The Trade Union movement originated in the necessity to provide some remedy for “the helplessness in which since the industrial revolution, the individual workman stood in relation to the capitalist employer and still more in relation to the joint-stock company and the national combine or trust.” In this initial stage it was governed by what Mr. Sidney Webb has called the “Doctrine of Vested Interests,” and it was chiefly concerned with securing those concessions and safe-guards which constitute the “Trade Union Conditions” to the suspension of which British Labour consented for the period of the war. These conditions affected the rate of wages, the length of working day, overtime, night work, Sunday duty, mealtimes, holidays, and included a countless multitude of details affecting processes, machines, the employment of boys and girls, the limitation of output, and other related subjects—the whole being an inconceivably intricate patchwork of concessions and advantages gained as the result of innumerable local skirmishes and negotiations. The policy at this stage may be properly described as one of “nibbling” at the enemies’ lines, of raiding his trenches as opportunity offered or need required; and it is a commonplace what large and substantial advantages these operations have yielded to the workers as a whole, whether unionists or not. But it was not possible that these piece-meal tactics should continue to be the chief weapon of a growing, highly organised movement which was gaining a kind of self-consciousness and a common mind; and gradually out of the experience of the Unions grew the “Doctrine of the Common Rule.” The main emphasis has now shifted from the local and sectional problem to that of establishing and maintaining a Standard Rate of Wages and a normal Working Day. This change is naturally marked by the appearance of a large scale strategy in place of the local and occasional tactics of the earlier stage; and the earlier type of labour leader is rapidly disappearing in favour of persons who are able to bring some gifts of statesmanship to the problems of labour. This is not to say that the earlier doctrine has been abandoned; rather it has been supplemented and overshadowed by the new orientation.