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Title: The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844

Author: Friedrich Engels

Translator: Florence Kelley

Release date: December 13, 2005 [eBook #17306]
Most recently updated: June 21, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17306

Credits: Transcribed from the January 1943 George Allen & Unwin
reprint of the March 1892 edition by David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
CONDITION OF THE WORKING-CLASS IN ENGLAND IN 1844 ***

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in
1844, by Frederick Engels

The Condition of the Working-
Class in England in 1844
With a Preface written in 1892

by
FREDERICK ENGELS
Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky
London
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
Museum Street

PREFACE

The book, an English translation of which is here republished, was first
issued in Germany in 1845. The author, at that time, was young, twenty-
four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with its
good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed. It was
translated into English, in 1885, by an American lady, Mrs. F. Kelley
Wischnewetzky, and published in the following year in New York. The
American edition being as good as exhausted, and having never been
extensively circulated on this side of the Atlantic, the present English
copyright edition is brought out with the full consent of all parties
interested.
For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix were written in
English by the author. The first had little to do with the book itself; it
discussed the American Working-Class Movement of the day, and is,
therefore, here omitted as irrelevant, the second—the original preface—is
largely made use of in the present introductory remarks.
The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects,
to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in
our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that
the larger the scale on which Capitalistic Production is carried on, the less
can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which
characterise its early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish
Jew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those
tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised
there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to
Hamburg or Berlin; and, again, the commission agent, who hails from
Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or Christian, after frequenting the Manchester
Exchange for a few months, finds out that, in order to buy cotton yarn or
cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightly more refined but still

miserable wiles and subterfuges which are considered the acme of
cleverness in his native country. The fact is, those tricks do not pay any
longer in a large market, where time is money, and where a certain standard
of commercial morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of
saving time and trouble. And it is the same with the relation between the
manufacturer and his “hands.”
The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new
industrial epoch. The repeal of the Corn Laws and the financial reforms
subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce all the elbow-
room they had asked for. The discovery of the Californian and Australian
gold-fields followed in rapid succession. The Colonial markets developed
at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing English manufactured
goods. In India millions of hand-weavers were finally crushed out by the
Lancashire power-loom. China was more and more being opened up.
Above all, the United States—then, commercially speaking, a mere colonial
market, but by far the biggest of them all—underwent an economic
development astounding even for that rapidly progressive country. And,
finally, the new means of communication introduced at the close of the
preceding period—railways and ocean steamers—were now worked out on
an international scale; they realised actually, what had hitherto existed only
potentially, a world-market. This world-market, at first, was composed of a
number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries grouped around one
manufacturing centre—England—which consumed the greater part of their
surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return with the greater part of
their requirements in manufactured articles. No wonder England’s
industrial progress was colossal and unparalleled, and such that the status of
1844 now appears to us as comparatively primitive and insignificant. And
in proportion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did
manufacturing industry become apparently moralised. The competition of
manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the
workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of
making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing
millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller
traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck
system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of
other secondary reforms introduced—much against the spirit of Free Trade

and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-
capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the
larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and
inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a
new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught
them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and
power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes—at
opportune times—a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest
manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class,
were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good
reason. The fact is, that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy
were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the
hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years
had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all
the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make
both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of
production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed—at
least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is
far from being the case—to do away with all those minor grievances which
aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages. And thus it renders
more and more evident the great central fact, that the cause of the miserable
condition of the working-class is to be sought, not in these minor
grievances, but in the Capitalistic System itself. The wage-worker sells to
the capitalist his labour-force for a certain daily sum. After a few hours’
work he has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance of his
contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete his
working-day; and the value he produces during these additional hours of
surplus labour is surplus value, which cost the capitalist nothing, but yet
goes into his pocket. That is the basis of the system which tends more and
more to split up civilised society into a few Rothschilds and Vanderbilts, the
owners of all the means of production and subsistence, on the one hand, and
an immense number of wage-workers, the owners of nothing but their
labour-force, on the other. And that this result is caused, not by this or that
secondary grievance, but by the system itself—this fact has been brought
out in bold relief by the development of Capitalism in England since 1847.

Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and other
epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of
sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family
from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses
described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less
conspicuous. Drainage has been introduced or improved, wide avenues
have been opened out athwart many of the worst “slums” I had to describe.
“Little Ireland” has disappeared, and the “Seven Dials” are next on the list
for sweeping away. But what of that? Whole districts which in 1844 I
could describe as almost idyllic, have now, with the growth of the towns,
fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort, and misery. Only the
pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longer tolerated. The bourgeoisie have
made further progress in the art of hiding the distress of the working-class.
But that, in regard to their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken
place, is amply proved by the Report of the Royal Commission “on the
Housing of the Poor,” 1885. And this is the case, too, in other respects.
Police regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but they can only
hedge in the distress of the workers, they cannot remove it.
But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist
exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it.
France, Germany, and especially America, are the formidable competitors
who, at this moment—as foreseen by me in 1844—are more and more
breaking up England’s industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young
as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid rate
than the latter; and, curious enough, they have at this moment arrived at
about the same phase of development as English manufacture in 1844.
With regard to America, the parallel is indeed most striking. True, the
external surroundings in which the working-class is placed in America are
very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and the results, if
not identical in every respect, must still be of the same order. Hence we
find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-day, for a legal
limitation of the working-time, especially of women and children in
factories; we find the truck-system in full blossom, and the cottage-system,
in rural districts, made use of by the “bosses” as a means of domination
over the workers. When I received, in 1886, the American papers with
accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the

Connellsville district, I seemed but to read my own description of the North
of England colliers’ strike of 1844. The same cheating of the workpeople
by false measure; the same truck-system; the same attempt to break the
miners’ resistance by the capitalists’ last, but crushing, resource,—the
eviction of the men out of their dwellings, the cottages owned by the
companies.
I have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to date, or to
point out in detail all the changes that have taken place since 1844. And for
two reasons: Firstly, to do this properly, the size of the book must be about
doubled; and, secondly, the first volume of “Das Kapital,” by Karl Marx, an
English translation of which is before the public, contains a very ample
description of the state of the British working-class, as it was about 1865,
that is to say, at the time when British industrial prosperity reached its
culminating point. I should, then, have been obliged again to go over the
ground already covered by Marx’s celebrated work.
It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical
standpoint of this book—philosophical, economical, political—does not
exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international
Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost
exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844. My
book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and as the
human embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches of our
fish-ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of
modern Socialism from one of its ancestors,—German philosophy. Thus
great stress is laid on the dictum that Communism is not a mere party
doctrine of the working-class, but a theory compassing the emancipation of
society at large, including the capitalist class, from its present narrow
conditions. This is true enough in the abstract, but absolutely useless, and
sometimes worse, in practice. So long as the wealthy classes not only do
not feel the want of any emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-
emancipation of the working-class, so long the social revolution will have
to be prepared and fought out by the working-class alone. The French
bourgeois of 1789, too, declared the emancipation of the bourgeoisie to be
the emancipation of the whole human race; but the nobility and clergy
would not see it; the proposition—though for the time being, with respect to
feudalism, an abstract historical truth—soon became a mere

sentimentalism, and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the
revolutionary struggle. And to-day, the very people who, from the
“impartiality” of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a
Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and
tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the
contending classes—these people are either neophytes, who have still to
learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers,—wolves in
sheeps’ clothing.
The recurring period of the great industrial crisis is stated in the text as five
years. This was the period apparently indicated by the course of events
from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history from 1842 to 1868 has shown
that the real period is one of ten years; that the intermediate revulsions were
secondary, and tended more and more to disappear. Since 1868 the state of
things has changed again, of which more anon.
I have taken care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies, amongst
others that of an imminent social revolution in England, which my youthful
ardour induced me to venture upon. The wonder is, not that a good many of
them proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved right, and that
the critical state of English trade, to be brought on by Continental and
especially American competition, which I then foresaw—though in too
short a period—has now actually come to pass. In this respect I can, and
am bound to, bring the book up to date, by placing here an article which I
published in the London Commonweal of March 1, 1885, under the
heading: “England in 1845 and in 1885.” It gives at the same time a short
outline of the history of the English working-class during these forty years,
and is as follows:

“Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to
all appearances by force only. The immense and rapid development of
manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the
increase of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was
violently interrupted by a general commercial crash, followed, after a
long period of chronic depression, by a few short years of prosperity,
and always ending in feverish over-production and consequent
renewed collapse. The capitalist class clamoured for Free Trade in
corn, and threatened to enforce it by sending the starving population of

the towns back to the country districts whence they came, to invade
them, as John Bright said, not as paupers begging for bread, but as an
army quartered upon the enemy. The working masses of the towns
demanded their share of political power—the People’s Charter; they
were supported by the majority of the small trading class, and the only
difference between the two was whether the Charter should be carried
by physical or by moral force. Then came the commercial crash of
1847 and the Irish famine, and with both the prospect of revolution.
“The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle-class. The
Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen
frightened the small middle-class of England and disorganised the
narrower, but more matter-of-fact movement of the English working-
class. At the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert itself in
its full strength, it collapsed internally, before even it collapsed
externally on the 10th of April, 1848. The action of the working-class
was thrust into the background. The capitalist class triumphed along
the whole line.
“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist
class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the
victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed
aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests
were more or less bound up with the landed interest,—bankers, stock-
jobbers, fund-holders, etc. Free Trade meant the re-adjustment of the
whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of England
in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists—the
class which now represented the nation. And they set about this task
with a will. Every obstacle to industrial production was mercilessly
removed. The tariff and the whole system of taxation were
revolutionised. Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that
end of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the
cheapening of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living of
the working-class; the reduction of the cost of raw material, and the
keeping down—if not as yet the bringing down—of wages. England
was to become the ‘workshop of the world;’ all other countries were to
become for England what Ireland already was,—markets for her
manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and

food. England the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world,
with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands
revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect!
“The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this their
great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for
traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their
more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent. Chartism was dying
out. The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion
of 1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free
Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working-
class, politically, into the tail of the ‘great Liberal party,’ the party led
by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be
perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist
opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade
into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more
and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and
political power over the nation except by the help of the working-
class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both
classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were
not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating
almost all trades, was tolerated. Trades’ Unions, hitherto considered
inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as
perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading
sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than
which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now
gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when
provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time. Of the legal
enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage
with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed.
And, practically, that horrid ‘People’s Charter’ actually became the
political programme of the very manufacturers who had opposed it to
the last. ‘The Abolition of the Property Qualification’ and ‘Vote by
Ballot’ are now the law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and
1884 make a near approach to ‘universal suffrage,’ at least such as it
now exists in Germany; the Redistribution Bill now before Parliament
creates ‘equal electoral districts’—on the whole not more unequal than

those of Germany; ‘payment of members,’ and shorter, if not actually
‘annual Parliaments,’ are visibly looming in the distance—and yet
there are people who say that Chartism is dead.
“The Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its predecessors, has
had strange bedfellows and successors. The very people who put it
down have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary
executors. Louis Napoleon had to create an independent and united
Italy, Bismarck had to revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian
independence, and the English manufacturers had to enact the People’s
Charter.
“For England, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing
capitalists were at first startling. Trade revived and extended to a
degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous
astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing
compared with the immense mass of productions of the twenty years
from 1850 to 1870, with the overwhelming figures of exports and
imports, of wealth accumulated in the hands of capitalists and of
human working power concentrated in the large towns. The progress
was indeed interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in 1857
as well as in 1866; but these revulsions were now considered as
natural, inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to,
and which always set themselves right in the end.
“And the condition of the working-class during this period? There was
temporary improvement even for the great mass. But this
improvement always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the
great body of the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of
hands by new machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural
population, now, too, more and more superseded by machines.
“A permanent improvement can be recognised for two ‘protected’
sections only of the working-class. Firstly, the factory hands. The
fixing by Act of Parliament of their working-day within relatively
rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed
them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration.
They are undoubtedly better off than before 1848. The best proof is

that, out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the
manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of securing a
reduced production. You can never get the masters to agree to work
‘short time,’ let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the
workpeople to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man.
“Secondly, the great Trades’ Unions. They are the organisations of
those trades in which the labour of grown-up men predominates, or is
alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and children
nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The
engineers, the carpenters, and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of them
a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and
bricklayers’ labourers, they can even successfully resist the
introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably
improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this
is in the fact, that for more than fifteen years not only have their
employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon
exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the
working-class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a
relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are
the model working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are
very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible
capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.
“But as to the great mass of working-people, the state of misery and
insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower. The
East End of London is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and
desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical
and moral, when in work. And so in all other large towns—abstraction
made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller
towns and in the agricultural districts. The law which reduces the
value of labour-power to the value of the necessary means of
subsistence, and the other law which reduces its average price, as a
rule, to the minimum of those means of subsistence, these laws act
upon them with the irresistible force of an automatic engine, which
crushes them between its wheels.

“This, then, was the position created by the Free Trade policy of 1847,
and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing capitalists. But,
then, a change came. The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by a
slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not,
indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or
1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation
in all dominant branches of industry. Neither will the full crash come;
nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be
entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all
markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten
years. How is this?
“The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England
was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world.
And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure
delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and
machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coals.
And other countries beside England,—France, Belgium, Germany,
America, even Russia,—have coals. And the people over there did not
see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for
the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set resolutely
about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the
world; and the consequence is, that the manufacturing monopoly
enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up.
“But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the pivot of the
present social system of England. Even while that monopoly lasted,
the markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity of
English manufacturers; the decennial crises were the consequence.
And new markets are getting scarcer every day, so much so that even
the negroes of the Congo are now to be forced into the civilisation
attendant upon Manchester calicos, Staffordshire pottery, and
Birmingham hardware. How will it be when Continental, and
especially American, goods flow in in ever-increasing quantities—
when the predominating share, still held by British manufacturers, will
become reduced from year to year? Answer, Free Trade, thou
universal panacea.

“I am not the first to point this out. Already, in 1883, at the Southport
meeting of the British Association, Mr. Inglis Palgrave, the President
of the Economic section, stated plainly that ‘the days of great trade
profits in England were over, and there was a pause in the progress of
several great branches of industrial labour. The country might almost
be said to be entering the non-progressive state.’
“But what is to be the consequence? Capitalist production cannot
stop. It must go on increasing and expanding, or it must die. Even
now, the mere reduction of England’s lion’s share in the supply of the
world’s markets means stagnation, distress, excess of capital here,
excess of unemployed workpeople there. What will it be when the
increase of yearly production is brought to a complete stop?
“Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles, for capitalistic
production. Its very basis is the necessity of constant expansion, and
this constant expansion now becomes impossible. It ends in a
deadlock. Every year England is brought nearer face to face with the
question: either the country must go to pieces, or capitalist production
must. Which is it to be?
“And the working-class? If even under the unparalleled commercial
and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1866, they have had to undergo
such misery; if even then the great bulk of them experienced at best
but a temporary improvement of their condition, while only a small,
privileged, ‘protected’ minority was permanently benefited, what will
it be when this dazzling period is brought finally to a close; when the
present dreary stagnation shall not only become intensified, but this, its
intensified condition, shall become the permanent and normal state of
English trade?
“The truth is this: during the period of England’s industrial monopoly
the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the
benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally
parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most,
but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then.
And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has
been no Socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly,

the English working-class will lose that privileged position; it will find
itself generally—the privileged and leading minority not excepted—on
a level with its fellow-workers abroad. And that is the reason why
there will be Socialism again in England.”

To this statement of the case, as that case appeared to me in 1885, I have but
little to add. Needless to say that to-day there is indeed “Socialism again in
England,” and plenty of it—Socialism of all shades: Socialism conscious
and unconscious, Socialism prosaic and poetic, Socialism of the working-
class and of the middle-class, for, verily, that abomination of abominations,
Socialism, has not only become respectable, but has actually donned
evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses. That shows
the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of “society,” middle-class
public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we Socialists
of a past generation always held that public opinion. At the same time, we
have no reason to grumble at the symptom itself.
What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among
bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even more
than the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally, that is
the revival of the East End of London. That immense haunt of misery is no
longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid
despair, has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the
“New Unionism;” that is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of
“unskilled” workers. This organisation may to a great extent adopt the form
of the old Unions of “skilled” workers, but it is essentially different in
character. The old Unions preserve the traditions of the time when they
were founded, and look upon the wages system as a once for all established,
final fact, which they at best can modify in the interest of their members.
The new Unions were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the
wages system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were
Socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave
them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working-
class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that their minds
were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited “respectable” bourgeois
prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated “old”
Unionists. And thus we see now these new Unions taking the lead of the

working-class movement generally, and more and more taking in tow the
rich and proud “old” Unions.
Undoubtedly, the East Enders have committed colossal blunders; so have
their predecessors, and so do the doctrinaire Socialists who pooh-pooh
them. A large class, like a great nation, never learns better or quicker than
by undergoing the consequences of its own mistakes. And for all the faults
committed in past, present, and future, the revival of the East End of
London remains one of the greatest and most fruitful facts of this fin de
siècle, and glad and proud I am to have lived to see it.
F. Engels.
January 11th, 1892.

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
recognised. 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 neighbourhood 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 groggeries 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 recognised 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 spinning-wheel, 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 eight hours’ daily
work, four pounds sterling in a week, and often more if trade was good and
work pressed. It happened often enough that a single weaver earned two
pounds 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 small holders 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 small holdings 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 yeomen, 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 yarn 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 18th 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
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 hand-workers 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,
demoralisation, 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 {7}
somewhat more minutely, beginning with the cotton industry. In the years
1771-1775, 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 £1,200,000. 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 11,000 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 revolutionised this
county, converting it from an obscure, ill-cultivated 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 Heathcote 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
district, 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:
Bradford contained in 1801 29,000, and in 1831 77,000 inhabitants.
Halifax ,, ,, 68,000, ,, ,, 110,000 ,,
Huddersfield ,, ,, 15,000, ,, ,, 34,000 ,,
Leeds,, ,, 53,000, ,, ,, 123,000 ,,
And the whole West Riding 564,000, ,, ,, 980,000 ,,
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 1833, 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 Scotch
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 60 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 coal-fields 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 1780 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 1790 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 4,600 tons of pig-iron; 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 coal mining has
attained in the course of the last 60 years can scarcely be conceived. All the
English and Scotch 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 Wedgewood, 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 miles square, 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 Humphrey 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, 60 feet, and nearly all the
old roads were reconstructed on the new system of M’Adam. 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 civilisation. The
Highlanders had hitherto been chiefly poachers and smugglers; they now
became farmers and hand-workers. And, though Gaelic schools were
organised for the purpose of maintaining the Gaelic language, yet Gaelic-
Celtic customs and speech are rapidly vanishing before the approach of
English civilisation. 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 civilisation 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 Helen’s; 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 revolutionise 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. To-day 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 1760 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. Hand-work 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 organisation 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 had 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 civilised 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 to-day 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 property-holding, 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 any one 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.

THE INDUSTRIAL PROLETARIAT.

The order of our investigation of the different sections of the proletariat
follows naturally from the foregoing history of its rise. The first
proletarians were connected with manufacture, were engendered by it, and
accordingly, those employed in manufacture, in the working up of raw
materials, will first claim our attention. The production of raw materials
and of fuel for manufacture attained importance only in consequence of the
industrial change, and engendered a new proletariat, the coal and metal
miners. Then, in the third place, manufacture influenced agriculture, and in
the fourth, the condition of Ireland; and the fractions of the proletariat
belonging to each, will find their place accordingly. We shall find, too, that
with the possible exception of the Irish, the degree of intelligence of the
various workers is in direct proportion to their relation to manufacture; and
that the factory hands are most enlightened as to their own interests, the
miners somewhat less so, the agricultural labourers scarcely at all. We shall
find the same order again among the industrial workers, and shall see how
the factory hands, eldest children of the industrial revolution, have from the
beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement,
and how the others have joined this movement just in proportion as their
handicraft has been invaded by the progress of machinery. We shall thus
learn from the example which England offers, from the equal pace which
the Labour Movement has kept with the movement of industrial
development, the historical significance of manufacture.
Since, however, at the present moment, pretty much the whole industrial
proletariat is involved in the movement, and the condition of the separate
sections has much in common, because they all are industrial, we shall have
first to examine the condition of the industrial proletariat as a whole, in
order later to notice more particularly each separate division with its own
peculiarities.

It has been already suggested that manufacture centralises property in the
hands of the few. It requires large capital with which to erect the colossal
establishments that ruin the petty trading bourgeoisie and with which to
press into its service the forces of Nature, so driving the hand labour of the
independent workman out of the market. The division of labour, the
application of water and especially steam, and the application of machinery,
are the three great levers with which manufacture, since the middle of the
last century, has been busy putting the world out of joint. Manufacture, on
a small scale, created the middle-class; on a large scale, it created the
working-class, and raised the elect of the middle-class to the throne, but
only to overthrow them the more surely when the time comes. Meanwhile,
it is an undenied and easily explained fact that the numerous, petty middle-
class of the “good old times” has been annihilated by manufacture, and
resolved into rich capitalists on the one hand and poor workers on the other.
{20}
The centralising tendency of manufacture does not, however, stop here.
Population becomes centralised just as capital does; and, very naturally,
since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a
piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under
the name of wages. A manufacturing establishment requires many workers
employed together in a single building, living near each other and forming a
village of themselves in the case of a good-sized factory. They have needs
for satisfying which other people are necessary; handicraftsmen,
shoemakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stonemasons, settle at hand. The
inhabitants of the village, especially the younger generation, accustom
themselves to factory work, grow skilful in it, and when the first mill can no
longer employ them all, wages fall, and the immigration of fresh
manufacturers is the consequence. So the village grows into a small town,
and the small town into a large one. The greater the town, the greater its
advantages. It offers roads, railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour
increases constantly, new establishments can be built more cheaply because
of the competition among builders and machinists who are at hand, than in
remote country districts, whither timber, machinery, builders, and
operatives must be brought; it offers a market to which buyers crowd, and
direct communication with the markets supplying raw material or
demanding finished goods. Hence the marvellously rapid growth of the

great manufacturing towns. The country, on the other hand, has the
advantage that wages are usually lower than in town, and so town and
country are in constant competition; and, if the advantage is on the side of
the town to-day, wages sink so low in the country to-morrow, that new
investments are most profitably made there. But the centralising tendency
of manufacture continues in full force, and every new factory built in the
country bears in it the germ of a manufacturing town. If it were possible for
this mad rush of manufacture to go on at this rate for another century, every
manufacturing district of England would be one great manufacturing town,
and Manchester and Liverpool would meet at Warrington or Newton; for in
commerce, too, this centralisation of the population works in precisely the
same way, and hence it is that one or two great harbours, such as Hull and
Liverpool, Bristol, and London, monopolise almost the whole maritime
commerce of Great Britain.
Since commerce and manufacture attain their most complete development
in these great towns, their influence upon the proletariat is also most clearly
observable here. Here the centralisation of property has reached the highest
point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are most
completely obliterated; here it has gone so far that the name Merry Old
England conveys no meaning, for Old England itself is unknown to
memory and to the tales of our grandfathers. Hence, too, there exist here
only a rich and a poor class, for the lower middle-class vanishes more
completely with every passing day. Thus the class formerly most stable has
become the most restless one. It consists to-day of a few remnants of a past
time, and a number of people eager to make fortunes, industrial Micawbers
and speculators of whom one may amass a fortune, while ninety-nine
become insolvent, and more than half of the ninety-nine live by perpetually
repeated failure.
But in these towns the proletarians are the infinite majority, and how they
fare, what influence the great town exercises upon them, we have now to
investigate.

THE GREAT TOWNS.

A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together
without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest
hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within
reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralisation, this heaping together
of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the
power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised London to
the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled
the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames. I know nothing
more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent
from the sea to London Bridge. The masses of buildings, the wharves on
both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along
both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a
narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which
hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive,
that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England’s
greatness before he sets foot upon English soil. {23}
But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After
roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with
difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after
visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that these
Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human
nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their
city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained
inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more
fully and multiply through union with those of others. The very turmoil of
the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature
rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past
each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and
powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in

the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still
they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing
to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each
keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing
streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so
much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in
his private interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more
these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And,
however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this
narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere,
it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the
crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of
which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried
out to its utmost extreme.
Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here
openly declared. Just as in Stirner’s recent book, people regard each other
only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that
the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the
capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the
poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.
What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true
of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one
hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every
man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the
protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one
shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest
themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy
fabric still hangs together.
Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and
production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on, it is
clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor. For
him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirlpool, he must
struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., if
the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich itself by means of him, wages
await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can

get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in
which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet and
inoffensive manner. During my residence in England, at least twenty or
thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting
circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to
speak the plain truth in the matter. Let the testimony of the witnesses be
never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is
selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful
verdict, death from starvation. The bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in
these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation. But indirectly, far
more than directly, many have died of starvation, where long continued
want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has
produced such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained
inoperative, brought on severe illness and death. The English working-men
call this “social murder,” and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this
crime perpetually. Are they wrong?
True, it is only individuals who starve, but what security has the working-
man that it may not be his turn to-morrow? Who assures him employment,
who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason his lord and master
discharges him to-morrow, he can struggle along with those dependent upon
him, until he may find some one else “to give him bread?” Who guarantees
that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness,
industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie,
are really his road to happiness? No one. He knows that he has something
to-day, and that it does not depend upon himself whether he shall have
something to-morrow. He knows that every breeze that blows, every whim
of his employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the fierce
whirlpool from which he has temporarily saved himself, and in which it is
hard and often impossible to keep his head above water. He knows that,
though he may have the means of living to-day, it is very uncertain whether
he shall to-morrow.
Meanwhile, let us proceed to a more detailed investigation of the position,
in which the social war has placed the non-possessing class. Let us see
what pay for his work society does give the working-man in the form of
dwelling, clothing, food, what sort of subsistence it grants those who

contribute most to the maintenance of society; and, first, let us consider the
dwellings.
Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded
together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of
the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where,
removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it
can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of
England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one or
two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings,
almost always irregularly built. These houses of three or four rooms and a
kitchen form, throughout England, some parts of London excepted, the
general dwellings of the working-class. The streets are generally unpaved,
rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or
gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover,
ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the
whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a small
space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men’s quarters may
readily be imagined. Further, the streets serve as drying grounds in fine
weather; lines are stretched across from house to house, and hung with wet
clothing.
Let us investigate some of the slums in their order. London comes first, and
in London the famous rookery of St. Giles which is now, at last, about to be
penetrated by a couple of broad streets. St. Giles is in the midst of the most
populous part of the town, surrounded by broad, splendid avenues in which
the gay world of London idles about, in the immediate neighbourhood of
Oxford Street, Regent Street, of Trafalgar Square and the Strand. It is a
disorderly collection of tall, three or four-storied houses, with narrow,
crooked, filthy streets, in which there is quite as much life as in the great
thoroughfares of the town, except that, here, people of the working-class
only are to be seen. A vegetable market is held in the street, baskets with
vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and hardly fit to use, obstruct the
sidewalk still further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers’ stalls,
arises a horrible smell. The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy
within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could
possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in comparison with the
dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the streets, entered by

covered passages between the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin
surpass all description. Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the
walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-frames loose and broken,
doors of old boards nailed together, or altogether wanting in this thieves’
quarter, where no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal. Heaps of
garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before
the doors gather in stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the
worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution
indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction,
and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which
surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their
power to resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil
surroundings.
Nor is St. Giles the only London slum. In the immense tangle of streets,
there are hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts lined with houses too
bad for anyone to live in, who can still spend anything whatsoever upon a
dwelling fit for human beings. Close to the splendid houses of the rich such
a lurking-place of the bitterest poverty may often be found. So, a short time
ago, on the occasion of a coroner’s inquest, a region close to Portman
Square, one of the very respectable squares, was characterised as an abode
“of a multitude of Irish demoralised by poverty and filth.” So, too, may be
found in streets, such as Long Acre and others, which, though not
fashionable, are yet “respectable,” a great number of cellar dwellings out of
which puny children and half-starved, ragged women emerge into the light
of day. In the immediate neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre, the second
in London, are some of the worst streets of the whole metropolis, Charles,
King, and Park Streets, in which the houses are inhabited from cellar to
garret exclusively by poor families. In the parishes of St. John and St.
Margaret there lived in 1840, according to the Journal of the Statistical
Society, 5,366 working-men’s families in 5,294 “dwellings” (if they deserve
the name!), men, women, and children thrown together without distinction
of age or sex, 26,830 persons all told; and of these families three-fourths
possessed but one room. In the aristocratic parish of St. George, Hanover
Square, there lived, according to the same authority, 1,465 working-men’s
families, nearly 6,000 persons, under similar conditions, and here, too, more
than two-thirds of the whole number crowded together at the rate of one

family in one room. And how the poverty of these unfortunates, among
whom even thieves find nothing to steal, is exploited by the property-
holding class in lawful ways! The abominable dwellings in Drury Lane,
just mentioned, bring in the following rents: two cellar dwellings, 3s.; one
room, ground-floor, 4s.; second-storey, 4s. 6d.; third-floor, 4s.; garret-room,
3s. weekly, so that the starving occupants of Charles Street alone, pay the
house-owners a yearly tribute of £2,000, and the 5,336 families above
mentioned in Westminster, a yearly rent of £40,000.
The most extensive working-people’s district lies east of the Tower in
Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, where the greatest masses of London
working-people live. Let us hear Mr. G. Alston, preacher of St. Philip’s,
Bethnal Green, on the condition of his parish. He says:

“It contains 1,400 houses, inhabited by 2,795 families, or about 12,000
persons. The space upon which this large population dwells, is less
than 400 yards (1,200 feet) square, and in this overcrowding it is
nothing unusual to find a man, his wife, four or five children, and,
sometimes, both grandparents, all in one single room, where they eat,
sleep, and work. I believe that before the Bishop of London called
attention to this most poverty-stricken parish, people at the West End
knew as little of it as of the savages of Australia or the South Sea
Isles. And if we make ourselves acquainted with these unfortunates,
through personal observation, if we watch them at their scanty meal
and see them bowed by illness and want of work, we shall find such a
mass of helplessness and misery, that a nation like ours must blush that
these things can be possible. I was rector near Huddersfield during the
three years in which the mills were at their worst, but I have never seen
such complete helplessness of the poor as since then in Bethnal Green.
Not one father of a family in ten in the whole neighbourhood has other
clothing than his working suit, and that is as bad and tattered as
possible; many, indeed, have no other covering for the night than these
rags, and no bed, save a sack of straw and shavings.”

The foregoing description furnishes an idea of the aspect of the interior of
the dwellings. But let us follow the English officials, who occasionally
stray thither, into one or two of these working-men’s homes.

On the occasion of an inquest held Nov. 14th, 1843, by Mr. Carter, coroner
for Surrey, upon the body of Ann Galway, aged 45 years, the newspapers
related the following particulars concerning the deceased: She had lived at
No. 3 White Lion Court, Bermondsey Street, London, with her husband and
a nineteen-year-old son in a little room, in which neither a bedstead nor any
other furniture was to be seen. She lay dead beside her son upon a heap of
feathers which were scattered over her almost naked body, there being
neither sheet nor coverlet. The feathers stuck so fast over the whole body
that the physician could not examine the corpse until it was cleansed, and
then found it starved and scarred from the bites of vermin. Part of the floor
of the room was torn up, and the hole used by the family as a privy.
On Monday, Jan. 15th, 1844, two boys were brought before the police
magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and
immediately devoured a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop. The
magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and received the
following details from the policeman: The mother of the two boys was the
widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard time
since the death of her husband, to provide for her nine children. She lived
at No. 2 Pool’s Place, Quaker Court, Spitalfields, in the utmost poverty.
When the policeman came to her, he found her with six of her children
literally huddled together in a little back room, with no furniture but two old
rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs
broken, a broken cup, and a small dish. On the hearth was scarcely a spark
of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s
apron, which served the whole family as a bed. For bed clothing they had
only their scanty day clothing. The poor woman told him that she had been
forced to sell her bedstead the year before to buy food. Her bedding she
had pawned with the victualler for food. In short, everything had gone for
food. The magistrate ordered the woman a considerable provision from the
poor-box.
In February, 1844, Theresa Bishop, a widow 60 years old, was
recommended, with her sick daughter, aged 26, to the compassion of the
police magistrate in Marlborough Street. She lived at No. 5 Brown Street,
Grosvenor Square, in a small back room no larger than a closet, in which
there was not one single piece of furniture. In one corner lay some rags
upon which both slept; a chest served as table and chair. The mother earned

a little by charring. The owner of the house said that they had lived in this
way since May, 1843, had gradually sold or pawned everything that they
had, and had still never paid any rent. The magistrate assigned them £1
from the poor-box.
I am far from asserting that all London working-people live in such want as
the foregoing three families. I know very well that ten are somewhat better
off, where one is so totally trodden under foot by society; but I assert that
thousands of industrious and worthy people—far worthier and more to be
respected than all the rich of London—do find themselves in a condition
unworthy of human beings; and that every proletarian, everyone, without
exception, is exposed to a similar fate without any fault of his own and in
spite of every possible effort.
But in spite of all this, they who have some kind of a shelter are fortunate,
fortunate in comparison with the utterly homeless. In London fifty
thousand human beings get up every morning, not knowing where they are
to lay their heads at night. The luckiest of this multitude, those who
succeed in keeping a penny or two until evening, enter a lodging-house,
such as abound in every great city, where they find a bed. But what a bed!
These houses are filled with beds from cellar to garret, four, five, six beds in
a room; as many as can be crowded in. Into every bed four, five, or six
human beings are piled, as many as can be packed in, sick and well, young
and old, drunk and sober, men and women, just as they come,
indiscriminately. Then come strife, blows, wounds, or, if these bedfellows
agree, so much the worse; thefts are arranged and things done which our
language, grown more humane than our deeds, refuses to record. And those
who cannot pay for such a refuge? They sleep where they find a place, in
passages, arcades, in corners where the police and the owners leave them
undisturbed. A few individuals find their way to the refuges which are
managed, here and there, by private charity, others sleep on the benches in
the parks close under the windows of Queen Victoria. Let us hear the
London Times:

“It appears from the report of the proceedings at Marlborough Street
Police Court in our columns of yesterday, that there is an average
number of 50 human beings of all ages, who huddle together in the
parks every night, having no other shelter than what is supplied by the

trees and a few hollows of the embankment. Of these, the majority are
young girls who have been seduced from the country by the soldiers
and turned loose on the world in all the destitution of friendless
penury, and all the recklessness of early vice.
“This is truly horrible! Poor there must be everywhere. Indigence will
find its way and set up its hideous state in the heart of a great and
luxurious city. Amid the thousand narrow lanes and by-streets of a
populous metropolis there must always, we fear, be much suffering—
much that offends the eye—much that lurks unseen.
“But that within the precincts of wealth, gaiety, and fashion, nigh the
regal grandeur of St. James, close on the palatial splendour of
Bayswater, on the confines of the old and new aristocratic quarters, in
a district where the cautious refinement of modern design has refrained
from creating one single tenement for poverty; which seems, as it
were, dedicated to the exclusive enjoyment of wealth, that there want,
and famine, and disease, and vice should stalk in all their kindred
horrors, consuming body by body, soul by soul!
“It is indeed a monstrous state of things! Enjoyment the most
absolute, that bodily ease, intellectual excitement, or the more innocent
pleasures of sense can supply to man’s craving, brought in close
contact with the most unmitigated misery! Wealth, from its bright
saloons, laughing—an insolently heedless laugh—at the unknown
wounds of want! Pleasure, cruelly but unconsciously mocking the
pain that moans below! All contrary things mocking one another—all
contrary, save the vice which tempts and the vice which is tempted!
“But let all men remember this—that within the most courtly precincts
of the richest city of God’s earth, there may be found, night after night,
winter after winter, women—young in years—old in sin and suffering
—outcasts from society—rotting from famine, filth, and disease. Let
them remember this, and learn not to theorise but to act. God knows,
there is much room for action nowadays.” {32}

I have referred to the refuges for the homeless. How greatly overcrowded
these are, two examples may show. A newly erected Refuge for the
Houseless in Upper Ogle Street, that can shelter three hundred persons

every night, has received since its opening, January 27th to March 17th,
1844, 2,740 persons for one or more nights; and, although the season was
growing more favourable, the number of applicants in this, as well as in the
asylums of Whitecross Street and Wapping, was strongly on the increase,
and a crowd of the homeless had to be sent away every night for want of
room. In another refuge, the Central Asylum in Playhouse Yard, there were
supplied on an average 460 beds nightly, during the first three months of the
year 1844, 6,681 persons being sheltered, and 96,141 portions of bread
were distributed. Yet the committee of directors declare this institution
began to meet the pressure of the needy to a limited extent only when the
Eastern Asylum also was opened.
Let us leave London and examine the other great cities of the three
kingdoms in their order. Let us take Dublin first, a city the approach to
which from the sea is as charming as that of London is imposing. The Bay
of Dublin is the most beautiful of the whole British Island Kingdom, and is
even compared by the Irish with the Bay of Naples. The city, too, possesses
great attractions, and its aristocratic districts are better and more tastefully
laid out than those of any other British city. By way of compensation,
however, the poorer districts of Dublin are among the most hideous and
repulsive to be seen in the world. True, the Irish character, which, under
some circumstances, is comfortable only in the dirt, has some share in this;
but as we find thousands of Irish in every great city in England and
Scotland, and as every poor population must gradually sink into the same
uncleanliness, the wretchedness of Dublin is nothing specific, nothing
peculiar to Dublin, but something common to all great towns. The poor
quarters of Dublin are extremely extensive, and the filth, the
uninhabitableness of the houses and the neglect of the streets, surpass all
description. Some idea of the manner in which the poor are here crowded
together may be formed from the fact that, in 1817, according to the report
of the Inspector of Workhouses, {33} 1,318 persons lived in 52 houses with
390 rooms in Barral Street, and 1,997 persons in 71 houses with 393 rooms
in and near Church Street; that:

“In this and the adjoining district there exists a multitude of foul courts
and alleys; many cellars receive all their light through the door, while
in not a few the inhabitants sleep upon the bare floor, though most of
them possess bedsteads at least; Nicholson’s Court, for example,

contains twenty-eight wretched little rooms with 151 human beings in
the greatest want, there being but two bedsteads and two blankets to be
found in the whole court.”

