[469] Robert Cushman, "Reasons and Considerations touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the parts of America" (printed by E. Arber, _The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers_).
[470] Harrison in _Elizabethan England_ (Withington), chap. x.
[471] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., pp. 160-161: "Orders agreed to by the Justices of the Peace for Cornwall at General Sessions for Bodmin the 5th and Truro the 8th of April, 39 Eliz."
And the Poor Law is a police measure for the necessity of which the agrarian changes are largely responsible. In spite of all the obstacles in the way of migration, in spite of whip and courteous refreshment, men do in fact migrate, and not only men, but women and children. By the latter part of the century, at any rate, statesmen have begun to understand that pauperism and vagrancy stand to the depopulation caused by enclosure in the relation of effect to cause. The revolution in the official attitude to the problem caused by this belated illumination is as great as that which has taken place in the last ten years with regard to unemployment. Once the new standpoint has been seized, though opinion, and the opinion not only of the ruling classes, but of burgesses and villagers, still treats the vagrant with iron severity, it never quite relapses into the comfortable doctrine, the grand discovery of a commercial age, that distress is itself a proof of the demerits of its victim, and that Heaven, like a Utilitarian philosopher, permits the existence of destitution only that it may make "less eligible" the lot of "improvidence and vice." It is saved from this last error not by the lore of economists, but because it regards economic questions through the eyes of a sturdy matter-of-fact morality. It is sufficiently enlightened to recognise that even among vagrants there is a class which is more sinned against than sinning, a class of whom it can be asked "at whose hands shall the blood of these men be required?"[472] It is sufficiently ingenuous to answer by pointing to "some covetous man" who, "espying a further commodity in their commons, holds, and tenures, doth find such means as thereby to wipe many out of their occupyings and turn the same unto his private gains."[473] Occasionally the effect of enclosures is brought home to the encloser in a practical way, by compelling him not only to pay a fine to the Crown, but also to make a contribution towards the relief of the poor whose numbers he has increased.[474]