This advance in the industrial world has come about through the agitation and power of labor organizations, of which, as they exist now, trades unions were the early manifestation. The employer, as a rule, looked after his own interests mainly, and the employee alone by himself had to take what he could get and do as he was told. Just as the people, after they sunk into subjection in the earlier days, had little political power as against the nobility until they were strong enough to take it, so the laborer still would be of little account except as a more or less intelligent machine unless he had proved himself a man, with a man's aspirations and a man's energy.
Labor organizations or trades unions came into existence in England. The democratic spirit, the spirit of liberty, the Saxon spirit of independence, which wrested from kings and the nobility all the rights which the common people enjoy, has been doing in the industrial world only what it did in the political world years before.
We may say that trades unions find their prototype in the _frith guilds_ or _peace guilds_ of the Anglo-Saxon. A few words in general about them and their successors and the spirit pervading them, the causes of their existence and decay, will have a bearing on labor organizations, which are like them in "being founded on similar mental faculties and desires and as contemplating similar purposes."
These _frith guilds_ seem to have been associations of neighbors for mutual help and protection. They replaced the older brotherhood of kinsfolk, which had existed among the German races, "by a voluntary association of neighbors for the same purposes of order and self-defense." An isolated existence for a man, even a freeman, was one of danger, especially when the feudal temper of the nobles increased and the Danish incursions broke over England. The ties of kindred had become weakened, and the frith guild took the place of the family. A mutual oath bound the members together, and the monthly guild feast became the substitute for the old gathering round the family hearth. A member could call upon the guild in case of violence or wrong; when charged with crime, the guild answered for him, and when guilty, punished him; when poor, it supported him; and when dead, buried him. When these guilds were located in towns rather than in the country, they inevitably tended in time to combine, and eventually the town passed from a collection of guilds into one large guild, and we have the _town guild_. The word "town" is used in contradistinction from the word "country," just as we say "town and country," "going to town," and so on. The spirit of independence and freedom, kept alive in our town meetings here, and in our local self-government, has come down to us through those old town guilds and the boroughs of England. It is to the towns of England and not to the country that we owe much of our liberty to-day.