Now this freedom-of-contract principle is one which, of course, legislation attempting to regulate the labor contract is peculiarly liable to "run up against"; and it is, for this reason, not only or chiefly because "labor" is opposed to the Constitution or because the courts are opposed to "labor," that so many statutes, passed at least nominally in the interest of labor, have been by them declared unconstitutional. For instance, it is a primary principle that an English free man of full age, under no disability, may control his person and his personal activities. He can work six, or four, or eight, or ten, or twelve, or twenty-four, or no hours a day if he choose, and any attempt to control him is impossible under the simplest principle of Anglo-Saxon liberty. Yet there is possibly a majority of the members of the labor unions who would wish to control him in this particular to-day; and will take for an example that under the police power the state has been permitted to control him in matters affecting the public health or safety, as, for instance, in the running of railway trains, or, in Utah, in labor in the mines. But freedom of contract in this connection results generally from personal liberty itself; although it results also from the right to property; that is to say, a man's wages (or his trade, for matter of that) is his property, and the right of property is of no practical use if you cannot have the right to make contracts concerning it. The only matter more important doubtless in the laborer's eye than the length of time he shall work is the amount of wages he shall receive. Now we may say at the start that in the English-speaking world there has been practically no attempt to regulate the _amount_ of wages. We found such legislation in mediaeval England, and we also found that it was abandoned with general consent. But of late years in these socialistic days (using again socialistic in its proper sense of that which controls personal liberty for the interest of the community or state) it is surprisingly showing its head once more. In Australasia and more recently in England we see the beginning of a minimum wage system which we must most carefully describe before we leave the subject. 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