poration. It costs next to
nothing. It is already becoming a substitute for strikes in
England, where the trades-unions are adopting this new
weapon. * * *

Trades-unions ought, among us, to emulate the wisdom of
European workingmen, and use their mechanism to organize
forms of association which should look not alone to winning
higher wages but to making the most of existing wages, and
ultimately to leading the wage-system into a higher
development. The provident features of the English
trades-unions are commonly overlooked, and yet it is
precisely in these provident features that their main
development has been reached. Mr. George Howell shows that a
number of societies, which he had specially studied, had
spent in thirty years upward of $19,000,000 through their
various relief-funds, and $1,369,455 only on strikes. Mr.
Harrison speaks of seven societies spending in one year
(1879) upward of $4,000,000 upon their members out of work.
He shows that seven of the great societies spent in 1882
less than 2 per cent of their income on strikes; and states
that 99 per cent of union funds in England "have been
expended in the beneficent work of supporting workmen in bad
times, in laying by a store for bad times, and saving the
country from a crisis of destitution and strife."

Trades-unions ought to be doing for our workingmen what
trades-unions have already done in England. * * * It has
been by the power of combination among the workingmen,
developed through the trades-unions, that this long list of
beneficent legislation--factory acts, mines-regulation acts,
education acts, tenant-right acts, employers' liability
acts, acts against "truck," acts against cruelty to animals,
etc.--has been secured. It has been wrested from reluctant
parliaments by the manifestations of strength on the part of
the laboring classes. * * *

Our trades unions ought to be the means of securing one of
the great necessities of labor in this country--accurate and
generally diffused information concerning the state of the
labor-market. Were there any thorough combination in
existence on the part of these unions in hard times, there
could be diffused through the great centers of labor in the
East regular reports of the labor-market in the different