ernment (whether wisely or not, I do not presume to
determine) attempting to portion out the rights of the various classes of
society by the rule, not of economy, but of equity. Statesmen did not care
for the accumulation of capital; they desired to see the physical
well-being of all classes of the commonwealth maintained at the highest
degree which the producing power of the country admitted; and population
and production remaining stationary, they were able to do it. This was
their object, and they were supported in it by a powerful and efficient
majority of the nation. On the one side parliament interfered to protect
employers against their labourers; but it was equally determined that
employers should not be allowed to abuse their opportunities; and this
directly appears from the 4th of the 5th of Elizabeth, by which, on the
most trifling appearance of a depreciation in the currency, it was declared
that the labouring man could no longer live on the wages assigned to him by
the act of Henry; and a sliding scale was instituted by which, for the
future, wages should be adjusted to the price of food.[34]

The same conclusion may be gathered also, indirectly, from other acts,
interfering imperiously with the rights of property where a disposition
showed itself to exercise them selfishly. The city merchants, as I have
said, were becoming landowners; and some of them attempted to apply the
rules of trade to the management of landed estates. While wages were ruled
so high, it answered better as a speculation to convert arable land into
pasture; but the law immediately stepped in to prevent a proceeding which
it regarded as petty treason to the commonwealth. Self-protection is the
first law of life; and the country relying for its defence on an
able-bodied population, evenly distributed, ready at any moment to be
called into action, either against foreign invasion or civil disturbance,
it could not permit the owners of land to pursue for their own benefit a
course of action which threatened to weaken its garrisons. It is not often
that we are able to test the wisdom of legislation by specific results so
clearly as in the present instance. The first attempts of the kind which I
have described were made in the Isle of Wight, early in the reign of Henry
VII. Lying so directly exposed to attacks from France, the Isle of Wight
was a place which it was peculiarly important to keep in a state of
defence, and the following act was th