Smallholding

“ Nor is the distinction upon which the deprivation is here based-the distinction between large and small families-one that readily commends itself as a basis for determining which children are to have support approximating subsistence and which are not. ”

“ Let any one in the evening visit the homes of the labouring class in a poor neighbourhood, and he will find, in many cases, a barely-furnished room, a numerous family of small children,—perhaps forgetting the pangs of hunger in the obliviousness of sleep,—a wife, with care-worn features, sitting in solitary wretchedness, ruminating on wants she knows not how to supply—namely, clothes and food for her children on the morrow, and on debts which she has no means of discharging. ”

“ If your aristocratic families would rear up their children in habits of business, and with some notions of duty and prudence, these mischievous arrangements would not be required, and they would retain in their possession estates at least as large as is compatible with the interests of the rest of the community. If the laws of entail and primogeniture are sound and just, why not apply them to personal property as well as to freehold? Imagine them in force in the middle classes of the community, and it will be seen at once that the unnatural system, if universal, would produce confusion ”

“ They care little whether their employer is pleased with them or not, and upon the slightest affront as they call it, or the slightest difference about wages, they are off directly. If one wont employ them, another must; or, at all events, they must be employed by the parish.
"Again; the natural affection which subsists between parent and child, is strengthened and increased in both—as is the case indeed [Pg 192] with brute animals—by the dependence of the children on their parents for subsistence. But now this dependence is, in many instances, removed from the parent to the overseer. ”

“ He does not like to part with them, and he spends his life bowed over them. Worse than this, unable to avert the further dismemberment of his estate on his death, he resolves in compact with his wife to have no more than one, or at the most two children. Now, with us, the younger son of a landed proprietor knows he must push his way in the world, and from the moment his intelligence begins to act he looks about him for openings. Our labourers also, unchained to the soil, go about wherever work may be had. ”

“ Knowing my incompetence for the task, I have no intention in this paper of trying to decide on how small a sum it is possible to maintain a family in this luxurious age. I only wish to say a few words upon what I consider to be the secret of the economy which has need to be exercised in these days in the largest household as well as in the smallest. ”

“ You take good care of your four-legged mules: we of our two-legged ones.’ The children, it seems, are taken away from the mothers, not merely because the mothers are needed for work, but because they neglect their offspring so much that the children have more chance of living—and therefore of paying—if brought up by hand. So each estate has, or had, its crêche, as the French would call it—a great nursery, in which the little black things are reared, kindly enough, by the elder ladies of the estate. ”

“ I was born upon an estate where the life tenure was the custom, and I found that in many cases men put their children's lives on a house, and some day or other they found themselves deprived of both children and property. In other cases the lives of sailors were on, and after a time there was great doubt whether the lives were in existence or not, and generally a great deal of misery was the result of this life tenure. ”

“ There is no shifting of strips, no changes in the quantities allotted to each family. Everything goes by heredity and settled rules of family property, as if the husbandry was not arranged for communal ownership and re-allotment. ”

“ They go much further, and include checks which must exist in every stage of society, as well while an immense expanse of fertile land remains unappropriated, as when every acre of land in the country has been cultivated like a garden. In every stage of society the period of infancy is helpless, and the prospect of a family must always carry with it the prospect of some division of a limited command of wealth, or otherwise of greater difficulties and more severe labour than in a single state. ”

“ To this Lien invariably replied:
“It is true my years are many, and that I am not worth a hair as a labourer, domestic servant, or tutor; but the purchaser I seek is a wealthy orphan, to whom I could act in the capacity of a father, by taking care of his money and property, managing his affairs, and regulating his household.” ”

“ The guardian of children, in such cases, is authorized to expend, from the children's share of property, as much as is necessary for their maintenance while they are children; and it is only the surplus, if there is any, which it is required of her to pay over to them, when they come of age. ”

“ Instead of the happy-go-lucky methods of the middle and lower class Anglo-Saxon, who will turn a family of sons and daughters loose upon the world with very little thought as to their future beyond the bare necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, the French parent regards it as his duty to see that [Pg 14] each daughter is provided with a dot suitable to her position, and the Civil Code requires a parent to leave a proportion of his property to each member of his family. ”

“ Can the responsibility be laid upon the parent who, in ignorance of what the ultimate consequences will be, sends the child out to labor in the fields of modern industry; upon the parent who is compelled by the presence of many children and few dollars to supplement the family income in every conceivable manner in order to provide an adequate subsistence? ”

“ Reformers have roundly abused, and striven to break down our land system, especially the right of primogeniture, and to resolve the land into small holdings to be cultivated by small owners. There are, as in all social and political questions, two sides to this. ”

“ Those who were born after the division of property would come into a world already possessed. If their parents from having too large a family were unable to give them sufficient for their support, what could they do in a world where every thing was appropriated? ”

“ No instance even is on record of a single householder rushing from his premises with all his family rather than endure cobwebs and dust; nor, indeed, of a single child refusing to stay in its nursery because it was untidy. ”

