510 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM 
30 low of work, shall be and are hereby declared to be illegal, null 
and void to all intents and purposes.” 
Masters At the same time attempts were made to strengthen the 
Seed to hands of the employers in exercising and controlling the 
Sonn Le men, as it was exceedingly difficult for any employer to 
Pranbiant exercise effective supervision over a number of weavers each 
of whom worked in his own home. It was alleged that the 
clothiers suffered severely from the fraud and negligence of 
the working manufacturers? though it was rarely worth their 
while to prosecute a poor man, even when he was grossly to 
blame. Thus masters were allowed to combine for the prose- 
cution of fraud in connection with trade, and in this way 
a right of combination was conceded to the masters®, which 
had been and continued to be denied to the men. 
There were other forms of fraud which had occasioned 
trouble in the export trade of the country in earlier times®, 
and against which it was necessary to guard. The excessive 
straining of broad cloth was injurious to the fabric. and in 
1727 the Justices were authorised to appoint Inspectors who 
should have the power to visit all the premises in Wiltshire, 
Gloucestershire and Somersetshire where the manufacture 
was carried on, in order to guard against this abuse’. Official 
inspection was still chiefly directed to the quality of goods, 
and was not yet applied to the conditions of work. 
The differ- 228. There is ample evidence of the rise of an employing 
ofan class and re-constitution of industry on a capitalistic basis, not 
employing only in weaving, but in other processes connected with the 
anevrred manufacture. The records of the investigation, in 1633, into 
spinning the condition of the clothing trade in the West of England 
make it clear that there was a class of market spinners® who 
“gett many spinners on work.” and gave “ better wages than 
and in- 
spectors 
were ap- 
pointed to 
te) 
the quality 
of goods. 
112 Geo. I. c. 34. 
3 All through the eighteenth century, the term manufacturer is applied, as in 
Johnson's Dictionary, to the working craftsman, not to the capitalist, who is 
generally spoken of as a clothier. [Temple's] Considerations on Taxes as they are 
supposed to affect the Price of Labour in our Manufacturies, p. 2, is an early 
(1755) instance of the modern sense of the word. 
8 17 Geo. IIL. c. 11; 24 Geo. III. c. 8. 
¢ Vol. 1. 193 and p. 221 n. 1 above. 
5 13 Geo. I. c. 23. A similar enactment was passed to repress the same evil 
among the domestic manufacturers in Yorkshire in 1765. 5 Geo. IIL. c. 51. 
8 PD CI coxa. 23: also cerxxxir 81. See 1. 96 n. above.