The poverty is so great in Dublin, that a single benevolent institution, the
Mendicity Association, gives relief to 2,500 persons or one per cent. of the
population daily, receiving and feeding them for the day and dismissing
them at night.
Dr. Alison describes a similar state of things in Edinburgh, whose superb
situation, which has won it the title of the Modern Athens, and whose
brilliant aristocratic quarter in the New Town, contrast strongly with the
foul wretchedness of the poor in the Old Town. Alison asserts that this
extensive quarter is as filthy and horrible as the worst district of Dublin,
while the Mendicity Association would have as great a proportion of needy
persons to assist in Edinburgh as in the Irish capital. He asserts, indeed,
that the poor in Scotland, especially in Edinburgh and Glasgow, are worse
off than in any other region of the three kingdoms, and that the poorest are
not Irish, but Scotch. The preacher of the Old Church of Edinburgh, Dr.
Lee, testified in 1836, before the Commission of Religious Instruction, that:

“He had never before seen such misery as in his parish, where the
people were without furniture, without everything, two married
couples often sharing one room. In a single day he had visited seven
houses in which there was not a bed, in some of them not even a heap
of straw. Old people of eighty years sleep on the board floor, nearly all
slept in their day-clothes. In one cellar room he found two families
from a Scotch country district; soon after their removal to the city two
of the children had died, and a third was dying at the time of his visit.
Each family had a filthy pile of straw lying in a corner; the cellar
sheltered besides the two families a donkey, and was, moreover, so
dark that it was impossible to distinguish one person from another by
day. Dr. Lee declared that it was enough to make a heart of adamant
bleed to see such misery in a country like Scotland.”

In the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Dr. Hennan reports a
similar state of things. From a Parliamentary Report, {35a} it is evident
that in the dwellings of the poor of Edinburgh a want of cleanliness reigns,

such as must be expected under these conditions. On the bed-posts
chickens roost at night, dogs and horses share the dwellings of human
beings, and the natural consequence is a shocking stench, with filth and
swarms of vermin. The prevailing construction of Edinburgh favours these
atrocious conditions as far as possible. The Old Town is built upon both
slopes of a hill, along the crest of which runs the High Street. Out of the
High Street there open downwards multitudes of narrow, crooked alleys,
called wynds from their many turnings, and these wynds form the
proletarian district of the city. The houses of the Scotch cities, in general,
are five or six-storied buildings, like those of Paris, and in contrast with
England where, so far as possible, each family has a separate house. The
crowding of human beings upon a limited area is thus intensified. {35b}

“These streets,” says an English journal in an article upon the sanitary
condition of the working-people in cities, “are often so narrow that a
person can step from the window of one house into that of its opposite
neighbour, while the houses are piled so high, storey upon storey, that
the light can scarcely penetrate into the court or alley that lies
between. In this part of the city there are neither sewers nor other
drains, nor even privies belonging to the houses. In consequence, all
refuse, garbage, and excrements of at least 50,000 persons are thrown
into the gutters every night, so that, in spite of all street sweeping, a
mass of dried filth and foul vapours are created, which not only offend
the sight and smell, but endanger the health of the inhabitants in the
highest degree. Is it to be wondered at, that in such localities all
considerations of health, morals, and even the most ordinary decency
are utterly neglected? On the contrary, all who are more intimately
acquainted with the condition of the inhabitants will testify to the high
degree which disease, wretchedness, and demoralisation have here
reached. Society in such districts has sunk to a level indescribably low
and hopeless. The houses of the poor are generally filthy, and are
evidently never cleansed. They consist in most cases of a single room
which, while subject to the worst ventilation, is yet usually kept cold
by the broken and badly fitting windows, and is sometimes damp and
partly below ground level, always badly furnished and thoroughly
uncomfortable, a straw-heap often serving the whole family for a bed,
upon which men and women, young and old, sleep in revolting

confusion. Water can be had only from the public pumps, and the
difficulty of obtaining it naturally fosters all possible filth.”

In the other great seaport towns the prospect is no better. Liverpool, with
all its commerce, wealth, and grandeur yet treats its workers with the same
barbarity. A full fifth of the population, more than 45,000 human beings,
live in narrow, dark, damp, badly-ventilated cellar dwellings, of which there
are 7,862 in the city. Besides these cellar dwellings there are 2,270 courts,
small spaces built up on all four sides and having but one entrance, a
narrow, covered passage-way, the whole ordinarily very dirty and inhabited
exclusively by proletarians. Of such courts we shall have more to say when
we come to Manchester. In Bristol, on one occasion, 2,800 families were
visited, of whom 46 per cent. occupied but one room each.
Precisely the same state of things prevails in the factory towns. In
Nottingham there are in all 11,000 houses, of which between 7,000 and
8,000 are built back to back with a rear parti-wall so that no through
ventilation is possible, while a single privy usually serves for several
houses. During an investigation made a short time since, many rows of
houses were found to have been built over shallow drains covered only by
the boards of the ground floor. In Leicester, Derby, and Sheffield, it is no
better. Of Birmingham, the article above cited from the Artisan states:

“In the older quarters of the city there are many bad districts, filthy and
neglected, full of stagnant pools and heaps of refuse. Courts are very
numerous in Birmingham, reaching two thousand, and containing the
greater number of the working-people of the city. These courts are
usually narrow, muddy, badly ventilated, ill-drained, and lined with
eight to twenty houses, which, by reason of having their rear walls in
common, can usually be ventilated from one side only. In the
background, within the court, there is usually an ash heap or something
of the kind, the filth of which cannot be described. It must, however,
be observed that the newer courts are more sensibly built and more
decently kept, and that even in the old ones, the cottages are much less
crowded than in Manchester and Liverpool, wherefore Birmingham
shows even during the reign of an epidemic a far smaller mortality
than, for instance, Wolverhampton, Dudley, and Bilston, only a few
miles distant. Cellar dwellings are unknown, too, in Birmingham,

though a few cellars are misused as workrooms. The lodging-houses
for proletarians are rather numerous (over four hundred), chiefly in
courts in the heart of the town. They are nearly all disgustingly filthy
and ill-smelling, the refuge of beggars, thieves, tramps, and prostitutes,
who eat, drink, smoke, and sleep here without the slightest regard to
comfort or decency in an atmosphere endurable to these degraded
beings only.”

Glasgow is in many respects similar to Edinburgh, possessing the same
wynds, the same tall houses. Of this city the Artisan observes:

“The working-class forms here some 78% of the whole population
(about 300,000), and lives in parts of the city which exceed in
wretchedness and squalor the lowest nooks of St. Giles and
Whitechapel, the Liberties of Dublin, the Wynds of Edinburgh. There
are numbers of such localities in the heart of the city, south of the
Trongate, westward from the Saltmarket, in Calton and off the High
Street, endless labyrinths of lanes or wynds into which open at almost
every step, courts or blind alleys, formed by ill-ventilated, high-piled,
waterless, and dilapidated houses. These are literally swarming with
inhabitants. They contain three or four families upon each floor,
perhaps twenty persons. In some cases each storey is let out in
sleeping places, so that fifteen to twenty persons are packed, one on
top of the other, I cannot say accommodated, in a single room. These
districts shelter the poorest, most depraved, and worthless members of
the community, and may be regarded as the sources of those frightful
epidemics which, beginning here, spread desolation over Glasgow.”

Let us hear how J. C. Symonds, Government Commissioner for the
investigation of the condition of the hand-weavers, describes these portions
of the city: {38}

“I have seen wretchedness in some of its worse phases both here and
upon the Continent, but until I visited the wynds of Glasgow I did not
believe that so much crime, misery, and disease could exist in any
civilised country. In the lower lodging-houses ten, twelve, sometimes
twenty persons of both sexes, all ages and various degrees of
nakedness, sleep indiscriminately huddled together upon the floor.

These dwellings are usually so damp, filthy, and ruinous, that no one
could wish to keep his horse in one of them.”

And in another place:

“The wynds of Glasgow contain a fluctuating population of fifteen to
thirty thousand human beings. This quarter consists wholly of narrow
alleys and square courts, in the middle of every one of which there lies
a dung heap. Revolting as was the outward appearance of these courts,
I was yet not prepared for the filth and wretchedness within. In some
of the sleeping-places which we visited at night (the Superintendent of
Police, Captain Miller, and Symonds) we found a complete layer of
human beings stretched upon the floor, often fifteen to twenty, some
clad, others naked, men and women indiscriminately. Their bed was a
litter of mouldy straw, mixed with rags. There was little or no
furniture, and the only thing which gave these dens any shimmer of
habitableness was a fire upon the hearth. Theft and prostitution form
the chief means of subsistence of this population. No one seemed to
take the trouble to cleanse this Augean stable, this Pandemonium, this
tangle of crime, filth, and pestilence in the centre of the second city of
the kingdom. An extended examination of the lowest districts of other
cities never revealed anything half so bad, either in intensity of moral
and physical infection, nor in comparative density of population. In
this quarter most of the houses have been declared by the Court of
Guild ruinous and unfit for habitation, but precisely these are the most
densely populated, because, according to the law, no rent can be
demanded for them.”

The great manufacturing district in the centre of the British Islands, the
thickly peopled stretch of West Yorkshire and South Lancashire, with its
numerous factory towns, yields nothing to the other great manufacturing
centres. The woollen district of the West Riding of Yorkshire is a charming
region, a beautiful green hill country, whose elevations grow more rugged
towards the West until they reach their highest point in the bold ridge of
Blackstone Edge, the watershed between the Irish Sea and the German
Ocean. The valleys of the Aire, along which stretches Leeds, and of the
Calder, through which the Manchester-Leeds railway runs, are among the

most attractive in England, and are strewn in all directions with the
factories, villages, and towns. The houses of rough grey stone look so neat
and clean in comparison with the blackened brick buildings of Lancashire,
that it is a pleasure to look at them. But on coming into the towns
themselves, one finds little to rejoice over. Leeds lies as the Artisan
describes it, and as I found confirmed upon examination: “on a gentle slope
that descends into the valley of the Aire. This stream flows through the city
for about a mile-and-a-half and is exposed to violent floods during thaws or
heavy rain. The higher western portions of the city are clean, for such a
large town. But the low-lying districts along the river and its tributary
becks are narrow, dirty, and enough in themselves to shorten the lives of the
inhabitants, especially of little children. Added to this, the disgusting state
of the working-men’s districts about Kirkgate, Marsh Lane, Cross Street
and Richmond Road, which is chiefly attributable to their unpaved,
drainless streets, irregular architecture, numerous courts and alleys, and
total lack of the most ordinary means of cleanliness, all this taken together
is explanation enough of the excessive mortality in these unhappy abodes of
filthy misery. In consequence of the overflows of the Aire” (which, it must
be added, like all other rivers in the service of manufacture, flows into the
city at one end clear and transparent, and flows out at the other end thick,
black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse), “the houses and cellars are
often so full of water that they have to be pumped out. And at such times
the water rises, even where there are sewers, out of them into cellars, {40a}
engenders miasmatic vapours strongly impregnated with sulphuretted
hydrogen, and leaves a disgusting residuum highly injurious to health.
During the spring-floods of 1839 the action of such a choking of the sewers
was so injurious, that, according to the report of the Registrar of Births and
Deaths for this part of the town, there were three deaths to two births,
whereas in the same three months, in every other part of the town, there
were three births to two deaths. Other thickly populated districts are
without any sewers whatsoever, or so badly provided as to derive no benefit
from them. In some rows of houses the cellars are seldom dry; in certain
districts there are several streets covered with soft mud a foot deep. The
inhabitants have made vain attempts from time to time to repair these
streets with shovelfuls of cinders, but in spite of all such attempts, dung-
heaps, and pools of dirty water emptied from the houses, fill all the holes
until wind and sun dry them up. {40b} An ordinary cottage in Leeds

occupies not more than five yards square of land, and usually consists of a
cellar, a living room, and one sleeping-room. These contracted dwellings,
filled day and night with human beings, are another point dangerous alike to
the morals and the health of the inhabitants.” And how greatly these
cottages are crowded, the Report on the Health of the Working-Classes,
quoted above, bears testimony: “In Leeds we found brothers and sisters, and
lodgers of both sexes, sharing the parents’ sleeping-room, whence arise
consequences at the contemplation of which human feeling shudders.”
So, too, Bradford, which, but seven miles from Leeds at the junction of
several valleys, lies upon the banks of a small, coal-black, foul-smelling
stream. On week-days the town is enveloped in a grey cloud of coal smoke,
but on a fine Sunday it offers a superb picture, when viewed from the
surrounding heights. Yet within reigns the same filth and discomfort as in
Leeds. The older portions of the town are built upon steep hillsides, and are
narrow and irregular. In the lanes, alleys, and courts lie filth and debris in
heaps; the houses are ruinous, dirty, and miserable, and in the immediate
vicinity of the river and the valley bottom I found many a one, whose
ground-floor, half-buried in the hillside, was totally abandoned. In general,
the portions of the valley bottom in which working-men’s cottages have
crowded between the tall factories, are among the worst built and dirtiest
districts of the whole town. In the newer portions of this, as of every other
factory town, the cottages are more regular, being built in rows, but they
share here, too, all the evils incident to the customary method of providing
working-men’s dwellings, evils of which we shall have occasions to speak
more particularly in discussing Manchester. The same is true of the
remaining towns of the West Riding, especially of Barnsley, Halifax and
Huddersfield. The last named, the handsomest by far of all the factory
towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, by reason of its charming situation and
modern architecture, has yet its bad quarter; for a committee appointed by a
meeting of citizens to survey the town, reported August 5th, 1844: “It is
notorious that in Huddersfield whole streets and many lanes and courts are
neither paved nor supplied with sewers nor other drains; that in them refuse,
debris, and filth of every sort lies accumulating, festers and rots, and that,
nearly everywhere, stagnant water accumulates in pools, in consequence of
which the adjoining dwellings must inevitably be bad and filthy, so that in
such places diseases arise and threaten the health of the whole town.”

If we cross Blackstone Edge or penetrate it with the railroad, we enter upon
that classic soil on which English manufacture has achieved its masterwork
and from which all labour movements emanate, namely, South Lancashire
with its central city Manchester. Again we have beautiful hill country,
sloping gently from the watershed westwards towards the Irish Sea, with
the charming green valleys of the Ribble, the Irwell, the Mersey, and their
tributaries, a country which, a hundred years ago chiefly swamp land, thinly
populated, is now sown with towns and villages, and is the most densely
populated strip of country in England. In Lancashire, and especially in
Manchester, English manufacture finds at once its starting point and its
centre. The Manchester Exchange is the thermometer for all the
fluctuations of trade. The modern art of manufacture has reached its
perfection in Manchester. In the cotton industry of South Lancashire, the
application of the forces of Nature, the superseding of hand labour by
machinery (especially by the power-loom and the self-acting mule), and the
division of labour, are seen at the highest point; and, if we recognise in
these three elements that which is characteristic of modern manufacture, we
must confess that the cotton industry has remained in advance of all other
branches of industry from the beginning down to the present day. The
effects of modern manufacture upon the working-class must necessarily
develop here most freely and perfectly, and the manufacturing proletariat
present itself in its fullest classic perfection. The degradation to which the
application of steam-power, machinery and the division of labour reduce the
working-man, and the attempts of the proletariat to rise above this
abasement, must likewise be carried to the highest point and with the fullest
consciousness. Hence because Manchester is the classic type of a modern
manufacturing town, and because I know it as intimately as my own native
town, more intimately than most of its residents know it, we shall make a
longer stay here.
The towns surrounding Manchester vary little from the central city, so far as
the working-people’s quarters are concerned, except that the working-class
forms, if possible, a larger proportion of their population. These towns are
purely industrial and conduct all their business through Manchester upon
which they are in every respect dependent, whence they are inhabited only
by working-men and petty tradesmen, while Manchester has a very
considerable commercial population, especially of commission and

“respectable” retail dealers. Hence Bolton, Preston, Wigan, Bury,
Rochdale, Middleton, Heywood, Oldham, Ashton, Stalybridge, Stockport,
etc., though nearly all towns of thirty, fifty, seventy to ninety thousand
inhabitants, are almost wholly working-people’s districts, interspersed only
with factories, a few thoroughfares lined with shops, and a few lanes along
which the gardens and houses of the manufacturers are scattered like villas.
The towns themselves are badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes,
and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the
originally bright red brick, turned black with time, which is here the
universal building material. Cellar dwellings are general here; wherever it
is in any way possible, these subterranean dens are constructed, and a very
considerable portion of the population dwells in them.
Among the worst of these towns after Preston and Oldham is Bolton, eleven
miles north-west of Manchester. It has, so far as I have been able to
observe in my repeated visits, but one main street, a very dirty one,
Deansgate, which serves as a market, and is even in the finest weather a
dark, unattractive hole in spite of the fact that, except for the factories, its
sides are formed by low one and two-storied houses. Here, as everywhere,
the older part of the town is especially ruinous and miserable. A dark-
coloured body of water, which leaves the beholder in doubt whether it is a
brook or a long string of stagnant puddles, flows through the town and
contributes its share to the total pollution of the air, by no means pure
without it.
There is Stockport, too, which lies on the Cheshire side of the Mersey, but
belongs nevertheless to the manufacturing district of Manchester. It lies in
a narrow valley along the Mersey, so that the streets slope down a steep hill
on one side and up an equally steep one on the other, while the railway from
Manchester to Birmingham passes over a high viaduct above the city and
the whole valley. Stockport is renowned throughout the entire district as
one of the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks, indeed, especially when
viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent. But far more repulsive are
the cottages and cellar dwellings of the working-class, which stretch in long
rows through all parts of the town from the valley bottom to the crest of the
hill. I do not remember to have seen so many cellars used as dwellings in
any other town of this district.

A few miles north-east of Stockport is Ashton-under-Lyne, one of the
newest factory towns of this region. It stands on the slope of a hill at the
foot of which are the canal and the river Tame, and is, in general, built on
the newer, more regular plan. Five or six parallel streets stretch along the
hill intersected at right angles by others leading down into the valley. By
this method, the factories would be excluded from the town proper, even if
the proximity of the river and the canal-way did not draw them all into the
valley where they stand thickly crowded, belching forth black smoke from
their chimneys. To this arrangement Ashton owes a much more attractive
appearance than that of most factory towns; the streets are broad and
cleaner, the cottages look new, bright red, and comfortable. But the modern
system of building cottages for working-men has its own disadvantages;
every street has its concealed back lane to which a narrow paved path leads,
and which is all the dirtier. And, although I saw no buildings, except a few
on entering, which could have been more than fifty years old, there are even
in Ashton streets in which the cottages are getting bad, where the bricks in
the house-corners are no longer firm but shift about, in which the walls
have cracks and will not hold the chalk whitewash inside; streets, whose
dirty, smoke-begrimed aspect is nowise different from that of the other
towns of the district, except that in Ashton, this is the exception, not the
rule.
A mile eastward lies Stalybridge, also on the Tame. In coming over the hill
from Ashton, the traveller has, at the top, both right and left, fine large
gardens with superb villa-like houses in their midst, built usually in the
Elizabethan style, which is to the Gothic precisely what the Anglican
Church is to the Apostolic Roman Catholic. A hundred paces farther and
Stalybridge shows itself in the valley, in sharp contrast with the beautiful
country seats, in sharp contrast even with the modest cottages of Ashton!
Stalybridge lies in a narrow, crooked ravine, much narrower even than the
valley at Stockport, and both sides of this ravine are occupied by an
irregular group of cottages, houses, and mills. On entering, the very first
cottages are narrow, smoke-begrimed, old and ruinous; and as the first
houses, so the whole town. A few streets lie in the narrow valley bottom,
most of them run criss-cross, pell-mell, up hill and down, and in nearly all
the houses, by reason of this sloping situation, the ground floor is half-
buried in the earth; and what multitudes of courts, back lanes, and remote

nooks arise out of this confused way of building may be seen from the hills,
whence one has the town, here and there, in a bird’s-eye view almost at
one’s feet. Add to this the shocking filth, and the repulsive effect of
Stalybridge, in spite of its pretty surroundings, may be readily imagined.
But enough of these little towns. Each has its own peculiarities, but in
general, the working-people live in them just as in Manchester. Hence I
have especially sketched only their peculiar construction, and would
observe, that all more general observations as to the condition of the
labouring population in Manchester are fully applicable to these
surrounding towns as well.
Manchester lies at the foot of the southern slope of a range of hills, which
stretch hither from Oldham, their last peak, Kersallmoor, being at once the
racecourse and the Mons Sacer of Manchester. Manchester proper lies on
the left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and the two smaller ones,
the Irk and the Medlock, which here empty into the Irwell. On the left bank
of the Irwell, bounded by a sharp curve of the river, lies Salford, and farther
westward Pendleton; northward from the Irwell lie Upper and Lower
Broughton; northward of the Irk, Cheetham Hill; south of the Medlock lies
Hulme; farther east Chorlton on Medlock; still farther, pretty well to the
east of Manchester, Ardwick. The whole assemblage of buildings is
commonly called Manchester, and contains about four hundred thousand
inhabitants, rather more than less. The town itself is peculiarly built, so that
a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming
into contact with a working-people’s quarter or even with workers, that is,
so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. This
arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as
with outspoken conscious determination, the working-people’s quarters are
sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle-class;
or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of charity.
Manchester contains, at its heart, a rather extended commercial district,
perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly
of offices and warehouses. Nearly the whole district is abandoned by
dwellers, and is lonely and deserted at night; only watchmen and policemen
traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns. This district is cut
through by certain main thoroughfares upon which the vast traffic
concentrates, and in which the ground level is lined with brilliant shops. In

these streets the upper floors are occupied, here and there, and there is a
good deal of life upon them until late at night. With the exception of this
commercial district, all Manchester proper, all Salford and Hulme, a great
part of Pendleton and Chorlton, two-thirds of Ardwick, and single stretches
of Cheetham Hill and Broughton are all unmixed working-people’s
quarters, stretching like a girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth,
around the commercial district. Outside, beyond this girdle, lives the upper
and middle bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie in regularly laid out streets
in the vicinity of the working quarters, especially in Chorlton and the lower
lying portions of Cheetham Hill; the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas
with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy heights of
Cheetham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air,
in fine, comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by
omnibuses going into the city. And the finest part of the arrangement is
this, that the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road
through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business,
without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks
to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange
in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost
unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and
lower bourgeoisie, which, out of self-interest, cares for a decent and cleanly
external appearance and can care for it. True, these shops bear some
relation to the districts which lie behind them, and are more elegant in the
commercial and residential quarters than when they hide grimy working-
men’s dwellings; but they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy
men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime
which form the complement of their wealth. So, for instance, Deansgate,
which leads from the Old Church directly southward, is lined first with
mills and warehouses, then with second-rate shops and alehouses; farther
south, when it leaves the commercial district, with less inviting shops,
which grow dirtier and more interrupted by beerhouses and gin palaces the
farther one goes, until at the southern end the appearance of the shops
leaves no doubt that workers and workers only are their customers. So
Market Street running south-east from the Exchange; at first brilliant shops
of the best sort, with counting-houses or warehouses above; in the
continuation, Piccadilly, immense hotels and warehouses; in the farther
continuation, London Road, in the neighbourhood of the Medlock,

factories, beerhouses, shops for the humbler bourgeoisie and the working
population; and from this point onward, large gardens and villas of the
wealthier merchants and manufacturers. In this way any one who knows
Manchester can infer the adjoining districts, from the appearance of the
thoroughfare, but one is seldom in a position to catch from the street a
glimpse of the real labouring districts. I know very well that this
hypocritical plan is more or less common to all great cities; I know, too, that
the retail dealers are forced by the nature of their business to take
possession of the great highways; I know that there are more good buildings
than bad ones upon such streets everywhere, and that the value of land is
greater near them than in remoter districts; but at the same time I have
never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working-class from the
thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront
the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester. And yet, in
other respects, Manchester is less built according to a plan, after official
regulations, is more an outgrowth of accident, than any other city; and when
I consider in this connection the eager assurances of the middle-class, that
the working-class is doing famously, I cannot help feeling that the liberal
manufacturers, the “Big Wigs” of Manchester, are not so innocent after all,
in the matter of this sensitive method of construction.
I may mention just here that the mills almost all adjoin the rivers or the
different canals that ramify throughout the city, before I proceed at once to
describe the labouring quarters. First of all, there is the old town of
Manchester, which lies between the northern boundary of the commercial
district and the Irk. Here the streets, even the better ones, are narrow and
winding, as Todd Street, Long Millgate, Withy Grove, and Shude Hill, the
houses dirty, old, and tumble-down, and the construction of the side streets
utterly horrible. Going from the Old Church to Long Millgate, the stroller
has at once a row of old-fashioned houses at the right, of which not one has
kept its original level; these are remnants of the old pre-manufacturing
Manchester, whose former inhabitants have removed with their descendants
into better-built districts, and have left the houses, which were not good
enough for them, to a population strongly mixed with Irish blood. Here one
is in an almost undisguised working-men’s quarter, for even the shops and
beerhouses hardly take the trouble to exhibit a trifling degree of
cleanliness. But all this is nothing in comparison with the courts and lanes

which lie behind, to which access can be gained only through covered
passages, in which no two human beings can pass at the same time. Of the
irregular cramming together of dwellings in ways which defy all rational
plan, of the tangle in which they are crowded literally one upon the other, it
is impossible to convey an idea. And it is not the buildings surviving from
the old times of Manchester which are to blame for this; the confusion has
only recently reached its height when every scrap of space left by the old
way of building has been filled up and patched over until not a foot of land
is left to be further occupied.
The south bank of the Irk is here very steep and between fifteen and thirty
feet high. On this declivitous hillside there are planted three rows of
houses, of which the lowest rise directly out of the river, while the front
walls of the highest stand on the crest of the hill in Long Millgate. Among
them are mills on the river, in short, the method of construction is as
crowded and disorderly here as in the lower part of Long Millgate. Right
and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into
numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting
grime, the equal of which is not to be found—especially in the courts which
lead down to the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible
dwellings which I have yet beheld. In one of these courts there stands
directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a
door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by
passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. This is the first
court on the Irk above Ducie Bridge—in case any one should care to look
into it. Below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole
neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction. Below Ducie Bridge
the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs
and over heaps of refuse and filth. The first court below Ducie Bridge,
known as Allen’s Court, was in such a state at the time of the cholera that
the sanitary police ordered it evacuated, swept, and disinfected with
chloride of lime. Dr. Kay gives a terrible description of the state of this
court at that time. {49} Since then, it seems to have been partially torn
away and rebuilt; at least looking down from Ducie Bridge, the passer-by
sees several ruined walls and heaps of débris with some newer houses. The
view from this bridge, mercifully concealed from mortals of small stature
by a parapet as high as a man, is characteristic for the whole district. At the

bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-
smelling stream, full of débris and refuse, which it deposits on the
shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting,
blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths
of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench
unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the
stream. But besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by
high weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick
masses. Above the bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from
which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives
further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. It may be
easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits. Below
the bridge you look upon the piles of débris, the refuse, filth, and offal from
the courts on the steep left bank; here each house is packed close behind its
neighbour and a piece of each is visible, all black, smoky, crumbling,
ancient, with broken panes and window frames. The background is
furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings. On the lower right bank
stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house being a ruin
without a roof, piled with débris; the third stands so low that the lowest
floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or doors. Here the
background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool
and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the “Poor-Law
Bastille” of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down
from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-
people’s quarter below.
Above Ducie Bridge, the left bank grows more flat and the right bank
steeper, but the condition of the dwellings on both banks grows worse
rather than better. He who turns to the left here from the main street, Long
Millgate, is lost; he wanders from one court to another, turns countless
corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and alleys, until after a few
minutes he has lost all clue, and knows not whither to turn. Everywhere
half or wholly ruined buildings, some of them actually uninhabited, which
means a great deal here; rarely a wooden or stone floor to be seen in the
houses, almost uniformly broken, ill-fitting windows and doors, and a state
of filth! Everywhere heaps of débris, refuse, and offal; standing pools for
gutters, and a stench which alone would make it impossible for a human

being in any degree civilised to live in such a district. The newly-built
extension of the Leeds railway, which crosses the Irk here, has swept away
some of these courts and lanes, laying others completely open to view.
Immediately under the railway bridge there stands a court, the filth and
horrors of which surpass all the others by far, just because it was hitherto so
shut off, so secluded that the way to it could not be found without a good
deal of trouble. I should never have discovered it myself, without the
breaks made by the railway, though I thought I knew this whole region
thoroughly. Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines,
one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied, one-roomed huts, in
most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and sleeping-room
all in one. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I found two
beds—and such bedsteads and beds!—which, with a staircase and chimney-
place, exactly filled the room. In several others I found absolutely nothing,
while the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned against it.
Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of pavement lay
underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with the feet.
This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on
two sides by houses and a factory, and on the third by the river, and besides
the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow doorway alone led out into another
almost equally ill-built, ill-kept labyrinth of dwellings.
Enough! The whole side of the Irk is built in this way, a planless, knotted
chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose
unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings.
And how could the people be clean with no proper opportunity for
satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants? Privies are so rare here that
they are either filled up every day, or are too remote for most of the
inhabitants to use. How can people wash when they have only the dirty Irk
water at hand, while pumps and water pipes can be found in decent parts of
the city alone? In truth, it cannot be charged to the account of these helots
of modern society if their dwellings are not more cleanly than the pig-sties
which are here and there to be seen among them. The landlords are not
ashamed to let dwellings like the six or seven cellars on the quay directly
below Scotland Bridge, the floors of which stand at least two feet below the
low-water level of the Irk that flows not six feet away from them; or like the
upper floor of the corner-house on the opposite shore directly above the

bridge, where the ground floor, utterly uninhabitable, stands deprived of all
fittings for doors and windows, a case by no means rare in this region, when
this open ground floor is used as a privy by the whole neighbourhood for
want of other facilities!
If we leave the Irk and penetrate once more on the opposite side from Long
Millgate into the midst of the working-men’s dwellings, we shall come into
a somewhat newer quarter, which stretches from St. Michael’s Church to
Withy Grove and Shude Hill. Here there is somewhat better order. In place
of the chaos of buildings, we find at least long straight lanes and alleys or
courts, built according to a plan and usually square. But if, in the former
case, every house was built according to caprice, here each lane and court is
so built, without reference to the situation of the adjoining ones. The lanes
run now in this direction, now in that, while every two minutes the
wanderer gets into a blind alley, or, on turning a corner, finds himself back
where he started from; certainly no one who has not lived a considerable
time in this labyrinth can find his way through it.
If I may use the word at all in speaking of this district, the ventilation of
these streets and courts is, in consequence of this confusion, quite as
imperfect as in the Irk region; and if this quarter may, nevertheless, be said
to have some advantage over that of the Irk, the houses being newer and the
streets occasionally having gutters, nearly every house has, on the other
hand, a cellar dwelling, which is rarely found in the Irk district, by reason of
the greater age and more careless construction of the houses. As for the
rest, the filth, débris, and offal heaps, and the pools in the streets are
common to both quarters, and in the district now under discussion, another
feature most injurious to the cleanliness of the inhabitants, is the multitude
of pigs walking about in all the alleys, rooting into the offal heaps, or kept
imprisoned in small pens. Here, as in most of the working-men’s quarters
of Manchester, the pork-raisers rent the courts and build pig-pens in them.
In almost every court one or even several such pens may be found, into
which the inhabitants of the court throw all refuse and offal, whence the
swine grow fat; and the atmosphere, confined on all four sides, is utterly
corrupted by putrefying animal and vegetable substances. Through this
quarter, a broad and measurably decent street has been cut, Millers Street,
and the background has been pretty successfully concealed. But if any one
should be led by curiosity to pass through one of the numerous passages

which lead into the courts, he will find this piggery repeated at every twenty
paces.
Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I
am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black
enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness,
the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health
which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least
twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart
of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If
any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how
little air—and such air!—he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may
share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the Old
Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one
mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but what
does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is
of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. The couple of hundred
houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long since abandoned
by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into
them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter; the industrial epoch
alone has built up every spot between these old houses to win a covering for
the masses whom it has conjured hither from the agricultural districts and
from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of these cattle-
sheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty
of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they
alone, the owners, may grow rich. In the industrial epoch alone has it
become possible that the worker scarcely freed from feudal servitude could
be used as mere material, a mere chattel; that he must let himself be
crowded into a dwelling too bad for every other, which he for his hard-
earned wages buys the right to let go utterly to ruin. This manufacture has
achieved, which, without these workers, this poverty, this slavery could not
have lived. True, the original construction of this quarter was bad, little
good could have been made out of it; but, have the landowners, has the
municipality done anything to improve it when rebuilding? On the
contrary, wherever a nook or corner was free, a house has been run up;
where a superfluous passage remained, it has been built up; the value of
land rose with the blossoming out of manufacture, and the more it rose, the

more madly was the work of building up carried on, without reference to
the health or comfort of the inhabitants, with sole reference to the highest
possible profit on the principle that no hole is so bad but that some poor
creature must take it who can pay for nothing better. However, it is the Old
Town, and with this reflection the bourgeoisie is comforted. Let us see,
therefore, how much better it is in the New Town.
The New Town, known also as Irish Town, stretches up a hill of clay,
beyond the Old Town, between the Irk and St. George’s Road. Here all the
features of a city are lost. Single rows of houses or groups of streets stand,
here and there, like little villages on the naked, not even grass-grown clay
soil; the houses, or rather cottages, are in bad order, never repaired, filthy,
with damp, unclean, cellar dwellings; the lanes are neither paved nor
supplied with sewers, but harbour numerous colonies of swine penned in
small sties or yards, or wandering unrestrained through the neighbourhood.
The mud in the streets is so deep that there is never a chance, except in the
dryest weather, of walking without sinking into it ankle deep at every step.
In the vicinity of St. George’s Road, the separate groups of buildings
approach each other more closely, ending in a continuation of lanes, blind
alleys, back lanes and courts, which grow more and more crowded and
irregular the nearer they approach the heart of the town. True, they are here
oftener paved or supplied with paved sidewalks and gutters; but the filth,
the bad order of the houses, and especially of the cellars, remains the same.
It may not be out of place to make some general observations just here as to
the customary construction of working-men’s quarters in Manchester. We
have seen how in the Old Town pure accident determined the grouping of
the houses in general. Every house is built without reference to any other,
and the scraps of space between them are called courts for want of another
name. In the somewhat newer portions of the same quarter, and in other
working-men’s quarters, dating from the early days of industrial activity, a
somewhat more orderly arrangement may be found. The space between
two streets is divided into more regular, usually square courts.
These courts were built in this way from the beginning, and communicate
with the streets by means of covered passages. If the totally planless
construction is injurious to the health of the workers by preventing
ventilation, this method of shutting them up in courts surrounded on all

sides by buildings is far more so. The air simply cannot escape; the
chimneys of the houses are the sole drains for the imprisoned atmosphere of
the courts, and they serve the purpose only so long as fire is kept burning.
{55} Moreover, the houses surrounding such courts are usually built back
to back, having the rear wall in common; and this alone suffices to prevent
any sufficient through ventilation. And, as the police charged with care of
the streets, does not trouble itself about the condition of these courts, as
everything quietly lies where it is thrown, there is no cause for wonder at
the filth and heaps of ashes and offal to be found here. I have been in
courts, in Millers Street, at least half a foot below the level of the
thoroughfares, and without the slightest drainage for the water that
accumulates in them in rainy weather! More recently another different
method of building was adopted, and has now become general. Working-
men’s cottages are almost never built singly, but always by the dozen or
score; a single contractor building up one or two streets at a time. These are
then arranged as follows: One front is formed of cottages of the best class,
so fortunate as to possess a back door and small court, and these command
the highest rent. In the rear of these cottages runs a narrow alley, the back
street, built up at both ends, into which either a narrow roadway or a
covered passage leads from one side. The cottages which face this back
street command least rent, and are most neglected. These have their rear
walls in common with the third row of cottages which face a second street,
and command less rent than the first row and more than the second.
By this method of construction, comparatively good ventilation can be
obtained for the first row of cottages, and the third row is no worse off than
in the former method. The middle row, on the other hand, is at least as
badly ventilated as the houses in the courts, and the back street is always in
the same filthy, disgusting condition as they. The contractors prefer this
method because it saves them space, and furnishes the means of fleecing
better paid workers through the higher rents of the cottages in the first and
third rows. These three different forms of cottage building are found all
over Manchester and throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire, often mixed up
together, but usually separate enough to indicate the relative age of parts of
towns. The third system, that of the back alleys, prevails largely in the
great working-men’s district east of St. George’s Road and Ancoats Street,

