Rural Rides — Rural Ride from Petersfield to Kensington Part 1

RURAL RIDE FROM PETERSFIELD TO KENSINGTON.

_Petworth, Saturday, 12th Nov.

1825. _ I was at this town in the summer of 1823, when I crossed Sussex from Worth to Huntington in my way to Titchfield in Hampshire.

We came this morning from Petersfield, with an intention to cross to Horsham, and go thence to Worth, and then into Kent; but Richard's horse seemed not to be fit for so strong a bout, and therefore we resolved to bend our course homewards, and first of all to fall back upon our resources at Thursley, which we intend to reach to-morrow, going through North Chapel, Chiddingfold, and Brook.

At about four miles from Petersfield we passed through a village called Rogate.

Just before we came to it I asked a man who was hedging on the side of the road how much he got a day.

He said, 1_s.

_ 6_d.

_: and he told me that the _allowed_ wages was 7_d.

_ a day for the man _and a gallon loaf a week for the rest of his family_; that is to say, one pound and two and a quarter ounces of bread for each of them; and nothing more!

And this, observe, is one-third short of the bread allowance of gaols, to say nothing of the meat and clothing and lodging of the inhabitants of gaols.

If the man have full work; if he get his eighteen-pence a day, the whole nine shillings does not purchase a gallon loaf each for a wife and three children, and two gallon loaves for himself.

In the gaols the convicted felons have a pound and a half each of bread a day to begin with: they have some meat generally, and it has been found absolutely necessary to allow them meat when they work at the tread-mill.

It is impossible to make them work at the tread-mill without it.

However, let us take the bare allowance of bread allowed in the gaols.

This allowance is, for five people, fifty-two pounds and a half in the week; whereas the man's nine shillings will buy but fifty-two pounds of bread; and this, observe, is a vast deal better than the state of things in the north of Hampshire, where the day-labourer gets but eight shillings a week.

I asked this man how much a day they gave to a young able man who had no family, and who was compelled to come to the parish-officers for work.

Observe that there are a great many young men in this situation, because the farmers will not employ single men _at full wages_, these full wages being wanted for the married man's family, just to keep them alive according to the calculation that we have just seen.

About the borders of the north of Hampshire they give to these single men two gallon loaves a week, or, in money, two shillings and eight-pence, and nothing more.

Here, in this part of Sussex, they give the single man seven-pence a day, that is to say, enough to buy two pounds and a quarter of bread for six days in the week, and as he does not work on the Sunday there is no seven-pence allowed for the Sunday, and of course nothing to eat: and this is the allowance, settled by the magistrates, for a young, hearty, labouring man; and that, too, in the part of England where, I believe, they live better than in any other part of it.

The poor creature here has seven-pence a day for six days in the week to find him food, clothes, washing, and lodging!

It is just seven-pence, less than one half of what the meanest foot soldier in the standing army receives; besides that the latter has clothing, candle, fire, and lodging into the bargain!

Well may we call our happy state of things the "envy of surrounding nations, and the admiration of the world!"

We hear of the efforts of Mrs. Fry, Mr. Buxton, and numerous other persons, to improve the situation of felons in the gaols; but never, no never, do we catch them ejaculating one single pious sigh for these innumerable sufferers, who are doomed to become felons or to waste away their bodies by hunger.

When we came into the village of Rogate, I saw a little group of persons standing before a blacksmith's shop.

The church-yard was on the other side of the road, surrounded by a low wall.

The earth of the church-yard was about four feet and a half higher than the common level of the ground round about it; and you may see, by the nearness of the church windows to the ground, that this bed of earth has been made by the innumerable burials that have taken place in it.

The group, consisting of the blacksmith, the wheelwright, perhaps, and three or four others, appeared to me to be in a deliberative mood.

So I said, looking significantly at the church-yard, "It has taken a pretty many thousands of your fore-fathers to raise that ground up so high."

"Yes, Sir," said one of them.

"And," said I, "for about nine hundred years those who built that church thought about religion very differently from what we do."

"Yes," said another.

"And," said I, "do you think that all those who made that heap there are gone to the devil?"

I got no answer to this.

"At any rate," added I, "they never worked for a pound and a half of bread a day."

