38 Large and Small Holdings 



miles ; the fare and the expenses ran high. But now ! a country 

 fellow, one hundred miles from London, jumps on to a coach-box in 

 the morning, and for eight or ten shillings gets to town by night ; 

 which makes a material difference ; besides rendering the going up 

 and down so easy, that the numbers who have seen London are 

 increased tenfold, and of course ten times the boasts are sounded in 

 the ears of country fools, to induce them to quit their healthy, clean 

 fields, for a region of dirt, stink and noise 1 ." Undoubtedly the rapid 

 growth of the towns and the cheapening of the means of communica- 

 tion must have exercised a great attraction on the agricultural popu- 

 lation of the eighteenth century. But undoubtedly also, the rural 

 exodus of the period would not have attained the extraordinary 

 proportions it did if the attractive power j>f rural life for the mass 

 of the people had not at the sametime decreased. The labourer had 

 no longer the chance of cultivating a holding of iiis own, nor the very 

 stimulating hope of one day raising himself to the position of a small 

 farmer. That hope lost, the chief superiority of work on the land was 

 lost to the mind of the day-labourer. It was replaced by the hope of 

 improving his position by migrating to the town 2 . So too the expro- 

 priated small farmer, degraded to the position of a labourer, and 

 unable to find work in the over-supplied agricultural market, swelled 

 the rural exodus, being driven into the towns, or, if the money gained 

 by the sale of his possessions was sufficient, he might make his way to 

 America or the colonies 3 . Painters such as Wheatley showed him, 

 his goods in his hand, turning his back on his ancestral home ; and 

 Goldsmith's Deserted Village gave poetical expression to the desolation 

 of the land : 



"The mournful peasant leads his humble band, 

 And while he sinks, without one arm to save, 

 The country blooms a garden and a grave." 



That the exodus was in many cases simply to be traced to 

 enclosures and engrossing is evident from the statements of various 

 contemporary writers on social subjects 4 . Even the enthusiasts for 



1 Young, Farmers Letter s> pp. 353 f. 



3 Forbes, op. cit. p. 160, draws attention to the fact that many young people went to the 

 towns for the reason that the possibility of renting small farms no longer offered. 



8 Cursory Remarks, p. 6. 



4 E.g. Price, op. cit. p. 376. He complains " that the inhabitants of the cottages thrown 

 down in the country fly to London and other towns, there to be corrupted and perish." . Cp. 

 further: Uniting and Monopolizing Farms, 1767, p. i ; G. Chalmers, An Estimate of the 

 Comparative Strength of Great Britain, ed. of 1802, p. 3 1 8 : " We owe much of this disadvan- 

 tageous change to our modern system of agriculture.... By consolidating farms to an enormous 



