To-day, the American constitutions all say that a militia is the natural defence of a state of free men. It is interesting; therefore, to find, hardly a century after the Norman Conquest. In 1181, the Assize of Arms, which revived the ancient Saxon "Fyrd," the word for what we now call militia; and, twenty years before that, "scutage" replaced military service. To the burdens of the feudal system, compulsory military service and standing armies, our ancestors objected from the very beginning. In a sense, scutage was the beginning of taxation; but it was only a commutation for military service, much as a man to-day might pay a substitute to go to war in times of draft. General taxation first appears in 1188 in the famous Saladin tithe, the first historical instance of the taxation of personal property as distinct from a feudal burden laid upon land. The object of this tax was to raise money for the crusade against the Sultan Saladin. It was followed, five years later, by a tax of one-fourth of every person's revenue or goods to ransom the king, Richard I having gone to this crusade against Saladin, and been captured on his return by his good friend and Christian ally, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It is interesting to note that the worth of the king in those days was considered exactly one-fourth of the common wealth of England. John was less expensive; but he was not captured. He levied a tax ten years later of one-seventh part on the barons, and one-thirteenth on every man.
In 1213 two important things happened. The high-water mark of domination by the Roman Church is reached when King John surrendered England to the pope, and took it back as a fief of the pope for a tribute of one thousand marks. The same year the other early method of trial of lawsuits was abolished by the Lateran Council—trial by ordeal. This was the only remaining Saxon method. The Norman trial by battle had already been superseded by trial by jury; and from this time on, in practice, no other method than a jury remains, though trial by battle was not abolished by statute until the nineteenth century.
And then we come to Magna Charta. The first time it was granted was in 1215 by John, but the charter always quoted is that promulgated ten years later under Henry III. They were very nearly identical, but the important omission in the charter of Henry was in regard to "scutage" ("no aid other than the three customary feudal aids shall be imposed without the common counsel of the kingdom"); that, of course, is the principle we have discussed above, first put in writing in the charter of John. The barons claimed it as part of the unwritten law. But Henry III in his charter cannily dropped it out—which is a trick still played by legislatures to-day. This Magna Charta was confirmed and ratified something like thirty times between the time of its adoption under John and the time it got established so completely that it wasn't necessary to ratify it any more. There are four sections of Magna Charta that are most important. Chapter 7, the establishment of the widow's dower; of no great importance to us except as showing how early the English law protected married women in their property rights. Chapter 13 confirmed the liberties and customs of London and other cities and seaports—which is interesting as showing how early the notion of free trade prevailed among our ancestors. It gave rise to an immense deal of commercial law, which has always existed independent of any act of Parliament. Chapter 17 provided that the common pleas court—that is, the ordinary trial court—should not follow the king about, but be held at a place and time certain. That was the beginning of our legal liberty; because before that the king used to travel about his realm with his justiciar, as they called his chief legal officer, and anybody who wanted to have a lawsuit had to travel around England and get the king to hear his case. But the uncertainty of such a thing made justice very difficult, so it was a great step when the leading court of the kingdom was to be held in a place certain, which was at once established in Westminster. Minor courts were, of course, later established in various counties, though usually the old Saxon county or hundred-motes continued to exist. Chapter 12 is the one relating to scutage, from the wordscutum, shield—meaning the service of armed men. Just as, to-day, a man who does not pay his taxes can in some States work them out on the road, so conversely in England they very early commuted the necessity of a knight or land-owner furnishing so many armed men into a money payment. "The three customary feudal aids" were for the defence of the kingdom, the building of forts, and the building of bridges—all the taxes usually imposed upon English citizens in these earliest times—all other taxation to be only by the Common Council of the kingdom. This is the first word, council; later, it became "consent"; the wordconseilmeaning both consent and council. "Council of England" means, of course, the Great Council. We are still before the time when the word Parliament was used. Thus Magna Charta expresses it that there should be no taxation without "the advice" of Parliament, without legislation; and as Parliament was a representative body, it is the equivalent of "taxation without representation." This also was omitted in Henry III's charter, 1217, and only restored under Edward I in 1297, a most significant omission. And it is also expressed in early republications of the Great Charter that taxation must be for the benefit ofall, "for public purposes only," for the people and not for a class. On this latter principle of Anglo-American constitutional law one of our great political parties bases its objection to the protective tariff, or to bounties; as, for instance, to the sugar manufacturers; or other modern devices for extorting wealth from all the people and giving it to the few. All taxation shall be for thecommonbenefit. Any taxation imposed for the sole benefit of the land-owning class, for instance, or even for the manufacturing class, is against the original principles of constitutional liberty.
Then we come to chapter 39, the great "Liberty" statute. "No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or be disseised of his freehold orhis liberties or his free customs[these important words added in 1217] or be outlawed or exiled or otherwise destroyed but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land." This, the right to law, is the cornerstone of personal liberty. Any government in any country on the Continent can seize a man and keep him as long as it likes; it is only Anglo-Saxons that have an absolute right not to have that happen to them, and not only are they entitled not to be imprisoned, but their liberty of free locomotion may not be impeded. An American citizen has a constitutional right to travel freely through the whole republic and also not to be excluded therefrom. Punishment by banishment beyond the four seas was forbidden in very early times in England. "Disseised of his freehold, of his liberties or his free customs"—that is the basis of all our modern law of freedom of trade, against restraint of trade, and the basis on which our actions against the modern trusts rest; the right to freely engage in any business, to be protected against monopoly either of the state or brought about by competitors, to freely make one's own contracts, for labor or property, to work as long as one chooses, for what wages one wills, and all the other liberties of labor and trade. "Or be outlawed or exiled or otherwise destroyed"—that is a broad general phrase for any interference with a man's property, life, or liberty. "Nor will we go upon him"—that has been translated in various ways, but it means what it says; it means that the king won't descend upon a man personally or with his army; nor will we "send upon him"—a law officer after him; "but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land"—that means jury trial, or at least the law of the land, as it then was; and that phrase, or its later equivalent—due process of law—is discussed to-day probably in one case out of every ten that arise in our highest courts. Many books have been written upon it. To start with, it means that none of these things can be done exceptunder law; that is, except under a lawsuit; except under a process in a court, having jury trial if it be a civil case, and also an indictment if it be a criminal case, with all the rights and consequences that attend a regularly conducted lawsuit. It must be done by the courts, and not by the executive, not by the mere will of the king; and, still more important to us to-day, not by legislatures, not even by Parliament. "We will sell to no man, we will deny or delay to no man, either right or justice," needs no explanation; it is equality before the law, repeated in our own Fourteenth Amendment.
Lastly, we have in cap. 41: "Merchants shall have safe conduct in England, subject only to the ancient and allowed customs, not to evil tolls"—a forecast of the allowable tariff as well as of the spirit of modern international law. Finally, there is a chapter on mortmain, recognizing that land might not be given to monasteries or religious houses, and particularly under a secret trust; the object being to keep the land, which made the power of the realm, out of the hands of the church. As far as that part of it goes, it is merely historical to us, but it developed into the principle that corporations "which have no souls," and do not die, should not own too much land, or have too much power—and that is a very live question in the United States to-day.
