This Preamble recites how “wealth,” with its development, has become so aggressive that “unless checked” it “will inevitably lead to the pauperisation and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses.”  Hence, if the toilers are “to enjoy the blessings of life,” they must organize “every department of productive industry” in order to “check” the power of wealth and to put a stop to “unjust accumulation.”  The battle cry in this fight must be “moral worth not wealth, the true standard of individual and national greatness.”  As the “action” of the toilers ought to be guided by “knowledge,” it is necessary to know “the true condition of the producing masses”; therefore, the Order demands “from the various governments the establishment of bureaus of labor statistics.”  Next in order comes the “establishment of cooperative institutions productive and distributive.”  Union of all trades, “education,” and producers’ cooperation remained forever after the cardinal points in the Knights of Labor philosophy and were steadily referred to as “First Principles,” namely principles bequeathed to the Order by Uriah Stephens and the other “Founders."[14]

These idealistic “First Principles” found an ardent champion in Terence V. Powderly, a machinist by trade and twice mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on a labor ticket, who succeeded Stephens in 1878 to the headship of the Order.  Powderly bore unmistakably the stamp of this sort of idealism throughout all the time when he was the foremost labor leader in the country.  Unlike Samuel Gompers, who came to supplant him about 1890, he was foreign to that spirit of combative unionism which accepts the wage system but concentrates on a struggle to wrest concessions from the employers.  Even when circumstances which were largely beyond his control made Powderly a strike leader on a huge scale, his heart lay elsewhere—­in circumventing the wage system by opening to the worker an escape into self-employment through cooperation.

Producers’ cooperation, then, was the ambitious program by which the Order of the Knights of Labor expected to lead the American wage-earning class out of the bondage of the wage system into the Canaan of self-employment.  Thus the Order was the true successor of the cooperative movement in the forties and sixties.  Its motto was “Cooperation of the Order, by the Order, and for the Order.”  Not scattered local initiative, but the Order as a whole was to carry on the work.  The plan resembled the Rochdale system of England in that it proposed to start with an organization of consumers—­the large and ever-growing membership of the Order.  But it departed radically from the English prototype in that instead of setting out to save money for the consumer, it primarily aimed to create a market for the productive establishments which were to follow.  Consumers’ cooperation was to be but a stepping stone to producers’ self-employment.  Eventually when the Order had grown to include nearly all useful members of society—­so