The events of June 1855 at Speakers' Corner inspired Karl Marx to declare that the English proletariat had begun their inexorable rise and that social revolution leading to a communist state was under way.
"This alliance between a degenerate, dissipated and pleasure-seeking aristocracy and the church -- built on a foundation of filthy and calculated profiteering on the part of the beer magnates and monopolistic wholesalers -- gave rise to a mass demonstration in Hyde Park yesterday, such as London has not seen since the death of George V," Marx wrote in the German newspaper Neue Oder-Zeitung.
"We witnessed the event from beginning to end and believe we can state without exaggeration that yesterday in Hyde Park the English revolution began," he wrote, adding that it was an "unparliamentary, extra-parliamentary and antiparliamentary demonstration."