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LECTURE
READINGS
Friedrich
Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844)
Introduction
THE history
of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last
century, with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for
working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an
industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society;
one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be
recognized. England is the classic soil of this transformation, which was
all the mightier, the more silently it proceeded; and England is,
therefore, the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat.
Only in England can the proletariat be studied in all its relations and
from all sides.
We have not, here and now, to deal with the history of this revolution,
nor with its vast importance for the present and the future. Such a
delineation must be reserved for a future, more comprehensive work. For
the moment, we must limit ourselves to the little that is necessary for
understanding the facts that follow, for comprehending the present state
of the English proletariat.
Before the introduction of machinery, the spinning and weaving of raw
materials was carried on in the working man's home. Wife and daughter spun
the yarn that the father wove or that they sold, if he did not work it up
himself. These weaver families lived in the country in the neighbourhood
of the towns, and could get on fairly well with their wages, because the
home market was almost the only one, and the crushing power of competition
that came later, with the conquest of foreign markets and the extension of
trade, did not yet press upon wages. There was, further, a constant
increase in the demand for the home market, keeping pace with the slow
increase in population and employing all the workers; and there was also
the impossibility of vigorous competition of the workers among themselves,
consequent upon the rural dispersion of their homes. So it was that the
weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little
piece of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as
many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he
pleased. True, he was a bad farmer and managed his land inefficiently,
often obtaining but poor crops; nevertheless, he was no proletarian, he
had a stake in the country, he was permanently settled, and stood one step
higher in society than the English workman of to-day.
So the workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence,
leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their
material position was far better than that of their successors. They did
not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet
earned what they needed. They had leisure for healthful work in garden or
field, work which, in itself, was recreation for them, and they could take
part besides in the recreations and games of their neighbours, and all
these games -- bowling, cricket, football, etc., contributed to their
physical health and vigour. They were, for the most part, strong,
well-built people, in whose physique little or no difference from that of
their peasant neighbours was discoverable. Their children grew up in the
fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was
only occasionally; while of eight or twelve hours work for them there was
no question.
What the moral and intellectual character of this class was may be
guessed. Shut off from the towns, which they never entered, their yarn and
woven stuff being delivered to travelling agents for payment of wages --
so shut off that old people who lived quite in the neighbourbood of the
town never went thither until they were robbed of their trade by the
introduction of machinery and obliged to look about them in the towns for
work -- the weavers stood upon the moral and intellectual plane of the
yeomen with whom they were usually immediately connected through their
little holdings. They regarded their squire, the greatest landholder of
the region, as their natural superior; they asked advice of him, laid
their small disputes before him for settlement, and gave him all honour,
as this patriarchal relation involved. They were 'respectable' people,
good husbands and fathers, led moral lives because they had no temptation
to be immoral, there being no gin palaces or low houses in their vicinity,
and because the host, at whose inn they now and then quenched their
thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who took
pride in his good order, good beer, and early hours. They had their
children the whole day at home, and brought them up in obedience and the
fear of God; the patriarchal relationship remained undisturbed so long as
the children were unmarried. The young people grew up in idyllic
simplicity and intimacy with their playmates until they married; and even
though sexual intercourse before marriage almost unfailingly took place,
this happened only when the moral obligation of marriage was recognized on
both sides, and a subsequent wedding made everything good. In short, the
English industrial workers of those days lived and thought after the
fashion still to be found here and there in Germany, in retirement and
seclusion, without mental activity and without violent fluctuations in
their position in life. They could rarely read and far more rarely write;
went regularly to church, never talked politics, never conspired, never
thought, delighted in physical exercises, listened with inherited
reverence when the Bible was read, and were, in their unquestioning
humility, exceedingly well-disposed towards the 'superior' classes. But
intellectually, they were dead; lived only for their petty, private
interest, for their looms and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty
movement which, beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind. They
were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial
revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which,
cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings. In
truth, they were not human beings; they were merely toiling machines in
the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that
time. The industrial revolution has simply carried this out to its logical
end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the
last trace of independent activity, and so forcing them to think and
demand a position worthy of men. As in France politics, so in England
manufacture, and the movement of civil society in general drew into the
whirl of history the last classes which had remained sunk in apathetic
indifference to the universal interests of mankind.
