during 1848 from active participation in its work. And at the end of the following year a strike of the Wolverhampton tinplate-workers involved the National Association in a struggle with employers and with the law which drained its funds and destroyed its credit.[325] The later history of the association is obscure.[326] It lingered on for many years in a small way, its paid officers serving as advisers and representatives to a number of minor Trade Unions. Its principal work in later years was the promotion and support of bills for the establishment of councils of conciliation, and its persistent efforts certainly paved the way for the Joint Boards subsequently set on foot. But it ceases after 1851 to exercise any influence or play any important part in the Trade Union Movement. The National Association of United Trades stands, in constitution and objects, half-way between the revolutionary voluntaryism of 1830-4 and the Parliamentary action of 1863-75. It may, in fact, be regarded either as a belated “General Trades Union” of an improved type, or as a premature and imperfect Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union world. And although the great national Unions of the time took no part in its proceedings, its moderate and unaggressive policy was only one manifestation of the new spirit which now prevailed in Trade Union councils. We see rising up in the Unions of the better-paid artisans a keen desire to get at the facts of their industrial and social condition. This new feeling for exact knowledge may to some extent be attributed to the increasing share which the printing trades were now beginning to take in the Trade Union Movement. The student of the reports of the larger compositors’ societies, from the very beginning of the century, will be struck, not only by the moderation, but also by the elaborate Parliamentary formality--one might almost say the stateliness of their proceedings. Instead of rhetorical abuse of all employers as “the unproductive classes,” and total abstinence from investigation of the details of disputes, we find the compositors dealing only with concrete instances of hardship, and referring every important question to a “Select Committee” for inquiry and report. In 1848 the London Consolidated Society of Bookbinders, established in 1786, used part of its funds to form a library for the benefit of its members. By 1851 a reading-room furnished with daily and weekly newspapers had been opened. Four years later a similar library was established by the London Society of Compositors. In 1842, the Journeymen Steam-Engine and Machine Makers’ Friendly Society started a Mutual Improvement Class at Manchester. Even the Stonemasons, at that time a rough and somewhat turbulent body, were reached by the new desire for self-improvement. The Glasgow branch of the Scottish United Operative Masons report with pride, in 1845, that they have “formed a class for mutual instruction ... an association for moral, physical,