reformers have been increasingly successful in all countries.
To-day, the majority of the labourers are well protected; their hours
are being reduced to the excellent average of eight, and their
children are sent to the schools instead of to the mine pit and to the
carding-room of the cotton mills.

But there were other men who also contemplated the sight of all the
belching smoke-stacks, who heard the rattle of the railroad trains, who
saw the store-houses filled with a surplus of all sorts of materials,
and who wondered to what ultimate goal this tremendous activity would
lead in the years to come. They remembered that the human race had lived
for hundreds of thousands of years without commercial and industrial
competition. Could they change the existing order of things and do away
with a system of rivalry which so often sacrificed human happiness to
profits?

This idea--this vague hope for a better day--was not restricted to a
single country. In England, Robert Owen, the owner of many cotton mills,
established a so-called "socialistic community" which was a success. But
when he died, the prosperity of New Lanark came to an end and an attempt
of Louis Blanc, a French journalist, to establish "social workshops"
all over France fared no better. Indeed, the increasing number of
socialistic writers soon began to see that little individual communities
which remained outside of the regular industrial life, would never
be able to accomplish anything at all. It was necessary to study the
fundamental principles underlying the whole industrial and capitalistic
society before useful remedies could be suggested.

The practical socialists like Robert Owen and Louis Blanc and Francois
Fournier were succeeded by theoretical students of socialism like Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels. Of these two, Marx is the best known. He was
a very brilliant Jew whose family had for a long time lived in Germany.
He had heard of the experiments of Owen and Blanc and he began to
interest himself in questions of labour and wages and unemployment. But
his liberal views made him very unpopular with the police authorities of
Germany, and he was forced to flee to Brussels and then to London, where
he lived a poor and shabby life as the correspondent of the New York
Tribune.

No one, thus far, had paid much attention to his books on economic
subjects. But in the year 1864 he organised the first international
association of working men and three years