Here, therefore, we have the much-discussed Standard Wage fixed by law, but in the interest of the employer; not a “living wage” fixed in the interest of the employee, as modern thought requires.  The same statute makes it unlawful to give to able-bodied beggars, which is of a piece with the compulsory labor of the able-bodied.  Now this first Statute of Laborers, which led to centuries of English law unjust to the laborers, it is interesting to note, was possibly never a valid law, for it was never agreed to by the House of Commons.  However that may be, the confirming statute of 1364 was duly enacted by Parliament, and this was not in terms repealed until the year 1869, although labor leaders claim it to have been repealed by general words in the 5th Elizabeth.

Thorold Rogers tells us that those, after all, were the happy days of the laborer—­when masons got four pence a day, and the Black Prince, the head of the army, only got twenty shillings—­sixty times as much.  This is a fair modern proportion, however, for military and other state service; though we pay the president a salary of nearly double that proportion to the yearly pay of a carpenter.  But then, these English statutes applied mainly to agricultural labor; and domestic labor was paid considerably less.

This Statute of Laborers was again re-enacted in 1360, with a clause allowing work in gross, and forbidding “alliances and covins between masons, carpenters, and guilds.”  Work “in gross” means work by contract, piece-work, thus made expressly lawful by statute in England in 1360, but still objected to by many of our labor unions to-day.  The provision against alliances and covins was extended to cover trades-unions, their rules and by-laws, as well as strikes, which were also considered combinations in restraint of trade.  Now this was never law in this country.

There was a very early case in Pennsylvania, while it was still a colony, and there were others in the States soon after, which held that the Statutes of Laborers were never law in America.  Our statutes early authorized trades-unions, but without this there is, I think, no American case where either a trades-union or a simple strike was held to be an unlawful combination.  It was these early statutes which gave rise to the law that existed until the nineteenth century in England, that both strikes and unions were unlawful; a strike because it was usually a combination to raise the rate of wages, which was in theory fixed by law.  Therefore, a strike was a combination with an unlawful aim, consequently a conspiracy.  The logic is simple; and in the same way a trades-union was certainly an alliance between skilled workmen, and as such forbidden under the Statute of Laborers, besides being a combination in restraint of trade.