were to be imprisoned without bail till they conformed and made submission.
The ideas of the clergy and the ruling classes on religion are well expressed by Mandeville, a clever writer of the period:
"The Poor more especially and their children should be made to go to church on Sunday, both in the fore and afternoon, because they have no time on any other. By precept and example they ought to be encouraged and used to it from their very infancy; the wilful neglect of it ought to be counted scandalous, and if downright compulsion to what I urge might seem too harsh and perhaps impracticable, all diversions at least ought to be strictly prohibited, and the poor hindered from every amusement abroad that might allure or draw them from it."
What Mandeville meant to effect by this careful church-going there can be no manner of doubt. He was philosopher enough to know that you can never be sure of a slave until you have mastered his conscience. The ancients did not understand this art, whence their terror of servile revolt. The Tudor statesmen were profoundly Machiavelian, and knew the value of mixing up respect for their position with reverence for the Almighty.
The Church of England, supported by the two Houses of Parliament, the Magistrates, and all the nobility, gentry and great landowners, had had its own way with the agricultural labourers of England for a good deal more than a thousand years. Every hostile influence has been crushed, and the whole formation of their moral and intellectual being had been in its hands. What the Church of England had done with this great trust, what it had made of its wards, to what a fate it had brought them let Crabbe, himself a clergyman, tell us. Let anyone read and ponder well "The Village," let him note that it is supported by all Crabbe says elsewhere, that it is in accord with what Clare and Bloomfield say; let him read those wonderful pieces of autobiography by another agricultural labourer:—Heaven taken by a Storm, The Bank of Faith, etc.; let him gather together such incidental references as he can find in books like that in which Hannah More recounts her work in the Mendip Hills, together with the whole literature of the Methodist Revival, and he will not be able to escape the conclusion that
