Yet patient students of those times, such men as Professor
Thorold Eogers, who has devoted himself to the history of
prices, and has deciphered the records of colleges, of nianors,
and public offices, tell us that the condition of the English
laborer was not only relatively but absolutely better in those
rude times than it is in England to-day, after five centuries of
advance in the productive arts. They tell us that the working-
man did not work so hard as he does now, and lived better;
that he was exempt from the harassing dread of being forced
by loss of employment to want and beggary, or of leaving
a family that must apply to charity to avoid starvation.
Pauperism, as it prevails in rich England of the nineteenth
century, was, in the far poorer England of the fourteenth cen-
tury, absolutely unknown. Medicine was empirical and super-
stitious. Sanitary regulations and precautions were all but un-
known. There was frequently plague and occasionally famine ;
for owing to the difficulties of transportation, the scarcity of
one district could not be relieved by the plenty of another. But
men did not — as they do now — starve in the midst of abundance ;
and, what is perhaps the most significant of all, women and
children were not worked as they are to-day; but the eight-
hour system, which even the working-classes of the United
States, with all the profusion of labor-saving machinery and
appliances, have not yet attained, was then the common system."

John Stuart Mill, in his work on political economy, says,
"Hitherto it is questionable if all mechanical inventions yet
made have lightened the day's burden of any human being.
