place.

The old regulation had never been so complete in reality as it was on
the statute book, and much of it had died out of itself. Some of the
provisions of the Statute of Apprentices were persistently
disregarded, and when appeals were made for its application to farm
work in the latter part of the eighteenth century Parliament refused
to enforce it, as they did in the case of discharged soldiers in 1726
and of certain dyers in 1777. The assize of bread was very irregularly
enforced, and that of other victuals had been given up altogether.
Many commercial companies were growing up without regulation by
government, and in the world of finance the hand of government was
very light. The new manufactures and the new agriculture grew up to a
large extent apart from government control or influence; while the
forms to which the old regulation did apply were dying out. In the new
factory industry practically the whole body of the employees were
without the qualifications required by the Statute of Apprentices, as
well as many of the hand-loom weavers who were drawn into the industry
by the abundance and cheapness of machine-spun thread. In the early
years of the nineteenth century a strenuous effort was made by the
older weavers to have the law enforced against them. The whole matter
was investigated by Parliament, but instead of enforcing the old law
they modified it by acts passed in 1803 and 1809, so as to allow of
greater liberty. The old prohibition of using fulling mills passed in
1553 was also repealed in 1809. The Statute of Apprentices after being
weakened piecemeal as just mentioned, and by a further amendment
removing the wages clauses in 1813, and after being referred to by
Lord Mansfield as "against the natural rights and contrary to the
common law rights of the land," was finally removed from the statute
book in 1814. Even the "Combination Acts," which had forbidden
laborers to unite to settle wages and hours, were repealed in 1824.
Similar changes took place in other fields than those of the relations
between employers and employees. The leading characteristics of
legislation on questions of commerce, manufactures, and agriculture
during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half
of the nineteenth consist in the fact that it almost wholly tended
toward freedom from government control. The proportions in which the
influence of the natural breaking down of an outgrown system, of the
new con