They looked hard at me, and then looked hard at one another; and I, having trotted off, looked round at the first turning, and saw them looking after us still.

I should suppose that the church was built about seven or eight hundred years ago, that is to say, the present church; for the first church built upon this spot was, I dare say, erected more than a thousand years ago.

If I had had time, I should have told this group that, before the Protestant Reformation, the labourers of Rogate received four-pence a day from Michaelmas to Lady-day; five-pence a day from Lady-day to Michaelmas, except in harvest and grass-mowing time, when able labourers had seven-pence a day; and that, at this time, bacon was _not so much as a halfpenny a pound_: and, moreover, that the parson of the parish maintained out of the tithes all those persons in the parish that were reduced to indigence by means of old age or other cause of inability to labour.

I

should have told them this, and, in all probability a great deal more, but I had not time; and, besides, they will have an opportunity of reading all about it in my little book called the _History of the Protestant Reformation_.

From Rogate we came on to Trotten, where a Mr. Twyford is the squire, and where there is a very fine and ancient church close by the squire's house.

I saw the squire looking at some poor devils who were making "wauste improvements, ma'am," on the road which passes by the squire's door.

He looked uncommonly hard at me.

It was a scrutinizing sort of look, mixed, as I thought, with a little surprise, if not of jealousy, as much as to say, "I wonder who the devil you can be?"

My look at the squire was with the head a little on one side, and with the cheek drawn up from the left corner of the mouth, expressive of anything rather than a sense of inferiority to the squire, of whom, however, I had never heard speak before.

Seeing the good and commodious and capacious church, I could not help reflecting on the intolerable baseness of this description of men, who have remained mute as fishes, while they have been taxed to build churches for the convenience of the Cotton-Lords and the Stock-Jobbers.

First, their estates have been taxed to pay interest of debts contracted with these Stock-jobbers, and to make wars for the sale of the goods of the Cotton-Lords.

This drain upon their estates has collected the people into great masses, and now the same estates are taxed to build churches for them in these masses.

And yet the tame fellows remain as silent as if they had been born deaf and dumb and blind.

As towards the labourers, they are sharp and vigorous and brave as heart could wish; here they are bold as Hector.

They pare down the wretched souls to what is below gaol allowance.

But, as towards the taxers, they are gentle as doves.

With regard, however, to this Squire Twyford, he is not, as I afterwards found, without some little consolation; for one of his sons, I understand, is, like squire Rawlinson of Hampshire, _a police justice in London_!

I hear that Squire Twyford was always a distinguished champion of loyalty; what they call a staunch friend of Government; and it is therefore natural that the Government should be a staunch friend to him.

By the taxing of his estate, and paying the Stock-Jobbers out of the proceeds, the people have been got together in great masses, and, as there are Justices wanted to keep them in order in those masses, it seems but reasonable that the squire should, in one way or another, enjoy some portion of the profits of keeping them in order.

However, this cannot be the case with every loyal squire; and there are many of them who, for want of a share in the distribution, have been totally extinguished.

I should suppose Squire Twyford to be in the second rank upwards (dividing the whole of the proprietors of land into five ranks).

It appears to me that pretty nearly the whole of this second rank is gone; that the Stock-Jobbers have eaten them clean up, having less mercy than the cannibals, who usually leave the hands and the feet; so that this squire has had pretty good luck.

From Trotten we came to Midhurst, and, having baited our horses, went into Cowdry Park to see the ruins of that once noble mansion, from which the Countess of Salisbury (the last of the Plantagenets) was brought by the tyrant Henry the Eighth to be cruelly murdered, in revenge for the integrity and the other great virtues of her son, Cardinal Pole, as we have seen in Number Four, paragraph 115, of the "History of the Protestant Reformation."

This noble estate, one of the finest in the whole kingdom, was seized on by the king, after the possessor had been murdered on his scaffold.

She had committed no crime.

No crime was proved against her.

The miscreant Thomas Cromwell, finding that no form of trial would answer his purpose, invented a new mode of bringing people to their death; namely, a Bill, brought into Parliament, condemning her to death.

The estate was then granted to a Sir Anthony Brown, who was physician to the king.

