very
few years. The complicity of the trade unions as such in these
disorders was constantly asserted and as constantly denied; but there
seems little doubt that while by far the greatest amount of disorder
was due to individual strikers or their sympathizers, and would have
occurred, perhaps in even more intense form, if there had been no
trade unions, yet there were cases where the organized unions were
themselves responsible. The frequent recurrence of rioting and
assault, the losses from industrial conflicts, and the agitation of
the trade unionists for further legalization, all combined to bring
the matter to attention, and four successive Parliamentary commissions
of investigation, in addition to those of 1824 and 1825, were
appointed in 1828, 1856, 1860, and 1867, respectively. The last of
these was due to a series of prolonged strikes and accompanying
outrages in Sheffield, Nottingham, and Manchester. The committee
consisted of able and influential men. It made a full investigation
and report, and finally recommended, somewhat to the public surprise,
that further laws for the protection and at the same time for the
regulation of trade unions be passed. As a result, two laws were
passed in the year 1871, the Trade Union Act and the Criminal Law
Amendment Act. By the first of these it was declared that trade unions
were not to be declared illegal because they were "in restraint of
trade," and that they might be registered as benefit societies, and
thereby become quasi-corporations, to the extent of having their funds
protected by law, and being able to hold property for the proper uses
of their organization. At the same time the Liberal majority in
Parliament, who had only passed this law under pressure, and were but
half hearted in their approval of trade unions, by the second law of
the same year, made still more clear and vigorous the prohibition of
"molesting," "obstructing," "threatening," "persistently following,"
"watching or besetting" any workmen who had not voluntarily joined the
trade union. As these terms were still undefined, the law might be,
and it was, still sufficiently elastic to allow magistrates or judges
who disapproved of trade unionism to punish men for the most ordinary
forms of persuasion or pressure used in industrial conflicts. An
agitation was immediately begun for the repeal or modification of
this later law. This was accomplished finally by the Trade Union Act
of 1875, by which it was