thods of labor and the amount and kind of wages matters to be left to employers and employed,1 subject only to the "law of supply and demand." By the operation of this.law, they claimed, the employer gets the laborer's services for the least sum possible under the conditions of supply; and on the other, the laborer secures the greatest sum for his services consistent with the existing demand. The employer's least price and the laborer's greatest price are therefore the same, and no injustice can be done so long as both parties are left free by law.

It is, however, fairly a question whether the writers and statesmen of this school, in their valorous disposition to stand by their principle in every case where issue on it might be joined, have not mistaken their ground in the matter of frame-rents and truck. Surely, freedom of contract, on which the Manchesterians insist so strongly, does not involve freedom to break contracts or to evade contracts; nor does the most advanced advocate of laissez faire propose that breach of contract shall be left to be punished by natural causes—that is, by the loss of business reputation, by the withdrawal of confidence, or by public reprobation. But if exactitude of performance may be enforced by law without any interference with industrial freedom, why, pray, may not precision in terms be required by the law, as the very first condition of a due and just enforcement of contracts? Precision in terms is, however, manifestly incompatible, in the very nature of the case, with truck; for if the employer says to the laborer, "I will pay you for your work twenty shillings a week, but you shall take it in commodities at my prices," he does not in fact agree how much he will pay the laborer; the use of the term twenty shillings becomes purely deceptive: it may mean more or less according as the employer chooses to fix his prices at the time; the laborer can not tell what his wages really are; the law can not tell, and therefore can not enforce

1 Fawcett's Speeches, p. 130.

the laborer's right if litigated.' Perhaps we can not say that precision in terms is incompatible with the very nature of the system of machine rents; but there is ample evidence to prove that it has been so in fact, and therefore the law, which is bound to enforce the contract, may justly demand that the contract shall not contain an element unsusceptible of exact determination. This is not interference with freedom of contract, but with looseness and uncertainty of contract, or with the power of one party to a contract to break, evade, or pervert its terms.

But I am not anxious to reconcile the prohibition of truck and machine rents with laissez faire. The authority accorded to that precept is not, in my opinion, to be justified on strictly economical principles.

We have previously (p. 168–9) discussed the principles on which it should be judged whether a law prohibitive or regulative in form really impairs competition, and prevents the resort of labor to its market. It was there seen that such a measure, though unquestionably obstructive as against a supposed pre-existing condition of perfect practical freedom, might, by removing important moral or intellectual obstacles to free action, which actually exist in human society as it is, have the effect to promote, and not retard, industrial movement.

Now, let us apply this principle to a proposed law in regulation or restraint of truck. It is, say Mr. Bright and Prof. Fawcett, an interference with freedom of contract and an obstruction to trade, and therefore mischievous

'For instance, suppose in a truck establishment a workman to die having undisputed claims on the employer, for work done, to the nominal amount of 100 shillings: what amount would his widow be entitled to recover in money at law, or would the employer be entitled to pay the debt into court in groceries and provisions, in quantities and at prices to suit himself? If the man had lived, the 100 shillings would have been paid, wholly or in part, in truck. His death certainly does not change the nature of his claim; yet is it conceivable that a court should award a payment in kind?

laissez faire, laissez passer. But is it really or only formally obstructive? There will not be absolute freedom of movement with it. Granted. But is there absolute freedom of movement without it? Assuredly not. Shall not, then, the question be, whether there will be more freedom with or without such a law?

