xiv PREFACE, 



men, or of a great sovereign, like Elizabeth, who is the 

 type of both, that most nefarious public crime would 

 never have been committed. Even at that time its 

 consequences were foreseen, and fully recognised. Had 

 good faith been kept at the Mint, the inevitable change 

 would have been gradual, and prices all round would 

 have accommodated themselves to the course of events. 

 But Henry was reckless and extravagant. He did not 

 dare to ask his Parliaments for money, and therefore 

 took to cheating his people. He inflicted other wrongs 

 on the English, for he educated a number of public 

 men, who were unspeakably servile to him during 

 his life, and when he was dead, felt that they were 

 let out of jail, and looked on the country as their 

 prey. 



From the epoch of Henry's death the degradation 

 of the English labourer begins. For nearly three cen- 

 turies the artisan suffered with the peasant ; that is, as 

 long as the combination laws impeded the creation of 

 those labour partisanships which we call trade unions. 

 But the condition of the farm labourer has gone from 

 bad to worse, has become more hopeless. The best and 

 most capable of them have fled from their traditional 

 occupation ; and, at the time in which I am writing, as 

 I foresaw when I wrote the last words of my first 

 volume sixteen years ago, the agricultural problem in 

 England is not the adjustment of local burdens, or the 

 arbitration of rent, or the revival of confidence in those 

 who put capital into land ; but it is assuredly the 

 recall of the agricultural labourer to effective and hope- 



