26o ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 



sent tools and machinery, which, after the work was over, 

 would be sold for whatever they might fetch. Thus, for in- 

 stance, two cranes (antemnae) are purchased in order to raise 

 the stone on the scaffold of the building, each of which weighs 

 367 Ibs., the former being bought (according to the custom of 

 the time) at id. the latter at i\d. the Ib. But no person, I 

 should think, would imagine that such a structure could be built 

 at present under from three to four thousand pounds : although 

 iron-work is incomparably cheaper, carriage could hardly be 

 so high, and labour is, relatively speaking, not paid better, 

 if indeed it be paid so well. 



Of course one great element in the economy of production in 

 the time before us is the slowness with which such structures 

 were raised. In modern times expeditious work is a matter 

 of demand, and being therefore a matter of cost, a building of 

 this character, if not suffered to linger, would be so far more 

 expensive. But the chief cause of comparative cheapness in 

 that age lay in the facts that fewer intermediaries were em- 

 ployed between labour and the demand for its produce, super- 

 vision was more effectual, or at least less necessary, and no 

 regulations existed at that age by which labour should be 

 studiously rendered inefficient, slow, or negligent. Men 

 worked for employers, not for contractors. There was no 

 struggle, as is professed now, between labour and capital, and 

 the jealousies fomented between the several contributors to 

 any work in the building trades had not yet arisen. I cannot 

 pretend to say that there is no warranty at all for the regula- 

 tions by which working men strive to protect themselves 

 against what is called the tyranny of capitalists. Nearly five 

 hundred years of parliamentary regulations laid on the price 

 of labour, were the legislation ever so inoperative, must have 

 certainly begot some irritation. Even though the laws pro- 

 hibiting combinations and fixing wages did not depress the 

 price by a single farthing, they were intended to do so, and 

 therefore justified the resentment which has been stereotyped 

 in the modern trades' union. But of this I am convinced, that 



