Note 207 — Chapter III

In a manuscript essay on the different forms of association, entitled “Trades Unions condemned, Trade Clubs justified,” Place gives us the distinction between the two. “A trade society,” he says, “that is, a club consisting of the journeymen in any one trade which does not form part of a union of several trades, which does not appoint delegates to meet other delegates, is a very different thing from a Trades Union, even though it may call itself a union. Trades Unions are those in which several trades, or portions of several trades, in the same line of business or in different callings, are confederated by means of delegates.” Place often refers to this distinction between the Trade Clubs, which were, according to his view, “very valuable institutions,” and the “Trades Unions,” or “associations of several or many trades in one combination,” which he regarded as “very mischievous associations.” William Lovett, too, watching the same transformation, makes, in a letter published in the Poor Man’s Guardian of August 30, 1834, exactly the same distinction.