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
the _price_ of 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