The complicated and contradictory legislation into which the _ignis fatuus_ of Protection led men, made our nominally protective laws not unfrequently laws prohibitive of industry. To protect the iron-masters of Staffordshire, the inhabitants of Pennsylvania (while yet a British colony) were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to avail themselves of their rich coal and iron mines. To protect the tobacco growers of Virginia (also in its colonial epoch) the agriculturists of Great Britain were forbidden to cultivate the plant—a prohibition which is still in force—even now, that the semblance of a reason or excuse for the restriction exists. The petty details into which these prohibitions of industry, under the pretext of protecting it, descended, can only be conceived by those who have studied the Statutes at Large. An act was passed in the fourth of George the First (the seventh chapter) for the better employing the manufacturers, and encouraging the consumption of raw silk. This act provides “that no person shall make, sell, or set upon any clothes or wearing garments whatsoever, any buttons made of serge, cloth, drugget, frieze, camlet, or any other stuff of which clothes or wearing garments are made, or any buttons made of wool only, and turned in imitations of other buttons, on pain of forfeiting forty shillings per dozen for all such buttons.” And again, in the seventh year of the same George, the twenty-second chapter of that year’s statutes declared that “No tailors shall set on any buttons or button-holes of serge, drugget, &c., under penalty of forty shillings for every dozen of buttons or button-holes so made or set on.... No person shall use or wear on any clothes, garments, or apparel whatsoever, except velvet, any buttons or button-holes made of or bound with cloth, serge, drugget, frieze, camlet, or other stuffs whereof clothes or woollen garments are usually made, on penalty of forfeiting forty shillings per dozen under a similar penalty.” These acts were insisted on by the ancient and important fraternity of metal button-makers, who thought they had a prescriptive right to supply the world with brass and other buttons “with shanks.” Shankless fasteners, made of cloth, serge, &c., were therefore interdicted; and every man, woman, and child, down to the time when George the Third was king, was _obliged_ to wear metal buttons whether they liked them or not, on pain of fine or imprisonment.