Insurrectionism, whether Owenite or Chartist, was, in fact, losing its attraction for the working-class mind. Robert Owen’s economic axioms of the extinction of profit and the elimination of the profit-maker were, during these very years, passing into the new Co-operative Movement, inaugurated in 1844 by the Rochdale Pioneers. The believers in a “new system of society,” to be brought about by universal agreement, were henceforth to be found in the ranks of the commercial-minded Co-operators rather than in those of the militant Trade Unionists. Chartism, meanwhile, had degenerated from Lovett’s high ideal of a complete political democracy to an ignoble scramble for the ownership of small plots of land. The example of the French Revolution of 1848 fanned the dying embers for a few weeks into a new flame; and many of the London trades swung into the somewhat theatrical fête of April 10, 1848, swelling the procession against which the Duke of Wellington had marshalled the London middle class. But the danger of revolution had passed away. A new generation of workmen was growing up, to whom the worst of the old oppression was unknown, and who had imbibed the economic and political philosophy of the middle-class reformers. Bentham, Ricardo, and Grote were read only by a few; but the activity of such popular educationalists as Lord Brougham and Charles Knight propagated “useful knowledge” to all the members of the Mechanics’ Institutes and the readers of the _Penny Magazine_. The middle-class ideas of “free enterprise” and “unrestricted competition” which were thus diffused received a great impetus from the extraordinary propaganda of the Anti-Corn Law League, and the general progress of Free Trade. Fergus O’Connor and Bronterre O’Brien struggled in vain against the growing dominance of Cobden and Bright as leaders of working-class opinion. And so we find in the Trade Union records of 1847-8, that vigorous resistance begins to be made to any movement in support of the old ideals. The Steam-Engine Makers’ Society suspended some of their branches for depositing the branch funds in Fergus O’Connor’s Land Bank. When two branches of the Stonemasons’ Society propose the same investment, the others indignantly protest against it as an absurd political speculation. And it is significant that these protests came, not from the cautious elders whose enthusiasm had outlived many failures, but from those who had never shared the old faith. When in 1848 the Yorkshire Woolstaplers proposed to take a farm upon which to set to work their unemployed men, it was the younger members, as we are expressly told, who strenuously but vainly resisted this action, which resulted ruinously for the society.