[25] _The Force of Circumstances_, a poem, by John Garwood, Birmingham, 1808.
[26] Quoted by Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 22 (English edition, 1892).
[27] Quoted by H. M. Hyndman, _The Economics of Socialism_, page 150.
[28] _The New Harmony Communities_, by George Browning Lockwood, page 71.
[29] Quoted by Lockwood, _The New Harmony Communities_, pages 71-72.
[30] Owen presided at the first organized Trade Union Congress in England.
[31] For the history of these and other Utopian Socialist schemes, the reader is referred to Professor Ely's _French and German Socialism_ (1883); Kirkup's _History of Socialism_ (1900); and Hillquit's _History of Socialism in the United States_ (1903).
[33] Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, pages 6-7.
[34] Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 15.
[39] See, for instance, _The Revolution in Mind and Practice_, by Robert Owen, pages 21-22.
THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT
The _Communist Manifesto_ has been called the birth-cry of the modern scientific Socialist movement. When it was written, at the end of 1847, little remained of those great movements which in the early part of the century had inspired millions with high hopes of social regeneration and rekindled the beacon fires of faith in the world. The Saint-Simonians had, as an organized body, disappeared; the Fourierists were a dwindling sect, discouraged by the failure of the one great trial of their system, the famous Brook Farm experiment, in the United States; the Owenite movement had never recovered from the failures of the experiments at New Harmony and elsewhere, and had lost much of its identity through the multiplicity of interests embraced in Owen's later propaganda. Chartism and Trade Unionism on the one hand, and the Coöperative Societies on the other, had, between them, absorbed most of the vital elements of the Owenite movement.
There was a multitude of what Engels calls "social quacks," but the really great social movements, Owenism in England, and Fourierism in France, were utterly demoralized and rapidly dwindling away. One thing only served to keep the flame of hope alive--"the crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism" of the workers. This Communism of the working class differed very essentially from the Socialism of Fourier and Owen. It was Utopian, being based, like all Utopian movements, upon abstract ideas. It differed from Fourierism and Owenism, however, in that instead of a universal appeal based upon Brotherhood, Justice, Order, and Economy, its appeal was, primarily, to the laborer. Its basis was the crude class doctrine of "the rights of Labor." The laborer was appealed to as one suffering from oppression and injustice. It was, therefore, distinctly a class movement, and its class-consciousness was sufficiently developed to keep its leaders from wasting their lives in abortive appeals to the master class. The leading exponents of this Communism of the workers were Wilhelm Weitling, in Germany, and Étienne Cabet, in France.