MINIMUM WAGE

The attempts to reduce cottage expenditure were thus a failure. We must now describe the attempts to increase the cottage income. There were two ways in which the wages of the labourers might have been raised. One way, the way of combination, was forbidden by law. The other way was the fixing of a legal minimum wage in relation to the price of food. This was no new idea, for the regulation of wages by law was a venerable English institution, as old as the Statute of Edward III. The most recent laws on the subject were the famous Act of Elizabeth, an Act of James I., and an Act of George II. (1747). The Act of Elizabeth provided that the Justices of the Peace should meet annually and assess the wages of labourers in husbandry and of certain other workmen. Penalties were imposed on all who gave or took a wage in excess of this assessment. The Act of James I. was passed to remove certain ambiguities that were believed to have embarrassed the operation of the Act of Elizabeth, and among other provisions imposed a penalty on all who gave a wage below the wage fixed by the magistrates. The Act of 1747[233] was passed because the existing laws were ‘insufficient and defective,’ and it provided that disputes between masters and men could be referred to the magistrates, ‘although no rate or assessment of wages has been made that year by the Justices of the shire where such complaint shall be made.’

Two questions arise on the subject of this legislation, Was it operative? In whose interests was it administered, the interests of the employers or the interests of the employed? As to the first question there is a good deal of negative evidence to show that during the eighteenth century these laws were rarely applied. An example of an assessment (an assessment declaring a maximum) made by the Lancashire magistrates in 1725, was published in the Annals of Agriculture in 1795[234] as an interesting curiosity, and the writer remarks: ‘It appears from Mr. Ruggles’ excellent History of the Poor that such orders must in general be searched for in earlier periods, and a friend of ours was much surprised to hear that any magistrates in the present century would venture on so bold a measure.’[235]

As to the second question, at the time we are discussing it was certainly taken for granted that this legislation was designed to keep wages down. So implicitly was this believed that the Act of James I. which provided penalties in cases where wages were given below the fixed rate was generally ignored, and speakers and writers mentioned only the Act of Elizabeth, treating it as an Act for fixing a maximum. Whitbread, for example, when introducing a Bill in 1795 to fix a minimum wage, with which we deal later, argued that the Elizabethan Act ought to be repealed because it fixed a maximum. This view of the earlier legislation was taken by Fox, who supported Whitbread’s Bill, and by Pitt who opposed it. Fox said of the Act of Elizabeth that ‘it secured the master from a risk which could but seldom occur, of being charged exorbitantly for the quantity of service; but it did not authorise the magistrate to protect the poor from the injustice of a grinding and avaricious master, who might be disposed to take advantage of their necessities, and undervalue the rate of their services.’[236] Pitt said that Whitbread ‘imagined that he had on his side of the question the support of experience in this country, and appealed to certain laws upon the statute-book in confirmation of his proposition. He did not find himself called upon to defend the principle of these statutes, but they were certainly introduced for purposes widely different from the object of the present bill. They were enacted to guard the industry of the country from being checked by a general combination among labourers; and the bill now under consideration was introduced solely for the purpose of remedying the inconveniences which labourers sustain from the disproportion existing between the price of labour and the price of living.’[237] Only one speaker in the debates, Vansittart, afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, took the view that legislation was not needed because the Act of James I. gave the magistrates the powers with which Whitbread sought to arm them.

It was natural that many minds searching after a way of escape from the growing distress of the labourers, at a time when wages had not kept pace with prices, should have turned to the device of assessing wages by law in accordance with the price of provisions. If prices could not be assimilated to wages, could not wages be assimilated to prices? Nathaniel Kent, no wild visionary, had urged employers to raise wages in proportion to the increase of their profits, but his appeal had been without effect. But the policy of regulating wages according to the price of food was recommended in several quarters, and it provoked a great deal of discussion. Burke, whose days were closing in, was tempted to take part in it, and he put an advertisement into the papers announcing that he was about to publish a series of letters on the subject. The letters never appeared, but Arthur Young has described the visit he paid to Beaconsfield at this time and Burke’s rambling thunder about ‘the absurdity of regulating labour and the mischief of our poor laws,’ and Burke’s published works include a paper Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, presented to Pitt in November 1795. In this paper Burke argued that the farmer was the true guardian of the labourer’s interest, in that it would never be profitable to him to underpay the labourer: an uncompromising application of the theory of the economic man, which was not less superficial than the Jacobins’ application of the theory of the natural man.

