their acres. Evidently British land could not bear this burden if brought
in competition with other equally good land that paid only a single rent,
and from a pretty early period the landlords appear to have been alive to
this fact. Nevertheless, ocean freights afforded a fair protection, and as
long as the industrial population remained tolerably self-supporting,
England rather tended to export than to import grain. But toward 1760
advances in applied science profoundly modified the equilibrium of English
society. The new inventions, stimulated by steam, could only be utilized
by costly machinery installed in large factories, which none but
considerable capitalists could build, but once in operation the product of
these factories undersold domestic labor, and ruined and evicted the
population of whole regions like Halifax. These unfortunate laborers were
thrust in abject destitution into filthy and dark alleys in cities, where
they herded in masses, in misery and crime. In consequence grain rose in
value, so much so that in 1766 prayers were offered touching its price.
Thenceforward England imported largely from America, and in 1773
Parliament was constrained to reduce the duty on wheat to a point lower
than the gentry conceded again, until the total repeal of the Corn Laws in
1846. [Footnote: John Morley, _The Life of Richard Cobden_, 167, note
5.] The situation was well understood in London. Burke, Governor Pownall,
and others explained it in Parliament, while Chatham implored the
landlords not to alienate America, which they could not, he told them,
conquer, but which gave them a necessary market,--a market as he aptly
said, both of supply and demand. And Chatham was right, for America not
only supplied the grain to feed English labor, but bought from England at
least one third of all her surplus manufactures.

This brings us to the eighteenth century, which directly concerns us,
because the religious superstition, which had previously caused men to
seek in a conscious supreme energy the effective motor in human affairs,