“Gladstone, surveying his hosts in 1866, appeared quite justified in telling his Conservative opponents that there was no use fighting against his social forces, ‘which move onwards in their might and majesty and which ... are marshalled on our side.’ He might have addressed the same eloquent words to the leaders of the International Working Men’s Association, who with Karl Marx at their head, were precisely at that time making a serious attempt to resuscitate Chartism and detach the masses from the Liberal Party. Socialism and independent Labour politics came to be regarded as exotic plants which could never flourish on British soil. “The trade unions renounced all class-warfare and merely tried to use their new citizenship (1867) and their growing economic organization—the first trade union congress took place in 1869—with a view to influencing the distribution of the national wealth in their favour. Their aim and end was that of a plebs striving for equality with the possessing and ruling-classes. It was, despite some struggle for the legalization of trade unionism, a period of social peace, and it lasted till about 1880.” This state of things continued in fact up to about 1885, and until that date Socialism formed really no part of official Trade Union principles. The Era of Constitutional State Socialism, 1885-1905 Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb in their _History of Trade Unionism_, revised edition, 1920, p. 374, describe the principles of the Labour Party about 1885 as follows: “_Laissez faire_ then was the political and social creed of the Trade Union leaders of this time; up to 1885 they undoubtedly represented the views current among the rank and file; at that date all observers were agreed that the Trade Unions of Great Britain would furnish an impenetrable barrier against Socialist projects. Within a decade we find the whole trade union world permeated with collectivist ideas, and, as _The Times_ recorded as early as 1893, the Socialist Party supreme in the Trades Union Congress. This revolution in opinion is the chief event of Trade Union history at the close of the nineteenth century.” These two talented authors analyse the causes. They attribute it in great measure to the “new unionism” of 1889 which was itself largely the result of the wide circulation in Great Britain of Henry George’s _Progress and Poverty_ during the years 1880-1882; the lecturing of the late Mr. H. M. Hyndman and Mr. William Morris and other disciples of Karl Marx; revelations of certain “well-intentioned if somewhat sentimental philanthropists” of their experiences in the sweated industries and slums of our great cities, as, for example, Mr. Charles Booth’s great work, _Life and Labour in London_; depression in trade; the great Dock Strike in 1889.