ges of the peasant did not
exceed four shillings a week; but that, in some parts of the kingdom,
five shillings, six shillings, and, during the summer months, even seven
shillings were paid. At present a district where a labouring man earns
only seven shillings a week is thought to be in a state shocking to
humanity. The average is very much higher; and in prosperous counties,
the weekly wages of husbandmen amount to twelve, fourteen, and even
sixteen shillings. The remuneration of workmen employed in manufactures
has always been higher than that of the tillers of the soil. In the year
1680, a member of the House of Commons remarked that the high wages
paid in this country made it impossible for our textures to maintain a
competition with the produce of the Indian looms. An English mechanic,
he said, instead of slaving like a native of Bengal for a piece of
copper, exacted a shilling a day. [198] Other evidence is extant,
which proves that a shilling a day was the pay to which the English
manufacturer then thought himself entitled, but that he was often forced
to work for less. The common people of that age were not in the habit
of meeting for public discussion, of haranguing, or of petitioning
Parliament. No newspaper pleaded their cause. It was in rude rhyme
that their love and hatred, their exultation and their distress, found
utterance. A great part of their history is to be learned only from
their ballads. One of the most remarkable of the popular lays chaunted
about the streets of Norwich and Leeds in the time of Charles the Second
may still be read on the original broadside. It is the vehement and
bitter cry of labour against capital. It describes the good old times
when every artisan employed in the woollen manufacture lived as well
as a farmer. But those times were past. Sixpence a day was now all that
could be earned by hard labour at the loom. If the poor complained that
they could not live on such a pittance, they were told that they were
free to take it or leave it. For so miserable a recompense were the
producers of wealth compelled to toil rising early and lying down late,
while the master clothier, eating, sleeping, and idling, became rich by
their exertions. A shilling a day, the poet declares, is what the weaver
would have if justice were done. [199] We may therefore conclude that,
in the generation which preceded the Revolution, a workman employed in
the great staple manufacture of England thought himse