There was little leisure for mental improvement, for recreation or social intercourse. The best that can be said for the workingman of this period is that he enjoyed political freedom, controlled in large measure his own employment, by virtue of his owning the tools of his trade, appropriated to his own use the product of his labor and lived his quiet, uneventful round to the end of his days. This was a new country, with boundless stretches of virgin soil. There was ample room and opportunity, air and sunlight, for all. There was no millionaire in the United States; nor was there a tramp. These types are the products of the same system. The former is produced at the expense of the latter, and both at the expense of the working class. They appeared at the same time in the industrial development and they will disappear together with the abolition of the system that brought them into existence. The application of machinery to productive industry was followed by tremendous and far-reaching changes in the whole structure of society. First among these was the change in the status of the worker, who, from an independent mechanic or small producer, was reduced to the level of a dependent wageworker. The machine had leaped, as it were, into the arena of industrial activity, and had left little or no room for the application of the worker’s skill or the use of his individual tools. The economic dependence of the working class became more and more rigidly fixed—and at the same time a new era dawned for the human race. The more or less isolated individual artisans were converted into groups of associated workers and marshalled for the impending social revolution. It was at this time that the trades-union movement began to take definite form. Unorganized, the workers were not only in open competition with each other for the sale of their labor power in the labor market, but their wages could be reduced, and their hours of labor lengthened at will, and they were left practically at the mercy of their employers. It is interesting to note the spirit evinced by the pioneers of unionism, the causes that impelled them and the reasons they assigned for banding themselves together in defense of their common interests. In this connection we again quote from Professor Ely’s “Labor Movement in America,” as follows: