90 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ym confiscated the monasteries, but put nothing in their place, an<I 

 in a measure by so doing deprived the poor of some relief from the 

 wealth of the church. But Elizabeth inaugurated a system of poor- 

 laws which, although crude and somewhat hard, still served to ward 

 off some of the social danger. The course of events, however, and 

 the rise of new industries did more to make life for the laborer, the 

 landless man, less bitter. With the discovery of America and the 

 opening of fisheries in these western waters, and the adventurous and 

 buccaneering voyages of Drake and his compeers, came the gradual 

 development of manufacture, and a " more careful and constant cul- 

 tivation of the land." All these were new and larger avenues for 

 the employment of labor. By this time the laborer had grown 

 entirely away from serfage, had been freed from the terrible grasp 

 of a hopeless future, and the possibility of a degree of comfort and 

 independence had come into existence. We need not linger longer 

 over his early days. The laborer still had his peculiar trials and hard- 

 ships, but he had a future. From a subject class, the terror as well as 

 necessity of its employers, he has grown to be their equal before the 

 law, and this by his own efforts, aided, of course, by the advance of 

 society and the broader humanity of mankind. 



The increase of manufacture brought with it a new danger to the 

 working class as we reach our times, and brought about a state of 

 things which gave rise to trades unions. Manufacture naturally in 

 the beginning was carried on in a small way, but in modern times, 

 especially as we get into this century, the small concerns grew into 

 large ones. Instead of one man or partnership with a comparatively 

 small amount of capital, the corporation or joint-stock company with 

 its large aggregation of capital carries on the business of manufacture 

 and trade. This aggregation of capital has made an entire change 

 in the relation between employer and employee. The corporation 

 came in the line of progress. Consolidation of capital has come to 

 stay, and properly so, but it brought with it dangers, just as every step 

 in advance has done. It was to meet the new dangers to the wage- 

 earners that trades unions came into being, for trades unions and 

 labor unions are really only organizations of labor as corporations are 

 aggregations of capital. 



When industrial establishments were small, the owner, whether 

 in trade or manufacture, had practically absolute direction of his 

 business. In the industrial world what corresponds to an unlimited 

 monarchy in the political world has been the system. As establish- 

 ments grew larger, the autocratic power of the owner passed to the 

 manager acting for the owners. As one writer puts it: "Huge in- 

 dustrial establishments are under the unrestrained control of a single 

 man. At his will they are set in motion; at his will they stand still; 