Now, if we ask the question respecting truck and framerents in England as they were in the first half of the century, it must, I think, be answered that interference with the formal freedom of contract in these particulars served to enhance, in a most important degree, the substantial freedom of movement among the laboring classes. The laborer's practical ability to seek his best market is made up of a material element-the means of transportation and present subsistence-and of intellectual and moral elements quite as essential, the knowledge of the comparative advantages of the different occupations and locations offering themselves, and the courage to break away from place and custom to seek his fortune elsewhere. Ignorance and fear keep far more men in a miserable lot than does the sheer physical difficulty of getting from place to place, and sustaining life meanwhile.

this

At the laborer's knowledge of the comparative advantages of different occupations and locations, the truck and machine-rent systems struck a deadly blow. In addition to the inevitable difficulties in determining the real wages of labor, which were detailed in Chapter II., system introduced a new and most hopeless element of uncertainty. The laborer's wages, paid nominally in money, were to be converted into commodities for his consumption, by an illicit process, at rates governed by the pleasure of the individual employer at the particular time. The truck system was maintained for the purpose chiefly, as was admitted, of enabling the employers to "sweat" their laborers' wages, as counterfeiters "sweat" the coin of the realm. It was claimed that in this way employers might make themselves good, if the nominal wages they were

paying were too high, more easily than they could obtain a reduction in the nominal wages themselves. Moreover, the degree to which wages should be thus reduced would depend upon the rapacity or the necessities of individual employers, and also upon the state of manufacture and trade.' The great flexibility of these charges was universally admitted; and, indeed, the readiness with which they could be adapted, in form and degree, to the times and exigencies of the master's business was made one of the chief recommendations.

If workmen are to seek their own interests, they must know them. Every thing that tends to simplify wages makes it easier for the laborer to dispose of his service to the highest advantage. Every thing that tends to complicate wages puts the laborer at disadvantage. A system of gross wages, with deductions "regulated by no fixed rule or principle whatever" (Muggeridge), varying with times and places, and, as Sir A. Alison admits, varying with the state of trade and the disposition of employers, makes it impossible for the most enlightened workman to act intelligently respecting his interests, while the uneducated workman loses his reckoning completely: his senses are deceived, and he is put wholly at the mercy of the extortioner.'

But it is said the workman may not, indeed, be able to compute with exactness his net wages and those of his fellows, through all this system of allowances and deductions and payments in kind; but he surely can appreciate the result so far as his own comfort and well-being are

1 See Sir A. Alison's remarkable admissions on this point, quoted in note to page 333.

This is a great oppression," quoth Arthur Young. "Farmers and gentlemen keeping accounts with the poor is a great abuse. So many days' work for a cabin, so many for a potato-garden, so many for keeping a horse, and so many for a cow, are clear accounts which a poor man can understand well; but further it ought not to go,—and when he has worked out what he has of this soft, the rest of his work ought punctually to be paid him every Saturday night.”—Pinkerton, iii. 815.

concerned; he surely knows whether he is well off or not; and if he feels himself wronged, he will seek a better employer. But how, I ask, is he to judge in advance, under such a system of combined truck and machine rents as oppressed the framework-knitters of England fifty years ago, whether his condition would be more tolerable under another master or in another place? Suppose him to have the rare intelligence and enterprise to ascertain the gross wages paid by other employers,. perhaps in distant localities, and to find some more favorable than his own, how can he have the slightest assurance that greater severity in the administration of the system of stoppages and deductions, and greater greed in pursuing the profits of truck, might not make the dif ference, and perchance more than the difference, in nominal rates? He can not tell until he has tried, and how often would a workman, on such a narrow margin of living, and it may be with a family, be able to change employers and shift his place in order to better his lot? How surely would he, after one or two bitter disappointments, relinquish the effort, and sink without a struggle into his miserable place, getting what wages he could, and taking for them what he might, at "the master's store." The fact is, the system of truck and machine rents, as administered in England in the early part of the century, completely blindfolded the workman, and left him to grope about in search of his true interest, in peril of pitfalls and quagmires, or, as was most likely, to submit in sullen despair to every indignity and injury of the position in which he found himself.

Surely, then, we are entitled to say that laws in restraint of these practices differ from those other laws affecting labor which have been described in this chapter, in the one all-important particular, that the latter were intended to diminish that mobility by which laborers could seek their best market, while the former have the effect to make competition more easy and certain.