Note 305 — Chapter II

The history of the decay of that once most important class, the English yeomanry, is an interesting subject, and one for which I have collected considerable materials; at present, I will only say, that its decline was first distinctly perceptible in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and was consummated by the rapidly-increasing power of the commercial and manufacturing classes early in the eighteenth century. After losing their influence, their numbers naturally diminished, and they made way for other bodies of men, whose habits of mind were less prejudiced, and therefore better suited to that new state which society assumed in the last age. I mention this, because some writers regret the almost total destruction of the yeoman freeholders; overlooking the fact, that they are disappearing, not in consequence of any violent revolution or stretch of arbitrary power, but simply by the general march of affairs; society doing away with what it no longer requires. Compare Kay's Social Condition of the People, vol. i. pp. 43, 602, with a letter from Wordsworth in Bunbury's Correspond. of Hanmer, p. 440; a note in Mill's Polit. Econ. vol. i. pp. 311, 312; another in Nichols's Lit. Anec. vol. v. p. 323; and Sinclair's Correspond. vol. i. p. 229.