the social state, we find that, besides suffering a direct loss of power to perform its duty on attempting anything else, there are several subsidiary ways in which the assumption of additional functions endangers the fulfilment of its original function.

THE REGULATION OF COMMERCE.

IN putting a veto upon any commercial intercourse, or in putting obstacles in the way of any such intercourse, a government trenches upon men's liberties of action; and by so doing directly reverses its function. To secure for each man the fullest freedom to exercise his faculties compatible with the like freedom of all others, we find to be the State's duty. Now trade-prohibitions and trade-restrictions not only do not secure this freedom, but they take it away. that in enforcing them the State is transformed from a maintainer of rights into a violator of rights. If it be criminal in a civil power commissioned to shield us from murder to turn murderer itself; if it be criminal in it to play the thief, though set to keep off thieves; then must it be criminal in it to deprive men, in any way, of liberty to pursue the objects they desire, when it was appointed to insure them that lib erty.

We saw that as unjust institutions derive their viciousness from moral defects in the people living under them, they must be uniformly pervaded by that viciousness-that as social laws, creeds, and arrangements consist merely of solidified character, the same character will be shown in all the social laws, creeds, and arrangements which co-exist; and, further, that any process of amelioration will affect them. simultaneously. We saw that tyranny in forms of government, tyranny in the conduct of lord to serf, tyranny in religious organizations and discipline, tyranny in the marital

relationship, and tyranny in the treatment of children, regularly flourish together and regularly decrease at like rates. In the same category we must now put-tyranny in commercial laws. Sinking those minor irregularities which pervade all Nature's processes, we shall find that from the days when exportation was a capital crime, down to our own free-trade era, there has been a constant ratio kept between the stringency of mercantile restraints and the stringency of other restraints, as there has also between the increase of commercial liberty and the increase of general liberty.

A few facts will sufficiently exemplify this. Take as one the instance just alluded to, in which associated with autocratic rule in Church, in State, and in feudal hall, we find Edward III., for the purpose of making foreigners come and buy in our markets, prohibiting his subjects from sending abroad any staple goods, "under penalty of death and confiscation;" and further enacting "that the law should be unalterable either by himself or his successors." Observe, too, how this same despotic spirit was exhibited in the regulations requiring these Continental traders to reside during their stay with certain inspectors, commissioned to see the cargoes sold within a specified time and the proceeds reinvested in English goods; and charged to transmit to the Exchequer periodical statements of each merchant's bargains: regulations, by the way, of which the abandonment was in after times lamented by the venerators of ancestral wisdom, much as the abolition of the sliding scale is mourned over by a certain party of our own day. Note again how, under the same régime, labourers were coerced into working for fixed wages; and then how, to keep the balance even, shopkeepers had the prices of provisions dictated to them. Mark, further, that when the most tyrannical of these ordinances fell into disuse, there still continued the less burdensome ones; such as those usury laws, orders to farmers, prescribing of the material for grave-clothes, instructions to manufacturers, &c., referred to in the last chapter. But without going into fur

ther detail-without enlarging upon the fact that those intolerable restraints once borne by the manufacturing classes of France were contemporary with intense despotism at court, and a still lingering feudalism in the provinces-without tracing the parallelism that exists between the political and commercial bondage under which, in spite of their revolutions, the French still live-without pointing out at length the same connexion of phenomena in Prussia, in Austria, and in other similarly-ruled countries-without doing all this, the evidence adduced sufficiently shows that the oppressiveness of a nation's mercantile laws varies as the oppressiveness of its general arrangements and government.

Many much-reverenced social instrumentalities, have originated in the primitive necessity of ascribing all causation to special workers--the inability to detach the idea of force from an individual something. Just in proportion as natural phenomena are regarded by any people as of personal instead of impersonal origin, will the phenomena of national life be similarly construed; and, indeed, since moral sequences are less obvious than physical ones, they will be thus construed even more generally. The old belief that a king could fix the value of coinage, and the cry raised at the change of style —“Give us our eleven days," obviously implied minds incapable of conceiving social affairs to be regulated by other than visible, tangible agencies. That there should be at work some unseen but universally-diffused influences determining the buyings and sellings of citizens and the transactions of merchants from abroad, in a way the most advantageous to all parties, was an idea as foreign to such minds as was that of uniform physical causation to the primitive Greeks; and, conversely, as the primitive Greeks could understand the operations of Nature being performed by a number of presiding individualities, so, to the people of the middle ages, it was comprehensible that a proper production and distribution of commodities could be ensured by acts of

Parliament and government officials. While the due regulation of trade by natural indestructible forces was inconceivable to them, they could conceive trade to be duly regulated by forces resident in some material instrumentality put together by legislators, clothed in the robes of office, painted by court-flatterers, and decorated with "jewels five words long."