4 pp. 11x8½".

Clews is best-known as author of the classic 1888 memoir, “Twenty-eight Years in Wall Street”. His firm issued Financial Circulars from the early 1880s through the turn of the century, fragile imprints on flimsy paper. This issue featured a long diatribe against the Knights of Labor, the first national trade union organization which was then launching strikes against the Railroads. While admitting “inequities” from which some workingmen suffered, Clews deplored “…the outbreak of labor derangements more general and more threatening than anything of the kind ever experienced in the history of the country… a crisis of a very serious kind…”, an attempt by employees to “wrest to their own profit power and control which, in every civilized community, are secured as to the most sacred and inalienable rights of the employer… absolutely revolutionary of the normal relations between labor and capital…utterly anarchical movement… labor disease must soon end…The demands of the Knights and their sympathizers... revolutionary…completely subversive of social order… must be resisted to the last extremity of endurance and authority… discredited and distrusted before the community at large as impracticable, unjust and reckless…their cause is gone and their organization doomed to failure. They have opened the floodgates to the immigration of foreign labor which is already pouring in by the thousands… It is by no means certain that we may not see a yet further spread of strikes, and possibly with even worse forms of violence than we have yet witnessed…” Ironically, this was published in New York hours before the Chicago “Haymarket Massacre”, the bomb explosion which killed seven policemen who were battling radicals in Haymarket Square. Several radical agitators were later tried and executed for complicity in the bombing, which did indeed precede the decline and fall of the Knights of Labor. A rare imprint of significance for both financial and labor history.