While the whole of this description of the ordeal that the farmers had to pass through is interesting, the point I desire here to emphasize is the need of a larger capital after enclosure. Those who had the requisite skill, knowledge, energy and capital survived the crisis; they were able to take up the farms which their weaker neighbours were compelled to relinquish; to send, in almost every case, a larger _surplus_ of food from the lands of the parish to maintain the state and power of England, and to pay higher rents. In perhaps the majority of cases they raised a larger gross produce, and provided maintenance and employment for a larger population than before. In some cases even (though these were rare exceptions) the labouring population gained in material prosperity as well as in numbers. But in any case the relationship between employer and employed was notably altered. In the open field village the entirely landless labourer was scarcely to be found. The division of holdings into numerous scattered pieces, many of which were of minute size, made it easy for a labourer to obtain what were in effect allotments in the common fields. If he had no holding, he still might have a common right; if no acknowledged common right, he might enjoy the advantage of one in a greater or less degree. From the poorest labourer to the richest farmer, there was, in the typical open field village, a gradation of rank. There was no perceptible social gap between the cottager who worked the greater part of his time for others, and for the smaller part of his time on his own holding, who is therefore properly termed a labourer, and his neighbour who reversed that distribution of time, and is therefore to be deemed a farmer. It was easy for the efficient or fortunate man to rise on such a social ladder; equally easy for the inefficient or unlucky to slip downwards. After enclosure the comparatively few surviving farmers, enriched, elevated intellectually as well as socially by the successful struggle with a new environment, faced, across a deep social gulf, the labourers who had now only their labour to depend upon. In the early part of the nineteenth century, at any rate, it was almost impossible for a labourer to cross that gulf; on his side the farmer henceforward, instead of easily becoming a farm labourer if bankrupt, would rather try his fortune in the growing industrial towns. Our “Country Farmer” gives us a vivid picture of one side of the social change (“Thoughts on Enclosure,” p. 21). Of the farmer after enclosure he says: