The only matter more important doubtless in the laborer’s eye than the length of time he shall work is the amount of wages he shall receive.  Now we may say at the start that in the English-speaking world there has been practically no attempt to regulate the amount of wages.  We found such legislation in mediaeval England, and we also found that it was abandoned with general consent.  But of late years in these socialistic days (using again socialistic in its proper sense of that which controls personal liberty for the interest of the community or state) it is surprisingly showing its head once more.  In Australasia and more recently in England we see the beginning of a minimum wage system which we must most carefully describe before we leave the subject.  There was in the State of Indiana a law that in ordinary unskilled labor in public employment there should be a minimum wage of fifteen cents per hour or twenty-five cents for a man and horse—­since declared unconstitutional by Indiana courts:  while to-day such labor receives a minimum of two dollars per day in California and Nebraska, one dollar and a quarter in Hawaii, three dollars in Nevada, and “the usual rate” in Delaware and New York,[1] and we are many of us familiar with the practice of towns and villages in New England or New York in passing a vote or town ordinance fixing the price of wages at two dollars per day, or a like sum; but this practice, it must be remarked, is in no sense a law regulating wages; it is merely the resolution or resolve of an employer himself, as a private citizen might say that he would give his gardener fifty dollars a month instead of forty.  And, on the other hand, the Constitution of Louisiana provides that the price of wages shall never be fixed by law.  Now it will be remembered that the Statutes of Laborers of the Middle Ages, when they regulated the price of wages, led directly to the result that they made all strikes, all concerted efforts to get an increase of wages, unlawful and even criminal; in fact, it may be said that this attempt to bind the workmen to a wage fixed by law was the very cause of the notion that strikes were illegal, which, indeed, was the English common law down to early in the last century.  Moreover, when an English mediaeval peasant refused to labor for his three pence a day he might be sent to gaol by the nearest justice of the peace, as, perhaps, some employers would like to do to-day in our South, and which resulted—­if not in slavery—­in precisely that condition which we call “peonage.”  Economically speaking, the attempt to regulate wages was, of course, a mistake; politically speaking, it was universally unpopular, and no class was more desirous than the working class themselves of getting rid of all such legislation, which they did in France at the French Revolution, and in England nearly two centuries earlier.  Only socialists should logically desire to go back to the system, and in the one modern English-speaking