However, the beginnings of a new movement, a "new Socialism," were distinctly seen in the questions that the English element introduced: the length of the working day, factory legislation, work of women and children. These had been the subject of rigid governmental inquiry. Marx was thoroughly familiar with these parliamentary findings. They are no small part of the fortifications he built around his theory of social development. But his German training inclined him to the Continental, not the Anglo-Saxon, view of social progress and of politics. The "Old International," then, was an attempt to spread Marxian doctrines into all lands. As such an attempt it is noteworthy. The Marxian _modus_, however, did not fit the world. Some Socialist writers attribute its failure to the fact that the time was not ripe for Marx's methods. The time will never be ripe for the Marxian method. Marx tried to move everything from one center. He was a German dogmatist. His council was a centralized autocracy, issuing mandates like a general to an army. This is an impossible method of international organization. The center must be supported by the periphery, not the periphery by the center. There could be no proletarian internationalism until there was an organized proletarian nationalism. Its conceptions of its detailed duties were even cruder than its machinery. The discussions were a blending of pedantic declamation and phosphoric denunciation. Its programs were a mixture of English trade-union realities and Continental vagaries. Such a movement had neither wings nor legs. But it had an influence, nevertheless, and a very important one. It was the means of bringing the new generation of leaders together, the men who were to make Socialism a practical political force. Even the fact that an international laboring men's society could meet was important. It realized the central idea of Marx, that the labor problem is international. That is the important point. Human solidarity is not ethnic, but inter-ethnic. The "Old International" was a faltering step toward that solidarity of humanity that has been advanced so rapidly by inventions, by international arbitrations, by treaties of commerce, and every other movement that makes international hostilities every year more difficult. On Socialism the "International" had at least one beneficial effect. It cleared its atmosphere of the anarchistic thunder clouds and prepared the way for the present more practical movement. This was largely due to the influence of the English trade unions. They were not inclined toward philosophical dissertations like the Germans, nor brilliant speculative vagaries like the French. Their stolid forms were always on the earth. That Marx was anxious for their support is apparent, and he drove them out of the movement by his indiscreet utterances on the Parisian Commune of 1871.