The first invention which gave rise to a radical change in the state of
the English workers was the jenny, invented in the year 1764 by a weaver,
James Hargreaves, of Standhill, near Blackburn, in North Lancashire. This
machine was the rough beginning of the later invented mule, and was moved
by hand. Instead of one spindle like the ordinary spinningwheel, it
carried sixteen or eighteen manipulated by a single workman. This
invention made it possible to deliver more yarn than heretofore. Whereas,
though one weaver had employed three spinners, there had never been enough
yarn, and the weaver had often been obliged to wait for it, there was now
more yarn to be had than could be woven by the available workers. The
demand for woven goods, already increasing, rose yet more in consequence
of the cheapness of these goods, which cheapness, in turn, was the outcome
of the diminished cost of producing the yarn. More weavers were needed,
and weavers' wages rose. Now that the weaver could earn more at his loom,
he gradually abandoned his farming, and gave his whole time to weaving. At
that time a family of four grown persons and two children (who were set to
spooling) could earn, with ten hours' daily work, £4 in a week,
and often more if trade was good and work pressed. It happened often
enough that a single weaver earned £2 a week at his loom. By
degrees the class of farming weavers wholly disappeared, and was merged in
the newly arising class of weavers who lived wholly upon wages, had no
property whatever, not even the pretended property of a holding, and so
became working men, proletarians. Moreover, the old relation between
spinner and weaver was destroyed. Hitherto, so far as this had been
possible, yarn had been spun and woven under one roof. Now that the jenny
as well as the loom required a strong hand, men began to spin, and whole
families lived by spinning, while others laid the antiquated, superseded
spinning-wheel aside; and, if they had not means of purchasing a jenny,
were forced to live upon the wages of the father alone. Thus began with
spinning and weaving that division of labour which has since been so
infinitely perfected.
While the industrial proletariat was thus developing with the first, still
very imperfect machine, the same machine gave rise to the agricultural
proletariat. There had, hitherto, been a vast number of small landowners,
yeomen, who had vegetated in the same unthinking quiet as their
neighbours, the farming weavers. They cultivated their scraps of land
quite after the ancient and inefficient fashion of their ancestors, and
opposed every change with the obstinacy peculiar to such creatures of
habit, after remaining stationary from generation to generation. Among
them were many smallholders also, not tenants in the present sense of the
word, but people who had their land handed down from their fathers, either
by hereditary lease, or by force of ancient custom, and had hitherto held
it as securely as if it had actually been their own property. When the
industrial workers withdrew from agriculture, a great number of
smallholdings fell idle, and upon these the new class of large tenants
established themselves, tenants-at-will, holding fifty, one hundred, two
hundred or more acres, liable to be turned out at the end of the year, but
able by improved tillage and larger farming to increase the yield of the
land. They could sell their produce more cheaply than the yeoman, for whom
nothing remained when his farm no longer supported him but to sell it,
procure a jenny or a loom, or take service as an agricultural labourer in
the employ of a large farmer. His inherited slowness and the inefficient
methods of cultivation bequeathed by his ancestors, and above which he
could not rise, left him no alternative when forced to compete with men
who managed their holdings on sounder principles and with all the
advantages bestowed by farming on a large scale and the investment of
capital for the improvement of the soil.
Meanwhile, the industrial movement did not stop here. Single capitalists
began to set up spinning-jennies in great buildings and to use water-power
for driving them, so placing themselves in a position to diminish the
number of workers, and sell their yam more cheaply than single spinners
could do who moved their own machines by hand. There were constant
improvements in the jenny, so that machines continually became antiquated,
and must be altered or even laid aside; and though the capitalists could
hold out by the application of water-power even with the old machinery,
for the single spinner this was impossible. And the factory system, the
beginning of which was thus made, received a fresh extension in 1767,
through the spinning throstle invented by Richard Arkwright, a barber, in
Preston, in North Lancashire. After the steam-engine, this is the most
important mechanical invention of the eighteenth century. It was
calculated from the beginning for mechanical motive power, and was based
upon wholly new principles. By the combination of the peculiarities of the
jenny and throstle, Samuel Crompton, of Firwood, Lancashire, contrived the
mule in 1785, and as Arkwright invented the carding engine, and
preparatory ('slubbing and roving') frames about the same time, the
factory system became the prevailing one for the spinning of cotton. By
means of trifling modifications these machines were gradually adapted to
the spinning of wool and later (in the first decade of the present
century) also of flax, and so to the superseding of hand-work here, too.
