第39章

Hops and Hoppers.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay:

Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade, A breath can make them, as a breath is made;But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

-GOLDSMITH.

SO FAR HAS THE DIVORCEMENT of the worker from the soil proceeded, that the farming districts, the civilized world over, are dependent upon the cities for the gathering of the harvests.Then it is, when the land is spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk, who have been driven away from the soil, are called back to it again.But in England they return, not as prodigals, but as outcasts still, as vagrants and pariahs, to be doubted and flouted by their country brethren, to sleep in jails and casual wards, or under the hedges, and to live the Lord knows how.

It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street people to pick her hops.And out they come, obedient to the call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure- lust still in them.Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished.Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want them.They are out of place.As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile spawn from underground.Their very presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh bright sun and the green and growing things.The clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of nature.

Is the picture overdrawn? It all depends.For one who sees and thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly overdrawn.

But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn.Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king.Wins his spurs- God forbid! In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to chine.And, after all, it is far finer to kill a strong man with a clean-slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of his seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery manipulation of industry and politics.

But to return to the hops.Here the divorcement from the soil is as apparent as in every other agricultural line in England.While the manufacture of beer steadily increases, the growth of hops steadily decreases.In 1835 the acreage under hops was 71,327.

To-day it stands at 48,024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last year.

Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible storms reduced the yield.This misfortune is divided between the people who own hops and the people who pick hops.The owners perforce must put up with less of the nicer things of life, the pickers with less grub, of which, in the best of times, they never get enough.For weary weeks headlines like the following have appeared in the London papers:

TRAMPS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE HOPS ARE FEW

AND NOT YET READY.

Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:

From the neighborhood of the hop fields comes news of a distressing nature.The bright outburst of the last two days has sent many hundreds of hoppers into Kent, who will have to wait till the fields are ready for them.At Dover the number of vagrants in the workhouse is treble the number there last year at this time, and in other towns the lateness of the season is responsible for a large increase in the number of casuals.

To cap their wretchedness, when at last the picking had begun, hops and hoppers were well-nigh swept away by a frightful storm of wind, rain, and hail.The hops were stripped clean from the poles and pounded into the earth, while the hoppers, seeking shelter from the stinging hail, were close to drowning in their huts and camps on the low-lying ground.Their condition after the storm was pitiable, their state of vagrancy more pronounced than ever; for, poor crop that it was, its destruction had taken away the chance of earning a few pennies, and nothing remained for thousands of them but to 'pad the hoof' back to London.

'We ayn't crossin'-sweepers,' they said, turning away from the ground, carpeted ankle-deep with hops.

Those that remained grumbled savagely among the half-stripped poles at the seven bushels for a shilling- a rate paid in good seasons when the hops are in prime condition, and a rate likewise paid in bad seasons by the growers because they cannot afford more.

I passed through Teston and East and West Farleigh shortly after the storm, and listened to the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hops rotting on the ground.At the hothouses of Barham Court, thirty thousand panes of glass had been broken by the hail, while peaches, plums, pears, apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds,- everything, had been pounded to pieces and torn to shreds.

All of which was too bad for the owners, certainly; but at the worst, not one of them, for one meal, would have to go short of food or drink.Yet it was to them that the newspapers devoted columns of sympathy, their pecuniary losses being detailed at harrowing length.

'Mr.Herbert Leney calculates his loss at L8000;' 'Mr.Fremlin, of brewery fame, who rents all the land in this parish, loses L10,000;'