The employers vehemently attacked the Government for conceding, as they said, practically all the Trade Union demands.[414] But from the men’s point of view this “complete charter legalising Unions” had a serious drawback. The Bill, as was complained, “while repealing the Combination Laws, substituted another penal law against workmen” as such. A lengthy clause provided that any violent threat or molestation for the purpose of coercing either employers or employed should be severely punished. All the terms of the old Combination Laws, “molest,” “obstruct,” “threaten,” “intimidate,” and so forth, were used without any definition or limitation, and picketing, moreover, was expressly included in molestation or obstruction by a comprehensive prohibition of “persistently following” any person, or “watching or besetting” the premises in which he was, or the approach to such premises. The Act of 1859, which had expressly legalised peaceful persuasion to join legal combinations, was repealed.[415] It seemed only too probable that the Government measure would make it a criminal offence for two Trade Unionists to stand quietly in the street opposite the works of an employer against whom they had struck, in order to communicate peacefully the fact of the strike to any workmen who might be ignorant of it. It does not appear that Bruce’s fiercely resented “Third Clause” was intended to effect any alteration in the law. Its comprehensive prohibition of violence, threats, intimidation, molestation, and obstruction did no more than sum up and codify the various judicial decisions of past years under which the Trade Unionists had suffered. But the law had hitherto been obscure and conflicting; both the statutes and the judicial decisions had proceeded largely from a presumption against the very existence of Trade Unionism which was now passing away; and the workmen and their advisers not unreasonably feared the consequences of an explicit re-enactment of provisions which practically made criminal all the usual methods of trade combination. A recent decision had brought the danger home to the minds of the Trade Union leaders and their legal friends. In July 1867 a great strike had broken out among the London tailors, in which the masters’ shops had been carefully “picketed.”[416] Druitt, Shorrocks, and other officers of the Union were thereupon indicted, not for personal violence or actual molestation, but for the vague crime of conspiracy. The Judge (Baron, afterwards Lord, Bramwell) held that pickets, if acting in combination, were guilty of “molestation” if they gave annoyance only by black looks, or even by their presence in large numbers, without any acts or gestures of violence, and that if two or more persons combined to do anything unpleasant and annoying to another person they were guilty of a common law offence. The Tailors’ officers and committeemen were found guilty merely of organising peaceful picketing, and it