The most manifest absurdities while remaining in fashion receive the
greatest respect; for it is not till Time affords a retrospect that the
full force of the absurdity is revealed. When men and women went about
dressed like the characters in the farce of Tom Thumb, we of the present
day wonder that they excited no mirth; nor can we now believe that
Betterton drew tears as _Cato_ in a full-bottomed wig. A beauty who a
dozen years ago excited admiration in the balloon-like costume of that
day, would now, if presenting herself in full-blown leg-of-mutton
sleeves, excite a smile. The more intelligent natives of Mexico are now
more disposed to grin than to shudder, as they once did, at their
comical idols. Everybody has heard of the monkey-god of India. In our
day, those who once adored and dreaded him, would as readily worship
_Punch_, and receive his squeakings for oracles, as to bow down before
the Great Monkey.
Amongst the most prominent superstitions in which our forefathers
believed, as a commercial opinion and rule of legislation, was
“Protection;” and we have not awakened too recently from the delusion
which descended from them not to perceive its absurdities, especially on
looking over their voluminous legacy, the Statute Book. Before, however,
we open some of its most comical pages, let us premise that the question
of Protection is not a political one. Of the precise force and meaning
of the term, there is a large class of “constant readers” who have no
definite idea. The word “Protection” calls up in their minds a sort of
phantasmagoria composed chiefly of Corn-law leagues, tedious debates in
Parliament, Custom-houses, excisemen, smugglers, preventive-men and
mounted coast-guards. They know it has to do with imports, exports,
drawbacks, the balance of trade, and with being searched when they step
ashore from a Boulogne steamer. Floating over this indefinite
construction of the term, they have a general opinion that Protection
must be a good thing, for they also associate it most intimately with
the guardianship of the law, which protects them from the swindler, and
with the policeman, who protects them from the thief. That powerful and
patriotic sentiment, “Protection to British Industry,” must, they think,
be nearly the same sort of thing, except that it means protection from
the tricks of foreigners instead of from those of compatriots. They
confess that, believing the whole matter to be a complicated branch of
politics, they have had neither time nor patience to “go into it.”
In supposing the question of Free Trade or Protection to be a political
one, they are, as we have before hinted, in error. It has no more to do
with politics than their own transactions with the grocer and the
coal-merchant; for it treats of the best mode of carrying on a nation’s,
instead of an individual’s dealings with foreign marts and foreign
customers. They are also wrong in supposing that protection to life and
property is of the same character as that to which British industry is
subjected. The difference can be easily explained; and although
doubtless the majority of our readers are quite aware of it, yet for the
benefit of the above-described, who are not, we will point it
out:—Connected, as everybody knows, with whatever is protected, there
must be two parties—A, in whose _favour_ it is protected; and B,
_against_ whom it is protected. Legitimate and wholesome protection
preserves the property we wish to guard against our enemies; impolitic
and unwholesome protection too securely preserves property to us which
we are most anxious to get rid of—by sale or barter,—against our best
friends, our customers.
These elementary explanations are absolutely essential for the thorough
enjoyment of the broad comedy, which here and there lightens up that
grave publication, the Statutes at Large.
When the laws had protected English manufacturers, and producers from
foreign produce and skill; they, by a natural sequence of blundering,
set about protecting the British manufacturing population one against
another, and the German jest of the wig-makers, who petitioned their
Crown Prince “to make it felony for any gentleman to wear his own hair,”
is almost realised. In the palmy days of Protection, a British
bookbinder could not use paste, nor a British dandy, hair-powder,
because the British farmer had been so tightly protected against foreign
corn, that the British public could not get enough of it to make bread
to eat.
These were perhaps the most expensive absurdities into which John Bull
was driven by his mania for protection, but they were by no means the
most ludicrous. Among his other dainty devices for promoting the woollen
manufacture, was the law which compelled all dead bodies to be buried in
woollen cloth. There may not be many who can sympathise with the agony
of Pope’s dying coquette:—
“Odious! In woollen! ’Twould a saint provoke;
Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.”
But every one must be astounded at the folly of bribing men to invest
ingenuity and industry, to bury that which above ground was the most
useful and saleable, of all possible articles. The intention was to
discourage the use of cotton, which has since proved one of the greatest
sources of wealth ever brought into this country.
The strangest and most practical protest of national common sense,
against laws enacting protective duties, was the impossibility of
compelling people to obey them. To those laws the country has been
indebted for the expensive coast-guards, who cannot, after all, prevent
smuggling. The disproportionate penalties threatened by protective laws,
show how difficult it was to ensure obedience. In 1765, so invincible
was the desire of our ladies to do justice to their neat ancles, that a
law had to be passed in the fifth of George the Third, (chapter
forty-eight,) decreeing that “if any foreign manufactured silk
stockings, &c., be imported into any part of the British dominions, they
shall be forfeited, and the importers, retailers, or vendors of the
same, shall be subject, for every such offence, to a fine of two hundred
pounds, with costs of suit.” The wise legislators did not dare to extend
the penalties to the fair wearers, who found means to make it worth the
while of the vendors to brave and evade the law.
