In the earlier part of the second century, under Trajan, two little statements show what was going on. A guild or trade union of firemen in Asia Minor wished to be incorporated: but the emperor forbade, because such trade guilds became political centres. There must have been some experience of such movement for it to be anticipated. The other statement is that the more able and wealthy men avoided entering the guild of permanent aldermen, or _curia_, because of the burdens which were thrown upon them. A century later, about 230 A.D., all trades were organised into corporations or trades unions, recognised by the government, instead of being only private societies as before. This seems to have been a compulsory unionism; but there was some difference in class between this trades unionism and our own. In Rome the trades were in the hands of smaller men, and not of large firms and companies as much as with us; and on the other hand the mere mechanic was usually a slave, this slave labour being economically the equivalent of machinery in our time. Hence the Roman trades unions were small employers of the status of our plumbers or upholsterers, more than, as with us, a large mass of crude labour organised against all capital. They were trade unions, rather than unions of the mechanics as against the managers. The compulsory entry of all the master employers into a union would no doubt be a step very welcome to modern unionism; and the compulsory extension of it, so as to leave no free labour, would be an ideal condition, in which picketing would be quite superseded by legal compulsion to join the union. The differences therefore were mainly such as our trades unions would desire, and aim at in future; in short unionism by 230 A.D. was more developed than it is at present with us.