Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/98

88 applied with even more rigor than in the country, and strikes and combinations became frequent.

That is the state of things in free England at a time when labor was not strong enough to protect itself—called upon by the law of the land to work for less than living wages or be branded as cattle! The irrepressible conflict between capital and labor began with the very beginning of the existence of the labor class.

In such a condition of things as here indicated, is it any wonder that there were labor disturbances in those days—that there was a peasant revolt? Already the doctrine of the equality of man and social inequality was being preached to the lower classes. In 1360 John Ball—"a mad priest in Kent," as Froissart calls him—preached such a communistic sermon as this to the sturdy yeomen of that day: "Good people, things will never go well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are 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; and we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labor, the rain and wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." That is the same cry against the inequality of property and social condition which we hear to-day. And we may thank him, and men like him and with his inspiration, that the conditions of five hundred years ago have changed, and that the dawn of a better and higher humanity has broken upon us. Filled with socialism and communism as the words are, they still have a truth which appeals to every sympathetic and thoughtful man.

And it was in those early days that the old rhyme was heard all over the land:

 When Adam delved and Eve span. Who was then the gentleman?"

The sermon was preached against the tyranny of property, the rhyme was full of the democracy of the coming years.

I do not imagine that the instigators of such laws as the Statute of Laborers were hard men as men go. They could see only their side of the case. The laborer had become a necessity for them, and they rather believed that the Almighty had put him on earth for their advantage. I am afraid that something of that spirit still is left among us. The feeling still exists that the employer and capitalist