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of every city were derived from forfeitures of trades, almost all established upon the principle, that if one trade became too industrious, or too clever, it would be the ruin of another trade. Every trade was accordingly fenced round with secrets; and the commonest trade, as we know from the language of an apprentice's indenture, was called an "art and mystery." All over western Europe were the appren

they existed in Great Britain less than a century ago. Watt, in 1756, commenced life in the employ of an instrument-maker in the city of London. After describing the skill and aptitude manifested by him for the profession he had chosen, his biographer goes on to say. "An unexpected danger at that time hung over his destiny, which might have cut short a least for a time, his prospects for further improvement in natural science, and postponed all his plans with their important consequences. This sword of Damocles was the chance of being impressed in the navy as a seaman. Watt writes in the spring of 1756, "that he avoids a very hot press just now by seldom going out," and at a later day he adds, "they now press every body they can get, landsmen as well as seamen, except it be in the liberties of the city, where they are obliged to carry them before my Lord Mayor first, and unless one be a creditable tradesman or a 'prentice, there is scarce any chance of getting off again. And if I am carried before my Lord Mayor, I durst never avow I wrought in the city, it being against their laws for any unfree man to work, even as a journeyman, within the liberties." Subsequently, Watt having completed his term of service with the instrument-maker, and escaped impressment in the navy, removed to Glasgow, Scotland, with the intention of following his profession. No sooner, however, had he manifested his intention of so doing, than the association of workmen forbid him "the exercise of his craft" in that city. "On account," says his biographer, "of his being neither the son of a burgess, nor having served a regular apprenticeship to any craft, he was resisted by tradesmen of arrogant and far more unfounded pretensions than the modest youth whom they persecuted with a sort of temporal excommunication; and was forbidden to set up even an humble shop, himself the sole tenant, within the limits of the burgh. He was only, in short, enabled to pursue his calling in Glasgow, by opening a shop within the precincts of the college, and using the designation "Instrument-maker to the University of Glasgow."

tices and journeymen taxed and ground down by arbitrary laws before they reached the dignity of freemen. Every man who had suffered these taxes, and submitted to these laws, was not willing to give up privileges so dearly bought, so that working-men who had attained to a free membership, in turn became the supporters of the very regulations that were once to them so oppressive. "In Paris," says a late writer, "before a man could become a freeman of a corporation, he must have produced a chef-d'œuvre. Thus, no obnoxious journeyman was ever held to have produced one; and so he was kept without the privileged pale. The freedom of a corporation became a heir-loom in certain families. The freemen heaped all kinds of rights and privileges upon themselves, to the disadvantage of workmen who did not happen to be their relations or friends. The merchants were banded in like manner. Constant broils and lawsuits arose between rival corporations-as between the tailors and the second-hand clothesmen-and a grave discussion settled the line of demarcation between a new coat and an old one. A locksmith dared not make the nails, necessary to the completion of his locks, because the manufacture of nails belonged to another corporation." All these follies went upon the presumption that "one man's gain is another man's loss," instead of vanishing before the truth, that, in proportion as the industry of all men is free, so will it be productive; and that production on all sides insures a state of things in which every exchanger is a gainer, and no one a loser.

It is not to be wondered at that, while such opinions existed, the union of capital and labor should have been very imperfect; and that, while the capitalists oppressed the laborers, in the same way that they oppressed each other, the laborers should have thought it not unreasonable to plunder the capitalists. It is stated by Harrison, an old

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writer of credit,* that during the single reign of Henry VIII., seventy-two thousand thieves were hanged in England. No fact can exhibit in a stronger light the universal misery that must have existed in those days. The whole kingdom did not contain half a million grown-up males, so that, considering that the reign of Henry VIII. extended over two generations, about one man in ten must have been, to use the words of the same historian, "devoured and eaten up by the gallows." Numerous other facts might be adduced, all tending to show the barbarity and cruelty of this period, and the utter indifference evinced by the government toward the lives as well as the property of its subjects. We read, for instance, of the execution of a Warwickshire squire, for using a coarse expression, which was erroneously said to have been applied to the king, and an innkeeper was hanged for the harmless pleasantry of saying, that he would make his son heir to the "Crown,” which was the sign of his house. In the reign of Henry VIII. also, the first statute against Egyptians (gypsies) was passed. These people went from place to place in great companies-spoke a cant language, which Harrison calls Peddler's French-and were subdivided into fifty-two different classes of thieves. The same race of people prevailed throughout Europe. Cervantes, the author of "Don Quixote," says of the Egyptians or Bohemians, that they seem. to have been born for no other purpose than that of pillaging. While this universal plunder went forward, it is evident that the insecurity of property must have been so great that there could have been little accumulation, and therefore little production. Capital was destroyed on every side;

Preface to the Chronicles of Holinshed.

A distinguished American theologian and reformer expressed a sentiment somewhat similar, when he described "hanging as the worst possible use to which a man could be put "

and because profitable labor had become so scarce by the destruction of capital, one half of the community sought to possess themselves of the few goods of the other half, not as exchangers, but as robbers. As the robbers diminished the capital, the diminution of capital increased the number of robbers; and if the unconquerable energy of human industry had not gone on producing, slowly and painfully indeed, but still producing, England would have soon fallen back to the state in which it was a thousand years before, when wolves abounded more than men. One great cause of all this plunder and misery was the oppression of the laborers.

RIGHTS OF LABOR.-EFFECTS OF SLAVERY ON PRODUCTION.-CONDITION OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS.-PROGRESS OF FREEDOM IN ENGLAND.-LAWS REGULATING LABOR.-WAGES AND PRICES.-POOR-LAW.

ADAM SMITH, in his great work, "The Wealth of Nations," says, "The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property." The right of property, in general, has been defined by another writer, M. Say, to be "the exclusive faculty guaran