and is the one most often found in the other working-men’s quarters of
Manchester and its suburbs.
In the last-mentioned broad district included under the name Ancoats, stand
the largest mills of Manchester lining the canals, colossal six and seven-
storied buildings towering with their slender chimneys far above the low
cottages of the workers. The population of the district consists, therefore,
chiefly of mill hands, and in the worst streets, of hand-weavers. The streets
nearest the heart of the town are the oldest, and consequently the worst;
they are, however, paved, and supplied with drains. Among them I include
those nearest to and parallel with Oldham Road and Great Ancoats Street.
Farther to the north-east lie many newly-built-up streets; here the cottages
look neat and cleanly, doors and windows are new and freshly painted, the
rooms within newly whitewashed; the streets themselves are better aired,
the vacant building lots between them larger and more numerous. But this
can be said of a minority of the houses only, while cellar dwellings are to be
found under almost every cottage; many streets are unpaved and without
sewers; and, worse than all, this neat appearance is all pretence, a pretence
which vanishes within the first ten years. For the construction of the
cottages individually is no less to be condemned than the plan of the
streets. All such cottages look neat and substantial at first; their massive
brick walls deceive the eye, and, on passing through a newly-built working-
men’s street, without remembering the back alleys and the construction of
the houses themselves, one is inclined to agree with the assertion of the
Liberal manufacturers that the working population is nowhere so well
housed as in England. But on closer examination, it becomes evident that
the walls of these cottages are as thin as it is possible to make them. The
outer walls, those of the cellar, which bear the weight of the ground floor
and roof, are one whole brick thick at most, the bricks lying with their long
sides touching; but I have seen many a cottage of the same height, some in
process of building, whose outer walls were but one-half brick thick, the
bricks lying not sidewise but lengthwise, their narrow ends touching. The
object of this is to spare material, but there is also another reason for it;
namely, the fact that the contractors never own the land but lease it,
according to the English custom, for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or ninety-
nine years, at the expiration of which time it falls, with everything upon it,
back into the possession of the original holder, who pays nothing in return

for improvements upon it. The improvements are therefore so calculated by
the lessee as to be worth as little as possible at the expiration of the
stipulated term. And as such cottages are often built but twenty or thirty
years before the expiration of the term, it may easily be imagined that the
contractors make no unnecessary expenditures upon them. Moreover, these
contractors, usually carpenters and builders, or manufacturers, spend little
or nothing in repairs, partly to avoid diminishing their rent receipts, and
partly in view of the approaching surrender of the improvement to the
landowner; while in consequence of commercial crises and the loss of work
that follows them, whole streets often stand empty, the cottages falling
rapidly into ruin and uninhabitableness. It is calculated in general that
working-men’s cottages last only forty years on the average. This sounds
strangely enough when one sees the beautiful, massive walls of newly-built
ones, which seem to give promise of lasting a couple of centuries; but the
fact remains that the niggardliness of the original expenditure, the neglect
of all repairs, the frequent periods of emptiness, the constant change of
inhabitants, and the destruction carried on by the dwellers during the final
ten years, usually Irish families, who do not hesitate to use the wooden
portions for fire-wood—all this, taken together, accomplishes the complete
ruin of the cottages by the end of forty years. Hence it comes that Ancoats,
built chiefly since the sudden growth of manufacture, chiefly indeed within
the present century, contains a vast number of ruinous houses, most of them
being, in fact, in the last stages of inhabitableness. I will not dwell upon the
amount of capital thus wasted, the small additional expenditure upon the
original improvement and upon repairs which would suffice to keep this
whole district clean, decent, and inhabitable for years together. I have to
deal here with the state of the houses and their inhabitants, and it must be
admitted that no more injurious and demoralising method of housing the
workers has yet been discovered than precisely this. The working-man is
constrained to occupy such ruinous dwellings because he cannot pay for
others, and because there are no others in the vicinity of his mill; perhaps,
too, because they belong to the employer, who engages him only on
condition of his taking such a cottage. The calculation with reference to the
forty years’ duration of the cottage is, of course, not always perfectly strict;
for, if the dwellings are in a thickly-built-up portion of the town, and there
is a good prospect of finding steady occupants for them, while the ground
rent is high, the contractors do a little something to keep the cottages

inhabitable after the expiration of the forty years. They never do anything
more, however, than is absolutely unavoidable, and the dwellings so
repaired are the worst of all. Occasionally when an epidemic threatens, the
otherwise sleepy conscience of the sanitary police is a little stirred, raids are
made into the working-men’s districts, whole rows of cellars and cottages
are closed, as happened in the case of several lanes near Oldham Road; but
this does not last long: the condemned cottages soon find occupants again,
the owners are much better off by letting them, and the sanitary police
won’t come again so soon. These east and north-east sides of Manchester
are the only ones on which the bourgeoisie has not built, because ten or
eleven months of the year the west and south-west wind drives the smoke of
all the factories hither, and that the working-people alone may breathe.
Southward from Great Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, working-
men’s quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached,
irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty building
lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet weather.
The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to mind. The
stretch cut through by the Birmingham railway is the most thickly built-up
and the worst. Here flows the Medlock with countless windings through a
valley, which is, in places, on a level with the valley of the Irk. Along both
sides of the stream, which is coal black, stagnant and foul, stretches a broad
belt of factories and working-men’s dwellings, the latter all in the worst
condition. The bank is chiefly declivitous and is built over to the water’s
edge, just as we saw along the Irk; while the houses are equally bad,
whether built on the Manchester side or in Ardwick, Chorlton, or Hulme.
But the most horrible spot (if I should describe all the separate spots in
detail I should never come to the end) lies on the Manchester side,
immediately south-west of Oxford Road, and is known as Little Ireland. In
a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four
sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand
two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in
which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish. The
cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen
into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and
sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is
poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke

of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children
swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps
and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and
repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the Irk.
The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows,
mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet
cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if
with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of
humanity. This is the impression and the line of thought which the exterior
of this district forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he
hears that in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and
perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty human beings live; that in the whole
region, for each one hundred and twenty persons, one usually inaccessible
privy is provided; and that in spite of all the preachings of the physicians, in
spite of the excitement into which the cholera epidemic plunged the sanitary
police by reason of the condition of Little Ireland, in spite of everything, in
this year of grace 1844, it is in almost the same state as in 1831! Dr. Kay
asserts that not only the cellars but the first floors of all the houses in this
district are damp; that a number of cellars once filled up with earth have
now been emptied and are occupied once more by Irish people; that in one
cellar the water constantly wells up through a hole stopped with clay, the
cellar lying below the river level, so that its occupant, a hand-loom weaver,
had to bale out the water from his dwelling every morning and pour it into
the street!
Farther down, on the left side of the Medlock, lies Hulme, which, properly
speaking, is one great working-people’s district, the condition of which
coincides almost exactly with that of Ancoats; the more thickly built-up
regions chiefly bad and approaching ruin, the less populous of more modern
structure, but generally sunk in filth. On the other side of the Medlock, in
Manchester proper, lies a second great working-men’s district which
stretches on both sides of Deansgate as far as the business quarter, and in
certain parts rivals the Old Town. Especially in the immediate vicinity of
the business quarter, between Bridge and Quay Streets, Princess and Peter
Streets, the crowded construction exceeds in places the narrowest courts of
the Old Town. Here are long, narrow lanes between which run contracted,
crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the

explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps, or comes out where he
least expects to, unless he knows every court and every alley exactly and
separately. According to Dr. Kay, the most demoralised class of all
Manchester lived in these ruinous and filthy districts, people whose
occupations are thieving and prostitution; and, to all appearance, his
assertion is still true at the present moment. When the sanitary police made
its expedition hither in 1831, it found the uncleanness as great as in Little
Ireland or along the Irk (that it is not much better to-day, I can testify); and
among other items, they found in Parliament Street for three hundred and
eighty persons, and in Parliament Passage for thirty thickly populated
houses, but a single privy.
If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find on a peninsula formed by the river,
a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, which, properly speaking, is one
large working-men’s quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue. Salford,
once more important than Manchester, was then the leading town of the
surrounding district to which it still gives its name, Salford Hundred.
Hence it is that an old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty, and ruinous
locality is to be found here, lying opposite the Old Church of Manchester,
and in as bad a condition as the Old Town on the other side of the Irwell.
Farther away from the river lies the newer portion, which is, however,
already beyond the limit of its forty years of cottage life, and therefore
ruinous enough. All Salford is built in courts or narrow lanes, so narrow,
that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever seen, the little lanes of
Genoa. The average construction of Salford is in this respect much worse
than that of Manchester, and so, too, in respect to cleanliness. If, in
Manchester, the police, from time to time, every six or ten years, makes a
raid upon the working-people’s districts, closes the worst dwellings, and
causes the filthiest spots in these Augean stables to be cleansed, in Salford it
seems to have done absolutely nothing. The narrow side lanes and courts of
Chapel Street, Greengate, and Gravel Lane have certainly never been
cleansed since they were built. Of late, the Liverpool railway has been
carried through the middle of them, over a high viaduct, and has abolished
many of the filthiest nooks; but what does that avail? Whoever passes over
this viaduct and looks down, sees filth and wretchedness enough; and, if
any one takes the trouble to pass through these lanes, and glance through
the open doors and windows into the houses and cellars, he can convince

himself afresh with every step that the workers of Salford live in dwellings
in which cleanliness and comfort are impossible. Exactly the same state of
affairs is found in the more distant regions of Salford, in Islington, along
Regent Road, and back of the Bolton railway. The working-men’s
dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane, where a mass of courts
and alleys are to be found in the worst possible state, vie with the dwellings
of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding. In this district I found a man,
apparently about sixty years old, living in a cow stable. He had constructed
a sort of chimney for his square pen, which had neither windows, floor, nor
ceiling, had obtained a bedstead and lived there, though the rain dripped
through his rotten roof. This man was too old and weak for regular work,
and supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart; the dung-
heaps lay next door to his palace!
Such are the various working-people’s quarters of Manchester as I had
occasion to observe them personally during twenty months. If we briefly
formulate the result of our wanderings, we must admit that 350,000
working-people of Manchester and its environs live, almost all of them, in
wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which surround them are
usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the
slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit secured
by the contractor. In a word, we must confess that in the working-men’s
dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently
no comfortable family life is possible; that in such dwellings only a
physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced
morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home.
And I am not alone in making this assertion. We have seen that Dr. Kay
gives precisely the same description; and, though it is superfluous, I quote
further the words of a Liberal, {63} recognised and highly valued as an
authority by the manufacturers, and a fanatical opponent of all independent
movements of the workers:
“As I passed through the dwellings of the mill hands in Irish Town,
Ancoats, and Little Ireland, I was only amazed that it is possible to maintain
a reasonable state of health in such homes. These towns, for in extent and
number of inhabitants they are towns, have been erected with the utmost
disregard of everything except the immediate advantage of the speculating
builder. A carpenter and builder unite to buy a series of building sites (i.e.,

they lease them for a number of years), and cover them with so-called
houses. In one place we found a whole street following the course of a
ditch, because in this way deeper cellars could be secured without the cost
of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but for dwellings for
human beings. Not one house of this street escaped the cholera. In general,
the streets of these suburbs are unpaved, with a dung-heap or ditch in the
middle; the houses are built back to back, without ventilation or drainage,
and whole families are limited to a corner of a cellar or a garret.” I have
already referred to the unusual activity which the sanitary police manifested
during the cholera visitation. When the epidemic was approaching, a
universal terror seized the bourgeoisie of the city. People remembered the
unwholesome dwellings of the poor, and trembled before the certainty that
each of these slums would become a centre for the plague, whence it would
spread desolation in all directions through the houses of the propertied
class. A Health Commission was appointed at once to investigate these
districts, and report upon their condition to the Town Council. Dr. Kay,
himself a member of this Commission, who visited in person every separate
police district except one, the eleventh, quotes extracts from their reports:
There were inspected, in all, 6,951 houses—naturally in Manchester proper
alone, Salford and the other suburbs being excluded. Of these, 6,565
urgently needed whitewashing within; 960 were out of repair; 939 had
insufficient drains; 1,435 were damp; 452 were badly ventilated; 2,221 were
without privies. Of the 687 streets inspected, 248 were unpaved, 53 but
partially paved, 112 ill-ventilated, 352 containing standing pools, heaps of
débris, refuse, etc. To cleanse such an Augean stable before the arrival of
the cholera was, of course, out of the question. A few of the worst nooks
were therefore cleansed, and everything else left as before. In the cleansed
spots, as Little Ireland proves, the old filthy condition was naturally
restored in a couple of months. As to the internal condition of these houses,
the same Commission reports a state of things similar to that which we have
already met with in London, Edinburgh, and other cities. {64}
It often happens that a whole Irish family is crowded into one bed; often a
heap of filthy straw or quilts of old sacking cover all in an indiscriminate
heap, where all alike are degraded by want, stolidity, and wretchedness.
Often the inspectors found, in a single house, two families in two rooms.
All slept in one, and used the other as a kitchen and dining-room in

common. Often more than one family lived in a single damp cellar, in
whose pestilent atmosphere twelve to sixteen persons were crowded
together. To these and other sources of disease must be added that pigs
were kept, and other disgusting things of the most revolting kind were
found.
We must add that many families, who had but one room for themselves,
receive boarders and lodgers in it, that such lodgers of both sexes by no
means rarely sleep in the same bed with the married couple; and that the
single case of a man and his wife and his adult sister-in-law sleeping in one
bed was found, according to the “Report concerning the sanitary condition
of the working-class,” six times repeated in Manchester. Common lodging-
houses, too, are very numerous; Dr. Kay gives their number in 1831 at 267
in Manchester proper, and they must have increased greatly since then.
Each of these receives from twenty to thirty guests, so that they shelter all
told, nightly, from five to seven thousand human beings. The character of
the houses and their guests is the same as in other cities. Five to seven beds
in each room lie on the floor—without bedsteads, and on these sleep, mixed
indiscriminately, as many persons as apply. What physical and moral
atmosphere reigns in these holes I need not state. Each of these houses is a
focus of crime, the scene of deeds against which human nature revolts,
which would perhaps never have been executed but for this forced
centralisation of vice. {65} Gaskell gives the number of persons living in
cellars in Manchester proper as 20,000. The Weekly Dispatch gives the
number, “according to official reports,” as twelve per cent. of the working-
class, which agrees with Gaskell’s number; the workers being estimated at
175,000, 21,000 would form twelve per cent. of it. The cellar dwellings in
the suburbs are at least as numerous, so that the number of persons living in
cellars in Manchester—using its name in the broader sense—is not less than
forty to fifty thousand. So much for the dwellings of the workers in the
largest cities and towns. The manner in which the need of a shelter is
satisfied furnishes a standard for the manner in which all other necessities
are supplied. That in these filthy holes a ragged, ill-fed population alone
can dwell is a safe conclusion, and such is the fact. The clothing of the
working-people, in the majority of cases, is in a very bad condition. The
material used for it is not of the best adapted. Wool and linen have almost
vanished from the wardrobe of both sexes, and cotton has taken their place.

Shirts are made of bleached or coloured cotton goods; the dresses of the
women are chiefly of cotton print goods, and woollen petticoats are rarely
to be seen on the washline. The men wear chiefly trousers of fustian or
other heavy cotton goods, and jackets or coats of the same. Fustian has
become the proverbial costume of the working-men, who are called “fustian
jackets,” and call themselves so in contrast to the gentlemen who wear
broadcloth, which latter words are used as characteristic for the middle-
class. When Feargus O’Connor, the Chartist leader, came to Manchester
during the insurrection of 1842, he appeared, amidst the deafening applause
of the working-men, in a fustian suit of clothing. Hats are the universal
head-covering in England, even for working-men, hats of the most diverse
forms, round, high, broad-brimmed, narrow-brimmed, or without brims—
only the younger men in factory towns wearing caps. Any one who does
not own a hat folds himself a low, square paper cap.
The whole clothing of the working-class, even assuming it to be in good
condition, is little adapted to the climate. The damp air of England, with its
sudden changes of temperature, more calculated than any other to give rise
to colds, obliges almost the whole middle-class to wear flannel next the
skin, about the body, and flannel scarfs and shirts are in almost universal
use. Not only is the working-class deprived of this precaution, it is scarcely
ever in a position to use a thread of woollen clothing; and the heavy cotton
goods, though thicker, stiffer, and heavier than woollen clothes, afford
much less protection against cold and wet, remain damp much longer
because of their thickness and the nature of the stuff, and have nothing of
the compact density of fulled woollen cloths. And, if a working-man once
buys himself a woollen coat for Sunday, he must get it from one of the
cheap shops where he finds bad, so-called “Devil’s-dust” cloth,
manufactured for sale and not for use, and liable to tear or grow threadbare
in a fortnight, or he must buy of an old clothes’-dealer a half-worn coat
which has seen its best days, and lasts but a few weeks. Moreover, the
working-man’s clothing is, in most cases, in bad condition, and there is the
oft-recurring necessity for placing the best pieces in the pawnbroker’s
shop. But among very large numbers, especially among the Irish, the
prevailing clothing consists of perfect rags often beyond all mending, or so
patched that the original colour can no longer be detected. Yet the English
and Anglo-Irish go on patching, and have carried this art to a remarkable

pitch, putting wool or bagging on fustian, or the reverse—it’s all the same
to them. But the true, transplanted Irish hardly ever patch except in the
extremest necessity, when the garment would otherwise fall apart.
Ordinarily the rags of the shirt protrude through the rents in the coat or
trousers. They wear, as Thomas Carlyle says,—{67}

“A suit of tatters, the getting on or off which is said to be a difficult
operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the
calendar.”

The Irish have introduced, too, the custom previously unknown in England,
of going barefoot. In every manufacturing town there is now to be seen a
multitude of people, especially women and children, going about barefoot,
and their example is gradually being adopted by the poorer English.
As with clothing, so with food. The workers get what is too bad for the
property-holding class. In the great towns of England everything may be
had of the best, but it costs money; and the workman, who must keep house
on a couple of pence, cannot afford much expense. Moreover, he usually
receives his wages on Saturday evening, for, although a beginning has been
made in the payment of wages on Friday, this excellent arrangement is by
no means universal; and so he comes to market at five or even seven
o’clock, while the buyers of the middle-class have had the first choice
during the morning, when the market teems with the best of everything.
But when the workers reach it, the best has vanished, and, if it was still
there, they would probably not be able to buy it. The potatoes which the
workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of
poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken from old, often
diseased, cattle, or such as have died a natural death, and not fresh even
then, often half decayed. The sellers are usually small hucksters who buy
up inferior goods, and can sell them cheaply by reason of their badness.
The poorest workers are forced to use still another device to get together the
things they need with their few pence. As nothing can be sold on Sunday,
and all shops must be closed at twelve o’clock on Saturday night, such
things as would not keep until Monday are sold at any price between ten
o’clock and midnight. But nine-tenths of what is sold at ten o’clock is past
using by Sunday morning, yet these are precisely the provisions which
make up the Sunday dinner of the poorest class. The meat which the

workers buy is very often past using; but having bought it, they must eat it.
On the 6th of January, 1844 (if I am not greatly mistaken), a court leet was
held in Manchester, when eleven meat-sellers were fined for having sold
tainted meat. Each of them had a whole ox or pig, or several sheep, or from
fifty to sixty pounds of meat, which were all confiscated in a tainted
condition. In one case, sixty-four stuffed Christmas geese were seized
which had proved unsaleable in Liverpool, and had been forwarded to
Manchester, where they were brought to market foul and rotten. All the
particulars, with names and fines, were published at the time in the
Manchester Guardian. In the six weeks, from July 1st to August 14th, the
same sheet reported three similar cases. According to the Guardian for
August 3rd, a pig, weighing 200 pounds, which had been found dead and
decayed, was cut up and exposed for sale by a butcher at Heywood, and
was then seized. According to the number for July 31st, two butchers at
Wigan, of whom one had previously been convicted of the same offence,
were fined £2 and £4 respectively, for exposing tainted meat for sale; and,
according to the number for August 10th, twenty-six tainted hams seized at
a dealer’s in Bolton, were publicly burnt, and the dealer fined twenty
shillings. But these are by no means all the cases; they do not even form a
fair average for a period of six weeks, according to which to form an
average for the year. There are often seasons in which every number of the
semi-weekly Guardian mentions a similar case found in Manchester or its
vicinity. And when one reflects upon the many cases which must escape
detection in the extensive markets that stretch along the front of every main
street, under the slender supervision of the market inspectors—and how else
can one explain the boldness with which whole animals are exposed for
sale?—when one considers how great the temptation must be, in view of the
incomprehensibly small fines mentioned in the foregoing cases; when one
reflects what condition a piece of meat must have reached to be seized by
the inspectors, it is impossible to believe that the workers obtain good and
nourishing meat as a usual thing. But they are victimised in yet another
way by the money-greed of the middle-class. Dealers and manufacturers
adulterate all kinds of provisions in an atrocious manner, and without the
slightest regard to the health of the consumers. We have heard the
Manchester Guardian upon this subject, let us hear another organ of the
middle-class—I delight in the testimony of my opponents—let us hear the
Liverpool Mercury: “Salted butter is sold for fresh, the lumps being covered

with a coating of fresh butter, or a pound of fresh being laid on top to taste,
while the salted article is sold after this test, or the whole mass is washed
and then sold as fresh. With sugar, pounded rice and other cheap
adulterating materials are mixed, and the whole sold at full price. The
refuse of soap-boiling establishments also is mixed with other things and
sold as sugar. Chicory and other cheap stuff is mixed with ground coffee,
and artificial coffee beans with the unground article. Cocoa is often
adulterated with fine brown earth, treated with fat to render it more easily
mistakable for real cocoa. Tea is mixed with the leaves of the sloe and with
other refuse, or dry tea-leaves are roasted on hot copper plates, so returning
to the proper colour and being sold as fresh. Pepper is mixed with pounded
nutshells; port wine is manufactured outright (out of alcohol, dye-stuffs,
etc.), while it is notorious that more of it is consumed in England alone than
is grown in Portugal; and tobacco is mixed with disgusting substances of all
sorts and in all possible forms in which the article is produced.” I can add
that several of the most respected tobacco dealers in Manchester announced
publicly last summer, that, by reason of the universal adulteration of
tobacco, no firm could carry on business without adulteration, and that no
cigar costing less than threepence is made wholly from tobacco. These
frauds are naturally not restricted to articles of food, though I could mention
a dozen more, the villainy of mixing gypsum or chalk with flour among
them. Fraud is practiced in the sale of articles of every sort: flannel,
stockings, etc., are stretched, and shrink after the first washing; narrow
cloth is sold as being from one and a half to three inches broader than it
actually is; stoneware is so thinly glazed that the glazing is good for
nothing, and cracks at once, and a hundred other rascalities, tout comme
chez nous. But the lion’s share of the evil results of these frauds falls to the
workers. The rich are less deceived, because they can pay the high prices of
the large shops which have a reputation to lose, and would injure
themselves more than their customers if they kept poor or adulterated
wares; the rich are spoiled, too, by habitual good eating, and detect
adulteration more easily with their sensitive palates. But the poor, the
working-people, to whom a couple of farthings are important, who must
buy many things with little money, who cannot afford to inquire too closely
into the quality of their purchases, and cannot do so in any case because
they have had no opportunity of cultivating their taste—to their share fall
all the adulterated, poisoned provisions. They must deal with the small

retailers, must buy perhaps on credit, and these small retail dealers who
cannot sell even the same quality of goods so cheaply as the largest
retailers, because of their small capital and the large proportional expenses
of their business, must knowingly or unknowingly buy adulterated goods in
order to sell at the lower prices required, and to meet the competition of the
others. Further, a large retail dealer who has extensive capital invested in
his business is ruined with his ruined credit if detected in a fraudulent
practice; but what harm does it do a small grocer, who has customers in a
single street only, if frauds are proved against him? If no one trusts him in
Ancoats, he moves to Chorlton or Hulme, where no one knows him, and
where he continues to defraud as before; while legal penalties attach to very
few adulterations unless they involve revenue frauds. Not in the quality
alone, but in the quantity of his goods as well, is the English working-man
defrauded. The small dealers usually have false weights and measures, and
an incredible number of convictions for such offences may be read in the
police reports. How universal this form of fraud is in the manufacturing
districts, a couple of extracts from the Manchester Guardian may serve to
show. They cover only a short period, and, even here, I have not all the
numbers at hand:
Guardian, June 16, 1844, Rochdale Sessions.—Four dealers fined five to
ten shillings for using light weights. Stockport Sessions.—Two dealers
fined one shilling, one of them having seven light weights and a false scale,
and both having been warned.
Guardian, June 19, Rochdale Sessions.—One dealer fined five, and two
farmers ten shillings.
Guardian, June 22, Manchester Justices of the Peace.—Nineteen dealers
fined two shillings and sixpence to two pounds.
Guardian, June 26, Ashton Sessions.—Fourteen dealers and farmers fined
two shillings and sixpence to one pound. Hyde Petty Sessions.—Nine
farmers and dealers condemned to pay costs and five shillings fines.
Guardian, July 9, Manchester—Sixteen dealers condemned to pay costs
and fines not exceeding ten shillings.

Guardian, July 13, Manchester.—Nine dealers fined from two shillings and
sixpence to twenty shillings.
Guardian, July 24, Rochdale.—Four dealers fined ten to twenty shillings.
Guardian, July 27, Bolton.—Twelve dealers and innkeepers condemned to
pay costs.
Guardian, August 3, Bolton.—Three dealers fined two shillings and
sixpence, and five shillings.
Guardian, August 10, Bolton.—One dealer fined five shillings.
And the same causes which make the working-class the chief sufferers from
frauds in the quality of goods make them the usual victims of frauds in the
question of quantity too.
The habitual food of the individual working-man naturally varies according
to his wages. The better paid workers, especially those in whose families
every member is able to earn something, have good food as long as this
state of things lasts; meat daily, and bacon and cheese for supper. Where
wages are less, meat is used only two or three times a week, and the
proportion of bread and potatoes increases. Descending gradually, we find
the animal food reduced to a small piece of bacon cut up with the potatoes;
lower still, even this disappears, and there remain only bread, cheese,
porridge, and potatoes, until on the lowest round of the ladder, among the
Irish, potatoes form the sole food. As an accompaniment, weak tea, with
perhaps a little sugar, milk, or spirits, is universally drunk. Tea is regarded
in England, and even in Ireland, as quite as indispensable as coffee in
Germany, and where no tea is used, the bitterest poverty reigns. But all this
pre-supposes that the workman has work. When he has none, he is wholly
at the mercy of accident, and eats what is given him, what he can beg or
steal. And, if he gets nothing, he simply starves, as we have seen. The
quantity of food varies, of course, like its quality, according to the rate of
wages, so that among ill-paid workers, even if they have no large families,
hunger prevails in spite of full and regular work; and the number of the ill-
paid is very large. Especially in London, where the competition of the
workers rises with the increase of population, this class is very numerous,
but it is to be found in other towns as well. In these cases all sorts of

devices are used; potato parings, vegetable refuse, and rotten vegetables are
eaten for want of other food, and everything greedily gathered up which
may possibly contain an atom of nourishment. And, if the week’s wages are
used up before the end of the week, it often enough happens that in the
closing days the family gets only as much food, if any, as is barely
sufficient to keep off starvation. Of course such a way of living
unavoidably engenders a multitude of diseases, and when these appear,
when the father from whose work the family is chiefly supported, whose
physical exertion most demands nourishment, and who therefore first
succumbs—when the father is utterly disabled, then misery reaches its
height, and then the brutality with which society abandons its members, just
when their need is greatest, comes out fully into the light of day.
To sum up briefly the facts thus far cited. The great towns are chiefly
inhabited by working-people, since in the best case there is one bourgeois
for two workers, often for three, here and there for four; these workers have
no property whatsoever of their own, and live wholly upon wages, which
usually go from hand to mouth. Society, composed wholly of atoms, does
not trouble itself about them; leaves them to care for themselves and their
families, yet supplies them no means of doing this in an efficient and
permanent manner. Every working-man, even the best, is therefore
constantly exposed to loss of work and food, that is to death by starvation,
and many perish in this way. The dwellings of the workers are everywhere
badly planned, badly built, and kept in the worst condition, badly ventilated,
damp, and unwholesome. The inhabitants are confined to the smallest
possible space, and at least one family usually sleeps in each room. The
interior arrangement of the dwellings is poverty-stricken in various degrees,
down to the utter absence of even the most necessary furniture. The
clothing of the workers, too, is generally scanty, and that of great multitudes
is in rags. The food is, in general, bad; often almost unfit for use, and in
many cases, at least at times, insufficient in quantity, so that, in extreme
cases, death by starvation results. Thus the working-class of the great cities
offers a graduated scale of conditions in life, in the best cases a temporarily
endurable existence for hard work and good wages, good and endurable,
that is, from the worker’s standpoint; in the worst cases, bitter want,
reaching even homelessness and death by starvation. The average is much
nearer the worst case than the best. And this series does not fall into fixed

classes, so that one can say, this fraction of the working-class is well off,
has always been so, and remains so. If that is the case here and there, if
single branches of work have in general an advantage over others, yet the
condition of the workers in each branch is subject to such great fluctuations
that a single working-man may be so placed as to pass through the whole
range from comparative comfort to the extremest need, even to death by
starvation, while almost every English working-man can tell a tale of
marked changes of fortune. Let us examine the causes of this somewhat
more closely.

COMPETITION.

We have seen in the introduction how competition created the proletariat at
the very beginning of the industrial movement, by increasing the wages of
weavers in consequence of the increased demand for woven goods, so
inducing the weaving peasants to abandon their farms and earn more money
by devoting themselves to their looms. We have seen how it crowded out
the small farmers by means of the large farm system, reduced them to the
rank of proletarians, and attracted them in part into the towns; how it further
ruined the small bourgeoisie in great measure and reduced its members also
to the ranks of the proletariat; how it centralised capital in the hands of the
few, and population in the great towns. Such are the various ways and
means by which competition, as it reached its full manifestation and free
development in modern industry, created and extended the proletariat. We
shall now have to observe its influence on the working-class already
created. And here we must begin by tracing the results of competition of
single workers with one another.
Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all
which rules in modern civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for
existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought
not between the different classes of society only, but also between the
individual members of these classes. Each is in the way of the other, and
each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their
place. The workers are in constant competition among themselves as the
members of the bourgeoisie among themselves. The power-loom weaver is
in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid
hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to
supplant the other. But this competition of the workers among themselves
is the worst side of the present state of things in its effect upon the worker,
the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
Hence the effort of the workers to nullify this competition by associations,

hence the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards these associations, and its
triumph in every defeat which befalls them.
The proletarian is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day. The
bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest
sense of the word. What the proletarian needs, he can obtain only from this
bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the State.
The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie,
which can decree his life or death. It offers him the means of living, but
only for an “equivalent” for his work. It even lets him have the appearance
of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained
consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority.
Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either
accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of
freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests! A fine
“equivalent” valued at pleasure by the bourgeoisie! And if one proletarian
is such a fool as to starve rather than agree to the equitable propositions of
the bourgeoisie, his “natural superiors,” another is easily found in his place;
there are proletarians enough in the world, and not all so insane as to prefer
dying to living.
Here we have the competition of the workers among themselves. If all the
proletarians announced their determination to starve rather than work for
the bourgeoisie, the latter would have to surrender its monopoly. But this is
not the case—is, indeed, a rather impossible case—so that the bourgeoisie
still thrives. To this competition of the worker there is but one limit; no
worker will work for less than he needs to subsist. If he must starve, he will
prefer to starve in idleness rather than in toil. True, this limit is relative; one
needs more than another, one is accustomed to more comfort than another;
the Englishman who is still somewhat civilised, needs more than the
Irishman who goes in rags, eats potatoes, and sleeps in a pig-sty. But that
does not hinder the Irishman’s competing with the Englishman, and
gradually forcing the rate of wages, and with it the Englishman’s level of
civilisation, down to the Irishman’s level. Certain kinds of work require a
certain grade of civilisation, and to these belong almost all forms of
industrial occupation; hence the interest of the bourgeoisie requires in this

case that wages should be high enough to enable the workman to keep
himself upon the required plane.
The newly immigrated Irishman, encamped in the first stable that offers, or
turned out in the street after a week because he spends everything upon
drink and cannot pay rent, would be a poor mill-hand. The mill-hand must,
therefore, have wages enough to enable him to bring up his children to
regular work; but no more, lest he should be able to get on without the
wages of his children, and so make something else of them than mere
working-men. Here, too, the limit, the minimum wage, is relative. When
every member of the family works, the individual worker can get on with
proportionately less, and the bourgeoisie has made the most of the
opportunity of employing and making profitable the labour of women and
children afforded by machine-work. Of course it is not in every family that
every member can be set to work, and those in which the case is otherwise
would be in a bad way if obliged to exist upon the minimum wage possible
to a wholly employed family. Hence the usual wages form an average
according to which a fully employed family gets on pretty well, and one
which embraces few members able to work, pretty badly. But in the worst
case, every working-man prefers surrendering the trifling luxury to which
he was accustomed to not living at all; prefers a pig-pen to no roof, wears
rags in preference to going naked, confines himself to a potato diet in
preference to starvation. He contents himself with half-pay and the hope of
better times rather than be driven into the street to perish before the eyes of
the world, as so many have done who had no work whatever. This trifle,
therefore, this something more than nothing, is the minimum of wages.
And if there are more workers at hand than the bourgeoisie thinks well to
employ—if at the end of the battle of competition there yet remain workers
who find nothing to do, they must simply starve; for the bourgeois will
hardly give them work if he cannot sell the produce of their labour at a
profit.
From this it is evident what the minimum of wages is. The maximum is
determined by the competition of the bourgeoisie among themselves; for we
have seen how they, too, must compete with each other. The bourgeois can
increase his capital only in commerce and manufacture, and in both cases
he needs workers. Even if he invests his capital at interest, he needs them
indirectly; for without commerce and manufacture, no one would pay him

interest upon his capital, no one could use it. So the bourgeois certainly
needs workers, not indeed for his immediate living, for at need he could
consume his capital, but as we need an article of trade or a beast of burden,
—as a means of profit. The proletarian produces the goods which the
bourgeois sells with advantage. When, therefore, the demand for these
goods increases so that all the competing working-men are employed, and a
few more might perhaps be useful, the competition among the workers falls
away, and the bourgeoisie begin to compete among themselves. The
capitalist in search of workmen knows very well that his profits increase as
prices rise in consequence of the increased demand for his goods, and pays
a trifle higher wages rather than let the whole profit escape him. He sends
the butter to fetch the cheese, and getting the latter, leaves the butter
ungrudgingly to the workers. So one capitalist after another goes in chase
of workers, and wages rise; but only as high as the increasing demand
permits. If the capitalist, who willingly sacrificed a part of his
extraordinary profit, runs into danger of sacrificing any part of his ordinary
average profit, he takes very good care not to pay more than average wages.
From this we can determine the average rate of wages. Under average
circumstances, when neither workers nor capitalists have reason to
compete, especially among themselves, when there are just as many
workers at hand as can be employed in producing precisely the goods that
are demanded, wages stand a little above the minimum. How far they rise
above the minimum will depend upon the average needs and the grade of
civilisation of the workers. If the workers are accustomed to eat meat
several times in the week, the capitalists must reconcile themselves to
paying wages enough to make this food attainable, not less, because the
workers are not competing among themselves and have no occasion to
content themselves with less; not more, because the capitalists, in the
absence of competition among themselves, have no occasion to attract
working-men by extraordinary favours. This standard of the average needs
and the average civilisation of the workers has become very complicated by
reason of the complications of English industry, and is different for different
sorts of workers, as has been pointed out. Most industrial occupations
demand a certain skill and regularity, and for these qualities which involve a
certain grade of civilisation, the rate of wages must be such as to induce the
worker to acquire such skill and subject himself to such regularity. Hence it

is that the average wages of industrial workers are higher than those of mere
porters, day labourers, etc., higher especially than those of agricultural
labourers, a fact to which the additional cost of the necessities of life in
cities contributes somewhat. In other words, the worker is, in law and in
fact, the slave of the property-holding class, so effectually a slave that he is
sold like a piece of goods, rises and falls in value like a commodity. If the
demand for workers increases, the price of workers rises; if it falls, their
price falls. If it falls so greatly that a number of them become unsaleable, if
they are left in stock, they are simply left idle; and as they cannot live upon
that, they die of starvation. For, to speak in the words of the economists,
the expense incurred in maintaining them would not be reproduced, would
be money thrown away, and to this end no man advances capital; and, so
far, Malthus was perfectly right in his theory of population. The only
difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the
worker of to-day seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but
piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells
him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the
slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. For
him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty
necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the
other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in
danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie,
and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in
his employment, his existence. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is far
better off under the present arrangement than under the old slave system; it
can dismiss its employees at discretion without sacrificing invested capital,
and gets its work done much more cheaply than is possible with slave
labour, as Adam Smith comfortingly pointed out. {80}
Hence it follows, too, that Adam Smith was perfectly right in making the
assertion: “That the demand for men, like that for any other commodity,
necessarily regulates the production of men, quickens it when it goes on too
slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast.” Just as in the case of any
other commodity! If there are too few labourers at hand, prices, i.e. wages,
rise, the workers are more prosperous, marriages multiply, more children
are born and more live to grow up, until a sufficient number of labourers
has been secured. If there are too many on hand, prices fall, want of work,

poverty, and starvation, and consequent diseases arise, and the “surplus
population” is put out of the way. And Malthus, who carried the foregoing
proposition of Smith farther, was also right, in his way, in asserting that
there are always more people on hand than can be maintained from the
available means of subsistence. Surplus population is engendered rather by
the competition of the workers among themselves, which forces each
separate worker to labour as much each day as his strength can possibly
admit. If a manufacturer can employ ten hands nine hours daily, he can
employ nine if each works ten hours, and the tenth goes hungry. And if a
manufacturer can force the nine hands to work an extra hour daily for the
same wages by threatening to discharge them at a time when the demand
for hands is not very great, he discharges the tenth and saves so much
wages. This is the process on a small scale, which goes on in a nation on a
large one. The productiveness of each hand raised to the highest pitch by
the competition of the workers among themselves, the division of labour,
the introduction of machinery, the subjugation of the forces of nature,
deprive a multitude of workers of bread. These starving workers are then
removed from the market, they can buy nothing, and the quantity of articles
of consumption previously required by them is no longer in demand, need
no longer be produced; the workers previously employed in producing them
are therefore driven out of work, and are also removed from the market, and
so it goes on, always the same old round, or rather, so it would go if other
circumstances did not intervene. The introduction of the industrial forces
already referred to for increasing production leads, in the course of time, to
a reduction of prices of the articles produced and to consequent increased
consumption, so that a large part of the displaced workers finally, after long
suffering, find work again. If, in addition to this, the conquest of foreign
markets constantly and rapidly increases the demand for manufactured
goods, as has been the case in England during the past sixty years, the
demand for hands increases, and, in proportion to it, the population. Thus,
instead of diminishing, the population of the British Empire has increased
with extraordinary rapidity, and is still increasing. Yet, in spite of the
extension of industry, in spite of the demand for working-men which, in
general, has increased, there is, according to the confession of all the
official political parties (Tory, Whig, and Radical), permanent surplus,
superfluous population; the competition among the workers is constantly
greater than the competition to secure workers.

