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 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" and politics received their day in court. Labor would turn to government and politics only as a last resort, when it had lost confidence in its ability to hold its own in industry. This phenomenon, noticeable also in other countries, came out with particular clearness in America.