e more than tilers, tilers a little more than carpenters;
though unskilled labor was paid less in proportion. The same statute
attempts to protect the laborer by providing that victuals shall be
sold only at reasonable prices, which were apparently fixed by the
mayor.

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and this was not in terms repealed until the year 1869, although labor
leaders claim it to have been repealed by general words in the 5th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