ch unions are strongly
formed, the employer or body of employers deals not with individual
workmen, but with the Union of workmen, in matters which the Union
considers to be of common interest.

2. Next comes the establishment of provincial or national relations
between these local Unions. The Northumberland and Durham miners will
connect their various branches, and will, if necessary, enter into
relations with the Unions of other mining districts. The local Unions of
engineers, of carpenters, &c., are related closely by means of elected
representatives in national Unions. In the strongest Unions the central
control is absolute in reference to the more important objects of union,
the pressure for higher wages, shorter hours, and other industrial
advantages, or the resistance of attempts to impose reductions of wages,
&c.

3. Along with the movement towards a national organization of the
workers in a trade, or in some cases prior to it, is the growth of
combined action between allied industries, that is to say, trades which
are closely related in work and interests. In the building trades, for
example, bricklayers, masons, carpenters, plasterers, plumbers, painters
and decorators, find that their respective trade interests meet, and are
interwoven at a score of different points. The sympathetic action thus
set up is beginning to find its way to the establishment of closer co-
operation between the Unions of these several trades. The different
industries engaged in river-side work are rapidly forming into closer
union. So also the various mining classes, the railway workers, civil
servants, are moving gradually but surely towards a recognition of
common interests, and of the advantage of close common action.

4. The fact of the innumerable delicate but important relations which
subsist among classes of workers, whose work appears on the surface but
distantly related, is leading to Trade Councils representative of all
the Trade Unions in a district. In the midland counties and in London
these general Trade Councils are engaged in the gigantic task of welding
into some single unity the complex conflicting interests of large bodies
of workmen.

5. An allusion to the attempts to establish international relations
between the Unions of English workmen and those of foreign countries is
important, more as indicating the probable line of future labour
movement, than as indicating the early probability of effective
internation