Whence comes this incongruity? It lies in the nature of industrial
competition and the commercial crises which arise from them. In the
present unregulated production and distribution of the means of subsistence,
which is carried on not directly for the sake of supplying needs, but for
profit, in the system under which every one works for himself to enrich
himself, disturbances inevitably arise at every moment. For example,
England supplies a number of countries with most diverse goods. Now,
although the manufacturer may know how much of each article is
consumed in each country annually, he cannot know how much is on hand
at every given moment, much less can he know how much his competitors
export thither. He can only draw most uncertain inferences from the
perpetual fluctuations in prices, as to the quantities on hand and the needs
of the moment. He must trust to luck in exporting his goods. Everything is
done blindly, as guess-work, more or less at the mercy of accident. Upon
the slightest favourable report, each one exports what he can, and before
long such a market is glutted, sales stop, capital remains inactive, prices
fall, and English manufacture has no further employment for its hands. In
the beginning of the development of manufacture, these checks were
limited to single branches and single markets; but the centralising tendency
of competition which drives the hands thrown out of one branch into such
other branches as are most easily accessible, and transfers the goods which
cannot be disposed of in one market to other markets, has gradually brought
the single minor crises nearer together and united them into one periodically
recurring crisis. Such a crisis usually recurs once in five years after a brief
period of activity and general prosperity; the home market, like all foreign
ones, is glutted with English goods, which it can only slowly absorb, the
industrial movement comes to a standstill in almost every branch, the small
manufacturers and merchants who cannot survive a prolonged inactivity of
their invested capital fail, the larger ones suspend business during the worst
season, close their mills or work short time, perhaps half the day; wages fall
by reason of the competition of the unemployed, the diminution of
working-time and the lack of profitable sales; want becomes universal
among the workers, the small savings, which individuals may have made,
are rapidly consumed, the philanthropic institutions are overburdened, the
poor-rates are doubled, trebled, and still insufficient, the number of the
starving increases, and the whole multitude of “surplus” population presses
in terrific numbers into the foreground. This continues for a time; the

“surplus” exist as best they may, or perish; philanthropy and the Poor Law
help many of them to a painful prolongation of their existence. Others find
scant means of subsistence here and there in such kinds of work as have
been least open to competition, are most remote from manufacture. And
with how little can a human being keep body and soul together for a time!
Gradually the state of things improve; the accumulations of goods are
consumed, the general depression among the men of commerce and
manufacture prevents a too hasty replenishing of the markets, and at last
rising prices and favourable reports from all directions restore activity.
Most of the markets are distant ones; demand increases and prices rise
constantly while the first exports are arriving; people struggle for the first
goods, the first sales enliven trade still more, the prospective ones promise
still higher prices; expecting a further rise, merchants begin to buy upon
speculation, and so to withdraw from consumption the articles intended for
it, just when they are most needed. Speculation forces prices still higher, by
inspiring others to purchase, and appropriating new importations at once.
All this is reported to England, manufacturers begin to produce with a will,
new mills are built, every means is employed to make the most of the
favourable moment. Speculation arises here, too, exerting the same
influence as upon foreign markets, raising prices, withdrawing goods from
consumption, spurring manufacture in both ways to the highest pitch of
effort. Then come the daring speculators working with fictitious capital,
living upon credit, ruined if they cannot speedily sell; they hurl themselves
into this universal, disorderly race for profits, multiply the disorder and
haste by their unbridled passion, which drives prices and production to
madness. It is a frantic struggle, which carries away even the most
experienced and phlegmatic; goods are spun, woven, hammered, as if all
mankind were to be newly equipped, as though two thousand million new
consumers had been discovered in the moon. All at once the shaky
speculators abroad, who must have money, begin to sell, below market
price, of course, for their need is urgent; one sale is followed by others,
prices fluctuate, speculators throw their goods upon the market in terror, the
market is disordered, credit shaken, one house after another stops payments,
bankruptcy follows bankruptcy, and the discovery is made that three times
more goods are on hand or under way than can be consumed. The news
reaches England, where production has been going on at full speed
meanwhile, panic seizes all hands, failures abroad cause others in England,

the panic crushes a number of firms, all reserves are thrown upon the
market here, too, in the moment of anxiety, and the alarm is still further
exaggerated. This is the beginning of the crisis, which then takes precisely
the same course as its predecessor, and gives place in turn to a season of
prosperity. So it goes on perpetually,—prosperity, crisis, prosperity, crisis,
and this perennial round in which English industry moves is, as has been
before observed, usually completed once in five or six years.
From this it is clear that English manufacture must have, at all times save
the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve army of
workers, in order to be able to produce the masses of goods required by the
market in the liveliest months. This reserve army is larger or smaller,
according as the state of the market occasions the employment of a larger or
smaller proportion of its members. And if at the moment of highest activity
of the market the agricultural districts and the branches least affected by the
general prosperity temporarily supply to manufacture a number of workers,
these are a mere minority, and these too belong to the reserve army, with the
single difference that the prosperity of the moment was required to reveal
their connection with it. When they enter upon the more active branches of
work, their former employers draw in somewhat, in order to feel the loss
less, work longer hours, employ women and younger workers, and when
the wanderers discharged at the beginning of the crisis return, they find
their places filled and themselves superfluous—at least in the majority of
cases. This reserve army, which embraces an immense multitude during the
crisis and a large number during the period which may be regarded as the
average between the highest prosperity and the crisis, is the “surplus
population” of England, which keeps body and soul together by begging,
stealing, street-sweeping, collecting manure, pushing handcarts, driving
donkeys, peddling, or performing occasional small jobs. In every great
town a multitude of such people may be found. It is astonishing in what
devices this “surplus population” takes refuge. The London crossing-
sweepers are known all over the world; but hitherto the principal streets in
all the great cities, as well as the crossings, have been swept by people out
of other work, and employed by the Poor Law guardians or the municipal
authorities for the purpose. Now, however, a machine has been invented
which rattles through the streets daily, and has spoiled this source of income
for the unemployed. Along the great highways leading into the cities, on

which there is a great deal of waggon traffic, a large number of people may
be seen with small carts, gathering fresh horse-dung at the risk of their lives
among the passing coaches and omnibuses, often paying a couple of
shillings a week to the authorities for the privilege. But this occupation is
forbidden in many places, because the ordinary street-sweepings thus
impoverished cannot be sold as manure. Happy are such of the “surplus” as
can obtain a push-cart and go about with it. Happier still those to whom it
is vouchsafed to possess an ass in addition to the cart. The ass must get his
own food or is given a little gathered refuse, and can yet bring in a trifle of
money. Most of the “surplus” betake themselves to huckstering. On
Saturday afternoons, especially, when the whole working population is on
the streets, the crowd who live from huckstering and peddling may be seen.
Shoe and corset laces, braces, twine, cakes, oranges, every kind of small
articles are offered by men, women, and children; and at other times also,
such peddlers are always to be seen standing at the street corners, or going
about with cakes and ginger-beer or nettle-beer. Matches and such things,
sealing-wax, and patent mixtures for lighting fires are further resources of
such venders. Others, so-called jobbers, go about the streets seeking small
jobs. Many of these succeed in getting a day’s work, many are not so
fortunate.

“At the gates of all the London docks,” says the Rev. W. Champney,
preacher of the East End, “hundreds of the poor appear every morning
in winter before daybreak, in the hope of getting a day’s work. They
await the opening of the gates; and, when the youngest and strongest
and best known have been engaged, hundreds cast down by
disappointed hope, go back to their wretched homes.”

When these people find no work and will not rebel against society, what
remains for them but to beg? And surely no one can wonder at the great
army of beggars, most of them able-bodied men, with whom the police
carries on perpetual war. But the beggary of these men has a peculiar
character. Such a man usually goes about with his family singing a
pleading song in the streets or appealing, in a speech, to the benevolence of
the passers-by. And it is a striking fact that these beggars are seen almost
exclusively in the working-people’s districts, that it is almost exclusively
the gifts of the poor from which they live. Or the family takes up its

position in a busy street, and without uttering a word, lets the mere sight of
its helplessness plead for it. In this case, too, they reckon upon the
sympathy of the workers alone, who know from experience how it feels to
be hungry, and are liable to find themselves in the same situation at any
moment; for this dumb, yet most moving appeal, is met with almost solely
in such streets as are frequented by working-men, and at such hours as
working-men pass by; but especially on summer evenings, when the
“secrets” of the working-people’s quarters are generally revealed, and the
middle-class withdraws as far as possible from the district thus polluted.
And he among the “surplus” who has courage and passion enough openly to
resist society, to reply with declared war upon the bourgeoisie to the
disguised war which the bourgeoisie wages upon him, goes forth to rob,
plunder, murder, and burn!
Of this surplus population there are, according to the reports of the Poor
Law commissioners, on an average, a million and a half in England and
Wales; in Scotland the number cannot be ascertained for want of Poor Law
regulations, and with Ireland we shall deal separately. Moreover, this
million and a half includes only those who actually apply to the parish for
relief; the great multitude who struggle on without recourse to this most
hated expedient, it does not embrace. On the other hand, a good part of the
number belongs to the agricultural districts, and does not enter into the
present discussion. During a crisis this number naturally increases
markedly, and want reaches its highest pitch. Take, for instance, the crisis
of 1842, which, being the latest, was the most violent; for the intensity of
the crisis increases with each repetition, and the next, which may be
expected not later than 1847, {87} will probably be still more violent and
lasting. During this crisis the poor-rates rose in every town to a hitherto
unknown height. In Stockport, among other towns, for every pound paid in
house-rent, eight shillings of poor-rate had to be paid, so that the rate alone
formed forty per cent. of the house-rent. Moreover, whole streets stood
vacant, so that there were at least twenty thousand fewer inhabitants than
usual, and on the doors of the empty houses might be read: “Stockport to
let.” In Bolton, where, in ordinary years, the rents from which rates are
paid average £86,000, they sank to £36,000. The number of the poor to be
supported rose, on the other hand, to 14,000, or more than twenty per cent.
of the whole number of inhabitants. In Leeds, the Poor Law guardians had

a reserve fund of £10,000. This, with a contribution of £7,000, was wholly
exhausted before the crisis reached its height. So it was everywhere. A
report drawn up in January, 1843, by a committee of the Anti-Corn Law
League, on the condition of the industrial districts in 1842, which was based
upon detailed statements of the manufacturers, asserts that the poor-rate
was, taking the average, twice as high as in 1839, and that the number of
persons requiring relief has trebled, even quintupled, since that time; that a
multitude of applicants belong to a class which had never before solicited
relief; that the working-class commands more than two-thirds less of the
means of subsistence than from 1834-1836; that the consumption of meat
had been decidedly less, in some places twenty per cent., in others reaching
sixty per cent. less; that even handicraftsmen, smiths, bricklayers, and
others, who usually have full employment in the most depressed periods,
now suffered greatly from want of work and reduction of wages; and that,
even now, in January, 1843, wages are still steadily falling. And these are
the reports of manufacturers! The starving workmen, whose mills were
idle, whose employers could give them no work, stood in the streets in all
directions, begged singly or in crowds, besieged the sidewalks in armies,
and appealed to the passers-by for help; they begged, not cringing like
ordinary beggars, but threatening by their numbers, their gestures, and their
words. Such was the state of things in all the industrial districts, from
Leicester to Leeds, and from Manchester to Birmingham. Here and there
disturbances arose, as in the Staffordshire potteries, in July. The most
frightful excitement prevailed among the workers until the general
insurrection broke out throughout the manufacturing districts in August.
When I came to Manchester in November, 1842, there were crowds of
unemployed working-men at every street corner, and many mills were still
standing idle. In the following months these unwilling corner loafers
gradually vanished, and the factories came into activity once more.
To what extent want and suffering prevail among these unemployed during
such a crisis, I need not describe. The poor-rates are insufficient, vastly
insufficient; the philanthropy of the rich is a rain-drop in the ocean, lost in
the moment of falling, beggary can support but few among the crowds. If
the small dealers did not sell to the working-people on credit at such times
as long as possible—paying themselves liberally afterwards, it must be
confessed—and if the working-people did not help each other, every crisis

would remove a multitude of the surplus through death by starvation.
Since, however, the most depressed period is brief, lasting, at worst, but
one, two, or two and a half years, most of them emerge from it with their
lives after dire privations. But indirectly by disease, etc., every crisis finds
a multitude of victims, as we shall see. First, however, let us turn to another
cause of abasement to which the English worker is exposed, a cause
permanently active in forcing the whole class downwards.

IRISH IMMIGRATION.

We have already referred several times in passing to the Irish who have
immigrated into England; and we shall now have to investigate more
closely the causes and results of this immigration. The rapid extension of
English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in
the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at
command. The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in
England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east
side of St. George’s Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong
arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither. It has been
calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and not far
from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the
industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there form the lowest
class of the population. Thus there are in London, 120,000; in Manchester,
40,000; in Liverpool, 34,000; Bristol, 24,000; Glasgow, 40,000; Edinburgh,
29,000, poor Irish people. {90a} These people having grown up almost
without civilisation, accustomed from youth to every sort of privation,
rough, intemperate, and improvident, bring all their brutal habits with them
among a class of the English population which has, in truth, little
inducement to cultivate education and morality. Let us hear Thomas
Carlyle upon this subject: {90b}

“The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness,
unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and
byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian
with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out
his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In
his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that
can be done by mere strength of hand and back—for wages that will
purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to
his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears

a suit of tatters, the getting on and off of which is said to be a difficult
operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the
calendar. The Saxon-man, if he cannot work on these terms, finds no
work. The uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by the
opposite of strength, drives the Saxon native out, takes possession in
his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity
and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and
disorder. Whoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find
an example how the human being can exist not swimming, but sunk.
That the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers
approximates more and more to that of the Irish, competing with them
in all the markets: that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with
little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the English
price, but at an approximation to the Irish price; at a price superior as
yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of potatoes for thirty weeks
yearly; superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat,
sinking nearer to an equality with that.”

If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish
national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who migrate
for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are
often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst
dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little
trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not;
their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn
beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want
with high wages? The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by
Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and
especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly
those Celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as different from
the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing, aspirate brogue
which the true Irishman never loses. I have occasionally heard the Irish-
Celtic language spoken in the most thickly populated parts of Manchester.
The majority of the families who live in cellars are almost everywhere of
Irish origin. In short, the Irish have, as Dr. Kay says, discovered the
minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the English workers
acquainted with it. Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with

them. The lack of cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country,
where population is scattered, and which is the Irishman’s second nature,
becomes terrifying and gravely dangerous through its concentration here in
the great cities. The Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house
door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the
pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working-people’s quarters and
poison the air. He builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home,
and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with
himself. This new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly
of Irish origin. The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the
difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats
and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with
it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of
England. The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses
themselves it is impossible to describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to
the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as
clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an
old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes,
equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in
want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts,
mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should
he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room
for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in
England. So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now
so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration. And
since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out
of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink is the only
thing which makes the Irishman’s life worth having, drink and his cheery
care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial
drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity,
which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane
enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing,
his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he
cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat.
What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in
a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it
leaves him to himself, to his savagery?

With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle with a
competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for
this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is
therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English working-
men should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the
Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such as demand
little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which requires long training
or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken
Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he
would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become,
in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it
is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the
Englishman. Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with
Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers,
count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race
has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if
the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become
more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a
strong degrading influence upon their English companions in toil,
especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish.
For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are
Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no
one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status—in short, the
whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish
characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading
position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its
immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of
Irish competition.

RESULTS.

Having now investigated, somewhat in detail, the conditions under which
the English working-class lives, it is time to draw some further inferences
from the facts presented, and then to compare our inferences with the actual
state of things. Let us see what the workers themselves have become under
the given circumstances, what sort of people they are, what their physical,
mental, and moral status.
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that
death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in
advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when
society {95} places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they
inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as
much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives
thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which
they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain
in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable
consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet
permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the
deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against
which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no
man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one,
since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder
it remains. I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly
commits what the working-men’s organs, with perfect correctness,
characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under
conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it
undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so
hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that
society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of
the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it

knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere
manslaughter, but murder, I shall have proved, when I cite official
documents, reports of Parliament and of the Government, in substantiation
of my charge.
That a class which lives under the conditions already sketched and is so ill-
provided with the most necessary means of subsistence, cannot be healthy
and can reach no advanced age, is self-evident. Let us review the
circumstances once more with especial reference to the health of the
workers. The centralisation of population in great cities exercises of itself
an unfavourable influence; the atmosphere of London can never be so pure,
so rich in oxygen, as the air of the country; two and a half million pairs of
lungs, two hundred and fifty thousand fires, crowded upon an area three to
four miles square, consume an enormous amount of oxygen, which is
replaced with difficulty, because the method of building cities in itself
impedes ventilation. The carbonic acid gas, engendered by respiration and
fire, remains in the streets by reason of its specific gravity, and the chief air
current passes over the roofs of the city. The lungs of the inhabitants fail to
receive the due supply of oxygen, and the consequence is mental and
physical lassitude and low vitality. For this reason, the dwellers in cities are
far less exposed to acute, and especially to inflammatory, affections than
rural populations, who live in a free, normal atmosphere; but they suffer the
more from chronic affections. And if life in large cities is, in itself,
injurious to health, how great must be the harmful influence of an abnormal
atmosphere in the working-people’s quarters, where, as we have seen,
everything combines to poison the air. In the country, it may, perhaps, be
comparatively innoxious to keep a dung-heap adjoining one’s dwelling,
because the air has free ingress from all sides; but in the midst of a large
town, among closely built lanes and courts that shut out all movement of
the atmosphere, the case is different. All putrefying vegetable and animal
substances give off gases decidedly injurious to health, and if these gases
have no free way of escape, they inevitably poison the atmosphere. The
filth and stagnant pools of the working-people’s quarters in the great cities
have, therefore, the worst effect upon the public health, because they
produce precisely those gases which engender disease; so, too, the
exhalations from contaminated streams. But this is by no means all. The
manner in which the great multitude of the poor is treated by society to-day

is revolting. They are drawn into the large cities where they breathe a
poorer atmosphere than in the country; they are relegated to districts which,
by reason of the method of construction, are worse ventilated than any
others; they are deprived of all means of cleanliness, of water itself, since
pipes are laid only when paid for, and the rivers so polluted that they are
useless for such purposes; they are obliged to throw all offal and garbage,
all dirty water, often all disgusting drainage and excrement into the streets,
being without other means of disposing of them; they are thus compelled to
infect the region of their own dwellings. Nor is this enough. All
conceivable evils are heaped upon the heads of the poor. If the population
of great cities is too dense in general, it is they in particular who are packed
into the least space. As though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets were
not enough, they are penned in dozens into single rooms, so that the air
which they breathe at night is enough in itself to stifle them. They are given
damp dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from below, or garrets
that leak from above. Their houses are so built that the clammy air cannot
escape. They are supplied bad, tattered, or rotten clothing, adulterated and
indigestible food. They are exposed to the most exciting changes of mental
condition, the most violent vibrations between hope and fear; they are
hunted like game, and not permitted to attain peace of mind and quiet
enjoyment of life. They are deprived of all enjoyments except that of
sexual indulgence and drunkenness, are worked every day to the point of
complete exhaustion of their mental and physical energies, and are thus
constantly spurred on to the maddest excess in the only two enjoyments at
their command. And if they surmount all this, they fall victims to want of
work in a crisis when all the little is taken from them that had hitherto been
vouchsafed them.
How is it possible, under such conditions, for the lower class to be healthy
and long lived? What else can be expected than an excessive mortality, an
unbroken series of epidemics, a progressive deterioration in the physique of
the working population? Let us see how the facts stand.
That the dwellings of the workers in the worst portions of the cities,
together with the other conditions of life of this class, engender numerous
diseases, is attested on all sides. The article already quoted from the
Artisan asserts with perfect truth, that lung diseases must be the inevitable
consequence of such conditions, and that, indeed, cases of this kind are

disproportionately frequent in this class. That the bad air of London, and
especially of the working-people’s districts, is in the highest degree
favourable to the development of consumption, the hectic appearance of
great numbers of persons sufficiently indicates. If one roams the streets a
little in the early morning, when the multitudes are on their way to their
work, one is amazed at the number of persons who look wholly or half-
consumptive. Even in Manchester the people have not the same
appearance; these pale, lank, narrow-chested, hollow-eyed ghosts, whom
one passes at every step, these languid, flabby faces, incapable of the
slightest energetic expression, I have seen in such startling numbers only in
London, though consumption carries off a horde of victims annually in the
factory towns of the North. In competition with consumption stands
typhus, to say nothing of scarlet fever, a disease which brings most frightful
devastation into the ranks of the working-class. Typhus, that universally
diffused affliction, is attributed by the official report on the sanitary
condition of the working-class, directly to the bad state of the dwellings in
the matters of ventilation, drainage, and cleanliness. This report, compiled,
it must not be forgotten, by the leading physicians of England from the
testimony of other physicians, asserts that a single ill-ventilated court, a
single blind alley without drainage, is enough to engender fever, and usually
does engender it, especially if the inhabitants are greatly crowded. This
fever has the same character almost everywhere, and develops in nearly
every case into specific typhus. It is to be found in the working-people’s
quarters of all great towns and cities, and in single ill-built, ill-kept streets
of smaller places, though it naturally seeks out single victims in better
districts also. In London it has now prevailed for a considerable time; its
extraordinary violence in the year 1837 gave rise to the report already
referred to. According to the annual report of Dr. Southwood Smith on the
London Fever Hospital, the number of patients in 1843 was 1,462, or 418
more than in any previous year. In the damp, dirty regions of the north,
south, and east districts of London, this disease raged with extraordinary
violence. Many of the patients were working-people from the country, who
had endured the severest privation while migrating, and, after their arrival,
had slept hungry and half-naked in the streets, and so fallen victims to the
fever. These people were brought into the hospital in such a state of
weakness, that unusual quantities of wine, cognac, and preparations of
ammonia and other stimulants were required for their treatment; 16½ per

cent. of all patients died. This malignant fever is to be found in
Manchester; in the worst quarters of the Old Town, Ancoats, Little Ireland,
etc., it is rarely extinct; though here, as in the English towns generally, it
prevails to a less extent than might be expected. In Scotland and Ireland, on
the other hand, it rages with a violence that surpasses all conception. In
Edinburgh and Glasgow it broke out in 1817, after the famine, and in 1826
and 1837 with especial violence, after the commercial crisis, subsiding
somewhat each time after having raged about three years. In Edinburgh
about 6,000 persons were attacked by the fever during the epidemic of
1817, and about 10,000 in that of 1837, and not only the number of persons
attacked but the violence of the disease increased with each repetition.
{100a}
But the fury of the epidemic in all former periods seems to have been
child’s play in comparison with its ravages after the crisis of 1842. One-
sixth of the whole indigent population of Scotland was seized by the fever,
and the infection was carried by wandering beggars with fearful rapidity
from one locality to another. It did not reach the middle and upper classes
of the population, yet in two months there were more fever cases than in
twelve years before. In Glasgow, twelve per cent. of the population were
seized in the year 1843; 32,000 persons, of whom thirty-two per cent.
perished, while this mortality in Manchester and Liverpool does not
ordinarily exceed eight per cent. The illness reached a crisis on the seventh
and fifteenth days; on the latter, the patient usually became yellow, which
our authority {100b} regards as an indication that the cause of the malady
was to be sought in mental excitement and anxiety. In Ireland, too, these
fever epidemics have become domesticated. During twenty-one months of
the years 1817-1818, 39,000 fever patients passed through the Dublin
hospital; and in a more recent year, according to Sheriff Alison, {100c}
60,000. In Cork the fever hospital received one-seventh of the population
in 1817-1818, in Limerick in the same time one-fourth, and in the bad
quarter of Waterford, nineteen-twentieths of the whole population were ill
of the fever at one time.
When one remembers under what conditions the working-people live, when
one thinks how crowded their dwellings are, how every nook and corner
swarms with human beings, how sick and well sleep in the same room, in
the same bed, the only wonder is that a contagious disease like this fever

does not spread yet farther. And when one reflects how little medical
assistance the sick have at command, how many are without any medical
advice whatsoever, and ignorant of the most ordinary precautionary
measures, the mortality seems actually small. Dr. Alison, who has made a
careful study of this disease, attributes it directly to the want and the
wretched condition of the poor, as in the report already quoted. He asserts
that privations and the insufficient satisfaction of vital needs are what
prepare the frame for contagion and make the epidemic widespread and
terrible. He proves that a period of privation, a commercial crisis or a bad
harvest, has each time produced the typhus epidemic in Ireland as in
Scotland, and that the fury of the plague has fallen almost exclusively on
the working-class. It is a noteworthy fact, that according to his testimony,
the majority of persons who perish by typhus are fathers of families,
precisely the persons who can least be spared by those dependent upon
them; and several Irish physicians whom he quotes bear the same
testimony.
Another category of diseases arises directly from the food rather than the
dwellings of the workers. The food of the labourer, indigestible enough in
itself, is utterly unfit for young children, and he has neither means nor time
to get his children more suitable food. Moreover, the custom of giving
children spirits, and even opium, is very general; and these two influences,
with the rest of the conditions of life prejudicial to bodily development,
give rise to the most diverse affections of the digestive organs, leaving life-
long traces behind them. Nearly all workers have stomachs more or less
weak, and are yet forced to adhere to the diet which is the root of the evil.
How should they know what is to blame for it? And if they knew, how
could they obtain a more suitable regimen so long as they cannot adopt a
different way of living and are not better educated? But new disease arises
during childhood from impaired digestion. Scrofula is almost universal
among the working-class, and scrofulous parents have scrofulous children,
especially when the original influences continue in full force to operate
upon the inherited tendency of the children. A second consequence of this
insufficient bodily nourishment, during the years of growth and
development, is rachitis, which is extremely common among the children of
the working-class. The hardening of the bones is delayed, the development
of the skeleton in general is restricted, and deformities of the legs and spinal

column are frequent, in addition to the usual rachitic affections. How
greatly all these evils are increased by the changes to which the workers are
subject in consequence of fluctuations in trade, want of work, and the
scanty wages in time of crisis, it is not necessary to dwell upon. Temporary
want of sufficient food, to which almost every working-man is exposed at
least once in the course of his life, only contributes to intensify the effects
of his usual sufficient but bad diet. Children who are half-starved, just
when they most need ample and nutritious food—and how many such there
are during every crisis and even when trade is at its best—must inevitably
become weak, scrofulous and rachitic in a high degree. And that they do
become so, their appearance amply shows. The neglect to which the great
mass of working-men’s children are condemned leaves ineradicable traces
and brings the enfeeblement of the whole race of workers with it. Add to
this, the unsuitable clothing of this class, the impossibility of precautions
against colds, the necessity of toiling so long as health permits, want made
more dire when sickness appears, and the only too common lack of all
medical assistance; and we have a rough idea of the sanitary condition of
the English working-class. The injurious effects peculiar to single
employments as now conducted, I shall not deal with here.
Besides these, there are other influences which enfeeble the health of a
great number of workers, intemperance most of all. All possible
temptations, all allurements combine to bring the workers to drunkenness.
Liquor is almost their only source of pleasure, and all things conspire to
make it accessible to them. The working-man comes from his work tired,
exhausted, finds his home comfortless, damp, dirty, repulsive; he has urgent
need of recreation, he must have something to make work worth his trouble,
to make the prospect of the next day endurable. His unnerved,
uncomfortable, hypochondriac state of mind and body arising from his
unhealthy condition, and especially from indigestion, is aggravated beyond
endurance by the general conditions of his life, the uncertainty of his
existence, his dependence upon all possible accidents and chances, and his
inability to do anything towards gaining an assured position. His enfeebled
frame, weakened by bad air and bad food, violently demands some external
stimulus; his social need can be gratified only in the public-house, he has
absolutely no other place where he can meet his friends. How can he be
expected to resist the temptation? It is morally and physically inevitable

that, under such circumstances, a very large number of working-men should
fall into intemperance. And apart from the chiefly physical influences
which drive the working-man into drunkenness, there is the example of the
great mass, the neglected education, the impossibility of protecting the
young from temptation, in many cases the direct influence of intemperate
parents, who give their own children liquor, the certainty of forgetting for
an hour or two the wretchedness and burden of life, and a hundred other
circumstances so mighty that the workers can, in truth, hardly be blamed for
yielding to such overwhelming pressure. Drunkenness has here ceased to
be a vice, for which the vicious can be held responsible; it becomes a
phenomenon, the necessary, inevitable effect of certain conditions upon an
object possessed of no volition in relation to those conditions. They who
have degraded the working-man to a mere object have the responsibility to
bear. But as inevitably as a great number of working-men fall a prey to
drink, just so inevitably does it manifest its ruinous influence upon the body
and mind of its victims. All the tendencies to disease arising from the
conditions of life of the workers are promoted by it, it stimulates in the
highest degree the development of lung and digestive troubles, the rise and
spread of typhus epidemics.
Another source of physical mischief to the working-class lies in the
impossibility of employing skilled physicians in cases of illness. It is true
that a number of charitable institutions strive to supply this want, that the
infirmary in Manchester, for instance, receives or gives advice and
medicine to 2,200 patients annually. But what is that in a city in which,
according to Gaskell’s calculation, {104} three-fourths of the population
need medical aid every year? English doctors charge high fees, and
working-men are not in a position to pay them. They can therefore do
nothing, or are compelled to call in cheap charlatans, and use quack
remedies, which do more harm than good. An immense number of such
quacks thrive in every English town, securing their clientèle among the
poor by means of advertisements, posters, and other such devices. Besides
these, vast quantities of patent medicines are sold, for all conceivable
ailments: Morrison’s Pills, Parr’s Life Pills, Dr. Mainwaring’s Pills, and a
thousand other pills, essences, and balsams, all of which have the property
of curing all the ills that flesh is heir to. These medicines rarely contain
actually injurious substances, but, when taken freely and often, they affect

the system prejudicially; and as the unwary purchasers are always
recommended to take as much as possible, it is not to be wondered at that
they swallow them wholesale whether wanted or not.
It is by no means unusual for the manufacturer of Parr’s Life Pills to sell
twenty to twenty-five thousand boxes of these salutary pills in a week, and
they are taken for constipation by this one, for diarrhœa by that one, for
fever, weakness, and all possible ailments. As our German peasants are
cupped or bled at certain seasons, so do the English working-people now
consume patent medicines to their own injury and the great profit of the
manufacturer. One of the most injurious of these patent medicines is a
drink prepared with opiates, chiefly laudanum, under the name Godfrey’s
Cordial. Women who work at home, and have their own and other people’s
children to take care of, give them this drink to keep them quiet, and, as
many believe, to strengthen them. They often begin to give this medicine to
newly-born children, and continue, without knowing the effects of this
“heartsease,” until the children die. The less susceptible the child’s system
to the action of the opium, the greater the quantities administered. When
the cordial ceases to act, laudanum alone is given, often to the extent of
fifteen to twenty drops at a dose. The Coroner of Nottingham testified
before a Parliamentary Commission {105a} that one apothecary had,
according to his own statement, used thirteen hundredweight of laudanum
in one year in the preparation of Godfrey’s Cordial. The effects upon the
children so treated may be readily imagined. They are pale, feeble, wilted,
and usually die before completing the second year. The use of this cordial
is very extensive in all great towns and industrial districts in the kingdom.
The result of all these influences is a general enfeeblement of the frame in
the working-class. There are few vigorous, well-built, healthy persons
among the workers, i.e., among the factory operatives, who are employed in
confined rooms, and we are here discussing these only. They are almost all
weakly, of angular but not powerful build, lean, pale, and of relaxed fibre,
with the exception of the muscles especially exercised in their work.
Nearly all suffer from indigestion, and consequently from a more or less
hypochondriac, melancholy, irritable, nervous condition. Their enfeebled
constitutions are unable to resist disease, and are therefore seized by it on
every occasion. Hence they age prematurely, and die early. On this point
the mortality statistics supply unquestionable testimony.

According to the Report of Registrar-General Graham, the annual death-rate
of all England and Wales is something less than 2¼ per cent. That is to say,
out of forty-five persons, one dies every year. {105b} This was the average
for the year 1839-40. In 1840-41 the mortality diminished somewhat, and
the death-rate was but one in forty-six. But in the great cities the proportion
is wholly different. I have before me official tables of mortality
(Manchester Guardian, July 31st, 1844), according to which the death-rate
of several large towns is as follows:—In Manchester, including Chorlton
and Salford, one in 32.72; and excluding Chorlton and Salford, one in
30.75. In Liverpool, including West Derby (suburb), 31.90, and excluding
West Derby, 29.90; while the average of all the districts of Cheshire,
Lancashire, and Yorkshire cited, including a number of wholly or partially
rural districts and many small towns, with a total population of 2,172,506
for the whole, is one death in 39.80 persons. How unfavourably the
workers are placed in the great cities, the mortality for Prescott in
Lancashire shows: a district inhabited by miners, and showing a lower
sanitary condition than that of the agricultural districts, mining being by no
means a healthful occupation. But these miners live in the country, and the
death-rate among them is but one in 47.54, or nearly two-and-a-half per
cent. better than that for all England. All these statements are based upon
the mortality tables for 1843. Still higher is the death-rate in the Scotch
cities; in Edinburgh, in 1838-39, one in 29; in 1831, in the Old Town alone,
one in 22. In Glasgow, according to Dr. Cowen, {106} the average has
been, since 1830, one in 30; and in single years, one in 22 to 24. That this
enormous shortening of life falls chiefly upon the working-class, that the
general average is improved by the smaller mortality of the upper and
middle-classes, is attested upon all sides. One of the most recent
depositions is that of a physician, Dr. P. H. Holland, in Manchester, who
investigated Chorlton-on-Medlock, a suburb of Manchester, under official
commission. He divided the houses and streets into three classes each, and
ascertained the following variations in the death-rate:
First class of Streets. Houses I. class. Mortality one in
51
,, ,, ,, II. ,, ,, ,,
45
,, ,, ,, III. ,, ,, ,,
36
Second ,, ,, I. ,, ,, ,,

55
,, ,, ,, II. ,, ,, ,,
38
,, ,, ,, III. ,, ,, ,,
35
Third ,, ,, I. ,, Wanting --- ---
-
,, ,, ,, II. ,, Mortality ,,
35
,, ,, ,, III. ,, ,, ,,
25

It is clear from other tables given by Holland that the mortality in the streets
of the second class is 18 per cent. greater, and in the streets of the third class
68 per cent. greater than in those of the first class; that the mortality in the
houses of the second class is 31 per cent greater, and in the third class 78
per cent. greater than in those of the first class; that the mortality is those
bad streets which were improved, decreased 25 per cent. He closes with the
remark, very frank for an English bourgeois: {107}

“When we find the rate of mortality four times as high in some streets
as in others, and twice as high in whole classes of streets as in other
classes, and further find that it is all but invariably high in those streets
which are in bad condition, and almost invariably low in those whose
condition is good, we cannot resist the conclusion that multitudes of
our fellow-creatures, hundreds of our immediate neighbours, are
annually destroyed for want of the most evident precautions.”

