Since the passings of the Equal Rights party, the mechanics and laborers had taken no concerted part in politics, not even as a faction. But at this period they were far from being lethargic. The recent discoveries of gold and silver had given a quickened pulse to business, enormously increasing the number of transactions and the aggregate of profits. The workers were determined to have their share of this prosperity, and acted accordingly. Old trade-unions were rapidly strengthened and new ones formed. More pay and shorter hours of work were demanded. Between the Spring of 1850 and the Spring of 1853 nearly every trade in the city engaged in one or more strikes, with almost invariable success. Having now no sincere leaders to prompt them to concerted political action, the workers oscillated listlessly between the two parties. They had lost the tremendous influence secured in the thirties, and the business element had again become dominant. Legislature and Common Council vied with each other in granting exploitative charters, and the persons who secured these, generally by bribery, were considered the leaders of public opinion. Every company demanding special privileges of the State maintained its lobby at Albany. The City Council was more easily reached, and was generally dealt with personally. Fortunes were made by plundering the city and State, and while the conduct of the agents and actual performers in this wholesale brigandage--the lobbyists, Legislators and Aldermen--was looked upon somewhat doubtfully, their employers stood before the world as the representatives of virtue and respectability. The one force which might have stood as a bulwark against this system of pillage had been so completely demoralized by its political experiences that it could now only look on and let matters drift as they would. In the Baltimore Democratic convention the Wigwam was represented by so boisterous a delegation that its speakers were denied a hearing. Among the delegates were Capt. Rynders, “Mike” Walsh and a number of the same kind. Cass was their favorite, and they shouted for him lustily; but on attempting to speak for him they were invariably howled down, despite the fact that Cass had a majority of the convention almost to the end of the balloting. The Wigwam, however, lost no time in indorsing the nomination of Franklin Pierce. In this ratification the “Barnburners” joined, ardently urging the election of candidates on a platform which held that Congress had no power under the Constitution “to interfere with the domestic institutions of the States”; which advocated compromise measures, the execution of the Fugitive Slave law, and which opposed all attempts to agitate the slavery question.