Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/125

 which may grow if in time it be not foreseen, ordained and enacted by authority of this present parliament, that no person using the feat or mystery of cloth-making and dwelling out of a city, borough, market town or corporate town, shall keep or retain or have in his or their houses or possession, any more than one woolen loom at a time, nor shall by any means, directly or indirectly, receive or take any manner of profit, gain or commodity, by letting or selling any loom or any house wherein any loom is or shall be used or occupied, which shall be together by him set or let, upon pain of forfeiture for every week that any person shall do the contrary to the tenor and true meaning hereof, twenty shillings."

In this unwise Act, the spirit of which still prevails among many of the working classes of England, and still forms in many other countries the basis of commercial legislation, another clause provided that weavers who lived in towns might have two looms but no more, so that as many persons as possible might be employed in their own houses, and, without the aid of capitalists, earn and obtain their own independent living—thus treating capital and labour as not merely distinct interests, but as opposed to each other.

The currency was then as it is now, a question on which a multiplicity of opinions were entertained; but the coins of the realm were in those days tampered with by the State to an extent sufficient to afford even a chancellor of the exchequer of our own time an excuse for attempting to mulct the sovereign of one per cent. of its gold to cover the cost of