This, the last method of infringing upon absolute rights of property, has assumed such importance of recent years as to deserve and require a chapter by itself.  The reader will remember what precedents we found for the fixing of prices, wages, and rates or tolls in England.  It may be convenient for our purposes to use these three definite words to mean the three definite things—­prices in the sense of prices of goods or commodities; wages the reward of labor or personal services; and rates (the English word is tolls) for the charges of what we should now term public-service corporations, or in old English law, franchises, or what our Supreme Court has termed “avocations affected with a public interest.”  The reader will remember that the attempted regulation of prices began early and was short-lived, dating from the Assize of Bread and Beer in 1266, to the Statute of Victuals of 1362, hardly a century, and even these two precedents are not really such, for the first only fixed the price of bread and beer according to the cost of wheat or barley, just as to-day we might conceivably fix the price of bread at some reasonable relation to the price of flour in Minneapolis, and as it was fixed in ancient Greece by the wholesale price of wheat at Athens[1]—­not as it now is, from three to four times the cost of bread in London, although made out of the same flour shipped there from Minneapolis; and the two latest statutes expressly say that they fix the price by reason of the great dearness of such articles on account of the Black Death or plague, and the consequent scarcity of labor.  Then the Statute of Laborers of 1349 provided that victuals should be sold only at reasonable prices, which apparently were to be fixed by the mayor.  With these statutes the effort to fix prices by general statute disappeared from English civilization save, of course, as prices may be indirectly affected by laws against monopoly, engrossing, and restraint of trade; and local ordinances in towns continued probably for some time longer.

[Footnote 1:  For an actual report of an indictment and jury trial for forestalling and regrating wheat in the third century B.C., see Lysias’s oration, translated by Dr. Frederic Earle Whitaker, in Popular Science Monthly, April, 1910.]

Legal regulation of wages lasted much longer in England; and has reappeared in very recent years, at least in the Australasian colonies, with a beginning of such legislation in Great Britain and Ireland and the State of New York.  The first Statute of Laborers merely provides that the old wages and no more shall be given.  The next year, however, in 1350, the exact rate of wages was fixed; and this lasted for more than two centuries, to the reign of Elizabeth, the so-called “great” Statute of Laborers consolidating all the previous ones.  It is apt to be the case that when a statutory system has reached its full development it falls into disuse; and that is certainly the case here.  There is no later