By the descendants of this Brown, one of whom was afterwards created Lord Montague, the estate has been held to this day; and Mr. Poyntz, who married the sole remaining heiress of this family, a Miss Brown, is now the proprietor of the estate, comprising, I believe, _forty or fifty manors_, the greater part of which are in this neighbourhood, some of them, however, extending more than twenty miles from the mansion.

We entered the park through a great iron gateway, part of which being wanting, the gap was stopped up by a hurdle.

We rode down to the house and all round about and in amongst the ruins, now in part covered with ivy, and inhabited by innumerable starlings and jackdaws.

The last possessor was, I believe, that Lord Montague who was put an end to by the celebrated _nautical adventure_ on the Rhine along with the brother of Sir Glory.

These two sensible worthies took it into their heads to go down a place something resembling the waterfall of an overshot mill.

They were drowned just as two young kittens or two young puppies would have been.

And as an instance of the truth that it is an ill wind that blows nobody good, had it not been for this sensible enterprise, never would there have been a Westminster Rump to celebrate the talents and virtues of Westminster's Pride and England's Glory.

It was this Lord Montague, I believe, who had this ancient and noble mansion completely repaired, and fitted up as a place of residence: and a few days, or a very few weeks, at any rate, after the work was completed, the house was set on fire (by accident, I suppose), and left nearly in the state in which it now stands, except that the ivy has grown up about it and partly hidden the stones from our sight.

You may see, however, the hour of the day or night at which the fire took place; for there still remains the brass of the face of the clock, and the hand pointing to the hour.

Close by this mansion there runs a little river which runs winding away through the valleys, and at last falls into the Arron.

After viewing the ruins, we had to return into the turnpike road, and then enter another part of the park, which we crossed, in order to go to Petworth.

When you are in a part of this road through the park you look down and see the house in the middle of a very fine valley, the distant boundary of which, to the south and south-west, is the South Down Hills.

Some of the trees here are very fine, particularly some most magnificent rows of the Spanish chestnut.

I

asked the people at Midhurst where Mr. Poyntz himself lived; and they told me at the _lodge_ in the park, which lodge was formerly the residence of the head keeper.

The land is very good about here.

It is fine rich loam at top, with clay further down.

It is good for all sorts of trees, and they seem to grow here very fast.

We got to Petworth pretty early in the day.

On entering it you see the house of Lord Egremont, which is close up against the park-wall, and which wall bounds this little vale on two sides.

There is a sort of town-hall here, and on one side of it there is the bust of Charles the Second, I should have thought; but they tell me it is that of Sir William Wyndham, from whom Lord Egremont is descended.

But there is _another building_ much more capacious and magnificent than the town-hall; namely, the Bridewell, which, from the modernness of its structure, appears to be one of those "wauste improvements, Ma'am," which distinguish this _enlightened_ age.

This structure vies, in point of magnitude with the house of Lord Egremont itself, though that is one of the largest mansions in the whole kingdom.

The Bridewell has a wall round it that I should suppose to be twenty feet high.

This place was not wanted, when the labourer got twice as much instead of half as much as the common standing soldier.

Here you see the true cause why the young labouring man is "_content_" to exist upon 7_d.

_ a day, for six days in the week, and nothing for Sunday.

Oh!

we are a most free and enlightened people; our happy constitution in church and state has supplanted Popery and slavery; but we go to a Bridewell unless we quietly exist and work upon 7_d.

_ a day!

_Thursley, Sunday, 13th Nov.

_ To our great delight we found Richard's horse quite well this morning, and off we set for this place.

The first part of our road, for about three miles and a half, was through Lord Egremont's Park.

The morning was very fine; the sun shining; a sharp frost after a foggy evening; the grass all white, the twigs of the trees white, the ponds frozen over;

and everything looking exceedingly beautiful.

The spot itself being one of the very finest in the world, not excepting, I dare say, that of the father of Saxe Cobourg itself, who has, doubtless, many such fine places.

In a very fine pond, not far from the house and close by the road, there are some little artificial islands, upon one of which I observed an arbutus loaded with its beautiful fruit (quite ripe), even more thickly than any one I ever saw even in America.

There were, on the side of the pond, a most numerous and beautiful collection of water-fowl, foreign as well as domestic.

I never saw so great a variety of water-fowl collected together in my life.

