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cently sold, anticipating, perhaps, some such legislation as ruined the monks and made his ancestor's fortune. As for the monks whom Henry evicted they wandered forth from their homes beggars, and Henry hanged all of them whom he could catch as vagrants. How many perished as counterpoise for the peasant massacres and Lollard burnings of the foregoing two centuries can never be known, nor to us is it material. What is essential to mark, from the legal standpoint, is that while this long and bloody revolution, of one hundred and fifty years, displaced a favored class and confiscated its property, it raised up in their stead another class of land monopolists, rather more greedy and certainly quite as cruel as those whom they superseded. Also, in spite of all opposition, labor did make good its claim to participate, more or less fully, in the ownership of the property it cultivated, for while the holding of the ancient villein grew to be well recognized in the royal courts as a copyhold estate, villeinage itself disappeared.

Yet, unless I profoundly err, in the revolution of the sixteenth century, the law somewhat conspicuously failed in its function of moderating competition, for I am persuaded that competition of another kind sharpened, and shortly caused a second civil war bloodier than the War of the Roses.

Fifteen years before the convents were seized, Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, in whose opening chapter More has given an account of a dinner at Cardinal Morton's, who, by the way, presided in the Star Chamber. At this dinner one of the Cardinal's guests reflected on the thievish propensities of Englishmen, who were to be found. throughout the country, hanged as felons, sometimes twenty together on a single gallows. More protested that this was not the fault of the poor who were hanged, but of the rich land-monopolists, who pastured sheep and left no fields for tillage. According to More, these capitalists plucked down houses and even towns, leaving nothing but

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the church for a sheep-house, so that "by covin and fraud, or by violent oppression, or by wrongs and injuries," the husbandmen "be thrust out of their own," and, "must needs depart away, poor, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows." The dissolution of the convents accelerated the process, and more and more of the weaker yeomanry were ruined and evicted. It is demonstrated that the pauperization of the feebler rural population went on apace by the passage of poor laws under Elizabeth, which, in the middle ages, had not been needed and, therefore, were unknown. This movement, described by More, was the beginning of the system of enclosing common lands which afterward wrought such havoc among the English yeomen, and which, I suppose, contributed more than any other single cause to the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century. In the mediaeval village the owners of small farms enjoyed certian rights in the common land of the community, affording them pasturage for their cattle and the like, rights without which small farming could not be made profitable. These commons the land monopolists appropriated, sometimes giving some shadow of compensation, sometimes by undisguised force, but on the whole compensation amounted to so little that the enclosure of the commons must rank as confiscation. Also this seizure of property would doubtless have caused a convulsion as lasting as that which followed the insurrection of 1381, or as did actually occur in Ireland, had it not been for an unparalleled contemporaneous territorial and industrial expansion. Thorold Rogers always insisted that between 1563, the year of the passage of the Statute of Apprentices,2 and 1824, a regular conspiracy existed between the lawyers "and the parties interested in its success to cheat the English workand to degrade him to irremedi

man of his wages,

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able poverty."'3 Certainly the land monopolists resorted to strong measures to accumulate land, for something like

25 Eliz. C. 4.

3 Work and Wages, 398.

650 Enclosure Acts were passed between 1760, the opening of the Industrial Revolution, and 1774, the outbreak of the American War. But without insisting on Rogers' view, it is not denied that the weakest of the small yeomen sank into utter misery, becoming paupers or worse. On the other hand, of those stronger some emigrated to America, others who were among the ablest and the boldest, sought fortune as adventurers over the whole earth, and, like the grandfather of Chatham, brought home from India as smugglers or even as pirates, diamonds to be sold to kings for their crowns, or, like Clive, became the greatest generals and administrators of the nation. Probably, however, by far the majority of those who were of average capacity, found compensation for the confiscated commons in domestic industry, owning their houses with lots of land, and the tools of their trade. De Foe has left a charming description of the region about Halifax in Yorkshire, toward the year 1730, where he found the whole population busy, prosperous, healthy and, in the main, self-sufficing. He did not see a beggar or an idle person in the whole country. So, favored by circumstances, the landed oligarchy met with no effective resistance after the death of Cromwell, and achieved what amounted to being autocratic power, in 1688. Their great triumph was the conversion of the House of Commons into their own personal property, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, with all the guaranties of law. In the middle ages the chief towns of England had been summoned by the king to send burgesses to Westminster to grant him money, but as time elapsed the Commons acquired influence and, in 1642, became dominant. Then, after the Restoration, the landlords conceived the idea of appropriating the right of representation, as they had appropriated and were appropriating the common lands. Lord John Russell one day observed in the House of Commons that the burgesses were originally chosen from among the inhabitants of the towns they represented, but that, in the reign of Anne, the land

