C9G 
PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 
but land -holders were summoned to the King’s Council, or bad any 
political position. This monotony was only tempered by the position 
of clerics, who For a time had the learning all to themselves, and 
whose services for clerical work were therefore essential. Even in 
England till lately, a vote for the county was thought to be something 
superior to the vote for the borough, and the successful manufacturer 
did not consider himself socially set up — or at least his wife did not— 
till he had bought a country seat and worked himself into the society 
of the county gentry. The ascendancy of the landed interest in 
England had a long duration, and yet there is no definite treatise 
working out a coherent system of political economy on the basis of 
the supreme importance to society of the land-owning class. But the 
doctrine shows itself in the laws, and the legislation of the country, 
and carries abundant traces of the fact that for centuries the landed 
class made the laws, made them in their own interest, and made them 
on the fundamental principle that the landed interest was, and ought 
to be, supreme. The law of primogeniture, the law of settlement, the 
Statute of Labourers, the laws of Elizabeth regulating wages, the 
abolition of the feudal claims, the enclosure of commons, the priority 
of the landlord as creditor, are some of the indications of this 
tendency. The fundamental, even where unexpressed, axiom of this 
system of political economy is — make the land-owners prosperous, and 
all classes will be prosperous with them. 
Arthur Youug was no systematic economist. But he was the 
great describe!* and panegyrist of English landlordism. Professor 
Thorold Bogers, referring to his writings, says — 
“His entire sympathy is with agricultural production. Every- 
thing must lend itself to this result. The labour must be cheap, 
whatever it cost in penury to the workman. The produce must be 
increased by every effort of ingenuity and skill. The energies of the 
farmer must be stimulated, and his ignorance and slotli cured by a 
rack-rent lease. The continuity of these beneficent processes must 
be secured by prodigal bounties on the exportation of agricultural 
produce, and judicious restraints on its importation.” 
In course of time the produce of the soil found a rival in the 
produce of hand labour. The towns grew slowly, and the traders 
grew slowly with them, and they often had to pay a heavy tax to the 
feudal lord ; but such was the vitality of civic industries that their 
growth was irrepressible. Eor several centuries manufacture was, 
as its name implies, merely hand labour, the machine playing only a 
very subordinate part; and, so limited, production was necessarily 
costly, and the interchange part of trade was kept down accordingly. 
The great propulsive event that made manufactures advance by leaps 
and bounds was the invention of machinery, and this took place 
principally in England. First in importance was the invention of the 
steam-engine. Watt aimed at draining the Cornish mines ; he drained 
a great deal more. Then, within a very shoi't period, came the 
marvellous improvements in the machinery for textile industry ; and 
then the cheaper methods for working iron ore. In two or three 
generations the relative populations of town and country, and the 
relative wealth productiveness of agriculture and manufactures, was 
entirely changed. Hoods were enormously cheapened, British com- 
merce was enormously expanded, and its mercantile navy was seen on 
