well and good. But theirs is an occupation in which there
is much room for "unlawful subtlety and sleight," for
eking out the legitimate profits earned by the labour of
transport, with underhand gains filched from the neces-
sitous by buying cheap and selling dear, for speculations
perilously near the sin of the usurers who traffic in time
itself. Outside the circle of a few statesmen and financiers,
the men of the sixteenth century have not mastered the
secret by which modern societies feed and clothe (with
partial success) dense millions who have never seen wheat
or wool, though London and Bristol and Southampton are
beginning to grope towards it. Looking at the cornfields
which are visible from the centre of even the largest cities,
they see that a small harvest means poverty and a good
harvest prosperity, and that a decrease of a few hundred
acres in the area sown may make all the difference between
scarcity and abundance. A shortage in grain, which would
cause a modern State to throw open its ports and to revise
its railway tariff, sets a sixteenth century town ¹ breaking
up its pastures and extending the area under tillage. No
man is so clearly a "productive labourer" as the husband-
man, because no man so unmistakably adds to the most
obvious and indispensable forms of wealth; and though,
in the system of classes which makes up the State, there
are some whose function is more honourable, there is none
whose function is more necessary. In most ages there is
some body of men to whom their countrymen look with
pride as representing in a special degree the strength and
virtues of the nation. In the sixteenth century that class
consisted of the substantial yeoman. Men speak of them with
the same swaggering affection as is given by later generations
to the sea-dogs. The genius of England is a rural divinity
and does not yet rule the waves; but the English yeomen
have "in time past made all France afraid." ² They absorb

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