century the serf was almost completely emancipated; trade and industry were flourishing.

Poverty marked the third stage in the long story of the suffering of manual labor. The evils of slavery and serfdom were now followed by even greater suffering and want. The worker gained personal but not economic freedom. In the sixteenth century the movement began of enclosing thousands of acres of the common land which the poor farmer, free or serf, had for centuries enjoyed. Peasants were driven from the land. Some 300,000 workers were thrown out of employment and poverty became widespread. Unemployment and want drove the workers to rebellion in 1549. But this only ended in defeat and brought no relief to labor. "Merry England" was now passing into a land of large estates and poorhouses. Instead of providing for the unemployed who had been thrown out of work by the existing social system, they were penalized by severe legislation so that "sturdy beggars" were to be thrashed "till the body was bloody."

Thousands of peasants driven homeless from the land became fugitives or "vagabonds." The harshness of the Justices in some districts also caused migration. Cruel laws were passed to prevent the free movement of workers, fugitive laborers, or artificers. If caught they could be branded on the forehead or even enslaved. The Government seemed to contemplate a return to slavery for, by an Act of Edward VI's reign in 1547, it was ordered that any man or woman who lived idly for three days, who should refuse to labor, should be branded with a redhot iron on the breast with the letter V and should become the slave for two years of any person informing against him. The master could feed his slave on bread and water and refuse meat. He had the legal right to force him to do any work with whip and chains. If the slave were absent a fortnight,

he could be condemned to slavery for life and branded on the forehead or back. If he ran away thrice, he was to be executed.1

There were also laws against combinations of laborers to improve their conditions which made offenders liable to fine, the pillory, loss of an ear, etc. These men existed not in their own right but as "a means of ministering" to the "ease or pleasure" of another class. Laws were framed for the protection of the property of this class, not for the personality of men of another class.

The discovery of the new world by Columbus opened up new sources of wealth but they were not for the poor. Many were driven by hunger to the gallows, and in the reign of Henry VIII alone, 72,000 persons were put to death for stealing, often for petty theft to appease their hunger. Poverty was accompanied by the dense ignorance of the masses. Education was confined chiefly to gentlemen and the clergy. At the beginning of the seventeenth century unskilled or common workmen received a little less than two cents a day, or $6.66 a year, while skilled workers received three cents a day, or $10.00 a year. These were "maximum" rates.

By the agrarian and industrial revolutions, England was changed in one eventful century from a country of farming into a land of smoky cities and factories. Both movements led to the great future prosperity of England, but both at the time wrought incalculable hardship to multitudes of workers. The agrarian revolution turned the peasant proprietor into a dependent agricultural laborer or drove him as a homeless wanderer from the land. The industrial revolution forced him into the factory. The Enclosure Acts, which dispossessed the workers,

"A History of Labour," pp. 59, 96. 】

could, up to 1774, be passed by the limited franchise of the favored few, without the people concerned even hearing that their eviction from the land was contemplated. Legislation was enacted chiefly by the property-holding classes and naturally in their own interests. The masses without the vote were politically powerless. The enclosure of the common land had left many of them in abject poverty. Village laborers were receiving from sixty to ninety cents a week in wages. Hunger and want drove many of them to poaching in the rich game preserves for food. Cobbett tells of a young man working at breaking stones who when asked how he could live upon sixty-two cents a week replied: "I don't live upon it. I poach; it is better to be hanged than to be starved to death."

In the three years between 1827 and 1830, 8,502 persons were convicted under the Game Laws, or one in seven of all criminal convictions. Most were driven to crime by sheer want. The woods were strewn with deadly spring guns that dealt death without warning. One man testified to the judge at his trial for poaching before being hanged: "Sir, I had a pregnant wife, with one infant at her knee, and another at her breast; I was anxious to obtain work, I offered myself in all directions, but without success. I was allowed. What? Why, for myself, my babes, and my wife, in a condition requiring more than common support and unable to labour, I was allowed seven shillings ($1.75) a week for all; for which I was expected to work on the roads from light to dark, and to pay three guineas ($15.00) for the hovel which sheltered us."2

Every suggestion to alter the laws in favor of the poor met with indignant opposition. The great Burke well

1 The Village Labourer, p. 167.

Ibid., p. 169.

stated the social philosophy of the time. "The body of the people must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice." It was the dictum of the time that the poor had nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.

The Hammonds conclude the description of the Village Laborer of the time by a contrast of the brilliant accomplishments and sparkling wit of the class of privilege with the "dim and meagre records of the disinherited peasants that are the shadow of its wealth; of the exiled labourers that are the shadow of its pleasures; of the villages sinking in poverty and crime and shame that are the shadow of its power and its pride."

The industrial revolution that transformed England between 1760 and 1832 was the beginning of a vast world movement that was to affect first Europe, then America and finally Asia.

The agrarian revolution as we have seen, had driven the rural worker from the land, the mechanical revolution enabled man to harness the power first of water and then of steam to the new inventions for increased mass production; while the social and financial development produced the transformation known as the industrial revolution. This vast change embraced the displacement of labor from agriculture to industry, the massing of large populations in the cities, the speeding up of work, the mechanical discipline of life, the lessening of leisure, the increase of "free"

'Ibid., pp. 247, 265, 274, 308.

and fierce competition, and the rise of a capitalist and a proletarian class.

After the discovery of Watt's steam engine in 1765, the power of steam from coal was harnessed to the needs of man. This power was applied in turn to the production of cotton, wool, iron and steel. Labor no longer was independent with its simple tools, but was gradually massed in city factories requiring large capital, plant and credit. The cities were gradually linked together in a network of industrial life by railways, steamships, cables, telegraphs and telephones.

Massed production wrought massed wealth. But while man mastered matter he became also its slave. Though he drove his machine, it in turn drove him. While wages increased, life in many ways was cheapened. The machine made wealth but it divided men.

The sunny fields of England gave place to the "black country" of smoke and dirt. With the congestion of the city, and its cheap crowded dwellings around the overcrowded factory, came that spawn of the industrial revolution, the city slum. England today, according to Mr. Lloyd George, is still a country with three and a half millions in its slums though it could spend fifty billion dollars for the last war. "Men turned their cities into shambles of childhood, poverty was embittered, civil strife in mine, mill and factory became endemic, wars on an unprecedented scale engaged nations and groups of nations."1

Man has already harnessed by machinery a hundred and fifty million horsepower from the energy of coal alone. But he has not yet appropriated the spiritual power or moral dynamic to utilize this material energy to secure the "good life" for all. The industrial revolution which might

1 Bruére, "The Coming of Coal," p. 2.