themselves from insult is indeed a movement toward making them better and nobler men, just as the abolition of slavery in all its forms was a move in this direction. But no man is truly free if he is not secure in his right to immunity from personal insult as well as from bodily violence. It is not strange, however, that the workman, conscious of the strength of the fraternity behind him, sometimes grows arrogant and insolent toward those who must necessarily be in authority over him. Unaccustomed for generations past to other government than fear of one sort or other, he is all unused to self-control. But it is hardly possible that this should be a great evil. The body of workmen will, eventually, if not now, refuse to sanction and defend their members in any thing which their innate sense of justice must teach them is wrong. Few workingmen will causelessly ask their brotherhood to undertake the hardships and loss of prestige which accompany a strike. And even when insolence is shown toward employers or overseers, they have at least equal power to resent it, and are not, as was the laborer of a half-century ago, forced to submit to insults with outward humility.
We have already noticed the condition of the laws in reference to the laborer in former times: but the repeal of the laws oppressing the workman, and making him a servant to a master instead of a workman for an employer, has been largely due to the organized efforts of the trade unions. To them, also, we owe the passage of many acts like those for the guarding of machinery in factories, the restrictions upon the employment of child labor, and the proper care for the health, comfort, and convenience of employés in general. It cannot be said that the labor interests have always shown great wisdom in all their advocacy of new legislation, and too many acts, like those in reference to the employment of convict labor, show a lamentable retrogression. On the whole, however, there is every reason to believe that the general course of justice has been aided by the influence of the trade unions—something which can be said of very few special interests for whose benefit our legislatures have enacted laws.