“He goes bare-headed, stands bare-headed, waits bare-headed, before his master and mistress; and while as yet he is the youngest apprentice, he doth perhaps, for discipline’s sake, make old leather over-night shine with blacking for the morning; brusheth a garment, runs of errands, keeps silence till he have leave to speak, follows his master or ushereth his mistress, and sometimes my young mistresses their daughters (among whom some one or other of them doth not rarely prove the apprentice’s wife), walks not far out but with permission, and now and then, as offences happen, he may chance to be terribly chidden or menaced, or [for?] what sometime must be worthily corrected.” Stow, in his _Survey of London_, says that “when apprentices and journeymen attended upon their masters and mistresses at night, they went before them carrying a lantern and a candle in their hands, and a great long club on their necks; and many well-grown, sturdy apprentices used to wear long daggers in the daytime on their backs or sides.” All this the master in his young days had done for _his_ master, and all this the present apprentice had the prospective right of claiming for himself in the future; so in this inequality for the nonce there was no element of caste and no room for foolish murmuring. The turbulence of these young fellows was turned now against the city authorities, now against foreign or unlicensed traders and artificers, now against their masters. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth century――times when all classes were turbulent enough――these occasional riots went on and were punished; but what chiefly led to their cessation was the gradual falling to pieces of the old system, and the more effectual police force which patrolled the city after 1688. But the peculiarity of the apprentices’ privileges and of the influence of the companies in England was that, no matter how low a man began, his industry and good behavior could raise him to high public honor. This was not the case in most other European countries. Wealth and domestic happiness, of course, attended virtue and application to business, but such advancement as the English Constitution offered existed nowhere, unless, perhaps, in the Low Countries. This has been significantly commented upon by Lichtenberg, an admirer and critic of Hogarth, and professor of natural history at the University of Göttingen. “In Hogarth’s country,” says he, “it is not unfrequent that the son of a weaver or a brewer may distinguish himself in the House of Commons, and his grandson or great-grandson in the House of Lords. Oh! what a land, in which no cobbler is certain that the favors of his great-grandson may not one day be solicited by kings and emperors. And yet they grumble!”