The closing scene of Owen’s first and last attempt at “the Trades Union” shows how ephemeral had been his participation in the real life of the Trade Union Movement. In August 1834 he called together one of his usual miscellaneous congresses, consisting of delegates from all kinds of Owenite societies, with a few from the Grand National and other Trade Unions. At this congress the “Grand National Consolidated Trades Union,” which was to have brought to its feet Government, landlords, and employers, was formally converted into the “British and Foreign Consolidated Association of Industry, Humanity, and Knowledge,” having for its aim the establishment of a “New Moral World” by the reconciliation of all classes. Beyond one or two small and futile experiments in co-operative production, it had attempted nothing to realise Owen’s Utopia. Its whole powers had been spent, seemingly with his own consent, in a series of aggressive strikes. For all that, Owen’s meteoric appearance in the Trade Union World left a deep impression on the movement. The minute-books and other contemporary records of the Trade Unions of the next decade abound in Owenite phraseology, such as the classification of Society into the “idle” and the “industrious” classes, the latter apparently meaning--and being certainly understood to mean--only the manual workers. More important is the persistence of the idea that the Trade Unions, as Associations of Producers, should recover control of the instruments of production. From this time forth innumerable attempts were made, by one Trade Union or another, to employ its own members in Productive Co-operation. A long series of industrial disasters, culminating in the great losses of 1874, has, even now, scarcely eradicated the last remnant of this Joint Stock Individualism from the idealists of the Trade Union Movement; or taught them to distinguish accurately between it and the demonstrably successful Co-operative Production of the Associations of Consumers which constitute the Co-operative Movement of to-day. Outside the organised ranks his effect upon general working-class opinion was, as Place remarks, enormous, as we could abundantly show were we here concerned with the “Union Shops,” “Equitable Labour Exchanges,” and industrial communities which may be considered the most direct result of the Owenite propaganda, or with the fortunes of the innumerable co-operative associations of producers, whose delegates formed the backbone of the Owenite congresses of these years.[291]