THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 5 



bus " vituperated as " an open oppressor of poor people," * is simply- 

 one whose function it is to equalize the supply of a commodity by 

 checking unduly rapid consumption. Of kindred nature was the meas- 

 ure which, in 1315, to diminish the pressure of famine, prescribed the 

 prices of foods, but which was hastily repealed after it had caused 

 entire disappearance of various foods from the markets ; and also such 

 measures, more continuously operating, as those which settled by mag- 

 isterial order " the reasonable gains " of victualers. f Of like spirit 

 and followed by allied mischiefs have been the many endeavors to fix 

 wages, which began with the statute of laborers under Edward III, 

 and ceased only sixty years ago ; when, having long galvanized in 

 Spitalfields a decaying industry, and fostered there a miserable popu- 

 lation. Lords and Commons finally gave up fixing silk-weavers' earn- 

 ings by magisterial order. 



Here I imagine an impatient interruption : " We know all that ; 

 the story is stale. The mischiefs of interfering with trade have been 

 dinned in our ears till we are weary ; and no one needs to be taught 

 the lesson afresh," My first reply is, that by the great majority the 

 lesson was never properly learned at all, and that very many of those 

 who did learn it have forgotten it. For just the same pleas which of 

 old were put in for these dictations are again put in. In the statute 

 35 of Edward III, which aimed to keep down the price of herrings 

 (but was soon repealed because it raised the price), it was complained 

 that people " coming to the fair . , . do bargain for herring, and 

 every of them, by malice and envy, increase upon other, and, if one 

 proffer forty shillings, another will proffer ten shillings more, and the 

 third sixty shillings, and so every one surmounteth other in the bar- 

 gain." J And now the "higgling of the market," here condemned 

 and ascribed to "malice and envy," is being again condemned. The 

 evils of competition have all along been the stock cry of the socialists ; 

 and the council of the Democratic Federation denounced the carrying 

 on of exchange under " the control of individual greed and profit." 

 My second reply is, that interferences with the law of supply and de- 

 mand, which a generation ago were admitted to be habitually mis- 

 chievous, are now being daily made by acts of Parliament in other 

 fields ; and that, as I shall presently show, they are in these fields 

 increasing the evils to be cured and producing new ones, as much as 

 of old they did in fields no longer intruded upon. 



Returning from this parenthesis, I go on to explain that the above 

 acts are named to remind the reader that uninstructed legislators have 

 in past times continually increased human suffering in their endeavors 

 to mitigate it ; and I have now to add that if these evils, shown to be 

 legislatively intensified or produced, be multiplied by ten or more, a 



* Craik's "History of British Commerce," i, p. 134. f Ibid., i, pp. 136, 131 



X Craik, he. cit., i, p. 137. 



