LETTER 38

"CHILDREN, HAVE YE HERE ANY MEAT?"1

HERNE HILL, December, 1873.

1. THE laws of Florence in the fourteenth century, for us in the nineteenth!?

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Even so, good reader. You have, perhaps, long imagined that the judges of Israel, and heroes of Greece, the consuls of Rome, and the dukes of Venice, the powers of Florence, and the kings of England, were all merely the dim foreshadowings and obscure prophesyings of the advent of the Jones and Robinson of the future: demi-gods revealed in your own day, whose demi-divine votes, if luckily coincident upon any subject, become totally divine, and establish the ordinances thereof, for ever.

You will find it entirely otherwise, gentlemen, whether of the suburb, or centre. Laws small and great, for ever unchangeable ;-irresistible by all the force of Robinson, and unimprovable by finest jurisprudence of Jones, have long since been known, and, by wise nations, obeyed.

2. Out of the statute books of one of these I begin with an apparently unimportant order, but the sway of it cuts deep.

"No person whatsoever shall buy fish, to sell it again, either in the market of Florence, or in any markets in the state of Florence."

It is one of many such laws, entirely abolishing the profession of middleman, or costermonger of perishable articles of food, in the city of the Lily.

[Luke xxiv. 41; John xxi. 5.]

[See Letter 37, § 11 (p. 23). Ruskin quotes here (§ 2) and in § 15 from Florentine archives. A large collection of laws (not including, however, those for the fish trade) is printed in the third volume (1866) of Paolo Emiliani-Giudici's Storia dei Communi Italiani.]

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[See, for a similar reference, Aratra Pentelici, § 214 (Vol. XX. p. 357).]

"Entirely abolishing;-nonsense!" thinks your modern commercial worship. "Who was to prevent private con

tract?"

Nobody, my good sir;-there is, as you very justly feel, no power in law whatever to prevent private contract. No quantity of laws, penalties, or constitutions, can be of the slightest use to a public inherently licentious and deceitful. There is no legislation for liars and traitors. They cannot be prevented from the pit; the earth finally swallows them. They find their level against all embankment-soak their way down, irrestrainably, to the gutter grating;-happiest the nation that most rapidly so gets rid of their stench. There is no law, I repeat, for these, but gravitation. Organic laws can only be serviceable to, and in general will only be written by, a public of honourable citizens, loyal to their state, and faithful to each other.

3. The profession of middleman was then, by civic consent, and formal law, rendered impossible in Florence with respect to fish. What advantage the modern blessed possibility of such mediatorial function brings to our hungry multitudes; and how the miraculous draught of fishes, which living St. Peter discerns, and often dextrously catches"the shoals of them like shining continents" (said Carlyle to me, only yesterday)—are by such apostolic succession miraculously diminished, instead of multiplied; and, instead of baskets full of fragments taken up from the ground, baskets full of whole fish laid down on it, lest perchance any hungry person should cheaply eat of the same,-here is a pleasant little account for you, by my good and simple clergyman's wife. It would have been better still, if I had not been forced to warn her that I wanted it for Fors, which of course took the sparkle out of her directly.

4. Here is one little naughty bit of private preface, which really must go with the rest. "I have written my little letter about the fish trade, and L. says it is all right. I am afraid you won't think there is anything in it worth putting in Fors, as I really know very little about it, and

absolutely nothing that every one else does not know, except ladies, who generally never trouble about anything, but scold their cooks, and abuse the fishmongers-when they cannot pay the weekly bills easily." (After this we are quite proper.)

"The poor fishermen who toil all through these bitter nights, and the retail dealer who carries heavy baskets, or drags a truck so many weary miles along the roads, get but a poor living out of their labour; but what are called fish salesmen,' who by reason of their command of capital keep entire command of the London markets, are making enormous fortunes.

"When you ask the fishermen why they do not manage better for themselves at the present demand for fish, they explain how helpless they are in the hands of what they call the big men.' Some fishermen at Aldborough, who have a boat of their own, told my brother that one season, when the sea seemed full of herrings, they saw in the newspapers how dear they were in London, and resolved to make a venture on their own account; so they spent all their available money in the purchase of a quantity of the right sort of baskets, and, going out to sea, filled them all, -putting the usual five hundred lovely fresh fish in each,—sent them straight up to London by train, to the charge of a salesman they knew of, begging him to send them into the market and do the best he could for them. But he was very angry with the fishermen; and wrote them word that the market was quite sufficiently stocked; that if more fish were sent in, the prices would go down; that he should not allow their fish to be sold at all; and, if they made a fuss about it, he would not send their baskets back, and would make them pay the carriage. As it was, he returned them, after a time; but the poor men never received one farthing for their thousands of nice fish, and only got a scolding for having dared to try and do without the agents who buy the fish from the boats at whatever price they choose to settle amongst themselves.

