was held
to be an unlawful combination. It was these early statutes which gave
rise to the law that existed until the nineteenth century in England,
that both strikes and unions were unlawful; a strike because it was
usually a combination to raise the rate of wages, which was in theory
fixed by law. Therefore, a strike was a combination with an unlawful
aim, consequently a conspiracy. The logic is simple; and in the same
way a trades-union was certainly an alliance between skilled workmen,
and as such forbidden under the Statute of Laborers, besides being a
combination in restraint of trade.

Now the guild, in so far as it was a combination of a trade in a town,
was a perfectly lawful thing; in so far as it bore upon the right of a
man to be a freeman, it was a perfectly lawful thing; it was only from
the other end, from this statute I read as to combinations, that two
or three centuries later they got the notion that a trades-union was
an unlawful thing; so you may say that a trades-union in England has
a lawful root and an unlawful root, and it is rather important to see
from which each class springs. The first case in which the modern
strike was considered was a case known as the Journeymen Tailors'
case, which happened more than two hundred years ago; and in that case
it was definitely held to be an unlawful combination, while the first
case on the modern boycott, where an injunction was awarded, is as
late as 1868, this being the origin of that process which has evoked
so much criticism here, the use of the injunction in labor disputes.
The unskilled laborers in England have never combined; the only people
who combined were the guilds, the skilled men, and in so far as they
combined they did it rather as capitalists, employees, or as freemen,
to govern the town; this was a lawful object; and the guilds rapidly
grew into little aristocracies. They very soon ceased to be journeyman
laborers, and became combinations of employers. Thus, the guild
movement didn't amount to much in bringing about the modern
trades-union or combinations of laboring men; it began before it
occurred to these latter that they also could combine; just as,
even now, it is more difficult among _women_ to get them to join
trades-unions, or for working women to combine; they have not
apparently got into that stage of evolution; and so with the negroes
in the South. But about the end of the eighteenth century you begin to
find the first strikes a