service which are above the working level of public morality; and the deeper they are carried down into life, the larger become the opportunities of evasion.  That the system succeeded for centuries is evident from the organisation of the companies remaining so long in its vitality; but the efficiency of this organisation for the maintenance of fair dealing could exist only so long as the companies themselves—­their wardens and their other officials, who alone, quisque in sua arte, were competent to judge what was right and what was wrong—­could be trusted, at the same time being interested parties, to give a disinterested judgment.  The largeness of the power inevitably committed to the councils was at once a temptation and an opportunity to abuse those powers; and slowly through the statute book we find the traces of the poison as it crept in and in.  Already in the 24th of Henry VIII., we meet with complaints in the leather trade of the fraudulent conduct of the searchers, whose duty was to affix their seal upon leather ascertained to be sound, before it was exposed for sale, “which mark or print, for corruption and lucre, is commonly set and put by such as take upon them the search and sealing, as well upon leather insufficiently tanned, as upon leather well tanned, to the great deceit of the buyers thereof.”  About the same time, the “craft wardens” of the various fellowships, “out of sinister mind and purpose,” were levying excessive fees on the admission of apprentices; and when parliament interfered to bring them to order, they “compassed and practised by cautill and subtle means to delude the good and wholesome statutes passed for remedy."[64] The old proverb, Quis custodiat custodes, had begun to verify itself, and the symptom was a fatal one.  These evils, for the first half of the century, remained within compass; but as we pass on we find them increasing steadily.  In the 7th and the 8th of Elizabeth, there are indications of the truck system; and towards her later years, the multiplying statutes and growing complaints and difficulties show plainly that the companies had lost their healthy vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were fast taking themselves away.  There were no longer tradesmen to be found in sufficient numbers who were possessed of the necessary probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon with the deep melancholy which in those years settled down on Elizabeth herself.

For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era.  The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream.  Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return.  A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea.  The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe.  In the fabric of habit in which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer.