326 AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION AND POOR LAW 



( self-respect of the labourer. 1 The rapid growth of the manufac- 

 turing population not only created an increasing demand for 

 agricultural produce, but relieved the glut of the labour-market. 



To small freeholders, whether gentry, yeoman-farmers, or 

 peasant proprietors, the Napoleonic war, with its crushing load of 

 taxation and subsequent collapse of prices, had been fatal. The 

 evidence before the Agricultural Committee of 1833 proves that 

 some still held their own in every county. But it was in the first 

 thirty years of the nineteenth century that their numbers dwindled 

 most rapidly. Some had consulted their pecuniary interests by 

 selling their land at fancy prices, which they took into business. 

 Others sold and embarked their capital as tenant-farmers in hiring 

 larger areas of land, on which they could take fuller advantage of 

 the price of corn. Those who remained on their own estates were 

 for the most part ruined. Many had raised mortgages to buy 

 more land, or to improve their properties, or to put their children 

 out in the world. Prices fell ; but the private debt, as well as the 

 public burdens, remained. The struggle was brief ; farming 

 deteriorated ; buildings fell out of repair ; creditors pressed ; 

 finally the estate was sold. Even where land was free from charges, 

 owners could not stand up against the burden of poor-rates, which 

 was most crushing to those who employed no labour but their own. 

 " That respectable class of English yeomanry," writes Glover 2 in 

 1817, " whose fathers from generation to generation have lived on 

 the same spot and cultivated the same farms are now rapidly 

 dwindling into poverty and decay, sinking themselves into the 

 class of paupers." The purchasers were not men of their own 

 class. After 1812 small capitalists no longer invested their savings 

 in land. Their place as buyers was taken by large landowners or 

 successful traders. In Yorkshire the number of small proprietors 

 was dwindling ; formerly, if one freeholder went, another took his 

 place ; but this had now ceased to be the case. The same report 

 is made of Shropshire, Worcestershire, and Wiltshire. In Kent 

 and Somersetshire it is stated that, though many freeholders 

 retained then 1 land, it was only by the practice of the most rigorous 

 self-denial and by entirely ceasing to employ labour. Throughout 



1 In 1837 the expenditure dropped to the lowest point as yet recorded in the 

 century, 4,044,741. 



2 Observations on the Present State of Pauperism, etc. (Pamphleteer, vol. x, 

 p. 385). 



