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"Thus the trades-unions, too often governed by incompetent men, became a mighty power for evil. Strikes and lockouts were common, and were followed by loss of wages and consequent suffering, while the bitterness of feeling between the two classes constantly increased.
"Ah, we mustn't go to nature for our morality," the minister protested. "We were not talking of morality," said the manufacturer; "we were talking of business." This brought the laugh on the minister, but the lawyer cut it short: "Well, then, I don't really see why the trades-unions are not as business-like as the syndicates in their dealings with all those outside of themselves.
There was a very early case in Pennsylvania, while it was still a colony, and there were others in the States soon after, which held that the Statutes of Laborers were never law in America. Our statutes early authorized trades-unions, but without this there is, I think, no American case where either a trades-union or a simple strike was held to be an unlawful combination.
But about the end of the eighteenth century you begin to find the first strikes and combinations of workingmen; and then what the courts promptly applied to them was not the old line of statutes, the historical common-law growth, deriving from a guild which in its origin was a lawful body and so making the union free and lawful, but naturally for the magistrates were capitalists and land-owners, and all the courts were in sympathy with that class they went back to the long series of Statutes of Laborers, and said "this is a combination of workingmen to break the law by getting more than lawful wages," and consequently found both combinations unlawful, trades-unions and strikes, as well as when they were combinations to injure somebody, what we should now call a boycott.
So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word 'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany' this with a particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England. Other smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with humbler tread though there is really no need for their doing so.
Work "in gross" means work by contract, piece-work, thus made expressly lawful by statute in England in 1360, but still objected to by many of our labor unions to-day. The provision against alliances and covins was extended to cover trades-unions, their rules and by-laws, as well as strikes, which were also considered combinations in restraint of trade. Now this was never law in this country.
The audience cheered furiously, and the private secretary felt peace in his much troubled mind, for he knew how careful the Ministry would be, once they saw Bright talk republican principles before Trades-Unions; but, while he did not, like Roebuck, see reason to doubt the courage of a man who, after quarrelling with the Trades-Unions, quarreled with all the world outside the Trades-Unions, he did feel a doubt whether to class Bright as eccentric or conventional.
And we working men are, I think, of all classes the last that can afford to forget this; for if we did we should be much like sailors cutting away the timbers of our own ship to warm our grog with. For what else is the meaning of our trades-unions?
One cannot but think that if instead of the selfish principles which govern our trades-unions, and which are driving their industries out of the country, trade-schools could be provided such, for instance, as the cheap carving schools to be met with in many parts of Germany and the Tyrol much might be done to help the bread-earners.
Do our trades-unions and labor-clubs and workingmen's associations send a hundred picked men abroad every year for study and practice? Are they too conceited or ignorant to realize what most concerns them? Thousands of foreign subjects are earning money from us, while thousands of our countrymen are suffering.
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