They had been ejected from the water by the frost, and were sitting apparently in a state of great dejection: but this circumstance has brought them into a comparatively small compass; and we facing our horses about, sat and looked at them, at the pond, at the grass, at the house, till we were tired of admiring.

Everything here is in the neatest and most beautiful state.

Endless herds of deer, of all the varieties of colours; and, what adds greatly to your pleasure in such a case, you see comfortable retreats prepared for them in different parts of the woods.

When we came to what we thought the end of the park, the gate-keeper told us that we should find other walls to pass through.

We now entered upon woods, we then came to another wall, and there we entered upon farms to our right and to our left.

At last we came to a third wall, and the gate in that let us out into the turnpike road.

The gate-keeper here told us, that the whole enclosure was _nine miles round_; and this, after all, forms, probably, not a quarter part of what this nobleman possesses.

And is it wrong that one man should possess so much?

By no means; but in my opinion it is wrong that a system should exist which compels this man to have his estate taken away from him unless he throw the junior branches of his family for maintenance upon the public.

Lord Egremont bears an excellent character.

Everything that I have ever heard of him makes me believe that he is worthy of this princely estate.

But I cannot forget that his two brothers, who are now very old men, have had, from their infancy, enormous revenues in sinecure places in the West Indies, while the general property and labour of England is taxed to maintain those West Indies in their state of dependence upon England; and I cannot forget that the burden of these sinecures are amongst the grievances of which the West Indians justly complain.

True, the taxing system has taken from the family of Wyndham, during the lives of these two gentlemen, as much, and even more, than what that family has gained by those sinecures; but then let it be recollected, that it is not the helpless people of England who have been the cause of this system.

It is not the fault of those who receive 7_d.

_ a day.

It is the fault of the family of Wyndham and of such persons; and, if they have chosen to suffer the Jews and jobbers to take away so large a part of their income, it is not fair for them to come to the people at large to make up for the loss.

Thus it has gone on.

The great masses of property have, in general, been able to take care of themselves: but the little masses have melted away like butter before the sun.

The little gentry have had not even any disposition to resist.

They merit their fate most justly.

They have vied with each other in endeavours to ingratiate themselves with power, and to obtain compensation for their losses.

The big fishes have had no feeling for them; have seen them sink with a sneer, rather than with compassion; but, at last, the cormorant threatens even themselves; and they are struggling with might and main for their own preservation.

They everywhere "most liberally" take the Stock-jobber or the Jew by the hand, though they hate him mortally at the same time for his power to outdo them on the sideboard, on the table, and in the equipage.

They seem to think nothing of the extinguishment of the small fry; they hug themselves in the thought that they escape; and yet, at times, their minds misgive them, and they tremble for their own fate.

The country people really gain by the change; for the small gentry have been rendered, by their miseries, so niggardly and so cruel, that it is quite a blessing, in a village, to see a rich Jew or Jobber come to supplant them.

They come, too, with far less cunning than the half-broken gentry.

Cunning as the Stock-Jobber is in Change Alley, I defy him to be cunning enough for the country people, brought to their present state of duplicity by a series of cruelties which no pen can adequately describe.

The Stock-Jobber goes from London with the _cant of humanity_ upon his lips, at any rate; whereas the half-broken Squire takes not the least pains to disguise the hardness of his heart.

It is impossible for any just man to regret the sweeping away of this base race of Squires; but the sweeping of them away is produced by causes that have a wider extent.

These causes reach the good as well as the bad: all are involved alike: like the pestilence, this horrible system is no respecter of persons; and decay and beggary mark the whole face of the _country_.

North Chapel is a little town in the Weald of Sussex where there were formerly post-chaises kept; but where there are none kept now.

And here is another complete revolution.

In almost every country town the post-chaise houses have been lessened in number, and those that remain have become comparatively solitary and mean.

The guests at inns are not now gentlemen, but _bumpers_, who, from being called (at the inns) "riders," became "travellers," and are now "commercial gentlemen," who go about in _gigs_, instead of on horseback, and who are in such numbers as to occupy a great part of the room in all the inns, in every part of the country.

There are, probably, twenty thousand of them always out, who may perhaps have, on an average throughout the year, three or four thousand "ladies" travelling with them.

