Excerpt from The Rise and Progress of Democracy I have already called attention to the formation of trade-unions in England in the early part of the nine teenth century. After they had won legal recognition and were no longer persecuted they gave their chief at tention to effecting wage-agreements with their employers and to putting through legislation reducing the hours of labor, protecting the women and children, introduc ing safety devices and SO forth - a mass of Often in finitesimal, but in their bulk, very appreciable, ameliora tions in the lot of the wage - earner, servant and slave of the machine. In England the course of labor has con tinued down to our own day to travel this slow upward path characterized by concessions and compromise, though of late years the continued fair-weather prospect has been troubled by the more radical agitation imported from the continent. To this I shall now invite the reader's atten tion. I have already spoken of St. Simon and Louis Blanc and the rise of a socialist doctrine in France. Its gist was the abolition of private property and the nation alization of the means of production and although it did not call itself socialism at first, the name of socialism he came attached to it and has remained attached to all simi lar philosophies to the present day. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.