And now we find the first statutory origin of that utterly fallacious principle—­although alive to-day—­that the state, in a free country, a legislature-governed country, has the right, when expedient, to fix the price of anything, wages or other commodities; fallacious, I say, except possibly as to the charges of corporations, which are given special privileges by the government; the principle, which prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, of fixing the prices of all things.  In this case the price was on bread; but you find now for many centuries an attempt to fix the price of almost everything; and of labor, too, what wages a man should be paid.  It lasted persistently for centuries and centuries, and it was only under the influence of modern political economy, Adam Smith and other quite modern writers, that the principle that it was possible to fix prices of commodities was utterly eradicated from the English mind.  And you hardly got it out of England before it reappeared in the United States.  It is not a new-fangled principle.  You find the newspapers commonly talk about fixing prices by law as if it were something utterly unheard of and utterly new.  It is not so.  It Is on the contrary as old as almost any legislation we have, and you can make no argument against it on that ground.  It has always been the custom of our ancestors to regulate the prices of wages by law, and the notion that it was either unconstitutional or inexpedient dates from a very few years back; yet all such attempts at legislation have utterly disappeared from any modern statute-book.  In no State of our forty-six States is any one so unintelligent, even in introducing bills in the legislature, as to-day to propose that the price of a ton of coal or a loaf of bread shall be so much.  Nor is any modern legislature so unintelligent or so oppressive as to propose sumptuary laws; that is, to prescribe how expensively a man or woman must dress; but in the mediaeval times those were thought very important.  Every class in England was then required by law to have exactly so many coats, to spend so much money on their dress, so much on their wives’ dress, and certain men could have fine cloth and others coarse cloth; everything was graded, even to the number of buttons on clothes, and they went so far even as to try in some early legislation to say what men should have to eat; the number of courses a man should have for his dinner were prescribed by law at one time in England, varying according to the man’s rank.  All such legislation has absolutely vanished and probably no one need know that it existed—­but that when efforts are made, as they sometimes are, by our more or less uneducated members of legislatures to introduce bills of such a kind, it is very important for us to know that those experiments have been tried and have failed, having proved to be either impracticable or oppressive or not for the general benefit.  This is the importance of these early laws, even when