The state of the agricultural labourer at the end of the Anti-Jacobin War,
 during which landed proprietors, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers,
 stockbrokers, army-contractors, &c., enriched themselves so
 extraordinarily, has been already indicated above. The nominal wages rose in
 consequence partly of the bank-note depreciation, partly of a rise in the price
 of the primary means of subsistence independent of this depreciation. But the
 actual wage-variation can be evidenced in a very simple way, without entering
 into details that are here unnecessary. The Poor Law and its administration
 were in 1795 and 1814 the same. It will be remembered how this law was carried
 out in the country districts: in the form of alms the parish made up the
 nominal wage to the nominal sum required for the simple vegetation of the
 labourer. The ratio between the wages paid by the farmer, and the wage-deficit
 made good by the parish, shows us two things. First, the falling of wages below
 their minimum; second, the degree in which the agricultural labourer was a
 compound of wage labourer and pauper, or the degree in which he had been turned
 into a serf of his parish. Let us take one county that represents the average
 condition of things in all counties. In Northamptonshire, in 1795, the average
 weekly wage was 7s. 6d.; the total yearly
 expenditure of a family of 6 persons, £36 12s. 5d.; their total income, £29
 18s.; deficit made good by the parish, £6 14s. 5d. In 1814, in the same county,
 the weekly wage was 12s. 2d.; the total yearly expenditure of a family of 5
 persons, £54 18s. 4d.; their total income, £36, 2s.; deficit made good by the
 parish, £18 6s. 4d. [79] In 1795
 the deficit was less than 1/4 the wage, in 1814, more than half. It is
 self-evident that, under these circumstances, the meagre comforts that Eden
 still found in the cottage of the agricultural labourer, had vanished by 1814.
 [80] Of all the animals kept by the
 farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was, thenceforth, the
 most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.