LABOUR AND WAGES. 637 



quarter sessions assessments is, I submit, conclusive proof as 

 to the success with which the former was followed. And the 

 unintended testimony which Gregory King gives as to the 

 beggarly condition of the labourer and tenant farmer at the 

 end of the century shows how fully the object aimed at was 

 attained. 



We are accustomed to consider the seventeenth century as an 

 age of heroes who were engaged in gigantic struggles, in which 

 personal rights were vindicated against the perpetual conspi- 

 racy of the Court, aided by slavish priests and unscrupulous 

 lawyers, who sought to assist the designs of the sovereign by 

 the support of religion and law. We know that in the end 

 and for a time the agents in this conspiracy were baffled, and 

 after an armed resistance were overthrown, and that the forms 

 of the old constitution were superseded by a successful soldier, 

 whose government seemed strong and likely to endure, when 

 it was after all unsettled, and dependent on his life only. 

 Then we know that after Cromwell's premature death came a 

 reaction and a restoration, not of the second Charles only, but 

 of a shameless orgie, which lasted for a quarter of a century, 

 of a malignant conspiracy against all liberty, counselled by 

 lawyers in contrast with whose baseness the Finches and Noys 

 seem almost disinterested patriots, and that finally the King 

 was displaced and evicted when his designs seemed to be on 

 the eve of their full accomplishment. After this comes the 

 rule of Parliament. In 1542 the landowners abetted the 

 policy of Henry, because they expected, and with reason, that 

 they should share the plunder of the Church. In 1688 they 

 deserted and expelled James, because they foresaw that the 

 constitution which they were about to frame would enable 

 them to plunder the nation. 



During the whole of the seventeenth century, with the 

 exception of the ten years of the Commonwealth, the justices 

 in quarter sessions were vindicating, no doubt, their own 

 liberties against the Crown, but were striving to depress and 

 impoverish the labourer, to stint his very life. The law gave 



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