One must not be misled by the generality of the phrase used in chapter 39, and think it unimportant because it looks simple. It is hard for an American or Englishman to get a fresh mind on these matters. We all grow up with the notion that nobody has the right to arrest us, nobody has the right to deprive us of our liberty, even for an hour. If anybody, be he President of the United States or be he a police officer, chooses to lay his hand on our shoulder or attempts to confine us, we have the same right to try him, if he makes a mistake, as if he were a mere trespasser; and that applies just as much to the highest authority, to the president, to the general of the army, to the governor, as it does to a tramp. But one cannot be too often reminded that this principle is peculiar to English and American civilization. Throughout the Continent any official, any judge, anybody "who has a red band around his cap," who, in any indirect way, represents the state—a railway conductor, a spy, a station agent—not only has the right to deprive you of your freedom, but you have no right to question him; the "red band around the cap" is a final answer. Hence that extraordinary incident, at which all England laughed, the Kupenick robbery. A certain crook who had been a soldier and was familiar with the drill and the passwords, obtained possession of an old captain's uniform, walked into a provincial town of some importance, ordered the first company of soldiers he met to follow him, and then with that retinue, appeared before the town hall and demanded of the mayor the keys of the treasury. These were surrendered without question and he escaped with the money, representing, of course, that he had orders from the Imperial government. It never occurred to any one to question a soldier in full uniform, and it was only some days later, when the town accounts were sent to Berlin to be approved, that the robbery was discovered.
Such a thing could by no possibility have happened in England or with us; the town treasurer would at once have demanded his authority, his order from the civil authorities; the uniform would have failed to impress him. Moreover, under our local self-government, under our decentralized system, nobody isaboveeven a town officer, or a State or city official at the head of his department, however small it be, except the courts. State officers may not command town officers, nor Federal officers State officers; nor soldiers give orders to policemen. The president, the governor, may perhaps remove them; but that is all. And even the policeman acts at his peril, and may be sued in the ordinary courts, if he oversteps his authority. The notion that a free citizen has a right absolutely to question his constraint by any State officer is peculiar to the English and American people, and this cannot be too often repeated; for it is what foreigners simply fail to understand. And it rests on this chapter in the Great Charter, originally, as amplified and explained by the courts and later acts of Parliament, such, as the Habeas Corpus Act. If a man is arrested by any official, that person, however great, has to justify the arrest. In theory, a man arrested has a right to sue him for damages, and to sue him criminally for trespass; and if that man, be he private individual or be he an official or president, cannot show by a "due course of law"—that is, by a due lawsuit, tried with a jury—that he did it under a duly enacted law, and that the facts of the case were such as to place the man under that law—then that official, however high, is just as much liable in the ordinary courts, as if he were the merest footpad trying to stop a man on the highway—a doctrine almost unknown to any country in the world outside of England, the United States, and English colonies.
Going on with the statutes, the next thing we will note is a matter that concerns the personal relations. It shows again how eagerly our English common law overruled the church law, the canon law. Although the church under the pope always pretended that it alone had authority to regulate relations between the sexes, marriage and divorce, we found Henry I interfering with the priests themselves, and we now find as early as 1235, a secular statute which extends the interference of the secular law over the relations between parent and child; that is, as to when a child should be legitimate and when not. We shall have a great deal to say later about marriage and divorce laws, particularly divorce laws as they exist in this country and as they apparently are going to be. As early as 1235 the secular courts interfered with the marriage relation; and the importance of that is here: there is one great school to-day, including largely clergymen and the divorce reformers, so-called, who hold substantially that marriage is a sacrament, or at least a status; that the secular law has nothing to do with it and should not be allowed to grant a divorce except for canonical causes,i.e., causes recognized by the church; that it is not like any other contract, which can be set aside with mutual consent; when a marriage takes place, they say, it is a sacrament, or, at least, a status ensues which cannot in future be altered. Consequently, it is not like a contract; for all contracts can be abrogated by mutual consent. On the other hand, the most radical people go to the other extreme, and say that marriageislike any other contract; it is purely a civil contract, not a sacrament, not a status; just like any other, and some of them go to what is the logical conclusion of that position and say that therefore marriage, like any other contract, ought to be ended at any time by the consent of both parties. The extreme radical view leads to the conclusion that a man and woman ought to be divorced any time by merely saying that they want to be; and some States have almost got to this position in their statutes. This may seem a very far cry from this early statute, which does not directly concern marriage but the status of children; nevertheless it has this bearing—it is an interference by Parliament, by the secular, legislative branch of government, with a relation which the church believed to belong only to the church. It so happens that in this instance the secular law instead of being liberal and kindly was extremely cruel and the reverse of liberal. Under the church law, when a man married a woman by whom he already had children, all those children were thereby made legitimate, and that certainly seems the kindly and the Christian law. But the secular barons who constituted the Parliament, in their jealousy for the common law, took the harsher view, that any children born of parents who are not married at the time they are born shall be illegitimate, although their parents may marry afterward. Beaumont and Fletcher, in one of their plays, make a punning reference to that. It seems to have struck Beaumont and Fletcher as it does us, that it was a cruel law for the Parliament to make; when the church for once was liberal, it was queer that the Parliament should be illiberal; so Beaumont and Fletcher, in one of their plays, say: "The children thou shalt getby this civiliancannot inherit by thelaw." This is interesting, because they use all the words I have been trying to define; when they say "the children thou shalt get by thiscivilian," they mean by this civilian a person who is under the civil, or Roman, or church law; that is, they mean to say, although you marry a woman who is a church member and under the jurisdiction of the bishop, etc., nevertheless the church law won't help you; your children by her cannot inherit by thelaw, and the law as used by Beaumont and Fletcher and as used by me and as used in English books means thecommonlaw, the commonsecularlaw, the law ofEngland, not the civil or canon law.[1] Beaumont and Fletcher evidently thought it was a very illiberal statute; and our modern American States have all come to Beaumont and Fletcher's conclusion; they have universally reversed the old English statute and gone back to the church law, so that throughout the United States to-day a child born before the marriage of its parents is legitimate if its parents afterward marry. That is true, no matter how late it is; if the man marries her even on his death-bed, all his children are legitimized.
[Footnote 1: "And so all the earls and barons answered with one voice, that they would not change the laws of England."]
