During all this period, however, the country was developing, its industry and commerce expanding, and its wealth increasing by leaps and bounds; but in all this the "meaner sort," the Younger Brothers, the disinherited masses, had neither lot nor share. Though Clarendon may speak of the growing economical prosperity of the country during the time of which we are writing, yet there be no doubt of the truth of Thorold Rogers' contention, that[109:1]--"I am convinced from the comparison I have been able to make between wages, rents and prices, that it was a period of excessive misery among the mass of the people and the tenants, a time in which a few might have become rich, while the many were crushed down into hopeless and almost permanent indigence." And yet the facts are such as to compel him, when speaking of the Restoration, to point out that[110:1]--"the labourers, as far as the will went, were better off under the rule of the Saints than under that of the sinners." The English land-system, as we know it to-day, really began with the Restoration, when the very memory of Winstanley and his doctrines was swept away, when the men of the Model Army found themselves powerless, while "the great and wise men" of the nation "set up Monarchy again," humbly prostrating themselves at the feet of a licentious, cynical debauchee, and the Landocracy, new and old, found themselves in the saddle with far greater political power than they had ever before enjoyed. They soon found means of fastening their yoke more firmly than ever on the necks of the people, and of making short work of any claims of an independent yeomanry to any right to the soil of their native country apart from their good-will and pleasure. After some effort, they passed a Statute under which the estates of such of the free-holders as had no documentary evidence by which to support their titles, were confiscated and turned into tenancies at will. By means of Enclosure Acts they still further plundered and impoverished the peasantry, by appropriating to themselves millions of acres of land over which these still had some right, some enjoyment. By means of the Law of Parochial Settlement, as Thorold Rogers repeatedly points out,[110:2] they "consummated the degradation of the labourer"; and made him, as it has left him, what the same impartial authority well terms "the most portentous phenomenon in agriculture, a serf without land." By means of their Financial Policy they rid themselves of the duties which originally accompanied the privilege of land-holding, viz. to provide the necessary public revenues for all defence purposes, and converted themselves from Land Holders into Land Owners, by shifting the burden of taxation to the food, industry, and handicraft of those they had despoiled and disinherited. And, finally, for the first time in the history of England, they passed a Corn Law artificially to increase their rents, at the cost and to the detriment, often to the starvation,