CHAPTER V - THE INCREASE OF SHEER-FARMING, AND THE GROWTH OF A PROLETARIATE

Summary

We have already in the last chapter dwelt on the conversion of arable land into pasture, and on the enclosures of the waste for the purpose of sheep farming. We have assigned this phenomenon to what we believe to have been its real cause. It was a natural and inevitable step, resulting from the high price of labour and the profitable character of the industry of sheep-farming. In the social changes which this involved, the country was brought face to face with a difficulty which must sooner or later have made itself felt. Undoubtedly, labourers dependent solely on the sale of their labour suffered from the decrease of arable farming. So, at another time, operatives have been thrown out of work by changes in trade, and by the introduction of machinery. The process is a familiar one, even at the present day.

A contemplation of such incidents has provoked the modern socialist to say that the productive machinery of the country should be in the hands of Government, and that industrial enterprise should be manipulated in the interest of the classes who have nothing but their labour to sell. The economist, on the other hand, points out that Government organisation of labour will not prevent changes in the currents and direction of trade, and insists that the right way for a people to meet these inevitable fluctuations is by giving increased facility for individual ownership, and that this can only be done by removing not by increasing the restrictions on the mobility of property.