“ I then direct that the same shall not be sold, but that the profits thereof shall be annually appropriated to the use of her and her children as aforesaid, until her children shall come of age, or marry; but that whenever any one of them shall arrive at the age of twenty-one, or marry, his or her proportion of such land shall be conveyed by my said trustees, or the survivors or survivor of them, in fee simple, provided such child shall be capable of holding the same. ”

“ Then he bade the son give him the bit of flesh, kneaded a manikin out of it, breathed upon it, and in a minute there it stood, a really fine-looking little boy.
"His name is Small Profit," said he, turning to the son, "and you may call him brother. You are poor and have not the wherewithal with which to nourish your mother. If you need something, Small Profit can get it for you." ”

“ I should leave parents to dispose of their property as they would, trusting that if they had a perfect freedom of willing, they would provide for their estates being kept of a proper size, even if they could not trust their children’s prudence. ”

“ One of the chief complaints of small holders in the past has been that large holders regard them askance. The same, perhaps, applies to the attitude of the small holder to the allotment holder. That is all bad. Men and women on the land should be one big family, with interests, and sympathies in common and a neighbourly feeling. ”

“ The sale of children. In the Germanic states it remained lawful until far down in the Middle Ages for a man to sell his wife or child into servitude, or into adoption in another family in time of famine or distress. ”

“ The supply rarely answers the demand, for even from the tops of high houses in process of being built, we hear a shout of “Don’t forget us, please,” while the workmen on terra firma volunteer to distribute as many as we can spare. All seize with avidity on The Child’s Companion, for all, or most, have families at home, and “something for the little ones” is a boon. ”

“ The additions which a young family could make to the income of the parents would be inconsiderable, and their maintenance would chiefly be derived from the subdivision of the resources of the parents. ”

“ In a class where property runs with primogeniture, the first-born, if a female, is overlooked. In a class the whole status of which is based on property, on wealth to live at ease and in luxury, property is only dealt out to women, if at all, after male relatives have been served first, and then, as a rule, in much less proportion. ”

“ Would not a new orphan house for three hundred orphans cost another fifteen thousand pounds, or, if built for seven hundred, with the necessary ground, thirty-five thousand? And, even when built and fitted and filled, would there not be the providing for daily wants, which is a perpetual care, and cannot be paid for at once like a site and a building? It would demand eight thousand pounds annual outlay to provide for another seven hundred little ones. ”

“ No outflow rises higher than its source; as are the family standards, usage and influence, such inevitably must be the trend of the nation—the vast aggregation of those practically orphaned as regards parental authority and guardianship. We are all glad to remember distinguished exceptions to prevailing conditions, but how little genuine home life remains to leaven the social masses? ”

“ Let us take any family group, sufficiently coherent to live together as a single household, and supporting itself on the produce of the land that surrounds its dwelling. Whilst this group is small, the acreage will be small also, which, as ploughland, hunting-ground, or pasture, is required to supply its wants ”

“ To prevent a parent from pursuing a disgraceful traffic in a series of alarming sacrifices of his family stock, he was not permitted to sell the same child more than three times over, when the infant was permitted to go into the market on his own account, free of all filial duty. ”

“ An individual having five or more children could only dispose by will of half the estate; the remainder belonged to the children, and upon the death of the parent it was equally divided among them; if any were minors their share was taken in trust for them by guardians provided by law. ”

“ But when he comes to give all the goods he has year after year collected, in one estate to his son, house, orchard, ploughed land, cattle, bridges, hardware, wooden-ware, carpets, cloths, provisions, books, money, and cannot give him the skill and experience which made or collected these, and the method and place they have in his own life, the son finds his hands full,—not to use these things,—but to look after them and defend them from their natural enemies. To him they are not means, but masters. ”

“ Hence the reserve, the aloofness of children, their remoteness from grown people. There are certain things which the boy most deeply feels that he must not do, and certain other things that he must do ”

“ An unduly large family means the lowering of the present standard of living for all and a lowering of the future standard for the children. With most workmen it is not possible either to endow many children with property or to educate them in an elaborate way. ”

“ It enables fathers to dispose of their children's share during their minority, and gives the custody of the personal estate to the guardians of such child, and imposes in lieu of the revenues raised in the Court of Ward and Liveries, duties upon beer and ale. ”

“ There may be a system of mutual obligation if you like, but boys of a certain age are apt to become very arbitrary, and to consider their sisters in the light of body servants. By allowing boys to order their sisters about, to bring them things and give in always, you foster a spirit of selfishness, which grows tyrannical as the years go by, and paves the way for some domestic discomfort in a future home which will be beyond your jurisdiction. ”

“ Reflect upon the probable increase of my family within seven years; they alone will be almost numerous enough to people a small city. Where a family now requires only a hundred bushels a year, let the head of that family lay up a hundred bushels the first year, two hundred the next, and increase the amount every year in proportion to their probable requirements. ”

“ It would be obviously unjust, in cases where children themselves have property left them by legacy, or falling to them by inheritance, to compel their father or mother to toil ten or twenty years to feed and clothe them, in order that they might have their property, whole and untouched, when they come of age. ”

“ And if he sighed to think that there were no little feet pattering through the rooms and along the corridors, who may blame him? For a man owning a large property to be childless is to 10convert his freehold estate into a mere leasehold, terminable with his own life. ”