In the same Statute of Merton there is a sentence against usury, "no usury permitted against minors"; and there are two things to note here. One is, that the secular legislature is also taking jurisdiction of minors, who were claimed at that time to be solely under the jurisdiction of the church; and the other is the reference to usury. Mind you, usury is interest. It didn't mean excessive interest, as it does now. As you probably know, the notion prevailed in the early Middle Ages that all usury—interest—was a sin and wrong; and even Ruskin has chapter after chapter arguing that principle, that it is wrong to take interest for money. I should perhaps add another reason why interest was so disliked in early England: There was very little money in early England; and it mostly belonged to the Jews. It was a good deal as it is in Russia to-day; the Jews were persecuted in Russia as in early England, because, in the country districts of Russia, the Jews have all the money, and money-lenders are always unpopular. So in early England. The great barons had their land and their cattle and crops, but they had little money. When they wanted money they got the value of it out of their tenants. Nobody carried large sums of money around with him then, any more than a woman does to-day—she relies on her husband or father; they went to the nearest Jew. When the king wanted cash, he also extorted it from the Jews. One of the early Henrys said seriously, that he regarded the Jews as a very convenient sponge! That is, they sucked all the money in the kingdom and got it into a place whence he could easily get it out. But it made the Jews very unpopular with the masses of the people and with the Parliament; hence, their great dislike of usury. I doubt very much if they would have cared much about usury if one gentleman had been in the habit of loaning money to another; but all the money came from the Jews, who were very unpopular; and the statutes against usury were really made against them, and that is why it was so easy to pass them—they based it, doubtless, on the references to usury in the Bible. Thus they got the notion that it was wrong to charge interest, or at least extortionate interest; more than a certain definite per cent.; and this is the origin of all our interest and usury statutes to-day. Although most economists will tell you that it is ridiculous to have any limit on the rate of interest, that the loan of money may well be worth only four per cent. to one man and twenty-five to another, and that the best way for everybody would be to leave it alone; nevertheless, nearly all our States have usury laws. We shall discuss that later; but here is the first statute on the subject, and it really arose because of the feeling against the Jews. To show how strong that prejudice was, there was another statute passed in the interest of liberality to protect the Jews—a statute which provided liberally that you must not take from a Jew "more than one-half his substance." And a very early commentator tells us of a Jew who fell into a privy on a Friday, but refused to be helped out on Saturday because it was his Sunday; and on Sunday he besought the Earl of Gloucester to pull him out, but the Earl of Gloucester refused because it was his Sunday; so the Jew remained there until Monday morning, when he was found dead. There is no prejudice against Hebrews to-day anywhere in Europe stronger than existed even in England for the first three or four centuries after the Norman Conquest; and had it not been for the protection given them by the crown, probably they would have been exterminated or starved out, and in 1289 they were all banished to the number of 16,160, and their movables seized.
In 1264 citizens of towns were first represented in the Parliament (in the Great Council, that is, for the word parliament is not yet used), originally only composed of the great barons, who were the only land-owners. The notion of there being freemen in towns was slowly established, but it was fully recognized by 1264, and in that year citizens of towns first appeared in the Council. To-day, under the various Reform Acts, tenants or even lodgers in towns are just as much represented as the land-owners; but the reform which began in 1264 took six hundred years to be thoroughly established.
And now we find the first statutory origin of that utterly fallacious principle—although alive to-day—that the state, in a free country, a legislature-governed country, has the right, when expedient, to fix thepriceof anything, wages or other commodities; fallacious, I say, except possibly as to the charges of corporations, which are given special privileges by the government; the principle, which prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, of fixing the prices of all things. In this case the price was on bread; but you find now for many centuries an attempt to fix the price of almost everything; and of labor, too, what wages a man should be paid. It lasted persistently for centuries and centuries, and it was only under the influence of modern political economy, Adam Smith and other quite modern writers, that the principle that it was possible to fix prices of commodities was utterly eradicated from the English mind. And you hardly got it out of England before it reappeared in the United States. It is not a new-fangled principle. You find the newspapers commonly talk about fixing prices by law as if it were something utterly unheard of and utterly new. It is not so. It Is on the contrary as old as almost any legislation we have, and you can make no argument against it on that ground. It has always been the custom of our ancestors to regulate the prices of wages by law, and the notion that it was either unconstitutional or inexpedient dates from a very few years back; yet all such attempts at legislation have utterly disappeared from any modern statute-book. In no State of our forty-six States is any one so unintelligent, even in introducing bills in the legislature, as to-day to propose that the price of a ton of coal or a loaf of bread shall be so much. Nor is any modern legislature so unintelligent or so oppressive as to propose sumptuary laws; that is, to prescribe how expensively a man or woman must dress; but in the mediaeval times those were thought very important. Every class in England was then required by law to have exactly so many coats, to spend so much money on their dress, so much on their wives' dress, and certain men could have fine cloth and others coarse cloth; everything was graded, even to the number of buttons on clothes, and they went so far even as to try in some early legislation to say what men should have to eat; the number of courses a man should have for his dinner were prescribed by law at one time in England, varying according to the man's rank. All such legislation has absolutely vanished and probably no one need know that it existed—but that when efforts are made, as they sometimes are, by our more or less uneducated members of legislatures to introduce bills of such a kind, it is very important for us to know that those experiments have been tried and have failed, having proved to be either impracticable or oppressive or not for the general benefit. This is the importance of these early laws, even when obsolete; because we never know when some agitator may not pop up with some new proposal—something he thinks new—which he thinks, if adopted, will revolutionize society. If you can show him that his new discovery is not only not new, but was tried, and tried in vain, during two or three centuries in the life of our own ancestors, until an enraged public abolished it, it will destroy any effect that he is likely to make upon the average legislature.
The first general example of an English law fixing the price of a commodity is in 1266, the Assize of Bread and Beer. That fixed the price of bread according to the cost of wheat, a sliding scale, in other words; when a bushel of wheat cost so much, a loaf weighing a certain amount must cost so much, etc. But you must not confound that with the modern law that still exists in England, and in some States and cities here, merely regulating thesizeof a loaf. That is perfectly proper, reasonable legislation, done merely for the purpose of protecting the public and preventing fraud. In England, for instance, there is a certain standard loaf known as a quartern loaf, and in order to prevent poor people being cheated it is prescribed by city ordinance that the quartern loaf shall weigh so much, shall contain so many ounces of flour. We do have similar laws saying how much a bushel of potatoes shall weigh, how much a barrel of flour shall weigh. That isn't fixing the price; it is only fixing a uniform size so that the public may not be cheated in its dealings, and one must not take such a law as justifying the fixing of prices.
In the year 1266 I find the first statute in the French language, Norman French; before that they were all in Latin; and they lasted in French for some four or five hundred years, and then they were put in English. The Statute of Marlborough, 1267, is a very important one historically, but it does not concern us, because it mainly had to do with the ownership of land, the tenure of land in England, an extremely important subject, but one that is obsolete here. Then we have something about the trial of clerks for murder. Of course the word clerk there means not what we mean by a clerk, but a person who could read and write; and nothing more than that. It originally meant persons in holy orders, who were called clerks (clerics), but there got to be clerks who were not in holy orders. Originally only priests could read and write. No one else knew how, except possibly great personages like kings, and consequently it was the same thing whether, when you said a clerk, you meant a person who could read and write or a priest. But when there got to be people who could read and write and who were not priests, it became an important distinction. There was a privilege in England known as the "benefit of the clergy"; if any clerk was tried for a criminal offence, no matter what, all he had to do was to state that he was a priest and he was at once set free. In other words, he could not be punished. That doesn't concern us; but, I suppose, it resulted from the old notion that all priests were subject only to Rome, and to the church courts, and not to the civil law courts; and consequently when a priest was attempted to be tried in a civil law court, it was a way of doing what we should call "pleading to the jurisdiction" of the court. Later, as time went on, in England it was greatly abused, especially when there got to be clerks who were not priests. When it meant anybody who could read and write, and anybody who had committed a murder had only to say, "I can read and write," and be set free, it led to an extraordinary state of things. So, from time to time, they modified the benefit of the clergy, until ultimately it was abolished entirely; first by not allowing it in high offences like murder; then by imposing certain slight punishment—they were "burned in the hand"; then by applying it only to the first offence, and so on, until they got rid of it entirely; and this Statute of Marlborough is simply one of the first of that long chain of statutes which finally did away with it and prevented people from getting rid of a criminal prosecution merely because they knew how to read and write or were priests.
