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not too much of a strain on the individual. With twenty looms, he still had broken threads only once in fifteen minutes. They were scattered over twenty looms. He merely had to keep walking back and forth to check them. A loom stops when the thread breaks. All he had to do was to be there, mend it, keep his eye out and not lose time.

What really, of course, was the background of the disgruntlement and the sense of injustice was the fact that the wages did not increase in proportion to the extra amount of production and the number of extra looms tended. The wokers tended to think of the loom as the producing unit, and to think of themselves as producing so many thousand yards per day, basing it upon the loom. But as their job increased and the number of looms they tended increased, the wages did not keep up, were not commensurate with that, and, in fact, bore no relation to the number of looms tended.

Wages had increased during the past fifty years, and during the last twenty before this time, a little, but they reflected more the general wage increase of the whole of American life and American society, rather than an increase based upon the exact loom coverage. That had always been a sore spot, a grievance. They felt that