Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/206

 202 shadows over France, and both encouraged the stricken proletariat to agitate, to think, to combine, and to hope. The superficial] optimism of the French Revolution passed as a mirage, and the dark and confusing entanglements of democracy and commercialism gathered round the workers. But the new propaganda gave them heart. In 1831 the workers of Lyons rose to the cry "Live working or die fighting." As a shepherd gathers his sheep from the hills into a banded flock, so the Time Spirit was gathering men into a movement.

I must turn from France to England. Some of the boldest pioneers of the new movement belonged to this country, for here the evil side of the Industrial Revolution manifested itself earliest and most dramatically. It was British pamphleteers who examined and explained most carefully how the Industrial Revolution led to the impoverishment of the poor and the exploitation of the worker. "The right to the whole Produce of Labour" is a characteristically British contribution to Socialist economics.

The beginnings of the national movement can be traced back into the eighteenth century through what were mainly political associations meeting in taverns and obscure places. But the British political movement has always had a social purpose more or less clearly within its vision, and the theories of land national-