Apprentices, by which the access of unskilled labor to the trades and professions was restricted within the narrowest bounds. A single section will suffice. No merchant, mercer, draper, goldsmith, ironmonger, embroiderer, or clothier may take an apprentice, "except such servant or apprentice be his son, or else that the father or mother of such apprentice or servant shall have, at the time of taking of such apprentice or servant, lands, tenements, or other hereditaments of the clear yearly value of forty shillings of one estate of inheritance or freehold at the least."

So much for restraints on movement from one occupation to another. Movement from place to place was restricted with equal jealousy. By statute of 25 Edward III. it was ordained that, with exception of certain counties, no laborer in agriculture should "go out of the town where he dwelleth in the winter to serve the summer, if he may serve in the same town, taking as before is said." By the statute of 12 Richard II. it was provided. that "no servant or laborer, be he man or woman, shall depart at the end of his term out of the hundred, rape, or wapentake where he is dwelling, to serve or dwell elsewhere, or by color to go from thence in pilgrimage, unless he bring a letter-patent containing the cause of his going, and the time of his return, if he ought to return, under the king's seal," etc. Although all life had long passed out of these statutes, it was not until 1824 that the laws prohibiting the emigration of artisans from the kingdom were repealed, as vain and uselessly irritating.

Such extracts as have been presented will perhaps serve sufficiently to convey an impression of the minuteness and rigidity of the numerous acts which sought to regulate the industry of England. It is not necessary to show that such laws were always fully enforced,' to establish the certainty

'Many of these acts were doubtless passed in the spirit of 2 and 3 Edward VI. (c. 9): "Therefore, as the malice of man increaseth to defraud the intent of good laws, so laws must rise against such guile with the more severity, day by day, for the due repress of the same."

that they wrought grievous evil to the working classes. If they had effect only in part, if they were only enforced here and there and now and then, or even if they were always to be evaded, but by resort to concealment, stratagem, or indirection, then they must have seriously affected the mobility of labor.

But it is doubtful if all the barbarous enactments we have cited are together responsible for more of the present pauperism and destitution of England than is the law of parochial settlement. This act originated in the reign of Charles II., and while other restrictions upon the movement of population were gradually giving way before the expansion of industrial enterprise and the liberalizing tendencies of modern thought, the mischievous provisions of the Law of Settlement were given a wider scope and an increased severity from reign to reign. It is only within the last twelve years that the cords that crossed the political body in all directions, cutting off the circulation until every portion of the surface broke out in putrefying sores, have been loosened. The image may seem extravagant; but no language can exaggerate the effect of such restraints on population. Migration within the kingdom was practically prohibited. If the laborer in search of employment ventured across the boundaries of his parish (and there are 15,535 parishes in England and Wales), he was liable to be apprehended and returned to the place of his settlement; while parish officers were perpetually incited by the fears of the ratepayers to zeal in hunting down and running out all possible claimants of public charity on whom, if unmolested, residence would confer a right to support. "When an employer wished to engage a servant from a foreign parish, he was not permitted to do so unless he entered into a recognizance, often to a considerable amount, to the effect that the incomer should not obtain the settlement, else the bond to be good against the employer. Parochial registers are full of such acknowledgments.'

Rogers, Pol. Econ., p. 122.

The peasant and the artisan, thus shut up within the place of their birth, were compelled to meet the fate which awaited the industry of that locality. All local calamities fell with unbroken force upon a population that had no escape. The calamity might be temporary, but the effects upon character and life were not. Industry might look up again, but the peasant, broken in his self-respect, brutalized, pauperized, could never afterwards be the same man. Employment might revive; but no art of man, no power of government could reconstitute the shattered manhood.

