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The trade clubs of the eighteenth century inherited from the Middle Ages the tradition of strictly localised corpora- tions, the unit of government necessarily coinciding, like that of the English craft gild, with the area of the particular city in which the members lived. And we can well imagine that a contemporary observer of the constitution and policy of these little democracies might confidently have predicted that they, like the craft gilds, must inevitably remain strictly localised bodies. The crude and primitive form of popular government to which, as we have seen, the workmen were obstinately devoted, could only serve the needs of a small and local society. Government by general meeting of all fee members, administration by the forced service of indi- viduals taken in rotation from the roll—in short, the ideal of each member taking an equal and identical share in the management of public affairs—was manifestly impracticable in any but a society of which the members met each other with the frequent intimacy of near neighbours. Yet in spite of all difficulties of constitutional machinery, the historian watches these local trade clubs, in marked contrast with the craft gilds, irresistibly expanding into associations of national extent. Thus, the little friendly club which twenty -three Bolton ironfounders established in 1809 spread steadily over the whole of England, Ireland, and Wales, until to-day it numbers over 1 6,000 members, dispersed among 122 separate

The Unit of Government 73

branches. The scores of little clubs of millwrights apd steam-engine makers, fitters and blacksmiths, as if impelled by some overmastering impulse, drew together between 1 840 and 1 85 1 to form the great Amalgamated Society of Engineers. The Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (established i860) has, in the thirty-five years of its existence, absorbed several dozens of local carpenters' .'societies, and now counts within its ranks four-fifths of the organised carpenters in the kingdom. . Finally, we see organisations established, like the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants in 1872, with the deliberate intention of covering the whole trade from one end of the kingdom to the other. How slowly, painfully, and reluctantly the workmen have modified their crude ideas of democracy to meet the exigencies of a national organisation, we have already described.