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introducing a Bill in 1795 to fix a minimum wage, with which we deal later, argued that the Elizabethan Act ought to be repealed because it fixed a maximum.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.