THE WORKING-CLASSES IN 'THE GOOD OLD TIMES.' As it has become fashionable in some quarters to hold that the working-classes are ever sinking in position, and that they have lost the comforts, the pleasures, and the freedom of the 'good old times,' it may serve a useful purpose to put together, from authentic sources, some notices of their actual condition among our ancestors. To associate our present working-classes with slavery would seem an insult; and it would be said, that it is a condition to which they could not, under any circumstances, be induced to submit. But although this is true of their present condition, it is equally true, that not only in the rest of Europe, but even in England and Scotland, those who of old held the position of the working-classes, were slaves in the strictest sense of the term. Among our Saxon ancestors, to whose free institutions our historians so often proudly refer, two-thirds of the people--that is, in short, the whole of the working-classes--are computed to have been slaves. Sir Walter Scott, whose descriptions of life and manners are as faithful as they are picturesque, gives an admirable sketch of the slave or thrall of the Saxons in the faithful Gurth, the follower of Ivanhoe. First, we have the account of his close-fitting tunic, made of skin; after which follows that of a part of his dress which, Sir Walter said, was too remarkable to be overlooked. 'It was a brass ring resembling a dog's collar, but without any opening, and soldered fast round his neck, so loose as to form no impediment to his breathing, yet so tight as to be incapable of being removed except by the use of the file. On this singular gorget was engraved in Saxon characters--"Gurth, the son of Beowald, the born thrall of Cedric the Saxon."' For two or three centuries after the Conquest, there is no doubt that the peasantry were liable to be bought and sold as slaves. Even in Magna Charta, there is a prohibition that a guardian shall not 'waste the men or cattle' in the estate of the ward: there is here no consideration for the men who might be 'wasted;' it is all for the property of the ward, which is not to be injured through the cupidity or carelessness of his guardian. Sir Frederic Eden, the historian of the poor-law, adduces many instances in which slaves had been sold--thus in 1283, a slave and his family were sold by the Abbey of Dunstable for 13s. 4d.