wer, in the main, was in the landowner's hands, men anxious to
take part in politics eagerly bought up the small estates, and the old
yeoman class disappeared, except in out-of-the-way places. These yeomen and
small landowners had been the backbone of the Parliamentary Party in the
days of the Stuarts, but they were left hopelessly behind in an age of
mechanical inventions and agrarian changes, and were in most cases glad to
sell out and invest their property in other ways.

The story of the misery of rural depopulation in the first half of the
sixteenth century repeats itself at the close of the eighteenth.

"A single farmer held as one farm the lands that once formed fourteen
farms, bringing up respectably fourteen families. The capitalist farmer
came in like the capitalist employer. His gangs of poor and ignorant
labourers were the counterpart of the swarm of factory hands. The business
of farming was worked more scientifically, with better tools and greater
success; but after the middle of the eighteenth century the condition of
the agricultural labourer got no better, and now the great mass of the
rural population were mere labourers.... Pauperism became more and more a
pressing evil, especially after 1782, when _Gilbert's Act_ abolished the
workhouse test (which compelled all who received relief from the rates to
go into the half-imprisonment of a poor-house), and the system of poor law
doles in aid of wages was encouraged by the high prices at the end of the
century. In 1803 one-seventh of the people was in receipt of poor law
relief."[77]

But with all the considerable distress, in town and country alike amongst
the working people, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, swift
progress was taking place in agriculture and in manufactures. Only, the
accumulated wealth fell into fewer hands, and the fluctuations in the
demand for goods, caused partly by the opening up of new markets, brought
successions of good times and bad times. "The workmen shared but partially
in the prosperity, and were the first to bear the brunt of hard times."[78]

THE NEED FOR PARLIAMENTARY REFORM

The point for us to note here is that the changed economic conditions made
Parliamentary reform a necessity, and brought the question of popular
enfranchisement within sight. It was useless for Burke to maintain the
incomparable beauty of the British constitution; English politicians might
be indifferent to political theories of democrac