The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Working-Class contains
information which attests the same fact. In Liverpool, in 1840, the average
longevity of the upper-classes, gentry, professional men, etc., was thirty-
five years; that of the business men and better-placed handicraftsmen,
twenty-two years; and that of the operatives, day-labourers, and serviceable
class in general, but fifteen years. The Parliamentary reports contain a mass
of similar facts.
The death-rate is kept so high chiefly by the heavy mortality among young
children in the working-class. The tender frame of a child is least able to
withstand the unfavourable influences of an inferior lot in life; the neglect
to which they are often subjected, when both parents work or one is dead,

avenges itself promptly, and no one need wonder that in Manchester,
according to the report last quoted, more than fifty-seven per cent. of the
children of the working-class perish before the fifth year, while but twenty
per cent. of the children of the higher classes, and not quite thirty-two per
cent. of the children of all classes in the country die under five years of age.
{108a} The article of the Artisan, already several times referred to,
furnishes exacter information on this point, by comparing the city death-rate
in single diseases of children with the country death-rate, thus
demonstrating that, in general, epidemics in Manchester and Liverpool are
three times more fatal than in country districts; that affections of the
nervous system are quintupled, and stomach troubles trebled, while deaths
from affections of the lungs in cities are to those in the country as 2½ to 1.
Fatal cases of smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, and whooping cough, among
small children, are four times more frequent; those of water on the brain are
trebled, and convulsions ten times more frequent. To quote another
acknowledged authority, I append the following table. Out of 10,000
persons, there die—{108b}
Under 5-19 20-39 40-59 60-69 70-79 80-89
90-99 100 x
5 years
In Rutlandshire, a
healthy agricultural
district 2,865 891 1,275 1,299 1,189 1,428 938
112 3
Essex, marshy
agricultural
district 3,159 1,110 1,526 1,413 963 1,019 630
177 3
Town of Carlisle,
1779-1787, before
introduction of
mills 4,408 921 1,006 1,201 940 826 633
153 22
Town of Carlisle,
after introduction
of mills 4,738 930 1,201 1,134 677 727 452
80 1
Preston, factory
town 4,947 1,136 1,379 1,114 553 532 298
38 3
Leeds, factory

town 5,286 927 1,228 1,198 593 512 225
29 2

Apart from the divers diseases which are the necessary consequence of the
present neglect and oppression of the poorer classes, there are other
influences which contribute to increase the mortality among small children.
In many families the wife, like the husband, has to work away from home,
and the consequence is the total neglect of the children, who are either
locked up or given out to be taken care of. It is, therefore, not to be
wondered at if hundreds of them perish through all manner of accidents.
Nowhere are so many children run over, nowhere are so many killed by
falling, drowning, or burning, as in the great cities and towns of England.
Deaths from burns and scalds are especially frequent, such a case occurring
nearly every week during the winter months in Manchester, and very
frequently in London, though little mention is made of them in the papers. I
have at hand a copy of the Weekly Despatch of December 15th, 1844,
according to which, in the week from December 1st to December 7th
inclusive, six such cases occurred. These unhappy children, perishing in
this terrible way, are victims of our social disorder, and of the property-
holding classes interested in maintaining and prolonging this disorder. Yet
one is left in doubt whether even this terribly torturing death is not a
blessing for the children in rescuing them from a long life of toil and
wretchedness, rich in suffering and poor in enjoyment. So far has it gone in
England; and the bourgeoisie reads these things every day in the
newspapers and takes no further trouble in the matter. But it cannot
complain if, after the official and non-official testimony here cited which
must be known to it, I broadly accuse it of social murder. Let the ruling
class see to it that these frightful conditions are ameliorated, or let it
surrender the administration of the common interests to the labouring-class.
To the latter course it is by no means inclined; for the former task, so long
as it remains the bourgeoisie crippled by bourgeois prejudice, it has not the
needed power. For if, at last, after hundreds of thousands of victims have
perished, it manifests some little anxiety for the future, passing a
“Metropolitan Buildings Act,” under which the most unscrupulous
overcrowding of dwellings is to be, at least in some slight degree, restricted;
if it points with pride to measures which, far from attacking the root of the
evil, do not by any means meet the demands of the commonest sanitary
policy, it cannot thus vindicate itself from the accusation. The English

bourgeoisie has but one choice, either to continue its rule under the
unanswerable charge of murder and in spite of this charge, or to abdicate in
favour of the labouring-class. Hitherto it has chosen the former course.
Let us turn from the physical to the mental state of the workers. Since the
bourgeoisie vouchsafes them only so much of life as is absolutely
necessary, we need not wonder that it bestows upon them only so much
education as lies in the interest of the bourgeoisie; and that, in truth, is not
much. The means of education in England are restricted out of all
proportion to the population. The few day schools at the command of the
working-class are available only for the smallest minority, and are bad
besides. The teachers, worn-out workers, and other unsuitable persons who
only turn to teaching in order to live, are usually without the indispensable
elementary knowledge, without the moral discipline so needful for the
teacher, and relieved of all public supervision. Here, too, free competition
rules, and, as usual, the rich profit by it, and the poor, for whom
competition is not free, who have not the knowledge needed to enable them
to form a correct judgment, have the evil consequences to bear.
Compulsory school attendance does not exist. In the mills it is, as we shall
see, purely nominal; and when in the session of 1843 the Ministry was
disposed to make this nominal compulsion effective, the manufacturing
bourgeoisie opposed the measure with all its might, though the working-
class was outspokenly in favour of compulsory school attendance.
Moreover, a mass of children work the whole week through in the mills or
at home, and therefore cannot attend school. The evening schools,
supposed to be attended by children who are employed during the day, are
almost abandoned or attended without benefit. It is asking too much, that
young workers who have been using themselves up twelve hours in the day,
should go to school from eight to ten at night. And those who try it usually
fall asleep, as is testified by hundreds of witnesses in the Children’s
Employment Commission’s Report. Sunday schools have been founded, it
is true, but they, too, are most scantily supplied with teachers, and can be of
use to those only who have already learnt something in the day schools.
The interval from one Sunday to the next is too long for an ignorant child to
remember in the second sitting what it learned in the first, a week before.
The Children’s Employment Commission’s Report furnishes a hundred
proofs, and the Commission itself most emphatically expresses the opinion,

that neither the week-day nor the Sunday schools, in the least degree, meet
the needs of the nation. This report gives evidence of ignorance in the
working-class of England, such as could hardly be expected in Spain or
Italy. It cannot be otherwise; the bourgeoisie has little to hope, and much to
fear, from the education of the working-class. The Ministry, in its whole
enormous budget of £55,000,000, has only the single trifling item of
£40,000 for public education, and, but for the fanaticism of the religious
sects which does at least as much harm as good, the means of education
would be yet more scanty. As it is, the State Church manages its national
schools and the various sects their sectarian schools for the sole purpose of
keeping the children of the brethren of the faith within the congregation,
and of winning away a poor childish soul here and there from some other
sect. The consequence is that religion, and precisely the most unprofitable
side of religion, polemical discussion, is made the principal subject of
instruction, and the memory of the children overburdened with
incomprehensible dogmas and theological distinctions; that sectarian hatred
and bigotry are awakened as early as possible, and all rational mental and
moral training shamefully neglected. The working class has repeatedly
demanded of Parliament a system of strictly secular public education,
leaving religion to the ministers of the sects; but, thus far, no Ministry has
been induced to grant it. The Minister is the obedient servant of the
bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie is divided into countless sects; but each
would gladly grant the workers the otherwise dangerous education on the
sole condition of their accepting, as an antidote, the dogmas peculiar to the
especial sect in question. And as these sects are still quarrelling among
themselves for supremacy, the workers remain for the present without
education. It is true that the manufacturers boast of having enabled the
majority to read, but the quality of the reading is appropriate to the source
of the instruction, as the Children’s Employment Commission proves.
According to this report, he who knows his letters can read enough to
satisfy the conscience of the manufacturers. And when one reflects upon
the confused orthography of the English language which makes reading one
of the arts, learned only under long instruction, this ignorance is readily
understood. Very few working-people write readily; and writing
orthographically is beyond the powers even of many “educated” persons.
The Sunday schools of the State Church, of the Quakers, and, I think, of
several other sects, do not teach writing, “because it is too worldly an

employment for Sunday.” The quality of the instruction offered the workers
in other directions may be judged from a specimen or two, taken from the
Children’s Employment Commission’s Report, which unfortunately does
not embrace mill-work proper:

“In Birmingham,” says Commissioner Grainger, “the children
examined by me are, as a whole, utterly wanting in all that could be in
the remotest degree called a useful education. Although in almost all
the schools religious instruction alone is furnished, the profoundest
ignorance even upon that subject prevailed.”—“In Wolverhampton,”
says Commissioner Horne, “I found, among others, the following
example: A girl of eleven years had attended both day and Sunday
school, ‘had never heard of another world, of Heaven, or another life.’
A boy, seventeen years old, did not know that twice two are four, nor
how many farthings in two pence even when the money was placed in
his hand. Several boys had never heard of London nor of Willenhall,
though the latter was but an hour’s walk from their homes, and in the
closest relations with Wolverhampton. Several had never heard the
name of the Queen nor other names, such as Nelson, Wellington,
Bonaparte; but it was noteworthy that those who had never heard even
of St. Paul, Moses, or Solomon, were very well instructed as to the
life, deeds, and character of Dick Turpin, and especially of Jack
Sheppard. A youth of sixteen did not know how many twice two are,
nor how much four farthings make. A youth of seventeen asserted that
four farthings are four half pence; a third, seventeen years old,
answered several very simple questions with the brief statement, that
he ‘was ne jedge o’ nothin’.’” {112a} These children who are
crammed with religious doctrines four or five years at a stretch, know
as little at the end as at the beginning. One child “went to Sunday
school regularly for five years; does not know who Jesus Christ is, but
had heard the name; had never heard of the twelve Apostles, Samson,
Moses, Aaron, etc.” {112b} Another “attended Sunday school
regularly six years; knows who Jesus Christ was; he died on the Cross
to save our Saviour; had never heard of St. Peter or St. Paul.” {113a}
A third, “attended different Sunday schools seven years; can read only
the thin, easy books with simple words of one syllable; has heard of
the Apostles, but does not know whether St. Peter was one or St. John;

the latter must have been St. John Wesley.” {113b} To the question
who Christ was, Horne received the following answers among others:
“He was Adam,” “He was an Apostle,” “He was the Saviour’s Lord’s
Son,” and from a youth of sixteen: “He was a king of London long
ago.” In Sheffield, Commissioner Symonds let the children from the
Sunday school read aloud; they could not tell what they had read, or
what sort of people the Apostles were, of whom they had just been
reading. After he had asked them all one after the other about the
Apostles without securing a single correct answer, one sly-looking
little fellow, with great glee, called out: “I know, mister; they were the
lepers!” {113c} From the pottery districts and from Lancashire the
reports are similar.

This is what the bourgeoisie and the State are doing for the education and
improvement of the working-class. Fortunately the conditions under which
this class lives are such as give it a sort of practical training, which not only
replaces school cramming, but renders harmless the confused religious
notions connected with it, and even places the workers in the vanguard of
the national movement of England. Necessity is the mother of invention,
and what is still more important, of thought and action. The English
working-man who can scarcely read and still less write, nevertheless knows
very well where his own interest and that of the nation lies. He knows, too,
what the especial interest of the bourgeoisie is, and what he has to expect of
that bourgeoisie. If he cannot write he can speak, and speak in public; if he
has no arithmetic, he can, nevertheless, reckon with the Political
Economists enough to see through a Corn-Law-repealing bourgeois, and to
get the better of him in argument; if celestial matters remain very mixed for
him in spite of all the effort of the preachers, he sees all the more clearly
into terrestrial, political, and social questions. We shall have occasion to
refer again to this point; and pass now to the moral characteristics of our
workers.
It is sufficiently clear that the instruction in morals can have no better effect
than the religious teaching, with which in all English schools it is mixed
up. The simple principles which, for plain human beings, regulate the
relations of man to man, brought into the direst confusion by our social
state, our war of each against all, necessarily remain confused and foreign
to the working-man when mixed with incomprehensible dogmas, and

preached in the religious form of an arbitrary and dogmatic commandment.
The schools contribute, according to the confession of all authorities, and
especially of the Children’s Employment Commission, almost nothing to
the morality of the working-class. So short-sighted, so stupidly narrow-
minded is the English bourgeoisie in its egotism, that it does not even take
the trouble to impress upon the workers the morality of the day, which the
bourgeoisie has patched together in its own interest for its own protection!
Even this precautionary measure is too great an effort for the enfeebled and
sluggish bourgeoisie. A time must come when it will repent its neglect, too
late. But it has no right to complain that the workers know nothing of its
system of morals, and do not act in accordance with it.
Thus are the workers cast out and ignored by the class in power, morally as
well as physically and mentally. The only provision made for them is the
law, which fastens upon them when they become obnoxious to the
bourgeoisie. Like the dullest of the brutes, they are treated to but one form
of education, the whip, in the shape of force, not convincing but
intimidating. There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers,
treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their
consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the
most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power. They are
men so long only as they burn with wrath against the reigning class. They
become brutes the moment they bend in patience under the yoke, and
merely strive to make life endurable while abandoning the effort to break
the yoke.
This, then, is all that the bourgeoisie has done for the education of the
proletariat—and when we take into consideration all the circumstances in
which this class lives, we shall not think the worse of it for the resentment
which it cherishes against the ruling class. The moral training which is not
given to the worker in school is not supplied by the other conditions of his
life; that moral training, at least, which alone has worth in the eyes of the
bourgeoisie; his whole position and environment involves the strongest
temptation to immorality. He is poor, life offers him no charm, almost
every enjoyment is denied him, the penalties of the law have no further
terrors for him; why should he restrain his desires, why leave to the rich the
enjoyment of his birthright, why not seize a part of it for himself? What
inducement has the proletarian not to steal! It is all very pretty and very

agreeable to the ear of the bourgeois to hear the “sacredness of property”
asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies out of
itself. Money is the god of this world; the bourgeois takes the proletarian’s
money from him and so makes a practical atheist of him. No wonder, then,
if the proletarian retains his atheism and no longer respects the sacredness
and power of the earthly God. And when the poverty of the proletarian is
intensified to the point of actual lack of the barest necessaries of life, to
want and hunger, the temptation to disregard all social order does but gain
power. This the bourgeoisie for the most part recognises. Symonds {115a}
observes that poverty exercises the same ruinous influence upon the mind
which drunkenness exercises upon the body; and Dr. Alison explains to
property-holding readers, with the greatest exactness, what the
consequences of social oppression must be for the working-class. {115b}
Want leaves the working-man the choice between starving slowly, killing
himself speedily, or taking what he needs where he finds it—in plain
English, stealing. And there is no cause for surprise that most of them
prefer stealing to starvation and suicide.
True, there are, within the working-class, numbers too moral to steal even
when reduced to the utmost extremity, and these starve or commit suicide.
For suicide, formerly the enviable privilege of the upper classes, has
become fashionable among the English workers, and numbers of the poor
kill themselves to avoid the misery from which they see no other means of
escape.
But far more demoralising than his poverty in its influence upon the English
working-man is the insecurity of his position, the necessity of living upon
wages from hand to mouth, that in short which makes a proletarian of him.
The smaller peasants in Germany are usually poor, and often suffer want,
but they are less at the mercy of accident, they have at least something
secure. The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes
to-day what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance,
and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest
necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may
deprive of bread, this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman
position conceivable for a human being. The slave is assured of a bare
livelihood by the self-interest of his master, the serf has at least a scrap of
land on which to live; each has at worst a guarantee for life itself. But the

proletarian must depend upon himself alone, and is yet prevented from so
applying his abilities as to be able to rely upon them. Everything that the
proletarian can do to improve his position is but a drop in the ocean
compared with the floods of varying chances to which he is exposed, over
which he has not the slightest control. He is the passive subject of all
possible combinations of circumstances, and must count himself fortunate
when he has saved his life even for a short time; and his character and way
of living are naturally shaped by these conditions. Either he seeks to keep
his head above water in this whirlpool, to rescue his manhood, and this he
can do solely in rebellion {116} against the class which plunders him so
mercilessly and then abandons him to his fate, which strives to hold him in
this position so demoralising to a human being; or he gives up the struggle
against his fate as hopeless, and strives to profit, so far as he can, by the
most favourable moment. To save is unavailing, for at the utmost he cannot
save more than suffices to sustain life for a short time, while if he falls out
of work, it is for no brief period. To accumulate lasting property for himself
is impossible; and if it were not, he would only cease to be a working-man
and another would take his place. What better thing can he do, then, when
he gets high wages, than live well upon them? The English bourgeoisie is
violently scandalised at the extravagant living of the workers when wages
are high; yet it is not only very natural but very sensible of them to enjoy
life when they can, instead of laying up treasures which are of no lasting
use to them, and which in the end moth and rust (i.e., the bourgeoisie) get
possession of. Yet such a life is demoralising beyond all others. What
Carlyle says of the cotton spinners is true of all English industrial workers:
{117a}

“Their trade, now in plethoric prosperity, anon extenuated into
inanition and ‘short time,’ is of the nature of gambling; they live by it
like gamblers, now in luxurious superfluity, now in starvation. Black,
mutinous discontent devours them; simply the miserablest feeling that
can inhabit the heart of man. English commerce, with its world-wide,
convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable Proteus Steam demon,
makes all paths uncertain for them, all life a bewilderment; society,
steadfastness, peaceable continuance, the first blessings of man are not
theirs.—This world is for them no home, but a dingy prison-house, of
reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancour, indignation against themselves

and against all men. Is it a green, flowery world, with azure
everlasting sky stretched over it, the work and government of a God;
or a murky, simmering Tophet, of copperas fumes, cotton fuz, gin riot,
wrath and toil, created by a Demon, governed by a Demon?”

And elsewhere: {117b}

“Injustice, infidelity to truth and fact and Nature’s order, being
properly the one evil under the sun, and the feeling of injustice the one
intolerable pain under the sun, our grand question as to the condition
of these working-men would be: Is it just? And, first of all, what belief
have they themselves formed about the justice of it? The words they
promulgate are notable by way of answer; their actions are still more
notable. Revolt, sullen, revengeful humour of revolt against the upper
classes, decreasing respect for what their temporal superiors command,
decreasing faith for what their spiritual superiors teach, is more and
more the universal spirit of the lower classes. Such spirit may be
blamed, may be vindicated, but all men must recognise it as extant
there, all may know that it is mournful, that unless altered it will be
fatal.”

Carlyle is perfectly right as to the facts and wrong only in censuring the
wild rage of the workers against the higher classes. This rage, this passion,
is rather the proof that the workers feel the inhumanity of their position, that
they refuse to be degraded to the level of brutes, and that they will one day
free themselves from servitude to the bourgeoisie. This may be seen in the
case of those who do not share this wrath; they either bow humbly before
the fate that overtakes them, live a respectful private life as well as they
can, do not concern themselves as to the course of public affairs, help the
bourgeoisie to forge the chains of the workers yet more securely, and stand
upon the plane of intellectual nullity that prevailed before the industrial
period began; or they are tossed about by fate, lose their moral hold upon
themselves as they have already lost their economic hold, live along from
day to day, drink and fall into licentiousness; and in both cases they are
brutes. The last-named class contributes chiefly to the “rapid increase of
vice,” at which the bourgeoisie is so horrified after itself setting in motion
the causes which give rise to it.

Another source of demoralisation among the workers is their being
condemned to work. As voluntary, productive activity is the highest
enjoyment known to us, so is compulsory toil the most cruel, degrading
punishment. Nothing is more terrible than being constrained to do some
one thing every day from morning until night against one’s will. And the
more a man the worker feels himself, the more hateful must his work be to
him, because he feels the constraint, the aimlessness of it for himself. Why
does he work? For love of work? From a natural impulse? Not at all! He
works for money, for a thing which has nothing whatsoever to do with the
work itself; and he works so long, moreover, and in such unbroken
monotony, that this alone must make his work a torture in the first weeks if
he has the least human feeling left. The division of labour has multiplied
the brutalising influences of forced work. In most branches the worker’s
activity is reduced to some paltry, purely mechanical manipulation, repeated
minute after minute, unchanged year after year. {119} How much human
feeling, what abilities can a man retain in his thirtieth year, who has made
needle points or filed toothed wheels twelve hours every day from his early
childhood, living all the time under the conditions forced upon the English
proletarian? It is still the same thing since the introduction of steam. The
worker’s activity is made easy, muscular effort is saved, but the work itself
becomes unmeaning and monotonous to the last degree. It offers no field
for mental activity, and claims just enough of his attention to keep him from
thinking of anything else. And a sentence to such work, to work which
takes his whole time for itself, leaving him scarcely time to eat and sleep,
none for physical exercise in the open air, or the enjoyment of Nature, much
less for mental activity, how can such a sentence help degrading a human
being to the level of a brute? Once more the worker must choose, must
either surrender himself to his fate, become a “good” workman, heed
“faithfully” the interest of the bourgeoisie, in which case he most certainly
becomes a brute, or else he must rebel, fight for his manhood to the last,
and this he can only do in the fight against the bourgeoisie.
And when all these conditions have engendered vast demoralisation among
the workers, a new influence is added to the old, to spread this degradation
more widely and carry it to the extremest point. This influence is the
centralisation of the population. The writers of the English bourgeoisie are
crying murder at the demoralising tendency of the great cities, like

perverted Jeremiahs, they sing dirges, not over the destruction, but the
growth of the cities. Sheriff Alison attributes almost everything, and Dr.
Vaughan, author of “The Age of Great Cities,” still more to this influence.
And this is natural, for the propertied class has too direct an interest in the
other conditions which tend to destroy the worker body and soul. If they
should admit that “poverty, insecurity, overwork, forced work, are the chief
ruinous influences,” they would have to draw the conclusion, “then let us
give the poor property, guarantee their subsistence, make laws against
overwork,” and this the bourgeoisie dare not formulate. But the great cities
have grown up so spontaneously, the population has moved into them so
wholly of its own motion, and the inference that manufacture and the
middle-class which profits from it alone have created the cities is so remote,
that it is extremely convenient for the ruling class to ascribe all the evil to
this apparently unavoidable source; whereas the great cities really only
secure a more rapid and certain development for evils already existing in
the germ. Alison is humane enough to admit this; he is no thoroughbred
Liberal manufacturer, but only a half developed Tory bourgeois, and he has,
therefore, an open eye, now and then, where the full-fledged bourgeois is
still stone blind. Let us hear him: {120}

“It is in the great cities that vice has spread her temptations, and
pleasure her seductions, and folly her allurements; that guilt is
encouraged by the hope of impunity, and idleness fostered by the
frequency of example. It is to these great marts of human corruption
that the base and the profligate resort from the simplicity of country
life; it is here that they find victims whereon to practise their iniquity,
and gains to reward the dangers that attend them. Virtue is here
depressed from the obscurity in which it is involved. Guilt is matured
from the difficulty of its detection; licentiousness is rewarded by the
immediate enjoyment which it promises. If any person will walk
through St. Giles’s, the crowded alleys of Dublin, or the poorer
quarters of Glasgow by night, he will meet with ample proof of these
observations; he will no longer wonder at the disorderly habits and
profligate enjoyments of the lower orders; his astonishment will be,
not that there is so much, but that there is so little crime in the world.
The great cause of human corruption in these crowded situations is the
contagious nature of bad example and the extreme difficulty of

avoiding the seductions of vice when they are brought into close and
daily proximity with the younger part of the people. Whatever we may
think of the strength of virtue, experience proves that the higher orders
are indebted for their exemption from atrocious crime or disorderly
habits chiefly to their fortunate removal from the scene of temptation;
and that where they are exposed to the seductions which assail their
inferiors, they are noways behind them in yielding to their influence.
It is the peculiar misfortune of the poor in great cities that they cannot
fly from these irresistible temptations, but that, turn where they will,
they are met by the alluring forms of vice, or the seductions of guilty
enjoyment. It is the experienced impossibility of concealing the
attractions of vice from the younger part of the poor in great cities
which exposes them to so many causes of demoralisation. All this
proceeds not from any unwonted or extraordinary depravity in the
character of these victims of licentiousness, but from the almost
irresistible nature of the temptations to which the poor are exposed.
The rich, who censure their conduct, would in all probability yield as
rapidly as they have done to the influence of similar causes. There is a
certain degree of misery, a certain proximity to sin, which virtue is
rarely able to withstand, and which the young, in particular, are
generally unable to resist. The progress of vice in such circumstances
is almost as certain and often nearly as rapid as that of physical
contagion.”

And elsewhere:

“When the higher orders for their own profit have drawn the
labouring-classes in great numbers into a small space, the contagion of
guilt becomes rapid and unavoidable. The lower orders, situated as
they are in so far as regards moral or religious instruction, are
frequently hardly more to be blamed for yielding to the temptations
which surround them than for falling victims to the typhus fever.”

Enough! The half-bourgeois Alison betrays to us, however narrow his
manner of expressing himself, the evil effect of the great cities upon the
moral development of the workers. Another, a bourgeois pur sang, a man
after the heart of the Anti-Corn Law League, Dr. Andrew Ure, {122}

betrays the other side. He tells us that life in great cities facilitates cabals
among the workers and confers power on the Plebs. If here the workers are
not educated (i.e., to obedience to the bourgeoisie), they may view matters
one-sidedly, from the standpoint of a sinister selfishness, and may readily
permit themselves to be hoodwinked by sly demagogues; nay, they might
even be capable of viewing their greatest benefactors, the frugal and
enterprising capitalists, with a jealous and hostile eye. Here proper training
alone can avail, or national bankruptcy and other horrors must follow, since
a revolution of the workers could hardly fail to occur. And our bourgeois is
perfectly justified in his fears. If the centralisation of population stimulates
and develops the property-holding class, it forces the development of the
workers yet more rapidly. The workers begin to feel as a class, as a whole;
they begin to perceive that, though feeble as individuals, they form a power
united; their separation from the bourgeoisie, the development of views
peculiar to the workers and corresponding to their position in life, is
fostered, the consciousness of oppression awakens, and the workers attain
social and political importance. The great cities are the birthplaces of
labour movements; in them the workers first began to reflect upon their
own condition, and to struggle against it; in them the opposition between
proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself manifest; from them proceeded
the Trades-Unions, Chartism, and Socialism. The great cities have
transformed the disease of the social body, which appears in chronic form in
the country, into an acute one, and so made manifest its real nature and the
means of curing it. Without the great cities and their forcing influence upon
the popular intelligence, the working-class would be far less advanced than
it is. Moreover, they have destroyed the last remnant of the patriarchal
relation between working-men and employers, a result to which
manufacture on a large scale has contributed by multiplying the employés
dependent upon a single employer. The bourgeoisie deplores all this, it is
true, and has good reason to do so; for, under the old conditions, the
bourgeois was comparatively secure against a revolt on the part of his
hands. He could tyrannise over them and plunder them to his heart’s
content, and yet receive obedience, gratitude, and assent from these stupid
people by bestowing a trifle of patronising friendliness which cost him
nothing, and perhaps some paltry present, all apparently out of pure, self-
sacrificing, uncalled-for goodness of heart, but really not one-tenth part of
his duty. As an individual bourgeois, placed under conditions which he had

not himself created, he might do his duty at least in part; but, as a member
of the ruling class, which, by the mere fact of its ruling, is responsible for
the condition of the whole nation, he did nothing of what his position
involved. On the contrary, he plundered the whole nation for his own
individual advantage. In the patriarchal relation that hypocritically
concealed the slavery of the worker, the latter must have remained an
intellectual zero, totally ignorant of his own interest, a mere private
individual. Only when estranged from his employer, when convinced that
the sole bond between employer and employé is the bond of pecuniary
profit, when the sentimental bond between them, which stood not the
slightest test, had wholly fallen away, then only did the worker begin to
recognise his own interests and develop independently; then only did he
cease to be the slave of the bourgeoisie in his thoughts, feelings, and the
expression of his will. And to this end manufacture on a grand scale and in
great cities has most largely contributed.
Another influence of great moment in forming the character of the English
workers is the Irish immigration already referred to. On the one hand it has,
as we have seen, degraded the English workers, removed them from
civilisation, and aggravated the hardship of their lot; but, on the other hand,
it has thereby deepened the chasm between workers and bourgeoisie, and
hastened the approaching crisis. For the course of the social disease from
which England is suffering is the same as the course of a physical disease; it
develops, according to certain laws, has its own crisis, the last and most
violent of which determines the fate of the patient. And as the English
nation cannot succumb under the final crises, but must go forth from it,
born again, rejuvenated, we can but rejoice over everything which
accelerates the course of the disease. And to this the Irish immigration
further contributes by reason of the passionate, mercurial Irish
temperament, which it imports into England and into the English working-
class. The Irish and English are to each other much as the French and the
Germans; and the mixing of the more facile, excitable, fiery Irish
temperament with the stable, reasoning, persevering English must, in the
long run, be productive only of good for both. The rough egotism of the
English bourgeoisie would have kept its hold upon the working-class much
more firmly if the Irish nature, generous to a fault, and ruled primarily by
sentiment, had not intervened, and softened the cold, rational English

character in part by a mixture of the races, and in part by the ordinary
contact of life.
In view of all this, it is not surprising that the working-class has gradually
become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie
has more in common with every other nation of the earth than with the
workers in whose midst it lives. The workers speak other dialects, have
other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different
religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie. Thus they are two
radically dissimilar nations, as unlike as difference of race could make
them, of whom we on the Continent have known but one, the bourgeoisie.
Yet it is precisely the other, the people, the proletariat, which is by far the
more important for the future of England.
Of the public character of the English working-man, as it finds expression
in associations and political principles, we shall have occasion to speak
later; let us here consider the results of the influences cited above, as they
affect the private character of the worker. The workman is far more
humane in ordinary life than the bourgeois. I have already mentioned the
fact that the beggars are accustomed to turn almost exclusively to the
workers, and that, in general, more is done by the workers than by the
bourgeoisie for the maintenance of the poor. This fact, which any one may
prove for himself any day, is confirmed, among others, by Dr. Parkinson,
Canon of Manchester, who says: {125}

“The poor give one another more than the rich give the poor. I can
confirm my statement by the testimony of one of our eldest, most
skilful, most observant, and humane physicians, Dr. Bardsley, who has
often declared that the total sum which the poor yearly bestow upon
one another, surpasses that which the rich contribute in the same time.”

In other ways, too, the humanity of the workers is constantly manifesting
itself pleasantly. They have experienced hard times themselves, and can
therefore feel for those in trouble, whence they are more approachable,
friendlier, and less greedy for money, though they need it far more, than the
property-holding class. For them money is worth only what it will buy,
whereas for the bourgeois it has an especial inherent value, the value of a
god, and makes the bourgeois the mean, low money-grabber that he is. The

working-man who knows nothing of this feeling of reverence for money is
therefore less grasping than the bourgeois, whose whole activity is for the
purpose of gain, who sees in the accumulations of his money-bags the end
and aim of life. Hence the workman is much less prejudiced, has a clearer
eye for facts as they are than the bourgeois, and does not look at everything
through the spectacles of personal selfishness. His faulty education saves
him from religious prepossessions, he does not understand religious
questions, does not trouble himself about them, knows nothing of the
fanaticism that holds the bourgeoisie bound; and if he chances to have any
religion, he has it only in name, not even in theory. Practically he lives for
this world, and strives to make himself at home in it. All the writers of the
bourgeoisie are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not religious,
and do not attend church. From the general statement are to be excepted the
Irish, a few elderly people, and the half-bourgeois, the overlookers,
foremen, and the like. But among the masses there prevails almost
universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost, some trace of
Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague
dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc. The clergy of all sects is in very bad
odour with the working-men, though the loss of its influence is recent. At
present, however, the mere cry: “He’s a parson!” is often enough to drive
one of the clergy from the platform of a public meeting. And like the rest of
the conditions under which he lives, his want of religious and other culture
contributes to keep the working-man more unconstrained, freer from
inherited stable tenets and cut-and-dried opinions, than the bourgeois who is
saturated with the class prejudices poured into him from his earliest youth.
There is nothing to be done with the bourgeois; he is essentially
conservative in however liberal a guise, his interest is bound up with that of
the property-holding class, he is dead to all active movement; he is losing
his position in the forefront of England’s historical development. The
workers are taking his place, in rightful claim first, then in fact.
All this, together with the correspondent public action of the workers, with
which we shall deal later, forms the favourable side of the character of this
class; the unfavourable one may be quite as briefly summed up, and follows
quite as naturally out of the given causes. Drunkenness, sexual
irregularities, brutality, and disregard for the rights of property are the chief
points with which the bourgeois charges them. That they drink heavily is to

be expected. Sheriff Alison asserts that in Glasgow some thirty thousand
working-men get drunk every Saturday night, and the estimate is certainly
not exaggerated; and that in that city in 1830, one house in twelve, and in
1840, one house in ten, was a public-house; that in Scotland, in 1823, excise
was paid upon 2,300,000 gallons; in 1837, upon 6,620,000 gallons; in
England, in 1823, upon 1,976,000 gallons, and in 1837, upon 7,875,000
gallons of spirits. The Beer Act of 1830, which facilitated the opening of
beerhouses (jerry shops), whose keepers are licensed to sell beer to be
drunk on the premises, facilitated the spread of intemperance by bringing a
beerhouse, so to say, to everybody’s door. In nearly every street there are
several such beerhouses, and among two or three neighbouring houses in
the country one is sure to be a jerry shop. Besides these, there are hush-
shops in multitudes, i.e., secret drinking-places which are not licensed, and
quite as many secret distilleries which produce great quantities of spirits in
retired spots, rarely visited by the police, in the great cities. Gaskell
estimates these secret distilleries in Manchester alone at more than a
hundred, and their product at 156,000 gallons at the least. In Manchester
there are, besides, more than a thousand public-houses selling all sorts of
alcoholic drinks, or quite as many in proportion to the number of
inhabitants as in Glasgow. In all other great towns, the state of things is the
same. And when one considers, apart from the usual consequences of
intemperance, that men and women, even children, often mothers with
babies in their arms, come into contact in these places with the most
degraded victims of the bourgeois regime, with thieves, swindlers, and
prostitutes; when one reflects that many a mother gives the baby on her arm
gin to drink, the demoralising effects of frequenting such places cannot be
denied.
On Saturday evenings, especially when wages are paid and work stops
somewhat earlier than usual, when the whole working-class pours from its
own poor quarters into the main thoroughfares, intemperance may be seen
in all its brutality. I have rarely come out of Manchester on such an evening
without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others lying in
the gutter. On Sunday evening the same scene is usually repeated, only less
noisily. And when their money is spent, the drunkards go to the nearest
pawnshop, of which there are plenty in every city—over sixty in
Manchester, and ten or twelve in a single street of Salford, Chapel Street—

and pawn whatever they possess. Furniture, Sunday clothes where such
exist, kitchen utensils in masses are fetched from the pawnbrokers on
Saturday night only to wander back, almost without fail, before the next
Wednesday, until at last some accident makes the final redemption
impossible, and one article after another falls into the clutches of the usurer,
or until he refuses to give a single farthing more upon the battered, used-up
pledge. When one has seen the extent of intemperance among the workers
in England, one readily believes Lord Ashley’s statement that this class
annually expends something like twenty-five million pounds sterling upon
intoxicating liquor: and the deterioration in external conditions, the frightful
shattering of mental and physical health, the ruin of all domestic relations
which follow may readily be imagined. True, the temperance societies have
done much, but what are a few thousand teetotallers among the millions of
workers? When Father Matthew, the Irish apostle of temperance, passes
through the English cities, from thirty to sixty thousand workers take the
pledge; but most of them break it again within a month. If one counts up
the immense numbers who have taken the pledge in the last three or four
years in Manchester, the total is greater than the whole population of the
town—and still it is by no means evident that intemperance is diminishing.
Next to intemperance in the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of the
principal faults of English working-men is sexual licence. But this, too,
follows with relentless logic, with inevitable necessity out of the position of
a class left to itself, with no means of making fitting use of its freedom.
The bourgeoisie has left the working-class only these two pleasures, while
imposing upon it a multitude of labours and hardships, and the consequence
is that the working-men, in order to get something from life, concentrate
their whole energy upon these two enjoyments, carry them to excess,
surrender to them in the most unbridled manner. When people are placed
under conditions which appeal to the brute only, what remains to them but
to rebel or to succumb to utter brutality? And when, moreover, the
bourgeoisie does its full share in maintaining prostitution—and how many
of the 40,000 prostitutes who fill the streets of London every evening live
upon the virtuous bourgeoisie! How many of them owe it to the seduction
of a bourgeois, that they must offer their bodies to the passers-by in order to
live?—surely it has least of all a right to reproach the workers with their
sexual brutality.

