But the Fenians were not the only outragemongers who frightened the comfortable classes out of their senses in 1867. The skilled artisans in many cases had employed their trade organisations to coerce by violence masters who refused to yield to the demands of their workmen, and workmen who refused to obey the orders of their Unions. Early in the year a Commission had been appointed to consider the legal position of the Unions, which was most unsatisfactory, and a separate Commission, appointed to investigate outrages which had been perpetrated at Sheffield, made some astounding revelations. They reported that the officials of the Sawgrinders’ Union had hired assassins to maim, murder, or torture people who thwarted the policy of the Union.[264] They reported that similar barbarities were practised by the officials of the Brickmakers’ and Bricklayers’ Unions in Manchester. The country rang with denunciations of the working classes, and “strikes,” such as that of the London tailors, were carried on with unparalleled acrimony. War between “the two nations,” to use Mr. Disraeli’s phrase in “Sybil,” was imminent. It is curious to observe how seldom public writers and speakers on the conflict between Labour and Capital which then raged, took the trouble to ascertain the precise position of the artisans in the struggle. The truth, however, had been told with uncompromising honesty by the Committee of the House of Commons, who in 1821 had reported that outlawry made Trades Unionists lawless. In that year it was true an Act had been passed to legalise workmen’s combinations for improving wages and reducing the hours of labour. But then this Act gave the preference to the word of the master in any dispute between him and his servant, and pedantic judges had made it a dead letter, by ruling that “all combinations in restraint of trade” were criminal. Nor had they stopped here. They roused the wrath of the working classes to white heat in 1867, by ruling in the case of Hornby _v._ Close that Trades Unions could not even hold property or funds for benevolent purposes. In fact, at that period, the position of the English working man was one of almost servile degradation, and under an extended franchise such a state of things could not last long. On the 5th of March a Conference of Trades Unionists was held in St. Martin’s Hall, London, to protest against the decision in Hornby _v._ Close, a meeting which was the germ of the great Trades Union Congress, that ultimately became a mighty power in the industrial world.[265]