Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/172

 tended to produce, by some recondite operation, a contingent good, is an attempt to accomplish objects which exceed the powers, and are beyond the province of legislators. If they have any immediate effect whatever, it must be that they produce inconvenience, and therefore peril, with scarcely the remotest probability of effecting any good. It partakes of that meddling legislation, of which our statute-book is a remarkable monument, that presumed to teach men the manner in which almost every action of life should be performed. The Parliament thought it knew better than the people themselves where they should live, and what rents they should pay—what labourers they should hire, and what wages they should pay—how they should make, and measure, and wear their clothes—how they were to pack their fish, how their beer was to be brewed, and the barrels made to put it in —what they should pay for their candles, and how their beds and bolsters should be stuffed —a legislation which permitted its subject to be neither the regulator of his own actions nor the keeper of his own conscience.