In closest connection with this belief in the willingness of the ruling classes to make concessions stands the disinclination to all use of force, to all demand and command. Thus we find, as the simple thought in the tactics of the utopists, the repudiation of class strife and political effort. For how can this be brought into harmony with their main idea? How can anything that is to be accomplished by intellectual illumination, or at most by example, be achieved through strife? It is unthinkable. So, just as utopian socialism rejects political exertion, it also stands opposed to all those efforts which we are accustomed to call the economic agitation of the workman, such as trade-unions and the like. It is the same thought: how shall the organisation of working-men for strife tend to the improvement of the condition of work, when this can come only through the preaching of the new gospel? Robert Owen indeed organised in England trade-unions. But their work was really the propagation of his socialistic theories, not painful struggle against capitalism. Rejection of class strife in the sphere of politics as of economic agitation, repudiation of this in speech and writing and example--herein culminate the tactics of the utopian socialists. This, as I have attempted to show to you, is the necessary outcome of their system, built upon beautiful but narrow lines. As we now take leave of utopian socialism we must guard ourselves from the thought that the spirit of this great historic influence has fully disappeared from the world. No! no day passes without the reappearance, in some book or speech, of these fundamental thoughts which we have recognised as the essence of utopian socialism. Especially in the circles of the well inclined middle-class social politicians does this spirit live to-day; but even in the proletariat itself it is not by any means dead. We shall see how it is revived later, in connection with revolutionary thought. For this reason a more than merely historic interest invests this particular line of thought. CHAPTER III THE ANTECEDENTS OF THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT "The great, dumb, deep-buried class lies like an Enceladus, who in his pain, if he will complain of it, has to produce earthquakes."--THOMAS CARLYLE, "Chartism," ix. (_Essays._ Edition, Chapman and Hall, vi., 169). The question which now rests upon the lips of you all, since I have indicated the lines of thought of the first socialists, is this: When such noble minds drew the plan of a new and better world for their suffering brethren, where was the proletariat itself, and what did it do? What are the beginnings of the social movement which is carried on by the masses?