266 Transactions op the 



before the Great Charter secured personal rights and a trial by jury to 

 every freeman born upon English soil. 



At the time of the Norman conquest the population of England wds 

 supposed to be a million and a half, and the roll of land owners num- 

 bered over forty-five thousand. In eighteen hundred and sixty-one, 

 with a population of twenty millions, the number of land owners is 

 reduced to thirty thousand, and every twentieth man is a pauper. ' In 

 Ireland, just before the famine, the rural population amounted to twen- 

 ty-five for every hundred acres; in France, at the same period, to six- 

 teen; in England, to twelve, and iu the Scotch Lowlands, to five. Land 

 monopoly had driven two millions of agricultural laborers out of Great 

 Britain. The English farm laborer has been cheated of his manhood: 

 First, by a monopoly of government, which, by withholding the ballot, 

 kept him in a servile condition; second, by monopoly of land, which 

 destroyed the highest motive for industry, viz: the improvement of 

 his condition, and the attainment of a permanent home; and third, a 

 monopoly of education. 



In eighteen hundred and forty-eight, an English statesman was asked 

 if something could not be done to check the stream of emigration from 

 Ireland setting toward America. "Not while middlemen hold all the 

 land as agents of the aristocracy, and get all the profits," was the 

 significant reply. 



Professor I. Thorold Rogers has given us a history of British agri- 

 culture from twelve hundred and fifty-nine to seventeen hundred and 

 ninety-three. He shows, from carefully collected data, how gradually 

 the emancipation of the agricultural classes took place, the aristocracy 

 were eating each other up with expensive wars, and the extravagance 

 of Courts; how the yeomanry lost ground during the Reformation, 

 what was their Golden Age, and that the English peasant is again be- 

 coming a serf, and the yeomanry disappearing in the absorption of 

 nearly all the land by a small number of great proprietors. 



If the end of labor, and of wealth created by labor, is man himself, 

 the civilization of England finds a parallel in that of Rome, and for the 

 same reasons. Its agriculture, successful and wonderful in its results 

 during the last century and a half, is an exhibition of the power of cap- 

 ital applied to land. The development of agricultural wealth, and of 

 civilization in the United States, and in Australia, is an exhibition of 

 the power of manhood similarly applied. 



The advance in the price of agricultural labor in England has been 

 slower than in other countries. In twelve hundred and seventy three, 

 the haymaker got two and one half pence an acre; two and one 

 quarter pence in fourteen hundred, with board; women laborers eight 

 pence and fed themselves. The price for washing and shearing sheep 

 was a penny a score, in twenty years sixteen were sheared for a penny, 

 then ten, and finally eight. We read of one farmer at about the year 

 fifteen hundred who gave his women shearers one and one half pence a 

 day and fed them. And yet, Joseph Arch tells us that agricultural 

 labor, all things considered, fared better then than now. 



The price of meat and dairy products in England makes cattle raising 

 more profitable than grain. Some one has said, and it is very near the 

 truth, that a failure of the turnip crop for two years would bankrupt 

 England. Agriculture is, therefore, growing in importance hourly, and 

 so are all questions involved in the feeding of that vast and rapidly in- 

 creasing population. England is increasing her acreage as fast as she 

 can, by reclamation, and reducing her pasturage. The culture of sain- 



