66 3 LABOUR AND WAGES. 



rise was necessary, in order that labour should even live. 

 Wages had been driven down to starvation point, and as far as 

 we know, or shall ever know, the mass of the people acquiesced 

 in its misery, and believed, as it was taught from thousands of 

 pulpits to believe, that their degradation was Providential, and 

 must be borne with resignation. The patriots of the first half 

 of the century and the profligates of the last half were equally 

 indifferent to the misery of the poor, upon whose labours they 

 lived. It is no wonder that one of those later patriots, Fletcher 

 of Saltoun, who was a republican for the rich and well-born, 

 but had no interest in the fortunes of the workman, should 

 have suggested, as part of the noble edifice of liberty, that 

 the mass of the people should be doomed to hopeless 

 bondage l . 



The chief value of historical study, the all in all of econo- 

 mical history, is to show how far the present is the outcome 

 of the selfish folly or the wise foresight of the past. We have 

 inherited in our times the fruit of that vile conspiracy, the 

 justices' assessment. We are now suffering the experience of 

 what was sure to come in time from the practices of which 

 every agricultural writer of the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries complained, the systematic plunder of the farmer by 

 the ordinary landlord, and as far as they could and can do it 

 still, the plunder of the nation. When I deal with rents in the 

 seventeenth century, the condition of the farmer, and the 

 purchasing power of wages, I shall hope to make the situation 

 clear. 



The subjoined tables, with the decennial averages, are of the 

 highest price of the carpenter's wages and the mason's, of the 

 ordinary carpenter and mason, of the bricklayer, the pair of 

 sawyers, of sawing by task, of the tiler and slater, of the tiler 

 and help and of the artisan's help, of the carpenter and man, 



1 The proposal, and the reasons on which Fletcher urges it, will be found in his 

 1 Second Discourse on the Affairs of Scotland,' 1698. The pamphlet is worth 

 reading for the comments which the author makes on the Scottish system of letting 

 land. Fletcher does not share the views of the Duke of Argyll. 



