The French Revolution, which owed its economic measures to the Physiocrats, gave a powerful impulse to the principle of liberty. The influence of the movement was patent enough on the Continent. Even in England, where this influence was least felt; everybody was in favour of _laissez-faire_. Pitt became anxious to free Ireland from its antiquated system of prohibitions, and he succeeded in doing this by his Act of Union of 1800. The regulations laid down by the Elizabethan Statute of Apprentices, with its limitation of the hours of work and the fixing of wages by justices of the peace, became more and more irksome as industry developed. Every historian of the Industrial Revolution has described the struggle between workers and masters and shown how the former clung in despair to the old legislative measures as their only safeguard against a too rapid change, while the latter refused to be constrained either in the choice of workmen or the methods of their work.[248] They wished to pay only the wages that suited them and to use their machines as long as possible. These repeated attacks rendered the old Statute of Apprentices useless, and Parliament abolished its regulations one after another, so that by 1814 all traces of it were for ever effaced from the Statute Book. But Smith did not foresee these things. He did not write with a view to pleasing either merchants or manufacturers. On the contrary, he was never weary of denouncing their monopolistic tendencies. But by the force of circumstances manufacturers and merchants became his best allies. His book supplied them with arguments, and it was his authority that they always invoked. His authority never ceased growing. As soon as the _Wealth of Nations_ appeared, men like Hume, and Gibbon, the historian, expressed to Smith or to his friends their admiration of the new work. In the following year the Prime Minister, Lord North, borrowed from him the idea of levying two new taxes—the tax on malt and the tax on inhabited houses. Smith was yet to make an even more illustrious convert in the person of Pitt. Pitt was a student when the _Wealth of Nations_ appeared, but he always declared himself a disciple of Smith, and as soon as he became a Minister he strove to realise his ideas. It was he who signed the first Free Trade treaty with France—the Treaty of Eden, 1786.[249] When Smith came to London in 1787, Pitt met him more than once and consulted him on financial matters. The story is told that after one of these conversations Smith exclaimed: “What an extraordinary person Pitt is! He understands my ideas better than myself.”