practiced the remnants
of the experience and the education several generations of workers had
acquired in trade unionism and trade-union policy and methods.

Still, at intervals and under sore disadvantages the poor newcomers
did some fighting on their own account. Although they were immigrants
they were of flesh and blood like their predecessors, and they
naturally rebelled against the ever-increasing amount of work that
was demanded of them. The two looms, formerly complained of, had now
increased to six and seven. The piece of cloth that used to be thirty
yards long was now forty-two yards, though the price per piece
remained the same. But strike after strike was lost. A notable
exception was the strike of the Fall River weavers in 1875. It was led
by the women weavers, who refused to accept a ten per cent. cut in
wages to which the men of the organization (for they were organized)
had agreed. The women went out in strike in the bitter month of
January, taking the men with them. The leaders selected three mills,
and struck against those, keeping the rest of their members at work,
in order to have sufficient funds for their purposes. Even so, 3,500
looms and 156,000 spindles were thrown idle, and 3,125 strikers were
out. The strike lasted more than two months and was successful.

Progress must have seemed at the time, may even seem to us looking
back, to be tantalizingly slow, but far oftener than in earlier days
do the annals of trade unionism report, "The strikers won." Another
feature is the ever-increasing interest and sympathy shown in such
industrial risings of the oppressed by a certain few among the more
fortunate members of society. One strike of cap-makers (men and
women), was helped to a successful issue by rich German bankers and
German societies.

The account of the condition of women in the sewing trades during
the sixties makes appalling reading. The wonder is not that
the organizations of seamstresses during those years were few,
short-lived, and attended with little success, but that among women so
crushed and working at starvation wages any attempt at organization
should have been possible at all. A number of circumstances combined
to bring their earnings below, far below, the margin of subsistence.
It was still the day of pocket-money wages, when girls living at home
would take in sewing at prices which afforded them small luxuries, but
which cut the remuneration of the woman who had to live by h