Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/98

 cause, creates this necessity,—whether for moral or physical reasons,—it must he sumbitted to; but if there be no moral or physical necessity for such a combination, it certainly cannot be the duty of a wise legislator artificially to create it. It is not his province to raise legal or technical ohstacles, having no foundation in natural causes, to the free action of mankind. Nothing is more remarkable in the early history of this country than the disposition to form guilds and associations. Our archives contain records of these forms of political existence. The association produced strength. It was the threefold cord which withstood oppression, and was too stubborn to he easily broken. These societies became an offence to arbitrary princes. Sir Francis Palgrave has remarked, that so early as the reign of Richard the Second, when that monarch was asked by the Commons to restrain alienations of land to ecclesiastics, he went still farther than the petition demanded, and extended the restriction to lay guilds and fraternities. The king, he observes, was jealous of the strength and independence of such voluntary bodies, and they were ordered to make returns into Chancery of their regulations and bye-laws. He says, that there are now in the Tower a great number of these returns, and that the Statute of Mortmain, of the 15th of Richard II. (cap. 5), was intended to hold in check the guilds and corporations,—which included all the ancient trading companies,—who were acquiring that political influence which not long afterwards deprived the king of his crown.

In later times, the guilds and fraternities assumed a mixed character, and became partly civil and partly ecclesiastical. They sought to combine the objects of mutual assistance and support in temporal necessities with the consolations of religion. If the rolls of some of these city fraternities were perused, they would astonish many who regard the want of