Labor Author:Robert Dale Owen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: thing, except how to enjoy some moderate fraction of the enormous wealth they produce ; it is there that problem must soon bo solved—by her statesmen or her peop... more »le, peacefully or violently, in reform or in revolution. Nor should we delay its examination, until, in turn, it knocks at our doors. I do not propose here to venture a solution of the problem I have in view; distinctly to state it, is my humbler intention. As a useful preliminary, I propose to touch on some points of comparison between the condition and resources of former ages and those of the present: and as, beyond two centuries past, the ancestry of North America must chiefly be sought in Great Britain, to her early history I first direct my search. In England, as throughout Europe, during the feudal ages, war was the trade of men. To this, agriculture, commerce, and all handicrafts, were strictly subservient. The soil was held by military tenure; and the protection of the law, such as it was, purchased of the noble by the peasant, at the ' price of military service. It is difficult to imagine a state of things less favorable to the production of wealth. At any moment the serf might be taken from the plow, to arm in his liege lord's quarrel; or the craftsman called from his bench or his loom, to THE FEUDAL AGES. 17 bear the spear or bend the bow. And the loss of time and interruption of regular labor was but one item, and a small one, in the list of burdens imposed by the spirit of the ago. If, spite of all interruption, the seed was sown, and the harvest ripened, the chance yet remained, that it might bo cut down by the sword of the forager, or trampled under the hoof of the war-horse. The wording of the Borderer's account of a hostile inroad, in Scott's "Lay," is characteristic: " They crossed t...« less