comparatively recent period, over the
working-classes in Britain. We may judge of the tyrannical
interference of the government with the freedom of labour by the
Statute of Labourers, passed in 1349. One of the frightful famines of
the middle ages had occurred, and labourers were scarce in comparison
with the means of employment. It is said that the same phenomenon has
now in some measure recurred in Ireland; but there is little chance of
our statesmen treating it as those of the fourteenth century did.
Justice says, that the labourer is entitled to obtain the value of his
labour, be it much or little. Parliament, however, fixed the amount
which it thought the reasonable price of labour--the rate at which the
members of the legislature desired to have it; and endeavoured, by
penalties and persecution, to obtain it at that rate. The statute
commences by abusing the labourers for taking advantage of the
scarcity of hands to demand high wages--as if there ever were human
beings, employed in the ordinary affairs of life, who would not take
what wages or profits they could obtain; and as if labourers were like
missionaries, and other devotees, who are not led by any mercenary
motive. The statute then enacts, that every person able in body, and
under the age of sixty, not having means of maintaining himself, is
bound to serve whoever shall be willing to employ him, at the wages
which were usually paid during the six years preceding the plague; and
if he refuses, and it is proved by two witnesses before the sheriff,
bailiff, lord, or constable of the village where the refusal is given,
he is to be committed to jail, and continue there till he finds surety
to enter into service in terms of the act.

It is always observable, that laws interfering with freedom of trade
go on increasing in strictness, because the confusion which the first
attempt creates is always attributed to the deficiency of the law
instead of its excess. The Statute of Labourers was of course
insufficient to put everything right between employers and employed;
and so, two years afterwards, another and stricter Statute of
Labourers was passed (23 Ed. III., ch. 1-8.) This statute not only
regulated the wages of husbandry, and the times when peasant-labourers
were to work, but fixed the precise amount which each kind of artisan
was bound to work for. The account given of it by Mr Daines
Barrington, in his observations on the statutes, may be quoted as
among th