We now have to consider what a union of proletarians can do to defend their livelihood from the continual encroachments of Capitalism. First, when the union is sufficiently complete, it enables them to face the employer without any risk of being told that if they will not submit to his terms others will. If nearly all the bricklayers in a town form a union, and each pays into it week by week a small contribution until they have a little fund to fall back on, then, if their employers attempt to reduce their wages, they can, by refusing to work and living on their fund, bring the employers’ business to a dead stop for weeks or months, according to the size of the fund. This is called a strike. They can strike not only against a reduction of wages but for an increase, or for a reduction of their working hours, or for anything that may be in dispute between them and the employers. Their success will depend on the state of the employers’ business. The employers can practically always wait if they choose until the strike fund is exhausted, and thus starve the strikers into submission. But if trade is so flourishing at the moment, and the employers consequently in such a hurry to get on with their profit making, that they would lose more by an interruption to their business than by giving the strikers what they demand, then the employers will give in. But the employers will bide their time for a counterstrike. When trade gets slack again, and they have little or nothing to lose by shutting up their works for a while, they reduce the wage, and lock out all the workers who will not submit to the reduction. This is why an employers’ strike is called a lock-out. The newspapers use the word strike for strikes and lock-outs indiscriminately, because their readers blame the workers instead of the employers for a strike; but some of the greatest so-called strikes should have been called lock-outs. A boom in trade always produces a series of strikes which are generally successful. A falling-off in trade produces a series of lock-outs; and they, too, are generally successful, the one series undoing the work of the other in a dreary see-saw. After the war we went through a gigantic boom followed by a disastrous slump, with strikes and lock-outs all complete. Your own experience of these civil wars of strike and lock-out must have left you convinced that they are public disasters which would have no sort of sense in a well ordered community. But let that pass for the moment. We have not yet finished our study of primitive Trade Unionism, nor seen what it led to besides saving up for a strike and then “downing tools”.