factories. He carefully examined their working conditions and encouraged young workers to 'See-Judge-Act'. During the inter-war years the movement steadily grew and became influential among many young people, including the young Jacques Delors. Germany had been ahead of the field with the establishment of the Kopling Associations in the mid-nineteenth century. Father Kopling, a curate at Elberfield in the Ruhr, brought together young craftsmen for primarily educational purposes. Later the associations expanded their work, admitted factory workers, and supported the rising forces of Christian trade unionism. Their pre-First World War membership peaked at 60,000. In 1929 they boasted 90,000 German members and, with branches in Austria and Switzerland, 117,000 overall.
The Protestant Tradition - Stirrings in the Undergrowth
As Catholic social thinking was assuming this new sense of purpose and clarity, after 1880 there were stirrings in the undergrowth of the reformed Churches. From the world missionary conferences of 1910 on, the Life and Work Movement, the Faith and Order Movement, and the great conferences of the World Council of Churches in 1948 and 1954 were manifestations of this. Each of these laid increasing emphasis on social and political action and challenged the view that religion was merely a matter of private conscience. Fogarty records that 'the conversion of German Protestants to independent political and social action occurred in three main ways'.8 First, there was a demand, beginning on a very small scale, to affirm the Christian position against secularism and the ideologies of Communists, socialists, liberals and nationalists. Second, there was the need for 'balance' with the Catholics who were already engaged in political action. And third, came the realisation that now free from State control German Protestants might use their freedom in positive ways. In 1878 Adolf Stocker founded a Christian social political movement. It had a programme of social reform through State intervention. He then joined forces with the Evangelical workers' movement, whose leader, Pastor Weber of M端nchenGladbach, had, from the beginning of the 1880s, been establishing workers' unions. Stocker, who had secured election and then defeat in the Reichstag as a Conservative, contested the 1898 election on a Christian Social platform. In a cliffhanging and dramatic battle he regained his seat by a majority of twenty-seven votes. From then until 1933 the Christian Social tendency continued to be represented, although it never caught the imagination of the wider Protestant community. Like some of its late nineteenth-century Catholic counterparts it had