Once we accept the view that a broadly conceived aim to control competitive menaces is the key to the conduct of organized labor in America, light is thrown on the causes of the American industrial class struggles.  In place of looking for these causes, with the Marxians, in the domain of technique and production, we shall look for them on the market, where all developments which affect labor as a bargainer and competitor, of which technical change is one, are sooner or later bound to register themselves.  It will then become possible to account for the long stretch of industrial class struggle in America prior to the factory system, while industry continued on the basis of the handicraft method of production.  Also we shall be able to render to ourselves a clearer account of the changes, with time, in the intensity of the struggle, which, were we to follow the Marxian theory, would appear hopelessly irregular.

We shall take for an illustration the shoe industry.[102] The ease with which shoes can be transported long distances, due to the relatively high money value contained in small bulk, rendered the shoe industry more sensitive to changes in marketing than other industries.  Indeed we may say that the shoe industry epitomized the general economic evolution of the country.[103]

We observe no industrial class struggle during Colonial times when the market remained purely local and the work was custom-order work.  The journeyman found his standard of life protected along with the master’s own through the latter’s ability to strike a favorable bargain with the consumer.  This was done by laying stress upon the quality of the work.  It was mainly for this reason that during the custom-order stage of industry the journeymen seldom if ever raised a protest because the regulation of the craft, be it through a guild or through an informal organization, lay wholly in the hands of the masters.  Moreover, the typical journeyman expected in a few years to set up with an apprentice or two in business for himself—­so there was a reasonable harmony of interests.

A change came when improvements in transportation, the highway and later the canal, had widened the area of competition among masters.  As a first step, the master began to produce commodities in advance of the demand, laying up a stock of goods for the retail trade.  The result was that his bargaining capacity over the consumer was lessened and so prices eventually had to be reduced, and with them also wages.  The next step was even more serious.  Having succeeded in his retail business, the master began to covet a still larger market,—­the wholesale market.  However, the competition in this wider market was much keener than it had been in the custom-order or even in the retail market.  It was inevitable that both prices and wages should suffer in the process.  The master, of course, could recoup himself by lowering the quality of the product, but when he did that he lost a telling argument in bargaining with the consumer or the retail merchant.  Another result of this new way of conducting the business was that an increased amount of capital was now required for continuous operation, both in raw material and in credits extended to distant buyers.