"When we were at Yarmouth this autumn, the enormous abundance of herrings on the fish quay was perfectly wonderful; it must be (I should think) two hundred yards long, and is capable of accommodating the unloading of a perfect fleet of boats. The swills,' as they call the baskets, each containing five hundred fish, were side by side, touching each other, all over this immense space, and men were shovelling salt about, with spades, over heaps of fish, previous to packing at once in boxes. I said, 'How surprised our poor people would be to see such a sight, after constantly being obliged to pay three-halfpence for every herring they buy.' An old fisherman answered me, saying, 'No one need pay that, ma'am, if we could get the fish to them; we could have plenty more boats, and plenty more fish, if we could have them taken where the poor people could get them.' We brought home a hundred dried herrings, for which we paid ten shillings; when we asked if we might buy some lovely mackerel on the Fish Quay, they said (the fishermen) that they were not allowed to sell them there, except all at once. Since then, I have read an account of a Royal Commission having been

investigating the subject of the fishery for some time past, and the result of its inquiries seems to prove that it is inexhaustible, and that in the North Sea it is always harvest-time.*

"When I told our fishmonger all about it, he said I was quite right about the big men' in London, and added, 'They will not let us have the fish under their own prices; and if it is so plentiful that they cannot sell it all at that, they have it thrown away, or carted off for manure; sometimes sunk in the river. If we could only get it here, my trade would be twice what it is, for, except sprats, the poor can seldom buy fish now.'1

"I asked him if the new Columbia Market 2 was of no use in making things easier, but he said, 'No'; that these salesmen had got that into their hands also; and were so rich that they would keep any number of markets in their own hands. A few hundred pounds sacrificed any day to keep up the prices they think well worth their while."

Harvests, no

Not quite so, gentlemen of the Royal Commission. less than sales, and fishermen no less than salesmen, need regulation by just human law. Here is a piece of news, for instance, from Glasgow, concerning Loch Fyne:-"Owing to the permission to fish for herring by trawling, which not only scrapes up the spawn from the bottom, but catches great quantities of the fry, which are useless for market, and only fit for manure, it is a fact that, whereas Loch Fyne used to be celebrated for containing the finest herrings to be caught anywhere, and thousands and tens of thousands of boxes used to be exported from Inverary, there are not now enough caught there to enable them to export a single bor, and the quantity caught lower down the loch, near its mouth (and every year the herring are being driven farther and farther down) is not a tithe of what it used to be. Such a thing as a Loch Fyne herring (of the old size and quality) cannot be had now in Glasgow for any money, and this is only a type of the destruction which trawling, and too short close-time, are causing to all the west-coast fishing. Whiting Bay, Arran, has been rid of its whiting by trawling on the spawning coast opposite. The cupidity of careless fishers, unchecked by beneficial law, is here also 'killing the goose that lays the golden eggs,' and herring of any kind are very scarce and very bad in Glasgow, at a penny and sometimes twopence each. Professor Huxley gave his sanction to trawling, in a Government Commission, I am told, some years ago, and it has been allowed ever since. I will tell you something similar about the seal-fishing off Newfoundland, another time."

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1 [For a later reference to this passage, see Letter 88, § 4 (Vol. XXIX. p. 383).] In Bethnal Green; erected by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts at a cost of £200,000. "As a place of business in the way designed by its noble founder, Columbia Market from the very first has proved a comparative failure. . . . In April 1877 it was reopened as a meat market” (Cassell's Old and New London, vol. v. p. 596).]

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3 [Huxley (who afterwards in 1881 succeeded Frank Buckland as Inspector of Fisheries) had been a member from 1863-65 of the Commission which had conducted an elaborate investigation into the fisheries of the United Kingdom, and had taken a large share in the preparation of the Report. This protracted investigation had convinced Huxley that the supply of fish in the deep sea was practically inexhaustible. . . . He was not, however, equally certain that particular

XXVII.

5. What do you think of that, by way of Free-trade? -my British-never-never-never-will-be-slaves,-hey? Freetrade; and the Divine Law of Supply and Demand; and the Sacred Necessity of Competition, and what not;-and here's a meek little English housewife who can't get leave, on her bended knees, from Sultan Costermonger, to eat a fresh herring at Yarmouth! and must pay three-halfpence apiece, for his leave to eat them anywhere;-and you, you simpletons-Fishermen, indeed!-Cod's heads and shoulders, say rather, meekly receiving back your empty baskets; your miracle of loaves and fishes executed for you by the Costermongering Father of the Faithful, in that thimblerig manner!

6. "But haven't you yourself been hard against competition, till now? and haven't you always wanted to regulate prices ?"1

Yes, my good SS. Peter and Andrew!-very certainly I want to regulate prices; and very certainly I will, as to such things as I sell, or have the selling of. I should like to hear of anybody's getting this letter for less than tenpence!-and if you will send me some fish to sell for you, perhaps I may even resolve that they shall be sold at twopence each, or else made manure of,-like these very costermongers; but the twopence shall go into your pockets—not mine; which you will find a very pleasant and complete difference in principle between his Grace the Costermonger and me; and, secondly, if I raise the price of a herring to twopence, it will be because I know that people have been in some way misusing them, or wasting them; and need to get fewer for a time; or will eat twopenny herrings at fashionable tables (when they wouldn't touch halfpenny

areas of sea shore might not be exhausted. . . . His reports for 1882 and 1883, in which he gave elaborate accounts of the results of legislation on the Tyne and on the Severn, show that he keenly appreciated the necessity of regulating the Salmon Fisheries" Sir Spencer Walpole in Leonard Huxley's Life and Letters of Huxley, vol. ii. pp. 294-295 (1903 edition).]

1 [See, for instance, on competition, Unto this Last, § 54 (Vol. XVII. p. 75); and on the regulation of prices, Time and Tide, § 80 (ibid. p. 386): on the latter point, compare Letter 58, § 17 (below, p. 433).]