lords, to depress the shipping interest, opened the borough representation to all qualified persons without regard to domicile. Lord John was mistaken in his date, for the change occurred earlier, but he described correctly enough the persistent animus of the landlords. An important part of their policy turned on the so-called Determination Acts of 1696 and 1729, which defined the franchises and which had the effect of confirming the title of patrons to borough property, thus making a seat in the House of Commons an incorporeal hereditament fully recognized by law. On this point so high an authority as Lord Eldon was emphatic. By the time of the American War the oligarchy had become so narrow that one hundred and fifty peers and commoners returned three hundred and seven members, or much more than a majority of the House as then organized. With the privileged class reduced to these contemptible numbers a catastrophe necessarily followed. Almost impregnable as the position of the oligarchy appeared, it yet had its vulnerable point. As Burke told the Duke of Portland, a duke's power did not come from his title but from his wealth, and the landlords' wealth rested on their ability to draw double rent from their estates, one rent for themselves, and another to provide for the farmer to whom they let their acres. Evidently British land could not bear this burden if brought in competition with other equally good land that paid only a single rent, and from a pretty early period the landlords appear to have been alive to this fact. Nevertheless, ocean freights afforded a fair protection, and as long as the industrial population remained tolerably self-supporting, England rather tended to export than to import grain. But, toward 1760, advances in applied science profoundly modified the equilibrium of English society. The new inventions, stimulated by steam, could only be utilized by costly machinery in

436 Hansard, Third Series, 548. 5 Unreformed House of Commons, Porritt, 1, 9, et seq.

€ 12 Hansard, Third Series, 396. 7 Grey's motion for Reform, 30 Parl. Hist., 795. (A. D. 1793.)

stalled in large factories, which none but considerable capitalists could build, but once in operation the product of these factories undersold domestic labor, and ruined and evicted the population of whole regions like Halifax. These unfortunate laborers were thrust in abject destitution into filthy and dark alleys in cities, where they herded in masses, in misery and crime. In consequence grain rose is value, so much so that in 1700 prayers were offered touching its price. Thenceforward England imported largely from America, and in 1773 Parliament was constrained to reduce the duty on wheat to a point lower than the gentry conceded again, until the total repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. The situation was well understood in London. Burke, Governor Pownall and others explained it in Parliament, while Chatham implored the landlords not to alienate America, which they could not, he told them, conquer, but which gave them a necessary market,—a market, as he aptly said, both of supply and demand. And Chatham was right, for America not only supplied the grain to feed English labor, but bought from England at least one-third of all her surplus manufactures.

The landlords, nevertheless, like most favored minorities, would not contemplate compromise. If a free American market were tolerated the price of English grain must fall to permit low wages, and rents would suffer; but if a proper tariff could be enforced in America all might be well. The proposition was simple. If continental goods could be excluded from America, and the Americans prevented from manufacturing for themselves, the Americans might be forced to buy goods from England at prices which would admit of wages which would enable British labor to subsist on grain grown on land which paid the double rent. Then the British Empire, consisting of India, the British Islands, the colonies and the West Indies, might form a practically self-sufficing unit which could maintain prices independent of the rest of the world. Thus America would be made to carry the burden of the landlords.

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