Freed from its former shackles, the progress of native industry was steady and rapid; and that inscrutable Providence, which so often chooses the worst men to achieve the best objects, selected as its champion the cruel and the profligate Edward IV. Merciless as any of his predecessors, he nevertheless saw clearly what they had, one and all, failed to see, that the future of England lay not in sword and lance, but in loom, trowel, and ploughshare. Hence, although his own blood was as noble as that of any Plantagenet, he sided with the burghers against the barons from the very first; and the zealous support given to his cause, during the war, by London and the other great towns, showed that the appreciation was mutual. When the last of the barons fell, in the person of Warwick, the king-maker, the burghers felt that their time had come at last. And so, indeed, it had. So rapidly did the resources of England develop themselves under the comparatively peaceful rule of Henry VII, that that economical sovereign (who himself encouraged native trade and industry as much as his miserly nature would let him) contrived to accumulate, in a reign of less than twenty-three years, fully $9,000,000, a sum as considerable then as $70,000,000 would be now. This was so far fortunate, inasmuch as without this reserve-fund, the splendid prodigalities of his successor would have borne heavily upon a people already straitened by the sudden rise of prices caused by the influx of precious metals into Europe from the newly-discovered mines of South America. It might have been thought that the England of that period, torn by religious feuds, pressed by commercial scarcity, and stirred by an ever bolder and more intractable spirit of popular liberty, was the very last kingdom which a prince of Henry the Eighth's imperious temper could be expected to rule with success. But the event proved otherwise. With all his overbearing pride and monstrous cruelty, he never forgot for a moment the great truth which so many of his predecessors had ignored to their cost, that the natural enemies of an absolute monarch are not the plebeians but the patricians. Accordingly, while butchering his nobles and beheading his wives, he contrived to be popular with the commonalty to the very last; and on the single occasion when his purposes came into direct collision with their interests, he yielded with the same genial frankness wherewith he had joined the sports of his archers around the May-pole. This popularity was not, as has often been asserted, wholly due either to the dazzling effect of his handsome person and magnificent display, or to the hearty joviality with which he shared the exercises and pastimes of his poorest subjects. His real hold upon the affections of his people was their instinctive recognition of the fact that, despite his fierce temper and headstrong impatience of opposition, he a thorough Englishman at heart, and regarded them not as mere nameless beasts of burden, but as free men and women. They long retained a grateful remembrance of his emphatic provision for the support of "all that bee impotent, feeble, lame, or otherwise unable to worke (such being poore in very deede), and lykewise their children, until they bee of age to care for themselves." This was as it should be; but the royal John Bull had an English head as well as an English heart, and was in no way inclined to extend his charity to the able-bodied "tramps with whom the dissolution of the monasteries and the great feudal establishments had recently flooded all England. With them, as he quickly showed, he had no sympathy whatever. All subsequent Vagrant Acts "pale their ineffectual fires" beside the grim, business-like conciseness of Bluff Harry's famous ordinance: "As for all sturdy, mighty and valiant beggars, which do go to and fro in this realm, craving alms for their idlesse, the first tyme they bee found so offending, they shall be soundly scourged for a publick ensample. The second tyme their eares shall bee cut off; and the thirde, they shall incontinently be put to death." Under such legislation, pauperism was not likely to be a very thriving trade. All this time the trading "guilds" of London and the other great towns were rising upon the ruins of overthrown feudalism, to a height which the latter had never attained. The cloth-workers, whose broad pieces had paid the cost of Poitiers and Agincourt, the goldsmiths, whose "benevolences" had replenished the coffers of Edward IV, the grocers who founded national schools and endowed national charities, the mercers and silk merchants whom Henry VII himself delighted to honor-might well consider themselves a power in the State, second to none on its own ground. Nor did they always abide by that limit. The men of the people had already begun to rival the "blue blood" on fields which the latter held peculiarly its own. The best knights of France and Italy had fallen before Sir John Hawkwood, the son of a Cheapside tailor. A city clothier's apprentice had become Sir Edward Osborne, Councillor of State, and ancestor of the future Dukes of Leeds. An Ipswich butcher-lad had risen to be the greatest man in England, and had barely missed exchanging his Cardinal's hat for the triple crown itself. Later on in the same period, an obscure Warwickshire youth, whose father was a wool-comber of Stratford-on-Avon, became the associate of princes, and the greatest Englishman of all