Excerpts from the last lectures of Carroll Quigley(continued)

"By 1776 there was a landed oligarchy in England. That landed oligarchy controlled the Parliament. It had taken it away from the king in the civil wars of the seventeenth century. It also controlled the court system and the interpretation of the law. Naturally, when any dispute arose, 'What rights does someone have in this piece of land?' they invariably decided in favor of the landlord group and against any other group, above all, any peasants. As a result, England's rural areas became depopulated. In the early eighteenth century, Goldsmith wrote 'The Deserted Village'. 'Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain...but there's no one there'. Or if you read 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard' once again there's no one around. The whole countryside was deserted by the end of the eighteenth century. The people came to America, or they went to other places, and this eventually gave us the British Empire."