owever, though showing that present times are not
good, do not prove that they are worse than past times. It may be that
there was poverty in the valley before the enclosure of the common quite
as severe as there is now; and, so far as concerns mere economics, that
event did but change the mode of the struggle for existence, without
greatly affecting its intensity. People are poor in a different way now,
that is all. Hence, in its more direct results, the loss of the common
has not mattered much, and it might be forgotten if those results were
the only ones.

But they are not the only ones. The results have spread from the
economic centre outwards until the whole life of the people has been
affected, new influences coming into play which previously were but
little felt. So searching, indeed, has the change been, and so
revolutionary, that anything like a full account of it would be out of
the question. The chapters that follow, therefore, do not pretend to
deal with it at all exhaustively; at most they will but draw attention
to a few of its more striking aspects.

X

COMPETITION

When the half-peasant men of the valley began to enter the labour market
as avowed wage-earners, a set of conditions confronted them which we are
apt to think of as established by a law of Nature, but which, in fact,
may be almost unknown in a peasant community. For the first time the
importance of a "demand for labour" came home to them. I do not say that
it was wholly a new thing; but to the older villagers it had not been,
as it is now to their descendants, the dominating factor in their
struggle for life. On the contrary, in proportion as their labour was
bestowed immediately on productive work for their own uses, the question
whether there was a demand for labour elsewhere did not arise. The
common was indifferent; it wanted none of them. It neither asked them to
avail themselves of its resources, nor paid them money for doing so, nor
refused employment to one because another was already engaged there. But
to-day, instead of going for a livelihood to the impartial heath, the
people must wait for others to set them to work. The demand which they
supply is their own no longer, and no longer, therefore, is their
living in their own hands. Of all the old families in the village, I
think there are only two left now who have not drifted wholly into this
dependent state; but I know numbers of labourers, often out of work,
whose gran