ccepted. It was that the members of a union may procure
the discharge of non-members through strikes for this purpose against
their employers. This is the essence of the question of the closed shop;
and Commonwealth _v._ Hunt goes the full length of regarding strikes for
the closed shop as legal. Justice Shaw said that there is nothing
unlawful about such strikes, if they are conducted in a peaceable
manner. This was much in advance of the position which is taken by many
courts upon this question even at the present day.

After Commonwealth _v._ Hunt came a forty years' lull in the courts'
application of the doctrine of conspiracy to trade unions. In fact so
secure did trade unionists feel from court attacks that in the seventies
and early eighties their leaders advocated the legal incorporation of
trade unions. The desire expressed for incorporation is of extreme
interest compared with the opposite attitude of the present day. The
motive behind it then was more than the usual one of securing protection
for trade union funds against embezzlement by officers. A full
enumeration of other motives can be obtained from the testimony of the
labor leaders before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in
1883. McGuire, the national secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters
and Joiners, argued before the committee for a national incorporation
law mainly for the reason that such a law passed by Congress would
remove trade unions from the operation of the conspiracy laws that still
existed though in a dormant state on the statute books of a number of
Slates, notably New York and Pennsylvania. He pleaded that "if it
(Congress) had not the power, it shall assume the power; and, if
necessary, amend the constitution to do it." Adolph Strasser of the
cigar makers raised the point of protection for union funds and gave as
a second reason that it "will give our organization more stability, and
in that manner we shall be able to avoid strikes by perhaps settling
with our employers, when otherwise we should be unable to do so, because
when our employers know that we are to be legally recognized that will
exercise such moral force upon them that they cannot avoid recognizing
us themselves." W.H. Foster, the secretary of the Legislative Committee
of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, stated that in
Ohio the law provided for incorporation at a slight cost, but he wanted
a national law to "legalize arbitration," by which