f trade legislation, it is
obvious, could only be determined by persons professionally conversant with
those details; and the indispensable condition of success with such
legislation is, that it be conducted under the highest sense of the
obligations of honesty. No laws are of any 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,