the plan contemplated—­it would control practically the whole market and cooperative production would become the rule rather than the exception.  So far, therefore, as “First Principles” went, the Order was not an instrument of the “class struggle,” but an association of idealistic cooperators.  It was this pure idealism which drew to the Order of the Knights of Labor the sympathetic interest of writers on social subjects and university teachers, then unfortunately too few in number, like Dr. Richard T. Ely[15] and President John Bascom of Wisconsin.

The other survival in the seventies of the labor movement of the sixties, which has already been mentioned, namely the trade union movement grouped around the Cigar Makers’ Union, was neither so purely American in its origin as the Knights of Labor nor so persistently idealistic.  On the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and “pragmatic.”  The training school for this opportunistic trade unionism was the socialist movement during the sixties and seventies, particularly the American branch of the International Workingmen’s Association, the “First Internationale,” which was founded by Karl Marx in London in 1864.  The conception of economic labor organization which was advanced by the Internationale in a socialistic formulation underwent in the course of years a process of change:  On the one hand, through constant conflict with the rival conception of political labor organization urged by American followers of the German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, and on the other hand, through contact with American reality.  Out of that double contact emerged the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor.

The Internationale is generally reputed to have been organized by Karl Marx for the propaganda of international socialism.  As a matter of fact, its starting point was the practical effort of British trade union leaders to organize the workingmen of the Continent and to prevent the importation of Continental strike-breakers.  That Karl Marx wrote its Inaugural Address was merely incidental.  It chanced that what he wrote was acceptable to the British unionists rather than the draft of an address representing the views of Giuseppe Mazzini, the leader of the “New Italy” and the “New Europe,” which was submitted to them at the same time and advocated elaborate plans of cooperation.  Marx emphasized the class solidarity of labor against Mazzini’s harmony of capital and labor.  He did this by reciting what British labor had done through the Rochdale system of cooperation without the help of capitalists and what the British Parliament had done in enacting the ten-hour law of 1847 against the protest of capitalists.  Now that British trade unionists in 1864 were demanding the right of suffrage and laws to protect their unions, it followed that Marx merely stated their demands when he affirmed the independent economic and political organization of labor in all lands.  His Inaugural Address was a trade union document, not a Communist Manifesto.  Indeed not until Bakunin and his following of anarchists had nearly captured the organization in the years 1869 to 1872 did the program of socialism become the leading issue.