284 THE KEGULATION OF NUMBERS 



confirms the evidence from other sources to show that the gilds 

 were being overstocked with journeymen who could hardly hope 

 to attain the position of householders and employers. In the 

 callings where the old-world organization was effective there 

 was an increasing tendency, during the fifteenth century, to 

 restrict the avenues by which the freedom to exercise a craft 

 could be obtained ; larger fines were demanded on admission, 

 while the social qualifications of those who were eligible as 

 apprentices were raised.' ^ At other times certain social changes 

 caused over-population. Such was the case in the sixteenth 

 century owing to the enclosures. ' According to one calculation 

 made in 1548 three hundred thousand men had been thrown 

 out of work by the decay of agriculture — or about ten per 

 cent, of the whole population.' ^ What is important, however, 

 is that in general the determination of the people to maintain 

 the standard of living brought about adjustment — which at 

 this period usually took the form of making marriage more 

 difficult. 



There were also instances of a definite failure over a long period 

 to achieve adjustment. Such a case is that of Ireland in the 

 eighteenth century. The potato was introduced about 1585, and 

 when taken into cultivation throughout the country could have 

 enabled a larger population to subsist at a higher standard of 

 living. So degraded, however, did the social conditions become, 

 that the introduction of the potato merely enabled a larger popula- 

 tion to subsist at the lowest standard which would support life. 

 The conditions of that period have been described in the following 

 passage by Goldwin Smith : ' The mass of the people were 

 socially and economically in a state the most deplorable, perhaps, 

 which history records as having existed in any civilized nation. . . . 

 The Irish gentry were probably the very worst upper class with 

 which a country was ever afflicted. Their habits grew beyond 

 measure brutal and reckless. Their drunkenness, their blasphemy, 

 their ferocious duelling, left the squires of England far behind. . . . 

 Over the Roman Catholic poor on their estates these " vermin 

 of the kingdom ", as Arthur Young calls them, exercised a tyraimy 

 compared with which the arbitrary rule of the old chiefs over their 

 clans was probably a parental authority used with beneficence 



* Cunningham, Growth oj English Industry and Commerce, vol. i, p. 442. 

 ^ Pollard, loc. cit., p. 144. 



