FROM 1583 TO 1702. 99 



signed the beggarly condition of those whom Gregory King 

 declares to be a decreasing element in the public wealth. And 

 here I must express my conviction that the English poor-law 

 has been on the whole the worst enemy of the English work- 

 man that has ever existed. Elizabeth's councillors conceded 

 it in sheer despair. Everything was tried before this was tried 

 voluntary requisitions, involuntary requisitions, compulsory 

 payments enforced on reluctant contributors, the experiment 

 of 1597, and the temporary expedient of 1601. I do not indeed 

 doubt that the English Government was incomparably more 

 humane and generous to labour than any other European 

 system was. It had been accustomed to regulate prices in 

 the interest of the poor, and it was only natural that it should 

 regulate wages in the interest of employers. The nobles and 

 gentry of sixteenth and seventeenth-century England imagined 

 that they were, quite apart from their public services as Eng- 

 lishmen, which cannot be disputed, valuable elements of society 

 as landowners. Now to be efficient agents in the political 

 system, they had to increase their means. But they could 

 not increase them, except at the expense of labour. The 

 indestructible powers of the soil, on which Ricardo bases his 

 theory of rent, are a fiction. The real fertility of land is the 

 progressive skill of the husbandman. The richest soil may be 

 exhausted by over-cropping in a very short time, the poorest, 

 if it be capable of improvement, may be made a garden by 

 judicious treatment. Now it is true that great progress was 

 made in husbandry in the seventeenth century. But it is also 

 certain that the progress was local, spasmodic, and risky. 

 Near a century after the date with which these volumes close, 

 Arthur Young laments that an agriculture on which Hartlib 

 and his contemporaries insisted had been so little diffused in 

 England. For the danger to the experimental agriculturist, 

 a danger commented on from the time of Fitzherbert to our 

 own experience, is that the English law allowed a landowner 

 to appropriate what is called by a euphemism the indestructible 

 powers of the soil, but is in reality the intelligence and the 



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