out to Others that the inhabitants thereof may be able to pay the rents and also to honestly live, to nourish their families and to relieve the poor; give them grace to consider that they are but strangers and pilgrims in this world, having here no dwelling-place, but seeking one to come; that they, remembering the short continuance of their life, may be content with that which is sufficient and not join house to house, nor couple land to land to the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands, and pastures, that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling-places; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
VII.
Another Struggle for Justice.
"My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions." These words, which Scripture gibbets as the last degree of princely arrogance and folly, exactly symbolize the opening acts of the reign of the most pious, most conscientious young prince England has possessed since the Conquest. That the reign of Edward the Sixth commenced more wickedly than that of Rehoboam was due to the rabid greediness of the new aristocracy. "Covetousness," as Gilpin told the King, "had brought the nation to such a pass that every man scraped and pilled from others, every man would suck the blood of others, every man encroached upon another;" and of the truth of this, there was no more flagrant example than that given by the men who, at Henry the Eighth's death, seized on power, helping themselves to great titles and to the public wealth.
It is a fact that ought not to be hid, because it throws a flood of light on the present condition of England, that the same authority that gave this country the Common Prayer Book enacted the most atrocious law against its Poor that has ever disgraced the Statute Book.
By the 1 Edward VI., c. 3, Men or Women able to work, and who lived idly for three days, were to be branded with a red-hot
