These deterrents were removed by enabling legislation.  In 1829 a central authority, the Registrar of Friendly Societies, was appointed to supervise Friendly Societies, and between 1829 and 1875 further privileges and safeguards were conferred.  But the Friendly Society Movement throughout the nineteenth century was wholly voluntary.  In 1911 the situation was suddenly reversed by the passing of the National Insurance Act.

The Co-operative Societies were more suspect.  They crept into legal recognition as the children of the Friendly Society, under the ’frugal investments’ clause of the Act of 1846, being compelled by the legal prejudice against association in restraint of trade to adopt this unnatural mother.  Their real nature was recognized in 1852, when they were brought under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, and in 1862, when they were granted the boon of limited liability.  But the accident of their legal origin still survives; for they are regulated to-day by the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1893.  The Co-operative Movement is now drawing closer to politics, following the lead of most of the continental countries, notably Belgium and Germany.  Though we cannot say that there is any indication of the State taking over the movement, we may note that the growth of municipal trading in the ‘nineties was, in principle, an application of the consumers’ association to monopolies of distribution such as tramways, water, electricity, and gas.

The State was altogether hostile to the growth of the Trade Union.  The Charter of Emancipation, won by the guile of Francis Place in 1824, was severely curtailed in 1825.  Huskisson[68] depicted in lurid terms the tyranny of a military trades unionism, ’representing a systematic union of the workers of many different trades’.  It was a ’kind of federal republic’, whose mischievous operations, if not checked, would keep the commercial classes ’in constant anxiety and fear about their interests and property’.  Arnold, of Rugby, a decade later wrote of them in the same strain:  ’you have heard, I doubt not, of the trades unions; a fearful engine of mischief, ready to riot or assassinate; and I see no counteracting power.’[69]

The counteracting power was their own weakness.  The early militancy burnt itself out, and was succeeded at the turn of the century by a ’New Spirit and a New Model’.  The new spirit was anti-militant, and the new model was a trade union representing the elite of the skilled trades.  The Amalgamated Society of Engineers was founded in 1850 and served as a model to the Carpenters, Tailors, Compositors, Iron-founders, Brick-layers, and others.  The Trades Unions were now respectable, and in 1867 the State recognized the fact.

The period of collectivism is denoted by the growth of the Labour Party in Parliament, and the increasing part played by the State in industrial disputes and the regulation of wages.  The nationalization of railways and the nationalization of mines are burning questions.