and were an
undisguised exercise of the power of the employing class to use their
membership in Parliament to legislate in their own interest. It
provided that all agreements whatever between journeymen or other
workmen for obtaining an advance in wages for themselves or for other
workmen, or for decreasing the number of hours of labor, or for
endeavoring to prevent any employer from engaging any one whom he
might choose, or for persuading any other workmen not to work, or for
refusing to work with any other men, should be illegal. Any justice of
the peace was empowered to convict by summary process and sentence to
two months' imprisonment any workmen who entered into such a
combination.

The ordinary and necessary action of trade unions was illegal by the
Common Law also, under the doctrine that combined attempts to
influence wages, hours, prices, or apprenticeship were conspiracies in
restraint of trade, and that such conspiracies had been repeatedly
declared to be illegal.

In addition to their illegality, trade unions were extremely unpopular
with the most influential classes of English society. The employers,
against whose power they were organized, naturally antagonized them
for fear they would raise wages and in other ways give the workmen the
upper hand; they were opposed by the aristocratic feeling of the
country, because they brought about an increase in the power of the
lower classes; the clergy deprecated their growth as a manifestation
of discontent, whereas contentment was the virtue then most regularly
inculcated upon the lower classes; philanthropists, who had more faith
in what should be done for than by the workingmen, distrusted their
self-interested and vaguely directed efforts. Those who were
interested in England's foreign trade feared that they would increase
prices, and thus render England incapable of competing with other
nations, and those who were influenced by the teachings of political
economy opposed them as being harmful, or at best futile efforts to
interfere with the free action of those natural forces which, in the
long run, must govern all questions of labor and wages. If the
average rate of wages at any particular time was merely the quotient
obtained by dividing the number of laborers into the wages fund, an
organized effort to change the rate of wages would necessarily be a
failure, or could at most only result in driving some other laborers
out of employment or reducing their w