The failings of the workers in general may be traced to an unbridled thirst
for pleasure, to want of providence, and of flexibility in fitting into the
social order, to the general inability to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment
to a remoter advantage. But is that to be wondered at? When a class can
purchase few and only the most sensual pleasures by its wearying toil, must
it not give itself over blindly and madly to those pleasures? A class about
whose education no one troubles himself, which is a playball to a thousand
chances, knows no security in life—what incentives has such a class to
providence, to “respectability,” to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for a
remoter enjoyment, most uncertain precisely by reason of the perpetually
varying, shifting conditions under which the proletariat lives? A class
which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its
advantages, one to which the social system appears in purely hostile aspects
—who can demand that such a class respect this social order? Verily that is
asking much! But the working-man cannot escape the present arrangement
of society so long as it exists, and when the individual worker resists it, the
greatest injury falls upon himself.
Thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker.
In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly shelter,
ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling
rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible.
The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the
elder children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all
under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such
conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape from the family, must live
in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family
troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralising for parents and children
alike. Neglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is
only too common among the English working-people, and only too
vigorously fostered by the existing institutions of society. And children
growing up in this savage way, amidst these demoralising influences, are
expected to turn out goody-goody and moral in the end! Verily the
requirements are naïve, which the self-satisfied bourgeois makes upon the
working-man!
The contempt for the existing social order is most conspicuous in its
extreme form—that of offences against the law. If the influences

demoralising to the working-man act more powerfully, more concentratedly
than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water abandons the fluid
for the vaporous state at 80 degrees, Réaumur. Under the brutal and
brutalising treatment of the bourgeoisie, the working-man becomes
precisely as much a thing without volition as water, and is subject to the
laws of nature with precisely the same necessity; at a certain point all
freedom ceases. Hence with the extension of the proletariat, crime has
increased in England, and the British nation has become the most criminal
in the world. From the annual criminal tables of the Home Secretary, it is
evident that the increase of crime in England has proceeded with
incomprehensible rapidity. The numbers of arrests for criminal offences
reached in the years: 1805, 4,605; 1810, 5,146; 1815, 7,898; 1820, 13,710;
1825, 14,437; 1830, 18,107; 1835, 20,731; 1840, 27,187; 1841, 27,760;
1842, 31,309 in England and Wales alone. That is to say, they increased
sevenfold in thirty-seven years. Of these arrests, in 1842, 4,497 were made
in Lancashire alone, or more than 14 per cent. of the whole; and 4,094 in
Middlesex, including London, or more than 13 per cent. So that two
districts which include great cities with large proletarian populations,
produced one-fourth of the total amount of crime, though their population is
far from forming one-fourth of the whole. Moreover, the criminal tables
prove directly that nearly all crime arises within the proletariat; for, in 1842,
taking the average, out of 100 criminals, 32.35 could neither read nor write;
58.32 read and wrote imperfectly; 6.77 could read and write well; 0.22 had
enjoyed a higher education, while the degree of education of 2.34 could not
be ascertained. In Scotland, crime has increased yet more rapidly. There
were but 89 arrests for criminal offences in 1819, and as early as 1837 the
number had risen to 3,176, and in 1842 to 4,189. In Lanarkshire, where
Sheriff Alison himself made out the official report, population has doubled
once in thirty years, and crime once in five and a half, or six times more
rapidly than the population. The offences, as in all civilised countries, are,
in the great majority of cases, against property, and have, therefore, arisen
from want in some form; for what a man has, he does not steal. The
proportion of offences against property to the population, which in the
Netherlands is as 1: 7,140, and in France, as 1: 1,804, was in England, when
Gaskell wrote, as 1: 799. The proportion of offences against persons to the
population is, in the Netherlands, 1: 28,904; in France, 1: 17,573; in
England, 1: 23,395; that of crimes in general to the population in the

agricultural districts, as 1: 1,043; in the manufacturing districts as 1: 840.
{131a} In the whole of England to-day the proportion is 1: 660; {131b}
though it is scarcely ten years since Gaskell’s book appeared!
These facts are certainly more than sufficient to bring any one, even a
bourgeois, to pause and reflect upon the consequences of such a state of
things. If demoralisation and crime multiply twenty years longer in this
proportion (and if English manufacture in these twenty years should be less
prosperous than heretofore, the progressive multiplication of crime can only
continue the more rapidly), what will the result be? Society is already in a
state of visible dissolution; it is impossible to pick up a newspaper without
seeing the most striking evidence of the giving way of all social ties. I look
at random into a heap of English journals lying before me; there is the
Manchester Guardian for October 30, 1844, which reports for three days.
It no longer takes the trouble to give exact details as to Manchester, and
merely relates the most interesting cases: that the workers in a mill have
struck for higher wages without giving notice, and been condemned by a
Justice of the Peace to resume work; that in Salford a couple of boys had
been caught stealing, and a bankrupt tradesman tried to cheat his creditors.
From the neighbouring towns the reports are more detailed: in Ashton, two
thefts, one burglary, one suicide; in Bury, one theft; in Bolton, two thefts,
one revenue fraud; in Leigh, one theft; in Oldham, one strike for wages, one
theft, one fight between Irish women, one non-Union hatter assaulted by
Union men, one mother beaten by her son, one attack upon the police, one
robbery of a church; in Stockport, discontent of working-men with wages,
one theft, one fraud, one fight, one wife beaten by her husband; in
Warrington, one theft, one fight; in Wigan, one theft, and one robbery of a
church. The reports of the London papers are much worse; frauds, thefts,
assaults, family quarrels crowd one another. A Times of September 12,
1844, falls into my hand, which gives a report of a single day, including a
theft, an attack upon the police, a sentence upon a father requiring him to
support his illegitimate son, the abandonment of a child by its parents, and
the poisoning of a man by his wife. Similar reports are to be found in all
the English papers. In this country, social war is under full headway, every
one stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and
whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes,
depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous for

himself. It no longer occurs to any one to come to a peaceful understanding
with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by threats, violence, or in a
law-court. In short, every one sees in his neighbour an enemy to be got out
of the way, or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage. And this
war grows from year to year, as the criminal tables show, more violent,
passionate, irreconcilable. The enemies are dividing gradually into two
great camps—the bourgeoisie on the one hand, the workers on the other.
This war of each against all, of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, need
cause us no surprise, for it is only the logical sequel of the principle
involved in free competition. But it may very well surprise us that the
bourgeoisie remains so quiet and composed in the face of the rapidly
gathering storm-clouds, that it can read all these things daily in the papers
without, we will not say indignation at such a social condition, but fear of
its consequences, of a universal outburst of that which manifests itself
symptomatically from day to day in the form of crime. But then it is the
bourgeoisie, and from its standpoint cannot even see the facts, much less
perceive their consequences. One thing only is astounding, that class
prejudice and preconceived opinions can hold a whole class of human
beings in such perfect, I might almost say, such mad blindness. Meanwhile,
the development of the nation goes its way whether the bourgeoisie has
eyes for it or not, and will surprise the property-holding class one day with
things not dreamed of in its philosophy.

SINGLE BRANCHES OF INDUSTRY.
FACTORY HANDS.

In dealing now with the more important branches of the English
manufacturing proletariat, we shall begin, according to the principle already
laid down, with the factory-workers, i.e., those who are comprised under
the Factory Act. This law regulates the length of the working-day in mills
in which wool, silk, cotton, and flax are spun or woven by means of water
or steam-power, and embraces, therefore, the more important branches of
English manufacture. The class employed by them is the most intelligent
and energetic of all the English workers, and, therefore, the most restless
and most hated by the bourgeoisie. It stands as a whole, and the cotton-
workers pre-eminently stand, at the head of the labour movement, as their
masters the manufacturers, especially those of Lancashire, take the lead of
the bourgeois agitation.
We have already seen in the introduction how the population employed in
working up the textile materials were first torn from their former way of
life. It is, therefore, not surprising that the progress of mechanical invention
in later years also affected precisely these workers most deeply and
permanently. The history of cotton manufacture as related by Ure, {134a}
Baines, {134b} and others is the story of improvements in every direction,
most of which have become domesticated in the other branches of industry
as well. Hand-work is superseded by machine-work almost universally,
nearly all manipulations are conducted by the aid of steam or water, and
every year is bringing further improvements.
In a well-ordered state of society, such improvements could only be a
source of rejoicing; in a war of all against all, individuals seize the benefit
for themselves, and so deprive the majority of the means of subsistence.
Every improvement in machinery throws workers out of employment, and
the greater the advance, the more numerous the unemployed; each great

improvement produces, therefore, upon a number of workers the effect of a
commercial crisis, creates want, wretchedness, and crime. Take a few
examples. The very first invention, the jenny, worked by one man,
produced at least sixfold what the spinning-wheel had yielded in the same
time; thus every new jenny threw five spinners out of employment. The
throstle, which, in turn, produced much more than the jenny, and like it, was
worked by one man, threw still more people out of employment. The mule,
which required yet fewer hands in proportion to the product, had the same
effect, and every improvement in the mule, every multiplication of its
spindles, diminished still further the number of workers employed. But this
increase of the number of spindles in the mule is so great that whole armies
of workers have been thrown out of employment by it. For, whereas one
spinner, with a couple of children for piecers, formerly set six hundred
spindles in motion, he could now manage fourteen hundred to two thousand
spindles upon two mules, so that two adult spinners and a part of the piecers
whom they employed were thrown out. And since self-acting mules have
been introduced into a very large number of spinning-mills, the spinners’
work is wholly performed by the machine. There lies before me a book
from the pen of James Leach, {135} one of the recognised leaders of the
Chartists in Manchester. The author has worked for years in various
branches of industry, in mills and coal mines, and is known to me
personally as an honest, trustworthy, and capable man. In consequence of
his political position, he had at command extensive detailed information as
to the different factories, collected by the workers themselves, and he
publishes tables from which it is clear that in 1841, in 35 factories, 1,060
fewer mule spinners were employed than in 1829, though the number of
spindles in these 35 factories had increased by 99,239. He cites five
factories in which no spinners whatever are employed, self-actors only
being used. While the number of spindles increased by 10 per cent., the
number of spinners diminished more than 60 per cent. And Leach adds that
since 1841, so many improvements have been introduced by double-
decking and other means, that in some of the factories named, half the
operatives have been discharged. In one factory alone, where eighty
spinners were employed a short time ago, there are now but twenty left; the
others having been discharged or set at children’s work for children’s
wages. Of Stockport Leach tells a similar story, that in 1835, 800 spinners
were employed, and in 1840 but 140, though the manufacture of Stockport

has greatly increased during the last eight or nine years. Similar
improvements have now been made in carding frames, by which one-half
the operatives have been thrown out of employment. In one factory
improved frames have been set up, which have thrown four hands out of
eight out of work, besides which the employer reduced the wages of the
four retained from eight shillings to seven. The same process has gone on
in the weaving industry; the power-loom has taken possession of one
branch of hand-weaving after another, and since it produces much more
than the hand-loom, while one weaver can work two looms, it has
superseded a multitude of working-people. And in all sorts of manufacture,
in flax and wool-spinning, in silk-twisting, the case is the same. The
power-loom, too, is beginning to appropriate one branch after another of
wool and linen-weaving; in Rochdale alone, there are more power than
hand-looms in flannel and other wool-weaving branches. The bourgeoisie
usually replies to this, that improvements in machinery, by decreasing the
cost of production, supply finished goods at lower prices, and that these
reduced prices cause such an increase in consumption that the unemployed
operatives soon find full employment in newly-founded factories. {136}
The bourgeoisie is so far correct that under certain conditions favourable for
the general development of manufacture, every reduction in price of goods
in which the raw material is cheap, greatly increases consumption, and
gives rise to the building of new factories; but every further word of the
assertion is a lie. The bourgeoisie ignores the fact that it takes years for
these results of the decrease in price to follow and for new factories to be
built; it is silent upon the point that every improvement in machinery
throws the real work, the expenditure of force, more and more upon the
machine, and so transforms the work of full-grown men into mere
supervision, which a feeble woman or even a child can do quite as well, and
does for half or two-thirds wages; that, therefore, grown men are constantly
more and more supplanted and not re-employed by the increase in
manufacture; it conceals the fact that whole branches of industry fall away,
or are so changed that they must be learned afresh; and it takes good care
not to confess what it usually harps upon, whenever the question of
forbidding the work of children is broached, that factory-work must be
learned in earliest youth in order to be learned properly. It does not mention
the fact that the process of improvement goes steadily on, and that as soon
as the operative has succeeded in making himself at home in a new branch,

if he actually does succeed in so doing, this, too, is taken from him, and
with it the last remnant of security which remained to him for winning his
bread. But the bourgeoisie gets the benefit of the improvements in
machinery; it has a capital opportunity for piling up money during the first
years while many old machines are still in use, and the improvement not yet
universally introduced; and it would be too much to ask that it should have
an open eye for the disadvantages inseparable from these improvements.
The fact that improved machinery reduces wages has also been as violently
disputed by the bourgeoisie, as it is constantly reiterated by the working-
men. The bourgeoisie insists that although the price of piece-work has been
reduced, yet the total of wages for the week’s work has rather risen than
fallen, and the condition of the operatives rather improved than
deteriorated. It is hard to get to the bottom of the matter, for the operatives
usually dwell upon the price of piece-work. But it is certain that the weekly
wage, also, has, in many branches of work, been reduced by the
improvement of machinery. The so-called fine spinners (who spin fine
mule yarn), for instance, do receive high wages, thirty to forty shillings a
week, because they have a powerful association for keeping wages up, and
their craft requires long training; but the coarse spinners who have to
compete against self-actors (which are not as yet adapted for fine spinning),
and whose association was broken down by the introduction of these
machines, receive very low wages. A mule spinner told me that he does not
earn more than fourteen shillings a week, and his statement agrees with that
of Leach, that in various factories the coarse spinners earn less than sixteen
shillings and sixpence a week, and that a spinner, who years ago earned
thirty shillings, can now hardly scrape up twelve and a half, and had not
earned more on an average in the past year. The wages of women and
children may perhaps have fallen less, but only because they were not high
from the beginning. I know several women, widows with children, who
have trouble enough to earn eight to nine shillings a week; and that they and
their families cannot live decently upon that sum, every one must admit
who knows the price of the barest necessaries of life in England. That
wages in general have been reduced by the improvement of machinery is
the unanimous testimony of the operatives. The bourgeois assertion that the
condition of the working-class has been improved by machinery is most
vigorously proclaimed a falsehood in every meeting of working-men in the

factory districts. And even if it were true that the relative wage, the price of
piece-work only, has fallen, while the absolute wage, the sum to be earned
in the week, remained unchanged, what would follow? That the operatives
have had quietly to look on while the manufacturers filled their purses from
every improvement without giving the hands the smallest share in the gain.
The bourgeois forgets, in fighting the working-man, the most ordinary
principles of his own Political Economy. He who at other times swears by
Malthus, cries out in his anxiety before the workers: “Where could the
millions by which the population of England has increased find work,
without the improvements in machinery?” {138} As though the bourgeois
did not know well enough that without machinery and the expansion of
industry which it produced, these “millions” would never have been
brought into the world and grown up! The service which machinery has
rendered the workers is simply this: that it has brought home to their minds
the necessity of a social reform by means of which machinery shall no
longer work against but for them. Let the wise bourgeois ask the people
who sweep the streets in Manchester and elsewhere (though even this is
past now, since machines for the purpose have been invented and
introduced), or sell salt, matches, oranges, and shoe-strings on the streets, or
even beg, what they were formerly, and he will see how many will answer:
“Mill-hands thrown out of work by machinery.” The consequences of
improvement in machinery under our present social conditions are, for the
working-man, solely injurious, and often in the highest degree oppressive.
Every new advance brings with it loss of employment, want, and suffering,
and in a country like England where, without that, there is usually a
“surplus population,” to be discharged from work is the worst that can
befall the operative. And what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this
uncertainty of his position in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress
of machinery, must exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious
enough without it! To escape despair, there are but two ways open to him;
either inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness
and general demoralisation. And the English operatives are accustomed to
take refuge in both. The history of the English proletariat relates hundreds
of uprisings against machinery and the bourgeoisie; we have already spoken
of the moral dissolution which, in itself, is only another form of despair.

The worst situation is that of those workers who have to compete against a
machine that is making its way. The price of the goods which they produce
adapts itself to the price of the kindred product of the machine, and as the
latter works more cheaply, its human competitor has but the lowest wages.
The same thing happens to every operative employed upon an old machine
in competition with later improvements. And who else is there to bear the
hardship? The manufacturer will not throw out his old apparatus, nor will
he sustain the loss upon it; out of the dead mechanism he can make nothing,
so he fastens upon the living worker, the universal scapegoat of society. Of
all the workers in competition with machinery, the most ill-used are the
hand-loom cotton weavers. They receive the most trifling wages, and, with
full work, are not in a position to earn more than ten shillings a week. One
class of woven goods after another is annexed by the power-loom, and
hand-weaving is the last refuge of workers thrown out of employment in
other branches, so that the trade is always overcrowded. Hence it comes
that, in average seasons, the hand-weaver counts himself fortunate if he can
earn six or seven shillings a week, while to reach this sum he must sit at his
loom fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Most woven goods require
moreover a damp weaving-room, to keep the weft from snapping, and in
part, for this reason, in part because of their poverty, which prevents them
from paying for better dwellings, the workrooms of these weavers are
usually without wooden or paved floors. I have been in many dwellings of
such weavers, in remote, vile courts and alleys, usually in cellars. Often
half-a-dozen of these hand-loom weavers, several of them married, live
together in a cottage with one or two workrooms, and one large sleeping-
room. Their food consists almost exclusively of potatoes, with perhaps
oatmeal porridge, rarely milk, and scarcely ever meat. Great numbers of
them are Irish or of Irish descent. And these poor hand-loom weavers, first
to suffer from every crisis, and last to be relieved from it, must serve the
bourgeoisie as a handle in meeting attacks upon the factory system. “See,”
cries the bourgeois, triumphantly, “see how these poor creatures must
famish, while the mill operatives are thriving, and then judge the factory
{140} system!” As though it were not precisely the factory system and the
machinery belonging to it which had so shamefully crushed the hand-loom
weavers, and as though the bourgeoisie did not know this quite as well as
ourselves! But the bourgeoisie has interests at stake, and so a falsehood or
two and a bit of hypocrisy won’t matter much.

Let us examine somewhat more closely the fact that machinery more and
more supersedes the work of men. The human labour, involved in both
spinning and weaving, consists chiefly in piecing broken threads, as the
machine does all the rest. This work requires no muscular strength, but
only flexibility of finger. Men are, therefore, not only not needed for it, but
actually, by reason of the greater muscular development of the hand, less fit
for it than women and children, and are, therefore, naturally almost
superseded by them. Hence, the more the use of the arms, the expenditure
of strength, can be transferred to steam or water-power, the fewer men need
be employed; and as women and children work more cheaply, and in these
branches better than men, they take their places. In the spinning-mills
women and girls are to be found in almost exclusive possession of the
throstles; among the mules one man, an adult spinner (with self-actors, he,
too, becomes superfluous), and several piecers for tying the threads, usually
children or women, sometimes young men of from eighteen to twenty
years, here and there an old spinner {141} thrown out of other
employment. At the power-looms women, from fifteen to twenty years, are
chiefly employed, and a few men; these, however, rarely remain at this
trade after their twenty-first year. Among the preparatory machinery, too,
women alone are to be found, with here and there a man to clean and
sharpen the carding-frames. Besides all these, the factories employ
numbers of children—doffers—for mounting and taking down bobbins, and
a few men as overlookers, a mechanic and an engineer for the steam-
engines, carpenters, porters, etc.; but the actual work of the mills is done by
women and children. This the manufacturers deny.
They published last year elaborate tables to prove that machinery does not
supersede adult male operatives. According to these tables, rather more
than half of all the factory-workers employed, viz., 52 per cent., were
females and 48 per cent. males, and of those operatives more than half were
over eighteen years old. So far, so good. But the manufacturers are very
careful not to tell us, how many of the adults were men and how many
women. And this is just the point. Besides this, they have evidently
counted the mechanics, engineers, carpenters, all the men employed in any
way in the factories, perhaps even the clerks, and still they have not the
courage to tell the whole truth. These publications teem generally with
falsehoods, perversions, crooked statements, with calculations of averages,

that prove a great deal for the uninitiated reader and nothing for the
initiated, and with suppressions of facts bearing on the most important
points; and they prove only the selfish blindness and want of uprightness of
the manufacturers concerned. Let us take some of the statements of a
speech with which Lord Ashley introduced the Ten Hours’ Bill, March 15th,
1844, into the House of Commons. Here he gives some data as to the
relations of sex and age of the operatives, not yet refuted by the
manufacturers, whose statements, as quoted above, cover moreover only a
part of the manufacturing industry of England. Of 419,560 factory
operatives of the British Empire in 1839, 192,887, or nearly half, were
under eighteen years of age, and 242,296 of the female sex, of whom
112,192 were less than eighteen years old. There remain, therefore, 80,695
male operatives under eighteen years, and 96,569 adult male operatives, or
not one full quarter of the whole number. In the cotton factories, 56¼ per
cent.; in the woollen mills, 69½ per cent.; in the silk mills, 70½ per cent.; in
the flax-spinning mills, 70½ per cent. of all operatives are of the female
sex. These numbers suffice to prove the crowding out of adult males. But
you have only to go into the nearest mill to see the fact confirmed. Hence
follows of necessity that inversion of the existing social order which, being
forced upon them, has the most ruinous consequences for the workers. The
employment of women at once breaks up the family; for when the wife
spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband
works the same length of time there or elsewhere, what becomes of the
children? They grow up like wild weeds; they are put out to nurse for a
shilling or eighteenpence a week, and how they are treated may be
imagined. Hence the accidents to which little children fall victims multiply
in the factory districts to a terrible extent. The lists of the Coroner of
Manchester {143a} showed for nine months: 69 deaths from burning, 56
from drowning, 23 from falling, 77 from other causes, or a total of 225
{143b} deaths from accidents, while in non-manufacturing Liverpool
during twelve months there were but 146 fatal accidents. The mining
accidents are excluded in both cases; and since the Coroner of Manchester
has no authority in Salford, the population of both places mentioned in the
comparison is about the same. The Manchester Guardian reports one or
more deaths by burning in almost every number. That the general mortality
among young children must be increased by the employment of the mothers
is self-evident, and is placed beyond all doubt by notorious facts. Women

often return to the mill three or four days after confinement, leaving the
baby, of course; in the dinner hour they must hurry home to feed the child
and eat something, and what sort of suckling that can be is also evident.
Lord Ashley repeats the testimony of several workwomen: “M. H., twenty
years old, has two children, the youngest a baby, that is tended by the other,
a little older. The mother goes to the mill shortly after five o’clock in the
morning, and comes home at eight at night; all day the milk pours from her
breasts, so that her clothing drips with it.” “H. W. has three children, goes
away Monday morning at five o’clock, and comes back Saturday evening;
has so much to do for the children then that she cannot get to bed before
three o’clock in the morning; often wet through to the skin, and obliged to
work in that state.” She said: “My breasts have given me the most frightful
pain, and I have been dripping wet with milk.” The use of narcotics to keep
the children still is fostered by this infamous system, and has reached a
great extent in the factory districts. Dr. Johns, Registrar in Chief for
Manchester, is of opinion that this custom is the chief source of the many
deaths from convulsions. The employment of the wife dissolves the family
utterly and of necessity, and this dissolution, in our present society, which is
based upon the family, brings the most demoralising consequences for
parents as well as children. A mother who has no time to trouble herself
about her child, to perform the most ordinary loving services for it during
its first year, who scarcely indeed sees it, can be no real mother to the child,
must inevitably grow indifferent to it, treat it unlovingly like a stranger.
The children who grow up under such conditions are utterly ruined for later
family life, can never feel at home in the family which they themselves
found, because they have always been accustomed to isolation, and they
contribute therefore to the already general undermining of the family in the
working-class. A similar dissolution of the family is brought about by the
employment of the children. When they get on far enough to earn more
than they cost their parents from week to week, they begin to pay the
parents a fixed sum for board and lodging, and keep the rest for
themselves. This often happens from the fourteenth or fifteenth year.
{144} In a word, the children emancipate themselves, and regard the
paternal dwelling as a lodging-house, which they often exchange for
another, as suits them.

In many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the
wife, but turned upside down. The wife supports the family, the husband
sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks. This case
happens very frequently; in Manchester alone, many hundred such men
could be cited, condemned to domestic occupations. It is easy to imagine
the wrath aroused among the working-men by this reversal of all relations
within the family, while the other social conditions remain unchanged.
There lies before me a letter from an English working-man, Robert
Pounder, Baron’s Buildings, Woodhouse, Moorside, in Leeds (the
bourgeoisie may hunt him up there; I give the exact address for the
purpose), written by him to Oastler: {145}
He relates how another working-man, being on tramp, came to St. Helens,
in Lancashire, and there looked up an old friend. He found him in a
miserable, damp cellar, scarcely furnished; and when my poor friend went
in, there sat poor Jack near the fire, and what did he, think you? why he sat
and mended his wife’s stockings with the bodkin; and as soon as he saw his
old friend at the door-post, he tried to hide them. But Joe, that is my
friend’s name, had seen it, and said: “Jack, what the devil art thou doing?
Where is the missus? Why, is that thy work?” and poor Jack was ashamed,
and said: “No, I know this is not my work, but my poor missus is i’ th’
factory; she has to leave at half-past five and works till eight at night, and
then she is so knocked up that she cannot do aught when she gets home, so I
have to do everything for her what I can, for I have no work, nor had any
for more nor three years, and I shall never have any more work while I
live;” and then he wept a big tear. Jack again said: “There is work enough
for women folks and childer hereabouts, but none for men; thou mayest
sooner find a hundred pound on the road than work for men—but I should
never have believed that either thou or any one else would have seen me
mending my wife’s stockings, for it is bad work. But she can hardly stand
on her feet; I am afraid she will be laid up, and then I don’t know what is to
become of us, for it’s a good bit that she has been the man in the house and
I the woman; it is bad work, Joe;” and he cried bitterly, and said, “It has not
been always so.” “No,” said Joe; “but when thou hadn’t no work, how hast
thou not shifted?” “I’ll tell thee, Joe, as well as I can, but it was bad
enough; thou knowest when I got married I had work plenty, and thou
knows I was not lazy.” “No, that thou wert not.” “And we had a good

furnished house, and Mary need not go to work. I could work for the two
of us; but now the world is upside down. Mary has to work and I have to
stop at home, mind the childer sweep and wash, bake and mend; and, when
the poor woman comes home at night, she is knocked up. Thou knows, Joe,
it’s hard for one that was used different.” “Yes, boy, it is hard.” And then
Jack began to cry again, and he wished he had never married, and that he
had never been born; but he had never thought, when he wed Mary, that it
would come to this. “I have often cried over it,” said Jack. Now when Joe
heard this, he told me that he had cursed and damned the factories, and the
masters, and the Government, with all the curses that he had learned while
he was in the factory from a child.
Can any one imagine a more insane state of things than that described in
this letter? And yet this condition, which unsexes the man and takes from
the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow upon the man true
womanliness, or the woman true manliness—this condition which degrades,
in the most shameful way, both sexes, and, through them, Humanity, is the
last result of our much-praised civilisation, the final achievement of all the
efforts and struggles of hundreds of generations to improve their own
situation and that of their posterity. We must either despair of mankind, and
its aims and efforts, when we see all our labour and toil result in such a
mockery, or we must admit that human society has hitherto sought salvation
in a false direction; we must admit that so total a reversal of the position of
the sexes can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in
a false position from the beginning. If the reign of the wife over the
husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the
pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too. If
the wife can now base her supremacy upon the fact that she supplies the
greater part, nay, the whole of the common possession, the necessary
inference is that this community of possession is no true and rational one,
since one member of the family boasts offensively of contributing the
greater share. If the family of our present society is being thus dissolved,
this dissolution merely shows that, at bottom, the binding tie of this family
was not family affection, but private interest lurking under the cloak of a
pretended community of possessions. The same relation exists on the part
of those children who support unemployed parents {147a} when they do
not directly pay board as already referred to. Dr. Hawkins testified in the

Factories’ Inquiry Commission’s Report that this relation is common
enough, and in Manchester it is notorious. In this case the children are the
masters in the house, as the wife was in the former case, and Lord Ashley
gives an example of this in his speech: {147b} A man berated his two
daughters for going to the public house, and they answered that they were
tired of being ordered about, saying, “Damn you, we have to keep you!”
Determined to keep the proceeds of their work for themselves, they left the
family dwelling, and abandoned their parents to their fate.
The unmarried women, who have grown up in mills, are no better off than
the married ones. It is self-evident that a girl who has worked in a mill
from her ninth year is in no position to understand domestic work, whence
it follows that female operatives prove wholly inexperienced and unfit as
housekeepers. They cannot knit or sew, cook or wash, are unacquainted
with the most ordinary duties of a housekeeper, and when they have young
children to take care of, have not the vaguest idea how to set about it. The
Factories’ Inquiry Commission’s Report gives dozens of examples of this,
and Dr. Hawkins, Commissioner for Lancashire, expresses his opinion as
follows: {147c}

“The girls marry early and recklessly; they have neither means, time,
nor opportunity to learn the ordinary duties of household life; but if
they had them all, they would find no time in married life for the
performance of these duties. The mother is more than twelve hours
away from her child daily; the baby is cared for by a young girl or an
old woman, to whom it is given to nurse. Besides this, the dwelling of
the mill-hands is too often no home but a cellar, which contains no
cooking or washing utensils, no sewing or mending materials, nothing
which makes life agreeable and civilised, or the domestic hearth
attractive. For these and other reasons, and especially for the sake of
the better chances of life for the little children, I can but wish and hope
that a time may come in which married women will be shut out of the
factories.” {148a}

But that is the least of the evil. The moral consequences of the employment
of women in factories are even worse. The collecting of persons of both
sexes and all ages in a single workroom, the inevitable contact, the
crowding into a small space of people, to whom neither mental nor moral

education has been given, is not calculated for the favourable development
of the female character. The manufacturer, if he pays any attention to the
matter, can interfere only when something scandalous actually happens; the
permanent, less conspicuous influence of persons of dissolute character,
upon the more moral, and especially upon the younger ones, he cannot
ascertain, and consequently cannot prevent. But precisely this influence is
the most injurious. The language used in the mills is characterised by many
witnesses in the report of 1833, as “indecent,” “bad,” “filthy,” etc. {148b}
It is the same process upon a small scale which we have already witnessed
upon a large one in the great cities. The centralisation of population has the
same influence upon the same persons, whether it affects them in a great
city or a small factory. The smaller the mill the closer the packing, and the
more unavoidable the contact; and the consequences are not wanting. A
witness in Leicester said that he would rather let his daughter beg than go
into a factory; that they are perfect gates of hell; that most of the prostitutes
of the town had their employment in the mills to thank for their present
situation. {148c} Another, in Manchester, “did not hesitate to assert that
three-fourths of the young factory employees, from fourteen to twenty years
of age, were unchaste.” {149a} Commissioner Cowell expresses it as his
opinion, that the morality of the factory operatives is somewhat below the
average of that of the working-class in general. {149b} And Dr. Hawkins
{149c} says:

“An estimate of sexual morality cannot readily be reduced to figures;
but if I may trust my own observations and the general opinion of
those with whom I have spoken, as well as the whole tenor of the
testimony furnished me, the aspect of the influence of factory life upon
the morality of the youthful female population is most depressing.”

It is, besides, a matter of course that factory servitude, like any other, and to
an even higher degree, confers the jus primæ noctis upon the master. In this
respect also the employer is sovereign over the persons and charms of his
employees. The threat of discharge suffices to overcome all resistance in
nine cases out of ten, if not in ninety-nine out of a hundred, in girls who, in
any case, have no strong inducements to chastity. If the master is mean
enough, and the official report mentions several such cases, his mill is also
his harem; and the fact that not all manufacturers use their power, does not

in the least change the position of the girls. In the beginning of
manufacturing industry, when most of the employers were upstarts without
education or consideration for the hypocrisy of society, they let nothing
interfere with the exercise of their vested rights.
To form a correct judgment of the influence of factory-work upon the health
of the female sex, it is necessary first to consider the work of children, and
then the nature of the work itself. From the beginning of manufacturing
industry, children have been employed in mills, at first almost exclusively
by reason of the smallness of the machines, which were later enlarged.
Even children from the workhouses were employed in multitudes, being
rented out for a number of years to the manufacturers as apprentices. They
were lodged, fed, and clothed in common, and were, of course, completely
the slaves of their masters, by whom they were treated with the utmost
recklessness and barbarity. As early as 1796, the public objection to this
revolting system found such vigorous expression through Dr. Percival and
Sir Robert Peel (father of the Cabinet Minister, and himself a cotton
manufacturer), that in 1802 Parliament passed an Apprentices’ Bill, by
which the most crying evils were removed. Gradually the increasing
competition of free workpeople crowded out the whole apprentice system;
factories were built in cities, machinery was constructed on a larger scale,
and workrooms were made more airy and wholesome; gradually, too, more
work was found for adults and young persons. The number of children in
the mills diminished somewhat, and the age at which they began to work
rose a little; few children under eight or nine years were now employed.
Later, as we shall see, the power of the State intervened several times to
protect them from the money-greed of the bourgeoisie.
The great mortality among children of the working-class, and especially
among those of the factory operatives, is proof enough of the unwholesome
conditions under which they pass their first year. These influences are at
work, of course, among the children who survive, but not quite so
powerfully as upon those who succumb. The result in the most favourable
case is a tendency to disease, or some check in development, and
consequent less than normal vigour of the constitution. A nine years old
child of a factory operative that has grown up in want, privation, and
changing conditions, in cold and damp, with insufficient clothing and
unwholesome dwellings, is far from having the working force of a child

brought up under healthier conditions. At nine years of age it is sent into
the mill to work 6½ hours (formerly 8, earlier still, 12 to 14, even 16 hours)
daily, until the thirteenth year; then twelve hours until the eighteenth year.
The old enfeebling influences continue, while the work is added to them. It
is not to be denied that a child of nine years, even an operative’s child, can
hold out through 6½ hours’ daily work, without any one being able to trace
visible bad results in its development directly to this cause; but in no case
can its presence in the damp, heavy air of the factory, often at once warm
and wet, contribute to good health; and, in any case, it is unpardonable to
sacrifice to the greed of an unfeeling bourgeoisie the time of children which
should be devoted solely to their physical and mental development,
withdraw them from school and the fresh air, in order to wear them out for
the benefit of the manufacturers. The bourgeoisie says: “If we do not
employ the children in the mills, they only remain under conditions
unfavourable to their development;” and this is true, on the whole. But
what does this mean if it is not a confession that the bourgeoisie first places
the children of the working-class under unfavourable conditions, and then
exploits these bad conditions for its own benefit, appeals to that which is as
much its own fault as the factory system, excuses the sin of to-day with the
sin of yesterday? And if the Factory Act did not in some measure fetter
their hands, how this “humane,” this “benevolent” bourgeoisie, which has
built its factories solely for the good of the working-class, would take care
of the interests of these workers! Let us hear how they acted before the
factory inspector was at their heels. Their own admitted testimony shall
convict them in the report of the Factories’ Inquiry Commission of 1833.
The report of the Central Commission relates that the manufacturers began
to employ children rarely of five years, often of six, very often of seven,
usually of eight to nine years; that the working-day often lasted fourteen to
sixteen hours, exclusive of meals and intervals; that the manufacturers
permitted overlookers to flog and maltreat children, and often took an
active part in so doing themselves. One case is related of a Scotch
manufacturer, who rode after a sixteen years old runaway, forced him to
return running after the employer as fast as the master’s horse trotted, and
beat him the whole way with a long whip. {151} In the large towns where
the operatives resisted more vigorously, such things naturally happened less
often. But even this long working-day failed to satisfy the greed of the

capitalists. Their aim was to make the capital invested in the building and
machinery produce the highest return, by every available means, to make it
work as actively as possible. Hence the manufacturers introduced the
shameful system of night-work. Some of them employed two sets of
operatives, each numerous enough to fill the whole mill, and let one set
work the twelve hours of the day, and the other twelve hours of the night. It
is needless to picture the effect upon the frames of young children, and even
upon the health of young persons and adults, produced by permanent loss of
sleep at night, which cannot be made good by any amount of sleep during
the day. Irritation of the whole nervous system, with general lassitude and
enfeeblement of the entire frame, were the inevitable results, with the
fostering of temptation to drunkenness and unbridled sexual indulgence.
One manufacturer testifies {152a} that during the two years in which night-
work was carried on in his factory, the number of illegitimate children born
was doubled, and such general demoralisation prevailed that he was obliged
to give up night-work. Other manufacturers were yet more barbarous,
requiring many hands to work thirty to forty hours at a stretch, several times
a week, letting them get a couple of hours sleep only, because the night-
shift was not complete, but calculated to replace a part of the operatives
only.
The reports of the Commission touching this barbarism surpass everything
that is known to me in this line. Such infamies, as are here related, are
nowhere else to be found—yet we shall see that the bourgeoisie constantly
appeals to the testimony of the Commission as being in its own favour. The
consequences of these cruelties became evident quickly enough. The
Commissioners mention a crowd of cripples who appeared before them,
who clearly owed their distortion to the long working-hours. This distortion
usually consists of a curving of the spinal column and legs, and is described
as follows by Francis Sharp, M.R.C.S., of Leeds: {152b}

“I never saw the peculiar bending of the lower ends of the thigh bones
before I came to Leeds. At first I thought it was rachitis, but I was
soon led to change my opinion in consequence of the mass of patients
who presented themselves at the hospital, and the appearances of the
disease at an age (from the fourteenth to the eighteenth year) in which
children are usually not subject to rachitis, as well as by the
circumstance that the malady had first appeared after children began to

work in the mills. Thus far I have seen about a hundred such cases,
and can, most decidedly, express the opinion that they are the
consequences of overwork. So far as I know they were all mill
children, and themselves attributed the evil to this cause. The number
of cases of curvature of the spine which have fallen under my
observation, and which were evidently consequent upon too protracted
standing, was not less than three hundred.”

Precisely similar is the testimony of Dr. Ray, for eighteen years physician in
the hospital in Leeds: {153a}

“Malformations of the spine are very frequent among mill-hands; some
of them consequent upon mere overwork, others the effect of long
work upon constitutions originally feeble, or weakened by bad food.
Deformities seem even more frequent than these diseases; the knees
were bent inward, the ligaments very often relaxed and enfeebled, and
the long bones of the legs bent. The thick ends of these long bones
were especially apt to be bent and disproportionately developed, and
these patients came from the factories in which long work-hours were
of frequent occurrence.”

