Yet notwithstanding so now it is, that by reason of the abundance of foreign wares brought into this realm from the parts of beyond the seas, the said artificers are not only less occupied, and thereby utterly impoverished, the youth not trained in the said sciences and exercises, and thereby the said faculties and the exquisite knowledges thereof like in short time within this realm to decay; but also divers cities and towns within this realm of England much thereby impaired, the whole realm greatly endamaged and other countries greatly enriched. For reformation whereof, be it enacted by our sovereign lady the Queen’s Highness, and by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons of this present parliament assembled and by the authority of the same, that no person or persons whatsoever, from or after the feast of the Nativity of St John Baptist now next ensuing, shall bring or cause to be brought into this realm of England from the parts of beyond the seas, any girdles, harness for girdles, rapiers, daggers, knives, hilts, pummels, lockets, chapes, dagger-blades, handles, scabbards, and sheaths for knives, saddles, horseharness, stirrups, bits, gloves, points, leather laces, or pins, being ready made or wrought in any parts of beyond the seas, to be sold, bartered, or exchanged within this realm of England or Wales; upon pain to forfeit all such wares so to be brought contrary to the true meaning of this act, in whose hands soever they or any of them shall be found, on the very value thereof. Shall it be either this again, or from a universal war of machine-competition the survival of one titanic industrial nation with a monopoly of foreign trade and the might to force its surplus goods on other people’s markets? That nation would fall in time and not altogether from its own weight. It would, of course, abuse its power; but, moreover, it would be unable to collect its favourable trade-balances from all the rest of the world.