will increase his wants; increase his wants and you will immediately
raise his wages. Although he occasionally tried to soften his doctrine
by the argument that a shorter work-day not only does not decrease but
may actually increase output, his was a distinctly revolutionary
doctrine; he aimed at the total abolition of profits through their
absorption into wages. But the instrument was nothing more radical than
a progressive universal shortening the hours.

So much for the general policy. To bring it to pass two alternatives
were possible: trade unionism or legislation. Steward chose the latter
as the more hopeful and speedy one. Steward knew that appeals to the
humanity of the employers had largely failed; efforts to secure the
reform by cooperation had failed; the early trade unions had failed; and
there seemed to be no recourse left now but to accomplish the reduction
of hours by legislative enactment.

In 1866 Steward organized the Grand Eight-Hour League of Massachusetts
as a special propagandist organization of the eight-hour philosophy. The
League was a secret organization with pass words and obligations,
intended as the central organization of a chain of subordinate leagues
in the State, afterwards to be created. Of a total of about eighty local
leagues in existence from 1865 to 1877, about twenty were in
Massachusetts, eight elsewhere in New England, at least twenty-five in
Michigan, four or five in Pennsylvania, about seven in Illinois, as many
in Wisconsin, and smaller numbers in Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, and
California. Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Pennsylvania had each a Grand
Eight-Hour League. Practically all of these organizations disappeared
soon after the panic of 1873.

The National Labor Union centered on the passage of an eight-hour law