of the
poor-rate.

Even in the last decade of the seventeenth century, the yeomanry, or
independent peasants, outnumbered the farmers, and they formed the main
strength of Cromwell's army. About 1750 the yeomen had vanished, and not
long afterwards was lost the common land of the agricultural labourer.

Communal property was an old institution which had lived on under the
aegis of feudalism. Under the "glorious revolution" which brought William
of Orange to England, the landlord and capitalist appropriators of
surplus value inaugurated the new era by thefts of land on a colossal
scale. Thus was formed the foundation of the princely domains of the
English oligarchy. In the eighteenth century the law itself became the
instrument of the theft of the people's land, and the transformation of
communal land into private property had for its sequel the parliamentary
form of robbery in shape of the Acts for the Enclosure of Commons.

Immense numbers of the agricultural population were by this
transformation "set free" as proletarians for the manufacturing
industry.

After the foregoing consideration of the forcible creation of a class of
outlawed proletarians, converted into wage-labourers, the question
remains,--Whence came the capitalists originally? The capitalist farmer
developed very gradually, first as a bailiff, somewhat corresponding to
the old Roman _villicus_; then as a _metaver_, or semi-farmer, dividing
stock and product with the landowner; next as the farmer proper, making
his own capital increase by employing wage-labourers, and paying part of
the profit to the landlord as rent. The agricultural revolution of the
sixteenth century enriched the farmer in proportion as it impoverished
the mass of the agricultural people. The continuous rise in the price of
commodities swelled the money capital of the farmer automatically, and
he grew rich at the expense both of landlord and labourer. It is thus
not surprising that at the close of the sixteenth century England had a
class of capitalist farmers who were wealthy, considering the conditions
of the age.

_II.--The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist_

By degrees the agricultural population was transformed into material
elements of variable capital. For the peasants were constrained, now
that they had been expropriated and cast adrift, to purchase their value
in the form of wages from their new masters, the industrial capitalists.
So they were transformed into a