When the industry of the country was nearly annihilated by the laws regulating wages, it was found out that something like a balance should be preserved between wages and prices; and the magistrates were therefore empowered twice a year to make proclamation, according to the price of provisions, how much every workman should receive. The system, however, would not work well. In 1496 a new statute of wages was passed, the preamble of which recited that the former statutes had not been executed, because "the remedy by the said statutes is not very perfect." Then came a new remedy: that is, a new scale of wages for all trades; regulations for the hours of work and of rest; and penalties to prevent labour being transported from one district to another. As a necessary consequence of a fixed scale for wages, came another fixed scale for regulating the prices of provisions; till at last, in the reign of Henry VIII., lawgivers began to open their eyes to the folly of their proceedings, and the preamble of a statute says "that dearth, scarcity, good cheap, and plenty of cheese, butter, capons, hens, chickens, and other victuals necessary for man's sustenance, happeneth, riseth, and chanceth, of so many and divers occasions, that it is very hard and difficile to put any certain prices to any such things." Yet they went on with new scales, in spite of the hardness of the task; till at last some of the worst of these absurd laws were swept from the statute-book. The justices, whose principal occupation was to balance the scale of wages and labour, complained incessantly of the difficulty of the attempt; and the statute of the 5th Elizabeth acknowledged that these old laws "could not be carried into execution without the great grief and burden of the poor labourer and hired man." Still new laws were enacted to prevent the freedom of industry working out plenty for capitalists as well as labourers; and at length, in 1601, a general assessment was directed for the support of the impotent poor, and for setting the unemployed poor to work. The capitalists at length paid a grievous penalty for their two centuries of oppression; and had to maintain a host of paupers, that had gradually filled the land during these unnatural contests. It would be perhaps incorrect to say, that these contests alone produced the paupers that required this legislative protection in the reign of Elizabeth; but certainly the number of those paupers would have been far less, if the laws of industry had taken their healthy and natural course,--if capital and labour had gone hand in hand to produce abundance for all, and fairly to distribute that abundance in the form of profits and wages, justly balanced by the steady operation of demand and supply in a free and extensive market.