The expense of this can be little short of fifteen millions a year, all to be paid by the country-people who consume the goods, and a large part of it to be drawn up to the Wen.

From North Chapel we came to Chiddingfold, which is in the Weald of Surrey; that is to say, the country of oak-timber.

Between these two places there are a couple of pieces of that famous commodity, called "Government property."

It seems that these places, which have extensive buildings on them, were for the purpose of making gunpowder.

Like most other of these enterprises, they have been given up, after a time, and so the ground and all the buildings, and the monstrous fences, erected at enormous expense, have been sold.

They were sold, it seems, some time ago, in lots, with the intention of being pulled down and carried away, though they are now nearly new, and built in the most solid, substantial, and expensive manner; brick walls eighteen inches through, and the buildings covered with lead and slate.

It appears that they have been purchased by a Mr. Stovell, a Sussex banker; but for some reason or other, though the purchase was made long ago, "Government" still holds the possession; and, what is more, it keeps people there to take care of the premises.

It would be curious to have a complete history of these pretty establishments at Chiddingford; but this is a sort of history that we shall never be treated with until there be somebody in Parliament to rummage things to the bottom.

It would be very easy to call for a specific account of the cost of these establishments, and also of the quantity of powder made at them.

I should not be at all surprised, if the concern, all taken together, brought the powder to a hundred times the price at which similar powder could have been purchased.

When we came through Chiddingfold, the people were just going to church;

and we saw a carriage and pair conveying an old gentleman and some ladies to the churchyard steps.

Upon inquiry, we found that this was Lord Winterton, whose name, they told us, was Turnour.

I thought I had heard of all the Lords, first or last; but, if I had ever heard of this one before, I had forgotten him.

He lives down in the Weald, between the gunpowder establishments and Horsham, and has the reputation of being a harmless, good sort of man, and that being the case I was sorry to see that he appeared to be greatly afflicted with the gout, being obliged to be helped up the steps by a stout man.

However, it is as broad, perhaps, as it is long: a man is not to have all the enjoyments of making the gout, and the enjoyments of abstinence too: that would not be fair play;

and I dare say that Lord Winterton is just enough to be content with the consequences of his enjoyments.

This Chiddingfold is a very pretty place.

There is a very pretty and extensive green opposite the church; and we were at the proper time of the day to perceive that the modern system of education had by no means overlooked this little village.

We saw _the schools_ marching towards the church in military order.

Two of them passed us on our road.

The boys looked very hard at us, and I saluted them with "There's brave boys, you'll all be parsons or lawyers or doctors."

Another school seemed to be in a less happy state.

The scholars were too much in uniform to have had their clothes purchased by their parents; and they looked, besides, as if a little more victuals and a little less education would have done as well.

There were about twenty of them without one single tinge of red in their whole twenty faces.

In short I never saw more deplorable looking objects since I was born.

And can it be of any use to expend money in this sort of way upon poor creatures that have not half a bellyful of food?

We had not breakfasted when we passed them.

We felt, at that moment, what hunger was.

We had some bits of bread and meat in our pockets, however; and these, which, were merely intended as stay-stomachs, amounted, I dare say, to the allowance of any half-dozen of these poor boys for the day.

I could, with all my heart, have pulled the victuals out of my pocket and given it to them;

but I did not like to do that which would have interrupted the march, and might have been construed into a sort of insult.

To quiet my conscience, however, I gave a poor man that I met soon afterwards sixpence, under pretence of rewarding him for telling me the way to Thursley, which I knew as well as he, and which I had determined, in my own mind, not to follow.

We had now come on the Turnpike road from my Lord Egremont's Park to Chiddingfold.

I had made two or three attempts to get out of it, and to bear away to the north-west, to get through the oak-woods to Thursley;

but I was constantly prevented by being told that the road which I wished to take would lead me to Haslemere.

If you talk to ostlers, or landlords, or post-boys; or, indeed, to almost anybody else, they mean by a _road_ a _turnpike road_; and they positively will not talk to you about any other.

Now, just after quitting Chiddingfold, Thursley lies over fine woods and coppices, in a north-west direction, or thereabouts;

and the Turnpike road, which goes from Petworth to Godalming, goes in a north-north-east direction.

