Note 20 — FURNITURE

The purpose of these Spanish city laws was in its essence unimpeachable; namely, to guard the intensely ignorant Christian populace—the same which fugitive Moriscos of the kingdom of Valencia had readily prevailed upon to barter tons of brass and pewter trash for sterling gold and silver coin—from being imposed upon by manufacturers and merchants. But the power of discriminating between a genuine or well-made object and a piece of counterfeit or worthless rubbish is, among all peoples, better sought for and developed by experience than by legislation; and there was something noxiously prosaic in a code of city ordinances which forbade the craftsman to prepare his own design, or choose his own material, or establish his own prices. How violently, or at least how primitively, hostile to the sense of art must not have been these Christian sons of Spain to need—or think they needed—so impertinent and tyrannous a system of protection!