and business is, of
course, that of the pure-food laws. The Federal law has certainly
proved effective, although it is in danger of being repealed or
emasculated in the interest of the "special interests"; most of the
State laws simply copy it. Undoubtedly the laws should be identical in
interstate commerce and in all the States; and this can only be done
by voluntary uniform action.

VIII

REGULATION OF RATES AND PRICES

This, the last method of infringing upon absolute rights of property,
has assumed such importance of recent years as to deserve and require
a chapter by itself. The reader will remember what precedents we found
for the fixing of prices, wages, and rates or tolls in England. It may
be convenient for our purposes to use these three definite words to
mean the three definite things--prices in the sense of prices of goods
or commodities; wages the reward of labor or personal services; and
rates (the English word is tolls) for the charges of what we should
now term public-service corporations, or in old English law,
franchises, or what our Supreme Court has termed "avocations affected
with a public interest." The reader will remember that the attempted
regulation of prices began early and was short-lived, dating from the
Assize of Bread and Beer in 1266, to the Statute of Victuals of 1362,
hardly a century, and even these two precedents are not really such,
for the first only fixed the price of bread and beer according to the
cost of wheat or barley, just as to-day we might conceivably fix the
price of bread at some reasonable relation to the price of flour in
Minneapolis, and as it was fixed in ancient Greece by the wholesale
price of wheat at Athens[1]--not as it now is, from three to four
times the cost of bread in London, although made out of the same flour
shipped there from Minneapolis; and the two latest statutes expressly
say that they fix the price by reason of the great dearness of such
articles on account of the Black Death or plague, and the consequent
scarcity of labor. Then the Statute of Laborers of 1349 provided that
victuals should be sold only at reasonable prices, which apparently
were to be fixed by the mayor. With these statutes the effort to fix
prices by general statute disappeared from English civilization save,
of course, as prices may be indirectly affected by laws against
monopoly, engrossing, and restraint of trade; and local ordinances in
towns continued probably for