500 INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



and in days of perpetual internal quarrels, there was every 

 where a motive on the part of a local potentate to accept 

 additions to his forces. Of course immigrants, not bound to 

 the soil, were usually subject to less servile conditions, and 

 became a semi-free class. Then, again, there must ever have 

 been additions to the free class from the unacknowledged 

 illegitimate children of higher classes; and larger increments 

 must have been supplied by unsuccessful copyholders who 

 had parted with their lands, as well as by the children of 

 copyholders for whom there was no room. In our own days 

 we see recruits to the labouring classes continually arising 

 in kindred ways. 



811. Let us now contemplate the position of the free 

 rural class which, in the slow course of ages, was produced 

 in these various ways by purchase of freedom, by gift of 

 freedom, by commutation of dues and services, by eviction 

 of semi-servile tenants, by immigration of fugitives, by impo 

 verishment of small free tenants, by multiplication of their 

 children, and by the addition of bastards derived from higher 

 ranks. Let us, I say, look at the condition of the class thus 

 constituted. It will suffice if we consider the case of our 

 own peasantry. 



To remedy the evils which had arisen from the production 

 of a large unemployed mass of discharged soldiers and 

 serving-men, added to by the evicted tenants named above 

 and by the dependents of suppressed monasteries, stringent 

 laws were passed. These had the effect of reducing to a 

 semi-servile state, multitudes of mendicants and others who 

 had been brought to a wandering life by the unjust dealings 

 of feudal lords and by royal greediness especially by that 

 of Henry VIII, who in such various ways exemplified the 

 criminality of monarchs, and who intensified the prevailing 

 misery by large debasements of coinage. Of the swarms of 

 homeless men thus artificially generated, those who did not 

 die of starvation saved their lives by robbery, for which they 



