Regulation of Wages Finally Successful Under Elizabeth.

Then came the statute of Elizabeth, which first successfully imposed a legal restraint upon wages, both in husbandry and in handicrafts, and this system was continued under legal sanction until 1812, and "by a sufficient understanding" for long after that date. All persons able to work as laborers or artisans, and not having independent means, were compelled to work upon the farms. The statute both fixed the hours of work and gave the justice power to fix the rate of wages. Agricultural labor was further depressed, and industrial labor somewhat protected, by that provision of the statute which prohibited anyone from exercising any trade, craft, or occupation then in use in England and Wales without first serving an apprenticeship of seven years. This part of the statute, passed in 1662, was not repealed until 1875. I shall postpone for the present any notice of those statutes which provided for the suppression of combinations among workmen for the raising of their wages, as this matter, belonging rather to the law of remedies, will come more naturally in a subsequent lecture upon strikes and boycotts; but will note here that in 1796 a statute fixed a day's work at twelve hours, with one hour for dinner, probably a longer day than was enacted three hundred years before.

General Review.

So much for general review of the history of English labor legislation, and it may be summarized in the statement that the rate of wages, originally left to natural laws, was attempted to be fixed by law during about three centuries, and a strict apprenticeship both required and limited; in other respects industrial labor was always free, and at liberty to seek employment where it would, subject only to the limitations of place, which were imposed by natural custom or by the system of residence in corporate guilds and to the limitations, or the protection, as to rates and employment which were furnished, in the interest of the laborer or handicraftsman, by his own tradeguilds; and since about 1812 it has been free in all respects, even as to wages and prices. There are thus (but separated by no clear demarcation) four stages-serf-relation, guild control, state control, and free contract.

Modern Factory, etc., Legislation.

Nothing in a world of uncertainty can, however, remain crudely logical. The perfect system of laissez-faire hardly lasted a generation when, for an aggregation of labor, it gave way to the principle of the factory acts. These began about 1804; and if not strange, it is suggestive, that the culminating statute, the ten-hour law of 1847,

signalized, with the same rejoicings on the part of the laboring world, a return to the same principle of privilege or state control that had been abolished by the laboring world amid bonfires and bell-ringing in the Paris of 1791, just fifty years before; the only difference being that the older system controlled prices, not conditions; the renewal controlled conditions and not prices.

It was doubtless the modern factory which brought about the change. The increased proportion of capital to labor in production, but still more the necessary localization, with its attendant evils, was making the mill-hands villeins appendant to the factory as truly as in early times there had been villeins appendant to the land. The conditions of child-labor and woman-labor, in particular, were rapidly becoming intolerable. Practically as unable to leave the factory as the villeins to leave the manor, the tyranny was as insufferable, their conditions of health and morality infinitely worse. Adam Smith himself foresaw that before the evils of this artificial condition the logic of laissez-faire would have to yield. The factory acts passed up to 1847 were rapidly copied in the manufacturing States of this country. And substantially all the principles of our later legislation were first embodied in these statutes passed in England during the early years of the reign of Victoria. It may be well to get a gen

eral view of these in the time remaining for this lecture, leaving out only the law directly relating to the labor contract to be the main subject of the next.

Eight-hour Laws.

First, let us consider the hours of labor. It may be generally stated that no attempt has yet been made by legislation in England or America to prescribe for how long a period of each day, in general occupations, a man twenty-one years old shall work. I have noted that by the early custom of England only eight hours was probably considered a full day, and first by statute in the early part of this century it was fixed at twelve, which statute, if not inoperative, was soon repealed. In England to-day there is great disagreement, both among employers and among laborers, as to the advisability of a general eighthour law. There are now said to be six million non-unionist workers, and only one million tradeunionists, up to date, in England; the six million non-unionists do not demand any system of industrial regulation of hours of labor whatever, nor even do all the trade-unionists. Many of the trades complain that neither employer nor employed could exist under any system of regulations that prevented them from making up in good times for their losses incurred in periods of depression.

Perhaps, however, the bulk of trade-unionists have, in England, accepted the principle of depriving the individual of his full freedom of contract in settling his hours of labor, and they partly justify by the plea that such freedom is irrevocably lost already; inasmuch as modern business establishments can be conducted only on the basis of uniformity in the men's hours of labor with the women's and children's which are so regulated; and the chief remaining objection in the tradeunions to the government fixing the hours of labor comes only in those trades which are directly subject to foreign competition.

In the United States.

In this country the tendency has not gone so far. We shall speak of women and children in a moment; but for full-grown men there is no effort, so far as I know, nor has any general statute yet been passed, which prescribes how long they shall work,

The Legislature of Massachusetts passed a resolution this year instructing its Commissioners on Uniformity of Law to introduce a recommendation at the next meeting of the National Conference of such Commissions from all the States, to consider whether by voluntary action the legal hours of labor in the several States of the Union might not well be made the same. But it is doubtful whether