In the 16th century, the condition of the labourers had,
 as we know, become much worse. The money wage rose, but not
 in proportion to the depreciation of money and the
 corresponding rise in the prices of commodities. Wages,
 therefore, in reality fell. Nevertheless, the laws for
 keeping them down remained in force, together with the
 ear-clipping and branding of those “whom no one was willing
 to take into service.” By the Statute of Apprentices 5
 Elizabeth, c. 3, the justices of the peace were empowered to
 fix certain wages and to modify them according to the time
 of the year and the price of commodities. James I. extended
 these regulations of labour also to weavers, spinners, and
 all possible categories of workers. [5] George II. extended the laws
 against coalitions 691of labourers to
 manufactures. In the manufacturing period par
 excellence, the capitalist mode of production had
 become sufficiently strong to render legal regulation of
 wages as impracticable as it was unnecessary; but the ruling
 classes were unwilling in case of necessity to be without
 the weapons of the old arsenal. Still, 8 George II. forbade
 a higher day’s wage than 2s. 7½d. for journeymen tailors
 in and around London, except in cases of general mourning;
 still, 13 George III., c. 68, gave the regulation of the
 wages of silk-weavers to the justices of the peace; still,
 in 1706, it required two judgments of the higher courts to
 decide, whether the mandates of justices of the peace as to
 wages held good also for non-agricultural labourers; still,
 in 1799, an act of Parliament ordered that the wages of the
 Scotch miners should continue to be regulated by a statute
 of Elizabeth and two Scotch acts of 1661 and 1671. How
 completely in the meantime circumstances had changed, is
 proved by an occurrence unheard-of before in the English
 Lower House. In that place, where for more than 400 years
 laws had been made for the maximum, beyond which wages
 absolutely must not rise, Whitbread in 1796 proposed a legal
 minimum wage for agricultural labourers. Pitt opposed this,
 but confessed that the “condition of the poor was cruel.”
 Finally, in 1813, the laws for the regulation of wages were
 repealed. They were an absurd anomaly, since the capitalist
 regulated his factory by his private legislation, and could
 by the poor-rates make up the wage of the agricultural
 labourer to the indispensable minimum. The provisions of the
 labour statutes as to contracts between master and workman,
 as to giving notice and the like, which only allow of a
 civil action against the contract-breaking master, but on
 the contrary permit a criminal action against the
 contract-breaking workman, are to this hour (1873) in full
 force. The barbarous laws against Trades’ Unions fell in
 1825 before the threatening bearing of the proletariat.
 Despite this, they fell only in part. Certain beautiful
 fragments of the old statute vanished only in 1859. Finally,
 the act of Parliament of June 29, 1871, made a pretence of
 removing the last traces of this class of
 legislation 692by legal recognition of
 Trades’ Unions. But an act of Parliament of the same date
 (an act to amend the criminal law relating to violence,
 threats, and molestation), re-established, in point of fact,
 the former state of things in a new shape. By this
 Parliamentary escamotage the means which the labourers could
 use in a strike or lock-out were withdrawn from the laws
 common to all citizens, and placed under exceptional penal
 legislation, the interpretation of which fell to the masters
 themselves in their capacity as justices of the peace. Two
 years earlier, the same House of Commons and the same Mr.
 Gladstone in the well-known straightforward fashion brought
 in a bill for the abolition of all exceptional penal
 legislation against the working class. But this was never
 allowed to go beyond the second reading, and the matter was
 thus protracted until at last the “great Liberal party,” by
 an alliance with the Tories, found courage to turn against
 the very proletariat that had carried it into power. Not
 content with this treachery, the “great Liberal party” 
 allowed the English judges, ever complaisant in the service
 of the ruling classes, to dig up again the earlier laws
 against “conspiracy,” and to apply them to coalitions of
 labourers. We see that only against its will and under the
 pressure of the masses did the English Parliament give up
 the laws against Strikes and Trades’ Unions, after it had
 itself, for 500 years, held, with shameless egoism, the
 position of a permanent Trades’ Union of the capitalists
 against the labourers.