“When I was ten, I had been put in a factory to learn shoemaking, but a few months afterward was apprenticed to a man in my father’s trade,—that of a cigarmaker. I went to school at night, but it was a very meagre foundation for an education that I got this way, and I have been trying ever since to make up for it by reading and study. My lack of early opportunity to learn and develop normally, with schooling and much recreation, as a boy should, has always been a great drawback to me, but it has made me zealous in the cause of keeping the children of the workers out of the workshops and giving them a fair education. College training is not necessary for success in any but scholastic pursuits, but boys must certainly know the rudiments.” THE LATER ARISTOCRACY. “Times were bad in London when I was a child there. Gangs of workmen used to parade the streets, singing mournfully, ‘We have no work to do!’ This condition led my father to immigrate to this country, in 1863, when I was thirteen. I continued my trade of cigarmaker in New York, and joined the ‘Cigarmakers’ International Union’ when it was organized, in 1864. It now has thirty thousand members, but mine is the longest continued membership; my due card is No. 1. This was the first labor organization I belonged to. I attended its meetings and got into the habit of studying and thinking about labor matters and the many changes in the workingman’s condition that would be beneficial to himself and to the commonwealth. “I began to realize that, in the struggles of the ages, lords and nobles have lost their gold lace and velvet, but that they survive as the economic lords of the means of life, and that their aggressions must be opposed by combinations of labor—by trade unions. I began to appreciate the true dignity of labor and the importance to the state of fair conditions for workingmen. The older I grew, the more essential seemed the strong organization of labor. I felt what Wendell Phillips expressed in these words: ‘I rejoice at every effort workingmen make to organize. I hail the labor movement. It is my only hope for democracy. Organize and stand together. Let the nation hear a united demand from the laboring voice.’ THE NEED OF ORGANIZED LABOR. “Of course the idea of organized labor is a very old one. Trade unions have been in existence since the Middle Ages, but what they needed in this country was more cohesive strength. There were a great number of separate unions and some general organizations, but they were not strong enough. A new plan was needed, and we published a call which resulted in a convention at Pittsburg, in 1881, at which the American Federation of Labor was formed. Most of the delegates to that convention were strongly opposed to our project for an organization on broader lines than had been before attempted, but we carried the point, and at present the Federation has six hundred and fifty thousand members.”