Why the country should begin to feel the acuteness of social wrong before the town is sufficiently obvious. In the town there are mitigations, and there are escapes. If the conditions of one trade become oppressive, it is easier to pass to another. The workers are better educated and better organised; there is a middle class, and the tyrant dare not bring matters to so high a crisis. The might of the wealthy, too, is divided; the poor man's employer is seldom at the same time his landlord. But in the country power easily gathers into the hands of the few. The labourer's opportunities and means of work, his home, his very standing-ground, are often all of them the property of one man. In the country the rich have a real power of life and death, and are less hampered by competition with each other and by the force of public opinion. One man cannot hold a city in fee, but one man can affect for evil or for good almost as large a population as a city's, when it is scattered across a countryside. This is precisely the state of wrong which Micah attacks. The social changes of the eighth century in Israel were peculiarly favourable to its growth.[842] The enormous increase of money which had been produced by the trade of Uzziah's reign threatened to overwhelm the simple economy under which every family had its croft. As in many another land and period, the social problem was the descent of wealthy men, land-hungry, upon the rural districts. They made the poor their debtors, and bought out the peasant proprietors. They absorbed into their power numbers of homes, and had at their individual disposal the lives and the happiness of thousands of their fellow-countrymen. Isaiah had cried, _Woe upon them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no room_ for the common people, and the inhabitants of the rural districts grow fewer and fewer.[843] Micah pictures the recklessness of those plutocrats--the fatal ease with which their wealth enabled them to dispossess the yeomen of Judah. The prophet speaks:-- _Woe to them that plan mischief,_ _And on their beds work out evil!_ _As soon as morning breaks they put it into execution,_ _For--it lies to the power of their hands! They covet fields and--seize them,_ _Houses and--lift them up._ _So they crush a good man and his home,_ _A man and his heritage._