of work was, according to law, dragged to the nearest town on a hurdle, stripped, and whipped through the town until his body was covered with blood.  For a second offense his right ear was cut off and he received the bastinado.  For a third offense he was put to death.  An act passed under Edward VI. (1555) provided that the able-bodied laborer refusing work should be branded on the breast with the letter V and adjudged to the informer as his slave for two years.  The master might fasten a ring about the neck, arm, or leg.

REFORM.

Under William IV., by the act of 1832, the laboring hours of children were reduced to ten hours.  By the act of 1847 women were included in the ten-hour law.  By 1867 the power of the English working man had secured the permanence of a custom making ten hours a day’s work.  In the factories of Nottingham, England, the men make as high as fourteen dollars a week.  Improved machinery has raised their wages.  At the spinning machines which formerly required two men, who each received $4.50 a week, there is now required one man, who gets $6.25.  At the beginning of the present century the workman in these mills earned 4-1/2 shillings a week.  At the present day he earns 10-1/2 shillings, with twenty-four hours’ less labor.

THE ENGLISH FIELD-LABORER

who now earns 3 shillings a day spends, for a family of eight, 15 shillings a week in bread, cheese, butter, washing, tea, sugar and schooling.  How much cheese, tea, butter, washing, sugar and schooling did our friend and his cubs of the fourteenth century enjoy?

Invention and economy are keeping far in advance of the effects of growth in population.  In 1766 England and Wales had but 8,500,000 inhabitants; now, there are 25,000,000.  The same thing is

TRUE OF AMERICA.

I have for authorities “England, Political and Social” by August Laugel, private secretary of the Duc d’Aumale, Notes and Queries, No 283, Green’s “History of the English People,” “Froude’s History of England,” and current numbers of the Mark Lane Express.

In the terms applied to the laborer, from pariah, helot, servus, serf, knecht, thrall, slave, villain, peasant, and laborer, to artisan and working-man—­there is a vision of progress as bright as the light which fell upon Saul of Tarsus as he journeyed toward Damascus.

To the man whose whole mind is given to the work he does, the time goes swiftly.  Many a man whom success has translated from the grocery, the plow-factory, the farm, to the matting and the yellow bedsteads of the seaside hotel, finds that he was happier at home, when he was poor, and that he was then often far more comfortable in body.

THE ATHEIST

does not “look upon a beautiful face and see a grinning skull.”  He must not, then, gaze upon the freest body of workingmen of all the ages and see but a chain of quarry-slaves scourged to their dungeons.