SOCIAL ECONOMY.

 At the Social Science Congress at Bradford on the fifteenth of October, the Earl of Shaftesbury presiding, Sir J. Kay Shuttleworth read a paper on this subject, which is well worthy the consideration of colonists.

Sir John began his address by a reference to the gradual changes which, notwithstanding the apparent stability of nature, were observable in the condition of the earth, its atmosphere and temperature. He then proceeded as follows: — The history of nations exhibits analogous phenomena. To confine our necessarily brief survey to our own country, we have in its progress, in like manner as in nature, successive eras of development. Each era is marked by the operation of some new force on our domestic and social habits, internal organisation, civil or religious polity — all tending to produce that form of civilisation which we now enjoy. Before the invasion of Cæsar the southern part of England had probably made as much progress in civilisation as the Gauls. The Britons maintained a considerable commercial intercourse with the coast of Gaul. They had discovered and worked some of the metals, and the commerce of Cornwall had from a very early period a connection even with Phœnicia. They were therefore much raised above merely savage life. The Druids as a priesthood had probably quite as much learning as the Roman augers. The resistance of the Britons to the Roman legions, the rigor with which they even assaulted the Roman camps, the successive insurrections by which they disputed the Roman power, their war cars armed with scythes, the remains of their camps — all prove that South Britain was inhabited by a race which had within itself the germs of civilization. At the same time a large part of the country was in a condition of forest and morass ; there were few roads deserving the name ; probably no walled towns ; the fastnesses of the Britons were almost impregnable by the depth of forests and bogs in which they were secluded— the abattis, fence, ditch, or rampart by which they were surrounded ; and the difficulties of the Roman army consisted as much in a conquest of nature as in a struggle with the valour, stratagems, surprises, and wiles of a fierce race inhabiting a wild country, with the resources of which they were familiar. With this invasion ceased the British power in the greater part of England in the century before the Christian era. The first step in the succeeding 2000 years is the Roman occupation of England for 400 years. We read the characteristics of this Roman dominion (according to Ptolemy) in 56 walled towns, some of which still exist in the ruins of theatres, villas, baths, and other public or private buildings now found in the neighborhood of many towns, and giving proofs of the introduction of the arts and luxury of the empire ; in many military roads, penetrating the primeval forests and leading from camp to camp and town to town ; in the supremacy of law and order over the disputes and raids of tribes ; and in the foundation of municipalities, though these, in the withdrawal of the Roman power as one of the signs of the decay of the empire, probably left little trace in our customs. The arts, the literature, the law of Rome penetrated to the cities which it founded, and which became centres from which the civilisation of the masters of the world even in that corrupt age tended to diffuse itself. The great eras in the history of mankind resemble the geological in this, that while they are attended with the introduction of new forms of life and organisation, they are destructive to a large extent of those which preceded them. As the tide of Roman civilisation, art, and law receded from Great Britain, it was succeeded by a period of mingled colonisation and conquest by the northern European tribes of the Saxons and Danes. This era of Teutonic occupation, extending without more than transient disturbance over 700 years, has had a more marked influence than any other on the race, the local institutions, and the social organisation of England.
