Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/330

Rh 306 WAGWAG money to be awarded to the winner or winners of any lawful game, sport, pastime, or exercise.&quot; What is a lawful game depends upon numerous statutes from 33 Hen. VIII. c. 9 downwards, among which may be classed the Lottery Acts (see LOTTERIES). A curious exception is made in some of the statutes in favour of unlawful games if they are played in a royal palace. The mere making of a wager is not now illegal, as it was under the earlier statutes ; it is simply unenforceable. The winner has no legal remedy against the loser or the stake holder. The loser can recover his stake where it still remains in the stakeholder s hands or has been paid over to the winner after notice from the loser to the stakeholder not to pay it over. He cannot recover where it has been paid over to the winner without notice. The agent in a wagering contract may have legal rights against his principal, though the principal has none against the other party. Agreements between buyers and sellers of stocks and shares to pay or receive differences only (sometimes known as &quot;time-bargains&quot;) are within 8 and 9 Viet. c. 109, but a broker employed to speculate on the understanding that only differences should be paid by his principal may recover indemnity against the principal. Employment of an agent to bet in his own name may imply an authority to pay the bet if lost, an authority that may become irrevocable after payment to the winner. Though wagers themselves are now void and not illegal, securities for wagers, by the combined effect of 5 and 6 Will. IV. c. 41 and 8 and 9 Viet, c. 109, are still either illegal (as a bet on the result of a game) or void (as a bet on the result of something other than a game, such as a contested election). This difference is important as affecting the question of burden of proof in actions on securities originally given for wagering purposes. Where the consideration is illegal, the plaintiff must show affirmatively that he gave value, but the mere absence of consideration throws on him no such duty. In commercial matters the most important examples are wagering policies of insurance, that is, policies made by persons having no insurable interest, and made void by statute (see INSURANCE). Sir John Barnard s Act, 7 Geo II. c. 8 (called &quot;An Act to prevent the infamous practice of stock -jobbing &quot;), prohibited contracts for liberty to accept or refuse any public stocks or securities, and wagers relating to the stocks. In Scotland the courts refuse to try actions on wagers, as being sponsioncs hidicrse, unbecoming the dignity of the courts. 9 Anne c. 19 and 5 and 6 Will. IV. c. 41 extend to Scotland, but the weight of judicial opinion is that 8 and 9 Viet. c. 109 does not. In the United States the loser may, by the legislation of some States, recover his money if he sue within a limited time, as he might have done in England under 9 Aune c. 19. Defini- WAGES. Wages, although one of the most common and familiar terms in economic science, is at the same time one of the most difficult to define accurately. The natural definition is that wages is the &quot; reward for labour,&quot; but then we are at once confronted with the difficulty so well stated by Adam Smith: &quot; The greater part of people understand better what is meant by a quantity of a particular commodity than by a quantity of labour ; the one is a plain palpable object, the other an abstract notion, which, though it can be made sufficiently intelligible, is not altogether so natural and obvious.&quot; If we regard wages as the reward for a quantity of labour, it is clear that to make the meaning precise we must give a precise meaning to this abstract notion of Adam Smith. From the point of view of the labourer the quantity of labour refers not so much to the work accomplished (e.g., raising so many foot-pounds) as to &quot; all the feelings of a disagree able kind, all the bodily inconvenience or mental annoyance, connected with the employment of one s thoughts or muscles or both in a particular occupation &quot; (J. S. Mill). But this analysis seems only to make the task of definition more difficult, for the class of labourers, in this wide sense of the term labour, would include the capitalist who racks his brains in making plans just as much as the navvy who digs with the sweat of his brow. Thus &quot; profits,&quot; in the ordinary sense of the term, instead of being contrasted, would to a large extent be classified with wages, and in fact the wages of superintendence or of management is one of the recognized elements in the classical analysis of profits. It is, however, only when we refer to the list of occupations &quot; in any civilized country that we can really form an adequate idea of the variety of classes to which the term labour, as defined by Mill, may be extended. In the General Report of the census (1881) in England and Wales (published 1883) an analysis is given of the &quot;un occupied class.&quot; After deducting children and young persons under fifteen, persons over sixty-five years of age, who for the most part had been engaged in work of some kind previously, and those between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who might be considered as training for work, there remained 4,641,190 between the ages of twenty and sixty- five without specified occupation. But of these 4,458,908 were &quot; women, of whom by far the greater part were married and engaged in the management of domestic life,&quot; and thus the number of males in the working period of life (20-65) of the &quot; unoccupied &quot; class was reduced to 182,282. Thus practically nearly the whole of the efficient male population of the country was engaged in some form of &quot; labour &quot; and in receipt of some form of &quot; wages.&quot; It may be granted that in certain economic inquiries it is extremely useful to bring out the points of resemblance between &quot; workers &quot; at the various stages of the social scale, and it is especially serviceable in showing that the op position between &quot;employer&quot; and the &quot;employed,&quot; and the &quot; classes &quot; and the &quot; masses,&quot; is often exaggerated. At the same time, however, the differences, if not in kind at any rate in degree, are so great that if the analogy is carried very far it becomes misleading. Accordingly it seems natural to adopt as the preliminary definition of &quot; wages &quot; something equivalent to that of Prof. Walker in his work on the Wages Question (the best book on the subject as a whole), viz., &quot;the reward of those who are employed in production with a view to the profit of their employers and are paid at stipulated rates.&quot; Even as thus restricted the &quot; working or vage-earning classes &quot; represent probably two-thirds of the population of the United King dom. It may be observed that by extending the meaning of production, as is now done by most economists, to include all kinds of labour, and by substituting benefit for profit, this definition will include all grades of wages. Having thus limited the class of those who earn Nominal &quot; wages,&quot; the next point is to consider the way in which and real the wages ought to be measured. The most obvious wa S es - method is to take as the rate of time-ivages the amount of money earned in a certain time, and as the rate of taslc- wages the amount of money obtained for a given amount of ivork of a given quality; and in many inquiries this rough mode of measurement is sufficient. But the intro duction of money as the measure at once makes it necessary to assume that for purposes of comparison the value of the money to the wage-earners may be considered constant. This supposition, however, does not hold good even between different places in the same country at the same time, and still less with variations in time as well as place. To the labourers, however, the amount of money they obtain is only a means to an end, and accordingly economists have drawn a sharp distinction between nominal and real wages. &quot; Labour, like commodities,&quot; says Adam Smith, &quot; may be said to have a real and a nominal price. Its real price may be said to consist in the quantity of the necessaries and conveniences of life which are given for it ; its nominal price in the quantity of money. The labourer is rich or poor, is well or ill rewarded, in proportion to the real not to the nominal price of his labour.&quot; Prof. Walker (op. cit., p. 12 sq.) has given a f ull Varia- analysis of the principal elements which ought to be t iolis taken into account in estimating the real wages of labour. m They may be classified as follows. (1) Variations in the purchasing power of money may be due in the first place to causes affecting the general level of prices in a country. Such, for instance, is a debasement of the coinage, of which a good example is furnished in English wages.