The complicated and contradictory legislation into which the _ignis
fatuus_ of Protection led men, made our nominally protective laws not
unfrequently laws prohibitive of industry. To protect the iron-masters
of Staffordshire, the inhabitants of Pennsylvania (while yet a British
colony) were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to avail themselves of
their rich coal and iron mines. To protect the tobacco growers of
Virginia (also in its colonial epoch) the agriculturists of Great
Britain were forbidden to cultivate the plant—a prohibition which is
still in force—even now, that the semblance of a reason or excuse for
the restriction exists.
The petty details into which these prohibitions of industry, under the
pretext of protecting it, descended, can only be conceived by those who
have studied the Statutes at Large. An act was passed in the fourth of
George the First (the seventh chapter) for the better employing the
manufacturers, and encouraging the consumption of raw silk. This act
provides “that no person shall make, sell, or set upon any clothes or
wearing garments whatsoever, any buttons made of serge, cloth, drugget,
frieze, camlet, or any other stuff of which clothes or wearing garments
are made, or any buttons made of wool only, and turned in imitations of
other buttons, on pain of forfeiting forty shillings per dozen for all
such buttons.” And again, in the seventh year of the same George, the
twenty-second chapter of that year’s statutes declared that “No tailors
shall set on any buttons or button-holes of serge, drugget, &c., under
penalty of forty shillings for every dozen of buttons or button-holes so
made or set on.... No person shall use or wear on any clothes, garments,
or apparel whatsoever, except velvet, any buttons or button-holes made
of or bound with cloth, serge, drugget, frieze, camlet, or other stuffs
whereof clothes or woollen garments are usually made, on penalty of
forfeiting forty shillings per dozen under a similar penalty.” These
acts were insisted on by the ancient and important fraternity of metal
button-makers, who thought they had a prescriptive right to supply the
world with brass and other buttons “with shanks.” Shankless fasteners,
made of cloth, serge, &c., were therefore interdicted; and every man,
woman, and child, down to the time when George the Third was king, was
_obliged_ to wear metal buttons whether they liked them or not, on pain
of fine or imprisonment.
The shackles and pitfalls in which men involved themselves in their
chase after the illusive idea of universal protection were as numerous,
and more fatal than those with which Louis the Eleventh garnished his
castle at Plessis-le-Tours. It was impossible to move without stumbling
into some of them. British ship-builders were allowed to ply their trade
exclusively for British ship-owners; but, in return, they were compelled
to buy the dear timber of Canada, instead of that of the Baltic. British
ship-owners had exclusive privileges of ocean carriage, but had to pay
tribute to the monopoly of British ship-builders and Canadian lumberers.
British sailors were exclusively to be employed in English ships, but in
return they were at the mercy of the press-gangs. Dubious advantages
were bought at a price unquestionably dear and ruinous.
The condition of our country while possessed by the fallacy of
protection, can be compared to nothing so aptly, as to a man under the
influence of a nightmare. One incongruity pursues another through the
brain. There is a painful half-consciousness that all is delusion, and a
fear that it may be reality—there is a choking sense of oppression. The
victim of the unhealthy dream, tries to shake it off and awaken, but his
faculties are spell-bound. By a great effort the country has awakened to
the light of day, and a sense of realities.
The way in which the rural population, great and small, were protected
against one another, may be well illustrated by an extract from the
third of James the First, chapter fourteen. This act was in force so
lately as 1827, for it was only repealed by the seventh and eighth of
George the Fourth, chapter twenty-seven. The fifth clause of this
precious enactment made a man who had not forty pounds a year a
“malefactor” if he shot a hare; while a neighbour who possessed a
hundred a year, and caught him in the fact, became in one moment his
judge and executioner. After reciting that if any person who had not
real property producing forty pounds a year, or who had not two hundred
pounds’ worth of goods and chattels, shall presume to shoot game, the
clause goes on to say—“Then any person, having lands, tenements, and
hereditaments, of the clear value of one hundred pounds a year, may take
from the person or possession of such malefactor or malefactors, and to
his own use for ever keep, such guns, bows, cross-bows, buckstalls,
engine-traps, nets, ferrets, and coney dogs,” &c. This is hardly a comic
leaf from the statute book. Indignation gives place to mirth on perusing
it. Some portions of the game-laws still in force could be enumerated,
equally unreasonable and summary.
Most of the statutes contain a comical set of rules of English Grammar,
which are calculated to make the wig of Lindley Murray stiffen in his
grave with horror; they run thus:—“Words importing the singular number
shall include the plural number, and words importing the plural number
shall include the singular number. Words importing the masculine gender
shall include females. The word ‘person’ shall include a corporation,
whether aggregate or sole. The word ‘lands’ shall include messuages,
lands, tenements, and hereditaments of any tenure. The word ‘street’
shall extend to and include any road, square, court, alley, and
thoroughfare, or public passage, within the limits of the special act.
The expression ‘two justices’ shall be understood to mean two or more
justices met and acting together.”
Thus ends our chapter of only a few of the mirth provocatives of the
Statutes at Large.
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