communism bred of the preachings of the more visionary among the Wycliffites mingles in the movement with the sense of fiscal and industrial wrong. "When Adam delved and Eve span, where was then the gentleman?" is the motto of the villeins, and it is one of more formidable import than any utterance of peasant orators at Agricultural Labourers' meetings in the present day. Then come fearful scenes of confusion, violence and crime. London is in the power of hordes brutalized by oppression. High offices of state, high ecclesiastics are murdered. Special vengeance falls on the lawyers, as the artificers who forged the cunning chains of feudal iniquity. The rulers, the troops, are paralyzed by the aspect of the sea of furious savagery raging round them. The boy king, by a miraculous exhibition of courageous self- possession, saves the State; but he is compelled to grant general charters of manumission, which, when the danger is over, the feudal parliament forces him by a unanimous vote to repudiate. Wholesale hanging of serfs, of course, follows the landlords' victory. The rising under Jack Cade, in the reign of Henry VI., was rather political than industrial. The demands of the insurgents, political reform and freedom of suffrage, show that progress had been made in the condition and aspirations of the labouring class. But with the age of the Tudors came the final breakup in England of feudalism, as well as of Catholicism, attended by disturbances in the world of labour, similar to those which have attended the abolition of slavery in the Southern States. This is the special epoch of the sanguinary vagrancy laws, the most sanguinary of which was framed by the hand of Henry VIII. The new nobility of courtiers and upstarts, who had shared with the king the plunder of the monasteries, were hard landlords of course; they robbed the people of their rights of common, and swept away homesteads and cottages, to make room for sheep farms, the wool trade being the great source of wealth in those days. By the spoliation of the monasteries, the great alms-houses of the Middle Ages, the poor had also been left for a time without the relief, which was given them again in a more regular form by the Poor Law of Elizabeth. Hence in the reign of Edward VI., armed strikes again, in different parts of the kingdom. In the West, the movement was mainly religious; but in the Eastern countries, under Kett of Norfolk, it was agrarian. Kett's movement after a brief period of success, during which the behaviour of the insurgents and their leader was very creditable, was put down by the disciplined mercenaries under the command of the new aristocracy, and its suppression was of course followed by a vigorous use of the gallows. No doubt the industrial conservatives of those days were as frightened, as angry, and as eager for strong measures as their successors are now: but the awkwardness of the newly liberated captive, in the use of his limbs