Moreover, when it came to legislating
against the mutinous labourers, King and Parliament, while sternly
setting their faces against the rise in wages, _do not take the
twenty-third year of the King as the standard year_ by which to
settle what the normal rate of wages should be. They go back to the
twentieth year, _ou cynk ou sis ans devans_. That is to say, the
wages had been steadily rising for ten years before the plague; the
labourers had been getting their share of the increased prosperity of
the country; and the Statute of Labourers was only one of the clumsy
attempts to interfere with the action of a great economical law which
had been working silently for the advantage of the operatives long
before the Black Death had come to perplex and confuse men's minds
and disturb their calculations.
* * * * * * *
Some of us remember when the science of geology was young--and we
were young too--we remember how there was a certain romance and
fascination about those fearless and richly imaginative theories
which explained all the great changes in the crust of the earth by
magnificent cataclysms, upheaving, exploding, overwhelming. The crack
of doom meant something after all! What had been should be again. Old
times had stories to tell of sublime catastrophes, the crash of
systems, and the swallowing up of chains of cloud-capped mountains in
the yawning abysses of a world that might at any moment turn itself
inside out.
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