aced by them today.
To grant to any set of people nominal freedom, and deny them economic
freedom is only half solving the difficulty. To deny economic freedom
to the colored person is in the end to deny it to the white person,
too.

The immediate cause which seems to have brought about the downfall of
the labor organizations of the first period (1825-1840) was the panic
of 1837, and the long financial depression which succeeded. We read,
on the other side of the water, of the "Hungry Forties," and although
no such period of famine and profound misery fell to the lot of the
people of the United States, as Great Britain and Ireland suffered,
the influence of the depression was long and widely felt in the
manufacturing districts of the Eastern states. Secondarily the workers
were to know of its effects still later, through the invasion of
their industrial field by Irish immigrants, starved out by that same
depression, and by the potato famine that followed it. These newcomers
brought with them very un-American standards of living, and flooded
the labor market with labor unskilled and therefore cheaper than the
normal native supply. When the year 1845 came it is to be inferred
that the worst immediate effects of the financial distress had passed,
for from then on the working-women made repeated efforts to improve
their condition. Baffled in one direction they would turn in another.

As earlier, there is a long series of local strikes, and another long
succession of short-lived local organizations. It is principally in
the textile trade that we hear of both strikes and unions, but also
among seamstresses and tailoresses, shoemakers and capmakers. New
York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, Fall River and Lowell all
contributed their quota of industrial uprisings among the exasperated
and sorely pressed workers, with a sad similarity in the stories.

In a class by themselves, however, were the female labor reform
associations, which for some years did excellent work in widely
separated cities. These were strictly trade unions, in spite of their
somewhat vague name. They seem to have drawn their membership from the
workers in the local trades. That of Lowell, perhaps the best known,
originated among the mill girls, but admitted other workers. Lowell,
as usual, was to the fore in the quality of its women leaders. The
first president of the Association was the brilliant and able Sarah
G. Bagley. She and other delegates went