e 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:

"After prescribing the rate of remuneration many of the Trades' Unions
go to enact laws for the government of the respective departments, to
all of which the employer must assent.... The result even thus far is
that there is found no limit to this species of encroachment. If
workmen may dictate the hours and mode of service, and the number and
description of hands to be employed, they may also regulate other items
of the business with which their labor is connected. Thus we find that
within a few days, in the city of New York, the longshoremen have taken
by force from their several stations the horses and labor-saving gear
used for delivering cargoes, it being part of their regulations not to
allow of such competition."

The gravitation towards common action was felt over a wide area during
this period. Some trades met in national convention to lay down rules
for their craft. One of the earliest national meetings was that of the
carpet-weavers (1846) in New York City, when thirty-four delegates,
representing over a thousand operatives, adopted rules and took steps
to prevent a reduction in wages. The National Convention of Journeymen
Printers met in 1850, and out of this emerged two years later an
organization called the National Typographical Union, which ten years
later still, on the admission of some Canadian unions, became the
International Typographical Union of North America; and as such it
flourishes today. In 1855 the Journeymen Stone Cutters' Association of