Surgeons Beaumont and Sharp, of Bradford, bear the same testimony. The
reports of Drinkwater, Power, and Dr. Loudon contain a multitude of
examples of such distortions, and those of Tufnell and Sir David Barry,
which are less directed to this point, give single examples. {153b} The
Commissioners for Lancashire, Cowell, Tufnell, and Hawkins, have almost
wholly neglected this aspect of the physiological results of the factory
system, though this district rivals Yorkshire in the number of cripples. I
have seldom traversed Manchester without meeting three or four of them,
suffering from precisely the same distortions of the spinal columns and legs
as that described, and I have often been able to observe them closely. I
know one personally who corresponds exactly with the foregoing
description of Dr. Ray, and who got into this condition in Mr. Douglas’
factory in Pendleton, an establishment which enjoys an unenviable
notoriety among the operatives by reason of the former long working
periods continued night after night. It is evident, at a glance, whence the
distortions of these cripples come; they all look exactly alike. The knees

are bent inward and backwards, the ankles deformed and thick, and the
spinal column often bent forwards or to one side. But the crown belongs to
the philanthropic manufacturers of the Macclesfield silk district. They
employed the youngest children of all, even from five to six years of age.
In the supplementary testimony of Commissioner Tufnell, I find the
statement of a certain factory manager Wright, both of whose sisters were
most shamefully crippled, and who had once counted the cripples in several
streets, some of them the cleanest and neatest streets of Macclesfield. He
found in Townley Street ten, George Street five, Charlotte Street four,
Watercots fifteen, Bank Top three, Lord Street seven, Mill Lane twelve,
Great George Street two, in the workhouse two, Park Green one, Peckford
Street two, whose families all unanimously declared that the cripples had
become such in consequence of overwork in the silk-twisting mills. One
boy is mentioned so crippled as not to be able to go upstairs, and girls
deformed in back and hips.
Other deformities also have proceeded from this overwork, especially
flattening of the foot, which Sir D. Barry {154a} frequently observed, as
did the physicians and surgeons in Leeds. {154b} In cases, in which a
stronger constitution, better food, and other more favourable circumstances
enabled the young operative to resist this effect of a barbarous exploitation,
we find, at least, pain in the back, hips, and legs, swollen joints, varicose
veins, and large, persistent ulcers in the thighs and calves. These affections
are almost universal among the operatives. The reports of Stuart,
Mackintosh, and Sir D. Barry contain hundreds of examples; indeed, they
know almost no operative who did not suffer from some of these affections;
and in the remaining reports, the occurrence of the same phenomena is
attested by many physicians. The reports covering Scotland place it beyond
all doubt, that a working-day of thirteen hours, even for men and women
from eighteen to twenty-two years of age, produces at least these
consequences, both in the flax-spinning mills of Dundee and Dunfermline,
and in the cotton mills of Glasgow and Lanark.
All these affections are easily explained by the nature of factory-work,
which is, as the manufacturers say, very “light,” and precisely by reason of
its lightness, more enervating than any other. The operatives have little to
do, but must stand the whole time. Any one who sits down, say upon a
window-ledge or a basket, is fined, and this perpetual upright position, this

constant mechanical pressure of the upper portions of the body upon spinal
column, hips, and legs, inevitably produces the results mentioned. This
standing is not required by the work itself, and at Nottingham chairs have
been introduced, with the result that these affections disappeared, and the
operatives ceased to object to the length of the working-day. But in a
factory where the operative works solely for the bourgeois, and has small
interest in doing his work well, he would probably use the seats more than
would be agreeable and profitable to the manufacturer; and in order that
somewhat less raw material may be spoiled for the bourgeois, the operative
must sacrifice health and strength. {155} This long protracted upright
position, with the bad atmosphere prevalent in the mills, entails, besides the
deformities mentioned, a marked relaxation of all vital energies, and, in
consequence, all sorts of other affections general rather than local. The
atmosphere of the factories is, as a rule, at once damp and warm, unusually
warmer than is necessary, and, when the ventilation is not very good,
impure, heavy, deficient in oxygen, filled with dust and the smell of the
machine oil, which almost everywhere smears the floor, sinks into it, and
becomes rancid. The operatives are lightly clad by reason of the warmth,
and would readily take cold in case of irregularity of the temperature; a
draught is distasteful to them, the general enervation which gradually takes
possession of all the physical functions diminishes the animal warmth: this
must be replaced from without, and nothing is therefore more agreeable to
the operative than to have all the doors and windows closed, and to stay in
his warm factory-air. Then comes the sudden change of temperature on
going out into the cold and wet or frosty atmosphere, without the means of
protection from the rain, or of changing wet clothing for dry, a circumstance
which perpetually produces colds. And when one reflects that, with all this,
not one single muscle of the body is really exercised, really called into
activity, except perhaps those of the legs; that nothing whatsoever
counteracts the enervating, relaxing tendency of all these conditions; that
every influence is wanting which might give the muscles strength, the fibres
elasticity and consistency; that from youth up, the operative is deprived of
all fresh air recreation, it is impossible to wonder at the almost unanimous
testimony of the physicians in the Factories’ Report, that they find a great
lack of ability to resist disease, a general depression in vital activity, a
constant relaxation of the mental and physical powers. Let us hear Sir D.
Barry first: {156}

“The unfavourable influences of mill-work upon the hands are the
following: (1) The inevitable necessity of forcing their mental and
bodily effort to keep pace with a machine moved by a uniform and
unceasing motive power. (2) Continuance in an upright position
during unnaturally long and quickly recurring periods. (3) Loss of
sleep in consequence of too long working-hours, pain in the legs, and
general physical derangement. To these are often added low, crowded,
dusty, or damp workrooms, impure air, a high temperature, and
constant perspiration. Hence the boys especially very soon and with
but few exceptions, lose the rosy freshness of childhood, and become
paler and thinner than other boys. Even the hand-weaver’s bound boy,
who sits before his loom with his bare feet resting upon the clay-floor,
retains a fresher appearance, because he occasionally goes into the
fresh air for a time. But the mill child has not a moment free except
for meals, and never goes into the fresh air except on its way to them.
All adult male spinners are pale and thin, suffer from capricious
appetite and indigestion; and as they are all trained in the mills from
their youth up, and there are very few tall, athletic men among them,
the conclusion is justified that their occupation is very unfavourable
for the development of the male constitution; females bear this work
far better.” (Very naturally. But we shall see that they have their own
diseases.)

So, too, Power: {157a}

“I can bear witness that the factory system in Bradford has engendered
a multitude of cripples, and that the effect of long continued labour
upon the physique is apparent, not alone in actual deformity, but also,
and much more generally, in stunted growth, relaxation of the muscles,
and delicacy of the whole frame.”

So, too, F. Sharp, in Leeds, the surgeon {157b} already quoted:

“When I moved from Scarborough to Leeds, I was at once struck by
the fact that the general appearance of the children was much paler,
and their fibre less vigorous here than in Scarborough and its
environs. I saw, too, that many children were exceptionally small for
their age. I have met with numberless cases of scrofula, lung trouble,

mesenteric affections, and indigestion, concerning which I, as a
medical man, have no doubt that they arose from mill work. I believe
that the nervous energy of the body is weakened by the long hours, and
the foundation of many diseases laid. If people from the country were
not constantly coming in, the race of mill-hands would soon be wholly
degenerate.”

So, too, Beaumont, surgeon in Bradford:

“To my thinking, the system, according to which work is done in the
mills here, produces a peculiar relaxation of the whole organism, and
thereby makes children in the highest degree susceptible to epidemic,
as well as to incidental illness. I regard the absence of all appropriate
regulations for ventilation and cleanliness in the mills very decidedly
as the chief cause of that peculiar tendency or susceptibility to morbid
affections which I have so frequently met in my practice.”

Similar testimony is borne by Dr. Ray:

(1) “I have had opportunity of observing the effects of the factory
system upon the health of children under the most favourable
circumstances (in Wood’s mill, in Bradford, the best arranged of the
district, in which he was factory surgeon). (2) These effects are
decidedly, and to a very great extent, injurious, even under these most
favourable circumstances. (3) In the year 1842, three-fifths of all the
children employed in Wood’s mill were treated by me. (4) The worst
effect is not the predominance of deformities, but of enfeebled and
morbid constitutions. (5) All this is greatly improved since the
working-hours of children have been reduced at Wood’s to ten.”

The Commissioner, Dr. Loudon himself, who cites these witnesses, says:

“In conclusion, I think it has been clearly proved that children have
been worked a most unreasonable and cruel length of time daily, and
that even adults have been expected to do a certain quantity of labour
which scarcely any human being is able to endure. The consequence is
that many have died prematurely, and others are afflicted for life with
defective constitutions, and the fear of a posterity enfeebled by the

shattered constitution of the survivors is but too well founded, from a
physiological point of view.”

And, finally, Dr. Hawkins, in speaking of Manchester:

“I believe that most travellers are struck by the lowness of stature, the
leanness and the paleness which present themselves so commonly to
the eye at Manchester, and above all, among the factory classes. I
have never been in any town in Great Britain, nor in Europe, in which
degeneracy of form and colour from the national standard has been so
obvious. Among the married women all the characteristic peculiarities
of the English wife are conspicuously wanting. I must confess that all
the boys and girls brought before me from the Manchester mills had a
depressed appearance, and were very pale. In the expression of their
faces lay nothing of the usual mobility, liveliness, and cheeriness of
youth. Many of them told me that they felt not the slightest inclination
to play out of doors on Saturday and Sunday, but preferred to be quiet
at home.”

I add, at once, another passage of Hawkins’ report, which only half belongs
here, but may be quoted here as well as anywhere else:

“Intemperance, excess, and want of providence are the chief faults of
the factory population, and these evils may be readily traced to the
habits which are formed under the present system, and almost
inevitably arise from it. It is universally admitted that indigestion,
hypochondria, and general debility affect this class to a very great
extent. After twelve hours of monotonous toil, it is but natural to look
about for a stimulant of one sort or another; but when the above-
mentioned diseased conditions are added to the customary weariness,
people will quickly and repeatedly take refuge in spirituous liquors.”

For all this testimony of the physicians and commissioners, the report itself
offers hundreds of cases of proof. That the growth of young operatives is
stunted, by their work, hundreds of statements testify; among others,
Cowell gives the weight of 46 youths of 17 years of age, from one Sunday
school, of whom 26 employed in mills, averaged 104.5 pounds, and 20 not
employed in mills, 117.7 pounds. One of the largest manufacturers of

Manchester, leader of the opposition against the working-men, I think
Robert Hyde Greg himself, said, on one occasion, that if things went on as
at present, the operatives of Lancashire would soon be a race of pigmies.
{159a} A recruiting officer {159b} testified that operatives are little
adapted for military service, looked thin and nervous, and were frequently
rejected by the surgeons as unfit. In Manchester he could hardly get men of
five feet eight inches; they were usually only five feet six to seven, whereas
in the agricultural districts, most of the recruits were five feet eight.
The men wear out very early in consequence of the conditions under which
they live and work. Most of them are unfit for work at forty years, a few
hold out to forty-five, almost none to fifty years of age. This is caused not
only by the general enfeeblement of the frame, but also very often by a
failure of the sight, which is a result of mule-spinning, in which the
operative is obliged to fix his gaze upon a long row of fine, parallel threads,
and so greatly to strain the sight.
Of 1,600 operatives employed in several factories in Harpur and Lanark,
but 10 were over 45 years of age; of 22,094 operatives in diverse factories
in Stockport and Manchester, but 143 were over 45 years old. Of these 143,
16 were retained as a special favour, and one was doing the work of a
child. A list of 131 spinners contained but seven over 45 years, and yet the
whole 131 were rejected by the manufacturers, to whom they applied for
work, as “too old,” and were without means of support by reason of old
age! Mr. Ashworth, a large manufacturer, admits in a letter to Lord Ashley,
that, towards the fortieth year, the spinners can no longer prepare the
required quantity of yarn, and are therefore “sometimes” discharged; he
calls operatives forty years of age “old people!” Commissioner Mackintosh
expresses himself in the same way in the report of 1833:

“Although I was prepared for it from the way the children are
employed, I still found it difficult to believe the statements of the older
hands as to their ages; they age so very early.”

Surgeon Smellie, of Glasgow, who treated operatives chiefly, says that forty
years is old age for them. {160a} And similar evidence may be found
elsewhere. {160b} In Manchester, this premature old age among the
operatives is so universal that almost every man of forty would be taken for

ten to fifteen years older, while the prosperous classes, men as well as
women, preserve their appearance exceedingly well if they do not drink too
heavily.
The influence of factory-work upon the female physique also is marked and
peculiar. The deformities entailed by long hours of work are much more
serious among women. Protracted work frequently causes deformities of
the pelvis, partly in the shape of abnormal position and development of the
hip bones, partly of malformation of the lower portion of the spinal column.

“Although,” says Dr. Loudon, in his report, “no example of
malformation of the pelvis and of some other affections came under
my notice, these things are nevertheless so common, that every
physician must regard them as probable consequences of such
working-hours, and as vouched for besides by men of the highest
medical credibility.”

That factory operatives undergo more difficult confinement than other
women is testified to by several midwives and accoucheurs, and also that
they are more liable to miscarriage. {161} Moreover, they suffer from the
general enfeeblement common to all operatives, and, when pregnant,
continue to work in the factory up to the hour of delivery, because
otherwise they lose their wages and are made to fear that they may be
replaced if they stop away too soon. It frequently happens that women are
at work one evening and delivered the next morning, and the case is none
too rare of their being delivered in the factory among the machinery. And if
the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie find nothing particularly shocking in this,
their wives will perhaps admit that it is a piece of cruelty, an infamous act
of barbarism, indirectly to force a pregnant woman to work twelve or
thirteen hours daily (formerly still longer), up to the day of her delivery, in a
standing position, with frequent stoopings. But this is not all. If these
women are not obliged to resume work within two weeks, they are thankful,
and count themselves fortunate. Many come back to the factory after eight,
and even after three to four days, to resume full work. I once heard a
manufacturer ask an overlooker: “Is so and so not back yet?” “No.” “How
long since she was confined?” “A week.” “She might surely have been
back long ago. That one over there only stays three days.” Naturally, fear
of being discharged, dread of starvation drives her to the factory in spite of

her weakness, in defiance of her pain. The interest of the manufacturer will
not brook that his employees stay at home by reason of illness; they must
not be ill, they must not venture to lie still through a long confinement, or
he must stop his machinery or trouble his supreme head with a temporary
change of arrangements, and rather than do this, he discharges his people
when they begin to be ill. Listen: {162a}

“A girl feels very ill, can scarcely do her work. Why does she not ask
permission to go home? Ah! the master is very particular, and if we
are away half a day, we risk being sent away altogether.”

Or Sir D. Barry: {162b}

“Thomas McDurt, workman, has slight fever. Cannot stay at home
longer than four days, because he would fear of losing his place.”

And so it goes on in almost all the factories. The employment of young
girls produces all sorts of irregularities during the period of development.
In some, especially those who are better fed, the heat of the factories
hastens this process, so that in single cases, girls of thirteen and fourteen are
wholly mature. Robertson, whom I have already cited (mentioned in the
Factories’ Inquiry Commission’s Report as the “eminent” gynæcologist of
Manchester), relates in the North of England Medical and Surgical Journal,
that he had seen a girl of eleven years who was not only a wholly developed
woman, but pregnant, and that it was by no means rare in Manchester for
women to be confined at fifteen years of age. In such cases, the influence
of the warmth of the factories is the same as that of a tropical climate, and,
as in such climates, the abnormally early development revenges itself by
correspondingly premature age and debility. On the other hand, retarded
development of the female constitution occurs, the breasts mature late or
not at all. {162c} Menstruation first appears in the seventeenth or
eighteenth, sometimes in the twentieth year, and is often wholly wanting.
{163a} Irregular menstruation, coupled with great pain and numerous
affections, especially with anæmia, is very frequent, as the medical reports
unanimously state.
Children of such mothers, particularly of those who are obliged to work
during pregnancy, cannot be vigorous. They are, on the contrary, described

in the report, especially in Manchester, as very feeble; and Barry alone
asserts that they are healthy, but says further, that in Scotland, where his
inspection lay, almost no married women worked in factories. Moreover,
most of the factories there are in the country (with the exception of
Glasgow), a circumstance which contributes greatly to the invigoration of
the children. The operatives’ children in the neighbourhood of Manchester
are nearly all thriving and rosy, while those within the city look pale and
scrofulous; but with the ninth year the colour vanishes suddenly, because all
are then sent into the factories, when it soon becomes impossible to
distinguish the country from the city children.
But besides all this, there are some branches of factory-work which have an
especially injurious effect. In many rooms of the cotton and flax-spinning
mills, the air is filled with fibrous dust, which produces chest affections,
especially among workers in the carding and combing-rooms. Some
constitutions can bear it, some cannot; but the operative has no choice. He
must take the room in which he finds work, whether his chest is sound or
not. The most common effects of this breathing of dust are blood-spitting,
hard, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughs, sleeplessness—in short, all
the symptoms of asthma ending in the worst cases in consumption. {163b}
Especially unwholesome is the wet spinning of linen-yarn which is carried
on by young girls and boys. The water spirts over them from the spindle, so
that the front of their clothing is constantly wet through to the skin; and
there is always water standing on the floor. This is the case to a less degree
in the doubling-rooms of the cotton mills, and the result is a constant
succession of colds and affections of the chest. A hoarse, rough voice is
common to all operatives, but especially to wet spinners and doublers.
Stuart, Mackintosh, and Sir D. Barry express themselves in the most
vigorous terms as to the unwholesomeness of this work, and the small
consideration shown by most of the manufacturers for the health of the girls
who do it. Another effect of flax-spinning is a peculiar deformity of the
shoulder, especially a projection of the right shoulder-blade, consequent
upon the nature of the work. This sort of spinning and the throstle-spinning
of cotton frequently produce diseases of the knee-pan, which is used to
check the spindle during the joining of broken threads. The frequent
stooping and the bending to the low machines common to both these
branches of work have, in general, a stunting effect upon the growth of the

operative. In the throstle-room of the cotton mill at Manchester, in which I
was employed, I do not remember to have seen one single tall, well-built
girl; they were all short, dumpy, and badly-formed, decidedly ugly in the
whole development of the figure. But apart from all these diseases and
malformations, the limbs of the operatives suffer in still another way. The
work between the machinery gives rise to multitudes of accidents of more
or less serious nature, which have for the operative the secondary effect of
unfitting him for his work more or less completely. The most common
accident is the squeezing off of a single joint of a finger, somewhat less
common the loss of the whole finger, half or a whole hand, an arm, etc., in
the machinery. Lockjaw very often follows, even upon the lesser among
these injuries, and brings death with it. Besides the deformed persons, a
great number of maimed ones may be seen going about in Manchester; this
one has lost an arm or a part of one, that one a foot, the third half a leg; it is
like living in the midst of an army just returned from a campaign. But the
most dangerous portion of the machinery is the strapping which conveys
motive power from the shaft to the separate machines, especially if it
contains buckles, which, however, are rarely used now. Whoever is seized
by the strap is carried up with lightning speed, thrown against the ceiling
above and floor below with such force that there is rarely a whole bone left
in the body, and death follows instantly. Between June 12th and August
3rd, 1843, the Manchester Guardian reported the following serious
accidents (the trifling ones it does not notice): June 12th, a boy died in
Manchester of lockjaw, caused by his hand being crushed between wheels.
June 16th, a youth in Saddleworth seized by a wheel and carried away with
it; died, utterly mangled. June 29th, a young man at Green Acres Moor,
near Manchester, at work in a machine shop, fell under the grindstone,
which broke two of his ribs and lacerated him terribly. July 24th, a girl in
Oldham died, carried around fifty times by a strap; no bone unbroken. July
27th, a girl in Manchester seized by the blower (the first machine that
receives the raw cotton), and died of injuries received. August 3rd, a
bobbins turner died in Dukenfield, caught in a strap, every rib broken. In
the year 1843, the Manchester Infirmary treated 962 cases of wounds and
mutilations caused by machinery, while the number of all other accidents
within the district of the hospital was 2,426, so that for five accidents from
all other causes, two were caused by machinery. The accidents which
happened in Salford are not included here, nor those treated by surgeons in

private practice. In such cases, whether or not the accident unfits the victim
for further work, the employer, at best, pays the doctor, or, in very
exceptional cases, he may pay wages during treatment; what becomes of the
operative afterwards, in case he cannot work, is no concern of the employer.
The Factory Report says on this subject, that employers must be made
responsible for all cases, since children cannot take care, and adults will
take care in their own interest. But the gentlemen who write the report are
bourgeois, and so they must contradict themselves and bring up later all
sorts of bosh on the subject of the culpable temerity of the operatives.
The state of the case is this: If children cannot take care, the employment of
children must be forbidden. If adults are reckless, they must be mere over-
grown children on a plane of intelligence which does not enable them to
appreciate the danger in its full scope; and who is to blame for this but the
bourgeoisie which keeps them in a condition in which their intelligence
cannot develop? Or the machinery is ill-arranged, and must be surrounded
with fencing, to supply which falls to the share of the bourgeoisie. Or the
operative is under inducements which outweigh the threatened danger; he
must work rapidly to earn his wages, has no time to take care, and for this,
too, the bourgeoisie is to blame. Many accidents happen, for instance,
while the operatives are cleaning machinery in motion. Why? Because the
bourgeois would otherwise oblige the worker to clean the machinery during
the free hours while it is not going, and the worker naturally is not disposed
to sacrifice any part of his free time. Every free hour is so precious to the
worker that he often risks his life twice a week rather than sacrifice one of
them to the bourgeois. Let the employer take from working-hours the time
required for cleaning the machinery, and it will never again occur to an
operative to clean machinery in motion. In short, from whatever point of
view, the blame falls ultimately on the manufacturer, and of him should be
required, at the very least, life-long support of the incapacitated operative,
and support of the victim’s family in case death follows the accident. In the
earliest period of manufacture, the accidents were much more numerous in
proportion than now, for the machinery was inferior, smaller, more
crowded, and almost never fenced. But the number is still large enough, as
the foregoing cases prove, to arouse grave question as to a state of things
which permits so many deformities and mutilations for the benefit of a
single class, and plunges so many industrious working-people into want and

starvation by reason of injuries undergone in the service and through the
fault of the bourgeoisie.
A pretty list of diseases engendered purely by the hateful money greed of
the manufacturers! Women made unfit for childbearing, children deformed,
men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked, afflicted with
disease and infirmity, purely to fill the purses of the bourgeoisie. And when
one reads of the barbarism of single cases, how children are seized naked in
bed by the overlookers, and driven with blows and kicks to the factory, their
clothing over their arms, {167a} how their sleepiness is driven off with
blows, how they fall asleep over their work nevertheless, how one poor
child sprang up, still asleep, at the call of the overlooker, and mechanically
went through the operations of its work after its machine was stopped;
when one reads how children, too tired to go home, hide away in the wool
in the drying-room to sleep there, and could only be driven out of the
factory with straps; how many hundreds came home so tired every night,
that they could eat no supper for sleepiness and want of appetite, that their
parents found them kneeling by the bedside, where they had fallen asleep
during their prayers; when one reads all this and a hundred other villainies
and infamies in this one report, all testified to on oath, confirmed by several
witnesses, deposed by men whom the commissioners themselves declare
trustworthy; when one reflects that this is a Liberal report, a bourgeois
report, made for the purpose of reversing the previous Tory report, and
rehabilitating the pureness of heart of the manufacturers, that the
commissioners themselves are on the side of the bourgeoisie, and report all
these things against their own will, how can one be otherwise than filled
with wrath and resentment against a class which boasts of philanthropy and
self-sacrifice, while its one object is to fill its purse à tout prix?
Meanwhile, let us listen to the bourgeoisie speaking through the mouth of
its chosen apostle, Dr. Ure, who relates in his “Philosophy of
Manufactures” {167b} that the workers have been told that their wages bore
no proportion to their sacrifices, the good understanding between masters
and men being thus disturbed. Instead of this, the working-men should
have striven to recommend themselves by attention and industry, and
should have rejoiced in the prosperity of their masters. They would then
become overseers, superintendents, and finally partners, and would thus—

(Oh! Wisdom, thou speakest as the dove!)—“have increased at the same
time the demand for their companions’ labour in the market!”

“Had it not been for the violent collisions and interruptions resulting
from erroneous views among the operatives, the factory system would
have been developed still more rapidly and beneficially.” {168a}

Hereupon follows a long Jeremiad upon the spirit of resistance of the
operatives, and on the occasion of a strike of the best paid workers, the fine
spinners, the following naïve observation: {168b}

“In fact, it was their high wages which enabled them to maintain a
stipendiary committee in affluence, and to pamper themselves into
nervous ailments, by a diet too rich and exciting for their indoor
employments.”

Let us hear how the bourgeois describes the work of children: {168c}

“I have visited many factories, both in Manchester and in the
surrounding districts, during a period of several months, entering the
spinning-rooms unexpectedly, and often alone, at different times of the
day, and I never saw a single instance of corporal chastisement
inflicted on a child; nor, indeed, did I ever see children in ill-humour.
They seemed to be always cheerful and alert; taking pleasure in the
light play of their muscles, enjoying the mobility natural to their age.
The scene of industry, so far from exciting sad emotions, in my mind,
was always exhilerating. It was delightful to observe the nimbleness
with which they pieced broken ends, as the mule carriage began to
recede from the fixed roller beam, and to see them at leisure, after a
few seconds’ exercise of their tiny fingers, to amuse themselves in any
attitude they chose, till the stretch and winding on were once more
completed. The work of these lively elves seemed to resemble a sport,
in which habit gave them a pleasing dexterity. Conscious of their skill,
they were delighted to show it off to any stranger. As to exhaustion by
the day’s work, they evinced no trace of it on emerging from the mill
in the evening; for they immediately began to skip about any
neighbouring playground, and to commence their little games with the
same alacrity as boys issuing from a school.”

Naturally! As though the immediate movement of every muscle were not
an urgent necessity for frames grown at once stiff and relaxed! But Ure
should have waited to see whether this momentary excitement had not
subsided after a couple of minutes. And besides, Ure could see this whole
performance only in the afternoon after five or six hours’ work, but not in
the evening! As to the health of the operatives, the bourgeois has the
boundless impudence to cite the report of 1833 just quoted in a thousand
places, as testimony for the excellent health of these people; to try to prove
by detached and garbled quotations that no trace of scrofula can be found
among them, and, what is quite true, that the factory system frees them
from all acute diseases, (that they have every variety of chronic affection
instead he naturally conceals). To explain the impudence with which our
friend Ure palms off the grossest falsehoods upon the English public, it
must be known that the report consists of three large folio volumes, which it
never occurs to a well-fed English bourgeois to study through. Let us hear
further how he expresses himself as to the Factory Act of 1834, passed by
the Liberal bourgeoisie, and imposing only the most meagre limitations
upon the manufacturers, as we shall see. This law, especially its
compulsory education clause, he calls an absurd and despotic measure
directed against the manufacturers, through which all children under twelve
years of age have been thrown out of employment; and with what results?
The children thus discharged from their light and useful occupation receive
no education whatsoever; cast out from the warm spinning-room into a cold
world, they subsist only by begging and stealing, a life in sad contrast with
their steadily improving condition in the factory and in Sunday school.
Under the mask of philanthropy, this law intensifies the sufferings of the
poor, and will greatly restrict the conscientious manufacturer in his useful
work, if, indeed, it does not wholly stop him. {169}
The ruinous influence of the factory system began at an early day to attract
general attention. We have already alluded to the Apprentices’ Act of 1802.
Later, towards 1817, Robert Owen, then a manufacturer in New Lanark, in
Scotland, afterwards founder of English Socialism, began to call the
attention of the Government, by memorials and petitions, to the necessity of
legislative guarantees for the health of the operatives, and especially of
children. The late Sir Robert Peel and other philanthropists united with
him, and gradually secured the Factory Acts of 1818, 1825, and 1831, of

which the first two were never enforced, and the last only here and there.
This law of 1831, based upon the motion of Sir J. C. Hobhouse, provided
that in cotton mills no one under twenty-one should be employed between
half-past seven at night and half-past five in the morning; and that in all
factories young persons under eighteen should work no longer than twelve
hours daily, and nine hours on Saturday. But since operatives could not
testify against their masters without being discharged, this law helped
matters very little. In the great cities, where the operatives were more
restive, the larger manufacturers came to an agreement among themselves
to obey the law; but even there, there were many who, like the employers in
the country, did not trouble themselves about it. Meanwhile, the demand
for a ten hours’ law had become lively among the operatives; that is, for a
law which should forbid all operatives under eighteen years of age to work
longer than ten hours daily; the Trades Unions, by their agitation, made this
demand general throughout the manufacturing population; the philanthropic
section of the Tory party, then led by Michael Sadler, seized upon the plan,
and brought it before Parliament. Sadler obtained a parliamentary
committee for the investigation of the factory system, and this committee
reported in 1832. Its report was emphatically partisan, composed by strong
enemies of the factory system, for party ends. Sadler permitted himself to
be betrayed by his noble enthusiasm into the most distorted and erroneous
statements, drew from his witnesses by the very form of his questions,
answers which contained the truth, but truth in a perverted form. The
manufacturers themselves, incensed at a report which represented them as
monsters, now demanded an official investigation; they knew that an exact
report must, in this case, be advantageous to them; they knew that Whigs,
genuine bourgeois, were at the helm, with whom they were upon good
terms, whose principles were opposed to any restriction upon manufacture.
They obtained a commission, in due order, composed of Liberal bourgeois,
whose report I have so often cited. This comes somewhat nearer the truth
than Sadler’s, but its deviations therefrom are in the opposite direction. On
every page it betrays sympathy with the manufacturers, distrust of the
Sadler report, repugnance to the working-men agitating independently and
the supporters of the Ten Hours’ Bill. It nowhere recognises the right of the
working-man to a life worthy of a human being, to independent activity,
and opinions of his own. It reproaches the operatives that in sustaining the
Ten Hours’ Bill they thought, not of the children only, but of themselves as

well; it calls the working-men engaged in the agitation demagogues, ill-
intentioned, malicious, etc., is written, in short, on the side of the
bourgeoisie; and still it cannot whitewash the manufacturers, and still it
leaves such a mass of infamies upon the shoulders of the employers, that
even after this report, the agitation for the Ten Hours’ Bill, the hatred
against the manufacturers, and the committee’s severest epithets applied to
them are all fully justified. But there was the one difference, that whereas
the Sadler report accuses the manufacturers of open, undisguised brutality,
it now became evident that this brutality was chiefly carried on under the
mask of civilisation and humanity. Yet Dr. Hawkins, the medical
commissioner for Lancashire, expresses himself decidedly in favour of the
Ten Hours’ Bill in the opening lines of his report, and Commissioner
Mackintosh explains that his own report does not contain the whole truth,
because it is very difficult to induce the operatives to testify against their
employers, and because the manufacturers, besides being forced into greater
concessions towards their operatives by the excitement among the latter, are
often prepared for the inspection of the factories, have them swept, the
speed of the machinery reduced, etc. In Lancashire especially they resorted
to the device of bringing the overlookers of workrooms before the
commissioners, and letting them testify as working-men to the humanity of
the employers, the wholesome effects of the work, and the indifference, if
not the hostility of the operatives, towards the Ten Hours’ Bill. But these
are not genuine working-men; they are deserters from their class, who have
entered the service of the bourgeoisie for better pay, and fight in the
interests of the capitalists against the workers. Their interest is that of the
capitalists, and they are, therefore, almost more hated by the workers than
the manufacturers themselves.
And yet this report suffices wholly to exhibit the most shameful
recklessness of the manufacturing bourgeoisie towards its employees, the
whole infamy of the industrial exploiting system in its full inhumanity.
Nothing is more revolting than to compare the long register of diseases and
deformities engendered by overwork, in this report, with the cold,
calculating political economy of the manufacturers, by which they try to
prove that they, and with them all England, must go to ruin, if they should
be forbidden to cripple so and so many children every year. The language

of Dr. Ure alone, which I have quoted, would be yet more revolting if it
were not so preposterous.
The result of this report was the Factory Act of 1834, which forbade the
employment of children under nine years of age (except in silk mills),
limited the working-hours of children between 9-13 years to 48 per week,
or 9 hours in any one day at the utmost; that of young persons from 14-18
years of age to 69 per week, or 12 on any one day as the maximum,
provided for an hour and a half as the minimum interval for meals, and
repeated the total prohibition of night-work for persons under eighteen
years of age. Compulsory school attendance two hours daily was
prescribed for all children under fourteen years, and the manufacturer
declared punishable in case of employing children without a certificate of
age from the factory surgeon, and a certificate of school attendance from
the teacher. As recompense, the employer was permitted to withdraw one
penny from the child’s weekly earnings to pay the teacher. Further,
surgeons and inspectors were appointed to visit the factories at all times,
take testimony of operatives on oath, and enforce the law by prosecution
before a Justice of the Peace. This is the law against which Dr. Ure
inveighs in such unmeasured terms!
The consequence of this law, and especially of the appointment of
inspectors, was the reduction of working-hours to an average of twelve to
thirteen, and the superseding of children as far as possible. Hereupon some
of the most crying evils disappeared almost wholly. Deformities arose now
only in cases of weak constitution, and the effects of overwork became
much less conspicuous. Nevertheless, enough testimony remains to be
found in the Factory Report, that the lesser evils, swelling of the ankles,
weakness and pain in the legs, hips, and back, varicose veins, ulcers on the
lower extremities, general weakness, especially of the pelvic region, nausea,
want of appetite alternating with unnatural hunger, indigestion,
hypochondria, affections of the chest in consequence of the dust and foul
atmosphere of the factories, etc. etc., all occur among employees subject to
the provisions of Sir J. C. Hobhouse’s law (of 1831), which prescribes
twelve to thirteen hours as the maximum. The reports from Glasgow and
Manchester are especially worthy of attention in this respect. These evils
remained too, after the law of 1834, and continue to undermine the health of
the working-class to this day. Care has been taken to give the brutal profit-

greed of the bourgeoisie a hypocritical, civilised form, to restrain the
manufacturers through the arm of the law from too conspicuous villainies,
and thus to give them a pretext for self-complacently parading their sham
philanthropy. That is all. If a new commission were appointed to-day, it
would find things pretty much as before. As to the extemporised
compulsory attendance at school, it remained wholly a dead letter, since the
Government failed to provide good schools. The manufacturers employed
as teachers worn-out operatives, to whom they sent the children two hours
daily, thus complying with the letter of the law; but the children learned
nothing. And even the reports of the factory inspectors, which are limited
to the scope of the inspector’s duties, i.e., the enforcement of the Factory
Act, give data enough to justify the conclusion that the old evils inevitably
remain. Inspectors Horner and Saunders, in their reports for October and
December, 1844, state that, in a number of branches in which the
employment of children can be dispensed with or superseded by that of
adults, the working-day is still fourteen to sixteen hours, or even longer.
Among the operatives in these branches they found numbers of young
people who had just outgrown the provisions of the law. Many employers
disregard the law, shorten the meal times, work children longer than is
permitted, and risk prosecution, knowing that the possible fines are trifling
in comparison with the certain profits derivable from the offence. Just at
present especially, while business is exceptionally brisk, they are under
great temptation in this respect.
Meanwhile the agitation for the Ten Hours’ Bill by no means died out
among the operatives; in 1839 it was under full headway once more, and
Sadler’s place, he having died, was filled in the House of Commons by
Lord Ashley {174} and Richard Oastler, both Tories. Oastler especially,
who carried on a constant agitation in the factory districts, and had been
active in the same way during Sadler’s life, was the particular favourite of
the working-men. They called him their “good old king,” “the king of the
factory children,” and there is not a child in the factory districts that does
not know and revere him, that does not join the procession which moves to
welcome him when he enters a town. Oastler vigorously opposed the New
Poor Law also, and was therefore imprisoned for debt by a Mr. Thornley, on
whose estate he was employed as agent, and to whom he owed money. The
Whigs offered repeatedly to pay his debt and confer other favours upon him

if he would only give up his agitation against the Poor Law. But in vain; he
remained in prison, whence he published his Fleet Papers against the
factory system and the Poor Law.
The Tory Government of 1841 turned its attention once more to the Factory
Acts. The Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, proposed, in 1843, a bill
restricting the working-hours of children to six and one-half, and making
the enactments for compulsory school attendance more effective; the
principal point in this connection being a provision for better schools. This
bill was, however, wrecked by the jealousy of the dissenters; for, although
compulsory religious instruction was not extended to the children of
dissenters, the schools provided for were to be placed under the general
supervision of the Established Church, and the Bible made the general
reading-book; religion being thus made the foundation of all instruction,
whence the dissenters felt themselves threatened. The manufacturers and
the Liberals generally united with them, the working-men were divided by
the Church question, and therefore inactive. The opponents of the bill,
though outweighed in the great manufacturing towns, such as Salford and
Stockport, and able in others, such as Manchester, to attack certain of its
points only, for fear of the working-men, collected nevertheless nearly two
million signatures for a petition against it, and Graham allowed himself to
be so far intimidated as to withdraw the whole bill. The next year he
omitted the school clauses, and proposed that, instead of the previous
provisions, children between eight and thirteen years should be restricted to
six and one-half hours, and so employed as to have either the whole
morning or the whole afternoon free; that young people between thirteen
and eighteen years, and all females, should be limited to twelve hours; and
that the hitherto frequent evasions of the law should be prevented. Hardly
had he proposed this bill, when the ten hours’ agitation was begun again
more vigorously than ever. Oastler had just then regained his liberty; a
number of his friends and a collection among the workers had paid his debt,
and he threw himself into the movement with all his might. The defenders
of the Ten Hours’ Bill in the House of Commons had increased in numbers,
the masses of petitions supporting it which poured in from all sides brought
them allies, and on March 19th, 1844, Lord Ashley carried, with a majority
of 179 to 170, a resolution that the word “Night” in the Factory Act should
express the time from six at night to six in the morning, whereby the

prohibition of night-work came to mean the limitation of working-hours to
twelve, including free hours, or ten hours of actual work a day. But the
ministry did not agree to this. Sir James Graham began to threaten
resignation from the Cabinet, and at the next vote on the bill the House
rejected by a small majority both ten and twelve hours! Graham and Peel
now announced that they should introduce a new bill, and that if this failed
to pass they should resign. The new bill was exactly the old Twelve Hours’
Bill with some changes of form, and the same House of Commons which
had rejected the principal points of this bill in March, now swallowed it
whole. The reason of this was that most of the supporters of the Ten Hours’
Bill were Tories who let fall the bill rather than the ministry; but be the
motives what they may, the House of Commons by its votes upon this
subject, each vote reversing the last, has brought itself into the greatest
contempt among all the workers, and proved most brilliantly the Chartists’
assertion of the necessity of its reform. Three members, who had formerly
voted against the ministry, afterwards voted for it and rescued it. In all the
divisions, the bulk of the opposition voted for and the bulk of its own party
against the ministry. {176} The foregoing propositions of Graham
touching the employment of children six and one-half and of all other
operatives twelve hours are now legislative provisions, and by them and by
the limitation of overwork for making up time lost through breakdown of
machinery or insufficient water-power by reason of frost or drought, a
working-day of more than twelve hours has been made well-nigh
impossible. There remains, however, no doubt that, in a very short time, the
Ten Hours’ Bill will really be adopted. The manufacturers are naturally all
against it, there are perhaps not ten who are for it; they have used every
honourable and dishonourable means against this dreaded measure, but with
no other result than that of drawing down upon them the ever deepening
hatred of the working-men. The bill will pass. What the working-men will
do they can do, and that they will have this bill they proved last spring. The
economic arguments of the manufacturers that a Ten Hours’ Bill would
increase the cost of production and incapacitate the English producers for
competition in foreign markets, and that wages must fall, are all half true;
but they prove nothing except this, that the industrial greatness of England
can be maintained only through the barbarous treatment of the operatives,
the destruction of their health, the social, physical, and mental decay of
whole generations. Naturally, if the Ten Hours’ Bill were a final measure, it

must ruin England; but since it must inevitably bring with it other measures
which must draw England into a path wholly different from that hitherto
followed, it can only prove an advance.

