Owen’s experiments, particularly at New Harmony, Indiana, demonstrated that a communistic organization of society in itself cannot save society. The strength of Owen’s social thought lay in its accentuation of the need for providing labor with opportunities of industrial initiative and co-operation. During the middle of the nineteenth century in England, the Christian socialists flourished. The founders of this movement were Frederick Maurice and Charles Kingsley. These men were clergymen who became greatly interested in the welfare of the working classes. They made clear the evils of the prevailing economic order, the formality of the Manchester school of economics, and proposed to apply the principles of Christianity to the economic system of the day. They opposed economic competition. For this method they urged the substitution of the ethical and spiritual principles of co-operation and love in industrial relationships--for both employer and employee in all their dealings with each other. Their socialism is essentially a vigorous application of Christian love to every-day relationships. The influence of Christian socialism strengthened the experiment of the Rochdale weavers who in 1844 had organized a consumers’ co-operative society. The concept of consumers’ co-operation received its original impetus from the thought and practice of Robert Owen, achieved a measurable degree of concreteness under the efforts of the Rochdale weavers, and through Maurice and Kingsley won the assistance of Christianity. In Germany, Rodbertus, Lassalle, Marx and Engels molded the thinking of socialists about the nature of human society. Rodbertus (1805–1875), the son of a university professor, was a quiet, deep thinker about social processes. According to his analysis of social development, three stages may be pointed out. The first was marked by slavery, or by private property in human beings. The second state is an indirect form of the first, namely, one of private property in land and capital. Through this type of ownership the economically fortunate or shrewd are able to exercise widespread power over the unfortunate and the uneducated. In the third state, toward which society is trending, the concept of service will rule, and private property as a dominant concept will be compelled to take a thoroughly subordinate place in human activities. The ultimate goal, according to Rodbertus, is a world communist society, with land and capital as national property, and with labor rewarded according to its productiveness.[XIV-2]