ctually put into
effect. Such a boycott as this may therefore be described as amounting
to a potential or actual sympathetic strike somewhat strategically
planned. If the strike actually comes, it may assist the men in whose
cause it is undertaken; and the principles which govern such a
boycott are those which govern strikes of the sympathetic kind.

_Direct Consumers' Boycotts economically Legitimate._--The other type
of boycott is a concurrent refusal to buy and use certain consumers'
goods. Legally it has been treated as a conspiracy to injure a
business, but the prohibition has lost its effectiveness, as legal
requirements generally do when they are not in harmony with economic
principles. Of late there has been little disposition to enforce the
law against boycotting, and none whatever to enforce the law when the
boycott carries its point by taking a positive instead of a negative
form. The trade-label movement enjoins on men to bestow their
patronage altogether on employers included within a certain list, and
this involves withdrawing it from others; but the terms of the actual
agreement between the workers involve the direct bestowing of a
benefit and only inferentially the inflicting of an injury. The men do
not, in terms, conspire to injure a particular person's business, but
do band themselves together to help certain other persons' business.
Economic theory has little use for this technical distinction. It is
favorable rather than otherwise to every sort of direct consumers'
boycott, and is particularly favorable to the trade-label movement.
This movement may powerfully assist workers in obtaining normal rates
of pay, and it will not help them to get much more.

_The Ground of the Legitimacy of the Boycott._--An individual has a
right to bestow his patronage where he pleases, and it is essential to
the action of economic law that he should freely use this right. The
whole fabric of economic society, the action of demand and supply,
the laws of price, wages, etc., rest on this basis. Modern conditions
require that large bodies of individuals should be able concurrently
to exercise a similar right,--that organized labor should bestow its
collective patronage where it wishes. This can be done, of course,
only by controlling individual members, for the trade union does not
buy consumers' goods collectively. If it can thus control its members,
it can use in promoting its cause the extensive patronage at its
disp