Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/128

108 better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet and warm in their furs^and their ermines, while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; we have oat cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields."

sang the English labourer, newly roused to a sense of his natural rights—rights which no legislation could crush and no tyranny deny. Through the intervening centuries the assertion of these rights has been more and more pronounced, until to-day the time has ripened for yet vaster natural developments, and the labourer has secured that representation in Parliament which is his right in a free country.