THE BAD OLD DAYS

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 150, 21 December 1929, Page 32

THE BAD OLD DAYS

jlSth CENTUEY ENGLAND

TRAGEDIES AND COMEDIES

We have lived through the difficult years that followed the Great War, through the agonies ana the heroism, the endurance ana the fellowship of the war itself. We are still struggling with, the bewilderment of this new after-war world which sseius to the elders among us so strangely unlike the world in which they grew up. How can we fail to be interested in the his-^ tory of that other generation which, a century ago, struggled through another great war, through another long and difficult period of post-war reconstruction?

Many of their difficulties seem to us Tory like our own. War bred hunger and poverty, trade dislocation, ruin here and . feverish prosperity there, crushing taxation, bitter unemployment, then, as it has done in our own .day. As now, so then war seemed to bring out the' beat and the worst characteristics of our race, our haphazardness, and lack of method, our gaiety, and our courage, our want of imagination, the way in which we struggle through to victory by sheer determination and force of character, writes Mrs. H. A. L. Fisher, in "John o' London's Weekly." • A KUEAL ENGLAND. Mr. Fremantle, whose great-grand-father served under . Nelson, and whose family is well known in more than one sphere of public activity, has devoted himself to the study of the early years of the nineteenth' century, and his "The Nineteenth Century," which deals with the first five of those years, is but a beginning. He gives one an admirable introductory survey of English life at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the* nineteenth century, followed by a close, detailed, well-documented and vividlydrawn account of the five years 1801-6. When the great struggle with Napoleon began, the old -England, which had endured for so many centuries, of which a little still survives to-day, was gradually turning into that nineteenth-cen-tury England that our elders knew. The old England was a rural England made up of self-sufficient villages, liv^ ing their owa^lives, with but little knowledge of SMd less care for the lives, of their fellows. By the end of the eighteenth century: The South of England had mainly passed beyond the stag© where each family provides for almost all its own needs, the husbandman building his own house, cutting his own tools, and shoeing his horse, the housewife spinning her thread ana knitting the garments for the family. Many southern homes indeed had their spinning wheels at the end of the century, and in them the maidens still earned the namo of spinster. But so little hard labour was done in the fields that England was called the Paradise of women. A more ungrateful soil, a.harsher climate, and a more isolated life had still preserved in the north xn their full vigour the first, energies of mankind struggling out of barbarism. While in the south the fields at harvest were thronged with women gleaning behind the reapers, a Yorkshire girl wouia have been ashamed to have' been found so engaged. She would have been in front wielding the sickle. NEW METHODS AND LONG HOUBS.

,New methods of agriculture were lapiaiy replacing the old, which couia no longer provide for the needs of a population. Enclosures made farmers prosperous and landlords rich, but they meant complete dislocation of the oia village economy. Without enclosure,' and the new scientific farming it rendered possible, a hungry country, already needing imports of corn from the continent, could never have been fed. The towns were growing fast, and growing, as we to-day know only too well faster than the knowledge of how they might healthily be built and planned: Their people^ had to be fed, and what ' they produced could be exported to pay for the'imported fuel. It was a changing age, a hard age, a hard-working age:—The hours of work followed the agricultural hours, which were generally from dawn to dusk in winter, and in summer twelve, and more at harvest time, with short intervals for refreshment. But a full twelve hours coulil be worked in other industries, both in summer and.winter.' To save up for the Christmas festivities weavers thought little of working whole- nights ■at the loom, singing carols such as "Christians Awake" to keep themselves from sleep. In good times when thoy worked sixty hours in a week, they ■worked a full twelVe-hour day, and took a whole day off at a time. BOUGH LANCASHIRE. It was not only a hard age, but a rough age. • Lancashire at this time bred the roughest men in England. They would fight together before the public in the most brutal maner, often till one or the other was killed. If the masters were hard they had good need to be-. The principal sports were the cruel ones auch as bull-baiting, at-whieh the people assisted only as spectators. Wrestling, single stick, and boxing still lingered as village recreations in such counties as Cumberland, Lancashirej and Cornwall. They were gradually being superseded by. cricket. But-it was not-until many ye^irs later that round arm bowling was invented, and the national game was still in its earlier stages.

Such an age was hard not only for the masses of the workers, but for women 'of all kinds. Seduction was , taken for granted: it had succeedea hard drinking as the fashionable vice. There were no circles, however refined, in which such subjects could not be mentioned with freedom, and there were few in which it was thought disgraceful to make the attempt. . . .The streets were full of th^ daughters of country clergymen and Others who had once borne the honourable namo of gentlewomen. Female suicides were probably commoner at this, period-wan-at any other. ■•'- -

The public conscience'was beginning to be roused, and it took the usual form of attacking female dress. A facetious writer suggested a "Petticoat Lenthening Bill, and a Bill to prohibit the use of flesh-coloured stockings." A dialect poem complains that "Van can't tell ladies fra bad lasses." ' Our modern morals are perplexing to some, and these complaints have a familiar ring. But surely we may hope that our short skirts and our modern freedoms may not lead to so violent a reaction as did those of our great-grand-mothers. A TURBULENT AGE. Mr. Fremantle's pages leave a picture in our minds of struggle, of brutality, of crushing poor rates, of terriffic burdens of taxation, of crowded and pestiferous prisons, of unrepresentative Parliamentary and local government, yet of a nation growing, living, expanding. ■We to-day are often full of a. righteous discontent, striving for a higher standard of life, for more leisure and a better use of that leisure, better care fpr the old and the weak, the helpless and the poor, better chances for the children. We look back upon that rough, hungry, brutal, and to our minds illgoverned England, and wonder how it stood against the might of Bonaparte, as no other country had stood, so that Pitt, in his last speech, was ablo to say, "England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save

.Europe by her example." Remembering our own experience, we feel that those exertions must have absorbed the country's whole energies. England did save Europe, but, as it were, without her own knowledge, and while she was very busy with her own affairs. It is a wonderful story, and well worth telling again.