ENCLOSURE 257 



sorry pastures of geese, hogs, asses, half-grown horses, and 

 half-starved cattle, which want but to be enclosed to be as 

 rich as any land now in tillage.' 



Enclosure worked an important social revolution. Before 

 it the entirely landless labourer was rare : he nearly always 

 had some holding in the common field or a right on the 

 common pasture. With enclosure his holding or right had 

 generally disappeared, and he deteriorated socially. It was 

 very unfortunate, too, that when enclosure was most active 

 domestic industries, such as weaving, decayed, and deprived 

 the labourer and his family of a badly needed addition to his 

 scanty income. 



I In its physical and moral effects the system of domestic 

 manufactures was immensely preferable to that of the crowded 

 factory, while economically it enabled the tillers of the soil 

 to exist on farms which could not support them by agriculture 

 alone. 



This uprooting of a great part of the agricultural population 

 from the soil by irresistible economic causes brought with 

 it grave moral evils, and created divisions and antagonisms 

 of interest from which we are suffering to-day.^ If some such 

 scheme as that of Arthur Young or Lord Winchelsea had 

 been universally adopted, this blot on an inevitable movement 

 might have been removed, and a healthy rural population 

 planted on English soil. Another result followed, the labourer 

 no longer boarded as a rule in his employer's house, where 

 the farmer worked and lived with his men ; the tie of mutual 

 interest was loosened, and he worked for this or that master 

 indifferently. One advantage, however, arose, in that, 

 having to find a home of his own, he married early, but 

 this was vitiated by his knowledge that the parish would 

 support his children, on which knowledge he was induced 

 to rely. 



On the other hand, the farmer often rose in the social scale. 

 ^ Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, vi. 191. 



CURTLER S 



