, and keeping and maintaining them by journeymen
and persons unskilful, to the decay of a great number of artificers which
were brought up in the said science of weaving, with their families and
their households--some by engrossing of looms into their hands and
possession, and letting them out at such unreasonable rents, as the poor
artificers are not able to maintain themselves, much less maintain their
wives, families, and children--some also by giving much less wages and hire
for weaving and workmanship than in times past they did, whereby they are
enforced utterly to forsake their art and occupation wherein they have been
brought up; It is, therefore, for remedy of the premises, and for the
avoiding of a great number of inconveniences which may grow if in time it
be not foreseen, ordained and enacted by authority of this present
parliament, that no person using the feat or mystery of cloth-making, and
dwelling out of a city, borough, market-town, or corporate town, shall
keep, or retain, or have in his or their houses or possession, any more
than one woollen loom at a time; nor shall by any means, directly or
indirectly, receive or take any manner of profit, gain, or commodity, by
letting or setting any loom, or any house wherein any loom is or shall be
used or occupied, which shall be together by him set or let, upon pain of
forfeiture for every week that any person shall do the contrary to the
tenor and true meaning hereof, twenty shillings."

A provision then follows, limiting weavers living in towns to two
looms--the plain intention being to prevent the cloth manufacture from
falling into the power of large capitalists employing "hands;" and to
enable as many persons as possible to earn all in their own homes their own
separate independent living. I suppose that the parliament was aware that
by pursuing this policy the cost of production was something increased;
that cloth was thus made dearer than it would have been if trade had been
left to follow its own course. It considered, however, that the loss was
compensated to the nation by retaining its people in the condition not of
"hands," but of men; by rendering them independent of masters, who only
sought to make their own advantage at the expense of labour; and enabling
them to continue to maintain themselves in manly freedom. The weak point of
all such provisions did not lie, I think, in the economic aspect of them,
but in a far deeper difficulty. The details o