Page:Landholding in England.djvu/126

 was the rights of the King, as the visible embodiment of the State, that were "sacred." The idea of the State waned more and more, even when changes took place which we have been taught to call victories of "liberty." The poor of England were more completely disinherited by each one of these victories, not because liberty is an illusion, but because in England the rich, since they robbed the poor of their lands, could never afford to acknowledge the rights of the poor. The very worst features of the violent ages were perpetuated in our Poor Laws. Of old, villeins were not allowed to pass freely from one part to another; the same disability was enforced by the Poor Law, which ordered the whipping of a poor man who left his parish without permission. In modern times it became legal to kidnap men for the navy. Could there be a more flagrant denial of personal rights than this? There had been Statutes of Wages in the old time, but the very preambles complain that they were evaded; whereas from the days of Elizabeth onwards, the justices actually did keep wages at the minimum, set long hours, and whipped the poor on the least sign of insubordination. The countrymen of Hampden boasted of liberty, but they were content to live in a nation of slaves—homeless and landless men, whom their own selfish policy had made so numerous that they were alarmed at the great army of destitute unemployed who had been weeded off the lands which the gentry had been stealthily enclosing for a century. These poor creatures had place and work under the feudal system, but none under the Commonwealth. There is not a particle of evidence that there was work waiting to be done—all the evidence shows that they were not wanted. Every now and then some silly scheme was proposed to make work for them, in a brief spasmodic effort which never did or could do any good. It never seems to have occurred to anyone but the diggers and levellers that the balance of social life was destroyed when so many thousands of small yeomen were cast landless upon the world. These unfortunates were the derelicts of the feudal system. Under that system, men had been of more account than money. A new system had come in, under which money was of more account than men.