Craft Unions for the purpose of preserving the crafts and maintaining the standard of living of the Craftsmen. He had a property—a commodity—to be bought and sold in the market, and through his union, he felt himself able to control the supply of that commodity and thereby affect the market to his own advantage. He resisted the encroachment of the machine upon the hand tool; he sought to limit the numbers of those possessing skill; and he endeavored to set a slow standard of production among the craftsmen. Contracts, closed shops, limited apprenticeships, high initiation fees and dues, and onerous conditions of membership were a natural result of his property ideas—the supply of his commodity must be limited, in order to boost the price. Working with tools that moved only as he applied his own skill and strength to them, and turning out a product that could be identified as the result of the labor of an individual, he thought strictly in individual terms. His craft was supreme, because all-necessary to his individual existence, and so extreme was this individual viewpoint that it was only when jurisdictional quarrels between the related crafts had become unbearable, that a federation of the craft unions was possible.
The craftsman had nothing to do with the unskilled. He looked upon them as inferior beings, and though their condition might sink to the lowest, he was not sufficiently interested in them to feel either sympathy or regret—they must look out for themselves as he did for himself. "It is the misfortune of the craftsman, that, having been compelled to operate in terms of property, the great HUMAN MOVEMENT has been lost upon him." His dread has always been that he might become "as one of these," for no matter how great his skill, or how close-knit his brotherhood, capitalism, through machine production, continually threatened the security of his position. Any economic system built upon the RIGHTS
