“A trade union,” says Mr. Webb, “is a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment.[118] The chief object of it is to elevate the social position [SN: WAGES ARTIFICIALLY KEPT UP.] of its members. * * * It is a union of individual forces in order to compete against the undue and unfair encroachments of capital into the continuance of the established well-being of the united individuals.”[119] Hence, “the trade unions wish to keep up the rates of wages, and to prevent a laborer from accepting employment, under stress of starvation, on terms which in its common judgment would be injurious to the union’s interests. And they would rather encourage idleness than cheap labor. Such idea existed with them since the beginning, or when it originated. This idea originated in 1741,” says Mr. Webb,[119] “but the special enforcing of it commenced at the beginning of the eighteenth century.” * * * And surely many an employer knows very well what the “Strike in Detail” of the trade unions under this enforcing means. The trade unions have used all the means in their power for the purpose of holding up the wages. But, if the wages have fallen notwithstanding the artificial support, their falling testifies to the presence of a mightier force pressing them down. In 1896 it was said that, “according to the last volume of the Connecticut Labor Report and the Massachusetts Statistics of Manufactures, the nominal rate of wages in [SN: GROSS INCOMES OF WORKERS DECREASED.] 1894 had declined 7 per cent below the level of 1892, while the yearly incomes of laborers had been still farther reduced by the lack of employment.” The Connecticut Report testifies that wages for the same period fell about 10 per cent, and it says that “the heavy losses of the wage-earners, however, came not from reduced pay, but from reduced employment, and that the reduction in pay and in the employment had decreased the total wage-payments 25 per cent.” And “the great mass of families in Connecticut had had their incomes reduced one-fourth,” says Dr. Spahr.[120] So that, in Connecticut and Massachusetts, together, “the family incomes of the laborers between 1892 and 1894 fell at least 20 per cent. In Pennsylvania they fell 24 per cent. The fall of wages in agriculture from 1890 to 1894 reduced the incomes of laborers to the extent of 20 per cent.”[121] And the rents of houses, on the whole, have risen against the homeless. It is not necessary to multiply the same examples in the remaining States, since we know that the supply of labor has increased throughout in the United States; and since we know that the demand for labor has proportionately decreased. And, consequently, the wages in general must have fallen according to the fundamental principles of economics, because of the increase of population without property and without resources.