the small peasants superseded by the overwhelming
competition of the large farmers. Instead of being landowners or
leaseholders, as they had been hitherto, they were now obliged to hire
themselves as labourers to the large farmers or the landlords. For a
time this position was endurable, though a deterioration in comparison
with their former one. The extension of industry kept pace with the
increase of population until the progress of manufacture began to assume
a slower pace, and the perpetual improvement of machinery made it
impossible for manufacture to absorb the whole surplus of the
agricultural population. From this time forward, the distress which had
hitherto existed only in the manufacturing districts, and then only at
times, appeared in the agricultural districts too. The twenty-five
years' struggle with France came to an end at about the same time; the
diminished production at the various seats of the wars, the shutting off
of imports, and the necessity of providing for the British army in Spain,
had given English agriculture an artificial prosperity, and had besides
withdrawn to the army vast numbers of workers from their ordinary
occupations. This check upon the import trade, the opportunity for
exportation, and the military demand for workers, now suddenly came to an
end; and the necessary consequence was what the English call agricultural
distress. The farmers had to sell their corn at low prices, and could,
therefore, pay only low wages. In 1815, in order to keep up prices, the
Corn Laws were passed, prohibiting the importation of corn so long as the
price of wheat continued less than 80 shillings per quarter. These
naturally ineffective laws were several times modified, but did not
succeed in ameliorating the distress in the agricultural districts. All
that they did was to change the disease, which, under free competition
from abroad, would have assumed an acute form, culminating in a series of
crises, into a chronic one which bore heavily but uniformly upon the farm
labourers.

For a time after the rise of the agricultural proletariat, the
patriarchal relation between master and man, which was being destroyed
for manufacture, developed here the same relation of the farmer to his
hands which still exists almost everywhere in Germany. So long as this
lasted, the poverty of the farm hands was less conspicuous; they shared
the fate of the farmer, and were discharged only in cases of the direst