head in his time, had no sympathy with the western rebels in England or with the Peasant War in Germany. The French Utopists condemned popular revolutionary action. Robert Owen, though 278 the most humane of men, looked upon Chartism as an interruption to his cooperative schemes, and deprecated it.
The progress of the revolutionary idea is shown by the fact that, in our own times, there is nothing but a trace of this jarring left. The workmen are not unwilling to accept the theorists as leaders; while the theorists fully and frankly recognise that it is through the instinctive working-class movement towards the bettering of life, by whatever political-economical methods, that their ideal of a new society must be sought. This period of practical unity of aim between the theorist and the agitator for immediate gains, must be considered to date from the Communist Manifesto published by Marx and Engels in 1847.
In short, while it is essential that the ideal of the new society should be always kept before the eyes of the mass of the working-classes, lest the continuity of the demands of the people should be broken, or lest they should be misdirected; so it is no less essential that the theorists should steadily take part in all action that tends towards Socialism, 279 lest their wholesome and truthful theories should be left adrift on the barren shore of Utopianism.
The demands for legislation at present formulated by the working-classes generally, and adopted, so far as they go, by Socialists, are manifestly incomplete, and if granted would still leave us with the evils of the capitalist system little touched. For example, the legal eight hours’ day, if carried, would, as above pointed out, result in a quite temporary absorption of the unemployed, and also it would not of itself permanently increase the wages of the employed. In order that the condition of the unskilled workmen should be raised to something like a human level, it would be necessary in our opinion that, first of all, a