The Saxons and Danes, following the era of Roman organisation from seats of military power, penetrated the forests, destroying, expelling, or taking captive and making slaves of their barbarous occupants, slowly subduing nature and taming man. Their first great gift was to introduce into the corporated mass of social life throughout the Roman empire the idea of the individual dignity of man as the member of a family. This prepared them to become the founders of enduring Christian States. The authority of the father in the household and over its branches and dependents was the centre whence the rudiment of our civil state evolved. Having described the old Saxon institutions, he proceeded : — The mass of laborers in every craft and of the herdsmen and tillers of the soil in the Saxon era had no political or social rights. They could be bought and sold. They were adscripti glebœ, and conveyed with it under the comprehensive phrase "mid mete and mid mannum." They received, like the beasts of burthen, food and lodging for their toil, but they were absolutely in the "mund," that is, under the protection and power of their master, who might kill them at his pleasure. They were reduced to this form of slavery either as captives in war, (and thus it is thought a large part of the ancient British population were held in thraldom) or as a consequence of marriage with a serf, of settlement among a servile population, of crime, by surrender, or superior legal power, or by oppression. The modern system of tenancy seams to have had its origin in the leases for life, or the shorter periods called " læ'an," or loan. We have thus in the Saxon era some of the constituent elements of English society more or less defined — in the "theoves," or serfs, the laborers and handicraftsmen in a condition of thraldom ; in the "ceorls," churls, or villeins, a class destined ultimately to emancipate themselves from the condition of villenage to that of an independent yeomanry ; in the freemen, the free occupants of the læ'an land, the types of our present free laborers and tenantry ; in the thanes of marks and lords of hundreds, one form of that English rural gentry which struggled for existence with the Norman power, and partially survived. The mission of St. Augustine in the sixth century occurred at a time when the forms of Saxon civilization had prepared the country for the dawn of Christianity. The Christian missionaries were first received in the circle of the Saxon kings, and their influence was soon felt in diminishing the frequency and ferocity of war, in mitigating the fierceness and bloody character of the right of feud, and substituting the vergyld, as settled by law and administered by authority, for the unlimited exercise of the lex talionis. The Germanic races treated their "theoves," or serfs, with humanity ; but with the introduction of Christianity the traditionary tendency to soften the hard lot of the slave was fostered by the example and counsels of the early bishops and the influence of the clergy. They urged manumission on the wealthy as an act of piety, and as a penance for sin, and on the dying as a means of propitiating mercy in the hour of judgment. Successive Christian kings likewise restrained by laws capricious excesses, and sought to improve the condition of the slave. With the sentiment grew up the institutions of Christian charity. The germ of the provision now made by law for the relief of the indigent was planted by the Christian Church, in the devotion of a third of its tithes, ratified by the express enactment of the Witan, to that charitable aid which was administered by the clergy to the poor. Penance, fine, and voluntary contributing also furnished assistance. Before gross abuses crept into the monastic establishments, their xenodochium, hospitium, and alms relieved the wayfarer, so as probably to promote the emancipation of serfs, by providing for a circulation of labor, otherwise impossible, and mitigating the hardships of an often ineffectual struggle for the independent life of a freeman. By teaching the equality of all classes, as purchased to an eternal inheritance by the blood of Christ, by proclaiming the brotherhood of mankind and the right of all to that Divine charity which sought the outcast, forgave him who owed the most, and pardoned the penitent, the Christian Missionaries introduced into the Saxon heathendom the transforming force of the Christian faith. The idea of a provision for indigence by a charge on all fixed property was of much later growth. That was a regulation of police which gave security to life in order to protect property by suppressing vagabondage and crime. Under the Anglo Saxon rule every man by the system of frankpledge was part of an association of neighbours whose mutual bond was an assurance for each member. If, however, he had no means of his own he was required to put himself under the protection of a lord, and thus to have someone to answer for him. If a serf, the State regarded him as the chattel of his owner, who was only responsible to God for his treatment of him. He therefore who had no means, and could find no one to take charge of him, was an outlaw — had no civil rights of any kind. To such a system Christian charity was a new element of civilisation ; it sustained the hopes and efforts of those who strove to purchase their freedom ; it helped them when in the struggle for subsistence ; it received and fed the sick and aged whose strength failed. Thus, it was not a simple consolation, though that is much, but a means of inspiring the hope of freedom, encouraging the effort to obtain it, and making it an act of piety to promote