in the best organized centers, it became necessary to equalize
competitive conditions in the various localities. That led to a
well-knit national organization to control working conditions, trade
rules, and strikes. In other trades, where the competitive area of the
product was still restricted to the locality, the paramount
nationalizing influence was a more intensive competition for employment
between migratory out-of-town journeymen and the locally organized
mechanics. This describes the situation in the printing trade, where the
bulk of work was newspaper and not book and job printing. Accordingly,
the printers did not need to entrust their national officers with
anything more than the control of the traveling journeymen and the
result was that the local unions remained practically independent.

The third cause of concerted national action in a trade union was the
organization of employers. Where the power of a local union began to be
threatened by an employers' association, the next logical step was to
combine in a national union.

The fourth cause was the application of machinery and the introduction
of division of labor, which split up the established trades and laid
industry open to invasion by "green hands." The shoemaking industry,
which during the sixties had reached the factory stage, illustrates this
in a most striking manner. Few other industries experienced anything
like a similar change during this period.

Of course, none of the causes of nationalization here enumerated
operated in entire isolation. In some trades one cause, in other trades
other causes, had the predominating influence. Consequently, in some
trades the national union resembled an agglomeration of loosely allied
states, each one reserving the right to engage in independent action and
expecting from its allies no more than a benevolent neutrality. In other
trades, on the contrary, the national union was supreme in declaring
industrial war and in making peace, and even claimed absolute right to
formulate the civil laws of the trade for times of industrial peace.

The national trade union was, therefore, a response to obvious and
pressing necessity. However slow or imperfect may have been the
adjustment of internal organizations to the conditions of the trade,
still the groove was defined and consequently the amount of possible
floundering largely limited. Not so with the next step, namely the
national federation of trades. In the sixti