In October 1795 Arthur Young sent out to the various correspondents of the Board of Agriculture a circular letter containing this question among others: ‘It having been recommended by various quarter-sessions, that the price of labour should be regulated by that of bread corn, have the goodness to state what you conceive to be the advantages or disadvantages of such a system?’[238] Arthur Young was himself in favour of the proposal, and the Suffolk magistrates, at a meeting which he attended on the 12th of October, ordered: ‘That the Members for this county be requested by the chairman to bring a bill into parliament, so to regulate the price of labour, that it may fluctuate with the average price of bread corn.’[239] Most of the replies were adverse, but the proposal found a warm friend in Mr. Howlett, the Vicar of Dunmow, who put into his answer some of the arguments which he afterwards developed in a pamphlet published in reply to Pitt’s criticisms of Whitbread’s Bill.[240] Howlett argued that Parliament had legislated with success to prevent combinations of workmen, and as an example he quoted the Acts of 8 George III., which had made the wages of tailors and silk-weavers subject to the regulations of the magistrates. It was just as necessary and just as practicable to prevent a combination of a different kind, that of masters. ‘Not a combination indeed formally drawn up in writing and sanctioned under hand and seal, a combination, however, as certain (the result of contingencies or providential events) and as fatally efficacious as if in writing it had filled five hundred skins of parchment: a combination which has operated for many years with a force rapidly increasing, a combination which has kept back the hire of our labourers who have reaped down our fields, and has at length torn the clothes from their backs, snatched the food from their mouths, and ground the flesh from their bones.’ Howlett, it will be seen, took the same view as Thelwall, that the position of the labourers was deteriorating absolutely and relatively. He estimated from a survey taken at Dunmow that the average family should be taken as five; if wages had been regulated on this basis, and the labourer had been given per head no more than the cost of a pauper’s keep in the workhouse sixty years ago, he would have been very much better off in 1795. He would himself take a higher standard. In reply to the argument that the policy of the minimum wage would deprive the labourers of all spur and incentive he pointed to the case of the London tailors; they at any rate displayed plenty of life and ingenuity, and nobody could say that the London fashions did not change fast enough. Employers would no more raise wages without compulsion than they would make good roads without the aid of turnpikes or the prescription of statutes enforced by the magistrates. His most original contribution to the discussion was the argument that the legal regulation should not be left to the unassisted judgment of the magistrates: ‘it should be the result of the clearest, fullest, and most accurate information, and at length be judiciously adapted to each county, hundred, or district in every quarter of the kingdom.’ Howlett differed from some of the supporters of a minimum wage, in thinking that wages should be regulated by the prices of the necessaries of life, not merely by that of bread corn.

The same policy was advocated by Davies in The Case of Labourers in Husbandry.[241] Davies argued that if the minimum only were fixed, emulation would not be discouraged, for better workmen would both be more sure of employment and also obtain higher wages. He suggested that the minimum wage should be fixed by calculating the sum necessary to maintain a family of five, or by settling the scale of day wages by the price of bread alone, treating the other expenses as tolerably steady. He did not propose to regulate the wages of any but day labourers, nor did he propose to deal with piecework, although piecework had been included in the Act of Elizabeth. He further suggested that the regulation should be in force only for half the year, from November to May, when the labourers’ difficulties pressed hardest upon them. Unfortunately he coupled with his minimum wage policy a proposal to give help from the rates to families with more than five members, if the children were unable to earn.

But the most interesting of all the declarations in favour of a minimum wage was a declaration from labourers. A correspondent sent the following advertisement to the Annals of Agriculture:—

‘The following is an advertisement which I cut out of a Norwich newspaper:—

“DAY LABOURERS

“At a numerous meeting of the day labourers of the little parishes of Heacham, Snettisham, and Sedgford, this day, 5th November, in the parish church of Heacham, in the county of Norfolk, in order to take into consideration the best and most peaceable mode of obtaining a redress of all the severe and peculiar hardships under which they have for many years so patiently suffered, the following resolutions were unanimously agreed to:—1st, That—The labourer is worthy of his hire, and that the mode of lessening his distresses, as hath been lately the fashion, by selling him flour under the market price, and thereby rendering him an object of a parish rate, is not only an indecent insult on his lowly and humble situation (in itself sufficiently mortifying from his degrading dependence on the caprice of his employer) but a fallacious mode of relief, and every way inadequate to a radical redress of the manifold distresses of his calamitous state. 2nd, That the price of labour should, at all times, be proportioned to the price of wheat, which should invariably be regulated by the average price of that necessary article of life; and that the price of labour, as specified in the annexed plan, is not only well calculated to make the labourer happy without being injurious to the farmer, but it appears to us the only rational means of securing the permanent happiness of this valuable and useful class of men, and, if adopted in its full extent, will have an immediate and powerful effect in reducing, if it does not entirely annihilate, that disgraceful and enormous tax on the public—the Poor Rate.

