Under these circumstances, we need not be surprised that labour, the prime factor in industry, has international interests and relations of the most serious importance. Its antagonism to capitalism must declare itself on the international arena. In the competitive struggles of the last sixty years, the cheap labour of one nation has not seldom been thrown into the scale to weigh down the dear labour of another. Irishmen, Germans, Belgians, and Italians have often rendered unavailing the efforts of English and French workmen for a higher standard of living. Continuous emigration from Europe depresses American labour. The Chinese and other Eastern races, habituated to a very low standard of subsistence, menace the workmen of America and Australia. The great industry which is now being established in the East will be a most serious danger alike to workmen and capitalists in the Western World. The capitalists of most countries have long sought to shield themselves against the consequences of competition by protection, by combinations tacit or avowed among themselves, of wide and frequently international magnitude. In view of the facts that we have indicated, in view of the example thus set them, why should not the working men seek to regulate their international interests? Efforts towards the international organisation of labour have proceeded chiefly from men who, banished from their own country by reactionary governments, have carried to other lands the seeds of new thought, and, meeting abroad those of like mind and like fate with themselves, have naturally planned the overthrow of their common oppressors. The origin of the famous International Association of Working Men was largely due to such a group of exiles. In 1836, a number of German exiles at Paris formed themselves into a secret society, under the name of the _League of the Just_, the principles of which were communistic.[1] Being involved in a rising at Paris in 1839, they removed to London. Here they met with workmen belonging to the nations of Northern Europe, to which German is a common speech, and the League naturally began to assume an international character.