ation in the currency, it was declared that the labouring man could no longer live on the wages assigned to him by the Act of Henry; and a sliding scale was instituted by which, for the future, wages should be adjusted to the price of food.[1]
The same conclusion may be gathered also, indirectly, from other Acts, interfering imperiously with the rights of property where a disposition showed itself to exercise them selfishly. The city merchants, as I have said, were becoming landowners; and some of them attempted to apply the rules of trade to the management of landed estates. While wages were ruled so high, it answered better as a speculation to convert arable land into pasture; but the law immediately stepped in to prevent a proceeding which it regarded as petty treason to the commonwealth. Self-protection is the first law of life; and the country relying for its defence on an able-bodied population, evenly distributed, ready at any moment to be called into action, either against foreign invasion or civil disturbance, it could not permit the owners of land to pursue for their own benefit a course of action which threatened to weaken its garrisons. It is not often that we are able to test the wisdom of legislation by specific results so clearly as in the present instance. The first attempts of the kind which I have described were made in the Isle of Wight, early in the reign of Henry VII. Lying
- ↑ The wages of the day labourer in London, under this Act of Elizabeth, were fixed at 9d. the day, and this, after the restoration of the depreciated currency.—Guildhall MS. Journal 18, fol. 157, &c.
