It was characteristic of Lamennais’ insight that he saw that political liberty without safeguards against economic exploitation would prove a vain thing. Writing to the working men of Paris in 1847, he said that, with them he “should demand that in accordance with justice and reason, the question should be gone into, how it is possible, in the distribution of the fruits of labour, to do away with the revolting anomalies which crush under their weight the most numerous portion of the human family.”[1] Emile Faguet justly observes that Lamennais saw that the coming enemy was “_le pouvoir d’argent_,” and that he did what he could to choke it off before it could establish itself. Nor was Lamennais alone in his sense of the inadequacy of political change to meet the needs of the common people. Robert Owen reached a similar conclusion, and, indeed, was so sceptical of the value of political action for social improvement that during one period of his life he preached outright to the working classes a doctrine of political indifferentism. The working-class movements which came into being early in the nineteenth century—the Co-operative Societies and the Trade Unions—originated in the need of countervailing the economic disadvantage under which the new order had placed the worker and which the endeavour to establish political equality and liberty had been powerless to prevent. The growth of Socialism and Syndicalism represents a revolt from a social order in which the privilege of noble birth has been superseded by the privilege of property, and the disinherited class has but suffered a new disinheritance. Footnote 1: This view was shared by Mazzini, whose gospel was at many points identical with that of Lamennais. See _The Duties of Man_, ch. xi.