We thus see the condition of the laboring man rise, in five hundred years, from 112 hours' labor for sixty pounds of wheat to about six or seven hours' work, and from 1372 hours' labor for 400 pounds of beef to 267 hours' labor for the same weight of better food!
But the atheist will say that the laborer of the olden time did not work, and got along by hook or crook; that, as it was a miracle if he lived with such wages, anyway, he had every inducement to become a vagabond. But all this had "been seen to." Such things are never unforeseen.
FOR INSTANCE:
"Here is a package of worm-medicine which, for one dollar will save the life of your child. Will you have it? No!! you will not pay one single dollar to save the life of your little child! Here is a man, who, for one standard dollar, in silver, worth intrinsically less than 90 cents, will let his child be lowered into the grave—will listen to the clods falling on its little coffin! But ah! I am provided against such men! They cannot escape me! Here is a smaller package which will save your child's life for fifty cents. It is yours. Death has missed his mark!" Now, with the inevitable forethought of
THIS VERMIFUGE FIEND
whom I have quoted, the law-makers of those days also saw to it that the laborer should not escape the original terms of Eve's surrender to "that first grand thief who clomb into God's fold." Under a statute of Richard II. the laborer was forbidden to remove from one part of the kingdom to another, or to otherwise seek to raise the price of his labor. This law stood for centuries, 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?