sses for nearly fifty
years. There had been no great revolutionary period, but from the
beginning of the nineteenth century to the extinction of Chartism in
1848 every doctrine of trade unionism, syndicalism, anarchism, and
socialism had been debated passionately by groups of workingmen and
their friends. The principles and methods of trade unionism were being
worked out on the actual battlefield, amid riots, strikes,
machine-breaking, and incendiarism. Instinctively the masses were
associating for mutual protection and, almost unconsciously, working out
by themselves programs of action. Nevertheless, Joseph Hume, Francis
Place, Robert Owen, and a number of other brilliant men were lending
powerful intellectual aid to the workers in their actual struggle. A
group of radical economists was also defending the claims of labor.
Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin, and J. F.
Bray were all seeking to find the economic causes of the wrongs suffered
by labor and endeavoring, in some manner, to devise remedies for the
immense suffering endured by the working classes. Together with Robert
Owen, a number of them were planning labor exchanges, voluntary
communities, and even at one time the entire reorganization of the world
through the trade unions. In this ferment the cooeperative movement also
had its birth. The Rochdale Pioneers began to work out practically some
of the cooeperative ideas of Robert Owen. With L28 a pathetic beginning
was made that has led to the immensely rich cooeperative movement of
to-day. Furthermore, the Chartists were leading a vast political
movement of the workers. In support of the suffrage and of parliamentary
representation for workingmen, a wonderful group of orators and
organizers carried on in the thirties and forties an immense agitation.
William Lovett, Feargus O'Connor, Joseph Rayner Stephens, Ernest Jones,
Thomas Cooper, and James Bronterre O'Brien were among the notable and
gifted men who were then preaching throughout all England revolutionary
and socialist ideas. Such questions as the abolition of inheritances,
the nationalization of land, the right of labor to the full product of
its toil, the necessity of breaking down class control of
Parliament--these and other subversive ideas were germinating in all
sections of the English labor movement. It was a heroic
period--altogether the most heroic period in the annals of toil--in
which the most advanced and varied revolut