In 1275 I note the first use of the word parliament. I have used it from the beginning, but it is important to remember that the thing was notcalledparliament until 1275. Before that it was called the Great Council or the King's Council, and in Saxon times the Witenagemot.
Then we come down to the Statute of Westminster I. That is considered a great landmark in statutory legislation mainly because it is the first attempt to establish a code, or, at least, a large collection of the laws of England. It is an attempt to put what they supposed to be a good part of them into writing. We have no codes in this country, as a rule; nor to-day in England; the ordinary Anglo-Saxon does not believe in codes. It is the French and Germans who have codes. Nevertheless, you often find collections of statutes. It is important not to confound these things with codes, because they never pretend to be complete. Many States in this country never make revision of the statutes. Nevertheless, every ten or twenty years they will print a collection of the statutes arranged alphabetically. In some States, as in Massachusetts, those collections are official; but in other States they are simply matters of private enterprise. They are of no authority, and if they are wrong it is no protection to you. You are bound to know the laws. These early so-called codes, especially this code of Edward I, although it caused him to be called the English Justinian, because it was the first attempt of putting any large body of the Anglo-Saxon laws in writing at all, are still not at allcodesin the technical sense. This one was merely a collection of a certain number of laws reduced to writing and re-enacted by Edward I. We note here the phrase "common right shall be done to rich and poor," rather an interesting landmark; it shows what progress was being made by the people in establishing their rights as freemen and to equal laws. For the laws of Norman England mainly applied to land-owners, and were made by the barons, the only people that had property; there was but a small class in those early days between the land-owners and actual serfs, villeins, who were practically attached to the soil, in a condition almost of servitude; they did service, were not paid wages, and couldn't leave the place where they were born—and both these are tests of slavery. But in the first two centuries after the Conquest the number of freemen very rapidly increased; men who were not property owners, not land-owners, but still freemen. Especially it increased in the towns, for the towns very early established their right to be free, far earlier than the country. It was very early established that the citizens of any town, that is, the members of the guild of the town, duly admitted to the guild, were freemen, and probably before this statute. But this is interesting as a recognition of the fact that there were free poor people—people without property, who nevertheless were neither villeins nor serfs—and that they were entitled to equality before the law, just as we are to-day, as early as 1275. Otherwise, the Statute of Westminster concerns mainly the criminal law. There is one very important provision—because it has been historically followed from then down to now—that there shall be no disturbance of the elections. Elections shall be free and unimpeded, uncontrolled by any power, either by the crown, or Parliament, or any trespasser. That has been a great principle of English freedom ever since, and passed into our unwritten constitution over here, and of course has been re-enacted in many of our laws. That is the feeling which lay behind those statutes which we enacted after our slaves were freed, for the making of elections free in the South; for protecting negroes in the act of voting and preventing interference with them by the Ku Klux Klan. The Democratic party strongly objected and objects still to such legislation on the part of the government, on the ground that the right of regulating elections belongs to the States and not to the Federal government; which, constitutionally speaking, before the Fifteenth Amendment at least, was true. They do not, of course, deny this great old English principle that elections must be free and must not be intimidated or controlled by anybody; but, they say, we left the machinery of the elections in the hands of the States when we adopted the Federal Constitution; and although at our State elections some of the officers elected are Federal officers—as, for instance, the President of the United States, or rather the presidential electors, and members of Congress—nevertheless, when we adopted the Federal Constitution, the founders chose to rely for the machinery of a fair and free election upon the officers of States; so that the Federal government has nothing to do with it, and has no business to send Federal troops to the South; and they called such bills the "force" bill. In theory, of course, those elections were controlled in these bills just as much in the North as in the South; but there being practically no complaint in the North that the negroes were not allowed to vote, as a matter of fact the strength of the Federal government was only invoked in the Southern States.
"Fines are to be reasonable." You find that principle in all our constitutions to-day in the clause that there shall be no cruel or unusual punishments, and that fines shall be proportionate to the offence; this principle is expressed also in Magna Charta.
Then slander and rape were made criminal at common law; before this only the church took jurisdiction. Slander Is the imputing of crime to a person by speech, by word of mouth. If it be a written imputation, it is libel and not slander. Then in this statute also we find the first import tax upon wool. The constitutionality of revenue taxes, duties, or taxes on imports, was once disputed by our parties; one party denying the constitutional right to impose any tax upon imports except for the strict purpose of raising necessary revenue; the argument being perfectly logical and based upon the constitutional principle we already have had that all taxation must be for the common benefit. Democrats argued that if a tax upon imports was imposed to raise the necessary revenue, that is for the common benefit; but if it was imposed, as it avowedly is imposed in Republican legislation, for the purpose of benefiting certain industries or classes, why that, of course, is not for the common or general benefit and therefore unconstitutional. The trouble with this position is that early English laws were prohibitive of imports—that is, they were imposed for prohibitionbeforethey allowed importation on payment of duties. This Statute of Westminster is a landmark, as showing how slow the Commons were in even allowing taxation upon imports at all. They earlier allowed the ordinary direct taxes. All that the Norman kings got they got with the consent of Parliament, direct taxes, for the common benefit; but they struggled for two centuries before they got the permission of Parliament to impose duties, taxes upon imports; here first they finally got it on wool, the thing produced of most value of anything in England; and consequently an important protective duty. It is a curious historical fact that this article, wool, seems to be the chief bone of contention ever since; in our tariffs nothing has been more bitter than the dispute on wool; the duty on wool is the shibboleth of the extreme protectionist.[1] Ohio, which is the home of the strong protection feeling, regards the duty on wool as the corner-stone to the whole fabric. It is argued that "a cheap coat makes a cheap man." In the East the feeling is that the duty on wool makes clothing poor and shoddy, and the prices excessively high for the poor. It is odd to find that the very first thing that did make trouble was the duty on wool, and it is still making the same trouble to-day.
[Footnote 1: The "ancient" customs were on wool, woolfels and leather; all other were "evil" customs. Holt, afterward C.J., in "The Great Case of Monopolies."]
