centuries of social peace in England corresponded in time with the same phenomenon on the continent, the English peasant was not resting in the same status as his brother across the channel. The French and German peasant was a serf; the English peasant was now, by law, a freeman. The French peasant was preparing a bright future for his descendants by acquiring land, but at present his own position was unenviable: the wars of religion in France and Germany, followed by the endless campaigns dictated by the proud policy of the House of Bourbon, reduced the tillers of the soil to a state of misery such as in a former age had caused the terrible outbreak of the Jacquerie to interrupt the wars of Froissart. But in peaceful England the economic effect of the brief war between Charles and his Parliament was to raise the wage of the agricultural laborer. English travellers were shocked at the "wooden shoes and straw hats" of the foreign peasantry, and the "grass herbs and roots" which was too often their only food.1

But though the English field laborer was ahead of the German and French in economic and legal position, we must not ascribe the abeyance of rural agitation so much to the absence of rural grievances, as to the division of class interests and the want of leadership from above. The farmers and yeomen were now more divided off from the agricultural laborer, and more contented with their own economic and social position than in the days of Wat Tyler. These two classes, thus already ranged on the side of social conservatism, formed in the Stuart epoch a far larger proportion of the whole agricultural community than they form to-day. Society in England was based on the stable and prosperous foundation of a very large number of small farms and small estates. The evils inseparable from private property in land, the loss of liberty which it too often inflicts on those who have to live and work on the land of others, were in those days limited by the high proportion of landowners to the total population.

agricultural land. But though the peasants pulled down some fences, the affair scarcely amounted to a rising.

1 Arber's Reprints, viii, Howell's Instructions, p. 74.

But even then the agricultural laborer for hire represented the most numerous class. The English peasant, though badly paid, was in some cases well fed by his employer. The "servant in husbandry" only went into a separate cottage when he married. Until then he boarded in the farm-house, and partook freely at the family table of the staple dish of meat, though not always of the puddings and delicacies. There was a closer contact between master and men than now; most of the farmers and yeomen were small and unpretentious people, living on intimate terms with their servants, whose families had often been on the same farm for generations.

The food of the farm-house, which the unmarried "servant in husbandry" shared, varied according to each season of the year, with its traditional fasts and feasts. In Lent all ate fish fresh, if near seas and rivers, but salted, if in dry and upland districts. For meat was prohibited, both by immemorial custom, which must in many places have still been in part religious, and by the statutes of Protestant Parliaments. Those shrewd legislators continued to enforce the observance of Lent, not, as they were careful to state, for superstitious reasons, but to encourage the fisheries as the great school of seamanship and national defence. But the chief reason why the Lenten fast was still observed was because the ordinary rural1 household had no meat to hand at that time of year except the flitch of bacon and the beef that had been slaughtered and salted last Martinmas Day (11th November). At midsummer fresh beef and mutton was killed amid general rejoicings, and continued to grace the tables until winter. At Christmas, during the "twelve days" of the year when least was to be gained by labor in the fields, the agricultural world made holiday, feasting on collars of brawn, fowls, turkeys, mince-pies and plum-pottage, besides nameless dishes, which the park-forester was not invited to share unless he came to court the honest yeoman's daughter; the roasting piece of beef was stuck with rosemary, and though Jeremiah Carpenter standing by the spit testified

1 Town butchers sometimes killed by stealth in the forbidden season (Court and Times of Charles I, 1848, ii, p. 72).

concerning meats offered to idols, yet notwithstanding surely he ate thereof. Compared to other sorts of food, there was abundance of meat to be had in old England, for besides flocks of sheep, and herds of cattle and pigs, the country-side swarmed with rabbits, hares, and birds of all kinds, which, as the gamelaws then stood, were the legitimate prey of the yeomen over whose land they strayed. The farm, which had to supply all the food of its inmates, except perhaps a little bad fish during Lent, could boast of a few vegetables in the garden but none in the fields. Fruit was more common; strawberries, raspberries, and gooseberries had been grown in farm gardens fifty years before James came to the throne.1

