the "three profits,"—of which our "miraculous Premier" is so enamoured, that he has taken to demonstrating that the arrangement is a law of nature.
The English laborer is the true servus servorum, the slave of the farmer, who is in turn the slave of landlord and parson. On him presses with crushing weight the whole fabric of "society." He is the subject-matter, the corpus vile of the great unpaid. Where were the judicial dignity of Justice Shallow but for the peccant Hodge who pilfers a turnip, gathers a mushroom, or knocks over a hare? Where were the pride of "officers and gentlemen," were there no regiments of full privates recruited from rural England to command? On whom could the so-called National Church unctuously enjoin contentment with the condition of life wherein it has pleased God to place them, were there no serfs of the soil among her presumed adherents?
Indeed, for many generations the combination of powers spiritual and temporal against the English agricultural laborer has been so irresistible, that the marvel is he has the smallest manhood left. Reform after reform has passed him by unheeded, or rather has increased the distance between him and other classes of the community. The Protestant Reformation deprived him of the charities of the monasteries, and in their place put in force poor laws of unexampled barbarity. It found him sunk in ignorance, and it kept him so. In time reform bills came; but who should bestow franchises on a being so abject? Free trade gave a new impetus to British commerce; but, let the economists explain it as best they may, the Manchester cornucopia never poured any of its abundance into Hodge's lap. He was seemingly beyond the beneficent opera-
