We are accustomed to read and talk of "merry England," but we sometimes fail to think how much real suffering lay beneath the surface of the merriment. Herrick, one of our charming old lyric poets, has sung the glories of the hock-cart--the cart that bore the full sheaves to the empty barn:-- "The harvest swains and wenches bound For joy, to see the hock-cart crown'd; About the cart hear how the rout Of rural younglings raise the shout, Pressing before, some coming after, Those with a shout, and these with laughter. Some bless the cart, some kiss the sheaves, Some prank them up with oaken leaves; Some cross the fill-horse, some with great Devotion stroke the home-borne wheat." Assuredly there was joy and there was devotion; for the laden cart made the difference between plenty and starvation. Before that harvest-home came there had been many an aching heart in the village hovels, for there was no store to equalize prices, and no communication to make the abundance of one district--much less of one country--mitigate the scarcity of another. It was not a question of the rise or the fall of a penny or two in the price of a loaf of bread; it was a question of bread or no bread. [Illustration: The Hock-Cart.] During those dark periods the crown carried on the war against capital with an industry that could not be exceeded by that of the nobles or the people. Before the great charter the Commons complained that King Henry seized upon whatever was suited to his royal pleasure--horses, implements, food, anything that presented itself in the shape of accumulated labour. In the reign of Henry III. a statute was passed to remedy excessive distresses; from which it appeared that it was no unfrequent practice for the king's officers to take the opportunity of seizing the farmer's oxen at the moment when they were employed in ploughing, or, as the statute says, "winning the earth,"--taking them off, and starving them to death, or only restoring them with new and enormous exactions for their keep. Previous to the Charter of the Forest no man could dig a marl-pit on his own ground, lest the king's horses should fall into it when he was hunting. As late as the time of James I. we find, from a speech of the great Lord Bacon, that it was a pretty constant practice of the king's purveyors to extort large sums of money by threatening to cut down favourite trees which grew near a mansion-house or in avenues. Despotism, in all ages, has depopulated the finest countries, by rendering capital insecure, and therefore unproductive; insomuch that Montesquieu lays it down as a maxim, that lands are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but in proportion to their freedom. In the fifteenth century, in England, we find sums of money voted for the restoration of decayed towns and villages. Just laws would have restored them much more quickly and effectually. The state of agriculture was so low that the most absurd