The Trade Unions world seems to have been quite unconscious of the gathering storm. In June 1866 138 delegates, representing all the great Unions, and a total membership of about 200,000, met at Sheffield to devise some defence against the constant use of the lock-out. The student of the proceedings of this conference will contrast with wonder the actual conduct of the Trade Union leaders with the denunciations to which these “few unscrupulous men” were at this time exposed. Nothing could be more worthy, even from the middle-class point of view, than the discussions of these representative workmen, who denounced with equal energy the readiness with which their impetuous followers came out on strike and the arbitrary lock-out of the masters, and whose resolutions express their desire for the establishment of Councils of Conciliation and the general resort to arbitration in industrial disputes.[395] Meanwhile, in order to meet the great federations of employers, they formed “The United Kingdom Alliance of Organised Trades,” to support the members of any trade who should find themselves “locked out” by their employers.[396] Unfortunately the conference utterly failed to decide what constituted a “lock-out,” as distinguished from a strike; and the “Judicial Council” of the Alliance, consisting of one delegate from each of the nine districts into which the kingdom was divided, found itself continually at issue with its constituents as to the disputes to be supported. This friction co-operated with the increasing depression of trade in causing the calls for funds to be very unwillingly responded to; and the Executive Committee, sitting at Sheffield, had seldom any cash at its command. The Alliance lingered on until about the end of 1870, when the defection of its last important Unions brought it absolutely to an end.[397] In 1866, however, the Alliance was young and hopeful. It received its first blow in October of this year, when it and the Trade Union Conference were forgotten in the sensation produced by the explosion of a can of gunpowder in a workman’s house in New Hereford Street, Sheffield.