such survivals as the purely trade societies of the brickmakers or the Sheffield industries. Foiled in this attempt the employers fell back upon an indictment of the Amalgamated Unions considered as friendly societies. The leading actuaries were called to prove that neither the Amalgamated Engineers nor the Amalgamated Carpenters could possibly meet their accumulating liabilities, and that these must, in a few years, inevitably bring both societies to bankruptcy. The whole of this evidence is a striking instance of the untrustworthiness of expert witnesses off their own ground. Neither Finlaison nor Tucker, who were called as actuaries on behalf of the employers, ever realised that a Trade Union, unlike a Friendly Society, possesses and constantly exercises an unlimited power to raise funds by special levies, or by increased contributions, whenever it may seem good to the majority of the members. But even had the actuarial indictment been completely warranted, it was a mistake in tactics on the part of the employers. The Commissioners found themselves shunted into an inquiry, not into the results of Trade Unionism upon the common weal, but into the arithmetical soundness of the financial arrangements which particular groups of workmen chose to make among themselves. Meanwhile the primary business of the Commission, the investigation into the Sheffield outrages, had been remitted to special “examiners,” whose local inquiry attracted far less attention than the proceedings of the main body. At first the investigation elicited little that was new; but in June 1867 the country was startled by dramatic confessions on the part of Broadhead and other members of the grinders’ trade clubs, unravelling a series of savage crimes instigated by them, and paid for out of Club funds. For a short time it looked as if all the vague accusations hurled at Trade Unionism at large were about to be justified; but the examiners reported that four-fifths of the societies even of the Sheffield trades were free from outrages, and that these had been most prevalent from 1839 to 1861, and had since declined. The only other place in which the Commissioners thought it necessary to make inquiry into outrages was Manchester, where the Brickmakers’ Union had committed many crimes, but where no complicity on the part of other trades was shown. It was made evident to all candid students that these criminal acts were not chargeable to Trade Unionism as a whole. They represented, in fact, the survival among such rough and isolated trades as the brickmakers and grinders of the barbarous usages of a time when working men felt themselves outside the law, and oppressed by tyranny.[403]