any such law would be unconstitutional because the president cannot legislate. But the point I wish to make now in both these cases is the exact correspondence of the problem; what are remedies to-day were remedies five hundred years ago. So far we have found nothing new, either in remedy or offence. (1349) Now there is a third great line of legislation that we must consider in connection with these other two, and that is the Statutes of Labor. It was the custom in early times to attempt to regulate prices; both of wages and commodities. The first Statute of Laborers dates from 1349. Its history was economic. They had had a great plague in England known as the Black Death; and it had carried off a vast number of people, especially the laboring people. There was naturally great demand for workers. Laborers were very scarce. It is estimated that one-third of the entire population had died; and there has never been a time when wages were so high relatively, that is, when wages would buy so much for the workingman, as about the middle of the fourteenth century. But the employers were no fonder of high wages than they are to-day. All England was used to sumptuary laws, laws regulating the price of commodities, and villeins still existed. They were only just beginning to consider agricultural laborers as freemen; they were used to the notion of exerting a control over laboring men, who were still often appendant to the land on which they worked, for it was unlawful for an agricultural laborer to change his abode; and in many other ways they were under strict laws. So that it didn't seem much of a step to say also, we will regulate the rate of wages--particularly as the payment of wages in money was rather a new thing. Probably two or three centuries before most wages were paid in articles of food or in the use of the land. So they got this first Statute of Laborers through; it required all persons able in body under sixty to do labor to such persons as require labor or else be committed to gaol. That, of course, is compulsory labor; the law would therefore be unconstitutional with us to-day except in so far as it applied, under a criminal statute, in regard to tramps or vagrants. In some States we commit tramps and vagrants to gaol if they won't do a certain amount of work for their lodging, under the theory that they have committed a criminal act in being vagrants. Otherwise this principle, a law requiring all persons to work, is now obsolete. Then it went on to say, no workman or servant can depart from service before the time agreed upon; lawful enough, to-day, although laborers do not like to make a definite contract. The South, however, has adopted this principle as to agricultural labor, just as in the England of the fourteenth century. Southern States have an elaborate system of legislation for the purpose of enforcing labor upon idle negroes, which, when it creates a system of "peonage," is forbidden by the Federal laws and Constitution.