s peasants" and
"the gentle" Melanchthon almost sighed, "the ass will have blows and
the people _will_ be ruled by force."

There were, indeed, a few honorable exceptions to the prevalent
callousness. "I praise thee, thou noble peasant," wrote an obscure
German, "before all creatures and lords upon earth; the emperor must be
thy equal." The little read epigrams of Euricius Cordus, a German
humanist who was, by exception, also humane, denounce the blood-sucking
of the peasants by their lords. Greatest of all, Sir Thomas More felt,
not so much pity for the lot of the poor, as indignation at their
wrongs. _The Utopia_ will always remain one of the world's noblest
books because it was almost the first to feel and to face the social
problem.

[Sidenote: Pauperism]

This became urgent with the large increase of pauperism and vagrancy
throughout the sixteenth century, the most distressing of the effects
of the economic revolution. When life became too hard for the evicted
tenant of a sheep-raising landlord, or for the declasse journeyman of
the town gild, he had little choice save to take to the road. Gangs of
sturdy vagrants, led by and partly composed of old soldiers, wandered
through Europe. But a little earlier than the sixteenth century that
race of mendicants the Gipsies, made their debut. The word "rogue" was
coined in England about 1550 to name the new class. _The Book of
Vagabonds_, [Sidenote: 1510] written by Matthew Huetlin of Pfortzheim,
describes twenty-eight varieties of beggars, exposes their tricks, and
gives a vocabulary of their jargon. Some of these beggars are said to
be dangerous, threatening the wayfarer or householder who will not pay
them; others feign various diseases, or make artificial wounds and
disfigurations to excite pity, or take a religious garb, or drag chains
to show that they had escaped from galleys, or have other plausible
tales of woe and {559} of adventure. All contemporaries testify to the
alarming numbers of these men and women; how many they really were it
is hard to say. It has been estimated that in 1500 20 per cent. of the
population of Hamburg and 15 per cent. of the population of Augsburg
were paupers. Under Elizabeth probably from a quarter to a third of
the population of London were paupers, and the country districts were
just as bad. Certain parts of Wales were believed to have a third of
their population in vagabondage.

In the face of this appalling situat