(g) _Legal Restrictions_ are another cause acting on wages, by acting directly on the Supply of laborers. Laws inhibiting or promoting immigration; laws appointing the fees and salaries of officials; tariff-taxes, whether prohibitory or only restrictive; laws creating privileged classes of any kind, which is only another designation for laws restricting the rights of the masses; unequal modes of taxation, whether adopted in ignorance or by design; all have a direct and powerful agency upon the distribution of laborers, upon the supply of them at given points, and upon the rates of their wages. Governments are coming, however, much more freely than formerly, but never through their natural choice and drift as governments, only by the gradual and oft-disappointed compulsion of their citizens, to leave all these matters Economical except the wages of their own servants and those commodities which they choose to tax, to the simple and safe action of Supply and Demand. (h) _Voluntary Associations_ for that avowed purpose were a mediæval, and have come to be again a modern, agency in adjusting the Supply of laborers to their respective markets, and in regulating the wages of various classes of them. The Guilds of the Middle Ages, and particularly the old guilds of London, had a remarkable history, upon which we can not here even touch. Their local importance is sufficiently attested by the fact, that the City Hall of London is to this day the "Guildhall." King Edward III. humored the civic feeling of his time by becoming himself a member of the Guild of Armorers. "A seven years' apprenticeship formed the necessary prelude to full membership of any trade-guild. Their regulations were of the minutest character; the quality and value of work was rigidly prescribed, the hours of toil fixed from daybreak to curfew, and strict provision made against competition in labor. At each meeting of these guilds their members gathered round the Craft-box, which contained the rules of their Society, and stood with bared heads as it was opened. The warden and a quorum of guild-brothers formed a court which enforced the ordinances of the guild, inspected all work done by its members, confiscated unlawful tools or unworthy goods; and disobedience to their orders was punished by fines, or in the last resort by expulsion, which involved the loss of right to trade. A common fund was raised by contributions among the members, which not only provided for the trade objects of the guild, but sufficed to found chantries and masses, and set up painted windows in the church of their patron saint. Even at the present day the arms of the craft-guild may often be seen blazoned in cathedrals, side by side with those of prelates and kings."[6]