But even then, the end was not yet. In the closing years of the last
century, Dr Cartwright, a country parson, had invented the power-loom, and
about 1804 had so far perfected it, that it could successfully compete
with the hand-weaver; and all this machinery was made doubly important by
James Watt's steam-engine, invented in 1764, and used for supplying motive
power for spinning since 1785.
With these inventions, since improved from year to year, the victory of
machine-work over hand-work in the chief branches of English industry was
won; and the history of the latter from that time forward simply relates
how the handworkers have been driven by machinery from one position after
another. The consequences of this were, on the one hand, a rapid fall in
price of all manufactured commodities, prosperity of commerce and
manufacture, the conquest of nearly all the unprotected foreign markets,
the sudden multiplication of capital and national wealth; on the other
hand, a still more rapid multiplication of the proletariat, the
destruction of all property-holding and of all security of employment for
the working class, demoralization, political excitement, and all those
facts so highly repugnant to Englishmen in comfortable circumstances,
which we shall have to consider in the following pages. Having already
seen what a transformation in the social condition of the lower classes a
single such clumsy machine as the jenny had wrought, there is no cause for
surprise as to that which a complete and interdependent system of finely
adjusted machinery has brought about, machinery which receives raw
material and turns out woven goods.
Meanwhile, let us trace the development of English manufacture[1] somewhat
more minutely, beginning with the cotton industry. In the years 1771-5,
there were annually imported into England rather less than 5,000,000
pounds of raw cotton; in the year 1841 there were imported 528,000,000
pounds, and the import for 1844 will reach at least 600,000,000 pounds. In
1834 England exported 556,000,000 yards of woven cotton goods, 76,500,000
pounds of cotton yarn, and cotton hosiery of the value of £12,000,000.
In the same year over 8,000,000 mule spindles were at work, 110,000 power
and 250,000 hand-looms, throstle spindles not included, in the service of
the cotton industry; and, according to MacCulloch's reckoning, nearly a
million and a half human beings were supported by this branch, of whom but
220,000 worked in the mills; the power used in these mills was steam,
equivalent to 33,000 horse-power, and water, equivalent to 111,000
horse-power. At present these figures are far from adequate, and it may be
safely assumed that, in the year 1845, the power and number of the
machines and the number of the workers is greater by one-half than it was
in 1834. The chief centre of this industry is Lancashire, where it
originated; it has thoroughly revolutionized this county, converting it
from an obscure, illcultivated swamp into a busy, lively region,
multiplying its population tenfold in eighty years, and causing giant
cities such as Liverpool and Manchester, containing together 700,000
inhabitants, and their neighbouring towns, Bolton with 60,000, Rochdale
with 75,000, Oldham with 50,000, Preston with 60,000, Ashton and
Stalybridge with 40,000, and a whole list of other manufacturing towns to
spring up as if by a magic touch. The history of South Lancashire contains
some of the greatest marvels of modern times, yet no one ever mentions
them, and all these miracles are the product of the cotton industry.
Glasgow, too, the centre for the cotton district of Scotland, for
Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, has increased in population, from 30,000 to
300,000, since the introduction of the industry. The hosiery manufacture
of Nottingham and Derby also received one fresh impulse from the lower
price of yarn, and a second one from an improvement of the stocking loom,
by means of which two stockings could be woven at once. The manufacture of
lace, too, became an important branch of industry after the invention of
the lace machine in 1777; soon after that date Lindley invented the
point-net machine, and in 1809 Heathcoat invented the bobbin-net machine,
in consequence of which the production of lace was greatly simplified, and
the demand increased proportionately in consequence of the diminished
cost, so that now, at least 200,000 persons are supported by this
industry. Its chief centres are Nottingham, Leicester, and the West of
England, Wiltshire, Devonshire, etc. A corresponding extension has taken
place in the branches dependent upon the cotton industry, in dyeing,
bleaching, and printing. Bleaching by the application of chlorine in place
of the oxygen of the atmosphere; dyeing and printing by the rapid
development of chemistry, and printing by a series of most brilliant
mechanical inventions, a yet greater advance which, with the extension of
these branches caused by the growth of the cotton industry, raised them to
a previously unknown degree of prosperity.