I was resolved, be the consequences what they might, not to follow the Turnpike road one single inch further; for I had not above three miles or thereabouts to get to Thursley, through the woods; and I had, perhaps, six miles at least to get to it the other way; but the great thing was to see the interior of these woods; to see the stems of the trees, as well as the tops of them.

I saw a lane opening in the right direction; I saw indeed, that my horses must go up to their knees in clay; but I resolved to enter and go along that lane, and long before the end of my journey I found myself most amply compensated for the toil that I was about to encounter.

But talk of toil!

It was the horse that had the toil; and I had nothing to do but to sit upon his back, turn my head from side to side and admire the fine trees in every direction.

Little bits of fields and meadows here and there, shaded all over, or nearly all over, by the surrounding trees.

Here and there a labourer's house buried in the woods.

We had drawn out our luncheons and eaten them while the horses took us through the clay;

but I stopped at a little house, and asked the woman, who looked very clean and nice, whether she would let us dine with her.

She said "Yes," with all her heart, but that she had no place to put our horses in, and that her dinner would not be ready for an hour, when she expected her husband home from church.

She said they had a bit of bacon and a pudding and some cabbage; but that she had not much bread in the house.

She had only one child, and that was not very old, so we left her, quite convinced that my old observation is true, that people in the woodland countries are best off, and that it is absolutely impossible to reduce them to that state of starvation in which they are in the corn-growing part of the kingdom.

Here is that great blessing, abundance of fuel at all times of the year, and particularly in the winter.

We came on for about a mile further in these clayey lanes, when we renewed our inquiries as to our course, as our road now seemed to point towards Godalming again.

I asked a man how I should get to Thursley?

He pointed to some fir-trees upon a hill, told me I must go by them, and that there was no other way.

"Where then," said I, "is Thursley?"

He pointed with his hand, and said, "Right over those woods; but there is no road there, and it is impossible for you to get through those woods."

"Thank you," said I; "but through those woods we mean to go."

Just at the border of the woods I saw a cottage.

There must be some way to that cottage; and we soon found a gate that let us into a field, across which we went to this cottage.

We there found an old man and a young one.

Upon inquiry we found that it was _possible_ to get through these woods.

Richard gave the old man threepence to buy a pint of beer, and I gave the young one a shilling to pilot us through the woods.

These were oak-woods with underwood beneath; and there was a little stream of water running down the middle of the woods, the annual and long overflowings of which has formed a meadow sometimes a rod wide, and sometimes twenty rods wide, while the bed of the stream itself was the most serpentine that can possibly be imagined, describing, in many places, nearly a complete circle, going round for many rods together, and coming within a rod or two of a point that it had passed before.

I stopped the man several times, to sit and admire this beautiful spot, shaded in great part by lofty and wide-spreading oak trees.

We had to cross this brook several times, over bridges that the owner had erected for the convenience of the fox-hunters.

At last, we came into an ash-coppice, which had been planted in regular rows, at about four feet distances, which had been once cut, and which was now in the state of six years' growth.

A road through it, made for the fox-hunters, was as straight as a line, and of so great a length, that, on entering it, the farther end appeared not to be a foot wide.

Upon seeing this, I asked the man whom these coppices belonged to, and he told me to Squire Leech, at Lea.

My surprise ceased, but my admiration did not.

A piece of ordinary coppice ground, close adjoining this, and with no timber in it, and upon just the same soil (if there had been such a piece), would, at ten years' growth, be worth, at present prices, from five to seven pounds the acre.

This coppice, at ten years' growth, will be worth twenty pounds the acre; and, at the next cutting, when the stems will send out so many more shoots, it will be worth thirty pounds the acre.

I did not ask the question when I afterwards saw Mr. Leech, but, I dare say, the ground was trenched before it was planted; but what is that expense when compared with the great, the permanent profit of such an undertaking?

And, above all things, what a convenient species of property does a man here create.

Here are no tenants' rack, no anxiety about crops and seasons; the rust and the mildew never come here; a man knows what he has got, and he knows that nothing short of an earthquake can take it from him, unless, indeed, by attempting to vie with the stock-jobber in the expense of living, he enable the stock-jobber to come and perform the office of the earthquake.

