poor law, under which the relief of destitution was guaranteed, was the only expedient before her government when it was left face to face with the irremediable poverty of labour.

The English labourer, then, in the sixteenth century was almost simultaneously assailed on two sides. The money which he received for his wages was debased, and the assistance which his benefit society gave him in times of difficulty, which allowed him loans without interest, apprenticed his son, or pensioned his widow, was confiscated. All the necessaries of life, as I have already stated, rose in value in the proportion generally of 1 to 21, while the wages of labour rose to little more than from 1 to 12. His ordinary means of life were curtailed. The considerable advantage which the London labourer and artizan had over his country fellow in the calling disappeared, and the wages of country and London hands were nearly equalised. This was indeed to be expected, for in the virtual decline of wages, the advantage of the better paid or selected hands would certainly be lost. But the deterioration of his condition was not confined to the loss of money wages. He lost his insurance also, the fund destined to support him and his during the period of youth and age, when work is not open to the imperfect powers of youth, and has become impossible to the enfeebled powers of age. Nor is the extent of the loss which the working classes suffered by the confiscation of the guild lands to be estimated by the value which was set upon the capital fund, as we may see from the enormous amount to which those funds have increased in London, where they were spared, for it is admitted that most of the guild or corporate estates of the city companies are of pre-Reformation origin. The estates of the guilds in country towns might not have nearly reached the value of the London property belonging to the companies, but they would hardly have been so entirely perverted from their original objects as they have been in the city, and would have remained, in some degree at least, to fulfil the original purposes of the donors. The country guilds, though not formally suppressed after being plundered, were practically superseded by the corporate action of the burgesses, who appropriated such income as was left, from fees and fines, to the common purse of the freemen.

The purpose which the legislature had before it for two centuries had now become possible. The Statute of Labourers had been passed, re-enacted, invoked, and put into execution in vain. There is hardly a trace in the history of English labour and wages that the passionate desire of the employers of labour that workmen should be constrained to accept reasonable wages had been satisfied. The rise in wages, and what was even more significant, of articles the price of which no law could pretend to control, had changed the form of English husbandry from capitalist cultivation on a large scale to the stock and land lease, and thence to tenancies of the ordinary farm kind on short lease, or to tenancies at will. But though there was a formidable increase in prices after the full effect of the debased currency was reached, there was no rise in rents. The landowner was paying nearly three times as much in the first years of Elizabeth's reign as he paid in the first years of her father's reign, and receiving no more rent in the latter than he did in the earlier period. This is proved by the evidence given of corporate income at the two periods when the income is the source of the corporation's existence. For a long time the revenues of King's College, Cambridge, and New College, All Souls, or Merton, Oxford, show no increase in amount. The Cambridge College, it is true, tries to remedy the loss by demanding its rents in kind, but the Oxford societies either did not attempt the expedient or found that their tenants could resist it. The bishoprics were opulent before the Reformation, but poor after it, not so much because they had generally been shorn of their possessions by the greedy courtiers of the later Tudor princes, though this took place, as because rents had remained stationary while prices had been rising. Nor is the cause far to seek. Rents do not rise because prices rise, for the power of the tenant to pay an enhanced rent which the rise in the price of farm produce will give him may be entirely neutralized by the rise in the price of that which he must purchase in order to carry on his industry. This is made clear at the present time. The high price of meat and dairy products is more than a compensation for the low price of corn, if one is to interpret the power of a tenant to pay rent by the price of agricultural produce. But all farmers will tell

us that, owing to the great price of lean stock, no profit, or little profit beyond manure, attends stock keeping. Nor would the difference between high and low wages materially diminish or increase the power of paying rent, apart from other causes. Wages may be high, and profits may remain high, because demand is great and supply indefinite. This is the common case when there is great activity in manufactures, and it arises from the fact that business has become more brisk, that the industry is for the time capable of indefinite extension, or that a great and notable economy has been induced on the process of production. Wages may be high and profits low, not because, as some economists have absurdly argued, wages trench on profits, but because an increasing number of persons compete for an inelastic or stationary amount of business, and therefore at once overbuy each other in the wages market and undersell each other in the produce market.

