It is the inalienable right of every human being to fight against unjust laws; only we must be sure they are unjust. Perhaps the dividing-line, when self-interest is involved, is not easily to be fixed. But there can be no doubt that the wool-growers were labouring under injustice, and that they were entirely justified in setting those laws at naught which menaced their existence. However, by December 1703, Mr. Baker was able to give his superiors a more favourable report. He believed the neck of the owling trade to have been broken and the spirit of the owlers themselves to have been crushed, particularly in Romney Marsh. There were not, at that time, he observed, “many visible signs” of any quantities of wool being exported: which seems to us rather to point to the perfected organisation of the owling trade than to its being crushed out of existence. “But for fine goods,” continued the supervisor, “as they call them (_viz._ silks, lace, etc.), I am well assured that the trade goes on through both counties, though not in such vast quantities as have been formerly brought in—I mean in those days when (as a gentleman of estate in one of the counties has within this twelve months told me) he has been att once, besides at other times, at the loading of a wagon with silks, laces, etc., till six oxen could hardly move it out of the place. I doe not think that the trade is now so carried on as ’twas then.” Things being so promising in the purview of this simple person, it seemed well to him to suggest to the Commissioners of the Board of Customs that a reduction of the annual charge of £4,500 for the preventive service along the coasts of Kent and Sussex might be effected. At that time there were fifty preventive officers patrolling over two hundred miles of seaboard, each in receipt of £60 per annum, and each provided with a servant and a horse, to help in night duty, at an estimated annual cost of £30 for each officer. We may here legitimately pause in surprise at the small pay for which these men were ready to endure the dangers and discomforts of such a service; very real perils and most unmistakable disagreeables, in midst of an almost openly hostile country-side. Mr. Baker, sanguine man that he was, proposed to abolish the annual allowance to each of these hard-worked men for servant and horse, thus saving £1,500 a year, and to substitute for them patrols of the Dragoon regiments at that time stationed in Kent. These regiments had been originally placed there in 1698 to overawe the owlers and other smugglers, the soldiers being paid twopence extra a day (which certainly did not err upon the side of extravagance) and the officers in proportion: the annual cost on that head amounting to £200 per annum. This military stiffening of the civil force employed to prevent clandestine export and import appears to have been discontinued in 1701, after about two years’ experiment.