work.[1] One of their number has been honest and frank enough to confess as much. "It is true," said Mr. John L. E. Firmin, of San Francisco, an official essayist at the Philadelphia convention, "that the prime moving cause of our organization was the betterment of our condition in dollars and cents."[2] However bald and brutal we may think such an impeachment of a noble purpose to "enhance the welfare of man" without "thought of pecuniary reward," it is the exact truth; and for a complete justification of every letter and syllable, no one need go beyond the official statements of the plumbers themselves. The annual reports of the proceedings of the National Conventions of the Master Plumbers' Association of the United States show that in spite of the exalted virtue they have assumed, they have not scorned the selfish policy and despotic practices of feudal times. By proposing the restriction of apprenticeship, by making more onerous the requirements for admission to their associations, by driving from the field they have seized upon the unauthorized persons called in to do their work, by striving to obtain a monopoly of the retail trade in plumbing supplies, they have exhibited all the traits that made the feudal corporations so odious and intolerable, and finally brought them to complete and merited ruin.
That they are not without some conception of the rights of the individual, that they realize the "irrepressible conflict" between their conduct and the principles of the institutions under which they live, there is ample evidence. When the journeymen plumbers of Omaha struck for an advance in wages, the master plumbers of the city discovered a keen enough appreciation of these rights and principles. "Resolved," said one of their resolutions in condemnation of the strikers, "that the members of the Omaha Master Plumbers' Association feel that their business interests are being unnecessarily and unwarrantably interfered with by the Journeymen's Union of this city, in that said organi-
- ↑ Besides the proofs of this statement in the text, the following may be given: A member of the New York Board of Horseshoers told me that one of the objects of their law was to increase the price for shoeing a horse all round from one dollar, charged by the poor horseshoers, to one dollar and a half and two dollars. "Ultimately," said the President of the New York Optical Society, in his address at Syracuse, June 2, 1896, published in the Optical Journal, vol. ii. No. 4, p. 124, "we should . . . endeavor to establish uniform prices for certain articles which are recognized as staples in our business. Great differences in our charges shatter public confidence in their legitimacy." Speaking of the benefits that should follow the enactment of a law to protect the barbers, the National Barber of April 30, 1896, says: "The better class of barbers would reap benefit, better prices would prevail, and the barber would then be classed with other professional men." Alluding to the barbers of Illinois, who demand protection also, a writer in the National Barber of December 31, 1896, says: "They are tired of seeing people buying their own razors, and will try to put a stop to such a one-sided practice if they can."
- ↑ Proceedings, Philadelphia, 1895, p. 90.
