In both America and England, especially during the periods referred to, there was abundant evidence of those tactics which we characterize today as syndicalistic. I. W. W. strikes were not invented in 1905. The Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, the Knights of Labor, the International Working People's Association, the "New Unionists" in the days of Robert Owen--all these and many another group have sought to push their cause by methods now once again made notorious by the French syndicalists and the American Wobblies. The general strike--mass action--the sympathetic strike--the solidarity of all labor--these concepts seem to have their prototypes and very possibly were put into action in still more ancient periods. Osborne Ward reports some revolutionary labor activities in years preceding the Christian era. He describes a strike of the silver miners in Greece--at Laurium, some thirty miles south of Athens. "The inference is unequivocal," says Ward, "that in 413 B. C. twenty thousand miners, mechanics, teamsters, and laborers suddenly struck work; and at a moment of Athens' greatest peril, fought themselves loose from their masters and their chains." He concludes that the strike "must have been well concerted, violent and swift," and "must have been plotted by the men themselves."[4] This strike, apparently, was widely heralded, but seems to have brought no more permanent results than has the average I. W. W. strike of today. The evidence for this very ancient prototype of syndicalism is not entirely conclusive. It was dug out of the old red sandstone--and there are missing links! It will be safer not to try to trace the lineage of syndicalist organizations--much less syndicalist activities and ideas--back more than one century. There is no doubt that the idea of _economic_ emancipation through economic as opposed to political channels, and to be achieved by _all_ classes of workers as workers, _i. e._, as human cogs in the industrial, rather than the political, state had been very definitely formulated before the end of the last century.[5] Indeed, the conception runs back well toward the beginning of the nineteenth century. The "one big union" of which we now hear so much was surely in existence in England in the early thirties. Robert Owen at that time outlined his great plan for a "General Union of the Productive Classes." Sidney and Beatrice Webb report the establishment, in 1834, of a "Grand National Consolidated Trades Union":