evolution to depress the conditions
of the wage bargain. It is needless to dilate upon the effects of
machine technique on labor conditions--they have become a commonplace of
political economy. The shoemakers were first among the organized trades
to feel the effects. In the later sixties they organized what was then
the largest trade union in the world, the Order of the Knights of St.
Crispin,[104] to ward off the menace of "green hands" set to work on
machines. With the machinists and the metal trades in general, the
invasion of unskilled and little skilled competitors began a decade
later. But the main and general invasion came in the eighties, the
proper era from which to date machine production in America. It was
during the eighties that we witness an attempted fusion into one
organization, the Order of the Knights of Labor, of the machine-menaced
mechanics and the hordes of the unskilled.[105]

With the nineties a change comes at last. The manufacturer finally wins
his independence. Either he reaches out directly to the ultimate
consumer by means of chains of stores or other devices, or else, he
makes use of his control over patents and trade marks and thus succeeds
in reducing the wholesale-jobber to a position which more nearly
resembles that of an agent working on a commission basis than that of
the _quondam_ industrial ruler. The immediate outcome is, of course, a
considerable increase in the manufacturer's margin of profit. The
industrial class struggle begins to abate in intensity. The employer,
now comparatively free of anxiety that he may be forced to operate at a
loss, is able to diminish pressure on wages. But more than this: the
greater certainty about the future, now that he is a free agent, enables
him to enter into time agreements with a trade union. At first he is
generally disinclined to forego any share of his newly acquired freedom
by tying himself up with a union. But if the union is strong and can
offer battle, then he accepts the situation and "recognizes" it. Thus
the class struggle instead of becoming sharper and sharper with the
advance of capitalism and leading, as Marx predicted, to a social
revolution, in reality, grows less and less revolutionary and leads to a
compromise or succession of compromises,--namely, collective trade
agreements.

But the manufacturer's emancipation from the middleman need not always
lead to trade agreements. In the shoe industry this process did not do
away