in the various localities.  That led to a well-knit national organization to control working conditions, trade rules, and strikes.  In other trades, where the competitive area of the product was still restricted to the locality, the paramount nationalizing influence was a more intensive competition for employment between migratory out-of-town journeymen and the locally organized mechanics.  This describes the situation in the printing trade, where the bulk of work was newspaper and not book and job printing.  Accordingly, the printers did not need to entrust their national officers with anything more than the control of the traveling journeymen and the result was that the local unions remained practically independent.

The third cause of concerted national action in a trade union was the organization of employers.  Where the power of a local union began to be threatened by an employers’ association, the next logical step was to combine in a national union.

The fourth cause was the application of machinery and the introduction of division of labor, which split up the established trades and laid industry open to invasion by “green hands.”  The shoemaking industry, which during the sixties had reached the factory stage, illustrates this in a most striking manner.  Few other industries experienced anything like a similar change during this period.

Of course, none of the causes of nationalization here enumerated operated in entire isolation.  In some trades one cause, in other trades other causes, had the predominating influence.  Consequently, in some trades the national union resembled an agglomeration of loosely allied states, each one reserving the right to engage in independent action and expecting from its allies no more than a benevolent neutrality.  In other trades, on the contrary, the national union was supreme in declaring industrial war and in making peace, and even claimed absolute right to formulate the civil laws of the trade for times of industrial peace.

The national trade union was, therefore, a response to obvious and pressing necessity.  However slow or imperfect may have been the adjustment of internal organizations to the conditions of the trade, still the groove was defined and consequently the amount of possible floundering largely limited.  Not so with the next step, namely the national federation of trades.  In the sixties we saw the national trade unions join with other local and miscellaneous labor organizations in the National Labor Union upon a political platform of eight-hours and greenbackism.  In 1873 the same national unions asserted their rejection of “panaceas” and politics by attempting to create in the National Labor Congress a federation of trades of a strictly economic character.  The panic and depression nipped that in the bud.  When trade unionism revived in 1879 the national trade unions returned to the idea of a national federation of labor, but this time they followed the model of the British Trades Union Congress, the organization which cares for the legislative interests of British labor.  This was the “Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada,” which was set up in 1881.