forest enclosures.

before i quit this part of my volume, let me say a word on the subject of forest enclosures. there are certain persons who, from notions of national benefit, are very desirous that all crown lands should be disposed of; and all forests and wastes enclosed. as a matter of national benefit i think them considerably mistaken. for the very highest purposes of national benefit i desire, and that most earnestly, to see them kept open. i know the logic regularly employed by these people;—to make two blades of corn grow where one grew before; to make all our lands in the highest degree productive of food. now, if we were cattle, or sheep, the great end of whose existence it was to graze well and get fat, then is their reasoning most excellent. but i look upon humanity as having other wants than mere physical ones. i too would have all our lands produce us food: but then it should be food of various kinds; food not only for one part, the corporeal, but for every part of our nature; and in these forests and open lands the intellectual part of the nation “have a food that these men know not of.” he who attends to our mere animal prosperity may call himself an utilitarian, but the true utilitarian comprehends in his scheme what is good for man in his integral nature; for his spiritual and intellectual needs, as well as for his bodily. but taking them on their own ground, these forest lands are not mere unproductive wastes. they supply our dockyards with an abundance of[389] valuable timber; in them lie farms, and cottage homes, with their orchards, gardens, and little enclosures. they maintain a large population, and they pasture a vast quantity of cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses. take even such a tract as that of dartmoor, now stripped of its trees. there cattle and sheep run in great numbers; and there lies about in inexhaustible quantities, granite, which supplies labour in shaping it, and conveying it away, to a large body of men, and goes forth to build our public works and adorn our metropolis. and there too the mines employ, again, numerous people, and send up large quantities of valuable metal. and what should we gain by an enclosure? we should gain a greater supply of corn, which the farmers and landlords sometimes find they have actually too much of.[23] having hedged about the kingdom with enactments to prevent the free importation of grain, they ever and anon find that they grow so much of it that they cannot really get a remunerating price for it. but even if we did want it, we have only to throw open our ports, and have as much as we want, at almost any price, and cattle too, which we could give our manufactures in exchange for. this is all that the most sanguine advocates of universal enclosure pretend that we should gain; and then let us see what we should lose by it. in the first place, these lands would go to swell the rentals of the rich, as all others enclosed have done. the enclosure system has been one of unexampled absurdity and injustice. it has been conducted on the principle of—“unto him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” unto him who could shew that he had land lying in proximity to the waste about to be enclosed, has been given more, in the exact proportion to the quantity which he had. the more he had, the more was given him; and from him that had none, was taken away that which he had—the custom of commoning his beasts on the waste. one would naturally have supposed that in a christian country there would have been a desire to provide for those who had nothing. that in every parish the waste land should have been, if allotted at all to the inhabitants, allotted to those who had most need of it. the rule has always been exactly the reverse; and the consequence has been that our[390] poor population, stripped of their old common rights, have been thrown upon the parish; their little flock of sheep, their few cows, their geese, their pigs, all gone; and no collateral help left them to eke out their small earnings; and in case of loss of work, or sickness, no resource but parish degradation;—the consequent evil influence upon the character of the rural population has been enormous. they have a sense of injustice, if they have not the power to resist it; and when they see a system of this kind, they say—“much will have more,” and their spirits are none the better for the feeling that accompanies the melancholy truth. now, the same system would assuredly be continued, where common allotments took place; and in the sale of crown lands, a few great persons would purchase them; a few farmers would live and pay high rents, where hundreds of comfortable cottagers now live, who would then be added to the list of paupers.

[23] they did so especially in 1834 and 1835; when wheat was only 38s. and 40s. per quarter.

but it is not merely the poor that would lose by it. the miner, the artist, the naturalist, the poet, the antiquarian, the lover of the country, and the frequenter of it for health or relaxation, all would suffer most seriously by it, and the country would suffer with them. in the wastes of devon and cornwall, in those of derbyshire, warwickshire, and northumberland, the subterranean mass is worth, in many places, a hundred times the surface. enclose and cover up with cultivation these wastes, and you bury by millions the wealth of the nation, and the bread of the miners. at present, they lie open to the foot and the eye of the scrutinizing and adventurous. they can traverse heaths and mountains, and amid the barely covered rocks beneath them, or in the precipices that tower above them, they can at leisure hunt out and discover the sparkling vein, or the dull and secret ore; and open up a fountain of labour and affluence that may run for ages. but enclose these wild regions; warn off the curious inquirers with boards threatening “prosecution as the law directs,” or as may now be seen on the premises of an old lady in surrey—that “anybody trespassing will be shot at without farther notice!”—keep them out with fences, and cover up the surface with accumulating soil and manure, and there may the riches of providence remain buried for ever. with the researches of the miner, you restrict those of the geologist too. with the naturalist it fares the same. every spadegraft of your cultivation[391] annihilates the habitats and localities of animals, insects, and plants, which can exist only in the unploughed wilderness. you destroy some of the most curious natural productions of your country for ever, and circumscribe some of the most healthful, heart-purifying, and spirit-cheering pursuits of men. your ploughs and mattocks pierce through and erase immediately the earthy mounds, the circles, the stone vestiges of far-past ages, and with them the pleasant journeys and inspiring speculations of antiquarians; as well as a great portion of the historic light and evidences of the nation. if you could root out the new forest, you might possibly get as well supplied with timber from some other quarter, but where would you find the landscape painter such a treasury of sylvan and picturesque beauty, such delicious nooks and hollows, and fair streams winding under forest boughs? where such groupings and endless variety of foliage and forest stems? where such lights and shades and colours as nature there diffuses over her own regions in the everlasting circulation of the seasons; and all within six or seven hours’ ride of the metropolis?[24] i should like to know where you will find him substitutes for the naked, waste, but glorious expanses of the surrey heaths, of dartmoor, stainmore, the high moors of derbyshire, those of northumberland, lancashire, or of scotland—that land which has often been called poor, but which from the influence of its wild and magnificent scenery is continually pouring out a wealth of genius that is miraculous? thank god; they never can pull down its mountains, and reduce them to the dead level, and quadrangular fields of cultivation; and into their fairyland recesses there will always be a retreat from the engrossing, engulphing spirit of mercantile calculation.

