“Many complaints are brought to us, who advise the trades. When they are frivolous, we are unwilling to disturb the harmony of employers and workmen; we reason with the complainant, and the thing dies away. When the grievance is substantial, we take it out of the individual's hands and lay it before the working committee. A civil note is sent to the master; or a respectable member of the committee calls on him, and urges him to redress the grievance, but always in kind and civil terms. The master generally assents: experience has taught him it is his wisest course. But if he refuses, we are bound to report the refusal to a larger committee, and sometimes a letter emanates from them, reminding the master that he has been a loser before by acts of injustice, and hinting that he may be a loser again. I do not quite approve this form of communication. But certainly it has often prevented the mischief from spreading further. Well, but perhaps he continues rebellious. What follows? We can't lock up facts that affect the trade; we are bound to report the case at the next general meeting. It excites comments, some of them perhaps a little intemperate; the lower kind of workmen get inflamed with passion, and often, I am sorry to say, write ruffianly letters, and now and then do ruffianly acts, which disgrace the town, and are strongly reprobated by us. Why, Mr. Little, it has been my lot to send a civil remonstrance, written with my own hand, in pretty fair English--for a man who plied bellows and hammer twenty years of my life--and be treated with silent contempt; and two months after to be offering a reward of twenty or thirty pounds, for the discovery of some misguided man, that had taken on himself to right this very matter with a can of gunpowder, or some such coarse expedient.” “Yes, but, sir, what hurts me is, you don't consider me to be worth a civil note. You only remonstrated with Cheetham.” “You can't wonder at that. Our trade hasn't been together many years: and what drove us together? The tyranny of our employers. What has kept us together? The bitter experience of hard work and little pay, whenever we were out of union. Those who now direct the trades are old enough to remember when we were all ground down to the dust by the greedy masters; and therefore it is natural, when a grievance arises, we should be inclined to look to those old offenders for redress in the first instance. Sometimes the masters convince us the fault lies with workmen; and then we trouble the master no more than we are forced to do in order to act upon the offenders. But, to come to the point: what is your proposal?” “I beg to be admitted into the union.” “What union?” “Why, of course, the one I have offended, through ignorance. The edge-tool forgers.” Jobson shook his head, and said he feared there were one or two objections.