It is a noteworthy and rather startling fact that Sidney and Beatrice Webb had pointed out the economic fallacies of syndicalism before the French Confederation of Labor was founded or Sorel, Berth, and Lagardelle had written a line on the subject. In their "History of Trade Unionism" they tell most interestingly the story of Owen's early trade-union socialism. The book was published in 1894, two or three years before the theories of the French school were born. Nevertheless, their critique of Owenism expresses as succinctly and forcibly as anything yet written the attitude of the socialists toward the economics of modern syndicalism. "Of all Owen's attempts to reduce his socialism to practice," write the Webbs, "this was certainly the very worst. For his short-lived communities there was at least this excuse: that within their own area they were to be perfectly homogeneous little socialist States. There were to be no conflicting sections, and profit-making and competition were to be effectually eliminated. But in 'the Trades Union,' as he conceived it, the mere combination of all the workmen in a trade as cooeperative producers no more abolished commercial competition than a combination of all the employers in it as a joint stock company. In effect, his Grand Lodges would have been simply the head offices of huge joint stock companies owning the entire means of production in their industry, and subject to no control by the community as a whole. They would, therefore, have been in a position at any moment to close their ranks and admit fresh generations of workers only as employees at competitive wages instead of as shareholders, thus creating at one stroke a new capitalist class and a new proletariat.[29] ... In short, the socialism of Owen led him to propose a practical scheme which was not even socialistic, and which, if it could possibly have been carried out, would have simply arbitrarily redistributed the capital of the country without altering or superseding the capitalist system in the least."[30]