s, and was reiterated in the seventeenth George II.
and the thirty-second George III., along with fixed wages for services
rendered. Personal liberty was held to be the privilege of the
proprietary class. By a statute of Henry VIII. (1536), children of five
years and up, were compelled to labor. A man able to work who refused a
proffer of work was, according to law, dragged to the nearest town on a
hurdle, stripped, and whipped through the town until his body was
covered with blood. For a second offense his right ear was cut off and
he received the bastinado. For a third offense he was put to death. An
act passed under Edward VI. (1555) provided that the able-bodied laborer
refusing work should be branded on the breast with the letter V and
adjudged to the informer as his slave for two years. The master might
fasten a ring about the neck, arm, or leg.

REFORM.

Under William IV., by the act of 1832, the laboring hours of children
were reduced to _ten hours_. By the act of 1847 women were included in
the ten-hour law. By 1867 the power of the English working man had
secured the permanence of a custom making ten hours a day's work. In the
factories of Nottingham, England, the men make as high as fourteen
dollars a week. Improved machinery has raised their wages. At the
spinning machines which formerly required two men, who each received
$4.50 a week, there is now required one man, who gets $6.25. At the
beginning of the present century the workman in these mills earned 4-1/2
shillings a week. At the present day he earns 10-1/2 shillings, with
twenty-four hours' less labor.

THE ENGLISH FIELD-LABORER

who now earns 3 shillings a day spends, for a family of eight, 15
shillings a week in bread, cheese, butter, washing, tea, sugar and
schooling. How much cheese, tea, butter, washing, sugar and schooling
did our friend and his cubs of the fourteenth century enjoy?

Invention and economy are keeping far in advance of the effects of
growth in population. In 1766 England and Wales had but 8,500,000
inhabitants; now, there are 25,000,000. The same thing is

TRUE OF AMERICA.

I have for authorities "England, Political and Social" by August Laugel,
private secretary of the Duc d'Aumale, Notes and Queries, No 283,
Green's "History of the English People," "Froude's History of England,"
and current numbers of the _Mark Lane Express_.

In the terms applied to the laborer, from pariah, helot, servus, serf,
knecht, thrall,