modern statute-book. In no State of our forty-six States is any one so
unintelligent, even in introducing bills in the legislature, as to-day
to propose that the price of a ton of coal or a loaf of bread shall
be so much. Nor is any modern legislature so unintelligent or so
oppressive as to propose sumptuary laws; that is, to prescribe how
expensively a man or woman must dress; but in the mediaeval times
those were thought very important. Every class in England was then
required by law to have exactly so many coats, to spend so much money
on their dress, so much on their wives' dress, and certain men could
have fine cloth and others coarse cloth; everything was graded, even
to the number of buttons on clothes, and they went so far even as to
try in some early legislation to say what men should have to eat; the
number of courses a man should have for his dinner were prescribed by
law at one time in England, varying according to the man's rank. All
such legislation has absolutely vanished and probably no one need know
that it existed--but that when efforts are made, as they sometimes
are, by our more or less uneducated members of legislatures to
introduce bills of such a kind, it is very important for us to know
that those experiments have been tried and have failed, having proved
to be either impracticable or oppressive or not for the general
benefit. This is the importance of these early laws, even when
obsolete; because we never know when some agitator may not pop up
with some new proposal--something he thinks new--which he thinks, if
adopted, will revolutionize society. If you can show him that his
new discovery is not only not new, but was tried, and tried in vain,
during two or three centuries in the life of our own ancestors, until
an enraged public abolished it, it will destroy any effect that he is
likely to make upon the average legislature.

The first general example of an English law fixing the price of a