dent' nations, it may be pardonable to take first the case of our own country.

With the establishment of the Feudal system, England, along with other nations, passed, to a great extent, into the self-subsistent state.

How did she get out of it?

There are few pages of international history which, if we could get at the facts, would be more instructive, than that which records the partial migration of the fishing trade and woollen manufacture from the Dutch to the British shores of the German ocean, the consequent partial decline of Flemish trade and manufactures, and the planting on English soil five centuries ago of the germ of that maritime enterprize and manufacturing skill which is the distinctive mark of the English nation at this day.

It

With regard to the fishing trade, something may be attributed to physical causes. The sea gradually encroached on the Dutch shore until at length it converted what was once an inland lake into the Zuyder Zee, and formed what was once part of the main land into the island of Walcheren. gradually, meanwhile, receded from the English coast forming Yarmouth sands and port, where a bay had once washed inland between the two Roman stations of Burgh and Caister, almost as far as Norwich. And from whatever cause, in

course of time, Yarmouth port became a great fishing station, much frequented by Dutch fishing and trading vessels, and ultimately possessing a large and rapidly increasing mercantile marine of its own. It is not perhaps generally known that, under these circumstances, the population of this fishing town had risen by the middle of the fourteenth century to a point which it had not passed four centuries after.

With regard to the woollen manufacture, the inundations on the Flemish coast had doubtless something to do with the migration of Flemish worsted weavers to those British ports with which their seamen were most familiar. A more potent cause, however, was to be found in the internal and international anarchy prevailing around them, notwithstanding the influence of the Hanseatic league.

This league did not wholly prevent internal dissensions, nor could it prevent nations, who had nothing to do with it, from going to war, or exercising belligerent rights.

Flemish manufacturers were greatly dependent on English wool, as Lancashire manufacturers are now dependent upon American cotton. Constant interruption of international intercourse, sometimes for years together, made this dependence of Flemish weavers upon the importation of the raw material from England hazardous in a high degree. Whenever it was the interest of England to do so,

whether as a civil or a military measure, the exportation of English wool was taxed or prohibited altogether by the English Parliament. Flemish weavers were thus liable to suffer from a wool famine, as our Lancashire weavers are now suffering from a cotton famine. These facts, together with the existence of a strong and tolerably settled government in England, were sufficient to induce large numbers of Flemings to migrate with their looms across the German Ocean to the land from whence much of their supply of wool had hitherto been drawn. The consequence to England was that the towns of the Eastern Counties began to swarm with worsted weavers, and the manufacture of cloth, by degrees spreading into other districts, took permanent root on British soil, and became a recognised source of employment and wealth to the English town population.

It is not perhaps generally known that the result of this Flemish immigration and the internal migration from rural to manufacturing districts which followed as its natural consequence, was so marked that the population of the counties in which the woollen manufacture rooted itself increased with almost incredible rapidity. I believe it may be stated with safety that the counties of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincoln, and the East Riding of Yorkshire, contained as large or a larger population in 1347 than, after a lapse of five centuries, they did in 1847.

And this important and almost forgotten fact bore other fruits.

The stream of emigration from the rural to the manufacturing districts naturally bore with it bond as well as free men. It presented a kind of ' underground railroad,' somewhat analogous to that between slave and free states in America, for the fugitive serf who could prove residence in a free town for a year and a day was legally enfranchised, and beyond the reach of any fugitive slave law.

The weeding out by the dread pestilence of 1348-9 of perhaps two or three millions (out of five or six millions) of the English people struck another blow at the already undermined institution.

Leaving the number of British acres unreduced, but reducing the number of tillers of them perhaps by one-half, this deadly plague caused great scarcity of labour. The value of the serf, in other words, rose in the market, and, luckily for him, his pluck rose with his sense of power.

The towns had suffered as much or even more than the country. There was great scarcity of labour in the towns, and consequently the wages of labour rose to double or treble their former amounts. What a premium this on the further immigration of fugitive serfs! Landowners invoked the aid of Parliament. Statutes were passed reciting that

' a great part of the people had died of the pestilence,' and enacting that serfs and labourers should work for the same services and wages as if nothing

had occurred.

But what were Acts of Parliament in such a case? In their own recitals we read the history of half a century of constant strikes and risings of the serfs, maintained as strikes are now by systematic contributions, of wholesale immigration of fugitive serfs into the towns by connivance of the townsmen, and finally of the general rising in various parts of England, known as Wat Tyler's rebellion. The result of all this was that serfdom was once for all turned up by the roots and the vegetable phase of the serf's history ended for ever. - That portion of the British population which hitherto had been rooted to the soil now became, like the free town population, by its own act, to a great extent detached from the soil, and dependent upon wages in return for free work done.

Nor was the freedom of the peasantry a onesided bargain. Serfs having claimed the right to do as they liked with their labour, landlords soon learned to do what they liked with their land. The depopulation of the pestilence had permanently reduced its market value for ordinary agricultural purposes. There were no longer hands enough, bond or free, to till the cultivated land of England as it had been tilled before. And therefore, because it required fewer hands and paid them better, landowners began very naturally to turn arable land by wholesale into sheep walks, and grow wool instead of corn. Because feeding sheep paid them