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Updated: May 28, 2025
During this period ten or fifteen thousand recorded strikes and lock-outs had taken place, but the net result of the industrial civil war, protracted through so long a period, had been to prove to the dullest of workingmen the hopelessness of securing any considerable amelioration of their lot by class action or organization, or indeed of even maintaining it against encroachments.
Understanding machinery and being a fair carpenter, he then came to the city, with $200 in his pocket, joined the Carpenter's Union, and tried to make a living at that trade. Between dull business, lock-outs, tie-ups, and strikes, he was reduced to fifty cents, and owed three dollars for room rent. He was in dead earnest when he threw his union card on my table and said:
Let them do something to win the men out of the public-houses; let them spare more of their enormous gains to build places of amusement and recreation for the people; let them provide better houses to live in, better conveniences for decency, better streets; and if all these things are done we shall have neither lock-outs nor strikes.
Ferdinand Lopez had paid no attention to the great political questions of the Commonwealth. He knew nothing of Labour and Capital, of Unions, Strikes, and Lock-outs. But because he was rich, and, by being rich, had made his way among great people, he was to have a seat in Parliament!
He believed of himself that he had gone rather deep into politics, and that he was entitled to call many statesmen asses because they did not see the things which he saw. He had the great question of labour, and all that refers to unions, strikes, and lock-outs, quite at his fingers' ends. He knew how the Church of England should be disestablished and recomposed.
The next decade witnessed continual troubles of this sort, though rarely if in any case so serious, between wage-workers and their employers in nearly all industries. The worst ones befell the manufacturing portions of the country. Strikes and lock-outs were part of the news almost every day. The causes were various.
If you are really to get a solution of these great problems, depend upon it you will never do it by strikes and lock-outs. I am an outsider in industrial matters. I am reproached when I venture to say anything about them with the observation that I am no business man. I can only hope that in this case lookers-on may sometimes see most of the game.
"Do you mean actual fighting with weapons?" said I, "or the strikes and lock-outs and starvation of which we have heard?" "Both, both," he said. "As a matter of fact, the history of the terrible period of transition from commercial slavery to freedom may thus be summarised.
The appeals are fervent, yet their effect seems uncertain. The terror of "lock-outs," of massacres done under the seal of the law, is vividly recalled. In 1900 the people had made a desperate effort to throw off the yoke of the Trusts. They had failed and been made to feel the lash of their victors. Eight years have passed, during which the Trusts have become impregnable, the people impotent.
And yet, every year there are thousands of strikes and lock-outs in Europe and America the most severe and protracted contests being, as a rule, the so-called "sympathy strikes," which are entered upon to support locked-out comrades or to maintain the rights of the unions.
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