city dignitary, the shops of the respective
traders; to receive complaints, and to examine into them. In each
provincial town local councils sate in connection with the municipal
authorities, who fulfilled in these places the same duties; and their
reports being forwarded to the central body, and considered by them,
representations on all necessary matters were then made to the privy
council; and by the privy council, if requisite, were submitted to
parliament. If these representations were judged to require legislative
interference, the statutes which were passed in consequence were returned
through the Chancellor to the mayors of the various towns and cities, by
whom they were proclaimed as law. No person was allowed to open a trade or
to commence a manufacture, either in London or the provinces, unless he had
first served his apprenticeship; unless he could prove to the satisfaction
of the authorities that he was competent in his craft; and unless he
submitted as a matter of course to their supervision. The legislature had
undertaken not to let that indispensable task go wholly unattempted, of
distributing the various functions of society by the rule of capacity; of
compelling every man to do his duty in an honest following of his proper
calling, securing to him that he in his turn should not be injured by his
neighbour's misdoings.

The state further promising for itself that all able-bodied men should be
found in work,[61] and not allowing any man to work at a business for which
he was unfit, insisted as its natural right that children should not be
allowed to grow up in idleness, to be returned at mature age upon its
hands. Every child, so far as possible, was to be trained up in some
business or calling,[62] idleness "being the mother of all sin," and the
essential duty of every man being to provide honestly for himself and his
family. The educative theory, for such it was, was simple but effective: it
was based on the single principle that, next to the knowledge of a man's
duty to God, and as a means towards doing that duty, the first condition of
a worthy life was the ability to maintain it in independence. Varieties of
inapplicable knowledge might be good, but they were not essential; such
knowledge might be left to the leisure of after years, or it might be
dispensed with without vital injury. Ability to labour could not be
dispensed with, and this, therefore, the state felt it to be its own duty
to see provi