The clothing maker, who sits week after week and sews a single seam on each of an endless succession of coats, leads a more nerve-wearing life than the tailor who makes a complete garment. Every such change, by which the physical or the nervous strain of labor is increased, ought, it should seem, to be accompanied with an increase of time wages.

From the social standpoint justice might also seem to require compensation for the destruction of the value of special skill. When a man has devoted years to the acquirement of an ability, he may be excused for feeling that he has a vested right in his income from the use of it. This feeling, indeed, is at the bottom of the machine breaking and the other less violent means by which men have undertaken to maintain their hold on work which they have felt belonged to them.

Without acknowledging the validity of this idea, may it not be admitted that a disappointment of the reasonable expectations on which the actions of men have been based is always a social misfortune? It is not a wrong, unless either government or particular men can be held responsible both for the expectations and for the disappointment of them. Yet any means by which such disappointment can be minimized in the present case, any means by which, without checking technical progress, the hardships which progress involves can be made less severe must be regarded as accordant with the true interests of society. Finally, the wage-earners are the class of society whose economic position is weakest. This fact alone might justify the opinion that whatever strengthens their economic position is, so far, likely to increase the aggregate strength and to promote the aggregate well-being of society.

Waiving any possible question of changes in laws and social arrangements, by which it might be attempted either to exempt labor from bargain and sale in the market or essentially to alter the market conditions, the only way in which the workmen in a particular trade can, by their own action, avoid the immediate hardship that results from improvement of machinery and methods in their own craft seems to be by united action, taken through some such organization as a trade union. It is believed

to be impossible to point out any instance in which unorganized workmen have received any immediate and visible benefit from the introduction of new machinery in their trade. Any number of instances might be pointed out in which they have suffered immediate and visible damage. It has been shown to be possible, however, by wise and united action, to secure a portion of the benefits of machinery for the workmen immediately concerned, while leaving other portions to be divided between the employer and society in general.

Granting the actual introduction of machinery, two main lines of policy in meeting it are open to workingmen and their organizations. The possessors of the skill which the older processes require may undertake to maintain the old processes in competition with the new by reducing their rate of pay. This is the course which is likely to be adopted by unorganized and uninstructed workers. It is the course which was followed by the hand weavers of England early in the nineteenth century, and their miserable decay furnishes the classical example of the folly of it. They undertook by lengthening their hours and increasing their speed to compete in price with the products of the power loom. As the power loom was progressively improved, the quality of its products rose and the prices of them fell. As the haste of production on the hand loom increased, the quality of its products deteriorated. They lost the individuality and the excellence of construction and finish which had at first given them a superiority of value. The final result was the extinction of hand weaving, after years of hopeless and squalid struggle by the weavers.

The other policy is one which is not practically possible unless the workers act together in some form of organization, nor unless they take from the beginning a far-sighted view of their true interests. It is one which has been adopted by the printers in the United States and the hand shoemakers in Great Britain. The British shoemakers, the Amalgamated Society of Cordwainers, when shoemaking machinery began to be introduced, steadily refused to lower their prices for hand work, but took into their society all who were employed in the new factories, and advised their old members, so far as they could not

get employment at hand work at the old rates, to take work in the factories at whatever they could get. Organizing the factory workers, they helped in the establishment of new standard rates for them; they maintained their own standard rates, and even increased them; and, by turning their attention to the production of the most perfect goods, they have kept a place for themselves in the industrial world, and have not only suffered no loss from the competition of machinery, but have progressively increased their skill, and, along with their skill, their wages.

