The shipwrights of Liverpool, and probably those of other shipbuilding ports, were combined in trade benefit clubs early in the eighteenth century. At Liverpool, where this society had very successfully maintained the customary limitation of apprentices, the members were all freemen of the municipal corporation, and as such entitled to the Parliamentary franchise. As a result the shipwrights’ organisation became intensely political, by which was meant chiefly the negotiation of the sale of its members’ votes. At the election of 1790, when Whigs and Tories compromised in order to avoid the expense of a contest, it was the Shipwrights’ Society, then at the zenith of its power, which insisted on forcing a contest by nominating its own candidate, and, in the end, actually put him at the head of the poll. The society, which had a contribution in 1824 of fifteen pence per month, and had built almshouses for its old members, is reputed to have been at one time so powerful that any employer who refused to obey its rules found his business absolutely brought to a standstill.[66] But the cardinal example of the conception of Trade Unionism with the divorce of the worker from the instruments of production is seen in the rapid rise of trade combinations on the introduction of the factory system. We have already noticed that Trade Unions in Yorkshire began with the erection of factories and the use of power. When, in 1794, the clothiers of the West Riding failed to prevent the Leeds merchants from establishing large factories, “wherein it is intended to employ a great number of persons now working at their own homes,” the journeymen took the matter into their own hands, and founded “the Clothiers’ Community,” or “Brief Institution,” professedly to gather “briefs” or levies for the relief of the sick, and to carry on a Parliamentary agitation for hampering the factory owners by a legal limitation of apprentices. “It appears,” reports the Parliamentary Committee of 1806, “that there has existed for some time an institution or society among the woollen manufacturers, consisting chiefly of clothworkers. In each of the principal manufacturing towns there appears to be a society, composed of deputies chosen from the several shops of workmen, from each of which town societies one or more deputies are chosen to form what is called the central committee, which meets, as occasion requires, at some place suitable to the local convenience of all parties. The powers of the central committee appear to pervade the whole institution; and any determination or measure which it may adopt may be communicated with ease throughout the whole body of manufacturers. Every workman, on his becoming a member of the society, receives a certain card or ticket, on which is an emblematical engraving--the same, the Committee are assured, both in the North and the West of England--that by producing his ticket he may at once show he belongs to the society.