, and knead the ashes into balls, with which they make lye for washing. Soap expenses are high, for a woman may wash for two single labourers."

p. 19. The situation was worse in Davies' day than forty years before: 186

"It is a fact, in which old people uniformly agree, that the joint earnings of a labouring man and his wife were sufficient

to maintain themselves and three children, and in a better manner too, about the middle of this (18th) century. Therefore the price of day-labour has not, in this interval, kept pace with the prices of the necessaries of life; and the condition of a labouring family is now become, from this circumstance alone, worse than it was then, by so much as would suffice for the maintenance of one child." pp. 24-25.

There is an extreme touch of the imperialist conditions, when Davies, having met the charge that the people eat wheat bread, with the cry, "Can you, who blame them, give a reason why they, who have tilled the ground, and sown and reaped the grain, are not as well entitled to eat good bread?" goes on to say at what charges they eat it:

"The poor man buys every thing at the highest price; at a higher price than the rich do. He cannot help this; but must submit to the established order." p. 34.

It is not for the want of sufficient land that things are so, Davies says:

"Strange this appears in a country where the third part at least of the land lies waste; and where, if every poor family were allowed as much of this land as they could, when not otherwise employed, cultivate with the spade and pick-axe, it would be undoubtedly a great public benefit. Yet such is the fact." p. 35. (a fact to be remembered, since Malthus was just then on the point of publishing his "Essay on Population.")

Meeting the charge that these people should not eat wheat bread, Davies says again, when it is asked why not potatoes instead of bread:

"The want of milk is an impediment in the use of potatoes. Wheaten bread may be eaten alone with pleasure; but potatoes require either milk or meat to make them go down: you cannot make many hearty meals of them with salt and water only. Poor people indeed give them to their childdren in the greasy water, in which they have boiled their greens and their morsel of bacon: and, blessed be God! children will thrive, if they have enough of anything." p. 36.

The reproach that the people use tea is met:

"Still you exclaim, Tea is a luxury. If you mean fine hyson tea, sweetened with refined sugar, and softened with cream, I readily admit it to be so. But this is not the tea of the poor.

Spring water, just colored with a few leaves of the lowest-priced tea, sweetened with the brownest sugar, is the luxury for which you reproach them. To this they have recourse from mere necessity: and were they now deprived of this, they would immediately be reduced to bread and water." p. 39.

Depreciation of the money-our overplus of goldand taxes on the necessaries of life, are cited by Davies as causes of the higher prices. pp. 50, 51. And note the favor of law against these landless laborers:

"The present war will unavoidably increase the taxes. And a late Act of Parliament has continued the bounties (on wheat). p. 52.

And what proportion of the children of the nation are included in the description!

"Supposing the inhabitants of England and Wales to be 8 millions, the number of children from 6 to 10 will be 800,000. Three-fourths of these, or 600,000 belong probably to poor parents, some of whom manage so as to give their children a little schooling." p. 96.

And their diet? "Many working men breakfast on dry bread alone, without either cheese or drink of any kind; their meal is supper, and that no better than potatoes and salt, or barley-cake fried and water. Clothes they get as they can, and the children go nearly naked." p. 149.

Davies gives a summary of the evils of the prevailing economics of imperialism. The reader will recognize how it substantiates the definition for the system which we drew from Adam Smith's description of the system in the preceding chapter. These evils of the imperialist distribution of wealth the rector cites as follows:

"The rise of the prices of the necessaries, the buying them at dearest hand, the low and unproportionate price of labour, the increasing scarcity of employment for the poor, and their own want of industry, having no encouragement given them." p 149.

"In general I fear the wages of the labourer are not adequate to his maintenance, supposing him to have three or four children." p. 163

"In the harpy claws of pettyfogging attornies, who are perpetually harassing them in county courts, and plundering them with impunity." p. 163.

"Coals a very dear article. . . the price of wood bearing a considerable proportion to that of coals." p. 177.

"Lodgers are taken in to help meet expences.” p. 181.

Labour "very often" taxed an expense of a tenth of its income per week for the repair of tools, exclusive of their cost." p. 181.

"To eke out soap the poor women of this country use chamberlye." 188

A letter from Dunrabin Castle, Sutherland County, informs Davies of the conditions of labourers at the hand of their employer:

"All the labourers that I have concern with, number eighty. You know the generality of labourers take up their residence bordering some muir, and moss-where they find materials (such as they are) for building a house, and plenty of moss for fuel, besides pasture for their beasts. Those that have not these advantages, you will see how they live . . . salt water is a substitute for salt; and you know that it is laid down as an invariable rule, never to exceed their annual income; never to contract debts, except on account of indisposition or uncommon calamity; in such a case they take credit for a boll or two of meal (boll is about six bushels), which they regularly pay out of their next year's earnings." p. 197.

As a final entry in his plea for an adequate distribution of wealth, the Rector of Barkham comes squarely across the position taken by Dr. Butler. He cannot accept charity as the divinely ordained means for holding society together. An insufficient wage is a defrauded wage. Something has gone wrong, when those whose labors have created the wealth, must look up to the superior order that has taken the wealth, to have their humble share of the wealth doled out to them,