We thus see the condition of the laboring man rise, in five hundred
years, from 112 hours' labor for sixty pounds of wheat to about six or
seven hours' work, and from 1372 hours' labor for 400 pounds of beef to
267 hours' labor for the same weight of better food!
But the atheist will say that the laborer of the olden time _did not
work_, and got along by hook or crook; that, as it was a miracle if he
lived with such wages, anyway, he had every inducement to become a
vagabond. But all this had "been seen to." Such things are never
unforeseen.