THE WAGE-CONTRACT AND PERSONAL LIBERTY. 647 



means of their utmost exertions, earn sufficient wages to purchase 

 the necessaries of life. 



That the great mass of wage-earners favor State regulation of 

 some sort will probably be conceded. Scarcely a month passes 

 that Congress and the State Legislatures are not asked by labor 

 interests to restrict the freedom of contract in one way or another. 

 They believe that their wages may be increased by legislation, 

 just as the price of commodities is increased by tariff laws. If 

 legislation can lower the rate of wages below the contract rate, it 

 is difficult to see why it can not also raise the rate of wages above 

 the contract rate. For centuries the employing class of England 

 legislated in its own interest and kept the rate of wages below 

 the contract rate. This they did, first, by various Statutes of 

 Laborers, passed by Parliament, giving the employing class 

 power to fix wages, and punishing laborers who asked or received 

 higher wages ; secondly, by laws abolishing trade guilds and con- 

 fiscating their property ; thirdly, by acts of Parliament and de- 

 cisions of the courts holding that peaceful combinations among 

 workmen to raise wages were conspiracies and punishable by fine 

 or imprisonment ; and, fourthly, by acts of Parliament debasing 

 the currency, by which the purchasing power of the laborer's 

 shilling or penny was greatly lessened. Prof. Rogers, in his great 

 work entitled Six Centuries of Work and Wages, shows how by 

 these various legislative means the English laborer's condition 

 was reduced from that of comparative comfort in the fourteenth 

 century to that of semi-starvation in the eighteenth. This sys- 

 tem was inaugurated in 1350, shortly after the Great Plague, 

 which destroyed one third of the entire population of England. 

 At that time the employing class, which, of course, controlled 

 legislation, seems to have had some excuse for passing the Statute 

 of Laborers. The supply of labor being thus suddenly reduced 

 one third, the demand was intense, and the laborers could get 

 exorbitant prices for their work. The contract rate depending 

 upon supply and demand was abnormally and unreasonably 

 high,* and therefore the employing class brought all the machin- 

 ery of the State to bear upon the situation, and finally succeeded 

 in reducing the rate below the contract rate. This policy was 

 pursued by England into the dawn of the nineteenth century, 

 when, the conditions having changed and there being an over- 

 supply of labor and the contract rate correspondingly low, the 

 Statutes of Laborers were magnanimously repealed. 



During all this time of State regulation of wages in favor of 

 the employing class we look in vain for any philosopher to arise 



* The preamble to the statute recites that wages had risen to double or treble the rate 

 that prevailed immediately before the plague. 



