THE ENCLOSURES OF THE EIGHTEENTH 



AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES AND THEIR 



RESULTS 



IN dealing with the sixteenth and early seventeenth 

 centuries we noticed that the Crown, by legislation or 

 otherwise, was attempting, and with poor success, to check 

 a movement which, whether good or not, was certainly in 

 favour with the more active and pushing spirits of the age, 

 and trying, by paternal interference, to stand between the 

 rich and the poor and maintain or establish an equitable 

 distribution of wealth. When we pass to the eighteenth 

 the position has entirely changed. The legislature is now 

 found on the side of those who urge the necessity of 

 departing from the old paths, of adopting measures more 

 suitable to economic conditions, and of stimulating by State 

 action the advance of national wealth and power. 



The reason for this is well known to most of my hearers, 

 and may, therefore, be very briefly given. By the time of 

 the Restoration, and still more at the date of the Revolu- 

 tion of 1688, the upper and middle landowning classes had 

 attained to a pfekion which they certainly never enjoyed 

 before, and perlSps never held again. At the head of this 

 powerful, and to a great extent homogeneous aristocracy, 

 stood the peers, closely connected with the largest of the 

 squires by social, if not by blood, ties a class into which 

 their younger children were ever descending and from 

 which they were ever being recruited ; while the body of 

 the county gentry, who formed the great bulk of this 



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