It was in watching the effect of the Combination Laws in his own trade that Place became converted to their repeal. The special laws of 1720 and 1767, fixing the wages of journeymen tailors, as well as the general law of 1800 against all combinations, had failed to regulate wages, to prevent strikes, or to hinder those masters who wished in times of pressure to engage skilled men, from offering the bribe of high piecework rates, or even time wages in excess of the legal limit. Place gave evidence as a master tailor before the Select Committee of the House of Commons which inquired into the subject in 1810; and it was chiefly his weighty testimony in favour of freedom of contract that averted the fresh legal restrictions which a combination of employers was then openly promoting.[170] This experience of the practical freedom of employers to combine intensified Place’s sense of the injustice of denying a like freedom to the journeymen, whilst the brutal prosecution of the compositors of the _Times_ in the same year brought home to his mind the severity of the law. Four years later (1814), as he himself tells us, he “began to work seriously to procure a repeal of the laws against combinations of workmen, but for a long time made no visible progress.” The employers were firmly convinced that combinations of wage-earners would succeed in securing a great rise of wages, to the serious detriment of profits. Far from contemplating a repeal of the Act of 1800, they were in 1814 and 1816 pestering the Home Secretary for legislation of greater stringency as the only safeguard for their “freedom of enterprise.”[171] The politicians were equally certain that Trade Union action would raise prices, and thus undermine the foreign trade upon which the prosperity and international influence of England depended. The working men themselves afforded in the first instance no assistance. Those who had suffered legal prosecution were hopeless of redress from an unreformed Parliament, and offered no support. One trade, the Spitalfields silk-weavers, supported the Government because they enjoyed what they deemed to be the advantage of legal protection from the lowering of wages by competition.[172] Others were suspicious of the intervention of one who was himself an employer, and who had not yet gained recognition as a friend to labour. But Place was undismayed by hostility and indifference. Knowing that with an English public the strength of his cause would lie, not in any abstract reasoning or appeal to natural rights, but in an enumeration of actual cases of injustice, he made a point of obtaining the particulars of every trade dispute. He intervened, as he says, in every strike, sometimes as a mediator, sometimes as an ally of the journeymen. He opened up a voluminous correspondence with Trade Unions throughout the kingdom, and wrote innumerable letters to the newspapers. In 1818 he secured a useful medium in the _Gorgon_,[173] a little working-class political