able-bodied unskilled labourer earns, as soon as he has arrived at man's
estate, as large an amount of wages as he will earn at any subsequent time;
and having no connection with his employer beyond the receiving the due
amount of weekly money from him, and thinking himself as well able to marry
as he is likely to be, he takes a wife, and is usually the father of a
family before he is thirty. Before the Reformation, not only were early
marriages determinately discouraged, but the opportunity for them did not
exist. A labourer living in a cottage by himself was a rare exception to
the rule; and the work of the field was performed generally, as it now is
in the large farms in America and Australia, by servants who lived in the
families of the squire or the farmer, and who, while in that position,
commonly remained single, and married only when by prudence they had saved
a sufficient sum to enable them to enter some other position.

Checked by circumstances of this kind, population would necessarily remain
almost stationary, and a tendency to an increase was not of itself regarded
by the statesmen of the day as any matter for congratulation or as any
evidence of national prosperity. Not an increase of population, which would
facilitate production and beat down wages by competition, but the increase
of the commonwealth, the sound and healthy maintenance of the population
already existing, were the chief objects which the government proposed to
itself; and although Henry VIII. carefully nursed his manufactures, there
is sufficient proof in the grounds alleged for the measures to which he
resorted, that there was little redundancy of occupation.

In a statute, for instance, for the encouragement of the linen
manufactures, it is said[2] that--"The King's Highness, calling to his most
blessed remembrance the great number of idle people daily increasing
throughout this his Realm, supposeth that one great cause thereof is by the
continued bringing into the same the great number of wares and merchandise