There is another interesting clause in this statute; I don't know whether in this country so much as there, but it is in England the almost universal custom of ships to have a dog or cat on board. You never will find a coasting vessel without a dog or cat, usually both; and I believe it is for this strange historical reason, as shown in this Statute of Westminster I: In those days all wrecks belonged to the king. (Pretty much everything, in fact, did belong to the king, except the land that was held by book or charter, or such personal property as a man had in his own house—all mines, all franchises, all monopolies, even all whales and sturgeons that were thrown up on the beach—the head to the king and the tail to the queen.) So all wrecks belonged to the king. The result was, that whenever any vessel went ashore the king's officers seized it; and naturally the owner of the vessel didn't like that, because it very often happened that the vessel was perfectly good and could be easily repaired and the cargo saved. It is still a great principle in marine law that if one-half of the cargo is good, the man who owns the vessel cannot surrender and claim from the insurance company as a total loss; it is important still how much of a wreck a wreck is. But in those days the king, even if the vessel was stranded and could be raised, would seize it on the plea it was a wreck. The man who owned the ship would say she is perfectly seaworthy; and then would come the dispute as to what a wreck was. Or even when the vessel was destroyed, a great part of the cargo might be saved, and the owner of the vessel thought it very unjust that the king should claim it all. So the Parliament of England established as part of the liberties of the English merchant or trader that he should still have a property in his wreck; and then the question came up as to what was a wreck. It was generally admitted that when all hands were lost, that was a wreck; but they wanted to get as narrow a definition as they could, so they got Parliament to establish this law, that in future nothing shall be considered a wreck out of which a cat or a dog escapes alive; and from that time until the present day no vessel coasts about England without carrying a cat or dog.
But the great achievements of legislation up to 1300 remain the re-establishment of English law, as shown in the great charters of John, Henry III, and the confirmation of Edward I. And Magna Charta had to be read once a year (like our Declaration of Independence), and for breach of it a king might be excommunicated; and Henry III himself, according to Cobbet, feared that the Archbishop of Canterbury was about to do so.
(1275) Far the most important phrase to us found in the Statute of Westminster I, save perhaps that common right should be done to rich and poor, is to be found in this sentence: "Excessive toll, contrary to the common custom of the realm," is forbidden. The statute applies only to market towns, but the principle established there would naturally go elsewhere, and indeed most towns where there was any trade were, in those days, market towns. Every word is noticeable: "Excessive toll"—extortion in rates. As this statute passed into the common law of England and hence our own, it has probably always been law in America except, possibly, in those few States which expressly repealed the whole common law[1] and those where civil law prevailed.[2] It was therefore equally unnecessary to adopt new statutes providing against extortion or discrimination, for the last part of the phrase "contrary to the common custom of the realm" means discrimination. But this is one of the numerous cases where our legislatures, if not our bar and bench, erred through simple historical ignorance. They had forgotten this law, or, more charitably, they may have thought it necessary to remind the people of it. There has been a recent agitation in this country with the object of compelling great public-service companies, such as electric lighting or gas companies, to make the same rates to consumers, large or small. This also was very possibly the common law, and required no new statutes; there are cases reported as far back as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries where, for instance, a ferryman was punished for charging less for the ferriage of a large drove of sheep or cattle than for a smaller number, "contrary to the common custom of the realm." Nine years before this statute is the Assize of Bread and Beer, attempting to fix the price of bread according to the cost of wheat, but notable to us as containing both the first pure-food statute and the first statute against "forestalling."
[Footnote 1: Florida, Texas, and the old Territory of Dakota.]
[Footnote 2: Louisiana, New Mexico, and Arizona.]
Now forestalling, regrating, and engrossing are the early English phrases for most of the unlawful or unmoral actions which we ascribe to the modern trust. In fact, there is hardly one legal injury which a trust is said to commit in these days which cannot be ranked under those three heads, or that of monopoly or that of restraint of trade.
"Forestalling" is the buying up provisions on the way to a market with intent to sell at a higher price; and the doctrine applied primarily to provisions, that is to say, necessaries of life. Precisely the same thing exists to-day, only we term it the buying of futures, or the attempt to create a corner. We shall find that the buying of futures, that is to say, of crops not yet grown or outputs not yet created, is still obnoxious to many of our legislatures to-day, and has been forbidden, or made criminal, in many States. "Regrating" is defined in some of the early dictionaries as speculating in provisions; the offence of buying provisions at a market for the purpose of reselling them within four miles of the place. The careful regulation of markets and market towns that existed in early times in England would not suffer some rich capitalist to go in and buy all that was offered for sale with intent of selling it to the same neighborhood at a higher price. Bishop Hatto of the Rhine, you may remember, paid with his life for this offence. The prejudice against this sort of thing has by no means ended to-day. We have legislation against speculation in theatre tickets, as well as in cotton or grain. "Engrossing" is really the result of a successful forestalling, with or without regrating; that is to say, it is a complete "corner of the market"; from it our word "grocer" is derived. Such corners, if completely successful, would have the public at their mercy; luckily they rarely are; the difficulty, in fact, begins when you begin to regrate. But in artificial commodities it is easier; so in the Northern Pacific corner, a nearly perfect engrossing; the shares of stock went to a thousand dollars, and might have gone higher but for the voluntary interference of great financiers. Leiter's Chicago corner in wheat, Sully's corner in cotton, were almost perfect examples of engrossing, but failed when the regrating began. All these tend to monopoly, and act, of course, in restraint of trade; the broader meanings of these two latter more important principles we leave for later discussion.
(1285) The Statute of Bakers, or Assize of Bread and Ale, is by some assigned to the 13th of Edward I. If so, we find all these great modern questions treated by statute in the reign of the same great law-making king, Edward I, who well was called the "English Justinian"; for, in 1305, twenty years later, we have the first Statute of Conspiracy. This statute only applies to the maintaining of lawsuits; but the Statute of Laborers of 1360 declares voidallalliances and covins between masons, carpenters, and guilds, chapters and ordinances; and from this time on the statutes recognize the English common law of conspiracy in general words.
As this is one of the most important doctrines of the English law, and moreover one which is most criticised to-day by large interests, both of capital and labor, it will be wise to dwell upon its historical and logical origin in this place, though we shall consider it at length later as it touches various fields of legislation. It is notable for two most important principles: first, that it recognizes the great menace of combined action, and both forbids and punishes combinations to do an act which might be lawful for the individual; second, of all branches of civil, as distinct from criminal, law, it is the one which most largely recognizes intent; that is to say, the ethical purposes of the combination. It has been urged in some judicial opinions that in matters of boycotts, strikes, etc., the law cannot go into the motive; this argument obviously proves too much, for it is no more easy to examine motives in the criminal law, and this is done all the time. A homicide, for instance, will vary in all degrees between justifiable guilt or manslaughter up to murder in the first degree, according to the motive which prompted the act. It is really no more difficult, and the reported cases do not show it to be any more difficult, to consider the motive behind a combination of men or the motive inspiring a series of related acts. The real trouble comes only in the Federal anti-trust act, because the machinery of this clumsy statute, a bill in equity, imposes upon judges the duty of finding the facts.
This doctrine of conspiracy is so old in England that I am unable to trace it to its source. From the wording of repeated early statutes it would seem that they recognized this law of conspiracy as already existing and merely applied it to new forms, such as, for instance, the combination of masons, carpenters, and guilds, just mentioned. It is, perhaps, not to us important whether it is originally based on common law or these early statutes, for these statutes are quite early enough to have passed into the common law of England, and consequently into the common law in this country. Moreover, early statutes merely express the common law; therein lies their significance. Now, many State laws and constitutions, as well as most State courts, recognize that the common-law statutes of England existing at least before 1775, if not 1620,[1] are common law in the States of this Union. In a general way, any statute that antedates the time of our settlement we took over as part of our common law.
