imes philanthropists did not yet regard it as a sacred duty, nor had
demagogues yet found it a lucrative trade, to talk and write about the
distress of the labourer. History was too much occupied with courts and
camps to spare a line for the hut of the peasant or the garret of the
mechanic. The press now often sends forth in a day a greater quantity of
discussion and declamation about the condition of the working man than
was published during the twenty-eight years which elapsed between the
Restoration and the Revolution. But it would be a great error to infer
from the increase of complaint that there has been any increase of
misery.

The great criterion of the state of the common people is the amount
of their wages; and as four-fifths of the common people were, in the
seventeenth century, employed in agriculture, it is especially important
to ascertain what were then the wages of agricultural industry. On this
subject we have the means of arriving at conclusions sufficiently exact
for our purpose.

Sir William Petty, whose mere assertion carries great weight, informs us
that a labourer was by no means in the lowest state who received for
a day's work fourpence with food, or eightpence without food. Four
shillings a week therefore were, according to Petty's calculation, fair
agricultural wages. [192]

That this calculation was not remote from the truth we have
abundant proof. About the beginning of the year 1685 the justices of
Warwickshire, in the exercise of a power entrusted to them by an Act of
Elizabeth, fixed, at their quarter sessions, a scale of wages for
the county, and notified that every employer who gave more than the
authorised sum, and every working man who received more, would be liable
to punishment. The wages of the common agricultural labourer, from
March to September, were fixed at the precise amount mentioned by Petty,
namely four shillings a week without food. From September to March the
wages were to be only three and sixpence a week. [193]

But in that age, as in ours, the earnings of the peasant were very
different in different parts of the kingdom. The wages of Warwickshire
were probably about the average, and those of the counties near the
Scottish border below it: but there were more favoured districts. In
the same year, 1685, a gentleman of Devonshire, named Richard Dunning,
published a small tract, in which he described the condition of the poor
of that county. That he understood his sub