In mediæval agriculture the greatest outlay, as I have frequently said, was on stock, live and dead. It is not easy, in the old system of capitalist farming, to precisely figure the wages of labour, because the tenants of the manor frequently paid the rents for their small holdings in labour, and an estimate of this would have to be given in any interpretation of the cost of labour in the earlier husbandry. But in the small tenancies which followed, this kind of labour is extinguished, and it is not easy, in the absence of direct evidence, to determine what additional cost the tenant would be at. Still the farmer gave, as in older times, his own labour and that of his household to his holding, and would not be as likely to employ independent labour as the capitalist farmer was, except in harvest time and under urgency. And it will be clear, that unless hired labour formed a considerable item in the cost of the tenant farmer, a fall in wages would not of itself render him, under such altered circumstances, able and willing to pay an enhanced rent. There is only one cause for a rise in rent, and this cause has manifested itself at well-defined periods in the history of English agricultural industry.

This is an economy in the process of production due to improvements in the process of agriculture. From the days of

Henry III. to those of James I., no such economy or improvement occurred. It is probable that some processes by which land was tilled were neglected or forgotten. It is not unlikely that the care which had been taken to improve breeds of sheep had been remitted. Only one new kind of agricultural industry had been introduced, the cultivation of the hop; and this was suspected and even denounced. But from the time of James I., especially after the middle of his reign, large and important improvements are made in agriculture, great economies discovered, and a rapid rise in rent ensues. These will be subsequently commented on. It is to be regretted, though it is not to be wondered at, that these improvements and economies had no beneficial effect on the wages of labour.

The government of Elizabeth was, however, convinced that the legal restraint of wages was a necessity or a benefit, or both. Hence the Statute 5 Eliz., cap. 4 (which enacts that no person shall, under a penalty of forty shillings a month, use or occupy any art, mystery, or manual occupation without a previous seven years' apprenticeship), seems to favour traders and artizans at the expense of labourers in husbandry, by limiting the number of the former and making the latter the residuum of all non-apprenticed labour. But the favour is more apparent than real in the case of the artizan; for what the statute gives with one hand it takes away with another. The justices in Quarter Sessions are empowered to fix the rate of wages in husbandry and in handicrafts, and they do not let their powers lie idle. The great collection of Elizabeth's proclamations now in the Bodleian Library, a volume which probably once belonged to Cecil, gives two of these exhaustive assessments,—one for the county of Rutland, which seems to have been published as a type for the southern counties, and one for that of Lancashire, which is probably a guide for the northern counties. There are others in existence.

This expedient was at last successful, and was the third in the set of causes from which pauperism was the inevitable effect. The two former, the base money and the confiscation of the benefit societies' funds, are economical, and can be so interpreted. The third is capable of historical proof. The wages of labour do conform, notwithstanding the continual increase in the price of

the necessaries of life, to the assessments of the Quarter Sessions, and the system is continued under legal sanction till 1812, and by a sufficient understanding for long after that date. It seems that as long as the practice remained, under which the wages of the peasant were eked out by land allowances and commonable rights, he continued to subsist, though but poorly, under the system; but that when the enclosures of the eighteenth century began, and the full influence of the corn laws was felt, during the fourth quarter of that century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, it became necessary to supplement his wages by an allowance from the parish fund, and thus to indirectly qualify the assessment which the magistrates had established.

Had, however, the first two acts to which I have so often referred not been committed, the third would have, I am persuaded, been nugatory. It was nothing more than had been enacted in the reign of Henry IV., and had been wholly inoperative, at any rate in the direction which it was intended to take the reduction of agricultural wages; for these, as we have seen, improve after the enactment. But it was a very different thing when the workman had been weakened, and he had been constrained for half a generation to submit to a base currency and to undergo other losses.

The altered condition of the labourers is further illustrated by the rise in the price of their maintenance. In the early part of the fifteenth century the average cost of a labourer's board is 9d. a week. In the famine year of the fifteenth century, 1348-9, it rose to an average of 1s. 6d., a proof that the rates which I have given were contract prices. Nor is there much variation in the rate till after the issue of the base money. In 1542, board and lodging are put at 1s. a week; but in ten years from this time it rises to an average of 3s. a week. In 1562, 1563, and 1570, Elizabeth makes quarterly contracts for victualling her workmen in her dockyards at Deptford and Portsmouth. In the first year the contract is at an average of 4s. 04d. ; in the second, at 4s. 6d. ; in the third, at 3s. 11d.; the first and third being a cheap, the second a dear year. The Queen also rents lodgings at 2d. a week, the contract being that the men should have feather beds, that two should lie in a bed, and that the queen should find sheets