Appendix.--On the assumed connection between the Trade Unions and the Gilds in Dublin--The Rules of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union--Sliding Scales--The Summons to the First Trade Union Congress--Distribution of Trade Unionists in the United Kingdom--The Progress in Membership of particular Trade Unions--Publications on Trade Unions and Combinations of Workmen--The Relationship of Trade Unionism to the Government of Industry 721 Index 765 Other Works by Sidney and Beatrice Webb THE HISTORY OF TRADE UNIONISM CHAPTER I THE ORIGINS OF TRADE UNIONISM A Trade Union, as we understand the term, is a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their working lives.[3] This form of association has, as we shall see, existed in England for over two centuries, and cannot be supposed to have sprung at once fully developed into existence. But although we shall briefly discuss the institutions which have sometimes been described as the forerunners of Trade Unionism, our narrative will commence only from the latter part of the seventeenth century, before which date we have been unable to discover the existence in the British Isles of anything falling within our definition. Moreover, although it is suggested that analogous associations may have existed during the Middle Ages in various parts of the Continent of Europe, we have no reason to suppose that such institutions exercised any influence whatever upon the rise and development of the Trade Union Movement in this country. We feel ourselves, therefore, warranted, as we are indeed compelled, to limit our history exclusively to the Trade Unions of the United Kingdom. We have, by our definition, expressly excluded from our history any account of the innumerable instances in which the manual workers have formed ephemeral combinations against their social superiors. Strikes are as old as history itself. The ingenious seeker of historical parallels might, for instance, find in the revolt, 1490 B.C., of the Hebrew brickmakers in Egypt against being required to make bricks without straw, a curious precedent for the strike of the Stalybridge cotton-spinners, A.D. 1892, against the supply of bad material for their work. But we cannot seriously regard, as in any way analogous to the Trade Union Movement of to-day, the innumerable rebellions of subject races, the slave insurrections, and the semi-servile peasant revolts of which the annals of history are full. These forms of the “labour war” fall outside our subject, not only because they in no case resulted in permanent associations, but because the “strikers” were not seeking to improve the conditions of a contract of service into which they voluntarily entered.