However, an enquiry was held to decide whether the master had abused his rights, and the officers of the guild or the civil authority, as the case might be, set at liberty any apprentice who had been unkindly or inhumanly treated. We find a master prosecuted for having beaten and kicked an apprentice to death; a mistress indicted for having forced into evil living a young girl who had been entrusted to her care. In such a case the apprentice was removed from his unworthy master and put into safer hands. Sometimes it happened that the master was attacked by a long and serious illness, or that through trouble and poverty he could no longer carry out his agreement. A custom, however, sprang up which threatened to wreck the system. This was the practice of buying for money so many years or months of service, thus establishing a privilege to the detriment of professional knowledge and to the advantage of the well-to-do. A sum of money took the place of actual instruction received, and some apprentices at the end of two years, others only at the end of four, obtained their final certificate which allowed them to aspire to mastership. Attention should be called to the fact that there are many statutes which limit the number of apprentices. What was the motive of this limitation? The reason which was usually put foremost--namely, the difficulty one master would have in completing the technical education of many pupils--does not seem to have been always the most serious. Perhaps a reduction was insisted on by the journeymen, for it was usually to the interest of the masters to have a great many apprentices, and to keep them for a long time at that stage. They were so many helpers to whom little or nothing was paid, although the work exacted of them nearly equalled that of the journeymen. Therefore we must not be astonished if the latter looked unfavourably on these young competitors who lowered the price of labour. The poor apprentices were thus between the devil and the deep sea. They suffered from the jealousy of the journeymen as well as from the greed of the masters, who cut down their allowance of food, and by keeping them unreasonably long prevented them from earning a decent living. The literature of the times,[11] when it deigns to notice them, leaves us to infer that their existence was not a particularly happy one; nevertheless it is only right to add that their lot cannot be compared with that of the wretched children who, in the opening years of the era of machinery, were introduced in large numbers into the great modern industries.