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validated.  who had been convicts and who formed Riley's third
class was comparatively free, and marriage between them and the
children of freedmen or prisoners was frequent and generally
approved. Indeed such connections were far more encouraged and
less a matter for reproach in early years than at a later date.
The lowest rung of the social ladder was made up of convicts
still under sentence and "free labourers". This was, of course,
a social and in no sense a legal equality. The development of a
class of "poor whites" was an inevitable consequence of the
existence of servile labour. The free man fell from the social
and economic point of view when he became a competitor of the
bond-servant whose labour was compulsory although paid for by
food, clothes and a yearly wage. The normal condition of a free
man in a country where land might be had for next to nothing and
cultivated with scarcely any capital was that of proprietor not
labourer, and