Now let us glance at the history of the past. For two centuries after the Norman conquest, intestine war and feudal oppressions embittered the life of the British labourer. He might be called from the plough at any moment to take up arms in his master’s quarrel, and if he sowed seed and saw his fields ripen, the harvest of his hopes might still be cut down by the sword of the forager, or trodden by the hoof of the war-horse. He was bondsman and slave, defenceless in the hands of the lords of the soil, who at best, protected him only in the barest necessities of a scanty livelihood—a hut without a chimney, its furniture a great brass pot and a bed valued at a few shillings. (Wade’s _History of the Working Classes_.) A change for the better came after the plague of 1348, and, when by perpetual warfare with France, men had become more valuable through diminution of their number. King Edward the Third freed the bondsmen to recruit his armies, and enforced villeinry service was exchanged for service paid by wages—these, however, were ordinarily fixed by statute. In the middle of the eighteenth century wages stood at the ratio of about a bushel and a half of wheat for one week’s labour; by the middle of the nineteenth century they had fallen to what could only purchase one bushel of wheat. (_Threading my Way_, R. D. Owen, p. 220.) The cause of this change was that meanwhile, two clever men—Arkwright and Watt—had made discoveries which gave an impetus to industry beyond all previous experience. Mechanical aids to production were invented, and the consequent cheapening of products created more and more demand. Machinery and human labour side by side were under stress and strain to meet the call of new desires. Cotton and wool and flax were woven into fabrics and poured out of Great Britain to every quarter of the globe; capital was amassed, and wealthy capitalists bid against each other for more labour still. Agriculturists flocked into towns, factories sprang up in all directions, population rapidly increased, and children were sucked into the industrial maelstrom, for health and happiness were in no way considered when remunerative work was offered.