he
baker's, the coal-merchant's, the provision-dealer's; and, of course,
needing to spend money, he needed first to get it.

The change was momentous, as events have sufficiently proved. In the
matter of earning, to be sure, the difference has appeared rather in the
attitude of the people than in the actual method of going about to get
money. To a greater or less extent, most of them were already
wage-earners, though not regularly. If a few had been wont to furnish
themselves with money in true peasant fashion--that is to say, by
selling their goods, their butter, or milk, or pig-meat, instead of
their labour--still, the majority had wanted for their own use whatever
they could produce in this way, and had been obliged to sell their
labour itself, when they required money. Wage-earning, therefore, was no
new thing in the village; only, the need to earn became more insistent,
when so many more things than before had to be bought with the wages.
Consequently, it had to be approached in a more businesslike, a more
commercial, spirit. Unemployment, hitherto not much worse than a
regrettable inconvenience, became a calamity. Every hour's work acquired
a market value. The sense of taking part in time-honoured duties of the
countryside disappeared before the idea--so very important now--of
getting shillings with which to go to a shop; while even the home
industries which were still practicable began to be valued in terms of
money, so that a man was tempted to neglect his own gardening if he
could sell his labour in somebody else's garden. Thus undermined, the
peasant outlook gave way, perforce, to that of the modern labourer, and
the old attachment to the countryside was weakened. In all this change
of attitude, however, we see only one of those indirect results of the
enclosure of the common which were spoken of above. If the villagers
became more mercenary, it was not because the fencing in of the heaths
immediately caused them to become so, but because it left them helpless
to resist becoming so--left them a prey to considerations whose weight
they had previously not so much felt. After all, the new order of things
did but intensify the need of wage-earning; it made no difference in the
procedure of it.

But in regard to spending the case was otherwise. Under the old regime,
although probably a small regular expenditure of money had been usual,
yet in the main the peasant's expenditure was not regular, but
intermittent. G