PBESIDENt’s ADDBE8S — SECTION G> 
161 
And yet it was not always so. In England, in former centuries, 
the law ordered the settlement of wages by public authority. * In 
1563 Parliament expressly charged itself with securing to all wage- 
earners a “convenient” livelihood; and by the “ Statute of Appren- 
tices” the justices were directed to fix yearly the wages of nearly 
every kind of labour. These laws were in force, nominally at least, 
till early in the present century; and as late as 1773 a fresh Act was 
passed fixing wages in the silk trade. 
How far these laws were actually carried out, and how far they 
served their purpose, is doubtful and disputed ; but the fact that they 
were passed shows that Govern inent in those times deliberately took 
upon itself the task of fixing wages at the rate considered best. 
The last remnants of these wage-fixing laws were swept away 
by the rising flood of the Industrial Revolution ; but not without 
protests on the part of the wage-earners. According to Mr. Sidney 
Webb, it became the common purpose of nearly all eighteenth century 
trade combinations to “appeal to the Government and the House of 
Commons to save the wage-earners from the new policy of buying 
labour, like the raw material of manufacture, in the cheapest market.” 
The skilled craftsmen demanded enforcement of the law of apprentice- 
ship; the weavers and others demanded the “ convenient proportion 
of wages” contemplated by Elizabethan legislation. In both cases 
“the wage-earners turned, for the maintenance of their standard 
of life, to that protection by the law on which they had been taught 
to rely.” 
But the Government was by this time adopting, as a matter of 
principle, the policy of laissez fa ire associated with the name of 
Adam Smith. The last occasion on which a wage rate was actually 
fixed by the justices in accordance with the old law appears to have 
been in 1805, in the Edinburgh printing trade. In 1808 a committee 
of the Commons, on an appeal from the hand-loom weavers to fix a 
minimum wage, reported that “it was wholly inadmissible in principle, 
incapable of being reduced to practice by any means that can possibly 
be devised, and, if practicable, would be productive of the most fatal 
consequences.” 
The law empowering justices to fix wages was repealed in 1813 ; 
and in 1814 were abolished the apprenticeship clauses of the old 
statute, “ and with them practically the last remnant of that legislative 
protection of the standard of life which had survived from the Middle 
Ages.” 
The settlement of wages entirely by free bargaining and the 
competition of the market, then, so far from being a “ law of nature,” 
is merely a modern innovation introduced by our own grandfathers. 
Shall we ever see similar laws re-enacted at the demand of the wage- 
earners, and in their interest ? That 1 cannot tell ; but it is not 
impossible. 
W e certainly could, if we chose to do so, pass a law forbidding 
any employer to offer, or any wage-earner to take, wages below a 
certain rate. "Whether we could enforce the law when passed is more 
doubtful. But, supposing that it could be enforced, what would be 
the effect ? 
L 
Webb, “ History of Trade Unions. 
