re not likely to
urge very strongly their claims for consideration.

In this connection it is interesting to recall the fact that before
slavery got a foothold in Rome, the masses in their struggle with the
classes used what we think of to-day as the most modern weapon employed in
industrial warfare. We can all remember the intense interest with which we
watched the novel experience which St. Petersburg underwent some six years
ago, when the general strike was instituted. And yet, if we accept
tradition, that method of bringing the government and society to terms was
used twice by the Roman proletariat over two thousand years ago. The
plebeians, so the story goes, unable to get their economic and political
rights, stopped work and withdrew from the city to the Sacred Mount. Their
abstention from labor did not mean the going out of street lamps, the
suspension of street-car traffic, and the closing of factories and shops,
but, besides the loss of fighting men, it meant that no more shoes could
be had, no more carpentry work done, and no more wine-jars made until
concessions should be granted. But, having slaves to compete with it, and
with conditions which made organization difficult, free labor could not
hope to rise, and the unions could take no serious step toward the
improvement of the condition of their members. The feeling of security on
this score which society had, warranted the government in allowing even
its own employees to organize, and we find unions of government clerks,
messengers, and others. The Roman government was, therefore, never called
upon to solve the grave political and economic questions which France and
Italy have had to face in late years in the threatened strikes of the
state railway and postal employees.

We have just been noticing how the ancient differed from the modern
trades-union in the objects which it sought to obtain. The religious
character which it took seems equally strange to us at first sight. Every
guild put itself under the protection of some deity and was closely
associated with a cult. Silvanus, the god of the woods, was a natural
favorite with the carpenters, Father Bacchus with the innkeepers, Vesta
with the bakers, and Diana with those who hunted wild animals for the
circus. The reason for the choice of certain other divine patrons is not
so clear. Why the cabmen of Tibur, for instance, picked out Hercules as
their tutelary deity, unless, like Horace in his Satires, the a