time; while a rough Plymouth seaman, half sailor and half pirate, circumnavigated the globe with a single vessel, and bearded in their own waters the noblest hidalgos of Spain. Meanwhile, war having changed from a pastime to a trade, commerce was beginning to reverse the act of Brennus, by casting her gold into the scale to counterpoise the sword. Even the brilliant and warlike Francis I could not restore to the Montmorencys and the Rohans the power which Louis XI had transferred to curriers and silk-weavers; while the Genoese bankers' refusal of a loan to Philip II, at the instigation of their English brethren, delayed the coming of the Armada for a whole year. The sixteenth century, indeed, may well be called the golden age of English labor. The resources of the country were amply sufficient for a population numbering barely two millions. Competition there was little or none, the demand for workmen being often greater than the supply. In those days of small capitals, any man might become a master, and any master might rise to be the head of a guild. Good food, manly sports, honest labor, frequent holidays, the discipline of service without servitude, made the English commonalty what their bitterest enemies justly styled them, "the freest and the fiercest people in Christendom." The men who, in 1588, answered Elizabeth's call for five thousand men and fifty ships by furnishing a hundred vessels and ten thousand men, were certainly not wanting either in courage or in public spirit; and the same qualities were even more conspicuously displayed in the great civil war of the ensuing century. Despite Lord Goring's sneer at "knaves who go to battle with their yard-measures in their hands," the pikemen of the London train-bands turned the day against the best blood of England, both at Edgehill and at Newbury; and their moderation in peace was even more creditable than their prowess in war. As Lord Macaulay has truly said, "an army of fifty thousand men, whose backs no enemy had ever seen, was quietly absorbed into the mass of the population; and only by his superior industry and good behavior could any man of them be identified as one of Oliver's old red-coats." Toward the close of the seventeenth century, when English society was already settling into the form which it still retains, signs of coming trouble began to overcast the world of labor. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and the consequent flight of the Huguenots from France, flooded Belgium and England with experienced foreign workmen, whose patient industry, superior skill, and amazing power of living upon nothing,* made the English mechanics regard their coming with much the same feelings with which a Californian of our day watches the landing of a fresh ship-load of Chinese. The "good wages" of the clothing-trade (then one shilling a day!) fell at once, and the general discontent found utterance in those rude peculiar songs which were the seventeenth-century Englishman's substitute for a letter to the Times. One of these may serve as a fair sample of the rest: "We'll make 'em work hard for sixpence a day, Though a shilling is what we should rightfully pay; * The invention of ox-tail soup is ascribed to the ingenious frugality of these refugees. But notwithstanding these and other drawbacks, the reigns of Anne and of the first three Georges were a time of comparative prosperity for the working-class. A business could then be started with a capital which would, now be absurdly inadequate. In many-trades, competition was limited by a law of apprenticeship. Not a few others had a fixed standard of wages. The mutual relations, too, of employer and employé, still retained much of the friendly and paternal character which had marked them in the "good old times." The apprentice sat at his master's table, took part in his master's conversation, and not unfrequently accompanied his master's family to a merrymaking. The cartoons of Hogarth, and the writings of his contemporaries, show us that it was then considered quite a natural thing that a shrewd and industrious 'prentice-lad should become the partner and son-inlaw of the man whose store he had swept, and whose errands he had run. Any brisk youth might be a Francis Goodchild, and any Francis Goodchild might become Lord Mayor of London, that ne plus ultra of Cockney grandeur, with which the prophetic chimes of Bow Bells cheered supperless Dick Whittington. But with the opening of the present century came a sudden and fearful change. The crushing expenses of the Napoleonic war, and the exclusion of British goods from the Continent by Napoleon's "Berlin Decrees," had already driven the workingclass to extremity, when the introduction of steam-power and machinery (which was to the world of labor what the French Revolution was to that of politics) dealt it what then appeared a death-blow. In a moment all existing laws and regulations-apprenticeship, limited capital, fixed wages, repressed competition, were swept away, and in their stead arose the joint-stock companies, colossal funds and gigantic business establishments, of the new school. The great innovation which was destined to multiply so vastly England's productive power, seemed at first sight to have annihilated it; and the horrors which ensued can never be forgotten. On every side mills were blazing, machines being destroyed, unpopular masters killed or maimed, soldiers and "Luddites" |