declared that the laboring man could no longer live on the wages
assigned to him by the Act of Henry VIII.; and a sliding scale was
instituted, by which, for the future, wages should be adjusted to
the price of food. The same conclusion may be gathered also
indirectly fom the acts interfering imperiously with the rights of
property where a disposition showed itself to exercise them
selfishly.

"The city merchants, as I have said, were becoming landowners, and
some of them attempted to apply their rules of trade to the
management of landed estates. While wages were rated so high, it
answered better as a speculation to convert arable land into
pasture, but the law immediately stepped in to prevent a proceeding
which it regarded as petty treason to the state. Self-protection is
the first law of life, and the country, relying for its defence on
an able-bodied population, evenly distributed, ready at any moment
to be called into action, either against foreign invasion or civil
disturbance, it could not permit the owners of land to pursue, for
their own benefit, a course of action which threatened to weaken
its garrisons. It is not often that we are able to test the wisdom
of legislation by specific results so clearly as in the present
instance. The first attempts of the kind which I have described
were made in the Isle of Wight early in the reign of Henry VII.
Lying so directly exposed to attacks by France, the Isle of Wight
was a place which it was peculiarly important to keep in a state of
defence, and the 4th Henry VII., cap. 16, was passed to prevent the
depopulation of the Isle of Wight, occasioned by the system of
large farms."

The city merchants alluded to by Froude seem to have remembered