In England the same questions had disturbed all classes for nearly fifty years. There had been no great revolutionary period, but from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the extinction of Chartism in 1848 every doctrine of trade unionism, syndicalism, anarchism, and socialism had been debated passionately by groups of workingmen and their friends. The principles and methods of trade unionism were being worked out on the actual battlefield, amid riots, strikes, machine-breaking, and incendiarism. Instinctively the masses were associating for mutual protection and, almost unconsciously, working out by themselves programs of action. Nevertheless, Joseph Hume, Francis Place, Robert Owen, and a number of other brilliant men were lending powerful intellectual aid to the workers in their actual struggle. A group of radical economists was also defending the claims of labor. Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin, and J. F. Bray were all seeking to find the economic causes of the wrongs suffered by labor and endeavoring, in some manner, to devise remedies for the immense suffering endured by the working classes. Together with Robert Owen, a number of them were planning labor exchanges, voluntary communities, and even at one time the entire reorganization of the world through the trade unions. In this ferment the cooeperative movement also had its birth. The Rochdale Pioneers began to work out practically some of the cooeperative ideas of Robert Owen. With L28 a pathetic beginning was made that has led to the immensely rich cooeperative movement of to-day. Furthermore, the Chartists were leading a vast political movement of the workers. In support of the suffrage and of parliamentary representation for workingmen, a wonderful group of orators and organizers carried on in the thirties and forties an immense agitation. William Lovett, Feargus O'Connor, Joseph Rayner Stephens, Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper, and James Bronterre O'Brien were among the notable and gifted men who were then preaching throughout all England revolutionary and socialist ideas. Such questions as the abolition of inheritances, the nationalization of land, the right of labor to the full product of its toil, the necessity of breaking down class control of Parliament--these and other subversive ideas were germinating in all sections of the English labor movement. It was a heroic period--altogether the most heroic period in the annals of toil--in which the most advanced and varied revolutionary ideas were hurtling in the air. The causes of the ruin that overcame this magnificent beginning of a revolutionary working-class movement cannot be dwelt upon here. Quarrels between the leaders, the incoherence of their policies, and divisions over the use of violence utterly wrecked a movement that anticipated by thirty years the social democracy of Germany. The tragic fiasco in 1848 was the beginning of an appalling working-class reaction