Excerpt from Trade Unions and the LawFor this reason the genuine Trade Unionists have all to lose by the conversion of their organisations into political bodies, whereas the Socialists have all to gain, as they have no use for, and see no value in, the Unions apart from politics.It is altogether wrong to claim, as the socialist-labour Party are doing, that the Unions have for the past forty years engaged in political activities in the same sense as they have recently been doing but it is true that a few Unions, chie¿y amongst the miners, have sent one or more Of their members to Parliament to watch their industrial interests, but on all other matters they were wholly free to Obey the dictates of their own conscience and the wishes of their constituencies. In other words the Unions only paid for the industrial services and recognised no party politics.It was not until after the year 1900 that anything of a party nature was to be found in any Trade Union rules. Political and religious matters were purposely kept outside the Unions as being subjects-likely to cause dissension amongst the members, and in some cases the rules provided for fines if any member insisted in introducing such subjects. The more general method was to provide a fine for disregard of the Chairman's ruling in the branches, and the bye-laws debarred the introduction of political and religious matters, and thus the fines were more indirect but not less real.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.