in grubbing on some bleak moor. Their starved pig or two,
together with a few wandering goslings, besides involving them in
perpetual altercations with their neighbours, are dearly paid for in
care, time, and bought food. There are thousands and thousands of
acres in the kingdom, now the sorry pastures of geese, hogs, asses,
half-grown horses, and half-starved cattle, which want but to be
enclosed to be as rich as any land now in tillage.'

Enclosure worked an important social revolution. Before it the
entirely landless labourer was rare: he nearly always had some holding
in the common field or a right on the common pasture. With enclosure
his holding or right had generally disappeared, and he deteriorated
socially. It was very unfortunate, too, that when enclosure was most
active domestic industries, such as weaving, decayed, and deprived the
labourer and his family of a badly needed addition to his scanty
income.

In its physical and moral effects the system of domestic manufactures
was immensely preferable to that of the crowded factory, while
economically it enabled the tillers of the soil to exist on farms
which could not support them by agriculture alone.

This uprooting of a great part of the agricultural population from the
soil by irresistible economic causes brought with it grave moral
evils, and created divisions and antagonisms of interest from which we
are suffering to-day.[575] If some such scheme as that of Arthur Young
or Lord Winchelsea had been universally adopted, this blot on an
inevitable movement might have been removed, and a healthy rural
population planted on English soil. Another result followed, the
labourer no longer boarded as a rule in his employer's house, where
the farmer worked and lived with his men; the tie of mutual interest
was loosened, and he worked for this or that master indifferently. One
advantage, however, arose, in that, having to find a home of his own,
he married early, but this was vitiated by his knowledge that the
parish would support his children, on which knowledge he was induced
to rely.

On the other hand, the farmer often rose in the social scale. With
the abandonment of the handicaps and restrictions of the common-field
system the efficient came more speedily to the front. It was they who
had amassed capital, and capital was now needed more than ever, so
they added field to field, and consolidated holdings.

The Act of 1845 did away with the necessity for pr