],921.] Agricultural Labour Early Last Century. 



589 



Prussia) that the peasantry should not be torn from the soil ; the 

 commercial interests of a powerful class pulled in the contrary 

 direction. At the time of the 18th century agrarian revolution 

 in England there was no such conscious conflict. The landlord 

 class which controlled the Government saw no antithesis between 

 the reasons of state and the reasons of class interest. In their 

 minds public policy and private interest pointed the same way. 

 Their power was absolute and they used it to destroy a village 

 society which seemed to them barbarous and obsolete. The 

 ideal village in their view was not a society linked together by 

 a system of common rights, but a society in which the squire was 

 supreme, the greatest encouragement was given to the applica- 

 tion of capital to farming, and the actual tilling of the soil was 

 carried out by a proletariat. 



Sir John Sinclair, first President of the Board of Agriculture 

 of that time, said what most enlightened people thought : " The 

 idea of having lands in common, it has been justly remarked, is 

 to be derived from that barbarous state of society, when men 

 were stranger to any higher occupation than those of hunters or 

 E^hepherds, or had only just tasted the advantages to be reaped 

 from the cultivation of the earth." And almost every 

 enlightened person would have agreed that the worst thing to 

 do in reforming this barbarous system would be to turn the man 

 who worked on the soil into an owner. McCulloch, the cele- 

 brated economist, predicted that in half a century France would 

 pay for her blunder in this respect by finding herself the 

 gi-eatest pauper warren in Europe." 



There w^as a sense, of course, in which it was quite true that 

 the interests of the class in power were identical with the 

 interests of .the nation. Ijord Ernie has shown in his judicial 

 survey of the problem in his classical history ' ' English Farming 

 Past and Present," that the old common field system, as it was 

 conducted, could not have met the growing and urgent needs 

 of the English people. The French War and the industrial revo- 

 lution, coming together, changed the balance and problem of 

 English economic life. There was the pressure of a great emer- 

 gency, throwing England on her own resources : there was the 

 rapid increase of population in industrial towns that produced 

 no food. England had to make her soil more productive or 

 starve. This need accelerated the process of enclosure. If this 

 problem had not arisen England might have remained for 

 another generation the kind of society for which Dean Inge 

 cherishes such regrets, as readers of his book, " Outspoken 

 Essays," will remember, and the extinction of the old village 