[Footnote 1: 1607 (Virginia, West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana,Missouri, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming); 1776 (Florida, Maryland, RhodeIsland, Pennsylvania). None, however, are law in New York.]
We are now coming also to that great range of statutes, which, on the one hand, control labor and regulate the rights of the laborer, both in his prices and in his hours; and, on the other, those statutes relating to what we call "trusts," conspiracy, and trades-unions, which have made common-law principles which are to-day, all of them, invoked by our courts; and form the precedents of practically all our modern legislation on matters affecting labor, labor disputes, injunctions, strikes, boycotts, blacklists, restraint of trade, and trusts—in fact, the largest field of discussion now before the mind of the American people. The subjects are more or less connected. That is, you have the growth of legislation as to laborers on the one hand, and on the other you have the growth of this legislation as to combinations or conspiracies, trades-unions, guilds, etc.
(1304) Now let us begin at that first statute of conspiracy, and find what the definition of a conspiracy is; because it is a very important question to-day, whether we are going to stick to the old common-law idea or not. The very title of this statute is "A definition of conspirators," and it begins: "Conspirators be they that do confeder or bind themselves together by oath, covenant or other alliance" either to indict or maintain lawsuits; "and such as retain men in the Countrie with Liveries or Fees for to maintain their malicious Enterprises, and this extends as well to the Takers as to the Givers." And as it gradually assumed shape and got definite and broad, the idea, we will say, by 1765, when Blackstone wrote, was this:A conspiracy is a combination by two or more men, persons or companies, to bring about, either an unlawful result by means lawful or unlawful, or a lawful result by unlawful means.Now so far the definition is admitted. Everybody agrees, both the labor leaders and the courts, on that definition—that when two or more people combine together to effect anunlawfulobject, it is a conspiracy; which is both a criminal offence under the laws of the land everywhere, and also gives the party injured a right to damages, that is, what we call a civil suit; and furthermore noactis necessary. There is no doubt about that part of the definition. Or where they combine to get a lawful end by unlawful means, as, for instance, when laborers combine to get their employer to raise their wages by the process of knocking on the head all men that come to take their places, that is gaining a lawful end by unlawful means, by intimidation—and is a conspiracy. But now the whole doctrine in discussion comes in: If you have a combination to bring about bylawfulmeans theinjuryof a third person in his lawful rights—not amounting to crime—is that an unlawful conspiracy? Yes—for it is a "malicious enterprise." So is our law, and the common law of England, yes. And you can easily see the common-sense of it. The danger to any individual is so tremendous if he is to be conspired against by thousands, hundreds of thousands, not by one neighbor, but by all the people of the town, that it early got established as a principle of the common law, and of these early English statutes, that, although one man alone might do an act which, otherwise lawful, was to the injury of a third person, and be neither restrained nor punished for it, he could notcombine with othersfor that purpose by the very same acts. For instance, I don't like the butcher with whom I have been doing business; I take away my trade. That, of course, I have a perfect right to do. But going a step farther, I tell my friends I don't like Smith and don't want to trade with him—probably I have a right to do that; but when I get every citizen of that town together at a meeting and say: "Let us all agree to ruin Smith, we will none of us trade with him"—Smith is bound to be ruined. The common law early recognized this importance of the principle of combination, and therefore it was part of the English common law and is still, barring one recent statute, that a combination to injure a person, although by an act which if done by one individual would be lawful, is nevertheless an unlawful combination; that is, aconspiracyunder the law; for all "conspiracies" are unlawful, under the law; the meaning of the wordconspiracyin the law is, not an innocent combination, but a guilty one, and anything which is aconspiracyat law can be punished criminally, or will give rise to civil suits for damages by the parties injured, or usually entitle one to the protection of an injunction. A conspiracy, therefore, is not only a guilty combination, of two or more persons, for an unlawful end by any means, or for a lawful end by unlawful means, but also one for an immoral end, a malicious end, as, let us say, the ruin of a third person, or the injury of the public. All the dispute about the law of conspiracy and the statutes and what laborers can do and what employers can do to-day really hinges about that last clause. The labor leaders, the radicals, want to say that nothing shall be a conspiracy where the end is not unlawful and where the acts done are such as, if done by an individual, would not be wrong. In other words, they want statutes to provide that nothing is a conspiracy where the acts done are in themselves lawful if done by one individual. But this English conspiracy law was of the most immense sociological value, in that it did recognize the tremendous power ofcombination. It said, although you don't have to trade with Smith alone, yet a combination of a great many individuals for the purpose of ruining Smith, by all simultaneously refusing to trade with him, is such a tremendous injury to Smith that the law will take cognizance of it and hold that kind of a combination to be unlawful.
This definition should be further extended, perhaps, to remind you that the courts hold that there are certain kinds of combinations, contemplating ends which will necessarily result in the use of unlawful means; the most familiar example is picketing. The courts mostly hold that although in theory a labor union can march up and down the highway and peacefully advise non-union men or other laborers not to take their jobs, in practice such action usually, if not necessarily, goes to the point of intimidation; and intimidation is nearly always made unlawful by statute. Now I should only add that it is very important to remember—and even the courts do not always remember it—that the thing being punished as a conspiracy is not the end, but the combining; the conspiracy itself is the criminal act. Suppose in Pennsylvania one thousand men meet and say: "John Smith has taken a job and is a scab, and we will go around and maul him to-night," and they do, or they don't; if they are tried, the fact whether they did maul him or not has nothing to do with the matter of the conspiracy. They might, of course, be tried for assault and battery, or for an attempt to commit murder; but if they are being tried for theconspiracythe criminal act is the combining and meeting, not what they do afterward. Therefore it is of no importance whatever what the result of the matter is. The thing that is criminal is the combining; and this leads to a very curious consequence: All conspiracies are criminal; but the object aimed at may be very slightly so. So that it is perfectly possible to have a conspiracy which shall result to its members in five or ten years in the state-prison, whereas the object itself, the act aimed at, may have been comparatively slight, a mere misdemeanor. Take the case of mere intimidation without assault or battery; one man goes to another and says: "If you take that work I shall smash your head," that is intimidation. Thirty of our States have made that unlawful, but it is only a misdemeanor. But if one thousand men get together and say: "We will go around to tell him we will smash his head," that is conspiracy; and conspiracy may subject them to penalty of years in prison. It has been found in the experience of the English people to be such a dangerous power, this power of combination, that to use it for an unlawful or wrongful end may be more of an offence than the end itself.