The same activity manifested itself in the manufacture of wool. This had
hitherto been the leading department of English industry, but the
quantities formerly produced are as nothing in comparison with that which
is now manufactured. In 1782 the whole wool crop of the preceding three
years lay unused for want of workers, and would have continued so to lie
if the newly invented machinery had not come to its assistance and spun
it. The adaptation of this machinery to the spinning of wool was most
successfully accomplished. Then began the same sudden development in the
wool districts which we have already seen in the cotton districts. In 1738
there were 75,000 pieces of woollen cloth produced in the West Riding of
Yorkshire; in 1817 there were 490,000 pieces, and so rapid was the
extension of the industry that in 1834, 450,000 more pieces were produced
than in 1825. In 1801, 101,000,000 pounds of wool (7,000,000 pounds of it
imported) were worked up; in 1835, 180,000,000 pounds were worked up; of
which 42,000,000 pounds were imported. The principal centre of this
industry is the West Riding of Yorkshire, where, especially at Bradford,
long English wool is converted into worsted yarns, etc while in the other
cities, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield, etc., short wool is converted into
hard-spun yarn and cloth. Then come the adjacent part of Lancashire, the
region of Rochdale, where in addition to the cotton industry much flannel
is produced, and the West of England which supplies the finest cloths.
Here also the growth of population is worthy of observation, a population
which, since 1831, must have increased at least 20 to 25 per cent further.
In 1835 the spinning of wool employed in the United Kingdom 1,313 mills,
with 71,300 workers, these last being but a small portion of the multitude
who are supported directly or indirectly by the manufacture of wool, and
excluding nearly all weavers.
Progress in the linen trade developed later, because the nature of the raw
material made the application of spinning machinery very difficult.
Attempts had been made in the last years of the last century in Scotland,
but the Frenchman, Girard, who introduced flax-spinning in 1810, was the
first who succeeded practically, and even Girard's machines first attained
on British soil the importance they deserved by means of improvements
which they underwent in England, and of their universal application in
Leeds, Dundee, and Belfast. From this time the British linen trade rapidly
extended. In 1814, 3,000 tons of flax were imported; in 1883, nearly
19,000 tons of flax and 3,400 tons of hemp. The export of Irish linen to
Great Britain rose from 32,000,000 yards in 1800 to 53,000,000 in 1825, of
which a large part was re-exported. The export of English and Scottish
woven linen goods rose from 24,000,000 yards in 1820 to 51,000,000 yards
in 1833. The number of flax-spinning establishments in 1835 was 347,
employing 33,000 workers, of which one-half were in the South of Scotland,
more than 6o in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Leeds, and its environs, 25
in Belfast, Ireland, and the rest in Dorset and Lancashire. Weaving is
carried on in the South of Scotland, here and there in England, but
principally in Ireland.
