to make him the serf of the community. Those persons, however, who owned the whole of a parish took care, whenever they could, to tear down cottages on their estate and rely on labor from a distance. By this system, they hired labor at the justice's rate, i. e., a factitiously low rate, while the parish of the man's residence had to supplement his wages and to bear all those contingencies which were enhanced by the laborer's being constrained to travel a considerable distance to his work in all weathers. The law of settlement, therefore, not only fixed the tenant to the soil but enabled opulent landowners to rob their neighbors and to wear out prematurely the laborer's health and strength. All this was done, too, when the patriots and placemen chattered about liberty and arbitrary administration, and fine ladies and gentlemen talked about the rights of man and Rousseau and the French Revolution; and Burke and Sheridan were denouncing the despotism of Warren Hastings! Why, at his own doors at Beaconsfield, Burke must have daily seen serfs who had less liberty than those Indians whose wrongs he described so dramatically and pathetically.

No trifling percentage of the funds collected for the maintenance of the poor was expended in litigation on the cases which sprang out of this law, since each parish tried to shift the burden of the support of the poor, if possible, on the neighboring parish. It was an evil inheritance of the English people, perhaps the worst act of the worst Parliament which ever sat, but it was an El Dorado to the lawyers. Many a barrister owed his place in Parliament and on the bench to his skill in arguing settlement cases, to the ingenuity with which he was able to tighten the bonds on the peasant. The wealthy landowners clung to it with desperate tenacity; for it increased their rents at the expense of the tenants and the laborers. What mattered it to them that the English peasant's life was aged soon after his prime, if they could get cheap labor and increasing rents? The whole force of law was directed for nearly two centuries toward the solution of this problem; How much oppression can the English people endure, how much privation, misery and starvation without

THE LAW OF PAROCHIAL SETTLEMENT, ETC.

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absolutely destroying the labor on which the growing rents depend? The present generation, though a portion of the evil has been prevented for the future, inherit the outcome of these two centuries and with it problems of the gravest kind daily pressing for solution, and to which it is idle to offer the nostrums of over-population, emigration, competition, and other formularies of an ideal society.

Towards the close of the last century the Berkshire magistrates, struck with the appalling discrepancy between wages. and the price of food for the labor of the peasant could procure him, for several years, only one-eighth of the amount of wheat which the same person could have earned before 1540 -met and proposed, not that the mischievous law of Elizabeth, which established legal wages, should be repealed or that. the infamous law of parochial settlement should be done away with, but that able-bodied laborers should have their wages supplemented by allowances from the overseer of the poor, proportionate to the number of their children or the general charges of the family. By this means they were enabled to prevent a general increase of wages, to fix the wages of the single and childless at a low amount, and compel all tenants to contribute to the expense of agricultural operations.

It is no wonder that the condition of the agricultural laborer is to-day a very unhappy one. Men do not come out of such a state of debasement as that into which such a policy as this, pursued for two centuries, has thrown them, in a few days or years, or even decades. The very name Hodge, which is applied to the British agricultural laborer, has come to be used as a synonym of stupidity. In 1865 Prof. Fawcett. wrote in his work on the economic condition of the British laborers, that theirs is a life of incessant toil for wages too scanty to give them a supply even of the first necessaries of life. No hope cheers their monotonous careers: a life of constant labor brings them no other prospect than that when their strength is exhausted they must crave as suppliant mendicants a pittance from parish relief.

The most hopeless feature in the case is the almost insurmountable obstacles in the way of any improvement on the

part of the laborers themselves. The condition of the agricultural laborer is very different from that of the artisan in this respect. Scattered and incapable of combined action with his fellows, bowed down by centuries of oppression, hard usage and hard words, with, as he believes, every social force against him, the landlord in league with the farmer, the clergyman in league with both; the latter preaching resignation, and the former enforcing it, he has lived through evil times. Several attempts have been made of late years to bring about an organization of agricultural laborers, but they have been only very partially successful. It is difficult to organize laborers who live so widely scattered. The present laborer can give absolutely nothing from his scanty wages toward defraying the costs of organization, and it costs something to conduct a successful organization. Those who attempt to form such unions have to contend with the apathy of despair, with the sluggishness of ignorance, with the habitual mendacity of distrust, and with the low cunning with which the oppressed shirk duty. In other words, the long policy of oppression has ended in sinking the laborer so low that he has neither intelligence enough nor virtue enough to combine with his fellow-laborers in order to raise their condition.

We have thus traced the process by which the condition of the English laborer has been continuously deteriorated by the acts of government. It was first impoverished by the issue of base money. Next it was robbed of its guild money by the land thieves of Edward's regency. It was next brought into contact with a new and more needy set of employers, the sheep-masters who succeeded the monks. It was then by a pretence subjected to the justices' assessment of wages, mercilessly used in the first half of the seventeenth century, the agricultural laborer being still further impoverished by being made the residuum of all labor. The agricultural laborer was then further mulcted by enclosures of common lands and the extinction of those immemorial rights of fuel and pasture which he had enjoyed so long. The poor law professed to find him work, but was so administered that the reduction of his wages to a bare subsistence became an easy process and