Whether we date the beginning of the English Labour Movement from the years when the famous “Junta” of trade union secretaries consolidated the societies of skilled workmen in the mid-Victorian period, trace its origins to fiercely democratic Chartism, or earlier still to Robert Owen's “socialism” and the national trades-union of a “New Moral World,” the Labour Movement as we know it to-day in Great Britain is really but little more than fifty years old—its course steadily, at first almost imperceptibly, directed to a co-operative commonwealth.

Two notes in the character of this movement have always puzzled and often shocked the leaders of continental trade unionism. Our British trade unions never require profession of political faith from their members; neither do they encourage hostility to the Christian religion. They seek neither to overturn the state nor intrude the dogma of atheism. This indifference to the “materialist conception of history”, and all the rest of it as revealed to Karl Marx, perplexed and distressed the German labour leaders in the years before the War. The Marxian “class-conscious proletariate” should quite definitely affirm its aloofness from Christianity the Germans maintained. French leaders of labour, Catholic and secularist alike, shrugged their shoulders at les Anglais, with their Catholics and Protestants, agnostics and freethinkers, all mixed up in the same trade unions.