It was in this field that Henry overstepped his normal policy of not only working through the law but avoiding misuse of it. For the filling of Henry's treasury, the law was abused. The exactions of Empson and Dudley were made possible by the statute of 1495, empowering judges, upon information received, to initiate in their own courts trials of offenders who were supposed to have escaped prosecution through the corruption or intimidation of juries. Empson and Dudley being appointed judges found it an easy task to provide informers, who laid before them charges on which a case could be made out for fining the accused. In theory, of course, the King was not responsible, and the guilty judges paid the penalty with their lives early in the following reign. But the King did in fact get his full share of the discredit attaching; and perhaps his methods in this particular have been emphasised out of proportion to other traits in his character and policy by popular writers. There is some reason to doubt if Henry was ever quite fully aware of the extent to which these extortions were distortions of law; and there is no doubt at all that Empson and Dudley did not conduct their operations with a single eye to their master's benefit, but contrived to intercept ample perquisites on their own account. The statute was soon repealed under Henry VIII. [Sidenote: Trade theories] Modern economic theories depend for their validity on the postulates of the transferability of capital and of labour. In proportion to the limitation of the industries possible to a community, their laws apply, or fail to apply, within that community. The development of a new industry may be impossible, in the competition with established rivals, without artificial assistance--assistance given to that industry at the expense of the community at large; the preservation of an existing industry may demand like assistance. When the labour and capital employed can be transferred productively to another industry, it is obviously better that the transfer should take place, and the failing industry lapse, than that the community should be charged with maintaining an industry which cannot support itself --whether or no the competitors driving it out of the market are enabled to do so only by like extraneous assistance. When the capital and the labour cannot be transferred, but the industry can be maintained by assistance, the question becomes one of weighing the cost of maintenance to the community against the injury to the community from the collapse of the industry. Thus in any state with its commerce in the making, when the transferability of capital and labour is at best in dispute, the theory of buying in the cheapest market, wherever it is to be found, is not in favour. It is held better to raise the prices to the point at which the native product pays its native producers. In mediaeval times the foreigner was _prima facie_ a person who came not to bring trade but to appropriate it.