And how can they negotiate for terms without organized concert? What chance would any laborer have who angrily for an advance of wages? How could he ever know whether the state of the market admitted of a rise, except by consultation with his fellows, normally leading to concerted action? I do not like to say that associations of laborers of a nature similar to trade unions, far from being a hindrance to a free market for labor, are the necessary instrumentality of that free market: the indispensable means of enabling the seller of labor to take due care of their interests. Experience has enabled the trades unions to comprehend the circumstances on which a strike for an advance of wages depends. The workmen are now nearly as well informed as the most educated of the masters of the state of trade; they calculate their faults and his expenses; they know when his trade is prosperous or not prosperous; and only when these are they are most likely to strike for higher wages. Their known readiness to strike under such circumstances, makes their employers, for the most part, willing to concede to their demands.

Such a movement is the commencement of that regular part of the laborer's participation in the profits derived from their labor, every tendency to which it is so important to encourage, since to it we have chiefly to look for any radical improvement in the social and economical relations between labor and capital. Strikes, therefore, and the trades unions which render strikes possible, are for these various reasons, not mischievous.

I have seen the conditions of labor improve greatly in England due to the efforts of the trades unions, especially in the last twenty years. The same movement is now gaining ground in America, and I believe that if left alone, it will eventually bring about the same results there. -H. Spencer, English philosopher 