The chief difference between man in a rude, and man in a civilized state of society is, that the one wastes his force, whether natural or acquired,--the other economizes, that is, saves it. The man in a rude state has very rude instruments; he therefore wastes his force: the man in a civilized state has very perfect ones; he therefore economizes it. Should we not laugh at the gardener who went to hoe his potatoes with a stick having a short crook at the end? It would be a tool, we should say, fit only for children to use. Yet such a tool was doubtless employed by some very ancient nations; for there is an old medal of Syracuse which represents this very tool. The common hoe of the English gardener is a much more perfect tool, because it saves labour. Could we have any doubt of the madness of the man who would propose that all iron hoes should be abolished, to furnish more extensive employ to labourers who should be provided only with a crooked stick cut out of a hedge? The truth is, if the working men of England had no better tools than crooked sticks, they would be in a state of actual starvation. One of the chiefs of New Zealand, before that country had been colonized by us, told Mr. Marsden, a missionary, that his wooden spades were all broken, and he had not an axe to make any more;--his canoes were all broken, and he had not a nail or a gimlet to mend them with;--his potato-grounds were uncultivated, and he had not a hoe to break them up with;--and that _for want of cultivation_ he and his people would have nothing to eat. This shows the state of a people without tools. The man had seen English tools, and knew their value.
About three or four hundred years ago, from the times of king Henry IV. to those of king Henry VI., and, indeed, long before these reigns, there were often, as we have already mentioned, grievous famines in this country, because the land was very wretchedly cultivated. Men, women, and children perished of actual hunger by thousands; and those who survived kept themselves alive by eating the bark of trees, acorns, and pig-nuts. There were no machines then; but the condition of the labourers was so bad, that they could not be kept to work upon the land without those very severe and tyrannical laws noticed in Chap. VII., which absolutely forbade them to leave the station in which they were born as labourers, for any hope of bettering their condition in the towns. There were not labourers enough to till the ground, for they worked without any skill, with weak ploughs and awkward hoes. They were just as badly off as some of the people of Portugal and Spain, who are miserably poor, _because_ they have bad machines; or as the Chinese labourers, who have scarcely any machines, and are the poorest in the world. There was plenty of labour to be performed, but the tools were so bad, and the want of agricultural knowledge so universal, that the land was never half cultivated, and therefore all classes were poorly off. They had little corn to exchange for manufactures, and in consequence the labourer was badly clothed, badly lodged, and had a very indifferent share of the scanty crop which he raised. The condition of the labourer would have proceeded from bad to worse, had agricultural improvement not gone forward to improve the general condition of all classes. Commons were enclosed; arable land was laid down to pasture; sheep were kept upon grass-land where wretched crops had before been growing. This was superseding labour to a great extent, and much clamour was raised about this plan, and probably a large amount of real distress was produced. But mark the consequence. Although the money wages of labour were lowered, because there were more labourers in the market, the real amount of wages was higher, for better food was created by pasturage at a cheaper rate. The labourer then got meat who had never tasted it before; and when the use of animal food became general, there were cattle and corn enough to be exchanged for manufactured goods, and the labourer got a coat and a pair of shoes, who had formerly gone half naked. Step by step have we been going in the same direction for two centuries; and the agricultural industry of Great Britain is now as much directed to the production of meat, milk, butter, cheese, as to the growth of corn and other cereals. The once simple husbandry of our forefathers has become a scientific manufacture.