=Source.=--Duke of Buckingham's _Memoirs of the Courts of William
IV. and Victoria_, Vol. II. p. 84. London, 1861.
On the 28th, [April] there was a strike of the London journeymen
tailors, numbering thirteen thousand. Their masters came to a
determination not to employ men belonging to trades unions, and
after a few weeks, the journeymen were content to return to their
work on those terms.
These trades unions and their strikes were becoming an insufferable
nuisance; nevertheless, no proper effort was made to put them down.
The mischief they created was well known to the Government,[8]
their interference with trade, their atrocious oaths, impious
ceremonies, desperate tyranny, and secret assassinations, had been
brought under their observation; but Ministers could not be stirred
to any exhibition of energy for the protection either of the
manufacturer, the workman, or the public.
Even the following powerful appeal was addressed to them without
effect:
"Those whose lives and property have been endangered by these
illegal associations have a right to call on Government to employ
some additional means for their suppression. Those who wish for the
prosperity of our trade, and what is of far more importance, the
prosperity and happiness of the working-classes, should equally
desire their extinction. Those who hate oppression should give
their suffrages for the putting down these most capricious and
irresponsible of all despotism. They are alike hurtful to the
workmen who form them, to the capitalists who are the objects of
their hostility, and to the public who more remotely feel their
effects. Were we asked to give a definition of a trades union, we
should say that it is a society whose constitution is the worst of
democracies, whose power is based on outrage, whose practice is
tyranny, and whose end is self-destruction."