By this time the town craftsmen were also beginning to be menaced by the revolutionary proposals of their employers. The hatters, for example, whose early combination we have already mentioned, had hitherto been protected by the strict limitation of the number of apprentices prescribed by the Acts of 1566 and 1603, and enforced by the Feltmakers’ Company. We gather from the employers’ complaints that the journeymen’s organisation, which by this time extended to most of the provincial towns in which hats were made, was aiming at a strict enforcement of the law limiting the number of apprentices which each master might take. This caused the leading master hatters to promote, in 1777, a Bill to remove the limitation. Against them was marshalled the whole strength of the journeymen’s organisation. Petitions poured in from London, Burton, Bristol, Chester, Liverpool, Hexham, Derby, and other places, the “piecemaster hat or feltmakers and finishers” usually joining with the journeymen against the demand of the capitalist employers. The men asserted that, even with the limitation, “except at brisk times many hundreds are obliged to go travelling up and down the kingdom in search of employ.” But the House was impressed with the evidence and arguments of the large employers, and their Bill passed into law.[94] The action of the House of Commons on occasions like these was not as yet influenced by any conscious theory of freedom of contract. What happened was that, as each trade in turn felt the effect of the new capitalist competition, the journeymen, and often also the smaller employers, would petition for redress, usually demanding the prohibition of the new machines, the enforcement of a seven years’ apprenticeship, or the maintenance of the old limitation of the number of boys to be taught by each employer. The House would as a rule appoint a Committee to investigate the complaint, with the full intention of redressing the alleged grievance. But the large employers would produce before that Committee an overwhelming array of evidence proving that without the new machinery the growing export trade must be arrested; that the new processes could be learnt in a few months instead of seven years; and that the restriction of the old master craftsmen to two or three apprentices apiece was out of the question with the new buyers of labour on a large scale. Confronted with such a case as this for the masters even the most sympathetic committee seldom found it possible to endorse the proposals of the artisans. In fact, these proposals were impossible. The artisans had a grievance--perhaps the worst that any class can have--the degradation of their standard of livelihood by circumstances which enormously increased the productivity of their labour. But they mistook the remedy; and Parliament, though it saw the mistake, could devise nothing better. Common sense forced the Government to take the easy and