I mean the Monopo- which have overspread the land. lisers and Pollers of the People. of Egypt have got possession of our dwellings: we have scarce a room free from them; they sip in our cup; they dip in our dish; they sit by our fire. Mr. Speaker, they will not bate us a pin; we may not buy our own clothes without their brokage. They have a vizard to hide the brand made by that good Law in the last Parliament of King James; they shelter themselves under the name of a Corporation. They make By-laws; these are not petty chapmen, but wholesale men." The degree to which the financial interest was already in the seventeenth century asserting itself in the councils of the Administration, and the difficulty with which the Government of the Interregnum was confronted on this account, was piquantly exhibited by that honest if impracticable advocate of primary Democracy, John Lilburn. The Monopolists, he asserted, for the help they had given to Charles, had deserved death far more than had the Earl of Strafford. 66 'Contrary to their deserts, however, divers of the Grandees of this very monopoly and illegal corporations are become the great Treasurers of the Kingdom's money both in the Custom House and Excise; contrary to Law, Right, Equity and Conscience which action of the Parliament in putting them into those two grand places loseth the Parliament more in the affections of thousands of honest people, and will, if not speedily prevented, make a greater breach in the peace of this distressed kingdom than all the Estates confiscated will repay. For people do already very much question the intention of Parliaments in reference to these men; and many begin to say that this demonstrates unto them that they shall only have a change of masters and not of this bondage, slavery, and oppression." Would it be unjust to suggest that there are political phenomena existing in this present England not undeserving the attention and the fury of a latter-day 'Freeborn' John? The Lilburn's fears, however, were exaggerated. system died with the Civil War as a dominant factor in the economic scheme. Its principal importance, when we have considered the part it played in nurturing the new capitalist organisation, lies in the fact that it puts an end to the epoch of nominal control. After the Restoration, the attention of the Government was directed toward the regulation of oversea commerce in accordance with the Mercantilist ideal of a carefully gauged and continually adjusted Balance of Trade. From 1680, as regards internal economic activities, dates the era of Laissez-faire, though that principle was not specifically adopted as economically advantageous until after the publication of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" in 1776. But the great enormity had already been committed; the great gulf was already fixed; the great destiny of this English State had already been postponed-pray God it is not vainly written "postponed"; and the next century was filled with the spawning-out of embryo plutocracies about the yet unsullied places of the world. The Puritan Revolution killed the Tudor Leviathan; but not all the waters in that rough rude sea could wash away the balm from the head of Mammon or batter the sceptre from his grasping hand. In 1651, when men were hoarse with crying 'Liberty!' and when wheat was fifty shillings a quarter, the wages of artisans were assessed under the Act of Artificers at one and sixpence per diem; and the wages of labourers at a shilling. "The eager spirits who crowded into the House of Commons; the mounted yeomen who rode with Hampden; the men who fought and won at Naseby thought no more of the peasant and the workman, had no more care for bettering him, than the Irish patriot of 1782 cared for the kerns and cottiers on whose labour he lived." A comparison between the attitudes of Catholic and Puritan toward Industrial Morality will not be flattering to a Protestant. The truth of the matter was that the Revolution was not democratic in essence, and that though the men who gathered at Harington's Rota Club proclaimed that political power is a mere reflex of economic power; though the light shone fitfully in Buckinghamshire and on S. Giles Hill, when poor Gerard Winstanley dug the trenches of his communistic city, the only thoroughgoing supporters of an extreme democratic creed were powerless in the face of the Councils of the Grandees and a monarchist or apathetic populace. Indeed it is doubtful whether Lilburn ever grasped the truth that political power belongs only to the possessing classes. The trend of economic development since the Restoration is plainer and more familiar than that which we have been tracing down from the thirteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century. With the great and glorious Revolution of 1688 a prospect opened for capital of further licence and of wider privilege; for labour of greater neglect and degradation. If during the early years of the eighteenth century there is a tendency to favour small concerns to the general advantage of English commerce rather than to vest special advantages in monopolist patentees-and in that one respect the fall of the Monarchy is the final extinction of the dangerous system of the early years of the previous century—yet it must be borne in mind that the government of the Whigs is the government of great territorialists, that the Whigs further came into office with the goodwill of the Monied Class, and remained in office largely owing to great vested monetary interests created in their supremacy— such as the Bank of England and the Union of England and Scotland. It will be remembered that Pepys records that in 1663 there were barely thirty members in the Pensioner Parliament drawn from the commercial classes, while in 1680 Evelyn already expresses his annoyance at the activity of many distinguished merchants at the election of Charles's third Parliament. The shopkeepers were steadily pressing their way to the front. In 1713 the free-trade proposals of Bolingbroke were wrecked by the silk, woollen, and distilling interests in spite of the Mercator" campaign in favour of the Treaty, while the power of the monied classes may further be illustrated by the influence of his capitalist supporters on the finance of Walpole. The "Novi Homines," however, were willing to make * this concession to prevailing sentiment-they would buy land, and so as far as possible assimilate their own position to that of the great territorial lords. Now the land had to come from somewhere, and thus we are brought face to face with a further tragedy of English economic history, the second epoch of enclosure-which affected 6,000,000 acres of land and resulted in the extinction of the yeoman class. It With the details of this process, as with the details of that other great change which came over industrial England during the latter half of the eighteenth century -the Industrial Revolution-we are not concerned. must be conceded that the great machines had to come and the great factories had to come. It must be conceded that the Strip System was uneconomic and that enclosure had to come. But these concessions made, a heavy indictment yet remains against the political bias in favour of large estates which prevented any attempt to check the urbanisation of the yeomen and to save small holdings in England by an equitable method of re-distribution; and against the political bias in favour of large-scale industries which resulted in an entire absence of governmental control during the process of the crisis. A childish and ignorant condemnation of the great revolutions which were proceeding in the towns and in the country-side would but imperil the plea which has been made, but a case, an overwhelming case lies against a Government which, at this double crisis, refused to guard the interests of those citizens who, at an economic disadvantage already, were likely to be despoiled, |