mantua-makers; and all the different manufacturers [_i.e._ operatives] shall be arranged in a similar way; communications shall pass from the various departments to the Grand National establishment in London.” In fact, the Trade Unions were to be transformed into “national companies” to carry on all the manufactures.[285] The Agricultural Union was to take possession of the land, the Miners’ Union of the mines, the Textile Unions of the factories. Each trade was to be carried on by its particular Trade Union, centralised in one “Grand Lodge.” Of all Owen’s attempts to reduce his Socialism to practice this was certainly the very worst. For his short-lived communities there was at least this excuse: that within their own area they were to be perfectly homogeneous little Communist States. There were to be no conflicting sections; and profit-making and competition were to be effectually eliminated. But in “the Trades Union,” as he conceived it, the mere combination of all the workmen in a trade as co-operative producers no more abolished commercial competition than a combination of all the employers in it as a Joint Stock Company. In effect his Grand Lodges would have been simply the head offices of huge Joint Stock Companies owning the entire means of production in their industry, and subject to no control by the community as a whole. They would therefore have been in a position at any moment to close their ranks and admit fresh generations of workers only as employees at competitive wages instead of as shareholders, thus creating at one stroke a new capitalist class and a new proletariat. Further, the improvident shareholders would soon have begun to sell their shares in order to spend their capital, and thus to drop with their children into the new proletariat; whilst the enterprising and capable shareholders would equally have sold their shares to buy into other and momentarily more profitable trades. Thus there would have been not only a capitalist class and proletariat, but a speculative stock market. Finally there would have come a competitive struggle between the Joint Stock Unions to supplant one another in the various departments of industry. Thus the shipwrights, making wooden ships, would have found the boilermakers competing for their business by making iron ships, and would have had either to succumb or to transform their wooden ship capital into iron ship capital and enter into competition with the boilermakers as commercial rivals in the same trade. This difficulty was staring Owen in the face when he entered the Trade Union Movement; for the trades, then as now, were in continual perplexity as to the exact boundaries between them; for example, the minute-books of the newly formed Joiners’ Society in Glasgow (whose secretary was a leading Owenite) show that its great difficulty was the demarcation of its trade against the cabinetmaker and the engineer-patternmaker, each of whom claimed certain technical