“Plan of the Price of Labour proportionate to the Price of Wheat

per last.per day.
When wheat shall be 14l. the price of labour shall be1s. 2d.
„„16„„„1s. 4d.
„„18„„„1s. 6d.
„„20„„„1s. 8d.
„„22„„„1s. 10d.
„„24„„„2s. 0d.
„„26„„„2s. 2d.
„„28„„„2s. 4d.
„„30„„„2s. 6d.
„„32„„„2s. 8d.
„„34„„„2s. 10d.
„„36„„„3s. 0d.

And so on, according to this proportion.

“3rd, That a petition to parliament to regulate the price of labour, conformable to the above plan, be immediately adopted; and that the day labourers throughout the county be invited to associate and co-operate in this necessary application to parliament, as a peaceable, legal, and probable mode of obtaining relief; and, in doing this, no time should be lost, as the petition must be presented before the 29th January 1796.

“4th, That one shilling shall be paid into the hands of the treasurer by every labourer, in order to defray the expences of advertising, attending on meetings, and paying counsel to support their petition in parliament.

“5th, That as soon as the sense of the day labourers of this county, or a majority of them, shall be made known to the clerk of the meeting, a general meeting shall be appointed, in some central town, in order to agree upon the best and easiest mode of getting the petition signed: when it will be requested that one labourer, properly instructed, may be deputed to represent two or three contiguous parishes, and to attend the above intended meeting with a list of all the labourers in the parishes he shall represent, and pay their respective subscriptions; and that the labourer, so deputed, shall be allowed two shillings and six pence a day for his time, and two shillings and six pence a day for his expences.

“6th, That Adam Moore, clerk of the meeting, be directed to have the above resolutions, with the names of the farmers and labourers who have subscribed to and approved them, advertised in one Norwich and one London paper; when it is hoped that the above plan of a petition to parliament will not only be approved and immediately adopted by the day labourers of this county, but by the day labourers of every county in the kingdom.

“7th, That all letters, post paid, addressed to Adam Moore, labourer, at Heacham, near Lynn, Norfolk, will be duly noticed.”[242]

This is one of the most interesting and instructive documents of the time. It shows that the labourers, whose steady decline during the next thirty years we are about to trace, were animated by a sense of dignity and independence. Something of the old spirit of the commoners still survived. But there is no sequel to this incident. This great scheme of a labourers’ organisation vanishes: it passes like a flash of summer lightning. What is the explanation? The answer is to be found, we suspect, in the Treason and Sedition Acts that Pitt was carrying through Parliament in this very month. Under those Acts no language of criticism was safe, and fifty persons could not meet except in the presence of a magistrate, who had power to extinguish the meeting and arrest the speaker. Those measures inflicted even wider injury upon the nation than Fox and Sheridan and Erskine themselves believed.

The policy of a minimum wage was brought before Parliament in the winter of 1795, in a Bill introduced by Samuel Whitbread, one of the small band of brave Liberals who had stood by Fox through the revolutionary panic. Whitbread is a politician to whom history has done less than justice, and he is generally known only as an implacable opponent of the Peninsular War. That opposition he contrived to conduct, as we know from the Creevey Papers, in such a way as to win and keep the respect of Wellington. Whitbread’s disapproval of that war, of which Liberals like Holland and Lord John Russell, who took Fox’s view of the difference of fighting revolutions by the aid of kings and fighting Napoleon by the aid of peoples, were strong supporters, sprang from his compassion for the miseries of the English poor. His most notable quality was his vivid and energetic sympathy; he spent his life in hopeless battles, and he died by his own hand of public despair. The Bill he now introduced was the first of a series of proposals designed for the rescue of the agricultural labourers. It was backed by Sheridan and Grey,[243] and the members for Suffolk.

