760 ON THE PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES, ETC. 



free food was denied the labourer, he felt it an injustice that the 

 misfortunes which the selfishness of the landowners made in- 

 evitable to him should be visited with a discipline which would 

 never have been necessary, had it not been that his industry 

 was stinted and his resources narrowed by the taxes on the 

 food which his industry might have bought, but was not allowed 

 to buy. From that unlucky precedence given to coercion over 

 reform, animosities have sprung up and still smoulder, which it 

 needs much wisdom and laborious patience to quench, a patience 

 which is too often vicarious. 



Meanwhile the errors and crimes of the past are inflicting 

 their present punishment. The man who for generations has 

 laboured on the soil, and has received no justice and little 

 mercy from those who have reaped the profit of his toils, has 

 fled from his ungrateful occupation. A serf without land for 

 centuries, he has at last found out that he is not bound to it ; 

 and the question now is, how can English land be tilled, when 

 they who could have tilled it are irrevocably gone ? The exodus 

 which I foresaw sixteen years ago has occurred. 



