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 commodity is in 1266, the Assize of Bread and Beer.  That fixed the price of bread according to the cost of wheat, a sliding scale, in other words; when a bushel of wheat cost so much, a loaf weighing a certain amount must cost so much, etc.  But you must not confound that with the modern law that still exists in England, and in some States and cities here, merely regulating the size of a loaf.  That is perfectly proper, reasonable legislation, done merely for the purpose of protecting the public and preventing fraud.  In England, for instance, there is a certain standard loaf known as a quartern loaf, and in order to prevent poor people being cheated it is prescribed by city ordinance that the quartern loaf shall weigh so much, shall contain so many ounces of flour.  We do have similar laws saying how much a bushel of potatoes shall weigh, how much a barrel of flour shall weigh.  That isn’t fixing the price; it is only fixing a uniform size so that the public may not be cheated in its dealings, and one must not take such a law as justifying the fixing of prices.

In the year 1266 I find the first statute in the French language, Norman French; before that they were all in Latin; and they lasted in French for some four or five hundred years, and then they were put in English.  The Statute of Marlborough, 1267, is a very important one historically, but it does not concern us, because it mainly had to do with the ownership of land, the tenure of land in England, an extremely important subject, but one that is obsolete here.  Then we have something about the trial of clerks for murder.  Of course the word clerk there means not what we mean by a clerk, but a person who could read and write; and nothing more than that.  It originally meant persons in holy orders, who were called clerks (clerics), but there got to be clerks who were not in holy orders.  Originally only priests could read and write.  No one else knew how, except possibly great personages like kings, and consequently it was the same thing whether, when you said a clerk, you meant a person who could read and write or a priest.  But when there got to be people who could read and write and who were not priests, it became an important distinction.  There was a privilege in England known as the “benefit of the clergy”; if any clerk was tried for a criminal offence, no matter what, all he had to do was to state that he was a priest and he was at once