But a cause more fundamental perhaps than all other causes of the failure of cooperation in the United States is to be found in the difficulties of successful entrepreneurship. In the labor movement in the United States there has been a failure, generally speaking, to appreciate the significance of management and the importance which must be imputed to it. Glib talk often commands an undeserved confidence and misleads the wage earner. Thus by 1888, three or four years after it had begun, the cooperative movement had passed the full cycle of life and succumbed. The failure, as said, was hastened by external causes and discrimination. But the experiments had been foredoomed anyway,--through the incompatibility of producers' cooperation with trade unionism. The cooperators, in their eagerness to get a market, frequently undersold the private employer expecting to recoup their present losses in future profits. In consequence, the privately employed wage earners had to bear reductions in their wages. A labor movement which endeavors to practice producers' cooperation and trade unionism at the same time is actually driving in opposite directions. FOOTNOTES: [20] See Chapter 1. [21] In the thirties the term "union" was reserved for the city federations of trades. What is now designated as a trade union was called trade society. In the sixties the "Union" became the "trades' assembly." [22] See below, 152-154. [23] See below, 285-290, for a discussion why American labor looks away from legislation. [24] The Constitution read as follows: "It alone possesses the power and authority to make, amend, or repeal the fundamental and general laws and regulations of the Order; to finally decide all controversies arising in the Order; to issue all charters.... It can also tax the members of the Order for its maintenance." [25] See above, 98-100. [26] The "local assemblies" generally followed in practice trade lines, but the district assemblies were "mixed." [27] See above, 100-101. CHAPTER 6 STABILIZATION, 1888-1897 The Great Upheaval of 1886 had, as we saw, suddenly swelled the membership of trade unions; consequently, during several years following, notwithstanding the prosperity in industry, further growth was bound to proceed at a slower rate.