time, the area under cultivation increased, from 1846 to 1856, by 464,119 acres, without reckoning the great area in the Eastern Counties which was transformed from rabbit warrens and poor pastures into magnificent cornfields. It has already been seen that, at the same time, the total number of persons employed in agriculture fell. As far as the actual agricultural labourers of both sexes and of all ages are concerned, their number fell from 1,241,396, in 1851, to 1,163,217 in 1861.[1] If the English Registrar-General therefore, rightly remarks: “The increase of farmers and farm-labourers, since 1801, bears no kind of proportion … to the increase of agricultural produce,”[2] this disproportion obtains much more for the last period, when a positive decrease of the agricultural population went hand in hand with increase of the area under cultivation, with more intensive cultivation, unheard-of accumulation of the capital incorporated with the soil, and devoted to its working, an augmentation in the products of the soil without parallel in the history of English agriculture, plethoric rent-rolls of landlords, and growing wealth of the capitalist farmers. If we take this, together with the swift, unbroken extension of the markets, viz., the towns, and the reign of Free Trade, then the agricultural laborer was at last, post tot discrimina rerum, placed in circumstances that ought, secundum artem, to have made him drunk with happiness.
But Professor Rogers comes to the conclusion that the lot of the English agricultural labourer of to-day, not to speak of his predecessor in the last half on the 14th and in the 15th century, but only compared with his predecessor from 1770 to 1780, has changed for the worse to an extraordinary extent, that “the peasant has again become a serf,” and a serf worse fed and worse clothed.[3] Dr. Julian Hunter, in his epoch-making report on the dwellings of the agricultural labourers, says: “The cost of the hind” (a name for the agricultural labourer, inherited from time of serfdom) “is fixed at the
