Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/618

 598 satisfactory. What can be done at one place, however, can be done at another. Such cases as these serve to loosen the bond which has heretofore made a geographical and geological unit of the gas-blower's calling. Already this disintegrating force is at work, and there is plainly visible a scattering of glass works. In New England old enterprises are slowly reviving. New plants are being built and projected in New Jersey. In the new South there is much activity. Large works are established in Virginia, at Roanoke and Buena Vista, while others are talked of for Buchanan. A substantial project has taken form at Denver. The Board of Trade Reports of the enterprising cities of the new State of Washington mention glass sand among their natural resources, and look to the speedy establishment of glass-houses in their midst. On all sides is to be seen this delocalization of the industry. For such a large country this seems indeed more like the static condition of affairs, since much of the glass product is too fragile and too bulky for ready transportation. Another most important tendency has been at work for some years past in the matter of labor organization among the glass-blowers, and is perhaps more potent now than ever. In such concentrated centers of the glass manufacture as Pittsburg the solidarity of labor is doing much to place the economic advantage in the hands of less compact and less affiliated bodies of workers in the outlying districts. Where labor is well organized and so perpetually on the defensive as at Pittsburg the most stringent regulations are forced upon manufacturers in regard to the number of apprentices who shall work at each furnace and attend each master blower. In consequence of this jealous watchfulness, much work which could as well be done by unskilled and less expensive labor must be reserved for those who are duly accredited by the unions and who receive schedule pay. In other districts where Nature has been less kind and trade-unionism less powerful, it is possible to make some of the commoner forms of glassware, such as bottles particularly, at a lower cost than in the more highly favored districts, for the simple reason that the manufacturers are at liberty to employ whom they will, and let unskilled labor do the work proper to it. This is a factor not to be lightly considered, for it is to-day sending business into the hands of out-of-the-way glass-houses, and it promises in the future to be very powerful in determining the course of the industry. It is a vexed question, but, if one is to judge from past industrial history, the victory will not be in favor of solidarity. The desire to hamper and restrict the growth of an industry by saying who shall and who shall not participate in it, is a remnant of the old mediæval guild spirit which is not in harmony with the modern way of thinking. It is much as if farmers attempted to dictate who should and who