The Agricultural Proletariat

contributed, and this is its only real service. When the farmers become Liberals, i.e. , conscious bourgeois, the agricultural labourers will inevitably become Chartists and Socialists; the first change involves the second. And that a new movement is already beginning among the agricultural labourers is proved by a meeting which Earl Radnor, a Liberal landlord, caused to be held in October, 1844 , near Highworth, where his estates lie, to pass resolutions against the Corn Laws. At this meeting, the labourers, perfectly indifferent as to these laws, demanded something wholly different, namely small holdings, at low rent, for themselves, telling Earl Radnor all sorts of bitter truths to his face. Thus the movement of the working-class is finding its way into the remote, stationary, mentally dead agricultural districts; and, thanks to the general distress, will soon be as firmly rooted and energetic as in the manufacturing districts. As to the religious state of the agricultural labourers, they are, it is true, more pious than the manufacturing operatives; but they, too, are greatly at odds with the Church⁠—for in these districts members of the Established Church almost exclusively are to be found. A correspondent of the Morning Chronicle , who, over the signature, “One who has whistled at the plough,” reports his tour through the agricultural districts, relates, among other things, the following conversation with some labourers after service: “I asked one of these people whether the preacher of the day was their own clergyman. ‘Yes, blast him! He is our own parson, and begs the whole time. He’s been always a-begging as long as I’ve known him.’ (The sermon had been upon a mission to the heathen.) ‘And as long as I’ve known him too,’ added another; ‘and I never knew a parson but what was begging for this or the other.’ ‘Yes,’ said a woman, who had just come out of the church, ‘and look how wages are going down, and see the rich vagabonds with whom the parsons eat and drink and hunt. So help me God, we are more fit to starve in the workhouse than pay the parsons as go among the heathen.’ ‘And why,’ said another, ‘don’t they send the parsons as drones every day in Salisbury Cathedral, for nobody but the bare stones? Why