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We have there the various trades and crafts-mariners, coat-makers, fullers, cloth-dyers and sellers, butchers, cordwainers, tanners, hucksters, smiths, masons, carpenters, arranged by guilds, and marching to the sound of flute and tabor, under banners bearing a fish and platter, a painted ship, and other "rare devices."

And except himself all the cordwainers in the town were idle, and without work. For as long as they could be had from him, neither shoes nor hose were bought elsewhere. And thus they tarried there a year, until the cordwainers became envious, and took counsel concerning him. And he had warning thereof, and it was told him how the cordwainers had agreed together to slay him.

Fourteen years later, in 1806, the journeymen cordwainers of the same city, following their conviction in court on the charge of conspiracy brought in by their masters, opened up a cooperative shoe warehouse and store. As a rule the workingmen took up productive cooperation when they had failed in strikes. In 1836 many of the trade societies began to lose their strikes and turned to cooperation.

"You err, son Henry," he replied, with much gravity: "the glovers' are the more honourable craft of the two, in regard they provide for the accommodation of the hands, whereas the shoemakers and cordwainers do but work for the feet." "Both equally necessary members of the body corporate," said Henry, whose father had been a cordwainer.

His rivals canvassed, consulted, roamed through the town, as he could see, filching votes from him. But he, too noble for such work as that, sat there alone in the little upstairs parlour of the Cordwainers' Arms, thinking of his speech for the evening, thinking, too, of Polly Neefit. And then, of a sudden, it occurred to him that it would be good to write a letter to Polly from Percycross.

The principle involves the employment of only union men in a shop; it means a monopoly of jobs by members of the union. The issue is as old as the unions themselves and as perplexing as human nature. As early as 1806 it was contended for by the Philadelphia cordwainers and by 1860 it had become an established union policy.

By 1836 employers' associations appeared in nearly every trade in which labor was aggressive; in New York there were at least eight and in Philadelphia seven. In Philadelphia, at the initiative of the master carpenters and cordwainers, there came to exist an informal federation of the masters' associations in the several trades.

And therefore was he called one of the three makers of Gold Shoes; and, when they could be had from him, not a shoe nor hose was bought of any of the cordwainers in the town. "Pryderi," said Manawyddan, "these men are minded to slay us." "Wherefore should we bear this from the boorish thieves?" said Pryderi. "Rather let us slay them all."

The strike, however, antedates machinery and was a practical method of protest long before there were unions. Men in a shop simply agreed not to work further and walked out. The earliest strike in the United States, as disclosed by the United States Department of Labor occurred in 1741 among the journeymen bakers in New York City. In 1792 the cordwainers of Philadelphia struck.

Especially the mariners, cordwainers, smiths, ship-chandlers, boatmen, the tapestry weavers, lace-manufacturers, shopkeepers, and, above all, the India merchants and stockholders in the great commercial companies for the East and West, lifted up their voices for war.