greater importance. It does this chiefly in the three following ways. First, by restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than would otherwise be disposed to enter into them, especially by the exclusive privileges of corporations. In Sheffield, no master cutler can have more than one apprentice. In Norfolk, no master weaver can have more than two, under pain of forfeiting five pounds a-month to the king. By the Statute of Apprenticeship it was enacted, that no person should exercise any trade, craft, or mystery, unless he had previously served to it an apprenticeship of seven years at least. The property which every man has in his own labour, the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. To hinder a poor man from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. Long apprenticeship has no tendency to form young people to industry. A young man would practice with much more diligence and attention, if from the beginning he wrought as a journeyman, being paid in proportion to the little work which he could execute. The master, indeed, would be a loser. But the public would be a gainer, the work of all artificers coming in this way much cheaper to market. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the