Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/117

Rh innovators should be allowed to poach on their preserves, as they did in the buckle business. They would push the iron ægis of the law against all the inventors and improvers that sought to insinuate themselves into the pale of their profits. A statute enacted in the reign of the first George existed, and this they determined to see enforced. Whoever undertakes to write the history of Protection, should cite in full this Act. How strangely it reads in the ears that listen to the new doctrines of the present day! It imposed a penalty of £5 "on any Taylor or other person convicted of making, covering, selling, or using, or setting on to a garment any Buttons covered with cloth or of any stuff of which garments are made." But if "Love laughs at locksmiths," fashion laughed at all the bolts and bars which The Black Country iron and coal could make to bar her out of the kingdom. The button-makers, like other tradesmen and manufacturers who seek to make their government a kind of special providence for the protection of their pretended interests, appealed to all the influential powers of state to interpose in their behalf. Even as late as 1850 deputations were sent up to London, not to ask for Parliamentary legislation, but to solicit the royal court to patronize metal buttons. But, like the shoe-bucklemen, they found a power behind the throne that wielded the sceptre over the realm of taste, and like