A combination to injure a man's trade is, therefore, an unlawful conspiracy; well shown in a recent Ohio case where a combination of several persons to draw their money out of a bank simultaneously for the purpose of making it fail, was held criminal. It gives a claim for damages in a civil suit and may be enjoined against. But is it necessarily criminal? It is possible that the offence to the public is so slight that the criminal courts would hardly take cognizance of it in minor cases where there is not some statute expressly providing for a criminal remedy. The Sherman Act, our Anti-trust Act, does so where even two persons conspire together to restrain interstate commerce. It is a crime at common law, however slight, for even two to combine to injure any person's trade. But, independent of statutes, suppose only two persons agree not to buy of a certain butcher in Cambridge: in theory, he might have a civil remedy; but it may be doubted that it would amount to a criminal offence.Lex non curat de minimis. So, it is an offence under most State anti-trust laws, as it was at the common law, to fix the price of an article—that is restraint of trade—or to limit the output. Two grocers going to the city in the morning train agree that they will charge seven dollars a barrel for flour during the ensuing week; two icemen, to harvest only a thousand tons of ice. The contract between them could not be enforced; it is undoubtedly unlawful; but it would hardly be a criminal offence at the common law. There is, at least at the common law, some middle ground between those contracts which are merely unenforceable, and those which subject the co-makers to a criminal liability; although under the cast-iron wording of a statute it may be that no such distinction can be made.
Independent of combination, there is probably no legal wrong in merely wishing ill to a man, withdrawing one's custom from him, competing with him, or even, possibly, in injuring his trade. There is an ancient case where the captain of an English ship engaged in a certain trade, to wit, the slave trade, arrived off a beach on the coast of Africa and was collecting his living cargo, when a second ship, arriving too late to get a load itself, fired a cannon over the heads of the negroes, and they, with the chief who was selling them, fled in terror to the forest. The captain of the first ship went back to London and brought suit against the captain of the second ship for injuring his trade and was allowed to recover damages; but it may be doubted if that is good law; although in 1909 a Minnesota court decided that a barber could sue an enemy if he maintained an opposition barbershop solely for the purpose of injuring his business; and a few years ago in Louisiana a street railway foreman was held liable in damages for instructing his men not to frequent the plaintiff's store.[1] I say to you: "Do not trade with Smith, he is not a good person to deal with," or, "Do not take employment with him, he will treat you cruelly"; and in either case, unless I can be convicted of slander, he has no remedy against me if I am acting alone.
[Footnote 1: Tarletonv. McGawley, Peak, N.P.C. 270; Tuttlev. Buck, 110 N.W. 946; Grahamv. St. Charles St. Ry. Co., 47 La. Ann. 214.]
Now, this great law of conspiracy applies equally and always to combinations of capital or of employers, to trusts, contracts in restraint of trade and blacklists, as well as to unlawful labor combinations, unlawful union rules, and boycotts. The statutes directed against both originated about the same time and have run historically on all-fours together. The old offences of forestalling and regrating may have been lost sight of, and possibly the statutes against them fallen into disuse, although they were expressly made perpetual by the 13th Elizabeth in 1570 and not repealed until the 12th George III in 1772; but the principle invalidating restraint of trade and contracts in restraint of trade remained as alive as that prohibiting unlawful combinations of labor. The latter, indeed, has largely disappeared. Both strikes and trades-unions, once thought unlawful in England, are made lawful now by statute, but a contract in restraint of trade or a monopolistic combination of capital is as unlawful as it ever was both in England and in this country; and the common law is only re-enforced by our State statutes and applied to matters of interstate commerce as well, by the Sherman Act. Closely connected with both is the principle of reasonable rates in the exercise of franchises; excessive toll contrary to common custom, as we found forbidden in 1275. The first statute against forestalling merely inflicts a punishment on forestallers and dates ten years later, 1285, though the time of this, the Statute concerning Bakers, is put by some still earlier, with the Assize of Bread and Beer, in 1266. It provides the standard weight and price of bread, ale, and wine, the toll of a mill. It anticipates our pure-food laws and punishes butchers for selling unwholesome flesh or adulterating oatmeal, and says "that no Forestaller be suffered to dwell in any Town, which is an open Oppressor of Poor People … which for Greediness of his private Gain doth prevent others in buying Grain, Fish, Herring, or any other Thing to be sold coming by land or Water, oppressing the Poor, and deceiving the Rich, which carrieth away such Things, intending to sell them more dear,… and an whole Town or a Country is deceived by such Craft and Subtilty," and the punishment is put at a fine at the first offence with the loss of the thing bought, the pillory for the second offence, fine and imprisonment for the third, and the fourth time banishment from the town.
The first definition of forestalling is here given. Our modern equivalent is the buying of futures or dealing in stocks without intent to deliver, both of which have been forbidden or made criminal in many of our States. And forestalling, regrating, and engrossing were things early recognized as criminal in England, and these statutes embody much of what is sound in the present legislation against trusts.
Forestalling was very apt to be done in astaple, that is, in the town which was specially devoted to that article of trade; so that the laws of forestalling got very much mixed up with the laws of the staple; but forestalling would equally mean going into any market and buying up all the production. If the article was produced abroad, the forestaller would try to buy up the entire importation.
(1352) We now find another statute; it applies to wines and liquors "and all other wares that come to the good towns of England," and the penalty imposed by that law was that the forestaller must forfeit the surplus over cost to the crown and be imprisoned two years. We are still enforcing remedies of that kind in our anti-trust laws, only instead of having him forfeit the surplus to the crown we usually have him pay damages, sometimes treble damages to the persons injured. In the Beef Trust case, the parties were duly convicted, and instead of being imprisoned, they were fined $25,000. In other words, we still have not the courage to go to the length that our ancestors did in enforcing the penalties of these unlawful combinations. Of course it is a much more difficult thing to have forestalling and engrossing laws against foreign importations than against home productions; and so to-day we have not tried, except by a tariff, forestalling laws against foreign importations, but we have attempted to apply them very much as to home productions. In England, however, the statute at that time said that a person who bought up all the foreign product must forfeit all the profits to the state. Now this is nothing but the "Iowa idea" of two years ago. It was suggested very urgently by Governor Cummins that there should be a law providing that where a trust got complete control of a certain industry in this country its surplus profit should be forfeited either indirectly by the taking off of the tariff, or by way of a franchise tax, that is, of a United States tax upon its franchises, which could be increased in such a way as to tax it out of existence if it persisted. The latter remedy is at the root of President Taft's new corporation tax, but Congress has not yet applied the former, although it was very seriously advocated that there should be statutes which should indirectly forfeit the profits of the trust that had secured a monopoly; that is an engrossing trust—covin or alliance, as our ancestors would have called it—"a gentleman's agreement"—and that it should be done by a reduction of the tariff on the articles in which that trust dealt; this reduction to be ordered by the president. When he determined that a trust had completely engrossed an industry, he might say so by proclamation; and then the act of Congress should go into effect and the duties upon that product be abolished, all the protection of the trust taken away. There is a trouble with such legislation, in that it may be said to allow the president to make the law; and under our Constitution the president cannot make laws. The legislative branch and the executive branch of the government must be kept distinct; and it probably would be argued by constitutional lawyers, and in this instance by either party that was not in favor of such legislation, that to reduce the duties of such a class of goods was a legislative act, and therefore 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. They are compelled, as in the old English statute, to serve under contract or for a period of time, and if they break it, are made liable by this statute to some fine or penalty imposed by the nearest justice of the peace; and when they cannot pay this, they may be Imprisoned. Finally, this Statute of Laborers first states the principle that the old "wage and no more" shall be given, thus establishing the notion that there was a legal wage, which lasted in England for centuries and gave rise to the later law under which strikes were held unlawful. Here, they meant such wages as prevailed before the Black Death.
