tant and influential part of the working classes, acknowledged by
the law, more or less fully approved by public opinion, and
influential in national policy. It is to be noticed that while the
legalization of trade unions was at first carried out under the claim
and with the intention that the workingmen would thereby be relieved
from restrictions and given a greater measure of freedom, yet the
actual effect of the formation of trade unions has been a limitation
of the field of free competition as truly as was the passage of the
factory laws. The control of the government was withdrawn, but the men
voluntarily limited their individual freedom of action by combining
into organizations which bound them to act as groups, not as
individuals. The basis of the trade unions is arrangement by the
collective body of wages, hours, and other conditions of labor for all
its members instead of leaving them to individual contract between the
employer and the single employee. The workman who joins a trade union
therefore divests himself to that extent of his individual freedom of
action in order that he may, as he believes, obtain a higher good and
a more substantial liberty through collective or associated action.
Just in as far, therefore, as the trade-union movement has extended
and been approved of by law and public opinion, just so far has the
ideal of individualism been discredited and its sphere of
applicability narrowed. Trade unions therefore represent the same
reaction from complete individual freedom of industrial action as do
factory laws and the other extensions of the economic functions of
government discussed in the last chapter.

*83. Employers' Organizations.*--From this point of view there has been
a very close analogy between the actions of workingmen and certain
recent action among manufacturers and other members of the employing
classes. In the first place, employers' associations have been formed
from time to time to take common action in resistance to trade unions
or for common negotiations with them. As early as 1814 the master
cutlers formed, notwithstanding the combination laws, the "Sheffield
Mercantile and Manufacturing Union," for the purpose of keeping down
piecework wages to their existing rate. In 1851 the "Central
Association of Employers of Operative Engineers" was formed to resist
the strong union of the "Amalgamated Engineers." They have also had
their national bodies, such as the "Iron Trade Empl