believed what their rulers told them of their prodigious kindness in managing private affairs so much better than individuals could themselves. Mr. Sergeant Thorpe, judge of assize for the northern circuit, in a charge to the grand jury in 1648, tells them to be vigilant against servants taking higher wages than those allowed by the justices,--to enforce the laws against everybody who bought every thing for the sustenance of man, with intent to make a profit by it--against every tradesman who did not produce his wares in conformity with the statutes;--wonderful laws, which would not permit the tanner to sell a piece of leather that had not been kept twelve months in the tan-pit, and which forbade the cloth-maker to use lime in whitening linen cloth. "And thus you see," says solemn Mr. Sergeant Thorpe, "how the wisdom of the common laws of this nation, and of the parliaments, from time to time, hath provided for the security and ease of the people; and hath furnished us with a salve for every sore; and gives us rules and instructions how to govern ourselves, that we may be helpful and useful to one another."[38] Instead of providing the salve, it probably would have been better not to have made the sore. But, after all, it is scarcely candid to laugh at the wisdom of "the good old times" in regulating trades, when in our own day, we have had excise laws which interfered in the most absurd way with production, and some of which still interfere. Nor can we look with perfect complacency at the manifest impolicy and injustice of fixing the rate of wages, when, within the last quarter of a century, we have had justices at work all over the country to keep down the wages of labour, by paying labourers not in proportion to their earnings, but according to their necessities; and raising up a fund for the encouragement of idleness and improvidence, by a diversion of the real funds for the maintenance of labour. The Poor Laws, as they were administered in the beginning and middle of the last half century, did this evil, and a great deal more; and persons of influence, with the most benevolent intentions, could see no difference between the parish allowance to able-bodied labourers, and the wages which they could have really commanded for their labour if this opposing fund had not been called into action. In those times, and even after a strenuous effort had been made to bring about an improvement, educated gentlemen used to say--"something must be done to give the labourers employment upon fair wages;" and they were accustomed to believe that "some plan should be devised whereby work should be at hand."[39] These gentlemen, and many others, did not understand that there is a natural fund for the maintenance of labour which is to produce such beneficial results; that this fund cannot be increased but by the addition of the results of _more_ profitable labour; that whatever is paid out of the fund for the support of unprofitable labour