n, or at
least, attention.

During the period 1450-1610 it is probable that about 2 3/4 per cent.
of the total area of England had been inclosed. The counties most
affected were the Midlands, in some of which the amount of land
affected was 8 per cent. to 9 per cent. of the total area. But though
the aggregate seems small, it was a much larger proportion, in the then
thinly settled state of the realm, of the total arable land,--of this
it was probably one-fifth. Under Elizabeth perhaps one-third of the
improved land was used for grazing and two-thirds was under the plow.

[Sidenote: Spain: the Mesta]

In Spain the same tendency to grow wool for commercial purposes
manifested itself in a slightly different form. There, not by the
inclosure of commons, but by the establishment of a monopoly by the
Castilian "sheep-trust," the Mesta, did a large corporation come to
prevail over the scattered and peasant agricultural interests. The
Mesta, which existed from 1273 to 1836, reached the pinnacle of its
power in the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century. [Sidenote:
1568] When it took over from the government the appointment of the
officer supposed to supervise it in the public interest, the Alcalde
Entregador, it may be said to have won a decisive victory for
capitalism. At that time it owned {546} as many as seven million
sheep, and exported wool to the weight of 55,000 tons and to the value
of $560,000, per annum.

[Sidenote: Wheat growing]

Having mastered the sources of wealth offered by wool-growing, the
capitalists next turned to arable land and by their transformation of
it took the last step in the commercializing of life. Even now, in
England, land is not regarded as quite the same kind of investment as a
factory or railroad; there is still the vestige of a tradition that the
tenant has customary privileges against the right of the owner of the
land to exploit it for all it is worth. But this is indeed a faint
ghost of the medieval idea that the custom was sacred and the profit of
the landlord entirely secondary. The longest step away from the
medieval to the modern system was taken in the sixteenth century, and
its outward and visible sign was the substitution of the leasehold for
the ancient copyhold. The latter partook of the nature of a vested
right or interest; the former was but a contract for a limited, often
for a short, term, at the end of which the tenant could be ejected, the
rent raise