The other doctrine which Justice Shaw advanced in this case has been less generally accepted. 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 he meant that "when a question of dispute arose between the employers and the employed, instead of having it as now, when the one often refuses to even acknowledge or discuss the question with the other, if they were required to submit the question to arbitration, or to meet on the same level before an impartial tribunal, there is no doubt but what the result would be more in our favor than it is now, when very often public