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 employment entirely, and into the poorhouse;[2] for, at a fixed price, it is obvious that the employer will employ only the most efficient labor, and the same argument causes some of their more thoughtful friends to dissuade the women school-teachers in New York from their present effort to get their wages or salaries fixed by law at a price equal to that paid a man.[3] [Footnote 1: See above, p. 161; below, p. 213.] [Footnote 2: In the old town of Plymouth the chairman of the selectmen asked what, he should do under vote of town meeting requiring him to pay two dollars a day for all unskilled labor employed by the town. "We have," he said, "about one hundred and twenty old men in Plymouth, largely veterans of the Civil War. We have been in the habit of giving them one dollar and a quarter per day. Under this two-dollar vote we cannot do it without bankrupting the town." He was advised to go ahead and still pay them the dollar and a quarter per day and take the chance of a lawsuit, which he did, and so far as the writer knows no lawsuit has ever been brought; but in all cases that would not be the result.]