Justice, as Opposed to Agrarian Law and to Agrarian Monopoly, published in 1797 in London, which advocated equal division by means of an inheritance tax.  Its adoption by the New York workingmen was little more than a stratagem, for their intention was to forestall any attempts by employers to lengthen the working day to eleven hours by raising the question of “the nature of the tenure by which all men hold title to their property.”  Apparently the stratagem worked, for the employers immediately dropped the eleven-hour issue.  But, although the workingmen quickly thereafter repudiated agrarianism, they succeeded only too well in affixing to their movement the mark of the beast in the eyes of their opponents and the general public.

Except during the brief but damaging “agrarian” episode, the demand for free public education or “Republican” education occupied the foreground.  We, who live in an age when free education at the expense of the community is considered practically an inalienable right of every child, find it extremely difficult to understand the vehemence of the opposition which the demand aroused on the part of the press and the “conservative” classes, when first brought up by the workingmen.  The explanation lies partly in the political situation, partly in the moral character of the “intellectual” spokesmen for the workingmen, and partly in the inborn conservatism of the tax-paying classes upon whom the financial burden would fall.  That the educational situation was deplorable much proof is unnecessary.  Pennsylvania had some public schools, but parents had to declare themselves too poor to send their children to a private school before they were allowed the privilege of sending them there.  In fact so much odium attached to these schools that they were practically useless and the State became distinguished for the number of children not attending school.  As late as 1837 a labor paper estimated that 250,000 out of 400,000 children in Pennsylvania of school age were not in any school.  The Public School Society of New York estimated in a report for 1829 that in New York City alone there were 24,200 children between the ages of five and fifteen years not attending any school whatever.

To meet these conditions the workingmen outlined a comprehensive educational program.  It was not merely a literary education that the workingmen desired.  The idea of industrial education, or training for a vocation, which is even now young in this country, was undoubtedly first introduced by the leaders of this early labor movement.  They demanded a system of public education which would “combine a knowledge of the practical arts with that of the useful sciences.”  The idea of industrial education appears to have originated in a group of which two “intellectuals,” Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright, were the leading spirits.