his own about the tillage of which he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighborhood where he is bound to serve" two years before the plague began. A refusal to obey was punished by imprisonment. Here was an attempt to fix the rate of wages by statute, and to fix them very much lower than a fair market rate; and, further, to force the unemployed laborer to serve any man who first demanded it. The statute failed in its object, naturally, and so sterner measures were adopted. "Not only was the price of labor fixed by Parliament in the next statute of 1351, but the labor class was once more tied to the soil." It was made the servant not of one master but of a class--the employers. "The laborer was forbidden to quit the parish where he lived in search of better-paid employment; if he disobeyed, he became a 'fugitive,' and subject to imprisonment at the hands of the justices of the peace." Provisions had risen so that a day's work at the legal wages would not purchase enough for a man's support, and therefore no such law could be enforced literally. Still, the landowners persisted in trying, and at last the runaway laborer, the man looking for better wages, was branded on the forehead with a hot iron, while the harboring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down. As the landowners wanted all the labor they could get, the commutation of labor service for money payments ceased, and every effort was made and every quibble taken advantage of to annul manumissions previously made. In the towns, under the pressure of the craftsmen, the system of forced labor was applied with even more rigor than in the country, and strikes and combinations became frequent. That is the state of things in free England at a time when labor was not strong enough to protect itself--called upon by the law of the land to work for less than living wages or be branded as cattle! The irrepressible conflict between capital and labor began with the very beginning of the existence of the labor class.