The Cortes watched with a truly parental care over the great interests of the state--its commerce, its husbandry, and its manufactures. They raised a loud, and as it would seem not an ineffectual, note of remonstrance against the tyrannical practice of the crown in seizing for its own use the bullion which, as elsewhere stated, had been imported from the New World on their own account by the merchants of Seville. Some of the petitions of the Cortes show what would be thought at the present day a strange ignorance of the true principles of legislation in respect to commerce. Thus, regarding gold and silver, independently of their value as a medium of exchange, as constituting in a peculiar manner the wealth of a country, they considered that the true policy was to keep the precious metals at home, and prayed that their exportation might be forbidden. Yet this was a common error in the sixteenth century with other nations besides the Spaniards. It may seem singular, however, that the experience of three-fourths of a century had not satisfied the Castilian of the futility of such attempts to obstruct the natural current of commercial circulation. In the same spirit, they besought the king to prohibit the use of gold and silver in plating copper and other substances, as well as for wearing-apparel and articles of household luxury. It was a waste of the precious metals, which were needed for other purposes. This petition of the commons may be referred in part, no doubt, to their fondness for sumptuary laws, which in Castile formed a more ample code than could be easily found in any other country.[425] The love of costly and ostentatious dress was a passion which they may have caught from their neighbours, the Spanish Arabs, who delighted in this way of displaying their opulence. It furnished accordingly, from an early period, a fruitful theme of declamation to the clergy, in their invectives against the pomp and vanities of the world. Unfortunately Philip, who was so frequently deaf to the wiser suggestions of the Cortes, gave his sanction to this petition; and in a _pragmatic_ devoted to the object, he carried out the ideas of the legislature as heartily as the most austere reformer could have desired. As a state paper, it has certainly a novel aspect, going at great length into such minute specifications of wearing-apparel, both male and female, that it would seem to have been devised by a committee of tailors and milliners, rather than of grave legislators.[426] The tailors, indeed, the authors of these seductive abominations, did not escape the direct animadversion of the Cortes. In another petition they were denounced as unprofitable persons, occupied with needlework, like women, instead of tilling the ground or serving his majesty in the wars, like men.[427]