CHAPTER 2—HISTORT™!". *SPECTS OF LEGAL
FI¥ "AGES

ETERMINATION of wages by free bargaining of the inter-D
 ested parties is of comparatively recent date. The guilds of
the Middle Ages had great powers over the fixation of wages.
The State later took over part of their functions. An Elizabethan
statute enacted in 1563 * instructed justices of the peace in England to
determine laborers’ wages and to take into account, as the basis of
their decisions, the fluctuations of food prices. Contrary to the
earlier custom of prescribing maxima only, in the interests of the
employing class, protection of the laborers was specifically stated as
the main objective of the law. That the justices of the peace, themselves
 belonging to the ruling class, were reasonably impartial is
denied by most authorities on the subject;? also, the determinations
Soin remained unapplied.
The law was in force, however, for over 150 years, and records of
numerous decisions thereunder are preserved. They show a steady
increase in the amounts of wages to be paid, although not in sufficient
 proportion to the rise of food prices. Different rulings were
made for urban artisans and agricultural laborers for summer.
winter, and harvest time.
The application of the law ceased with the beginning of the industrial
 Ta in the early part of the eighteenth century. All
governmental interference in industrial matters was swept away for
a while by the new productive forces. When exploitation of labor,
particularly of children and women, again brought interference by
public authorities (since 1802), it was restricted to problems of child
labor, sanitary conditions, and working hours. Wages in the British
Empire remained unaffected ‘until 1896—in England until 1909.
Since that time minimum-wage legislation has become a more and
more important part of protective labor legislation generally.
In 1896 wages boards were established in the Australian State of
Victoria. They were empowered to fix minimum wages in order to
abolish the sweating of home workers and to fix reasonable rates in
unorganized trades as the trade-unions do in organized trades.
Two years earlier New Zealand had adopted compulsory arbitration,
 starting at the opposite end of the industrial ladder in the
endeavor to substitute methods of industrial peace for the strike
weapon of powerful trade-unions.
Canadian legislation for compulsory inquiry into disputes in public
utilities services, in order to prevent stoppage of indispensable
branches of national activity, dates from 1907. At about the same

-.1Act VI Eliz, ch, 4 (1563) ; see Gibbins, H. de B.: Industry in England, New York.
Chas. Scribners Soms, 1920, p. 253.
2 Idem, p. 255.
3Idem, p. 257, giving a table of some of these assessments compiled from Rogers.
James E. T.: Six Centuries of Work and Wages, New York, 1884. pp. 387. 398.