496 History of the English Landed Interest. 



was originated "when manufactures were in their infancy, before 

 three per cents, India bonds, exchequer bills, scrip, omnium, 

 etc., were dreamed of, was, as Donaldson pointed out, to convert 

 laws originally arranged on equitable principles, into engines 

 of oppression. Surely even before the Elizabethan statute the 

 land had obtained a part quittance of its duties on this head by 

 its early tithe-offerings ? Was it not monstrous for the nation 

 to expect it to be borne down in perpetuity by a grievous load 

 of taxation which those interested in other forms of capital 

 would not raise a little finger to alleviate ? The manufac- 

 turer and the trader might no doubt draw public attention to 

 the iniquity of a system which confined a poor man to one 

 locality, and then fixed the cost of his food and wages at a rate 

 entirely inadequate for the purposes of livelihood, but they had 

 no right to utterly ignore the fact that they contributed not a 

 single farthing towards that fund which alone saved him from 

 utter destitution. "Without then the convenient reasoning of 

 the political economist, it would seem almost justifiable for 

 the landed proprietor to take out of wages a portion of the 

 share which the manufacturer inequitably withheld from the 

 national poor funds. At any rate it would have been unprece- 

 dented audacity and shamefacedness had the commercial in- 

 terest brought pressure to bear on the landed interest in 

 order to remedy a state of affairs for which their apathy was 

 mainly answerable. 



We have already in a former chapter produced ample evi- 

 dence confirmatory of the rapid growth of prices out of all 

 proportion with that of wages, but one further instance will no 

 doubt confirm what we have said about the emergency of this 

 disastrous condition of affairs as strongly in our readers' minds 

 as it did in those of the public nearly a hundred years ago. 

 Arthur Young, in his Annals of Agriculture^ relates that a 

 Suffolk labourer still lived who remembered the time when 

 with the weeklj'^ wages of 55, he could have purchased as much 

 food as was costing him 26s. in 1801, when his wages were 9*. 



It is, therefore, not surprising to find that towards the close of 

 the eighteenth century the public mind was set on remedj'iug 

 the condition of the poor at all hazards. But how ? That was 



