49^ History of the English Landed Interest. 



It would have been well for those in whose lucky hands 

 these three elements of wealth originally rested had they never 

 released their hold of them. Instead of knitting together the 

 interests of labour and capital, the landlords and farmers of 

 the seventeenth century had carried forward that policy of 

 estrangement which their Tudor forefathers had initiated. No 

 wonder therefore that Sismondi in the land of his exile had 

 occasion to ask : " You tell me you have improved the land, but 

 what have you done with the labourers ? You have converted 

 vast wastes into corn-fields, but what have you given the 

 labourer in exchange for his commonable rights ? " 



The Poor Laws had merely patched on to an old economy 

 a totally incongruous one — restrictions on the working-man's 

 liberty of action, highly essential when the head of a district 

 was lord of its inhabitants rather than owner of its lands, were 

 carried over into a state of society for which they were in no 

 way adapted. It is undoubtedly true, as Mr. W. T. Thornton 

 has said, that as long as the connection of the peasantry with 

 the land was unbroken, England was perfectly free from every 

 symptom of pauperism ; but it is not to be inferred from this 

 fact that the peasant's connection with the land was the cause 

 of his freedom from pauperism, but merely that this phase of 

 his history coincided with times when the supply of labour 

 never exceeded the demand. 



As long, therefore, as each manor required the services of 

 every one of its inhabitants a law of settlement was essential, 

 but when starvation or emigration were the only alternatives, 

 the effects of such a restriction were wholly disastrous. " The 

 law of settlement," says the Berkshire writer already referred 

 to, '' the restrictions on the amount of wages, and, above all, 

 the inadequacy of wages in agriculture to support a family, 

 have created and kept up that enormous mass of ills which is 

 equally distressing and disgraceful." Our grandfathers had, 

 in fact, not yet come to recognise all that was meant by, 

 much less all that was beneficial in, a complete fluidify of 

 labour. 



If, then, a poor rustic died of starvation, his death lay at the 

 doors of those who by artificial processes had rendered it im- 



