statute passed in the
interest of liberality to protect the Jews--a statute which provided
liberally that you must not take from a Jew "more than one-half his
substance." And a very early commentator tells us of a Jew who fell
into a privy on a Friday, but refused to be helped out on Saturday
because it was his Sunday; and on Sunday he besought the Earl of
Gloucester to pull him out, but the Earl of Gloucester refused because
it was his Sunday; so the Jew remained there until Monday morning,
when he was found dead. There is no prejudice against Hebrews to-day
anywhere in Europe stronger than existed even in England for the first
three or four centuries after the Norman Conquest; and had it not been
for the protection given them by the crown, probably they would have
been exterminated or starved out, and in 1289 they were all banished
to the number of 16,160, and their movables seized.

In 1264 citizens of towns were first represented in the Parliament (in
the Great Council, that is, for the word parliament is not yet used),
originally only composed of the great barons, who were the only
land-owners. The notion of there being freemen in towns was slowly
established, but it was fully recognized by 1264, and in that year
citizens of towns first appeared in the Council. To-day, under the
various Reform Acts, tenants or even lodgers in towns are just as much
represented as the land-owners; but the reform which began in 1264
took six hundred years to be thoroughly established.

And now we find the first statutory origin of that utterly fallacious
principle--although alive to-day--that the state, in a free country,
a legislature-governed country, has the right, when expedient, to fix
the _price_ of anything, wages or other commodities; fallacious, I
say, except possibly as to the charges of corporations, which are
given special privileges by the government; the principle, which
prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, of fixing the prices of all
things. In this case the price was on bread; but you find now for many
centuries an attempt to fix the price of almost everything; and of
labor, too, what wages a man should be paid. It lasted persistently
for centuries and centuries, and it was only under the influence of
modern political economy, Adam Smith and other quite modern writers,
that the principle that it was possible to fix prices of commodities
was utterly eradicated from the English mind. And you hardly got it
out of Eng