But the abundance of meat food procurable off the farm is not the only reason why it is unsafe to judge of the real condition. of the agricultural laborer solely from the statistics of wages and prices. Common land for pasturage of cows, pigs, and poultry, common rights of collecting fuel and fowling on moor and waste, were an important part of the cottagers' livelihood, though already encroached upon by deer-park enclosures, and destined to extinction in the great robbery of the poor by the rich at the close of the eighteenth century. Moreover, the wages of the head of the cottar family might be augmented by those of his wife and children, who were often separately employed and paid by the farmers. In haytime and harvest the whole population turned out; and the mothers worked, putting their babies to play together in a corner of the busy field. At most

1 Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce (ed. 1892), p. 193. W. A. S. Hewins, English Trade and Finance, pp. 88-96. A. H. Hamilton, Quarter Sessions, from Elizabeth to Anne (1878), p. 14. Also see Tusser's rhymes in Somers' Tracts, iii, for an intimate account of farm life in the middle of the Tudor period. Meat was so common that foreigners in the year 1602 remarked with surprise that the English rejected the entrails and feet for the table (Diary of the Duke of Stettin in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1892, p. 47).

2 Agricultural wages were generally somewhere between 3s. and 5s. a week (when food was not given), but rose slowly throughout the century. Wheat, varying very greatly from year to year and county to county, was generally between 205. and 50s., the average price, 1600-1610, being 34s. old.; and 1620-1630 being 435. old. (Miss Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief, 1900, pp. 145, 301, 198, 199. Hamilton, Quarter Sessions from Elizabeth to Anne, pp. 12-14, 163. Hewins, English Trade and Finance, p. 86. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 391-394, 426, 427).

other times throughout the year the unmarried girls were employed, as now, at certain kinds of agricultural labor, but not at the more severe ditching and carrying. That last sacrifice of poverty was spared. English gentlemen going out to join Prince Charles at Madrid, were shocked at the sight of the Spanish women staggering under loads, and going through that round of labor which brought the women of some of the most beautiful races of Europe to premature old age.1

But besides their work in the fields, country women were largely employed in industry. The cloth manufacture was organized by the "clothiers" of the towns; but much labor was carried on in distant cottages, each of which was visited by the clothier on his periodic rounds. The old woolpack inns of England recall the time when it was common to meet, round the turning of a country lane, a train of horses laden with sacks of wool hanging to the ground on either side, or a clothier riding into market with pieces of cloth upon his saddle-bow. In this and other employments boys and girls were set to work at an early age. Although the state of things among the families of the continental peasantry was perhaps worse, yet English women and children were overworked long before the era of the factory system.

Under the first two Stuarts all classes who lived on the land, and yet more those who were gathered in the towns, were in perpetual terror of plague. Disease and infant mortality prevented the rapid increase of the population. Medicine, as commonly practiced, was a formulated superstition rather than a science; rules of health were little understood; sanitary habits were free and filthy among rich as well as poor. Our ancestors washed little, and their standard of public decency in trivialities was that of some modern nations which we now readily condemn. Prudery was rare even among Puritans; and cleanliness even among courtiers, who compounded by free use of oils and scents. Drinking-water was often contaminated, and the danger seldom recognized. Little value was set on fresh air indoors. The population, though thinly scattered on the soil, was closely

1 Memoirs of the Verney Family, i, p. 78.

packed in the houses. Servants and apprentices generally slept in holes among the rafters, and industry was often conducted in the crowded dwelling-rooms of the family. Many of the worst conditions of slum life existed in a small and chiefly rural population, who had, however, the supreme advantage of open air and the beauties of nature outside their door. It is not possible to know whether the general standard of physique was higher or lower than it is in the present day under conditions so much better and so much worse.

THERE has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? That is the question that is uppermost in our minds to-day. That is the question I am going to try to answer, in order, if I may, to interpret the occasion.

It means much more than the mere success of a party. The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party. It seeks to use it to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view. Some old things with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into the very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect as we have latterly looked critically upon them, with fresh, awakened eyes; have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and sinister. Some new things, as we look frankly upon them, willing to comprehend their real character, have come to assume

1 Delivered at the Capitol, March 4, 1913.