For labor the combination of cut-throat competition among employers with the new machine technique brought serious consequences.  In this era of machinery the forces of technical evolution decisively joined hands with the older forces of marketing evolution to depress the conditions of the wage bargain.  It is needless to dilate upon the effects of machine technique on labor conditions—­they have become a commonplace of political economy.  The shoemakers were first among the organized trades to feel the effects.  In the later sixties they organized what was then the largest trade union in the world, the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin,[104] to ward off the menace of “green hands” set to work on machines.  With the machinists and the metal trades in general, the invasion of unskilled and little skilled competitors began a decade later.  But the main and general invasion came in the eighties, the proper era from which to date machine production in America.  It was during the eighties that we witness an attempted fusion into one organization, the Order of the Knights of Labor, of the machine-menaced mechanics and the hordes of the unskilled.[105]

With the nineties a change comes at last.  The manufacturer finally wins his independence.  Either he reaches out directly to the ultimate consumer by means of chains of stores or other devices, or else, he makes use of his control over patents and trade marks and thus succeeds in reducing the wholesale-jobber to a position which more nearly resembles that of an agent working on a commission basis than that of the quondam industrial ruler.  The immediate outcome is, of course, a considerable increase in the manufacturer’s margin of profit.  The industrial class struggle begins to abate in intensity.  The employer, now comparatively free of anxiety that he may be forced to operate at a loss, is able to diminish pressure on wages.  But more than this:  the greater certainty about the future, now that he is a free agent, enables him to enter into time agreements with a trade union.  At first he is generally disinclined to forego any share of his newly acquired freedom by tying himself up with a union.  But if the union is strong and can offer battle, then he accepts the situation and “recognizes” it.  Thus the class struggle instead of becoming sharper and sharper with the advance of capitalism and leading, as Marx predicted, to a social revolution, in reality, grows less and less revolutionary and leads to a compromise or succession of compromises,—­namely, collective trade agreements.

But the manufacturer’s emancipation from the middleman need not always lead to trade agreements.  In the shoe industry this process did not do away with competition.  In other industries such an emancipation was identical with the coming in of the “trust,” or a combination of competing manufacturers into a monopoly.  As soon as the “trust” becomes practically the sole employer of labor in an industry, the relations between labor