With like success did the English turn their attention to the manufacture
of silk. Raw material was imported from Southern Europe and Asia ready
spun, and the chief labour lay in the twisting of fine threads. Until 1824
the heavy import duty, four shillings per pound on raw material, greatly
retarded the development of the English silk industry, while only the
markets of England and the Colonies were protected for it. In that year
the duty was reduced to one penny, and the number of mills at once largely
increased. In a single year the number of throwing spindles rose from
780,000 to 1,180,000; and, although the commercial crisis of 1825 crippled
this branch of industry for the moment, yet in 1827 more was produced than
ever, the mechanical skill and experience of the English having secured
their twisting machinery the supremacy over the awkward devices of their
competitors. In 1835 the British Empire possessed 263 twisting mills,
employing 30,000 workers, located chiefly in Cheshire, in Macclesfield,
Congleton, and the surrounding districts, and in Manchester and
Somersetshire. Besides these, there are numerous mills for working up
waste, from which a peculiar article known as spun silk is manufactured,
with which the English supply even the Paris and Lyons weavers. The
weaving of the silk so twisted and spun is carried on in Paisley and
elsewhere in Scotland, and in Spitalfields, London, but also in Manchester
and elsewhere. Nor is the gigantic advance achieved in English manufacture
since 1760 restricted to the production of clothing materials. The
impulse, once given, was communicated to all branches of industrial
activity, and a multitude of inventions wholly unrelated to those here
cited, received double importance from the fact that they were made in the
midst of the universal movement. But as soon as the immeasurable
importance of mechanical power was practically demonstrated, every energy
was concentrated in the effort to exploit this power in all directions,
and to exploit it in the interest of individual inventors and
manufacturers; and the demand for machinery, fuel, and materials called a
mass of workers and a number of trades into redoubled activity. The
steam-engine first gave importance to the broad coalfields of England; the
production of machinery began now for the first time, and with it arose a
new interest in the iron mines which supplied raw material for it. The
increased consumption of wool stimulated English sheep-breeding, and the
growing importation of wool, flax, and silk called forth an extension of
the British ocean carrying trade. Greatest of all was the growth of
production of iron. The rich iron deposits of the English hills had
hitherto been little developed; iron had always been smelted by means of
charcoal, which became gradually more expensive as agriculture improved
and forests were cut away. The beginning of the use of coke in iron
smelting had been made in the last century, and in 178o a new method was
invented of converting into available wrought-iron coke-smelted iron,
which up to that time had been convertible into cast iron only. This
process, known as 'puddling', consists in withdrawing the carbon which had
mixed with the iron during the process of smelting and opened a wholly new
field for the production of English iron. Smelting furnaces were built
fifty times larger than before, the process of smelting was simplified by
the introduction of hot blasts, and iron could thus be produced so cheaply
that a multitude of objects which had before been made of stone or wood
were now made of iron.
In 1788 Thomas Paine, the famous democrat, built in Yorkshire the first
iron bridge, which was followed by a great number of others, so that now
nearly all bridges, especially for railroad traffic, are built of cast
iron, while in London itself a bridge across the Thames, the Southwark
bridge, has been built of this material. Iron pillars, supports for
machinery, etc., are universally used, and since the introduction of
gas-lighting and railroads, new outlets for English iron products are
opened. Nails and screws gradually came to be made by machinery. Huntsman,
a Sheffielder, discovered in 1760 a method for casting steel, by which
much labour was saved, and the production of wholly new cheap goods
rendered practicable; and through the greater purity of the material
placed at its disposal, and the more perfect tools, new machinery, and
minute division of labour, the metal trade of England now first attained
importance. The population of Birmingham grew from 73,000 in 1801 to
200,000 in 1844; that of Sheffield from 46,000 in 1801 to 110,000 in 1844,
and the consumption of coal in the latter city alone reached in 1836,
515,000 tons. In 1805 there were exported 4,300 tons of iron products and
4,6oo tons of pigiron; in 1834, 16,200 tons of iron products and 107,000
tons of pig-iron, while the whole iron product, reaching in 1740 but
17,000 tons, had risen in 1834 to nearly 700,000 tons. The smelting of
pig-iron alone consumes yearly more than 3,000,000 tons of coal, and the
importance which coalmining has attained in the course of the last sixty
years can scarcely be conceived. All the English and Scottish deposits are
now worked, and the mines of Northumberland and Durham alone yield
annually more than 5,000,000 tons for shipping, and employ from 40 to
50,000 men. According to the Durham Chronicle, there were worked in
these two counties: In 1753, 14 mines; in 1800, 40 mines; in 1836, 76
mines; in 1843, 130 mines. Moreover, all mines are now much more
energetically worked than formerly. A similarly increased activity was
applied to the working of tin, copper, and lead, and alongside of the
extension of glass manufacture arose a new branch of industry in the
production of pottery, rendered important by the efforts of Josiah
Wedgwood, about 1763. This inventor placed the whole manufacture of
stoneware on a scientific basis, introduced better taste, and founded the
potteries of North Staffordshire, a district of eight English square
miles, which, formerly a desert waste, is now sown with works and
dwellings, and supports more than 60,000 people.
Into this universal whirl of activity everything was drawn. Agriculture
made a corresponding advance. Not only did landed property pass, as we
have already seen, into the hands of new owners and cultivators,
agriculture was affected in still another way. The great holders applied
capital to the improvement of the soil, tore down needless fences,
drained, manured, employed better tools, and applied a rotation of crops.
