fix the wages in their districts. Wages steadily decreased during
the two hundred years in which this statute remained in force,
and poor laws were passed to bring the succor which artificial
wages made necessary. Thus two rules of arbitrary government were
meant to neutralize each other. It is the usual verdict of
historians that the estate of labor in England declined from a
flourishing condition in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
to one of great distress by the time of the Industrial
Revolution. This unhappy decline was probably due to several
causes, among which the most important were the arbitrary and
artificial attempts of the Government to keep down wages, the
heavy taxation caused by wars of expansion, and the want of
coercive power on the part of labor.

>From the decline of the guild system, which had placed labor and
its products so completely in the hands of the master craftsman,
the workman had assumed no controlling part in the labor bargain.
Such guilds and such journeyman's fraternities as may have
survived were practically helpless against parliamentary rigor
and state benevolence. In the domestic stage of production,
cohesion among workers was not so necessary. But when the factory
system was substituted for the handicraft system and workers with
common interests were thrown together in the towns, they had
every impulsion towards organization. They not only felt the need
of sociability after long hours spent in spiritless toil but they
were impelled by a new consciousness--the realization that an
inevitable and profound change had come over their condition.
They had ceased to be journeymen controlling in some measure
their activities; they were now merely wage-earners. As the
realization of this adverse change came over them, they began to