The general Combination Act of 1800 was not merely the codification of existing laws, or their extension from particular trades to the whole field of industry. It represented a new and momentous departure. Hitherto the central or local authority had acted as a court of appeal on all questions affecting the work and wages of the citizen. If the master and journeyman failed to agree as to what constituted a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, the higgling of the market was peremptorily superseded by the authoritative determination, presumably on grounds of social expediency, of the standard of remuneration. Probably the actual fixing of wages by justices of the peace fell very rapidly into disuse as regards the majority of industries, although formal orders are found in the minutes of Quarter Sessions during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and deep traces of the practice long survived in the customary rates of hiring. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, at any rate, free bargaining between the capitalist and his workmen became practically the sole method of fixing wages. Then it was that the gross injustice of prohibiting combinations of journeymen became apparent. “A single master,” said Lord Jeffrey, “was at liberty at any time to turn off the whole of his workmen at once--100 or 1000 in number--if they would not accept of the wages he chose to offer. But it was made an offence for the whole of the workmen to leave that master at once if he refused to give the wages they chose to require.”[121] What was even more oppressive in practice was the employers’ use of the threat of prosecution to prevent even the beginnings of resistance among the workmen to any reduction of wages or worsening of conditions. It is true that the law forbade combinations of employers as well as combinations of journeymen. Even if it had been impartially carried out, there would still have remained the inequality due to the fact that, in the new system of industry, a single employer was himself equivalent to a very numerous combination. But the hand of justice was not impartial. The “tacit, but constant” combination of employers to depress wages, to which Adam Smith refers, could not be reached by the law. Nor was there any disposition on the part of the magistrates or the judges to find the masters guilty, even in cases of flagrant or avowed combination. No one prosecuted the master cutlers who, in 1814, openly formed the Sheffield Mercantile and Manufacturing Union, having for its main rule that no merchant or manufacturer should pay higher prices for any article of Sheffield make than were current in the preceding year, with a penalty of £100 for each contravention of this illegal agreement.[122] During the whole epoch of repression, whilst thousands of journeymen suffered for the crime of combination, there is no case on record in which an employer was punished for the same offence.