The object of the Bill[244] was to explain and amend the Act of Elizabeth, which empowered Justices of the Peace at or within six weeks of every General Quarter Sessions held at Easter to regulate the wages of labourers in husbandry. The provisions of the Bill were briefly as follows. At any Quarter Sessions the justices could agree, if they thought fit, to hold a General Sessions for carrying into execution the powers given them by the Act. If they thought good to hold such a General Sessions, the majority of them could ‘rate and appoint the wages and fix and declare the hours of working of all labourers in husbandry, by the day, week, month or year, and with beer or cyder or without, respect being had to the value of money and the plenty or scarcity of the time.’ This rate was to be printed and posted on the church doors, and was to hold good till superseded by another made in the same way. The rate was not to apply to any tradesman or artificer, nor to any labourer whose diet was wholly provided by his employer, nor to any labourer bona fide employed on piecework, nor to any labourer employed by the parish. The young, the old, and the infirm were also exempted from the provisions of the Act. It was to be lawful ‘to contract with and pay to any male person, under the age of ——[245] years, or to any man who from age or infirmity or any other incapacity shall be unable to do the ordinary work of a labouring man, so much as he shall reasonably deserve for the work which he shall be able to do and shall do.’ In case of complaint the decision as to the ability of the labourer rested with the justices.

With the above exceptions no labourer was to be hired under the appointed rates, and any contract for lower wages was void. If convicted of breaking the law, an employer was to be fined; if he refused to pay the fine, his goods were to be distrained on, and if this failed to produce enough to pay the expenses, he could be committed to the common gaol or House of Correction. A labourer with whom an illegal contract was made was to be a competent witness.

The first discussions of the Bill were friendly in tone. On 25th November Whitbread asked for leave to bring it in. Sir William Young, Lechmere, Charles Dundas, and Sir John Rous all spoke with sympathy and approval. The first reading debate took place on 9th December, and though Whitbread had on that occasion the powerful support of Fox, who, while not concealing his misgivings about the Bill, thought the alternative of leaving the great body of the people to depend on the charity of the rich intolerable, an ominous note was struck by Pitt and Henry Dundas on the other side. The Bill came up for second reading on 12th February 1796.[246] Whitbread’s opening speech showed that he was well aware that he would have to face a formidable opposition. Pitt rose at once after the motion had been formally seconded by one of the Suffolk members, and assailed the Bill in a speech that made an immediate and overwhelming impression. He challenged Whitbread’s argument that wages had not kept pace with prices; he admitted the hardships of the poor, but he thought the picture overdrawn, for their hardships had been relieved by ‘a display of beneficence never surpassed at any period,’ and he argued that it was a false remedy to use legislative interference, and to give the justices the power to regulate the price of labour, and to endeavour ‘to establish by authority what would be much better accomplished by the unassisted operation of principles.’ This led naturally to an attack on the restrictions on labour imposed by the Law of Settlement, and a discussion of the operation of the Poor Laws, and the speech ended, after a glance at the great possibilities of child employment, with the promise of measures which should restore the original purity of the Poor Laws, and make them a blessing instead of the curse they had become. The speech seems to have dazzled the House of Commons, and few stood up against the general opinion that Whitbread’s proposal was dangerous, and that the whole question had better be left to Pitt. Lechmere, a Worcestershire member, was one of them, and he made an admirable little speech in which he tried to destroy the general illusion that the poor could not be unhappy in a country where the rich were so kind. Whitbread himself defended his Bill with spirit and ability, showing that Pitt had not really found any substantial argument against it, and that Pitt’s own remedies were all hypothetical and distant. Fox reaffirmed his dislike of compulsion, but restated at the same time his opinion that Whitbread’s Bill, though not an ideal solution, was the best solution available of evils which pressed very hardly on the poor and demanded attention. General Smith pointed out that one of Pitt’s remedies was the employment of children, and warned him that he had himself seen some of the consequences of the unregulated labour of children ‘whose wan and pale complexions bespoke that their constitutions were already undermined, and afforded but little promise of a robust manhood, or of future usefulness to the community.’ But the general sense of the House was reflected in the speeches of Buxton, Coxhead and Burdon, whose main argument was that the poor were not in so desperate a plight as Whitbread supposed, and that whatever their condition might be, Pitt was the most likely person to find such remedies as were practicable and effective. The motion for second reading was negatived without a division. The verdict of the House was a verdict of confidence in Pitt.

Four years later (11th February 1800) Whitbread repeated his attempt.[247] He asked for leave to bring in a Bill to explain and amend the Act of Elizabeth, and said that he had waited for Pitt to carry out his promises. He was aware of the danger of overpaying the poor, but artificers and labourers should be so paid as to be able to keep themselves and their families in comfort. He saw no way of securing this result in a time of distress except the way he had suggested. Pitt rose at once to reply. He had in the interval brought in and abandoned his scheme of Poor Law Reform. He had spent his only idea, and he was now confessedly without any policy at all. All that he could contribute was a general criticism of legislative interference, and another discourse on the importance of letting labour find its own level. He admitted the fact of scarcity, but he believed the labouring class seldom felt fewer privations. History scarcely provides a more striking spectacle of a statesman paying himself with soothing phrases in the midst of a social cyclone. The House was more than ever on his side. All the interests and instincts of class were disguised under the gold dust of Adam Smith’s philosophy. Sir William Young, Buxton, Wilberforce, Ellison, and Perceval attacked the Bill. Whitbread replied that charity as a substitute for adequate wages had mischievous effects, for it took away the independence of the poor, ‘a consideration as valuable to the labourer as to the man of high rank,’ and as for the argument that labour should be left to find its own level, the truth surely was that labour found its level by combinations, and that this had been found to be so great an evil that Acts of Parliament had been passed against it.