Mr. Leech's father planted, I think it was, forty acres of such coppice in the same manner;

and, at the same time, he _sowed the ground with acorns_.

The acorns have become oak trees, and have begun and made great progress in diminishing the value of the ash, which have now to contend against the shade and the roots of the oak.

For present profit, and, indeed, for permanent profit, it would be judicious to grub up the oak; but the owner has determined otherwise.

He cannot endure the idea of destroying an oak wood.

If such be the profit of planting ash, what would be the profit of planting locust, even for poles or stakes?

The locust would outgrow the ash, as we have seen in the case of Mr. Gunter's plantation, more than three to one.

I am satisfied that it will do this upon any soil, if you give the trees fifteen years to grow in; and, in short, that the locusts will be trees when the ash are merely poles, if both are left to grow up in single stems.

If in coppice, the locust will make as good poles; I mean as large and as long poles in six years, as the ash will in ten years: to say nothing of the superior durability of the locust.

I have seen locusts, at Mr. Knowles's, at Thursley, sufficient for a hop-pole, for an ordinary hop-pole, with only five years' growth in them, and leaving the last year's growth to be cut off, leaving the top of the pole three-quarters of an inch through.

There is nothing that we have ever heard of, of the timber kind, equal to this in point of quickness of growth.

In parts of the county where hop-poles are not wanted, espalier stakes, wood for small fencing, hedge stakes, hurdle stakes, fold-shores, as the people call them, are always wanted; and is it not better to have a thing that will last twenty years, than a thing that will last only three?

I know of no English underwood which gives a hedge stake to last even _two years_.

I should think that a very profitable way of employing the locust would be this.

Plant a coppice, the plants two feet apart.

Thus planted, the trees will protect one another against the wind.

Keep the side shoots pruned off.

At the end of six years, the coppice, if well planted and managed, will be, at the very least, twenty feet high to the tips of the trees.

Not if the grass and weeds are suffered to grow up to draw all the moisture up out of the ground, to keep the air from the young plants, and to intercept the gentle rains and the dews; but trenched ground, planted carefully, and kept clean;

and always bearing in mind that hares and rabbits and young locust trees will never live together; for the hares and rabbits will not only bite them off, but will gnaw them down to the ground, and, when they have done that, will scratch away the ground to gnaw into the very root.

A

gentleman bought some locust trees of me last year, and brought me a dismal account in the summer of their being all dead; but I have since found that they were all eaten up by the hares.

He saw some of my refuse; some of those which were too bad to send to him, which were a great deal higher than his head.

His ground was as good as mine, according to his account; but I had no hares to fight against; or else mine would have been all dead too.

I say, then, that a locust plantation, in pretty good land, well managed, would be twenty feet high in six years; suppose it, however, to be only fifteen, there would be, at the bottom, wood to make two locust PINS for ship-building; two locust pins at the bottom of each tree.

Two at the very least; and here would be twenty-two thousand locust pins to the acre, probably enough for the building of a seventy-four gun ship.

These pins are about eighteen inches long, and, perhaps, an inch and half through; and there is this surprising quality in the wood of the locust, that it is just as hard and as durable at five or six years' growth as it is at fifty years' growth.

Of which I can produce an abundance of instances.

The _stake_ which I brought home from America, and which is now at Fleet-street, had stood as a stake for about eight and twenty years, as certified to me by Judge Mitchell, of North Hampstead in Long Island, who gave me the stake, and who said to me at the time, "Now are you really going to take that crooked miserable stick to England!"

Now it is pretty well known, at least, I have been so informed, that our Government have sent to America in consequence of my writings about the locust, to endeavour to get locust pins for the navy.

I have been informed that they have been told that the American Government has bought them all up.

Be this as it may, I know that a waggon load of these pins is, in America itself, equal in value to a waggon load of barrels of the finest flour.

This being undeniable, and the fact being undeniable that we can grow locust pins here, that I can take a seed to-day, and say that it shall produce two pins in seven years' time, will it not become an article of heavy accusation against the Government if they neglect even one day to set about tearing up their infernal Scotch firs and larches in Wolmer Forest and elsewhere, and putting locust trees in their stead, in order, first to provide this excellent material for ship-building; and next to have some fine plantations in the Holt Forest, Wolmer Forest, the New Forest, the Forest of Dean, and elsewhere, the only possible argument against doing which being, that I may possibly take a ride round amongst their plantations, and that it may be everlastingly recorded that it was I who was the cause of the Government's adopting this wise and beneficial measure?

