Trades-unions are gradually, however, outgrowing their crude methods.  The attempts, such as we have seen lately, of great corporations to break them up, is a piece of despotism which ought to receive an indignant rebuke from the people at large.  Labor must combine, just as capital has combined, in forming these very corporations.  Labor’s only way of defending its interests as a class is through combination.  It is the abuse and not the use of trades-unions against which resistance should be made.

     The chief abuse of our trades-unions has been their
     concentration of attention upon the organization of strikes.

Strikes seem to me in our present stage of the “free-contract” system entirely justifiable when they are really necessary.  Workingmen have the right to combine in affixing a price at which they wish to work.  The supply of labor and the demand for goods, in the absence of higher considerations, will settle the question as to whether they can get the increase.  The trying features of this method of reaching a result are incidental to our immature industrial system.  Strikes have had their part to play in the development of that system.  We note their failures and forget their successes; but they have had their signal success, and have won substantial advantages for labor.  Their chief service, however, has been in teaching combination, and in showing labor the need of a better weapon by which to act than the strike itself.

The strike requires long practice and great skill to wield it well.  Practice in it is more costly than the experiments at Woolwich.  Mr. Dolles, in his new work on political economy, gives some statistics which abundantly illustrate the folly of strikes, although he only gives one side of the case, namely, the losses which fall directly upon the laborers themselves.  If to these were added the losses of capitalists, the aggregate would become colossal.  In 1829 the Manchester spinners struck, and lost $1,250,000 in wages before the dispute was at an end.  The next year their brethren at Ashton and Stayleybridge followed their example in striking and in losing $1,250,000.  In 1833 the builders of Manchester forfeited $360,000 by voluntary idleness.  In 1836 the spinners of Preston threw away $286,000.  Eighteen years afterward their successor, seventeen thousand strong, slowly starved through thirty-six weeks and paid $1,200,000 for the privilege.  In 1853 the English iron-workers lost $12,000 by a strike.  Such losses marked, too, the strikes of the London builders in 1860, and tailors in 1868, and the northern iron-workers in 1865.  The strike of the Belfast linen-weavers, which was ended a few weeks since by the mediation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, cost the operatives $1,000,000.