arose as soon as "the great bulk of the workers had ceased to be
independent producers, themselves controlling the processes and
owning the materials and product of their labour, and had passed
into the conditions of lifelong wage-earners, possessing neither the
instruments of production nor the commodity in its finished state." ⁸
This separation of classes or the separation of the worker from the
means of production preceded, to some extent, the development of
the factory system. The reduction of the worker to a mere wage-
earner, dependent upon others for employment, may have come about
as a result of one or many of several causes. In the tailoring trade,
the masters came from a small segment--the journeymen who had
acquired the highest level of skills. The great majority of the workers
were poor, employed as sewers who prepared the material for their
more skilled brethren. Increasing capital requirements accentuated
the class divisions within the trade. It was possible

to start a business in a back street as an independent master tailor with
no more capital or skill than the average journeyman could command,
yet the making of fine clothes worn by the Court and the gentry de-
manded then, as now, a capital and a skill which put the extensive and
lucrative trade altogether out of the reach of the thousands of journey-
men whom it employed. ⁹

In the woolen industry, class differentiation with its mass of
permanent wage-earners followed the rise of the "rich clothiers,"
who provided the raw materials, and encouraged the division of labor
so that a different set of workers would be employed at each stage of
manufacturing. The merchant capitalists or clothiers purchased the
wool, had it carded and spun into yarn by one group of workers, had
it changed into cloth by another group, the weavers, and finally turned
the product over to a new set of workers to be dressed. While the
workers still retained the tools of their trade, they could acquire, as
a rule, neither the capital nor the knowledge to enter business. Conse-
quently, a class of permanent wage-earners who had scant hopes of
ever becoming capitalists arose, with the result that permanent
organizations of labor were devised to protect the standard of life.

The universal cause which accounts for the origin of trade unionism
is the separation of the worker from the means of production with
the consequent rise of a permanent class of workers dependent upon
an employer. While other conditions may tend to create a permanent

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