Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/149

 courtesy, and gave his testimony to the general accuracy of the statements in the MS. referred to as being in the possession of his correspondent. So that Mr. Villiers was, in 1826, in the field which General (then Major) Thompson entered in 1827, by the publication of his celebrated "Catechism on the Corn Laws."

In 1827 Mr. Villiers was called to the Bar, and in 1832 he was an Assistant-Commissioner under the Royal Commission appointed to make a full inquiry into the practical operation of the Poor Laws. Being one of those employed under the same Commission of Inquiry, I had then for the first time the honour of his acquaintance, and also the advantage to be derived from seeing the actual working of the English system of Poor Laws.

Mr. Villiers would probably, after devoting to the subject the time and labour required for a thorough survey of it, arrive at the following among other conclusions:—

That in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the wages of the agricultural labourer in England were such as to procure for him nearly, if not quite, double the quantity of food which his wages between 1740 and 1794 procured; and that the wages obtained by him from 1834 to 1844, as