The guarantee worked absolutely in the case of the latter, for the Federation knew no mercy when a rival union attempted to undermine the strength of an organized union of a craft.  The trade unions have learned from experience with the Knights of Labor that their deadliest enemy was, after all, not the employers’ association but the enemy from within who introduced confusion in the ranks.  They have accordingly developed such a passion for “regularity,” such an intense conviction that there must be but one union in a given trade that, on occasions, scheming labor officials have known how to checkmate a justifiable insurgent movement by a skillful play upon this curious hypertrophy of the feeling of solidarity.  Not only will a rival union never be admitted into the Federation, but no subordinate body, state or city, may dare to extend any aid or comfort to a rival union.

The Federation exacted but little from the national and international unions in exchange for the guarantee of their jurisdiction:  A small annual per capita tax; a willing though a not obligatory support in the special legislative and industrial campaigns it may undertake; an adherence to its decisions on general labor policy; an undertaking to submit to its decision in the case of disputes with other unions, which however need not in every case be fulfilled; and lastly, an unqualified acceptance of the principle of “regularity” relative to labor organization.  Obviously, judging from constitutional powers alone, the Federation was but a weak sort of a government.  Yet the weakness was not the forced weakness of a government which was willing to start with limited powers hoping to increase its authority as it learned to stand more firmly on its own feet; it was a self-imposed weakness suggested by the lessons of labor history.

By contrast the Order of the Knights of Labor, as seen already, was governed by an all-powerful General Assembly and General Executive Board.  At a first glance a highly centralized form of government would appear a promise of assured strength and a guarantee of coherence amongst the several parts of the organization.  Perhaps, if America’s wage earners were cemented together by as strong a class consciousness as the laboring classes of Europe, such might have been the case.

But America’s labor movement lacked the unintended aid which the sister movements in Europe derived from a caste system of society and political oppression.  Where the class lines were not tightly drawn, the centrifugal forces in the labor movement were bound to assert themselves.  The leaders of the American Federation of Labor, in their struggle against the Knights of Labor, played precisely upon this centrifugal tendency and gained a victory by making an appeal to the natural desire for autonomy and self-determination of any distinctive group.  But originally perhaps intended as a mere “strategic” move, this policy succeeded in creating a labor movement which