it. Notwithstanding the despotic violence and usurpation of the Norman Conquest, its effects on the constitution of English society were felt rather among the governing classes than the governed. The rural lords and thanes were so fiercely dispossessed of their estates that probably one half, if not two thirds, of the land of England changed hands. The free tenants of the læ'an land, the ceorls of churls holding land in villenage, the cotsetla or cottarii, and the theoves or serfs had harsher and more exacting masters. The whole country was held in the iron gripe of the Conqueror as a modern city in a state of siege. The military strength, the Norman magnificence of the new court, the charge of a vigilant ruthless police, were all supported by subsidies which were wrung by the lords from their dependents of every class. No tyranny could be more absolute, cruel, and relentless, than that with which the Norman king and his nobles crushed the spirit of the Saxon people into subjection. But under even this ruthless rigor the constitution of society remained essentially the same. Under the successors of the Conqueror the Saxon people, in the comparative laxity of a less able and more corrupt rule, breathed more freely. Gradually the two races were mingled. The Norman, in whom the quick, impulsive, Gaulish blood had its vivid imagination tempered by the Teutonic, came to create the English race, in which the solid, stubborn, but slowly moving Saxon constitution was awakened to enterprise and daring by the infusion of qualities without which it might have sunk into a sensual sloth. The nation gained also by the introduction of many of the arts, of a more refined style of living, of literature as the occupation of the classes professing leisure, and of more polished manners and habits of intercourse. The nation thus rose in civilization, and "early in the 14th century the amalgamation of the races was all but complete, and it was soon manifest, by signs which could not be mistaken, that a people inferior to none existing in the world had been produced by the mixture of these branches of the great Teutonic family with each other and with the aboriginal Britons." — (Macaulay.) These several causes tended to increase the number of freemen by the growth of population, the increase of commerce and handicraft trades, and the influence of Christianity acting on the Saxon sense of individual responsibility and right. Nevertheless, the rigour of the feudal institutions, the selfish luxury of the barons, the wild license of their retainers, who mercilessly plundered the people and devastated the country, and the not unfrequent disorder from the contentions of nobler issuing with armed retainers from their castles, tended to give great insecurity to the possession of freedom, to harass the growing middle classes by vagabondage and by bands of marauders. Thus in successive reigns follow a series of enactments, carefully chronicled by Sir George Nicholls in his valuable history of the poor law, showing that the emancipation of the serfs from slavery was attended in these rude ages with disorders requiring the restraints of authority. This was doubtless more vigilant in the prescriptions of the laws than vigorous and just in the regular action of a well ordered police, of which, indeed, the country knew little.
In the middle of the fourteenth century the great plague swept through England, destroying one-half the population. Hence a scarcity of labor — migrations of the freeman to places where this scarcity was greatest and the wages highest — the escape of serfs to establish their freedom by service for a year and a day. The laws during the remainder of this century endeavor to prevent change of service — to enforce its obligations — to settle the rates of wages, and to give summary means of enforcing them. All these are signs of the awakening of a spirit of independence and enterprise. One new element had fostered this spirit. The long reign of Edward III. had sedulously promoted for the first time a domestic woollen manufacture, and the coincidence of the rise of this employment with the manifestation of a greater eagerness for freedom is not without its significance. Between this reign and the close of that of Henry VII. a series of enactments were passed, intended to promote the growth of wool and to encourage the settlement of foreign artisans, though not untainted with a jealousy of foreign merchants. The manufacture of woollens and worsted fabrics grew so steadily that efforts were made to restrict the exportation of English wool. During this time serfdom step by step tended to merge into a yearly hireling — apprenticeship to handicrafts increased — laborers still flocked to the towns and secured their freedom — the towns grew, and with them personal and municipal independence, under the guidance of a middle class whose wealth and social power augmented in every reign. A little later, in the 33rd year of Henry VIII., the preamble to an Act of Parliament (chap. 15) thus describes the state of Manchester : — " The inhabitants thereof are well set a-work in making cloths as well of linen as of woollen, whereby the inhabitants have obtained, gotten, and come unto riches and wealthy living, and have kept and sat many artificers and poor folk to work within the said town, and many poor folks had living and children and servants there, virtuously brought up in honest and true labor out of all idleness." The sumptuary laws of the 15th century seem to have originated chiefly in a desire to keep up the distinction of ranks by costume, which the growing wealth of the burgesses, tenantry, and freemen tended to confound. . . .
