Besides their primary function of group-bargaining, which has come to be generally recognized as essential, unions are performing a variety of services hardly less important to their members, and serviceable to society at large. In the way of influencing legislation they have probably done more than all other agencies together to combat child-labor, excessive hours, and other inhuman and degrading kinds of work; also to provide for safeguards against accident, for proper sanitation of factories, and the like. In this field their work is as much defensive as aggressive, since employing interests, on the other side, are constantly influencing legislation and administration to their own advantage. Their function as spheres of fellowship and self-development is equally vital and less understood. To have a we-feeling, to live shoulder to shoulder with one’s fellows, is the only human life; we all need it to keep us from selfishness, sensuality and despair, and the hand-worker needs it even more than the rest of us. Usually without pecuniary resource and insecure of his job and his home, he is, in isolation, miserably weak and in a way to be cowed and unmanned by misfortune or mere apprehension. Drifting about in a confused society, unimportant, apparently, to the rest of the world, it is no wonder if he feels “I am no link of Thy great chain,”[128] and loses faith in himself, in life and in God. The union makes him feel that he is part of a whole, one of a fellowship, that there are those who will stand by him in trouble, that he counts for something in the great life. He gets from it that thrill of broader sentiment, the same in kind that men get in fighting for their country; his self is enlarged and enriched and his imagination fed with objects, comparatively, “immense and eternal.” Moreover, the life of labor unions and other class associations, through the training which it gives in democratic organization and discipline, is perhaps the chief guaranty of the healthy political development of the hand-working class—especially those imported from non-democratic civilizations—and the surest barrier against recklessness and disorder. That their members get this training will be evident to anyone who studies their working, and it is not apparent that they would get it in any other way. Men learn most in acting for purposes which they understand and are interested in, and this is more certain to be the case with economic aims than with any other.