Ages.[108] The triumphant manufacturers presented Serjeant Onslow with several pieces of plate for his championship of commercial liberty.[109] So thoroughly had the new doctrine by this time driven out the very recollection of the old ideals from the mind of the governing class that it was now the operatives who were regarded as innovators, and we are hardly surprised to find another committee gravely declaring that “the right of every man to employ the capital he inherits, or has acquired, according to his own discretion, without molestation or obstruction, so long as he does not infringe on the rights or property of others, is one of those privileges which the free and happy constitution of this country has long accustomed every Briton to consider as his birthright.”[110] But it must be added that the governing class was by no means impartial in the application of its new doctrine. Mediæval regulation acted not only in restriction of free competition in the labour market to the pecuniary loss of the employers, but also in restriction of free contract to the loss of the employees, who could only obtain the best terms for their labour by collective instead of individual bargaining. Consequently the operatives, if they had clearly understood the situation, would have been as anxious to abolish the laws against combination as to maintain those fixing wages and limiting apprenticeship; just as the capitalists, better informed, were no less resolute in maintaining the anti-combination laws than in repealing the others. We shall presently see how slow the workers were to realise this, in spite of the fact that the laws against combinations of workmen were maintained in force, and even increased in severity. Strikes, and any organised resistance to the employers’ demands, were put down with a high hand. The first twenty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a legal persecution of Trade Unionists as rebels and revolutionists. This persecution, thwarting the healthy growth of the Unions, and driving their members into violence and sedition, but finally leading to the repeal of the Combination Laws and the birth of the modern Trade Union Movement, will be the subject of the next chapter. FOOTNOTES: [3] In the first edition we said “of their employment.” This has been objected to as implying that Trade Unions have always contemplated a perpetual continuance of the capitalist or wage-system. No such implication was intended. Trade Unions have, at various dates during the past century at any rate, frequently had aspirations towards a revolutionary change in social and economic relations. [4] Riley’s _Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries_ (1888), p. 495 (partly cited in _Trade Unions_, by William Trant, 1884). [5] _Ibid._ pp. 542-3. [6] _Ibid._ p. 609; Clode’s _Early History of the Merchant Taylors’ Company_, vol. i. p. 63.