We were on the eve of the Reformation, and that great event ushered in an era in our literature which produced Shakspeare. Before, however, that modern age of the last 360 years had established its characteristic features, new forms of evil had to be subdued. The system of frank-pledge, combined with the condition of serfs and villeins, had long prevented the migration of the people. We have seen how these restraints were dissolved, and how, in the appropriation of one third of the tithes to the relief of the poor, and in the succour administered by the monasteries and churches, migration was fostered, and the inevitable hardships of a struggle for freedom were mitigated. But this charity was liable to abuse, and in an age when the corruption of the monastic communities prepared the nation for their general suppression, and a large secularisation of ecclesiastical revenues, an ill-regulated charity cherished idleness, vagabondage, and crime. The laws, therefore, through a series of reigns, became more and more stringent against sturdy beggars and vagabonds. The rigor of these enactments tended even to defeat the object in the absence of a legal provision for indigence, and of an efficient police to prevent disorder and pursue crime. But by degrees the distinction between the impotent and able-bodied poor was established ; the former were to be relieved, the latter were to be set on work. The dissolution of the monasteries by dispersing the crowd of idle and useless persons who were fed by the abused charity of the Church, and releasing from the vow of celibacy great numbers of monks, is supposed to have added at least 200,000 persons to the effective stock of the population. This in the prevalent corruption of their manners could not occur without disorders, and therefore we may feel surprise, considering the despotic authority and the ruthless provisions of the criminal law, that in the reign of Henry VIII., 72,000 persons were executed for theft and robbery. The relief of the poor was transferred from the charity administered from the resources of the Church without the restraints of police and law, into a legal assessment giving security for life, so as to increase public order and with it the security of property. It was essentially a measure of police, and every step of its development was accompanied by positive enactments for setting the able-bodied poor on work, and for the suppression of mendicancy and vagabondage. Among these remained that which survives to this day among the last features of the original condition of the Saxon serfs and villeins awaiting the final acts of their emancipation. The law of settlement represents by its interference with the migration of labor (without which the manufacturing system could not have been built up) the condition of the serf when he was the chattel of his lord and lived on his land as one of the beasts of burden, and the state of the villein, who, though he had a right to his land so long as he acquitted the service, dues, and obligations by which it was held, could not remove from it, and was conveyed with the estate as part of the inheritance, sold "mid mete and mid mannum." As the reformation in religion was the sign of an independence of thought which dared to set up the rights of conscience to the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures in the place of the authority of the Church, sundry consequences immediately followed. The Bible must be made accessible to the vulgar, and for that purpose the version in the vulgar tongue was chained to the pillars of the churches and read aloud to the people at stated hours. The Liturgy must be adapted to the change, and homilies issued to be read by the clergy. A national church, in a State which recognised the right of private judgment, had been founded, and might be regulated by the Legislature. Hence, on the secularisation of the ecclesiastical revenues, Cranmer desired to devote a large portion of them to a new episcopal organisation, providing extensively for the education of the people. In the reign of Edward VI, part of this plan was adopted in the foundation of numerous grammar schools, and the same design was from time to time carried out in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I. Probably the schools thus founded by the Tudor dynasty and sanctioned by the Stuarts themselves, reared the sturdy yeomanry and middle class who fought the battles of the Long Parliament against the usurpations of the Crown, and who, whatever errors or crimes they committed, handed down to us the institutions of our Saxon forefathers strengthened by the civilisation of 1000 years. From the end of the reign of Elizabeth, at the beginning of the 17th century, to the present time, three great objects have chiefly occupied the domestic Legislature of Great Britain, though they were never separated in action, so as to divide these two centuries and a half into three distinct periods. These three objects were constitutional freedom, colonisation and commerce, and, lastly, the development of manufactures by invention and art. . . .

Age (Melbourne, Vic.  1859,) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article154879963