ce had been imposed upon the defendants, the lusty throng burned
the judge in effigy.

Sabotage is a new word, but the practice itself is old. In 1835 the
striking cabinet-makers in New York smashed thousands of dollars' worth
of chairs, tables, and sofas that had been imported from France, and the
newspapers observed the significant fact that the destroyers boasted in
a foreign language that only American-made furniture should be sold
in America. Houses were burned in Philadelphia because the contractors
erecting them refused to grant the wages that were demanded. Vengeance
was sometimes sought against new machinery that displaced hand labor. In
June, 1835, a New York paper remarked that "it is well known that many
of the most obstinate turn-outs among workingmen and many of the most
violent and lawless proceedings have been excited for the purpose of
destroying newly invented machinery." Such acts of wantonness, however,
were few, even in those first tumultuous days of the thirties. Striking
became in those days a sort of mania, and not a town that had a mill or
shop was exempt. Men struck for "grog or death," for "Liberty, Equality,
and the Rights of Man," and even for the right to smoke their pipes at
work.

Strike benefits, too, were known in this early period. Strikers in New
York received assistance from Philadelphia, and Boston strikers were
similarly aided by both New York and Philadelphia. When the high cost of
living threatened to deprive the wage-earner of half his income, bread
riots occurred in the cities, and handbills circulated in New York bore
the legend:

BREAD, MEAT, RENT, FUEL THEIR PRICES MUST COME DOWN

CHAPTER III. TRANSITION YEARS

With the panic of 1837 the mills were closed, thousands of unemployed
workers were thrown upon private charity, and, in the long years of
depression which followed, trade unionism suffered a temporary eclipse.
It was a period of social unrest in which all sorts of philanthropic
reforms were suggested and tried out. Measured by later events, it was a
period of transition, of social awakening, of aspiration tempered by the
bitter experience of failure.

In the previous decade Robert Owen, the distinguished English social
reformer and philanthropist, had visited America, and had begun in
1826 his famous colony at New Harmony, Indiana. His experiments at New
Lanark, in England, had already made him known to working people the
world over. Whatever may be said of h