The state further promising for itself that all able-bodied men should be found in work,[61] and not allowing any man to work at a business for which he was unfit, insisted as its natural right that children should not be allowed to grow up in idleness, to be returned at mature age upon its hands.  Every child, so far as possible, was to be trained up in some business or calling,[62] idleness “being the mother of all sin,” and the essential duty of every man being to provide honestly for himself and his family.  The educative theory, for such it was, was simple but effective:  it was based on the single principle that, next to the knowledge of a man’s duty to God, and as a means towards doing that duty, the first condition of a worthy life was the ability to maintain it in independence.  Varieties of inapplicable knowledge might be good, but they were not essential; such knowledge might be left to the leisure of after years, or it might be dispensed with without vital injury.  Ability to labour could not be dispensed with, and this, therefore, the state felt it to be its own duty to see provided; so reaching, I cannot but think, the heart of the whole matter.  The children of those who could afford the small entrance fees were apprenticed to trades, the rest were apprenticed to agriculture; and if children were found growing up idle, and their fathers or their friends failed to prove that they were able to secure them an ultimate maintenance, the mayors in towns and the magistrates in the country had authority to take possession of such children, and apprentice them as they saw fit, that when they grew up “they might not be driven” by want or incapacity “to dishonest courses."[63]

Such is an outline of the organisation of English society under the Plantagenets and Tudors.  A detail of the working of the trade laws would be beyond my present purpose.  It is obvious that such laws could be enforced only under circumstances when production and population remained (as I said before) nearly stationary; and it would be madness to attempt to apply them to the changed condition of the present.  It would be well if some competent person would make these laws the subject of a special treatise.  I will run the risk, however, of wearying the reader with two or three illustrative statutes, which I have chosen, not as being more significant than many others, but as specimens merely of the discipline under which, for centuries, the trade and manufactures of England contrived to move; showing on one side the good which the system effected, on the other the inevitable evils under which it finally sank.

The first which I shall quote concerns simply the sale of specific goods and the means by which tradesmen were prevented from enhancing prices.  The Act is the 6th of the 24th of Henry VIII., and concerns the sale of wines, the statute prices of which I have already mentioned.