590 Agkicultural Labour Early Last Century. [Oct.^ 



society would have been a slower process. Pteform was essential, 

 not merely for the sake of the future, for reform of that kind is 

 commonly neglected till the crisis comes, but for the immediate 

 wants of the moment. And reform is difficult in peasant societies 

 where men look to the past more than to the future, and honour 

 custom more than science, piety more than ^enterprise. 



Leadership of Landlords. — It was true also that the leader- 

 ship the landlords claimed was justified as a rule by their services. 

 Not only were they, in contrast to the French aristocrats, men of 

 great public spirit, who served their counties and their villages 

 with devotion and industry : they were in notable instances the 

 pioneers of the great improvements that marked this phase of 

 English agriculture. It would be difficult to name a Cabinet 

 Minister of the time, Pitt and Fox excepted, who counted for 

 so much in the life of the England of that time as Coke of Nor- 

 folk. Here was an opportunity and the men to seize it, a crisis 

 and the men to meet it. One reason why enclosure bills w^ent 

 through Parliament with so little scrutiny was that the advan- 

 tage of putting agriculture under the direction of men with 

 capital, knowledge and foresight and of removing every obstacle 

 to their exertions were so self-evident that the details seemed to 

 possess in comparison very trifling importance. One speaker 

 put it in the House of Commons that he supported every en- 

 closure bill as a matter of course because enclosures could not 

 be too rapid or too sweeping. 



Evils of the Revolution. — Unfortunately the social evils of 

 this revolution were not less striking than the economic advan- 

 tages. For the enclosures carried out in this spirit, with or 

 without an Act of Paliament, spelt ruin to the poorer classes 

 who took part either as small farmers or as cottagers and 

 labourers in the economy of the old village. The great majority 

 received nothing under the enclosure awards : those who did 

 receive an allotment could not as a rule put it to any use either 

 because they could not afford to fence it or because it was value- 

 less without a right of pasture on the common. Of the men who 

 were dispossessed some emigrated to America and some to the 

 new industrial tow^ns, where they supplied the new industrial 

 ■system with enterprise or with labour. Some of the chief names 

 in the history of the cotton industry, Peel and Fielden among 

 them, take us back to an enclosure. But the great majority 

 remained in their villages, sinking into the position of a 

 labourer without rights. The great bulk of agricultural work 

 w^as now carried on for the first time by men without any rights 

 on the soil. Few of the enthusiasts for enclosure foresaw all the 



