regard to labour has almost always been class-legislation. It is the effort of some dominant body to keep down a lower class, which had begun to show inconvenient aspirations. Such is clearly the nature of the celebrated Statute of Labourers, which was simply a futile attempt to prevent labour from getting its proper price. Brentano is doubtless right in saying that all statutes of labourers in the Middle Ages were framed with regard to the powers and wants of the landed proprietors, the feudal lords. The great Statute of Apprentices (5 Eliz. cap. 4), of which I shall have much to say, had a different origin. According to the opinion of historians, it represented the triumph of the craft-gilds-that is, the medieval trade-unions. If it was this, it was also more than this. Regarded as a piece of legislative handiwork, it certainly left nothing to be desired in thoroughness and comprehensiveness; but it was nevertheless a monstrous law. From beginning to end it aimed at industrial slavery. The Justices of the Peace could not only fix all rates of wages, but if they chose to exert their powers, could become the industrial despots of their district.

It has often been weakly remarked that probably this statute, however indefensible it may seem at the present day, was well suited to the then existing state of society. Such remarks imply ignorance of the contents of the statute. The general theory of the Act is that every servant or artificer shall be compelled to work in the trade to which he was brought up. Any workman departing from his city, town, or parish, without a testimonial from his previous employer or some officer, was to be imprisoned until he

procured a testimonial; or if he could not do so within the space of one and twenty days, was to be whipped and used as a vagabond. The hours of labour were prescribed, not, as in our Factory Acts, by way of limitation, but by imposition. Thus, from the middle of the month of March to the middle of September all artificers and labourers hired by time were to be and continue at their work at or before five o'clock in the morning, and continue at work and not depart until betwixt seven and eight of the clock at night-two and a half hours in the course of the day being allowed for meals and drinking. Thus the legal day's work was to be about twelve hours at the least.

As to young women, they were simply at the orders of the magistrates; for the 24th section enacts that any two Justices of the Peace or other competent magistrates shall "appoint any such woman as is of the age of twelve years and under the age of forty years and unmarried, and forth of service, as they shall think meet to serve, to be retained or serve by the year, or by the week or day, for such wages and in such reasonable sort and manner as they shall think meet; and if any such woman shall refuse so to serve, then it shall be lawful for the said Justices of Peace, Mayor, or Head Officers, to commit such woman to ward, until she shall be bounden to serve as is aforesaid." Lest the Justices should be lax in regulating the service of labourers, they were to be paid for their trouble. Such was liberty—such was industry under "good Queen Bess," at least such it was in the Statute Book, and in the intention of the governing classes. In operation the statute was, there is reason to believe, little more than a

dead letter, except as regards the important sections relating to apprenticeship, of which the evil influence has hardly yet died out. It has often been boasted that the laws of England were always just and equal to all classes; this may be true of much judge-made law, but it is decisively contradicted by such a monstrous statute, from the operation of which the higher classes and even their servants were expressly exempted. Yet this Statute of Apprentices was not finally and completely repealed until six years ago by the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act (38 and 39 Vict. cap. 86, sec. 17, III. a).

An Old Experiment in Industrial Legislation.-In many cases we learn from the preamble or other contents of a statute regulating a trade that it was really passed at the instance of the trade for their supposed advantage. This is most plain in the case of the Act touching drapers, cottoners, and frizers of Shrewsbury (8 Eliz. cap. 7), which commences by reciting that there has been in Shrewsbury time out of mind of man a gild of the art and mystery of drapers lawfully incorporated. This gild, it appeared, was used most commonly to set on work above six hundred persons of the art or science of shearmen or frizers. Divers artificers and other persons of Shrewsbury, however, not being of the said company or mystery, "nor brought up in the use of the said trade, have of late with great disorder, upon a mere covetous desire and mind, intromitted with and occupied the said trade of buying Welsh cloth or lining, having no knowledge, experience, or skill in the same." After further describing the dire evils thus produced by successful

competition, the Act proceeds to prohibit every person inhabiting in Shrewsbury from occupying the trade of buying Welsh cottons, etc., unless he be free thereof, However quaintly and candidly expressed, there is nothing in this statute but the simple spirit of trade monopoly. We may wonder indeed that the cottoners of Shrewsbury could so easily move the great statesmen of Queen Elizabeth in their favour; but the policy of the cottoners was of a piece with the policy of Lord Burleigh, as so strikingly formulated in the Statute of Apprentices above referred to. What, however, is very strange about the Shrewsbury cottoners is that before six years were over they had not only found out their error, but candidly confessed it to the powers. In the Act 14 Eliz. cap. 12, we find the previous Act almost entirely repealed, "at the humble suit of the inhabitants of the said town, and also of the said artificers, for whose benefit the said Act was supposed to be provided." Nor is this all; for in the second section the moral of the matter is brought out in the clearest terms. "Experience hath plainly taught in the said town that the said Act hath not only not brought the good effect that then was hoped and surmised, but also hath been and now is likely to be the very greatest cause of the impoverishing and undoing of the poor artificers and others, at whose suit the said Act was procured, for that there be now, sithence the making of the said statute, much fewer persons to set them a-work than before," etc. etc. Were it not that the Lord Chancellor Bacon was then a boy of only eleven years of age, we might have thought that he had had a hand in drawing this Act, where the value of experience is brought out in so truly a Baconian manner.

Parliament, since the 14th year of Elizabeth, has made many great mistakes and failures, and has had often to eat its own words. But it has seldom taken the lessons of experience in the same spirit of candour and philosophy..

The Common Law.-We ought not, however, to forget that, in England at least, the statute-book contains but half the law. The unwritten and judge-made common law has always held a very different tone in matters of industry. The same judges who delighted themselves with the intricacies of the law of real estate held one simple rule about industry-that it should be free. It would be very difficult to say when this doctrine of the common law took its rise. As Blackstone said of the common law in general, its rise is like that of the Nile—. unknown. Some persons have found the principle of non-restraint of trade in the Great Charter; but Article 41 of that charter (re-enacted by 2 Edw. III. cap. 9) only refers to foreign merchants trading in England. There is no reference to the general industry of the people, who, it need hardly be said, were by no means free at that time. It seems likely that the extremely wise course of the judges was due in no small degree to natural reaction against the tyranny of the statute law, the greed of class legislators, and the illegal encroachments of the Crown. The judges were the only disinterested parties in power, and however they might delight on other occasions to display their acumen in logical quibbles, they took in trade questions the interest of the whole community as their sole guide. In this course they were much assisted by the fact that the