14/23 There are written laws--they perish; but there are also unwritten laws--_they_ are eternal. Take the unwritten law of wages: it says they've got to advance, little by little, straight through the centuries. We know what wages are now, here and there and yonder; we strike an average, and say that's the wages of to-day. We know what the wages were a hundred years ago, and what they were two hundred years ago; that's as far back as we can get, but it suffices to give us the law of progress, the measure and rate of the periodical augmentation; and so, without a document to help us, we can come pretty close to determining what the wages were three and four and five hundred years ago. |