one extravagant demand to another, till the burden is become too intolerable to be borne. You fix the number of our apprentices, and oftentimes even the number of our journeymen. You dismiss certain proportions of our hands, and will not allow others to come in their stead. You stop all Surface Machines, and go the length even to destroy the rollers before our face. You restrict the Cylinder Machine, and even dictate the kind of pattern it is to print. You refuse, on urgent occasions, to work by candlelight, and even compel our apprentices to do the same. You dismiss our overlookers when they don’t suit you; and force obnoxious servants into our employ. Lastly, you set all subordination and good order at defiance, and instead of showing deference and respect to your employers, treat them with personal insult and contempt.”[128] Notwithstanding all this, no systematic attempt appears to have been made to put down the calico-printers’ combination, and only one or two isolated prosecutions can be traced. In Dublin, too, the cabinetmakers in the early part of the present century were combined in a strong union called the Samaritan Society, exclusively for trade purposes; “but though illegal, the employers do not seem to have looked upon it with any great aversion; and when on one occasion the chief constable had the men attending a meeting arrested, the employers came forward to bail them. Indeed, they professed that their object, though primarily to defend their own interests against the masters, was also to defend the interests of the masters against unprincipled journeymen. Many of the masters on receiving the bill of a journeyman were in the habit of sending it to the trades’ society committee to be taxed, after which the word Committee was stamped upon it. One case was mentioned, when between two and three pounds were knocked off a bill of about eight pounds by the trade committee.”[129] And both in London and Edinburgh the journeymen openly published, without fear of prosecution, elaborate printed lists of piecework prices, compiled sometimes by a committee of the men’s Trade Union, sometimes by a joint committee of employers and employed.[130] “The London Cabinetmakers’ Union Book of Prices,” of which editions were published in 1811 and 1824, was a costly and elaborate work, with many plates, published “by a Committee of Masters and Journeymen ... to prevent those litigations which have too frequently existed in the trade.” Various supplements and “index keys” to this work were published; and other similar lists exist. So lax was the administration of the law that George White, the energetic clerk to Hume’s Committee, asserted that the Act of 1800 had “been in general a dead letter upon those artisans upon whom it was intended to have an effect--namely, the shoemakers, printers, papermakers, shipbuilders, tailors, etc., who have had their regular societies and houses of call,