Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. TRADE UNIONS AS THE PIONEERS OF SOCIAL REFORM. ALMOST every humanitarian measure adopted during the igth century was first publicly proposed in a trade union. And all our present ideals of a more perfect economic system, of a just, co-operative method of producing and distributing wealth, were first appreciated and welcomed by labor organizations. In the investigation of this subject, the first fact which we cannot escape is that this republic, in its early days, was on a lower level than the Russia of to-day, so far as the treatment of working people was concerned. The most barbarous cruelties were inflicted upon those whose only crime was poverty; and most of the horrors of Siberia were in full swing in erery one of the thirteen States. In 1789 the treadmill was always going; the pillory and stocks were never empty; the branding-iron was seldom cold; and the whippingpost was always crimsoned with fresh blood. If a man without political influence imitated the bankers of those days, and manufactured paper money, he was not only imprisoned but had his ears cut off. If a starving bookkeeper robbed a rich farmer's hen house of a hatful of eggs, he was hanged. The terrible law of imprisonment for debt was not repealed until 1831,—48 years after the War of Independence. In New York, in 1816, the debtors' jail held 1,984 prisoners, nearly all for sums under $25. In two years and three months Boston imprisoned 3,492 for debt, 2,000 of them having been arrested for debts under $20, and 430 of them being women. This brought distress to over 10,000 people. One Boston worker was confined in jail for 30 years, for a trifling indebtedness. During every panic, or after a failure of the crops, the jails were packed like egg-boxes with men and women whose only wrong-d... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.