It is probably safe to say that no Continental country has, at least within late years, maintained any law so injurious in its practical effects in producing a helpless immobility of labor, as the English law of settlement, the original object of which was to keep, not laborers, but paupers, in their place. But of laws directly seeking, in the interests of employers, to control the movements of labor, whether from place to place or from occupation to occupation, there is in the history of European legislation limit neither to number nor to variety. In Trance,' in spite of some contradictory features, it may be said that freedom of labor was achieved by the Revolution. In Germany, and among the Scandinavian' peoples, the system of restriction was strongly intrenched, and still survives with no little force, nothwithstanding the tremendous breaches made in it by the liberalizing tendencies of the last twelve or fifteen years. In Denmark, perhaps, of all these countries, free trade in labor is most nearly achieved.' In Austria laws instituting the "Genossenschaften," or

'M. Ducarre's Report of 1875, to which I have several times referred, presents a good view of the course of measures by which labor in France has been emancipated (pp. 22-64).

"The corporation system exists with more vigor in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden," wrote Mr. Laing in 1851, "than in any other country."-Denmark and the Duchies, p. 301.

'Since 1862. See Report of Mr. Strachey on the Condition of the Industrial Classes, 1870, p. 505.

guilds, are so far modified that these are no longer close corporations. They are still, however, compulsory associations, to which every Austrian workman is under legal obligation to belong.'

II. The wage-laborer may be put at disadvantage by a fictitious currency. The laborer suffers, with other classes of the community, from the disturbances of industry which are always occasioned by an inflated and fluctuating circulation; but the injury to which I refer under the present title is due to the difficulty which the laborer experiences in adjusting his demand upon his employer to the rapid and violent changes in the currency cost of living, and to the illusions created by paper wealth, by which the laborer's expenditure is inevitably more or less perverted and distorted.

The most difficult mental operation which ordinary men. are called upon to perform is that of discount. Even the book-educated and men of affairs find it laborious and painful. Mr. Laing, the well-known traveller, has left a curious bit of testimony on this point in a remark made in his Tour in Sweden, to the effect that he always caught himself thinking of a mile in that country as he would of a mile in England, although the Swedish mile is seven times as long. If such is the experience of a cultivated mind in so simple and familiar a matter, what can be expected of men of limited views and little information, subject unduly to the first impression of things and untrained to arithmetical computations, when called to render their wages into terms corresponding to the rapidly chang ing prices of the necessaries of life? It is a work which would task the powers of a philosopher; it is extremely improbable that a workingman will succeed in accomplishing it. The laborer's interest will not come to him: he must go to it; and to do so he must be able to identify and locate it with precision and assurance. In the absence,

1 Report of Mr. Lytton, 1870, p. 522.

therefore, of clear and definite ideas on the relation of wages and prices, the laborer must under such a currency follow blindly around after prices, guided only by a general sense of the inadequacy of his wages in making his demands upon his employer. Acting without intelligence in the premises, it is a matter of course that he sacrifices in some degree his own interests. He either demands too much, and failing perhaps in a persistent demand injures alike himself and his employer; or, asking too little, he rests content with getting that.

It was doubtless with reference to this inability of the laboring class to meet such sudden and violent changes of conditions as are caused by a fictitious currency that Mr. Mill assigned to "custom" in economics the same beneficent function which it has performed in the sphere of politics as "the most powerful protector of the weak against the strong." Habit, usage, constitutes a barrier which in a degree preserves the economically weak from the hustlings and jostlings of the marketplace, and gives them room to stand.' A fictitious currency breaks down this barrier and involves all classes of the community in a furious and incessant struggle for existence in which the weakest are certain to be trampled down.

But it is not alone in competition with the employer that the laborer is placed at disadvantage by a fictitious currency. If it is difficult for the laborer to secure the

I am here speaking of wage-laborers as they are and not as they might be. There could be a better state of things still than that in which "custom" protects the poor-that is, a condition in which the laboring class should be so intelligent, and hence so strong, that they could not afford and would not endure to take a defensive position, but should welcome the utmost that competition could do. But so long as the working classes remain, as in most countries, ignorant and inert, it is possible that causes reducing the severity of competition may be properly correspondent to their weaknesses, and thus beneficial. However that may be, it stands by itself, that the working classes, being inadequately prepared to follow around after changes of price, must be injured by whatever makes those changes more frequent and violent.