The date of the second reading of the Bill was hotly disputed:[248] the friends of the measure wanted it to be fixed for 28th April, so that Quarter Sessions might have time to deliberate on the proposals; the opponents of the measure suggested 25th February, on the grounds that it was dangerous to keep the Bill in suspense so long: ‘the eyes of all the labouring poor,’ said Mr. Ellison, ‘must in that interval be turned upon it.’ The opponents won their point, and when the Bill came up for second reading its fate was a foregone conclusion. Whitbread made one last appeal, pleading the cause of the labourers bound to practical serfdom in parishes where the landowner was an absentee, employed at starvation wages by farmers, living in cottages let to them by farmers. But his appeal was unheeded: Lord Belgrave retorted with the argument that legislative interference with agriculture could not be needed, seeing that five hundred Enclosure Bills had passed the House during a period of war, and the Bill was rejected.

So died the policy of the minimum wage. Even later it had its adherents, for, in 1805, Sir Thomas Bernard criticised it[249] as the ‘favourite idea of some very intelligent and benevolent men.’ He mentioned as a reductio ad absurdum of the scheme, that had the rate of wages been fixed by the standard of 1780 when the quartern loaf was 6d. and the labourer’s pay 9s. a week, the result in 1800 when the quartern loaf cost 1s. 9d. would have been a wage of £1, 11s. 6d.

When Whitbread introduced his large and comprehensive Poor Law Bill in 1807,[250] the proposal for a minimum wage was not included.

From an examination of the speeches of the time and of the answers to Arthur Young’s circular printed in the Annals of Agriculture, it is evident that there was a genuine fear among the opponents of the measure that if once wages were raised to meet the rise in prices it would not be easy to reduce them when the famine was over. This was put candidly by one of Arthur Young’s correspondents: ‘it is here judged more prudent to indulge the poor with bread corn at a reduced price than to raise the price of wages.’[251] The policy of a minimum wage was revived later by a society called ‘The General Association established for the Purpose of bettering the Condition of the Agricultural and Manufacturing Labourers.’ Three representatives of this society gave evidence before the Select Committee on Emigration in 1827, and one of them pointed out as an illustration of the injustice with which the labourers were treated, that in 1825 the wages of agricultural labourers were generally 9s. a week, and the price of wheat 9s. a bushel, whereas in 1732 the wages of agricultural labour were fixed by the magistrates at 6s. a week, and the price of wheat was 2s. 9d. the bushel. In support of this comparison he produced a table from The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1732:—

Wheat in February 1732, 23s. to 25s. per quarter.
Wheat in March 1732, 20s. to 22s. per quarter.

Yearly wages appointed by the Justices to be taken by the servants in the county of Kent, not exceeding the following sums:

Head ploughman waggoner or seedsman£800
His mate400
Best woman300
Second sort of woman200
Second ploughman600
His mate300
Labourers by day in summer 12
In winter 10

Justices of Gloucester

Head servant in husbandry500
Second servant in husbandry400
Driving boy under fourteen100
Head maid servant or dairy servant2 100
Mower in harvest without drink per day 12
With drink 10
Other day labourers with drink 10
From corn to hay harvest with drink 08
Mowers and reapers in corn harvest with drink 10
Labourers with diet 04
Without diet or drink 0 10
Carpenter wheelwright or mason without drink 12
With drink 10

One of the witnesses pointed out that there were five millions of labourers making with their families eight millions, and that if the effect of raising their wages was to increase their expenditure by a penny a day, there would be an increase of consumption amounting to twelve millions a year. These arguments made little impression on the Committee, and the representations of the society were dismissed with contempt: ‘It is from an entire ignorance of the universal operation of the principle of Supply and Demand regulating the rate of wages that all these extravagant propositions are advanced, and recommendations spread over the country which are so calculated to excite false hopes, and consequently discontent, in the minds of the labouring classes. Among the most extravagant are those brought forward by the Society established for the purpose of bettering the condition of the manufacturing and agricultural labourers.’