State which is largely socialistic—­New Zealand—­it is said that the minimum wage law has had the effect that a similar resolve has had in Massachusetts towns:  to drive all the old men and all the weaker or less skilled out of employment entirely, and into the poorhouse;[2] for, at a fixed price, it is obvious that the employer will employ only the most efficient labor, and the same argument causes some of their more thoughtful friends to dissuade the women school-teachers in New York from their present effort to get their wages or salaries fixed by law at a price equal to that paid a man.[3]

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 161; below, p. 213.]

[Footnote 2:  In the old town of Plymouth the chairman of the selectmen asked what, he should do under vote of town meeting requiring him to pay two dollars a day for all unskilled labor employed by the town.  “We have,” he said, “about one hundred and twenty old men in Plymouth, largely veterans of the Civil War.  We have been in the habit of giving them one dollar and a quarter per day.  Under this two-dollar vote we cannot do it without bankrupting the town.”  He was advised to go ahead and still pay them the dollar and a quarter per day and take the chance of a lawsuit, which he did, and so far as the writer knows no lawsuit has ever been brought; but in all cases that would not be the result.]

[Footnote 3:  This is law in Utah; but nevertheless a letter from a State government official informs me that women are willing to [and do?] work for a smaller salary.]

A principle somewhat akin to that of a vote of a town fixing the rate of wages is the recent constitutional amendment in the State of New York (see above, p. 161) which validated the statute requiring that in public work (that is to say, labor for the State, for cities, towns, counties, villages, school districts, or any municipality of the State), or for contractors employed directly or indirectly by the State or such municipality, that rate shall be paid which is usual at the time in the same trade in the same neighborhood.  This was the earliest statute, which was declared unconstitutional (see above, p. 161).  The lack of interest in this tremendously important matter is shown in the fact that not one-third of the voters took the trouble to vote on the amendment at all, and that for three days after the election no New York newspaper took notice of the fact that the amendment had passed.  Up to this constitutional amendment the courts of New York, as well as those of California and even of the United States, had resented with great vigor the attempt of statutes to make a crime the permitting of a free American citizen to work over eight hours if he liked so to do.  But in New York at least (now followed in Delaware, Maryland, and Oklahoma) it is now settled that so much interference even with the rate of wages may be allowed, and as the percentage of public employment is, of course, very large—­covering as it does not only all public contractors, but all labor in or for gaols or public institutions—­it will necessarily, it would seem, drag with it a certain practical regulation of private industry corresponding to the public rules.