firing might still be cut
in waste places; fern continued until six or seven years ago to yield
litter for pig-sties; and since these things still seemed to go on
almost as well after the enclosure as before it, how should the people
have imagined that their ancient mode of life had been cut off at the
roots, and that it had really begun to die where it stood, under their
undiscerning eyes?

Nevertheless, that was the effect. To the enclosure of the common more
than to any other cause may be traced all the changes that have
subsequently passed over the village. It was like knocking the keystone
out of an arch. The keystone is not the arch; but, once it is gone, all
sorts of forces, previously resisted, begin to operate towards ruin, and
gradually the whole structure crumbles down. This fairly illustrates
what has happened to the village, in consequence of the loss of the
common. The direct results have been perhaps the least important in
themselves; but indirectly the enclosure mattered, because it left the
people helpless against influences which have sapped away their
interests, robbed them of security and peace, rendered their knowledge
and skill of small value, and seriously affected their personal pride
and their character. Observe it well. The enclosure itself, I say, was
not actually the cause of all this; but it was the opening, so to speak,
through which all this was let in. The other causes which have been at
work could hardly have operated as they have done if the village life
had not been weakened by the changes directly due to the loss of the
common.

They consisted--those changes--in a radical alteration of the domestic
economy of the cottagers. Not suddenly, but none the less inevitably,
the old thrift--the peasant thrift--which the people understood
thoroughly had to be abandoned in favour of a modern thrift--commercial
thrift--which they understood but vaguely. That was the essential effect
of the enclosure, the central change directly caused by it; and it
struck at the very heart of the peasant system.

For note what it involved. By the peasant system, as I have already
explained, people derived the necessaries of life from the materials and
soil of their own countryside. Now, so long as they had the common, the
inhabitants of the valley were in a large degree able to conform to this
system, the common being, as it were, a supplement to the cottage
gardens, and furnishing means of extending the scop