Evolution of the Wages System. 229 



nied the development of the factory-system is a fact too 

 obvious to be questioned. These, however, as I have else- 

 where shown,* are not inherent in the wages system, but 

 are evils which sound economics and wise statesmanship 

 may and should eliminate. But even with the blundering 

 economics and blind statesmanship hitherto so prevalent, 

 the permanence of employment has steadily increased with 

 the development of the wages system and factory methods. 

 For the proof of this you only need compare the statistics 

 of able-bodied pauperism (enforced idleness) of the six- 

 teenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, with that of 

 the last thirty years. 



How to deal with the unemployed was the chief indus- 

 trial problem that perplexed the English statesmen from 

 the middle of the sixteenth to the first quarter of the 

 nineteenth century. The statute books of that period 

 bristle with enactments inflicting pains and penalties varying 

 from the stocks to the scaffold, thousands being imprisoned, 

 branded with red-hot irons, and not a few put to death, as 

 the penalty for being "sturdy beggars," which condition 

 enforced idleness made necessary, f Indeed, the history of 

 the English Poor-Laws and the Act of Settlement under 

 the Tudors and Stuarts is the history of futile attempts to 

 deal with involuntary idleness. 



With the development of the factory system and the 

 concentration of capital, however, this evil has been stead- 

 ily diminished ; not from any generosity on the part of the 

 capitalist towards the laborer, but because permanence of 

 employment became indispensable to the success of large 

 undertakings. As industrial establishments increased in 

 size, involving millions of dollars, slight errors of manage- 

 ment result in more serious losses. Indeed, it is a law of 



* Prill, of Social Economics, Part IV., ch. iv (Industrial Depressions). 



t In the first year of the reign of Edward VI. (1547) it was enacted (chapter 

 iii) that " if any person refuse to labor, and live idly three days, he shall be 

 branded with ared-hot iron on the breast with letter V, and be adjudged slave 

 for two years of the person who informed against him. It is further provided 

 that the master may cause his slave to work by beating or chaining him ; if 

 the slave absconds for fourteen days he is condemned to slavety for life, and 

 if he runs away a second time, he can be put to death." It is said that " every 

 part of the kingdom was infested with robbers and idle vagabonds who, refus- 

 ing to labor, lived by plundering the peaceful inhabitants." In Elizabeth's 

 reign, " rogues were trussed up apace, and there was not <me year coTumonly 

 wherein 300 or 400 of them were not devoured and eaten up by' the gallows in 

 one place and other." In the reign of Henry VIII., 72,000 are said to have 

 been put to death for these offenses. (Wade's History of England, pp. 16 and 

 17. See also Rogers' Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 419.) 



