to ravage the realm, wipe out the landed gentry, and divide their
estates among the peasantry. What then shall we do? Our peasants
are wrath with us for we have treated them very badly, and you,
sir, in particular, have no cause to trust them. When you had
your house built, as you well remember, you made your serfs work
three weeks running for nothing. When you were a young man you
ruined the domestic happiness of many a married peasant; you
appropriated the communal lands to your own uses; you never
bestowed a thought upon the parish church; once you gave the
priest a good cudgelling; you kept a poor fellow in jail for four
or five years and beat and shamefully treated him. When a poor
man wanted to build him a house, you never gave him clay to make
bricks with, nor rushes for the thatching of his roof. When lots
of planks were rotting away in a corner of your courtyard, and
two poor young fellows stole just enough of them to make a coffin
for their father, you tied the pair of them up tight in the
burning sun and beat their naked bodies with thorny sticks; one
of them died a week afterwards of sun-stroke. On one occasion you
injured the thigh of a neat-herd on your estate and he is a
cripple to this day. When your sheep died of the murrain you hung
up their hides to dry--in the schoolhouse. If all these things
should now recur to the minds of your tenants, you will have, I
fancy, rather a bad time of it. But the rest of us are in the
same boat. We never gave a thought to the education of our
people. They grew up, they grew old, and all they have ever
learnt to know of life is its wretchedness; not one of them
therefore has any reason to love us now. What can we do if it
comes to an open collision with them? Five hundred thousand
gentry against twenty times as many peasants! Why not one of our
heads would remain for long in the place where God placed it. We
must defend ourselves with the weapons of desperation. It is too
late now to try and entice the common folk over to our side, as
some of our set want to do who are now distributing no end of
wine and corn among their underlings, building sick-houses for
them, and putting the priests up to preaching sobriety to them,
and the fear of God and due respect for the squire and his
family. It is