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VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
intellectual aid to the workers in their actual struggle.
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
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 cooperative
movement also had its birth. The Rochdale
Pioneers began to work out practically some of the
cooperative ideas of Robert Owen. With £28 a pathetic
beginning was made that has led to the immensely rich
cooperative 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
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