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