vacated. This is, perhaps, a rather pedantic definition of a very familiar thing. It serves, however, to emphasize two very essential points: (a) Strikes are not always declared for the laudable purpose of improving conditions of employment. Strikers, indeed, are often animated by the loftiest altruism, but sometimes they are animated chiefly by a desire for mere revenge or retaliation. (b) Secondly, the mistake must not be made of assuming that the strike is a mere cessation of work. When workmen quietly leave their employer and seek work elsewhere, we do not describe their action as a "strike. In the average or normal strike measures are always taken to induce competing workmen not to take the places vacated by the strikers. In other words an attempt-it may be lawful or unlawful—is made to prevent the employer from obtaining an adequate supply of labor.

Strikers, however, frequently fail in preventing the employer from securing an adequate supply of labor, and in this event other forms of pressure are brought to bear upon him. When instead of, or in addition to, endeavor, ing to prevent the employer from securing an adequate amount of labor, measures are taken to deprive him of his customers or the materials necessary in his business, the combination becomes to this extent a boycott.

2. History of Strikes: Strikes are as old as the wage. system itself, and the slave insurrections, peasant revolts and labor wars which frequently occurred before the emergence of the wage system, prove the existence in that

earlier epoch of all the elements of the strike save those which arise from that system itself. In Germany we have references to a strike among the journeymen girdlemakers of Breslau as early as 1329, and in 1349 the tanners of Paris struck for an increase of wages. In England, Mr. and Mrs. Webb have unearthed evidence of a strike-and possibly of a permanent trade union-as early as 1387 among the serving men of the London cordwainers; while in France during the fifteenth century, according to D'Avenel in his Paysans et Ouvriers Depuis Sept Cents Ans, strikes were plentiful, not so numerous as to-day, but relatively quite as serious in their consequences and more violent in their conduct. An amusing account of a sixteenth century strike is noted by the Webbs in the opening chapter of their History of Trade Unionism. "In 1538 the bishop of Ely reports to Cromwell that twenty-one journeymen shoemakers of Wisbech have assembled on a hill without the town and sent three of their number to summon all the master shoemakers to meet them, in order to insist upon an advance in their wages, threatening that 'there shall none come into the town to serve for that wages within a twelfth-month and a day, but we woll have an harme or a legge of hym, except they woll take an othe, as we have doon.'"

Just when the first strike occurred in the American colonies is not known, but in the celebrated trial of the journeymen cordwainers at New York in 1810, reference was made to a strike among certain bakers-probably of New York City-which occurred in 1741, and in Phila

delphia an association of journeymen shoemakers conducted a series of strikes in 1796, 1798, and 1799, referring to which one of the employers involved said "that for several years he had lost as much as $4,000 annually through inability to fulfill his contracts, consequent upon the refusal of the journeymen's association to allow their members to work in his shop along with men who did not belong to the organization. It was also developed in the testimony that workmen had been threatened and even severely beaten, for working against the orders of the association, and that practically the modern system of boycotting was in full operation."" By 1809 the terms "scab," "strike," "general turn-out," etc., were in common use. By 1835 strikes had become so common that the New York Daily Advertiser declared: "Strikes are all the fashion," With the violent and widespread railroad strikes of 1877, came the first strike of national magnitude and importance, which seriously impaired the business of the country and necessitated the calling out of state and national troops. The Commissioner of Labor has secured, without attempting a complete or exhaustive study, record of 1,440 strikes and lockouts which occurred in the United States prior to 1881.

It is impossible to make any detailed study of the his tory of the strike in this work, but the ancient origin of the strike and its persistent recurrence throughout modern history warrant the conclusion that the strike itself has been an inseparable accompaniment of the wage system,

1 Sixteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, p. 932.

Wherever wage contracts are made, there they will be terminated: this much is a truism. But that wherever wage contracts are made, workmen will combine to terminate them in concert, and unite in inducing other workmen not to take their places, is something more than a truism.

3. Statistics of Strikes: Since 1881 the Bureau of Labor has regularly investigated the strikes and lockouts occurring in this country, which lasted for one day or more; and the principal statistics for the twenty years 18811900 are given in this and the two succeeding sections. For the most part the figures are left to tell their own story, and the reader is advised to study them carefully as they are full of significance. In the original tables, strikes and lockouts are distinguished, but, as the Commissioner of Labor truly says, "these two classes of industrial disturbances are practically alike," and in the following tables the statistics of strikes and lockouts are combined whenever possible.1

Contrary

The figures in Table I speak for themselves. to the general opinion, perhaps, nearly 52 per cent. of the employees involved in strikes succeeed in winning all or part of their demands; and since 1886, at least, strikes have not been increasing as fast as the population of the country. Thus between 1890 and 1900 the general population increased 20.7 per cent., the breadwinners ten years of age and over, 27.8 per cent., and the wage earners in manufacturing industries 25.1 per cent. On the other

* Statistical material from the Sixteenth Annual Report of the (United States) Commissioner of Labor, pp. 11-42.