. There was in the State of Indiana a law that in ordinary
unskilled labor in public employment there should be a minimum wage of
fifteen cents per hour or twenty-five cents for a man and horse--since
declared unconstitutional by Indiana courts: while to-day such labor
receives a minimum of two dollars per day in California and Nebraska,
one dollar and a quarter in Hawaii, three dollars in Nevada, and
"the usual rate" in Delaware and New York,[1] and we are many of us
familiar with the practice of towns and villages in New England or New
York in passing a vote or town ordinance fixing the price of wages
at two dollars per day, or a like sum; but this practice, it must be
remarked, is in no sense a _law_ regulating wages; it is merely the
resolution or resolve of an employer himself, as a private citizen
might say that he would give his gardener fifty dollars a month
instead of forty. And, on the other hand, the Constitution of
Louisiana provides that the price of wages shall never be fixed by
law. Now it will be remembered that the Statutes of Laborers of the
Middle Ages, when they regulated the price of wages, led directly to
the result that they made all strikes, all concerted efforts to get an
increase of wages, unlawful and even criminal; in fact, it may be said
that this attempt to bind the workmen to a wage fixed by law was the
very cause of the notion that strikes were illegal, which, indeed, was
the English common law down to early in the last century. Moreover,
when an English mediaeval peasant refused to labor for his three pence
a day he might be sent to gaol by the nearest justice of the peace,
as, perhaps, some employers would like to do to-day in our South, and
which resulted--if not in slavery--in precisely that condition which
we call "peonage." Economically speaking, the attempt to regulate
wages was, of course, a mistake; politically speaking, it was
universally unpopular, and no class was more desirous than the working
class themselves of getting rid of all such legislation, which they
did in France at the French Revolution, and in England nearly two
centuries earlier. Only socialists should logically desire to go back
to the system, and in the one modern English-speaking State which is
largely socialistic--New Zealand--it is said that the minimum wage law
has had the effect that a similar resolve has had in Massachusetts
towns: to drive all the old men and all the weaker or less skilled out
of employm