The Armies of Labor | Page 8

careful study of
financial, political, and industrial problems. A great number of reform
laws can be traced directly to his incredible activity during his thirty
years in Parliament. The third leader was John R. McCulloch, an

orthodox economist, a disciple of Adam Smith, for some years editor of
The Scotsman, which was then a violently radical journal cooperating
with the newly established Edinburgh Review in advocating
sociological and political reforms.
Thus Great Britain, the mother country from which Americans have
inherited so many institutions, laws, and traditions, passed in turn
through the periods of extreme paternalism, glorified competition, and
governmental antagonism to labor combinations, into what may be
called the age of conciliation. And today the Labour Party in the House
of Commons has shown itself strong enough to impose its programme
upon the Liberals and, through this radical coalition, has achieved a
power for the working man greater than even Francis Place or Thomas
Carlyle ever hoped for.
CHAPTER II.
FORMATIVE YEARS
America did not become a cisatlantic Britain, as some of the colonial
adventurers had hoped. A wider destiny awaited her. Here were
economic conditions which upset all notions of the fixity of class
distinctions. Here was a continent of free land, luring the disaffected or
disappointed artisan and enabling him to achieve economic
independence. Hither streamed ceaselessly hordes of immigrants from
Europe, constantly shifting the social equilibrium. Here the demand for
labor was constant, except during the rare intervals of financial
stagnation, and here the door of opportunity swung wide to the
energetic and able artisan. The records of American industry are replete
with names of prominent leaders who began at the apprentice's bench.
The old class distinctions brought from the home country, however,
had survived for many years in the primeval forests of Virginia and
Maryland and even among the hills of New England. Indeed, until the
Revolution and for some time thereafter, a man's clothes were the
badge of his calling. The gentleman wore powdered queue and ruffled
shirt; the workman, coarse buckskin breeches, ponderous shoes with

brass buckles, and usually a leather apron, well greased to keep it
pliable. Just before the Revolution the lot of the common laborer was
not an enviable one. His house was rude and barren of comforts; his
fare was coarse and without variety. His wage was two shillings a day,
and prison --usually an indescribably filthy hole awaited him the
moment he ran into debt. The artisan fared somewhat better. He had
spent, as a rule, seven years learning his trade, and his skill and energy
demanded and generally received a reasonable return. The account
books that have come down to us from colonial days show that his
handiwork earned him a fair living. This, however, was before
machinery had made inroads upon the product of cabinetmaker, tailor,
shoemaker, locksmith, and silversmith, and when the main street of
every village was picturesque with the signs of the crafts that
maintained the decent independence of the community.
Such labor organizations as existed before the Revolution were limited
to the skilled trades. In 1648 the coopers and the shoemakers of Boston
were granted permission to organize guilds, which embraced both
master and journeyman, and there were a few similar organizations in
New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. But these were not unions like
those of today. "There are," says Richard T. Ely, "no traces of anything
like a modern trades' union in the colonial period of American history,
and it is evident on reflection that there was little need, if any, of
organization on the part of labor, at that time."*
* "The Labor Movement in America," by Richard T. Ely (1905), p. 86.
A new epoch for labor came in with the Revolution. Within a decade
wages rose fifty per cent, and John Jay in 1784 writes of the "wages of
mechanics and laborers" as "very extravagant." Though the industries
were small and depended on a local market within a circumscribed area
of communication, they grew rapidly. The period following the
Revolution is marked by considerable industrial restiveness and by the
formation of many labor organizations, which were, however,
benevolent or friendly societies rather than unions and were often
incorporated by an act of the legislature. In New York, between 1800
and 1810, twenty-four such societies were incorporated. Only in the

larger cities were they composed of artisans of one trade, such as the
New York Masons Society (1807) or the New York Society of
Journeymen Shipwrights (1807). Elsewhere they included artisans of
many trades, such as the Albany Mechanical Society (1801). In
Philadelphia the cordwainers, printers, and hatters had societies. In
Baltimore the tailors were the first to organize, and they conducted in
1795 one of the first strikes in America. Ten years later they struck
again, and succeeded in raising their