REVERSIONS IN MODERN INDUSTRIAL LIFE, 791 



work.* One of their number has been honest and frank enough 

 to confess as much. " It is true," said Mr. John L. E. Firmin, of 

 San Francisco, an official essayist at the Philadelphia convention, 

 " that the prime moving cause of our organization was the better- 

 ment of our condition in dollars and cents." f However bald and 

 brutal we may think such an impeachment of a noble purpose 

 to " enhance the welfare of man " without " thought of pecuniary 

 reward," it is the exact truth ; and for a complete justification of 

 every letter and syllable, no one need go beyond the ofl&cial state- 

 ments of the plumbers themselves. The annual reports of the 

 proceedings of the National Conventions of the Master Plumbers' 

 Association of the United States show that in spite of the exalted 

 virtue they have assumed, they have not scorned the selfish policy 

 and despotic practices of feudal times. By proposing the restric- 

 tion of apprenticeship, by making more onerous the requirements 

 for admission to their associations, by driving from the field they 

 have seized upon the unauthorized persons called in to do their 

 work, by striving to obtain a monopoly of the retail trade in 

 plumbing supplies, they have exhibited all the traits that made 

 the feudal corporations so odious and intolerable, and finally 

 brought them to complete and merited ruin. 



That they are not without some conception of the rights of the 

 individual, that they realize the " irrepressible conflict " between 

 their conduct and the principles of the institutions under which 

 they live, there is ample evidence. When the journeymen 

 I)lumbers of Omaha struck for an advance in wages, the master 

 plumbers of the city discovered a keen enough appreciation of 

 these rights and principles. " Resolved," said one of their reso- 

 lutions in condemnation of the strikers, " that the members of 

 the Omaha Master Plumbers' Association feel that their business 

 interests are being unnecessarily and unwarrantably interfered 

 with by the Journeymen's Union of this city, in that said organi- 



* Besides the proofs of this statement in the text, the following may be given : A mem- 

 ber of the New York Board of Horseshoers told me that one of the objeets of their law was 

 to increase the price for shoeing a horse all round from one dollar, charged by the poor 

 horseshoers, to one dollar and a half and two dollars. " Ultimately," said the President of 

 the New York Optical Society, in his address at Syracuse, June 2, 1896, published in the 

 Optical Journal, vol. ii. No. 4, p. 124, " we should . . . endeavor to establish uniform 

 prices for certain articles which are recognized as staples in our business. Great differ- 

 ences in our charges shatter public confidence in their legitimacy." Speaking of the bene- 

 fits that should follow the enactment of a law to protect the barbers, the National Barber 

 of April 30, 1896, says: "The better class of barbers would reap benefit, hetter prices would 

 prevail^ and the barber would then be classed with other professional men." Alluding to 

 the barbers of Illinois, who demand protection also, a writer in the National Barber of 

 December 31, 1896, says: "They are tired of seeing people buying their own razors, and 

 will try to put a stop to such a one-sided practice if they can." 



f Proceedings, Philadelphia, 1895, p. 90. 



