programmes that attempted to reform society. They had watched the
birth and death of many experiments. They had participated in
short-lived cooperative stores and shops; they had listened to
Owen's alluring words and had seen his World Convention meet and
adjourn; had witnessed national reform associations, leagues, and
industrial congresses issue their high-pitched resolutions; and
had united on legislative candidates. And yet the old world
wagged on in the old way. Wages and hours and working conditions
could be changed, they had learned, only by coercion. This
coercion could be applied, in general reforms, only by society,
by stress of public opinion. But in concrete cases, in their own
personal environment, the coercion had to be first applied by
themselves. They had learned the lesson of letting the world in
general go its way while they attended to their own business.

In the early fifties, then, a new species of union appears. It
discards lofty phraseology and the attempt at world-reform and it
becomes simply a trade union. It restricts its house-cleaning to
its own shop, limits its demands to its trade, asks for a minimum
wage and minimum hours, and lays out with considerable detail the
conditions under which its members will work. The weapons in its
arsenal are not new--the strike and the boycott. Now that he has
learned to distinguish essentials, the new trade unionist can
bargain with his employer, and as a result trade agreements
stipulating hours, wages, and conditions, take the place of the
desultory and ineffective settlements which had hitherto issued
from labor disputes. But it was not without foreboding that this
development was witnessed by the adherents of the status quo.
According to a magazine writer of 1853: