Under the system proposed by Owen [they say] the instruments of production were to become the property, not of the whole community, but of the particular set of workers who used them. The trade unions were to be transformed into "national companies" to carry on all the manufactures. 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, centralized in one "Grand Lodge."[6] The leaders of the New Unionists "aimed not at superseding existing social structures but at capturing them in the interests of the wage earners."[7] American prototypes of I. W. W.-ism appear much later than in England. As early as 1834, however, workingmen in the United States were discussing the attitude of the union toward politics. There was some discussion at that time by members of the National Trades Union of a proposal to have resolutions drawn up to express the views of the convention on the social, civil, and political condition of the laboring classes, and after considerable argument the word "political" was omitted.[8] In 1864 an unsuccessful attempt was made to organize in this country a national federation of trade unions. Two years later, in Baltimore, a National Labor Congress launched a conservative political organization, called the National Labor Union--a short-lived predecessor of the Knights of Labor. Ely says that it lived only about three years and died of the "disease known as politics."[9] It is probable that a general apathy and financial weakness were contributing causes. The most important of these forerunners of the "Wobblies" was the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor which was organized in 1869 and for the following decades carried on a remarkably successful propaganda. It had a membership of more than a million in the late eighties.[10] Soon after that the Knights suffered a decline that was even more rapid than their meteoric expansion in the early eighties and ultimately broke down and degenerated into the shadow of an organization that it has been for more than twenty years past. Carroll D. Wright thought that the Knights of Labor reached its highest membership point in 1887 when it had probably about a million enrolled. In 1898 there were about 100,000 in the organization. Colonel Wright believed that this great falling-off in membership was due to the socialistic tendencies of the organization, especially to the attempt to place all wage workers on the same level.[11]