Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/24

 with frightful cruelty, however, and the laws against vagrants who were forced to wander by the changed conditions of agriculture, were harsher than ever under the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the monarch whose reign is supposed to embrace the most glorious period of English history.

It is worthy of remark also that during the whole of the sixteenth century the attempts made to stop the uprooting of the people from the soil by law were absolutely unavailing. The class now gaining power in the country, namely the landlords with bailiffs, and the large farmers, who both regarded the land only as a means of making gain, rode rough-shod over the enactments of Parliament in favour of the poor; though they took care to give full force to all those which tended in any way to strengthen their own power. The same with the rising bourgeoisie, who rapidly gained influence under Elizabeth, and used it as far as possible to remove those restrictions upon usury, and laws in favour of the labourers, which in the middle-age polity had balanced the futile statutes against combination. By the end of the sixteenth century consequently all was ready in our country for the gradual formation of a competitive wage-slave class divorced from the soil and deprived of the means of production, which class must therefore be in a growing degree at the mercy of the classes that possessed the land and the capital.

The increasing amount of capital also needed for success in business as the markets grew, and the town supplied not only the country but foreign lands, gradually broke down the democratic constitution of