The Emancipation of Labour. 495 



tion of the wage-earning class to one particular parish instead 

 of as formerly to one particular manor. This monopoly, like 

 many another seignorial right, was not destined to escape the 

 fierce scrutiny which public opinion turned upon everything 

 connected with landed property from the beginning of the 

 present century. Here, however, as we might expect, the ex- 

 terior pressure on the landlords was insignificant. The condi- 

 tion of the poor was entirely under the control of the seignorial 

 class, and though their dispensation of poor-relief, combined 

 with their control over the rate of wages, hours of labour, and 

 the price of bread, tended to render the working classes more 

 and more dependant on eleemosynary assistance, no one except 

 themselves contributed the necessary funds out of which such 

 assistance was derived. Marshall, in the first volume of his 

 Rural Economy^ gives an instance where the unfair incidence of 

 pauper relief to the agricultural interest is accentuated. The 

 township of Modbury became the seat of a woollen manufac- 

 tury which, for a time, was carried on with much energy and 

 enterprise, but eventually failing to be of longer service was 

 abandoned. All the vice and debility which it had drawn 

 together was left by the manufacturer as an expensive legacy 

 to the farmers, so that in a neighbourhood where the poor-rate 

 averaged 2s. in the pound, Modbury was contributing 5^. 



A certain Mr. Donaldson in 1795 cited more unjust instances 

 still. In the parish of Kettering, in Northamptonshire, the 

 poor-rate was 15.9. in the pound at the rack rent, and in the 

 parish of Norwich it was no less than 24.s\ Thus, in the latter case, 

 while a tenant was paying £20 to the landlord, he was contri- 

 buting £24 to the poor-rate. The cause of this high assessment 

 in both cases was the ruin of the weaving interest by reason 

 of the war, and consequent depopulation of the district. In 

 the former parish two neighbours might be imagined, the one 

 a landlord, the other a stockholder; the one in receipt of £1,000 

 in rents, the other deriving an income of £1,750 from profits 

 in trade ; the former mulcted of £750 for poor-rate, the latter 

 liable for nothing more than some £60 on account of the assess- 

 ment on his house. To prolong a class of legislation which 

 brought about such incongruous results as the above, and which 



