ALTERED TONE RESPECTING ENCLOSURES 129 



productiveness, nor the appeal for progress, had gained their full 

 force. Yet the altered tone of agricultural writers is significant. 

 It was almost as incontestably in favour of enclosure as the tone 

 of Elizabethan writers had been opposed to the process. Generalisa- 

 tion from handfuls of particular instances is always easy. A 

 large tract of country might have been improved and enclosed with 

 the approval of all parties. But there were the widest differences 

 between commons, or between commons and moors, wastes, and 

 bogs. Moore himself reserves his bitterest condemnation for what 

 he calls " marish," as opposed to " uplandish," commons. Stress 

 might be laid on the moral influences of common land either way, 

 and self-interest or bias is always prone to conceal itself under the 

 mask of moral motives. The same rights might encourage industry 

 and thrift, or idleness and crime. It was doubtless illogical to argue 

 that enclosures must always depopulate, whether the change was 

 effected with or without regard to the claims of cottagers and small 

 commoners, or for the purpose of increasing the area either of 

 tillage or of pasture. Yet those who had suffered from enclosures 

 were not unjustified in the conclusion that history would repeat 

 itself. Whichever way the question was ultimately decided, it 

 could not fail to affect the condition of the rural population for 

 better or for worse, and to affect it profoundly. Unfortunately 

 the decision was made, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 

 under an economic pressure which completely overrode the social 

 considerations that should have controlled and modified the process 

 of enclosure. 



