riots easily enough. The workers forced their masters to grant them
ameliorations, real or imaginary, of their condition, but could not
force freedom from them. At last came a great crash. To explain
this you must understand that very great progress had been made
amongst the workers, though as before said but little in the
direction of improved livelihood."

I played the innocent and said: "In what direction could they
improve, if not in livelihood?"

Said he: "In the power to bring about a state of things in which
livelihood would be full, and easy to gain. They had at last learned
how to combine after a long period of mistakes and disasters. The
workmen had now a regular organization in the struggle against their
masters, a struggle which for more than half a century had been
accepted as an inevitable part of the conditions of the modern system
of labour and production. This combination had now taken the form of
a federation of all or almost all the recognised wage-paid
employments, and it was by its means that those betterments of the
conditions of the workmen had been forced from the masters: and
though they were not seldom mixed up with the rioting that happened,
especially in the earlier days of their organization, it by no means
formed an essential part of their tactics; indeed at the time I am
now speaking of they had got to be so strong that most commonly the
mere threat of a 'strike' was enough to gain any minor point:
because they had given up the foolish tactics of the ancient trades
unions of calling out of work a part only of the workers of such and
such an industry, and supporting them while out of work on the labour
of those that remained in. By this time they had a biggish fund of
money for the support of strikes, and could stop a certain industry