conditions, and a reduction in the hours of labor. It was in
many ways the golden age of trade unionism. But there was an important
limitation of the workers' power--the unions could not absorb the man
outside; they could not provide all the workers with employment. That is
an essential condition of capitalist industry, there is always the
"reserve army of the unemployed," to use the expressive phrase of
Friederich Engels. Rare indeed are the times when all the available
workers in any industry are employed, and the time has probably never
yet been when all the available workers in all industries were employed.

Notwithstanding this important limitation of power, it is
incontrovertible that the workers were benefited by their organization.
But only for a time. There came a time when the employers began to
organize unions also. That they called their organizations by other and
high-sounding names does not alter the fact that they were in reality
unions formed to combat the unions of the workers. Every employers'
association is, in reality, a union of the men who employ labor against
the unions of the men they employ. When the organized workers went to
individual, unorganized employers, who feared their rivals more than
they feared the workers, or, rather, who feared the workers most of all
because rivals waited to snatch their trade, a strike making their
employees allies with their competitors, the employers were easily
defeated. The workers could play one employer against another employer
with constant success. But when the employers also organized, it was
different. Then the individual employer, freed from his worst terrors,
could say, "Do your worst. I, too, am in an organization." Then it
became a battle betwixt organized capital and organized labor. When the
workers went out on strike in one shop or factory, depending upon their
brother unionists employed in other shops or factories, the employers of
these latter locked them out, thus cutting off the financial support of
the strikers. In other cases, when the workers in one place went out on
strike, the employer got his work done through other employers, by the
very fellow-members upon whom the strikers were depending for support.
Thus the workers were compelled to face this dilemma, either to withdraw
these men, thus cutting off their financial supplies, or to be beaten by
their own members.

Under these changed conditions, the workers were beaten time after time