(1350) The next year the statute is made more elaborate, and specifies, for common laborers, one penny a day; for mowers, carpenters, masons, tilers, and thatchers, three pence, and so on. It is curious that the relative scale is much the same as to-day: masons a little more than tilers, tilers a little more than carpenters; though unskilled labor was paid less in proportion. The same statute attempts to protect the laborer by providing that victuals shall be sold only at reasonable prices, which were apparently fixed by the mayor.
Here, therefore, we have the much-discussed Standard Wage fixed by law, but in the interest of the employer; not a "living wage" fixed in the interest of the employee, as modern thought requires. The same statute makes it unlawful to give to able-bodied beggars, which is of a piece with the compulsory labor of the able-bodied. Now this first Statute of Laborers, which led to centuries of English law unjust to the laborers, it is interesting to note, was possibly never a valid law, for it was never agreed to by the House of Commons. However that may be, the confirming statute of 1364 was duly enacted by Parliament, and this was not in terms repealed until the year 1869, although labor leaders claim it to have been repealed by general words in the 5th Elizabeth.
Thorold Rogers tells us that those, after all, were the happy days of the laborer—when masons got four pence a day, and the Black Prince, the head of the army, only got twenty shillings—sixty times as much. This is a fair modern proportion, however, for military and other state service; though we pay the president a salary of nearly double that proportion to the yearly pay of a carpenter. But then, these English statutes applied mainly to agricultural labor; and domestic labor was paid considerably less.
This Statute of Laborers was again re-enacted in 1360, with a clause allowing work in gross, and forbidding "alliances and covins between masons, carpenters, and guilds." Work "in gross" means work by contract, piece-work, thus made expressly lawful by statute in England in 1360, but still objected to by many of our labor unions to-day. The provision against alliances and covins was extended to cover trades-unions, their rules and by-laws, as well as strikes, which were also considered combinations in restraint of trade. Now this was never law in this country.
There was a very early case in Pennsylvania, while it was still a colony, and there were others in the States soon after, which held that the Statutes of Laborers were never law in America. Our statutes early authorized trades-unions, but without this there is, I think, no American case where either a trades-union or a simple strike was held to be an unlawful combination. It was these early statutes which gave rise to the law that existed until the nineteenth century in England, that both strikes and unions were unlawful; a strike because it was usually a combination to raise the rate of wages, which was in theory fixed by law. Therefore, a strike was a combination with an unlawful aim, consequently a conspiracy. The logic is simple; and in the same way a trades-union was certainly an alliance between skilled workmen, and as such forbidden under the Statute of Laborers, besides being a combination in restraint of trade.
Now the guild, in so far as it was a combination of a trade in a town, was a perfectly lawful thing; in so far as it bore upon the right of a man to be a freeman, it was a perfectly lawful thing; it was only from the other end, from this statute I read as to combinations, that two or three centuries later they got the notion that a trades-union was an unlawful thing; so you may say that a trades-union in England has a lawful root and an unlawful root, and it is rather important to see from which each class springs. The first case in which the modern strike was considered was a case known as the Journeymen Tailors' case, which happened more than two hundred years ago; and in that case it was definitely held to be an unlawful combination, while the first case on the modern boycott, where an injunction was awarded, is as late as 1868, this being the origin of that process which has evoked so much criticism here, the use of the injunction in labor disputes. The unskilled laborers in England have never combined; the only people who combined were the guilds, the skilled men, and in so far as they combined they did it rather as capitalists, employees, or as freemen, to govern the town; this was a lawful object; and the guilds rapidly grew into little aristocracies. They very soon ceased to be journeyman laborers, and became combinations of employers. Thus, the guild movement didn't amount to much in bringing about the modern trades-union or combinations of laboring men; it began before it occurred to these latter that they also could combine; just as, even now, it is more difficult amongwomento get them to join trades-unions, or for working women to combine; they have not apparently got into that stage of evolution; and so with the negroes in the South. But about the end of the eighteenth century you begin to find the first strikes and combinations of workingmen; and then what the courts promptly applied to them was not the old line of statutes, the historical common-law growth, deriving from a guild which in its origin was a lawful body and so making the union free and lawful, but naturally—for the magistrates were capitalists and land-owners, and all the courts were in sympathy with that class—they went back to the long series of Statutes of Laborers, and said "this is a combination of workingmen to break the law by getting more than lawful wages," and consequently found both combinations unlawful, trades-unions and strikes, as well as when they were combinations to injure somebody, what we should now call a boycott.
The great Statute of Laborers which was for centuries supposed to settle the law of England is that of Elizabeth in 1562. Meantime, agricultural labor as well as industrial was getting to be free. A statute of 1377, which requires villeins refusing to labor to be committed to prison on complaint of the landlord, without bail, itself recognizes that villeins fleeing to a town are made free after a year and day's habitation therein. In 1383 came Wat Tyler's rising; the villeins demanded a commutation of agricultural labor to a money rent (four pence) and full freedom of trade and labor in all the market towns; and about this time was great growth of small freeholders.
(1388) The Statute of Richard II restricts laborers to their hundred and makes it compulsory for them to follow the same trade as their father after the age of twelve. The wages of both industrial and agricultural laborers are again fixed-shepherds, ten shillings a year; ploughmen, seven; women laborers, six shillings, and so on. Servants are permitted to carry bows and arrows, but not swords, and they may not play tennis or foot-ball. And here is the historical origin of the important custom of exacting recommendations: servants leaving employment are required to carry a testimonial, and none are to receive servants without such letter—the original of the blacklist. Here, also, we find the beginning of poor-law legislation, those unable to work are to be supported in the town where born. Villeinage, which began at the Norman Conquest, according to Fitz-Herbert, "because the Conqueror gave lordships with all the inhabitants to do with them at their pleasure to his principal followers, and they, needing servants, pardoned the inhabitants of their lives, and caused them to do all manner of service"—was now abolished by compensation in a money wage payment. The institution of villeinage is last mentioned in a commission of Queen Elizabeth, 1574, directing Lord Burleigh and others in certain counties to compound with all such bondmen or bondwomen for their manumission and freedom.
(1389) The next year the practice of fixing wages at a permanent sum is abandoned and they are to be fixed semi-annually at Easter and Michaelmas by a justice of the peace. In 1402 we find the remarkable provision that laborers are not to work on feast days nor for more than half a day before a holiday. Such legislation would hardly be necessary in modern England, where, in many trades, no one works for a whole day after the holiday as well. In 1425 is another statute forbidding masons to confederate themselves in chapters; and in 1427 the attempt to fix wages by law is again abandoned and they are to be fixed by the justices as in 1389, "because Masters could not get Servants without giving higher Wages than allowed by the Statute."