(c) It would reduce the burden of charity and taxation.
(d) It would permit the workers to be better nourished and educated.
(e) It would permit the children to be better educated and technically trained.
(f) In course of time it would reduce the number of workers competing and further raise wages.
(g) The evils of overcrowding, with its serious hygienic and moral dangers, would be rapidly diminished, and the housing problem made easier of solution. A three bedroom house only provides decency for a family not exceeding four children.
(h) It would give better opportunities for thrift among the workers and for their emancipation from the position of “wage slaves.” It would then give them an opportunity of co-operating and owning their own instruments of production.
In support of these statements it may be recalled that in Prof. Thorold Rogers’s Six Centuries of Work and Wages a striking example is given of the continued rise of wages after the Black Death of 1349, despite all efforts of Parliament to fix them.
“It is certain that the immediate consequence of the plague was a dearth of labor, an excessive enhancement of wages, and a serious difficulty in collecting the harvests of those landowners who depended on a supply of hired labor for the purpose of getting in their crops.... The plague, in short, had almost emancipated the surviving serfs.
“I shall point out below what were the actual effects of this great and sudden scarcity of labor. At present I merely continue the narrative. Parliament was broken up when the plague was raging. The King, however, issued a proclamation, which he addressed to William, the Primate, and circulated among the sheriffs of the different counties, in which he directed all officials that no higher than customary wages should be paid, under the penalties of amercement. The King’s mandate, however, was universally disobeyed, for the farmers were compelled to leave their crops ungathered or to comply with the demands of the laborers. When the King found that his proclamation was unavailing, he laid, we are told, heavy penalties on abbots, priors, barons, crown tenants, and those who held lands under mesne lords, if they paid more than customary rates. But the laborers remained masters of the situation. Many were said to have been thrown into prison for disobedience; many, to avoid punishment or restraint, fled into forests, where they were occasionally captured. The captives were fined, and obliged to disavow under oath that they would take higher than customary wages for the future. But the expedients were vain; labor remained scarce and wages, according to all previous experience, excessive.”
Mr. Thorold Rogers tells us of all the expedients employed by Parliament, in the Statute of Laborers, in order to check the rise of wages, and how they broke down and were evaded by the employers themselves. “The rise in agricultural labor is, all kinds of men’s work being taken together, about 50 per cent., of women’s work fully 100 per cent.” Artisans fare equally well. And, despite the rise in price of manufactured articles consequent upon this rise of wages, “there was no corresponding rise in the price of provisions.... The free laborer, and, for the matter of that, the serf, was in his way still better off. Everything he needed was as cheap as ever, and his labor was daily rising in value.”