between themselves and the political labor organizations of the
preceding years. In Philadelphia, where as we have seen, the formation
of an analogous organization, the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations
of 1828, had served as a preliminary for a political movement, the
General Trades' Union took especial precaution and provided in the
constitution that "no party, political or religious questions shall at
any time be agitated in or acted upon in the Union." Its official organ,
the _National Laborer_, declared that "_the Trades' Union never will be
political_ because its members have learned from experience that the
introduction of politics into their societies has thwarted every effort
to ameliorate their conditions."

The repudiation of active politics did not carry with it a condemnation
of legislative action or "lobbying." On the contrary, these years
witnessed the first sustained legislative campaign that was ever
conducted by a labor organization, namely the campaign by the New York
Trades' Union for the suppression of the competition from prison-made
goods. Under the pressure of the New York Union the State Legislature
created in 1834 a special commission on prison labor with its president,
Ely Moore, as one of the three commissioners. On this question of
prison labor the trade unionists clashed with the humanitarian prison
reformers, who regarded productive labor by prisoners as a necessary
means of their reform to an honest mode of living; and the humanitarian
won. After several months' work the commission submitted what was to the
Union an entirely unsatisfactory report. It approved the prison-labor
system as a whole and recommended only minor changes. Ely Moore signed
the report, but a public meeting of workingmen condemned it.

The rediscovered solidarity between the several trades now embodied in
the city trades' unions found its first expression on a large scale in a