they have never presented a coherent and compelling explanation of why this market should be treated differently from other markets. - Karl Polanyi

Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the promise of boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter.

Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich is against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'. The fabric of society was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.

Another feature of the reversal of the Speenhamland method was less obvious to most nineteenth-century writers, namely, that the wage system had to be made universal in the interest also of the wage-earners themselves, even though this meant depriving them of their legal claim to subsistence. The "right to live" had proved a death trap to them.