Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/99

Rh can take care of and provide for the employees better than they can themselves; that they should be very thankful when out of his abundance the employer builds them a library or permits them to live in some finely ordered village as he directs. But somehow the feeling is growing now that if the wage-earner had a larger and fairer share in the profits he could take care of himself better in the end and grow faster, because he would be more his own master; and that the good things now and then given him with more or less ostentation as gifts are bought with the money he really ought to have and in the future hopes to have himself.

Well, the result of such laws and the general social discontent and the levy of new taxes upon even the lower classes brought about the Peasant Revolt in 1381. Of course, the power of the upper classes, aided by the courage of Richard II, then only a boy, put down the revolt, but not until the king had promised amnesty and emancipation to the serfs. Death on the scaffold and in the field soon showed the participants how little such promises were worth. The serfs were subdued, but strife between the laborers and employers was not ended. The legislation still reflects the terror and greed of the landowners, for, in spite of all, labor was in demand and had the market at its feet. Legislation forbade "the child of any tiller of the soil to be apprenticed in a town," and the landowners "prayed Richard to ordain 'that no bondman or bondwoman shall place their children at school, as has been done, so as to advance their children in the world by their going into the church.'" But villeinage continued to disappear, and within the next hundred and fifty years it had become "an antiquated thing." The failure of the landowners to again fasten labor to the soil and to fix low wages drove their energies in a new direction. "Sheep farming required fewer hands than tillage, and the scarcity and high price of labor tended to throw more and more land into sheep farms." As personal service died away it became the interest of the lord to unite the small holdings on his estate into larger ones. The evictions consequent upon this course threw many laborers upon the market, and the sheep farms diminished the number required, while the smaller amount of holdings devoted to agriculture increased the price of food. And so it is not surprising that within the course of a comparatively few years, instead of a scarcity there was a glut of labor; that pauperism increased, and social discontent continued; that vagabondage with its dangers to society at large became a difficult problem. Indeed, the poor have always been with us, but those of us who find so much to depress us in these modern days can get new courage by looking back to those old days and can see the real progress which has been made. The whole lower class in England down to the time of Elizabeth stood looking into the face of want. Henry