eadily brought
under the legal definition the secret connivings of the wage-earners.
Political conditions now also worked against the laboring class. The
unrest in the colonies that culminated in the independence of America
and the fury of the French Revolution combined to make kings and
aristocracies wary of all organizations and associations of plain folk.
And when we add to this the favor which the new employing class, the
industrial masters, were able to extort from the governing class,
because of their power over foreign trade and domestic finance, we
can understand the compulsory laws at length declaring against all
combinations of working men.

The second legal doctrine which Americans have inherited from England
and which has played a leading role in labor controversies is the
doctrine that declares unlawful all combinations in restraint of trade.
Like its twin doctrine of conspiracy, it is of remote historical
origin. One of the earliest uses, perhaps the first use, of the term
by Parliament was in the statute of 1436 forbidding guilds and trading
companies from adopting by-laws "in restraint of trade," and forbidding
practices in price manipulations "for their own profit and to the common
hurt of the people." This doctrine thus early invoked, and repeatedly
reasserted against combinations of traders and masters, was incorporated
in the general statute of 1800 which declared all combinations of
journeymen illegal. But in spite of legal doctrines, of innumerable laws
and court decisions, strikes and combinations multiplied, and devices
were found for evading statutory wages.

In 1824 an act of Parliament removed the general prohibition
of combinations and accorded to workingmen the right to bargain
collectively. Three men were responsible for this noteworthy reform,
each one a new type in British politics. The first was Francis Place, a
tailor who had taken active part in various strikes. He was secretary of
the London Corresponding Society, a powerful labor union, which in 1795
had twenty branches in London. Most of the officers of this organization
were at one time or another arrested, and some were kept in prison three
years without a trial. Place, schooled in such experience, became a
radical politician of great influence, a friend of Bentham, Owen, and
the elder Mill. The second type of new reformer was represented by
Joseph Hume, a physician who had accumulated wealth in the India
Service, who had return