Page:The Evolution of Modern Capitalism.djvu/37

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MODERN CAPITALISM. WW


made even the labourers greatly independent of the farmer. Though it cannot be supposed that the increased quantity and improved tillage which followed the enclosures, the increase of agricultural land by drainage and oceupation of wastes, and the other agricultural improvements, diminish the aggregate demand for labour, they do not seem to have increased it sufficiently to absorb the rapid increase of the rural population; for already in the last decade of the eighteenth century there arose numerous complaints of over- population in rural parts as well as in towns, and this con- dition notoriously prevailed through the first half of the following century. The new economy of large. farming which had shaken from all ownership or stake in the land the great mass of the rural population, did not then become sufficiently intensive to absorb them as mere wage-earners in the new system. On the other hand, the forces drawing the superfluous labour into the towns or into foreign emigration were not yet fully operative. The Napoleonic war had retarded for a while the development of machine industry and the demand for labour in the industrial towns; transport was too feeble and too expensive for any large stream of emi- gration to the colonies or to America; the shackles of the Poor Law and the Law of Settlement greatly impaired the mobility of the working population. It is, however, to this growth of a large rural population deprived of any ownership or security of tenure in the soil, that we must look for the chief explanation of the “proletariat” required for modern capitalism. ‘This class, gradually loosened from its economic and legal settlement upon the soil, was drawn faster and faster into the new industrialism of the factory, the mine, the city shop, and warehouse. There it fused with a town-bred, wage-earning population, representing the journeymen who from the fifteenth century on had been excluded more and more persistently from the guild organisations, and formed a town proletariat which was later reinforced by small masters? unable to hold their independence against the closing monopoly of the craft-guilds, and by skilled workmen from

1 Unwin, Zudustrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth

2 Centurtes, ch. viil.

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