FROM 1583 TO 1702. 10J 



were greater than those of any man who wrote on his own 

 age, and depicted the characters of his contemporaries. 



But full as the seventeenth century is of great men, the 

 economist must not lose sight of the fact that this heroic age 

 developed those social problems which are the serious troubles 

 of our own time. The seventeenth century began, or at 

 least developed and made permanent, the misery of the poor. 

 The liberty which the Parliament fought for was not a stake 

 in which the labourer had any interest or any share. It was 

 eminently a rising of the middle classes against absolute 

 theories of government. The labourer was not indeed quite 

 disinherited. But he was becoming a danger to growing 

 opulence by his numbers and by his migrations. He was 

 believed to decrease wealth. He was stinted by quarter 

 sessions' assessments, in which they whose whole interests 

 were committed to the task of getting his labour cheap were 

 allowed by law to fix his wages. A code of criminal law, 

 remorselessly severe, punished his offences against property. 

 The numerous sects now stereotyped and made permanent, 

 chiefly ministered to the dwellers in towns. I suspect that the 

 Habeas Corpus Act and other guarantees of liberty were far 

 more important securities to the wealthy and noble than they 

 were to the labouring poor, and that the peasant and artisan 

 might have invoked these safeguards in vain. These men 

 had no part, probably were entirely indifferent to the great 

 drama of human progress which was being enacted in their 

 midst. As some of their fellow-countrymen were making 

 governments, founding colonies, conquering empires, their lot 

 was getting progressively worse, and their existence was 

 reckoned to be a loss rather than a gain l . 



The tables which follow illustrate the distribution of wealth 

 in Kngland and Wales in the seventeenth century. The first 

 is the Ship Money assessment ; the second that of 1641 ; the 

 third that of March 25, 1649; the fourth that of December 



1 See for a fuller account of the condition of labour in the sixteenth century, my 

 ' six Centuries of Labour and Wages, chapters 14 and 15.' 



