" in Europe was contrasted repeatedly
with that prosperity that was typical of America. The insistence upon
the argument revealed the desire to conciliate a class that was being
noticed in American society for the first time.

The great labor problem before the Civil War had been that of getting
enough laborers and meeting the competition which the abundant free
lands of the West had offered. Labor organizations and strikes had been
so unusual that public opinion had not yet come to regard them as normal
features of society. But the manufacturing development of the sixties
in iron and steel, in textiles, and in other machine industries, threw
workmen together in increasing number, taught them their interests as a
class, and set the scene for an outbreak of strikes when the shops shut
down or reduced wages in the depression of the seventies. About 1877
these strikes shocked society by their violence. Neither had the public
been educated to the strike itself, nor the labor leaders to that
moderation, without which public sympathy cannot be retained or strikes
won. A feeling adverse to organized labor swept the country and
endangered the existence of the labor movement.

POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION, 1850-1910

(Table and Diagram based upon Thirteenth Census, 1910, Population,
Vol. 1, pp. 129, 130.)

Total Foreign
Population. and Mixed Foreign Born.
Parentage.

1910 91,972,266 18,897,837 13,345,545
1900 75,994,575 15,646,017 10,213,817
1890 62,947,714 11,503,675 9,121,867
1880 50,155,783 8,274,867 6,559,679
1870 39,818,449 5,324,268 5,493,712
1860 31,443,321 4,096,753
1850 23,191,876 2,240,535

[Illustration: graph]

The Knights of Labor received the heaviest weight of disfavor. This was
an industrial union, founded in 1869, embracing labor of all trades, and
held together by a secret organization. Dismissal so often followed
admitted membership in a union that secrecy was defensible, but secrecy
mystified and frightened the public. The policy of secrecy was abandoned
in 1882, after the excesses of the "Molly Maguires" had brought
discredit upon all organized labor. Under the leadership of Grand Master
Workman Powderly the Knights carried on an open and aggressive campaign