“I shall point out below what were the actual effects of this great and sudden scarcity of labor. At present I merely continue the narrative. Parliament was broken up when the plague was raging. The King, however, issued a proclamation, which he addressed to William, the Primate, and circulated among the sheriffs of the different counties, in which he directed all officials that no higher than customary wages should be paid, under the penalties of amercement. The King’s mandate, however, was universally disobeyed, for the farmers were compelled to leave their crops ungathered or to comply with the demands of the laborers. When the King found that his proclamation was unavailing, he laid, we are told, heavy penalties on abbots, priors, barons, crown tenants, and those who held lands under mesne lords, if they paid more than customary rates. But the laborers remained masters of the situation. Many were said to have been thrown into prison for disobedience; many, to avoid punishment or restraint, fled into forests, where they were occasionally captured. The captives were fined, and obliged to disavow under oath that they would take higher than customary wages for the future. But the expedients were vain; labor remained scarce and wages, according to all previous experience, excessive.” Mr. Thorold Rogers tells us of all the expedients employed by Parliament, in the Statute of Laborers, in order to check the rise of wages, and how they broke down and were evaded by the employers themselves. “The rise in agricultural labor is, all kinds of men’s work being taken together, about 50 per cent., of women’s work fully 100 per cent.” Artisans fare equally well. And, despite the rise in price of manufactured articles consequent upon this rise of wages, “there was no corresponding rise in the price of provisions.... The free laborer, and, for the matter of that, the serf, was in his way still better off. Everything he needed was as cheap as ever, and his labor was daily rising in value.” It would, of course, be absurd to apply the lesson of one period of history to another, without consideration of the changed circumstances. But it is equally absurd to pass over such a vivid object lesson as the above without giving it due consideration, especially when it has a sound theoretical basis. Prof. Thorold Rogers was not a disciple of the Malthusian school, and he takes Mill and others to task for the importance they ascribed to the population difficulty. Yet he tells us that the reign of prosperity lasted for some time after the reduction of population by the Black Death, and that a rapid growth of population followed. This is quite in accordance with the doctrine of Malthus, and justifies our belief that, if this increase had been prudentially restricted, prosperity would have been permanently maintained.