In this case it ultimately seemed best to let the new machine workers form a union of their own, separate from that of the old handicraftsmen. The latter union maintains itself as a small and compact body of highly skilled workmen. In the most conspicuous example of an analogous policy and an analogous success in the United States, the old hand workmen and the new machine men have continued in the same organization, but with results not less successful. The case is that of the International Typographical Union. When the typesetting machines began seriously to threaten the hand compositors early in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the union adopted the policy of avoiding any opposition to the introduction of machines, and demanding that they be run by union men and under wage scales and conditions of labor fixed by the union. The machines displaced, for the time being, a considerable number of compositors; but many more would have been displaced if the unions, by fighting the machines, had compelled the manning of them with non-unionists. In that case it is probable that comparatively cheap hands would have been employed, and that low rates of wages for them and a long workday would have been established; that the wages of hand compositors, struggling to compete with the machines, would have been lowered, and their hours of labor would have been increased. The actual policy of the union has resulted in the maintenance of the wages of hand compositors, in a gradual lessening of their hours, and in the maintenance for machine operators of even higher wages, on the average, and less hours than those of the hand printers. More printers are now employed than ever before.

2. The Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor.1

Prior to the Civil War national trade unions in the United States multiplied without any corresponding success in the formation of enduring alliances among them. Labor federations, when they existed, were local in character. Thus the General Trades Union of the City of New York, organized in 1833, was a federation composed of the trade unions of that city. On January 8, 1834, the General Trades Union of Boston was organized upon the same general lines as the New York federation, and shortly thereafter similar organizations came into existence in Philadelphia and Baltimore. In 1866 certain representatives of organized labor assembled at Baltimore and formed the National Labor Union, with the establishment of the eight-hour working day as its chief aim. In 1867 and again in 1868 this organization held conventions and displayed considerable vigor; but active participation in the national campaign of 1872 created internal dissensions, and the union soon ceased to exercise any large influence. A convention including representatives from several national and international unions. met in Cleveland, July 15, 1873, for the purpose of starting a movement for a national federation similar in scope to the National Labor Union. Though a declaration of principles and a constitution were adopted, the Industrial Brotherhood, as the new federation was called, possessed little vitality and soon disbanded.

In the general industrial depression of the early seventies, union after union was forced to disband. The system of low dues and slight benefits, now universally condemned as a trade-union policy, was then general, and hard times found the labor forces unprepared for the emergency. With industrial revival the labor world again moved towards organization. The experiences of the unions during the depression suggested the need of a strong

1 By William Kirk. Reprinted, by consent of the author, editor, and publisher, from Studies in American Trade Unionism, pp. 353-380, edited by J. H. Hollander. Copyright, 1906, by Henry Holt and Company.

2 Ely, The Labor Movement in America, pp. 43-44 [New York, 1890]; Burke, Central Labor Unions, in Columbia University Studies, XII, 28-30.

inter-trade alliance supplementary to the local and national trade unions then existing, and the order of the Knights of Labor undertook to supply this need. This organization, the first successful national federation of labor in the United States, had its genesis in a local union or "assembly" of garment cutters, formed in Philadelphia in 1869. With increase in the number of local assemblies a desire arose for a body which should represent all the local unions in a certain district. Delegates were sent to a common meeting place and a "district assembly," designated thereafter as District Assembly No. 1, was organized to further the interests of the local assemblies under its jurisdiction. This plan proving successful, other district assemblies were formed whenever the number of local assemblies in a new field justified a federation.

On August 2, 1877, a circular from District Assembly No. 1 was sent to all officers and members of the Knights of Labor, notifying them of a convention to be held in Reading, Pennsylvania, on January 1, 1878, for the purpose of forming a “general assembly," and establishing a central resistance fund, a bureau of statistics, and a system of revenue to aid in the work of organization. In response to the call thirty-two delegates assembled, formed a representative organization with a strongly centralized control, and after deliberation adopted as the name of the body so constituted, "General Assembly of the Knights of Labor of North America." In the next three years, the Knights of Labor- although in full accord with the ideals of the general labor movement-developed along lines unmistakably opposed to the traditional principle of trade unionism, viz. trade autonomy. It placed in the hands of the General Assembly "full and final jurisdiction in all matters pertaining to the local and district assemblies." The district assembly in turn possessed power within its district "to decide all appeals and settle all controversies within or between local assemblies."

The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada was formed in 1881. The

1 Proceedings of the Knights of Labor Convention, 1878, p. 3 [n. p., n. d.]. 2 Constitution of the General Assembly, 1878, Article 1, sect. 2.