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archers, among them twenty-four mounted men. The inefficiency of some
of the English officers is amusingly caricatured in the persons of
Dogberry and Verges who, when they saw a thief, concluded that he was
no honest man and the less they had to meddle or make with him the more
for their honesty.

[Sidenote: Blue laws]

If, in all that has just been said, it is evident that the legislation
of that period and of our own had the same conception of the function
of government and only differed in method and efficiency, there was one
very large class of laws spread upon the statute-books of medieval
Europe that has almost vanished now. A paternal statesmanship sought
to regulate the private lives of a citizen in every respect: the
fashion of his clothes, the number of courses at his meals, how many
guests he might have at wedding, dinner or dance, how long he should be
permitted to haunt the tavern, and how much he should drink, how he
{483} should spend Sunday, how he should become engaged, how dance, how
part his hair and with how thick a stick he should be indulged in the
luxury of beating his wife.

The "blue laws," as such regulations on their moral side came to be
called, were no Protestant innovation. The Lutherans hardly made any
change whatever in this respect, but Calvin did give a new and biting
intensity to the medieval spirit. His followers, the Puritans, in the
next century, almost succeeded in reducing the staple of a Christian
man's legitimate recreation to "seasonable meditation and prayer." But
the idea originated long before the evolution of "the non-conformist
conscience."

The fundamental cause of all this legislation was sheer conservatism.
[Sidenote: Spirit of conservatism] Primitive men and savages have so
strong a feeling of the sanction of custom that they have, as Bagehot
expresses it, fairly screwed themselves down by their unreasoning
demands for conformity. A good deal of this spirit has survived
throughout history and far more of it, naturally, was found four
centuries ago than at present, when reason has proved a solvent for so
many social institutions. There are a good many laws of the period
under survey--such as that of Nuremberg against citizens parting their
hair--for which no discoverable basis can be found save the idea that
new-fangled fashions should not be allowed.

Economic reasons also played their part in the regulation of the habits
of the people. Thus a law of