FROM 1583 TO 1702. 1 01 



small, according to King. The wages of the latter were so 

 scanty that they had to be supplemented by rates. Now in 

 1885, if we deduct from the revenue the interest on the public 

 debt, the cost of maintaining the poor will be found to 

 amount to a little over one-eighth of the imperial expenditure. 

 But at the Revolution the cost of maintaining the poor is 

 about one-third of the revenue received under identical 

 conditions 1 . It is impossible to doubt that the rents of the 

 seventeenth century had certainly been obtained by the 

 forcible depression of labour, and probably also by the cur- 

 tailment of farmers' profits. It must have been from these 

 sources that the rent of land rose, as our informants assure us 

 it did, during the seventeenth century from six to twelve 

 millions annually. 



The student of history dwells with peculiar interest on the 

 seventeenth century. At its beginning it is a wonderful 

 epoch of intellectual vigour. At the middle of the century 

 the military prowess of England is as great as it was in the 

 most successful times of the Plantagenets. Its conclusion was 

 a period in which public morality and public liberty reasserted 

 themselves, not indeed with that austere determination which 

 characterised the age of the Commonwealth, for the taint of 

 the restored Stuarts infected public life for generations, but on 

 a more lasting and progressive system than the founders of 

 the Commonwealth could frame. In every department of 

 human activity, men made irreversible progress, The seven- 

 teenth century was the age of the greatest English poets, of 

 the first founders of physical and mathematical science. It 

 striving, with no uncertain aim, after the principles of those 

 mechanical arts on which the later progress of human society 

 depended. It laid the foundations of the philosophy of law, 

 the philosophy of society, and the philosophy of mind and 

 morals. It discussed the principles of government, of finance, 

 of monetary science. The seventeenth century founded the 



1 In 1885,68774 to 8415 ; in 1688, 2001855 to 665362. In the first set of figures 

 I have omitted the last three in the original. 