I am disposed to believe, however, that the Government will not be brutish enough, obstinately to reject the advice given to them on this head, it being observed, however, that I wish to have no hand in their proceedings, directly or indirectly.

I can sell all the trees that I have for sale to other customers.

Let them look out for themselves; and as to any reports that their creatures may make upon the subjects I shall be able to produce proofs enough that such reports, if unfavourable, are false.

I wrote, in a Register from Long Island, that I could if I would tell insolent Castlereagh, who was for making Englishmen dig holes one day and fill them up the next, how he might _profitably put something into those holes_, but that I would not tell him as long as the Borough-mongers should be in the state in which they then were.

They are no longer in that state, I thank God.

There has been no positive law to alter their state, but it is manifest that there must be such law before it be long.

Events are working together to make the country worth living in, which, for the great body of the people, is at present hardly the case.

Above all things in the world, it is the duty of every man, who has it in his power, to do what he can to promote the creation of materials for the building of ships in the best manner; and it is now a fact of perfect notoriety, that, with regard to the building of ships, it cannot be done in the best manner without the assistance of this sort of wood.

I have seen a specimen of the locust wood used in the making of furniture.

I saw it in the posts of a bed-stead; and any thing more handsome I never saw in my life.

I had used it myself in the making of rules; but I never saw it in this shape before.

It admits of a polish nearly as fine as that of box.

It is a bright and beautiful yellow.

And in bedsteads, for instance, it would last for ever, and would not become loose at the joints, like oak and other perishable wood; because, like the live oak and the red cedar, no worm or insect ever preys upon it.

There is no fear of the quantity being too great.

It would take a century to make as many plantations as are absolutely wanted in England.

It would be a prodigious creation of real and solid wealth.

Not such a creation as that of paper money, which only takes the dinner from one man and gives it to another, which only gives an unnatural swell to a city or a watering place by beggaring a thousand villages; but it would be a creation of money's worth things.

Let any man go and look at a farmhouse that was built a hundred years ago.

He will find it, though very well built with stone or brick, actually falling to pieces, unless very frequently repaired, owing entirely to the rotten wood in the window-sills, the door-sills, the plates, the pins, the door frames, the window frames, and all those parts of the beams, the joists, and the rafters, that come in contact with the rain or the moisture.

The two parts of a park pailing which give way first, are, the parts of the post that meet the ground, and the pins which hold the rails to the post.

Both these rot long before the pailing rots.

Now, all this is avoided by the use of locust as sills, as joists, as posts, as frames, and as pins.

Many a roof has come down merely from the rotting of the pins.

The best of spine oak is generally chosen for these pins.

But after a time, the air gets into the pin-hole.

The pin rots from the moist air, it gives way, the wind shakes the roof, and down it comes, or it swags, the wet gets in, and the house is rotten.

In ships, the pins are the first things that give way.

Many a ship would last twenty years after it is broken up, if put together with locust pins.

I am aware that some readers will become tired of this subject; and, nothing but my conviction of its being of the very first importance to the whole kingdom could make me thus dwell upon it.

We got to Thursley after our beautiful ride through Mr. Leech's coppices, and the weather being pretty cold, we found ourselves most happily situated here by the side of an _American fire-place_, making extremely comfortable a room which was formerly amongst the most uncomfortable in the world.

This is another of what the malignant parsons call Cobbett's Quackeries.

But my real opinion is that the whole body of them, all put together, have never, since they were born, conferred so much benefit upon the country, as I have conferred upon it by introducing this fire-place.

Mr. Judson of Kensington, who is the manufacturer of them, tells me that he has a great demand, which gives me much pleasure; but really, coming to conscience, no man ought to sit by one of these fire-places that does not go the full length with me both in politics and religion.

It is not fair for them to enjoy the warmth without subscribing to the doctrines of the giver of the warmth.

However, as I have nothing to do with Mr. Judson's affair, either as to the profit or the loss, he must sell the fire-places to whomsoever he pleases.