[24] by the southampton railway, now brought within about three hours’ journey of london.

but i am passing from painting to poetry; and yet, one is so blended with the other that i would ask the shrewdest person living to shew me where they totally separate. where then, i ask, will they find substitutes for the painter, for our wild and desolate moors? there the very air in its elastic freshness is full of health and inspiration to him. there he draws an indemnity for his constitution from the deadly effects of long and close confinement in[392] cities and painting rooms. there every turf is covered with a rude beauty to his eyes; there every rock and stone is piled in bold and inimitable shapes of savage grandeur by the spirit of nature for him; and the winds, and rains, and vegetative powers of centuries have been busy tinging them with the hues of his admiration. there, amid the sound of falling waters and the roar of coming tempests, he feels all his faculties called into power and life within him, and brings home, season after season, scenes that cover the walls of our city homes with a wild magnificence. enclose these tracts; hem them in with walls and hedges, and he will no longer visit them. you will no longer find him sitting on some moorland stone, watching the stream which hurries with sea-like sound along its craggy bed; or gazing on those rocky banks and long lines of trees that overhang it, and mark its course along the desert. he will no longer fix the solitary labourer, or the passing group, in their own peculiar character, nor paint the lurid gloom of the storm as it comes with a frown and a thunder of rains and winds only known in such shelterless regions. and when you banish him, you banish the poet, and the lovers of poets too. it is on our moors and our mountains that the profoundest spirit of poetry dwells. there is an influence felt there, which has more than half created our shakspeares, miltons, spensers, wordsworths, scotts, coleridges, shelleys, and other high spirits that have striven to elevate the english mind above the mere ordinary enjoyments of life. and is it true that any one ever felt the full charm of the works of scott, who was not familiar with heaths and mountains? did any one ever feel all the beauty of the opening of ivanhoe who had not often lingered in our forests? has any one a true conception of “as you like it,” of “macbeth,” or of “the midsummer night’s dream,” of “the fairy queen,” or of many another divine creation of the british muse, who is not conversant with the free, beautiful, and untamed nature by whose influence they are shaped? it is one of the great offices of the poet to keep alive the love of nature; and it is, again, by a corresponding love of nature that they must be comprehended and relished. the more you reduce our whole island to a uniformity of colour and cultivation, the more effectually you extinguish this great action and reaction, which are health to the spirituality of the public mind.

[393]

we are now arrived at a crisis in which we can afford a few forests and moors to lie open; but we cannot afford to have our higher tastes and feeling deprived of their legitimate aliment. shut us up in towns, or within an eternal continuity of hedges and ditches, and we shall cease to be the high-souled people we are. we shall become the drudges of selfish interests, or the victims of false taste. we must have some openness, some freedom, some breathing places left us. as abernethy said, that the parks of london were its lungs; so our mountains, forests, and moorlands, are the lungs of the whole country. it is there that we rush away from counting-houses, factories, steam-engines, railroads, politics, and sectarian factions, and breathe for a season the air of physical and mental vigour; and feel the peace of nature; and drink in from all things around us a new life, a new feeling, full of the benevolent calm which is shed by its creator over the world. scott said he must see the heather at least once a year, or he should die. crabbe mounted his horse in a passion of desire which could no longer be resisted, and rode fifty miles to see the sea; and more or less of this feeling lies in every bosom that is not totally dead to the true objects of life. the failing in health; the over-worn in spirit; the followers of a summer’s recreation, all seek our hills and sea-coasts, and plains, where the peace or magnificence of nature, or where some celebrated monument of the past is to be found. if any one would know the extent of this delight in such things, or the numbers who indulge in it, let him go, as i have elsewhere said, to any such place in this kingdom, on any day through the summer and autumn. if we had the amount of the numbers who make a summer excursion to the sea-side, or to our moorland and mountain districts, it would be amazing. the parties who swarm along our derbyshire valleys, and in every nook of scotland, wales, ireland, and the western isles, are apparently without end.

now this is a very healthful taste, and one, that with all our trading, manufacturing, and money-getting habits, we cannot too much encourage. we complain of our countrymen seeking pleasure so much abroad, and shall we diminish the objects of popular attraction at home? no, there never was an age in which our forests and moorlands were of half the value they are of to us now. as true utilitarians, we have the strongest motives to keep them[394] open, as we mean to keep alive the fine arts, poetry, the love of antiquity, and the love of nature amongst us; as we would retain and invigorate in us that higher life by which we have climbed to our present national altitude; by which our sages and poets have been nourished, and become the true teachers and inspirers of virtue and nobility to the world; by which we are made to feel our animal life even with a double zest; and are yet, i trust, destined to make the name of england the greatest in the history of the world.

i do not mean to say that no waste lands should be henceforth enclosed. there are plenty, every one knows, that have no particular grace or interest about them. let them, in the name of all that is reasonable, be hedged and ditched as soon as you please; but as for the village green, the common lying near a town, the forest, and the moorland that has a poetical charm about it, felt and acknowledged by the public—may the axe and the spade that are lifted up against them be shivered to atoms, and a curse, worse than the curse of kehama, chase all commissioners, land-surveyors, petitioning lawyers, and every species of fencer and divider out of their boundaries for ever and ever.