The progress of science came to their assistance also; Sir Humphry Davy
applied chemistry to agriculture with success, and the development of
mechanical science bestowed a multitude of advantages upon the large
farmer. Further, in consequence of the increase of population, the demand
for agricultural products increased in such measure that from 1760 to
1834, 6,840,540 acres of waste land were reclaimed; and, in spite of this,
England was transformed from a grain exporting to a grain importing
country.
The same activity was developed in the establishment of communication.
From 1818 to 1829, there were built in England and Wales, 1,000 English
miles of roadway of the width prescribed by law, 6o feet, and nearly all
the old roads were reconstructed on the new system of McAdam. In Scotland,
the Department of Public Works built since 1803 nearly 900 miles of
roadway and more than 1,000 bridges, by which the population of the
Highlands was suddenly placed within reach of civilization. The
Highlanders had hitherto been chiefly poachers and smugglers; they now
became farmers and hand-workers. And, though Gaelic schools were organized
for the purpose of maintaining the Gaelic language, yet Gaelic-Celtic
customs and speech are rapidly vanishing before the approach of English
civilization. So, too, in Ireland; between the counties of Cork, Limerick,
and Kerry lay hitherto a wilderness wholly without passable roads, and
serving, by reason of its inaccessibility, as the refuge of all criminals
and the chief protection of the Celtic Irish nationality in the South of
Ireland. It has now been cut through by public roads, and civilization has
thus gained admission even to this savage region. The whole British
Empire, and especially England, which, sixty years ago, had as bad roads
as Germany or France then had, is now covered by a network of the finest
roadways; and these, too, like almost everything else in England, are the
work of private enterprise, the State having done very little in this
direction.
Before 1755 England possessed almost no canals. In that year a canal was
built in Lancashire from Sankey Brook to St Helens; and in 1759 James
Brindley built the first important one, the Duke of Bridgewater's canal
from Manchester, and the coal-mines of the district to the mouth of the
Mersey passing, near Barton, by aqueduct, over the river Irwell. From this
achievement dates the canal building of England, to which Brindley first
gave importance. Canals were now built, and rivers made navigable in all
directions. In England alone, there are 2,200 miles of canals and 1,800
miles of navigable river. In Scotland, the Caledonian Canal was cut
directly across the country, and in Ireland several canals were built.
These improvements, too, like the railroads and roadways, are nearly all
the work of private individuals and companies.
The railroads have been only recently built. The first great one was
opened from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830, since which all the great
cities have been connected by rail. London with Southampton, Brighton,
Dover, Colchester, Exeter, and Birmingham, Birmingham with Gloucester,
Liverpool, Lancaster (via Newton and Wigan, and via Manchester and
Bolton); also with Leeds (via Manchester and Halifax, and via Leicester,
Derby, and Sheffield); Leeds with Hull and Newcastle (via York). There are
also many minor lines building or projected, which will soon make it
possible to travel from Edinburgh to London in one day.
As it had transformed the means of communication by land, so did the
introduction of steam revolutionize travel by sea. The first steamboat was
launched in 1807, in the Hudson, in North America; the first in the
British Empire, in 1811, on the Clyde. Since then, more than 600 have been
built in England; and in 1836 more than 500 were plying to and from
British ports.
Such, in brief, is the history of English industrial development in the
past sixty years, a history which has no counterpart in the annals of
humanity. Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like every other,
with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but proportionally
large agricultural population. Today it is a country like no
other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants; with vast
manufacturing cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and
produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an
industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two-thirds are
employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different;
forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a different nation
from the England of those days. The industrial revolution is of the same
importance for England as the political revolution for France, and the
philosophical revolution for Germany; and the difference between England
in 176o and in 1844 is at least as great as that between France, under the
ancien régime and during the revolution of July. But the mightiest
result of this industrial transformation is the English proletariat.
