CHAPTER XXIV.
Natural law of wages—State-laws regulating wages—Enactments regulating consumption—The labour-fund and the want-fund—Ratio of capital to population—State of industry at the end of the seventeenth century—Rise of manufactures—Wages and prices—Turning over capital.
Vision of Henry I.
The old chroniclers relate that our Norman king, Henry I., had once a terrible vision, of soldiers, and priests, and peasants, surrounding his bed, one band succeeding another, and threatening to kill him. The legend became the subject of illuminated drawings in an ancient MS. preserved at Oxford, and one of these represented the tillers of the land, with spade, and fork, and scythe, demanding justice. The cultivators were loaded with heavy exactions, so great that the tenants of the crown even offered to give up their ploughs to the king. They ploughed, but they reaped not themselves. In such a state of things there could be no accumulation, and no profitable labour. The funds for supplying the wages of labour were exhausted. The country was depopulated.
During the next two centuries, the condition of the people had been materially improved. Capital had increased, and so had population. But capital had increased faster than population, and hence the improvement. The class of free labourers had for the most part succeeded to the old class of villeins. Labourers for hire, without understanding the great principles which govern the rate of wages, any more than did their masters, would practically seek to measure their earnings according to those principles. The lawgivers determined the contrary.[37] The Statute of Labourers, 23rd Edward III., says:—"Because a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence, many, seeing the necessity of masters and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they receive excessive wages." They were therefore to be compelled to serve, and they were to serve at the same wages which they had received three years before. The ratio of population, in consequence of the pestilence, had fallen considerably below the ratio of accumulated capital seeking to employ labour. Under the natural laws of demand and supply, the scarcity of labourers and the excess of capital would have raised the wages of labour. These laws were not to operate. Forty years after this enactment of Edward III., comes the statute of Richard II., which says that "Servants and labourers will not, nor by a long season would, serve and labour without outrageous and excessive hire, and much more than hath been given to such servants and labourers in any time past, so that for scarcity of the said servants and labourers the husbands and land-tenants may not pay their rents, nor scarcely live upon their lands." Here was a distinct conflict between the capitalists seeking profits and the labourers seeking wages. The law-makers resolved that the hires of the servants and labourers should be "put in certainty;" and they fixed the rate of wages throughout the land. They settled the contest in favour of profits, arbitrarily. To avoid this interference with the due payments of their labour in proportion to the ratio of capital and labour, the husbandmen might have fled to the towns, and some did so. But they were met there by the enactment that the artificers should be subject to the same controlling power, and that the boy who had laboured at the plough and cart till he was twelve years old should continue so to labour for the rest of his life. This state of things was truly slavery without the name. Some such marvellous folly and injustice went on for several centuries. But, regulating wages, the laws also undertook to regulate the cost of food and of clothing—their quality, and their consumption—how much people should eat, and what coats they should wear. These absurdities also went on for centuries—of course under a perpetual system of open violation or secret evasion. The people, we may safely conclude, never fully believed what their rulers told them of their prodigious kindness in managing private affairs so much better than individuals could themselves. Mr. Sergeant Thorpe, judge of assize for the northern circuit, in a charge to the grand jury in 1648, tells them to be vigilant against servants taking higher wages than those allowed by the justices,—to enforce the laws against everybody who bought every thing for the sustenance of man, with intent to make a profit by it—against every tradesman who did not produce his wares in conformity with the statutes;—wonderful laws, which would not permit the tanner to sell a piece of leather that had not been kept twelve months in the tan-pit, and which forbade the cloth-maker to use lime in whitening linen cloth. "And thus you see," says solemn Mr. Sergeant Thorpe, "how the wisdom of the common laws of this nation, and of the parliaments, from time to time, hath provided for the security and ease of the people; and hath furnished us with a salve for every sore; and gives us rules and instructions how to govern ourselves, that we may be helpful and useful to one another."[38] Instead of providing the salve, it probably would have been better not to have made the sore.
But, after all, it is scarcely candid to laugh at the wisdom of "the good old times" in regulating trades, when in our own day, we have had excise laws which interfered in the most absurd way with production, and some of which still interfere. Nor can we look with perfect complacency at the manifest impolicy and injustice of fixing the rate of wages, when, within the last quarter of a century, we have had justices at work all over the country to keep down the wages of labour, by paying labourers not in proportion to their earnings, but according to their necessities; and raising up a fund for the encouragement of idleness and improvidence, by a diversion of the real funds for the maintenance of labour. The Poor Laws, as they were administered in the beginning and middle of the last half century, did this evil, and a great deal more; and persons of influence, with the most benevolent intentions, could see no difference between the parish allowance to able-bodied labourers, and the wages which they could have really commanded for their labour if this opposing fund had not been called into action. In those times, and even after a strenuous effort had been made to bring about an improvement, educated gentlemen used to say—"something must be done to give the labourers employment upon fair wages;" and they were accustomed to believe that "some plan should be devised whereby work should be at hand."[39] These gentlemen, and many others, did not understand that there is a natural fund for the maintenance of labour which is to produce such beneficial results; that this fund cannot be increased but by the addition of the results of more profitable labour; that whatever is paid out of the fund for the support of unprofitable labour has a direct tendency to lower the rate at which the profitable labour is paid,—to prevent the payment of "fair wages;" and that there is a "plan" which requires no devising, because our necessities are constantly calling it into operation,—the natural law of exchange, which makes "work at hand" wherever there is capital to pay for it. Such reasoners also held that the labourers were not to seek for the fund "about the country on an uncertainty;" but that the work for the labourers "should be at hand"—"it should be certain." This clearly was not the ordinary labour-fund. That is neither always at hand, nor is it always certain. It shifts its place according to its necessity for use; it is uncertain in its distribution in proportion to the demand upon it. The fund which was to work this good was clearly not the labour-fund—it was the want-fund; and the mistake that these gentlemen and many others fell into was that the want-fund had qualities of far greater powers of usefulness than the labour-fund; that the parish purse was the purse of Fortunatus, always full; that the parish labour field was like the tent of the Indian queen in the Arabian tale—you could carry it in the palm of your hand, and yet it would give shelter to an army of thousands. All these fallacies are now, happily, as much exploded as the laws for the regulation of wages and the price of commodities. The real labour-fund—the accumulation of a portion of the results of past labour—is the only fund which can find profitable work and pay fair wages.