FROM SERFDOM TO FREEDOM. 91 



at his will capital and labor unite and are fruitful; at his will they 

 are parted and remain barren. Men come and go at his bidding. 

 He knows no superior and recognizes no limitations. He calls an 

 attempt at control * dictation/ and resents it with anger." That is 

 the extreme case, and is industrial despotism. While the results 

 doubtless are good in many cases, and the laborer receives fair and 

 decent treatment in most cases, that is owing to the temperament or 

 prudence and good judgment of the master and not to the system. 

 Such a condition of things is becoming more and more modified. We 

 have reached in many cases a condition which may be said to corre- 

 spond to a monarchy with constitutional limitations — the master is 

 restrained in the exercise of his power by public opinion, the strength 

 of the workingmen, and in some cases by legal limitations. The 

 organization of boards of arbitration, and the recognition of the right 

 of the employee to a share in the profits, are daily extending. The 

 tendency toward giving the wage-earners a share in the business, 

 some modified form of co-operation, is daily extending. The trend 

 is toward what may be called industrial democracy, just as in the 

 political world real democracy is fast becoming the universal prin- 

 ciple, whatever the style of the government may be. 



This advance in the industrial world has come about through the 

 agitation and power of labor organizations, of which, as they exist now, 

 trades unions were the early manifestation. The employer, as a rule, 

 looked after his own interests mainly, and the employee alone by 

 himself had to take what he could get and do as he was told. Just as 

 the people, after they sunk into subjection in the earlier days, had 

 little political power as against the nobility until they were strong 

 enough to take it, so the laborer still would be of little account except 

 as a more or less intelligent machine unless he had proved himself 

 a man, with a man's aspirations and a man's energy. 



Labor organizations or trades unions came into existence in Eng- 

 land. The democratic spirit, the spirit of liberty, the Saxon spirit 

 of independence, which wrested from kings and the nobility all the 

 rights which the common people enjoy, has been doing in the industrial 

 world only what it did in the political world years before. 



We may say that trades unions find their prototype in the frith 

 guilds or peace guilds of the Anglo-Saxon. A few words in general 

 about them and their successors and the spirit pervading them, the 

 causes of their existence and decay, will have a bearing on labor 

 organizations, which are like them in " being founded on similar men- 

 tal faculties and desires and as contemplating similar purposes." 



These frith guilds seem to have been associations of neighbors for 

 mutual help and protection. They replaced the older brotherhood 

 of kinsfolk, which had existed among the German races, " by a vol- 



