As things turned out, the whole rural economy of England was altered with the disappearance of serfdom. Greedy lords now seized the common lands of villages under acts of Parliament, made by their agents, authorizing them to enclose great areas and extinguish the ancient rights of the peasants. When, in the sixteenth century, the woolen industry rose to high prosperity and sheep-raising became more profitable than cropping, thousands of landlords drove off their tenants and turned their fields into pastures, changing prosperous hamlets into deserted villages. At the same time the vast estates of the monasteries, also tilled by peasants, passed into the hands of secular masters bent on profits and the walls of grand old abbeys sank down to ruin to receive their ivy crown. By various procedures, therefore, strong and active peasants, enamored of the soil that nurtured them, were transformed into wageworkers or sturdy beggars; the public poor relief that superseded monastic alms was heavily burdened; city streets were filled with paupers; and political economists were led to cry out: "What shall we do with the surplus population?"
Of all European countries, England alone had an abundance of men and women accustomed to hard labor in the fields and yet cut loose from bondage to the soil. It was a dubious freedom which they enjoyed—so dubious that it prepared them for migration to the New World in spite of all the hazards.
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Absolutely imperative to the successful development of European civilization in America was the participation of women in every sphere of life and labor. Soldiers could conquer and rule native populations, but colonies could not be founded and maintained without women. And England of the seventeenth century had women of talent and experience, skilled in industrial arts, accustomed to the management of property and employees. On every hand English
