old days. Partly, our expanding foreign commerce has multiplied these men at our ports. Partly, there is a constant variation or contraction of industries under the stress of taxation, or of invention, or the fierceness of domestic or external rivalry, whereby men are thrown out. Partly, legislation has sometimes unwittingly favoured in the past the classes of organised labour at the expense of this unorganised class.
During the two last decades this portion of the population increased in number, and its wages, so far as the records show, did not rise, at any rate as they did in other more organised trades. But prices rose, and made its condition yearly more difficult, more serious, and sometimes cruel.
It was from these multitudes of men, thus circumstanced, that there have been issuing those forces which have caused trade unionism to give way to socialism, socialism to syndicalism, and the latter to disorder and anarchy before our eyes. To comprehend how this has happened, let us get, as General Gordon recommended, into the skin of the labourers of this class.
The casual labourer had no regard for the older trade unions, for they were the aristocracy of labour, the men on the upward way. And this was why the socialists so easily dominated the trade union movement. For though the socialists were few, the trade unionists knew that the former had the big cohorts of unskilled labour at their back, that same unskilled labour which the trade
