under the control of their employers. With each step in this direction, consolidation of the land tends to increase, and there is increased necessity for "cheap labour." "The whole question" of England's manufacturing superiority, we are told, "has become one of a cheap and abundant supply of labour."[162] That is, if labour can be kept down, and the labourer can be prevented from having a choice of employers, then the system may be maintained, but not otherwise. Where, however, the labourer has not the power of determining for whom he will work, he is a slave; and to that condition it is that the system tends to reduce the English people, as it has already done with the once free men of India. Alarmed at the idea that the present flight from England may tend to give the labourer power to select his employer, and to have some control over the amount of his reward, the London _Times_ suggests the expediency of importing cheap labourers from Germany and other parts of the continent, to aid in underworking their fellow-labourers in America and in India. It has been well said that, according to some political economists, "man was made for the land, and not the land for man." In England, it would almost seem as if he had been made for cotton mills. Such would appear now to be the views of the _Times_, as, a quarter of a century since, they certainly were of Mr. Huskisson. The object of all sound political economy is that of raising the labourer, and increasing the dignity of labour. That of the English system is to "keep labour down," and to degrade the labourer to the condition of a mere slave; and such is its effect everywhere--and nowhere is its tendency in that direction more obvious than in England itself.[163] Consolidation of land on one side and a determination to underwork the world on the other, are producing a rapid deterioration of material and moral condition, and, as a natural consequence, there is a steady diminution in the power of local self-government. The diminution of the agricultural population and the centralization of exchanges have been attended by decay of the agricultural towns, and their remaining people become less and less capable of performing for themselves those duties to which their predecessors were accustomed--and hence it is that political centralization grows so rapidly. Scarcely a session of Parliament now passes without witnessing the creation of a new commission for the management of the poor, the drainage of towns, the regulation of lodging-houses, or other matters that could be better attended to by the local authorities, were it not that the population, is being so rapidly divided into two classes widely remote from each other--the poor labourer and the rich absentee landlord or other capitalist.