8 the great plague became a landmark in the field of wage
disputes. So scarce had laborers become through the ravages of the
Black Death, that wages rose rapidly, to the alarm of the employers,
who prevailed upon King Edward III to issue the historic proclamation of
1349, directing that no laborer should demand and no employer should pay
greater wages than those customary before the plague. This early attempt
to outmaneuver an economic law by a legal device was only the prelude to
a long series of labor laws which may be said to have culminated in
the great Statute of Laborers of 1562, regulating the relations of
wage-earner and employer and empowering justices of the peace to fix
the wages in their districts. Wages steadily decreased during the two
hundred years in which this statute remained in force, and poor laws
were passed to bring the succor which artificial wages made necessary.
Thus two rules of arbitrary government were meant to neutralize each
other. It is the usual verdict of historians that the estate of labor
in England declined from a flourishing condition in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries to one of great distress by the time of the
Industrial Revolution. This unhappy decline was probably due to several
causes, among which the most important were the arbitrary and artificial
attempts of the Government to keep down wages, the heavy taxation caused
by wars of expansion, and the want of coercive power on the part of
labor.

From the decline of the guild system, which had placed labor and its
products so completely in the hands of the master craftsman, the workman
had assumed no controlling part in the labor bargain. Such guilds and
such journeyman's fraternities as may have survived were practically
helpless against parliamentary rigor and state benevolence. In the
domestic stage of production, cohesion among workers was not so
necessary. But when the factory system was substituted for the
handicraft system and workers with common interests were thrown together
in the towns, they had every impulsion towards organization. They not
only felt the need of sociability after long hours spent in spiritless
toil but they were impelled by a new consciousness--the realization that
an inevitable and profound change had come over their condition.
They had ceased to be journeymen controlling in some measure their
activities; they were now merely wage-earners. As the realization of
this adverse change came over th