2.
TC's draft report on the hardship of agricultural laborers in Annandale, which he had presumably written at the same time
as working on Chartism. “Finest peasantry in the World,” a phrase used here, is the title of ch. 4, Chartism, which also speaks of “Scotch farm-labourers who, ‘in districts the half of whose husbandry is that of cows, taste no milk,
can procure no milk’” (Works 29:141). The MS is on two sides of a single sheet, 13” by 8”, folded, and headed, in another hand, “Carlyle's Picture of
Husbandry in Annandale,” followed by a note, probably by A. Carlyle, saying that it was “A Memorandum sent to Mr. Henry Cole
about the time of the Repeal of the Corn Laws—(1839–40).” Cole had refused to become sec. of the Anti-Corn Law League in Feb., but he helped with the Anti-Corn Law Circular, which had been inspired by his Post Circular. “In the lower district of Annandale, Dumfriesshire, the husbandry, which is understood to be in an advanced scientific state,
depends in about equal proportions on crops and on cattle. It is what they call a breeding district and a growing district.
The farm-labour in the large farms, which have become numerous within the last twenty years, is commonly performed by men
named hinds, oftenest married men, whose wages consist partly of money, partly of allowances in kind. The misery of these men in their
squalid cottages, where hope never comes, where hunger itself too often dwells, would not be credited readily on description.
One fact, capable of being stated and authenticated, will be significant of innumerable others.
“Till within the last ten or twelve years these hinds used to have each of them a cow, as part of their allowances. Some twelve
years ago it was resolved among the large farmers that their cows should be taken from them: a certain degree of trouble,
of annoyance arising from the interference of the hind's wife in the farmer's cowhouse, was hereby got rid of. These men have
now no cow. How did they submit to this? The district lies opposite Ireland; by steam-boats the finest peasantry in the world,
ready to live on potatoes, without clothes, and to roost or pig in any sod-cabin, are imported, sometimes at the rate of four-pence
a head: the Scotch hinds have one of two resources; to go to Canada, or take what terms soever are offered them. The unmarried
sort, of any enterprise, prefer Canada, endeavour to save ten pounds, and leave their native soil to the finest peasantry;
the married sort, without money, without means, have nothing for it but remaining, cow or no cow. They have no cow; and what
is more, tho' indeed but an extension of the same thing, they have in many cases no possibility of procuring milk. Their masters
find it suitabler to fatten pigs with the milk, than sell it at the rates going there to their farm-labourers: the labourers'
wives would have access to the farmer's kitchen in that case, the farmer's dairy-maid might peculate in the milk-halfpence
&c &c.; it is briefer, clearer, on the whole suitabler to give it to the pigs, and make bacon of it. If a farmer will not
sell milk to his own labourers; much less to those of others. Except by accident of some more liberal farmer, at whose option
it stands, the farm-labourers have no milk. They eat their oatmeal porridge with treacle-and-water, their potatoes with salt
followed by water;—they do. God knows how. They cannot, by money or love, or any industry of theirs, except robbery and theft
which they do not yet practice, procure for themselves, for their wives or young ones any milk. Half the industry of that
country is the production of cattle and milk; these men, sons of the soil, labourers exclusively in such industry, have to
go without milk as in a country which produced none. Such a fact may seem incredible; but it is unhappily indubitable. It
is significant of many things;—of very many things: one would say [last sentence crossed through].
“Not to shoot into the vague, we specify the Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry's estates in that quarter of Scotland; the estates
of the Radical M.P. for that quarter. Large farms tilled by hinds who neither can nor do procure for themselves any milk,
are easy to be met with on both those estates. It is a fact possible everywhere, practiseable everywhere. The Radical M.P.
is not reckoned a bad landlord; the Duke of Buccleuch is by universal consent admitted to be the best in the south of Scotland”
(MS: Huntington Library).