We have already seen how the proletariat was called into existence by the
introduction of machinery. The rapid extension of manufacture demanded
hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the agricultural
districts to the towns. Population multiplied enormously, and nearly all
the increase took place in the proletariat. Further, Ireland had entered
upon an orderly development only since the beginning of the eighteenth
century. There, too, the population, more than decimated by English
cruelty in earlier disturbances, now rapidly multiplied, especially after
the advance in manufacture began to draw masses of Irishmen towards
England. Thus arose the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the
British Empire, in which at least three-fourths of the population belong
to the working class, while the lower middle class consists only of small
shopkeepers, and very very few handicraftsmen. For, though the rising
manufacture first attained importance by transforming tools into machines,
workrooms into factories, and consequently, the toiling lower middle class
into the toiling proletariat, and the former large merchants into
manufacturers, though the lower middle class was thus early crushed out,
and the population reduced to the two opposing elements, workers and
capitalists, this happened outside of the domain of manufacture proper, in
the province of handicraft and retail trade as well. In the place of the
former masters and apprentices, came great capitalists and working men who
had no prospect of rising above their class. Handwork was carried on after
the fashion of factory work, the division of labour was strictly applied,
and small employers who could not compete with great establishments were
forced down into the proletariat. At the same time the destruction of the
former organization of hand-work, and the disappearance of the lower
middle class deprived the working man of all possibility of rising into
the middle class himself. Hitherto he had always had the prospect of
establishing himself somewhere as master artificer, perhaps employing
journeymen and apprentices; but now, when master artificers were crowded
out by manufacturers, when large capital had become necessary for carrying
on work independently, the working class became, for the first time, an
integral, permanent class of the population, whereas it has formerly often
been merely a transition leading to the bourgeoisie. Now, he who was born
to toil had no other prospect than that of remaining a toiler all his
life. Now, for the first time, therefore, the proletariat was in a
position to undertake an independent movement.
In this way were brought together those vast masses of working men who now
fill the whole British Empire, whose social condition forces itself every
day more and more upon the attention of the civilized world. The condition
of the working class is the condition of the vast majority of the English
people. The question: What is to become of those destitute millions, who
consume today what they earned yesterday; who have created the greatness
of England by their inventions and their toil; who become with every
passing day more conscious of their might, and demand, with daily
increasing urgency, their share of the advantages of society? -- This,
since the Reform Bill, has become the national question. All parliamentary
debates of any importance may be reduced to this; and, though the English
middle class will not as yet admit it, though they try to evade this great
question, and to represent their own particular interests as the truly
national ones, their action is utterly useless. With every session of
Parliament the working class gains ground, the interests of the middle
class diminish in importance; and, in spite of the fact that the middle
class is the chief, in fact, the only power in Parliament, the last
session of 1844 was a. continuous debate upon subjects affecting the
working class, the Poor Relief Bill, the Factory Act, the Masters' and
Servants' Act; and Thomas Duncombe, the representative of the working men
in the House of Commons, was the great man of the session; while the
Liberal middle class with its motion for repealing the Corn Laws, and the
Radical middle class with its resolution for refusing the taxes, played
pitiable roles. Even the debates about Ireland were at bottom debates
about the Irish proletariat, and the means of coming to its assistance. It
is high time, too, for the English middle class to make some concessions
to the working men who no longer plead but threaten; for in a short time
it may be too late.
In spite of all this, the English middle class, especially the
manufacturing class, which is enriched directly by means of the poverty of
the workers, persists in ignoring this poverty. This class, feeling itself
the mighty representative class of the nation, is ashamed to lay the sore
spot of England bare before the eyes of the world; will not confess, even
to itself, that the workers are in distress, because it, the
propertyholding, manufacturing class, must bear the moral responsibility
for this distress. Hence the scornful smile which intelligent Englishmen
(and they, the middle class, alone are known on the Continent) assume when
anyone begins to speak of the condition of the working class; hence the
utter ignorance on the part of the whole middle class of everything which
concerns the workers; hence the ridiculous blunders which men of this
class, in and out of Parliament, make when the position of the proletariat
comes under discussion; hence the absurd freedom from anxiety, with which
the middle class dwells upon a soil that is honeycombed, and may any day
collapse, the speedy collapse of which is as certain as a mathematical or
mechanical demonstration; hence the miracle that the English have as yet
no single book upon the condition of their workers, although they have
been examining and mending the old state of things no one knows how many
years. Hence also the deep wrath of the whole working class, from Glasgow
to London, against the rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and
mercilessly left to their fate, a wrath which before too long a time goes
by, a time almost within the power of man to predict, must break out into
a Revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year
1794, will prove to have been child's play.
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