Gideon Giles the Roper (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Gideon Giles the Roper In this volume I have attempted to produce a true English work - to make the scenery and characters thoroughly English, while the chief events of the story are such as have fallen under my own observation, and the interest centres on the effect produced by an unjust and cruel English law: and one which, for the love I bear to my country, I am ashamed to say, is in force at this very hour. To shew how great a check such a law is to honesty and industry, I have written this book, confident that every right-minded and honest-hearted man will agree with me, in wishing for the abolition of an Act, which has the power of imprisoning a poor man who, without a license, offers for sale the goods which his own hands have manufactured. This law requires no learned man to unravel it, for unlike most English laws, it is "clear as tho sun at noon-day." A poor man can sell the goods he himself makes in the town or parish in which ho lives, he can sell them (without a license) at the very doors of those high-rented and heavily-rated shops which deal in the self-same articles he offers for sale, and which this Act was made to protect. Change the scene, and let him offer the same goods for sale in the neighbouring villages, or at the doors of odd, lonely, and out-of-the-way houses, where there are none of these high-rented and high-rated shops to injure - where the inhabitants are compelled to go miles to purchase such articles as he brings to their doors, and he is liable to a penalty of forty pounds, or three months' imprisonment! How little does this Act vary from the hated Norman forest-laws - the "vert and venison" of the feudal ages? Substitute parish boundary for forest boundary, and there is the same narrow neck of land on which the Saxon serf trod, the doom is the same - a heavy fine, or the prison. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.