When the laws had protected English manufacturers, and producers from foreign produce and skill; they, by a natural sequence of blundering, set about protecting the British manufacturing population one against another, and the German jest of the wig-makers, who petitioned their Crown Prince “to make it felony for any gentleman to wear his own hair,” is almost realised. In the palmy days of Protection, a British bookbinder could not use paste, nor a British dandy, hair-powder, because the British farmer had been so tightly protected against foreign corn, that the British public could not get enough of it to make bread to eat. These were perhaps the most expensive absurdities into which John Bull was driven by his mania for protection, but they were by no means the most ludicrous. Among his other dainty devices for promoting the woollen manufacture, was the law which compelled all dead bodies to be buried in woollen cloth. There may not be many who can sympathise with the agony of Pope’s dying coquette:— “Odious! In woollen! ’Twould a saint provoke; Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.” But every one must be astounded at the folly of bribing men to invest ingenuity and industry, to bury that which above ground was the most useful and saleable, of all possible articles. The intention was to discourage the use of cotton, which has since proved one of the greatest sources of wealth ever brought into this country. The strangest and most practical protest of national common sense, against laws enacting protective duties, was the impossibility of compelling people to obey them. To those laws the country has been indebted for the expensive coast-guards, who cannot, after all, prevent smuggling. The disproportionate penalties threatened by protective laws, show how difficult it was to ensure obedience. In 1765, so invincible was the desire of our ladies to do justice to their neat ancles, that a law had to be passed in the fifth of George the Third, (chapter forty-eight,) decreeing that “if any foreign manufactured silk stockings, &c., be imported into any part of the British dominions, they shall be forfeited, and the importers, retailers, or vendors of the same, shall be subject, for every such offence, to a fine of two hundred pounds, with costs of suit.” The wise legislators did not dare to extend the penalties to the fair wearers, who found means to make it worth the while of the vendors to brave and evade the law.