gest. Extremely penurious, he loaned money at frightfully
usurious rates and hounded his victims without a vestige of
sympathy.[21] As a trader and government contractor he made enormous
profits; such was his cohesive collusion with high officials that
competitors found it impossible to outdo him. A current saying of him
was that he made a fortune by "pinching the bellies of the
soldiers"--that is, as an army contractor who defrauded in quantity and
quality of supplies. By a multitude of underhand and ignoble artifices
he finally found himself the lord of a manor sixteen miles long and
twenty-four broad. On this estate he built flour and saw mills, a bakery
and a brewery. In his advanced old age he exhibited great piety but held
on grimly to every shilling that he could and as long as he could. When
he died about 1728--the exact date is unknown--at the age of 74 years,
he left an estate which was considered of such colossal value that its
true value was concealed for fear of further enraging the discontented
people.

EFFECTS OF THE LAND SEIZURES.

The seizure of these vast estates and the arbitrary exclusion of the
many from the land produced a combustible situation. An instantaneous
and distinct cleavage of class divisions was the result. Intrenched in
their possessions the landed class looked down with haughty disdain upon
the farming and laboring classes. On the other hand, the farm laborer
with his sixteen hours work a day for a forty-cent wage, the carpenter
straining for his fifty-two cents a day, the shoemaker drudging for his
seventy-three cents a day and the blacksmith for his seventy cents,[22]
thought over this injustice as they bent over their tasks. They could
sweat through their lifetime at honest labor, producing something of
value and yet be a constant prey to poverty while a few men, by means of
bribes, had possessed themselves of estates worth tens of thousands of
pounds and had preempted great stretches of the available lands.

In consulting extant historical works it is noticeable that they give
but the merest shadowy glimpse of this intense bitterness of what were
called the lower classes, and of the incessant struggle now raging, now
smouldering, between the landed aristocracy and the common people.
Contrary to the roseate descriptions often given of the independent
position of the settlers at that time, it was a time when the use and
misuse of law brought about sharp divisions of class lines w