with competition. In other industries such an emancipation was
identical with the coming in of the "trust," or a combination of
competing manufacturers into a monopoly. As soon as the "trust" becomes
practically the sole employer of labor in an industry, the relations
between labor and capital are thrown almost invariably back into the
state of affairs which characterized the merchant-capitalist system at
its worst, but with one important difference. Whereas under the
merchant-capitalist system the employer was _obliged_ to press down on
wages and fight unionism to death owing to cut-throat competition, the
"trust," its strength supreme in both commodity and labor market, can do
so and usually does so _of free choice_.

The character of the labor struggle has been influenced by cyclical
changes in industry as much as by the permanent changes in the
organization of industry and market. In fact, whereas reaction to the
latter has generally been slow and noticeable only over long periods of
time, with a turn in the business cycle, the labor movement reacted
surely and instantaneously.

We observed over the greater part of the history of American labor an
alternation of two planes of thought and action, an upper and a lower.
On the upper plane, labor thought was concerned with ultimate goals,
self-employment or cooperation, and problems arising therefrom, while
action took the form of politics. On the lower plane, labor abandoned
the ultimate for the proximate, centering on betterments within the
limits of the wage system and on trade-union activity. Labor history in
the past century was largely a story of labor's shifting from one plane
to another, and then again to the first. It was also seen that what
determined the plane of thought and action at any one time was the state
of business measured by movements of wholesale and retail prices and
employment and unemployment. When prices rose and margins of employers'
profits were on the increase, the demand for labor increased and
accordingly also labor's strength as a bargainer; at the same time,
labor was compelled to organize to meet a rising cost of living. At such
times trade unionism monopolized the arena, won strikes, increased
membership, and forced "cure-alls" and politics into the background.
When, however, prices fell and margins of profit contracted, labor's
bargaining strength waned, strikes were lost, trade unions faced the
danger of extinction, and "cure-alls"