great statute, and no one can use a manual art who has not been apprenticed to the same for seven years. One journeyman shall be kept for each three apprentices; disputes are to be settled by the justices of the peace, and indeed the whole labor contract is regulated as carefully as the most statute-mad of modern labor leaders could desire, though hardly, perhaps, then, in the sole interest of the workingman. If this statute was ever repealed, it was in very recent times. (1571) The year of the statute against fraudulent conveyances, and of another poor law, with provisions for the punishment of "rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars," who are defined to include those going about the country "using sybtyll craftye and unlawfull Games or Playes ... Palmestrye ... or fantasticall Imaginacons.... Fencers Bearewardes and Common Players," and the penalty for harboring such vagabonds was twenty shillings. We are a long time from the knighting of Sir Henry Irving. In 1575 comes another act for setting the poor to work, and the punishing of tramps and beggars. In 1571 also is the first formal complaint of monopolies by the Commons. Coal, oil, salt, vinegar, starch, iron, glass, and many other commodities were all farmed out to individuals and monopolies; coal, mentioned first, is still, to-day, the subject of our greatest monopoly; while oil, mentioned fourth, is probably the subject of our second greatest monopoly; and iron, mentioned seventh, is probably the third. Conditions have not changed. The only reason we don't have salt still a monopoly is on account of the numerous sources and processes for obtaining it from mines and from the sea; Fugger, the John D. Rockefeller of the sixteenth century (whose portrait in Munich strongly resembles him), had a monopoly of the salt mines of all Germany. The conditions have maintained themselves, even as to the very articles. This grievance was first mooted in Parliament in 1571 by a Mr. Bell, "who was at once summoned before the Council." This council was the King's Council, or Privy Council--a body roughly corresponding to our United States Senate. He was summoned before the council for objecting because coal, oil, salt, vinegar, starch, iron, glass, were the subjects of monopoly; and he "returned to the House with such an amazed countenance that it daunted all the rest." That is very much the fate of the tariff reformer to-day, if we may credit the tales of those returning from Washington.