Under the new act, seventeen surveyors were appointed for nineteen counties; and 299 riding officers, whose salaries and expenses came to £20,000 a year. They seized only 457 packs of wool, got only 162 packs condemned, and had 504 packs rescued. In Kent, sixty-five packs were seized and eight only condemned; in Sussex, twenty-six were seized, and twelve condemned.[51] The illicit exportation of wool was never stopped; and, in 1702, Mr. William Symonds, of Milton, near Gravesend, in his “New Year’s Gift to the Parliament: or, England’s Golden Fleece preserved, in Proposals humbly laid before the Present Parliament,”[52] makes twenty-five proposals to prevent the exportation of wool, which was illicitly carried on to a great extent; and, by the first, he suggests six staples, or registry offices, at Ashford, Faversham, Maidstone, Tunbridge, Gravesend, and Dartford, for the prevention of clandestine export from these places. In 1717, an act passed, directing that smugglers of wool, who should be in prison, and should not plead, might have judgment against them, and, if they did not pay the penalty, might be transported;[53] and yet, on May 19, 1720, it was necessary to issue a proclamation for enforcing the law. In 1731, and in the five following years, the manufacturers petitioned for greater vigilance against the clandestine exportation of wool; it being alleged that the great decay of the woollen manufactures was, beyond dispute, owing to the illegal exportation of wool, of which 150,000 packs were supposed to be shipped yearly; and it was “feared that some gentlemen of no mean rank, whose estates bordered on the seacoast, were too much influenced by a near but false prospect of gain,” to wish for the application of a remedy proposed, viz., the registration of all wool at shearing-time, and a complete system of certificates till it was manufactured; “so that no smuggler or owler would venture to purchase it, by reason he would have no opportunity of sending it abroad in the dark.”[54] In the preamble to the Act of 1739,[55] it is expressly avowed that, notwithstanding the penalties imposed for eighty years, the exportation of wool, unmanufactured, was “notoriously continued.” The stringent law of 1698 had failed in its object, and when, in 1787 (in opposition to the demands of the Lincolnshire wool-growers for power to export their produce), the manufacturers brought in a bill to prevent the illicit exportation, because of the then increasing practice of smuggling British wool into France, and the inefficiency of the laws to prevent it; and when, as a remedy, it was proposed to extend the restrictions imposed upon Kent and Sussex to the entire kingdom, the opponents of the bill shrewdly asked:--“How it was the manufacturers could act so absurdly, to demand an extension of laws relating to those two counties, when it was supposed that the greatest quantities of wool were smuggled from those parts?”[56]