Let us turn to another side of the factory system which cannot be remedied
by legislative provisions so easily as the diseases now engendered by it. We
have already alluded in a general way to the nature of the employment, and
enough in detail to be able to draw certain inferences from the facts given.
The supervision of machinery, the joining of broken threads, is no activity
which claims the operative’s thinking powers, yet it is of a sort which
prevents him from occupying his mind with other things. We have seen,
too, that this work affords the muscles no opportunity for physical activity.
Thus it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening,
wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his
physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission
to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he
must not take a moment’s rest; the engine moves unceasingly; the wheels,
the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears without a pause, and if he
tries to snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book
of fines. This condemnation to be buried alive in the mill, to give constant
attention to the tireless machine is felt as the keenest torture by the
operatives, and its action upon mind and body is in the long run stunting in
the highest degree. There is no better means of inducing stupefaction than a
period of factory work, and if the operatives have, nevertheless, not only
rescued their intelligence, but cultivated and sharpened it more than other
working-men, they have found this possible only in rebellion against their
fate and against the bourgeoisie, the sole subject on which under all
circumstances they can think and feel while at work. Or, if this indignation
against the bourgeoisie does not become the supreme passion of the
working-man, the inevitable consequence is drunkenness and all that is
generally called demoralisation. The physical enervation and the sickness,
universal in consequence of the factory system, were enough to induce
Commissioner Hawkins to attribute this demoralisation thereto as
inevitable; how much more when mental lassitude is added to them, and
when the influences already mentioned which tempt every working-man to
demoralisation, make themselves felt here too! There is no cause for
surprise, therefore, that in the manufacturing towns especially, drunkenness
and sexual excesses have reached the pitch which I have already described.
{178}

Further, the slavery in which the bourgeoisie holds the proletariat chained,
is nowhere more conspicuous than in the factory system. Here ends all
freedom in law and in fact. The operative must be in the mill at half-past
five in the morning; if he comes a couple of minutes too late, he is fined; if
he comes ten minutes too late, he is not let in until breakfast is over, and a
quarter of the day’s wages is withheld, though he loses only two and one-
half hours’ work out of twelve. He must eat, drink, and sleep at command.
For satisfying the most imperative needs, he is vouchsafed the least possible
time absolutely required by them. Whether his dwelling is a half-hour or a
whole one removed from the factory does not concern his employer. The
despotic bell calls him from his bed, his breakfast, his dinner.
What a time he has of it, too, inside the factory! Here the employer is
absolute law-giver; he makes regulations at will, changes and adds to his
codex at pleasure, and even, if he inserts the craziest stuff, the courts say to
the working-man: “You were your own master, no one forced you to agree
to such a contract if you did not wish to; but now, when you have freely
entered into it, you must be bound by it.” And so the working-man only
gets into the bargain the mockery of the Justice of the Peace who is a
bourgeois himself, and of the law which is made by the bourgeoisie. Such
decisions have been given often enough. In October, 1844, the operatives
of Kennedy’s mill, in Manchester struck. Kennedy prosecuted them on the
strength of a regulation placarded in the mill, that at no time more than two
operatives in one room may quit work at once. And the court decided in his
favour, giving the working-men the explanation cited above. {179a} And
such rules as these usually are! For instance: 1. The doors are closed ten
minutes after work begins, and thereafter no one is admitted until the
breakfast hour; whoever is absent during this time forfeits 3d. per loom. 2.
Every power-loom weaver detected absenting himself at another time, while
the machinery is in motion, forfeits for each hour and each loom, 3d. Every
person who leaves the room during working-hours, without obtaining
permission from the overlooker, forfeits 3d. 3. Weavers who fail to supply
themselves with scissors forfeit, per day, 1d. 4. All broken shuttles,
brushes, oil-cans, wheels, window panes, etc., must be paid for by the
weaver. 5. No weaver to stop work without giving a week’s notice. The
manufacturer may dismiss any employee without notice for bad work or
improper behaviour. 6. Every operative detected speaking to another,

singing or whistling, will be fined 6d.; for leaving his place during working-
hours, 6d. {179b} Another copy of factory regulations lies before me,
according to which every operative who comes three minutes too late,
forfeits the wages for a quarter of an hour, and every one who comes twenty
minutes too late, for a quarter of a day. Every one who remains absent until
breakfast forfeits a shilling on Monday, and sixpence every other day of the
week, etc, etc. This last is the regulation of the Phœnix Works in Jersey
Street, Manchester. It may be said that such rules are necessary in a great,
complicated factory, in order to insure the harmonious working of the
different parts; it may be asserted that such a severe discipline is as
necessary here as in an army. This may be so, but what sort of a social
order is it which cannot be maintained without such shameful tyranny?
Either the end sanctifies the means, or the inference of the badness of the
end from the badness of the means is justified. Every one who has served
as a soldier knows what it is to be subjected even for a short time to military
discipline. But these operatives are condemned from their ninth year to
their death to live under the sword, physically and mentally. They are
worse slaves than the negroes in America, for they are more sharply
watched, and yet it is demanded of them that they shall live like human
beings, shall think and feel like men! Verily, this they can do only under
glowing hatred towards their oppressors, and towards that order of things
which place them in such a position, which degrades them to machines.
But it is far more shameful yet, that according to the universal testimony of
the operatives, numbers of manufacturers collect the fines imposed upon the
operatives with the most heartless severity, and for the purpose of piling up
extra profits out of the farthings thus extorted from the impoverished
proletarians. Leach asserts, too, that the operatives often find the factory
clock moved forward a quarter of an hour and the doors shut, while the
clerk moves about with the fines-book inside, noting the many names of the
absentees. Leach claims to have counted ninety-five operatives thus shut
out, standing before a factory, whose clock was a quarter of an hour slower
than the town clocks at night, and a quarter of an hour faster in the
morning. The Factory Report relates similar facts. In one factory the clock
was set back during working-hours, so that the operatives worked overtime
without extra pay; in another, a whole quarter of an hour overtime was
worked; in a third, there were two clocks, an ordinary one and a machine
clock, which registered the revolutions of the main shaft; if the machinery

went slowly, working-hours were measured by the machine clock until the
number of revolutions due in twelve hours was reached; if work went well,
so that the number was reached before the usual working-hours were ended,
the operatives were forced to toil on to the end of the twelfth hour. The
witness adds that he had known girls who had good work, and who had
worked overtime, who, nevertheless, betook themselves to a life of
prostitution rather than submit to this tyranny. {181a} To return to the
fines, Leach relates having repeatedly seen women in the last period of
pregnancy fined 6d. for the offence of sitting down a moment to rest. Fines
for bad work are wholly arbitrary; the goods are examined in the wareroom,
and the supervisor charges the fines upon a list without even summoning
the operative, who only learns that he has been fined when the overlooker
pays his wages, and the goods have perhaps been sold, or certainly been
placed beyond his reach. Leach has in his possession such a fines list, ten
feet long, and amounting to £35 17s. 10d. He relates that in the factory
where this list was made, a new supervisor was dismissed for fining too
little, and so bringing in five pounds too little weekly. {181b} And I repeat
that I know Leach to be a thoroughly trustworthy man incapable of a
falsehood.
But the operative is his employer’s slave in still other respects. If his wife
or daughter finds favour in the eyes of the master, a command, a hint
suffices, and she must place herself at his disposal. When the employer
wishes to supply with signatures a petition in favour of bourgeois interests,
he need only send it to his mill. If he wishes to decide a Parliamentary
election, he sends his enfranchised operatives in rank and file to the polls,
and they vote for the bourgeois candidate whether they will or no. If he
desires a majority in a public meeting, he dismisses them half-an-hour
earlier than usual, and secures them places close to the platform, where he
can watch them to his satisfaction.
Two further arrangements contribute especially to force the operative under
the dominion of the manufacturer; the Truck system and the Cottage
system. The truck system, the payment of the operatives in goods, was
formerly universal in England. The manufacturer opens a shop, “for the
convenience of the operatives, and to protect them from the high prices of
the petty dealers.” Here goods of all sorts are sold to them on credit; and to
keep the operatives from going to the shops where they could get their

goods more cheaply—the “Tommy shops” usually charging twenty-five to
thirty per cent. more than others—wages are paid in requisitions on the
shop instead of money. The general indignation against this infamous
system led to the passage of the Truck Act in 1831, by which, for most
employees, payment in truck orders was declared void and illegal, and was
made punishable by fine; but, like most other English laws, this has been
enforced only here and there. In the towns it is carried out comparatively
efficiently; but in the country, the truck system, disguised or undisguised,
flourishes. In the town of Leicester, too, it is very common. There lie
before me nearly a dozen convictions for this offence, dating from the
period between November, 1843, and June, 1844, and reported, in part, in
the Manchester Guardian and, in part, in the Northern Star. The system is,
of course, less openly carried on at present; wages are usually paid in cash,
but the employer still has means enough at command to force him to
purchase his wares in the truck shop and nowhere else. Hence it is difficult
to combat the truck system, because it can now be carried on under cover of
the law, provided only that the operative receives his wages in money. The
Northern Star of April 27th, 1843, publishes a letter from an operative of
Holmfirth, near Huddersfield, in Yorkshire, which refers to a manufacturer
of the name of Bowers, as follows (retranslated from the German):

“It is very strange to think that the accursed truck system should exist
to such an extent as it does in Holmfirth, and nobody be found who has
the pluck to make the manufacturer stop it. There are here a great
many honest hand-weavers suffering through this damned system; here
is one sample from a good many out of the noble-hearted Free Trade
Clique. There is a manufacturer who has upon himself the curses of
the whole district on account of his infamous conduct towards his poor
weavers; if they have got a piece ready which comes to 34 or 36
shillings, he gives them 20s. in money and the rest in cloth or goods,
and 40 to 50 per cent. dearer than at the other shops, and often enough
the goods are rotten into the bargain. But, what says the Free Trade
Mercury, the Leeds Mercury? They are not bound to take them; they
can please themselves. Oh, yes, but they must take them or else
starve. If they ask for another 20s. in money, they must wait eight or
fourteen days for a warp; but if they take the 20s. and the goods, then
there is always a warp ready for them. And that is Free Trade. Lord

Brougham said we ought to put by something in our young days, so
that we need not go to the parish when we are old. Well, are we to put
by the rotten goods? If this did not come from a lord, one would say
his brains were as rotten as the goods that our work is paid in. When
the unstamped papers came out “illegally,” there was a lot of them to
report it to the police in Holmfirth, the Blythes, the Edwards, etc.; but
where are they now? But this is different. Our truck manufacturer
belongs to the pious Free Trade lot; he goes to church twice every
Sunday, and repeats devotedly after the parson: ‘We have left undone
the things we ought to have done, and we have done the things we
ought not to have done, and there is no good in us; but, good Lord,
deliver us.’ Yes, deliver us till to-morrow, and we will pay our
weavers again in rotten goods.”

The Cottage system looks much more innocent and arose in a much more
harmless way, though it has the same enslaving influence upon the
employee. In the neighbourhood of the mills in the country, there is often a
lack of dwelling accommodation for the operatives. The manufacturer is
frequently obliged to build such dwellings and does so gladly, as they yield
great advantages, besides the interest upon the capital invested. If any
owner of working-men’s dwellings averages about six per cent. on his
invested capital, it is safe to calculate that the manufacturer’s cottages yield
twice this rate; for so long as his factory does not stand perfectly idle he is
sure of occupants, and of occupants who pay punctually. He is therefore
spared the two chief disadvantages under which other house-owners labour;
his cottages never stand empty, and he runs no risk. But the rent of the
cottages is as high as though these disadvantages were in full force, and by
obtaining the same rent as the ordinary house-owner, the manufacturer, at
cost of the operatives, makes a brilliant investment at twelve to fourteen per
cent. For it is clearly unjust that he should make twice as much profit as
other competing house-owners, who at the same time are excluded from
competing with him. But it implies a double wrong, when he draws his
fixed profit from the pockets of the non-possessing class, which must
consider the expenditure of every penny. He is used to that, however, he
whose whole wealth is gained at the cost of his employees. But this
injustice becomes an infamy when the manufacturer, as often happens,
forces his operatives, who must occupy his houses on pain of dismissal, to

pay a higher rent than the ordinary one, or even to pay rent for houses in
which they do not live! The Halifax Guardian, quoted by the Liberal Sun,
asserts that hundreds of operatives in Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham, and
Rochdale, etc., are forced by their employers to pay house-rent whether
they occupy the house or not. {184} The cottage system is universal in the
country districts; it has created whole villages, and the manufacturer usually
has little or no competition against his houses, so that he can fix his price
regardless of any market rate, indeed at his pleasure. And what power does
the cottage system give the employer over his operatives in disagreements
between master and men? If the latter strike, he need only give them notice
to quit his premises, and the notice need only be a week; after that time the
operative is not only without bread but without a shelter, a vagabond at the
mercy of the law which sends him, without fail, to the treadmill.
Such is the factory system sketched as fully as my space permits, and with
as little partisan spirit as the heroic deeds of the bourgeoisie against the
defenceless workers permit—deeds to wards which it is impossible to
remain indifferent, towards which indifference were a crime. Let us
compare the condition of the free Englishman of 1845 with the Saxon serf
under the lash of the Norman barons of 1145. The serf was glebæ
adscriptus, bound to the soil, so is the free working-man through the
cottage system. The serf owed his master the jus primæ noctis, the right of
the first night—the free working-man must, on demand, surrender to his
master not only that, but the right of every night. The serf could acquire no
property; everything that he gained, his master could take from him; the
free working-man has no property, can gain none by reason of the pressure
of competition, and what even the Norman baron did not do, the modern
manufacturer does. Through the truck system, he assumes every day the
administration in detail of the things which the worker requires for his
immediate necessities. The relation of the lord of the soil to the serf was
regulated by the prevailing customs and by-laws which were obeyed,
because they corresponded to them. The free working-man’s relation to his
master is regulated by laws which are not obeyed, because they correspond
neither with the interests of the employer nor with the prevailing customs.
The lord of the soil could not separate the serf from the land, nor sell him
apart from it, and since almost all the land was fief and there was no capital,
practically could not sell him at all. The modern bourgeois forces the

working-man to sell himself. The serf was the slave of the piece of land on
which he was born, the working-man is the slave of his own necessaries of
life and of the money with which he has to buy them—both are slaves of a
thing. The serf had a guarantee for the means of subsistence in the feudal
order of society in which every member had his own place. The free
working-man has no guarantee whatsoever, because he has a place in
society only when the bourgeoisie can make use of him; in all other cases
he is ignored, treated as non-existent. The serf sacrificed himself for his
master in war, the factory operative in peace. The lord of the serf was a
barbarian who regarded his villain as a head of cattle; the employer of
operatives is civilised and regards his “hand” as a machine. In short, the
position of the two is not far from equal, and if either is at a disadvantage, it
is the free working-man. Slaves they both are, with the single difference
that the slavery of the one is undissembled, open, honest; that of the other
cunning, sly, disguised, deceitfully concealed from himself and every one
else, a hypocritical servitude worse than the old. The philanthropic Tories
were right when they gave the operatives the name white slaves. But the
hypocritical disguised slavery recognises the right to freedom, at least in
outward form; bows before a freedom-loving public opinion, and herein lies
the historic progress as compared with the old servitude, that the principle
of freedom is affirmed, and the oppressed will one day see to it that this
principle is carried out. {186}

THE REMAINING BRANCHES OF INDUSTRY.

We were compelled to deal with the factory system somewhat at length, as
it is an entirely novel creation of the industrial period; we shall be able to
treat the other workers the more briefly, because what has been said either
of the industrial proletariat in general, or of the factory system in particular,
will wholly, or in part, apply to them. We shall, therefore, merely have to
record how far the factory system has succeeded in forcing its way into
each branch of industry, and what other peculiarities these may reveal.
The four branches comprised under the Factory Act are engaged in the
production of clothing stuffs. We shall do best if we deal next with those
workers who receive their materials from these factories; and, first of all,
with the stocking weavers of Nottingham, Derby, and Leicester. Touching
these workers, the Children’s Employment Commission reports that the
long working-hours, imposed by low wages, with a sedentary life and the
strain upon the eyes involved in the nature of the employment, usually
enfeeble the whole frame, and especially the eyes. Work at night is
impossible without a very powerful light produced by concentrating the
rays of the lamp, making them pass through glass globes, which is most
injurious to the sight. At forty years of age, nearly all wear spectacles. The
children employed at spooling and hemming usually suffer grave injuries to
the health and constitution. They work from the sixth, seventh, or eighth
year ten to twelve hours daily in small, close rooms. It is not uncommon
for them to faint at their work, to become too feeble for the most ordinary
household occupation, and so near-sighted as to be obliged to wear glasses
during childhood. Many were found by the commissioners to exhibit all the
symptoms of a scrofulous constitution, and the manufacturers usually refuse
to employ girls who have worked in this way as being too weak. The
condition of these children is characterised as “a disgrace to a Christian
country,” and the wish expressed for legislative interference. The Factory
Report {189} adds that the stocking weavers are the worst paid workers in

Leicester, earning six, or with great effort, seven shillings a week, for
sixteen to eighteen hours’ daily work. Formerly they earned twenty to
twenty-one shillings, but the introduction of enlarged frames has ruined
their business; the great majority still work with old, small, single frames,
and compete with difficulty with the progress of machinery. Here, too,
every progress is a disadvantage for the workers. Nevertheless,
Commissioner Power speaks of the pride of the stocking weavers that they
are free, and had no factory bell to measure out the time for their eating,
sleeping, and working. Their position to-day is no better than in 1833,
when the Factory Commission made the foregoing statements, the
competition of the Saxon stocking weavers, who have scarcely anything to
eat, takes care of that. This competition is too strong for the English in
nearly all foreign markets, and for the lower qualities of goods even in the
English market. It must be a source of rejoicing for the patriotic German
stocking weaver that his starvation wages force his English brother to starve
too! And, verily, will he not starve on, proud and happy, for the greater
glory of German industry, since the honour of the Fatherland demands that
his table should be bare, his dish half empty? Ah! it is a noble thing this
competition, this “race of the nations.” In the Morning Chronicle, another
Liberal sheet, the organ of the bourgeoisie par excellence, there were
published some letters from a stocking weaver in Hinckley, describing the
condition of his fellow-workers. Among other things, he reports 50
families, 321 persons, who were supported by 109 frames; each frame
yielded on an average 5½ shillings; each family earned an average of 11s.
4d. weekly. Out of this there was required for house rent, frame rent, fuel,
light, soap, and needles, together 5s. 10d., so that there remained for food,
per head daily, 1½d., and for clothing nothing. “No eye,” says the stocking
weaver, “has seen, no ear heard, and no heart felt the half of the sufferings
that these poor people endure.” Beds were wanting either wholly or in part,
the children ran about ragged and barefoot; the men said, with tears in their
eyes: “It’s a long time since we had any meat; we have almost forgotten
how it tastes;” and, finally, some of them worked on Sunday, though public
opinion pardons anything else more readily than this, and the rattling noise
of the frame is audible throughout the neighbourhood. “But,” said one of
them, “look at my children and ask no questions. My poverty forces me to
it; I can’t and won’t hear my children forever crying for bread, without
trying the last means of winning it honestly. Last Monday I got up at two in

the morning and worked to near midnight; the other days from six in the
morning to between eleven and twelve at night. I have had enough of it; I
sha’n’t kill myself; so now I go to bed at ten o’clock, and make up the lost
time on Sundays.” Neither in Leicester, Nottingham, nor Derby have wages
risen since 1833; and the worst of it is that in Leicester the truck system
prevails to a great extent, as I have mentioned. It is therefore not to be
wondered at that the weavers of this region take a very active part in all
working-men’s movements, the more active and effective because the
frames are worked chiefly by men.
In this stocking weavers’ district the lace industry also has its headquarters.
In the three counties mentioned there are in all 2,760 lace frames in use,
while in all the rest of England there are but 786. The manufacture of lace
is greatly complicated by a rigid division of labour, and embraces a
multitude of branches. The yarn is first spooled by girls fourteen years of
age and upwards, winders; then the spools are set up on the frames by boys,
eight years old and upwards, threaders, who pass the thread through fine
openings, of which each machine has an average of 1,800, and bring it
towards its destination; then the weaver weaves the lace which comes out of
the machine like a broad piece of cloth and is taken apart by very little
children who draw out the connecting threads. This is called running or
drawing lace, and the children themselves lace-runners. The lace is then
made ready for sale. The winders, like the threaders, have no specified
working-time, being called upon whenever the spools on a frame are empty,
and are liable, since the weavers work at night, to be required at any time in
the factory or workroom. This irregularity, the frequent night-work, the
disorderly way of living consequent upon it, engender a multitude of
physical and moral ills, especially early and unbridled sexual licence, upon
which point all witnesses are unanimous. The work is very bad for the
eyes, and although a permanent injury in the case of the threaders is not
universally observable, inflammations of the eye, pain, tears, and
momentary uncertainty of vision during the act of threading are
engendered. For the winders, however, it is certain that their work seriously
affects the eye, and produces, besides the frequent inflammations of the
cornea, many cases of amaurosis and cataract. The work of the weavers
themselves is very difficult, as the frames have constantly been made wider,
until those now in use are almost all worked by three men in turn, each

working eight hours, and the frame being kept in use the whole twenty-
four. Hence it is that the winders and threaders are so often called upon
during the night, and must work to prevent the frame from standing idle.
The filling in of 1,800 openings with thread occupies three children at least
two hours. Many frames are moved by steam-power, and the work of men
thus superseded; and, as the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report
mentions only lace factories to which the children are summoned, it seems
to follow either that the work of the weavers has been removed to great
factory rooms of late, or that steam-weaving has become pretty general; a
forward movement of the factory system in either case. Most unwholesome
of all is the work of the runners, who are usually children of seven, and
even of five and four, years old. Commissioner Grainger actually found
one child of two years old employed at this work. Following a thread
which is to be withdrawn by a needle from an intricate texture, is very bad
for the eyes, especially when, as is usually the case, the work is continued
fourteen to sixteen hours. In the least unfavourable case, aggravated near-
sightedness follows; in the worst case, which is frequent enough, incurable
blindness from amaurosis. But, apart from that, the children, in
consequence of sitting perpetually bent up, become feeble, narrow-chested,
and scrofulous from bad digestion. Disordered functions of the uterus are
almost universal among the girls, and curvature of the spine also, so that
“all the runners may be recognised from their gait.” The same
consequences for the eyes and the whole constitution are produced by the
embroidery of lace. Medical witnesses are unanimously of the opinion that
the health of all children employed in the production of lace suffers
seriously, that they are pale, weak, delicate, undersized, and much less able
than other children to resist disease. The affections from which they
usually suffer are general debility, frequent fainting, pains in the head,
sides, back, and hips, palpitation of the heart, nausea, vomiting and want of
appetite, curvature of the spine, scrofula, and consumption. The health of
the female lacemakers especially, is constantly and deeply undermined;
complaints are universal of anæmia, difficult childbirth, and miscarriage.
{192a} The same subordinate official of the Children’s Employment
Commission reports further that the children are very often ill-clothed and
ragged, and receive insufficient food, usually only bread and tea, often no
meat for months together. As to their moral condition, he reports: {192b}

“All the inhabitants of Nottingham, the police, the clergy, the
manufacturers, the working-people, and the parents of the children are
all unanimously of opinion that the present system of labour is a most
fruitful source of immorality. The threaders, chiefly boys, and the
winders, usually girls, are called for in the factory at the same time;
and as their parents cannot know how long they are wanted there, they
have the finest opportunity to form improper connections and remain
together after the close of the work. This has contributed, in no small
degree, to the immorality which, according to general opinion, exists
to a terrible extent in Nottingham. Apart from this, the quiet of home
life, and the comfort of the family to which these children and young
people belong, is wholly sacrificed to this most unnatural state of
things.”

Another branch of lace-making, bobbin-lacework, is carried on in the
agricultural shires of Northampton, Oxford, and Bedford, chiefly by
children and young persons, who complain universally of bad food, and
rarely taste meat. The employment itself is most unwholesome. The
children work in small, ill-ventilated, damp rooms, sitting always bent over
the lace cushion. To support the body in this wearying position, the girls
wear stays with a wooden busk, which, at the tender age of most of them,
when the bones are still very soft, wholly displace the ribs, and make
narrow chests universal. They usually die of consumption after suffering
the severest forms of digestive disorders, brought on by sedentary work in a
bad atmosphere. They are almost wholly without education, least of all do
they receive moral training. They love finery, and in consequence of these
two influences their moral condition is most deplorable, and prostitution
almost epidemic among them. {193}
This is the price at which society purchases for the fine ladies of the
bourgeoisie the pleasure of wearing lace; a reasonable price truly! Only a
few thousand blind working-men, some consumptive labourers’ daughters,
a sickly generation of the vile multitude bequeathing its debility to its
equally “vile” children and children’s children. But what does that come
to? Nothing, nothing whatsoever! Our English bourgeoisie will lay the
report of the Government Commission aside indifferently, and wives and
daughters will deck themselves with lace as before. It is a beautiful thing,
the composure of an English bourgeois.

A great number of operatives are employed in the cotton-printing
establishments of Lancashire, Derbyshire, and the West of Scotland. In no
branch of English industry has mechanical ingenuity produced such brilliant
results as here, but in no other has it so crushed the workers. The
application of engraved cylinders driven by steam-power, and the discovery
of a method of printing four to six colours at once with such cylinders, has
as completely superseded hand-work as did the application of machinery to
the spinning and weaving of cotton, and these new arrangements in the
printing-works have superseded the hand-workers much more than was the
case in the production of the fabrics. One man, with the assistance of one
child, now does with a machine the work done formerly by 200 block
printers; a single machine yields 28 yards of printed cloth per minute. The
calico printers are in a very bad way in consequence; the shires of
Lancaster, Derby, and Chester produced (according to a petition of the
printers to the House of Commons), in the year 1842, 11,000,000 pieces of
printed cotton goods: of these, 100,000 were printed by hand exclusively,
900,000 in part with machinery and in part by hand, and 10,000,000 by
machinery alone, with four to six colours. As the machinery is chiefly new
and undergoes constant improvement, the number of hand-printers is far too
great for the available quantity of work, and many of them are therefore
starving; the petition puts the number at one-quarter of the whole, while the
rest are employed but one or two, in the best case three days in the week,
and are ill-paid. Leach {194} asserts of one print-work (Deeply Dale, near
Bury, in Lancashire), that the hand-printers did not earn on an average more
than five shillings, though he knows that the machine-printers were pretty
well paid. The print-works are thus wholly affiliated with the factory
system, but without being subject to the legislative restrictions placed upon
it. They produce an article subject to fashion, and have therefore no regular
work. If they have small orders, they work half time; if they make a hit
with a pattern, and business is brisk, they work twelve hours, perhaps all
night. In the neighbourhood of my home, near Manchester, there was a
print-work that was often lighted when I returned late at night; and I have
heard that the children were obliged at times to work so long there, that they
would try to catch a moment’s rest and sleep on the stone steps and in the
corners of the lobby. I have no legal proof of the truth of the statement, or I
should name the firm. The Report of the Children’s Employment
Commission is very cursory upon this subject, stating merely that in

England, at least, the children are mostly pretty well clothed and fed
(relatively, according to the wages of the parents), that they receive no
education whatsoever, and are morally on a low plane. It is only necessary
to remember that these children are subject to the factory system, and then,
referring the reader to what has already been said of that, we can pass on.
Of the remaining workers employed in the manufacture of clothing stuffs
little remains to be said; the bleachers’ work is very unwholesome, obliging
them to breathe chlorine, a gas injurious to the lungs. The work of the
dyers is in many cases very healthful, since it requires the exertion of the
whole body; how these workers are paid is little known, and this is ground
enough for the inference that they do not receive less than the average
wages, otherwise they would make complaint. The fustian cutters, who, in
consequence of the large consumption of cotton velvet, are comparatively
numerous, being estimated at from 3,000 to 4,000, have suffered very
severely, indirectly, from the influence of the factory system. The goods
formerly woven with hand-looms, were not perfectly uniform, and required
a practised hand in cutting the single rows of threads. Since power-looms
have been used, the rows run regularly; each thread of the weft is exactly
parallel with the preceding one, and cutting is no longer an art. The
workers thrown out of employment by the introduction of machinery turn to
fustian cutting, and force down wages by their competition; the
manufacturers discovered that they could employ women and children, and
the wages sank to the rate paid them, while hundreds of men were thrown
out of employment. The manufacturers found that they could get the work
done in the factory itself more cheaply than in the cutters’ workroom, for
which they indirectly paid the rent. Since this discovery, the low upper-
storey cutters’ rooms stand empty in many a cottage, or are let for
dwellings, while the cutter has lost his freedom of choice of his working-
hours, and is brought under the dominion of the factory bell. A cutter of
perhaps forty-five years of age told me that he could remember a time when
he had received 8d. a yard for work, for which he now received 1d.; true, he
can cut the more regular texture more quickly than the old, but he can by no
means do twice as much in an hour as formerly, so that his wages have sunk
to less than a quarter of what they were. Leach {196} gives a list of wages
paid in 1827 and in 1843 for various goods, from which it appears that
articles paid in 1827 at the rates of 4d., 2¼d., 2¾d., and 1d. per yard, were

paid in 1843 at the rate of 1½d., 1d., ¾d., and 0.375d. per yard, cutters’
wages. The average weekly wage, according to Leach, was as follows:
1827, £1 6s. 6d.; £1 2s. 6d.; £1; £1 6s. 6d.; and for the same goods in 1843,
10s. 6d.; 7s. 6d.; 6s. 8d.; 10s.; while there are hundreds of workers who
cannot find employment even at these last named rates. Of the hand-
weavers of the cotton industry we have already spoken; the other woven
fabrics are almost exclusively produced on hand-looms. Here most of the
workers have suffered as the weavers have done from the crowding in of
competitors displaced by machinery, and are, moreover, subject like the
factory operatives to a severe fine system for bad work. Take, for instance,
the silk weavers. Mr. Brocklehurst, one of the largest silk manufacturers in
all England, laid before a committee of members of Parliament lists taken
from his books, from which it appears that for goods for which he paid
wages in 1821 at the rate of 30s., 14s., 3½s., ¾s., 1½s., 10s., he paid in
1839 but 9s., 7¼s., 2¼s., 0.333s., 0½s., 6¼s., while in this case no
improvement in the machinery has taken place. But what Mr. Brocklehurst
does may very well be taken as a standard for all. From the same lists it
appears that the average weekly wage of his weavers, after all deductions,
was, in 1821, 16½s., and, in 1831, but 6s. Since that time wages have fallen
still further. Goods which brought in 4d. weavers’ wages in 1831, bring in
but 2½d. in 1843 (single sarsnets), and a great number of weavers in the
country can get work only when they undertake these goods at 1½d.-2d.
Moreover, they are subject to arbitrary deductions from their wages. Every
weaver who receives materials is given a card, on which is usually to be
read that the work is to be returned at a specified hour of the day; that a
weaver who cannot work by reason of illness must make the fact known at
the office within three days, or sickness will not be regarded as an excuse;
that it will not be regarded as a sufficient excuse if the weaver claims to
have been obliged to wait for yarn; that for certain faults in the work (if, for
example, more weft-threads are found within a given space than are
prescribed), not less than half the wages will be deducted; and that if the
goods should not be ready at the time specified, one penny will be deducted
for every yard returned. The deductions in accordance with these cards are
so considerable that, for instance, a man who comes twice a week to Leigh,
in Lancashire, to gather up woven goods, brings his employer at least £15
fines every time. He asserts this himself, and he is regarded as one of the
most lenient. Such things were formerly settled by arbitration; but as the

workers were usually dismissed if they insisted upon that, the custom has
been almost wholly abandoned, and the manufacturer acts arbitrarily as
prosecutor, witness, judge, law-giver, and executive in one person. And if
the workman goes to a Justice of the Peace, the answer is: “When you
accepted your card you entered upon a contract, and you must abide by it.”
The case is the same as that of the factory operatives. Besides, the
employer obliges the workman to sign a document in which he declares that
he agrees to the deductions made. And if a workman rebels, all the
manufacturers in the town know at once that he is a man who, as Leach
says, {197} “resists the lawful order as established by weavers’ cards, and,
moreover, has the impudence to doubt the wisdom of those who are, as he
ought to know, his superiors in society.”
Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does not force
them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them what Leach
translates into plain English with the words: “If you don’t like to be frizzled
in my frying-pan, you can take a walk into the fire.” The silk weavers of
London, and especially of Spitalfields, have lived in periodic distress for a
long time, and that they still have no cause to be satisfied with their lot is
proved by their taking a most active part in English labour movements in
general, and in London ones in particular. The distress prevailing among
them gave rise to the fever which broke out in East London, and called forth
the Commission for Investigating the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring
Class. But the last report of the London Fever Hospital shows that this
disease is still raging.
After the textile fabrics, by far the most important products of English
industry are the metal-wares. This trade has its headquarters at
Birmingham, where the finer metal goods of all sorts are produced, at
Sheffield for cutlery, and in Staffordshire, especially at Wolverhampton,
where the coarser articles, locks, nails, etc., are manufactured. In
describing the position of the workers employed in these trades, let us begin
with Birmingham. The disposition of the work has retained in Birmingham,
as in most places where metals are wrought, something of the old handicraft
character; the small employers are still to be found, who work with their
apprentices in the shop at home, or when they need steam-power, in great
factory buildings which are divided into little shops, each rented to a small
employer, and supplied with a shaft moved by the engine, and furnishing

motive power for the machinery. Leon Faucher, author of a series of
articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes, which at least betray study, and are
better than what has hitherto been written upon the subject by Englishmen
or Germans, characterises this relation in contrast with the manufacture of
Lancashire as “Démocratie industrielle,” and observes that it produces no
very favourable results for master or men. This observation is perfectly
correct, for the many small employers cannot well subsist on the profit
divided amongst them, determined by competition, a profit under other
circumstances absorbed by a single manufacturer. The centralising
tendency of capital holds them down. For one who grows rich ten are
ruined, and a hundred placed at a greater disadvantage than ever, by the
pressure of the one upstart who can afford to sell more cheaply than they.
And in the cases where they have to compete from the beginning against
great capitalists, it is self-evident that they can only toil along with the
greatest difficulty. The apprentices are, as we shall see, quite as badly off
under the small employers as under the manufacturers, with the single
difference that they, in turn, may become small employers, and so attain a
certain independence—that is to say, they are at best less directly exploited
by the bourgeoisie than under the factory system. Thus these small
employers are neither genuine proletarians, since they live in part upon the
work of their apprentices, nor genuine bourgeois, since their principal
means of support is their own work. This peculiar midway position of the
Birmingham iron-workers is to blame for their having so rarely joined
wholly and unreservedly in the English labour movements. Birmingham is
a politically radical, but not a Chartist, town. There are, however, numerous
larger factories belonging to capitalists; and in these the factory system
reigns supreme. The division of labour, which is here carried out to the last
detail (in the needle industry, for example), and the use of steam-power,
admit of the employment of a great multitude of women and children, and
we find here {199} precisely the same features reappearing which the
Factories’ Report presented,—the work of women up to the hour of
confinement, incapacity as housekeepers, neglect of home and children,
indifference, actual dislike to family life, and demoralisation; further, the
crowding out of men from employment, the constant improvement of
machinery, early emancipation of children, husbands supported by their
wives and children, etc. etc. The children are described as half-starved and
ragged, the half of them are said not to know what it is to have enough to

eat, many of them get nothing to eat before the midday meal, or even live
the whole day upon a pennyworth of bread for a noonday meal—there were
actually cases in which children received no food from eight in the morning
until seven at night. Their clothing is very often scarcely sufficient to cover
their nakedness, many are barefoot even in winter. Hence they are all small
and weak for their age, and rarely develop with any degree of vigour. And
when we reflect that with these insufficient means of reproducing the
physical forces, hard and protracted work in close rooms is required of
them, we cannot wonder that there are few adults in Birmingham fit for
military service. “The working men,” says a recruiting surgeon, “are small,
delicate, and of very slight physical power; many of them deformed, too, in
the chest or spinal column.” According to the assertion of a recruiting
sergeant, the people of Birmingham are smaller than those anywhere else,
being usually 5 feet 4 to 5 inches tall; out of 613 recruits, but 238 were
found fit for service. As to education, a series of depositions and specimens
taken from the metal districts have already been given, {200a} to which the
reader is referred. It appears further, from the Children’s Employment
Commission’s Report, that in Birmingham more than half the children
between five and fifteen years attend no school whatsoever, that those who
do are constantly changing, so that it is impossible to give them any training
of an enduring kind, and that they are all withdrawn from school very early
and set to work. The report makes it clear what sort of teachers are
employed. One teacher, in answer to the question whether she gave moral
instruction, said, No, for threepence a week school fees that was too much
to require, but that she took a great deal of trouble to instil good principles
into the children. (And she made a decided slip in her English in saying it.)
In the schools the commissioner found constant noise and disorder. The
moral state of the children is in the highest degree deplorable. Half of all
the criminals are children under fifteen, and in a single year ninety ten-
years’-old offenders, among them forty-four serious criminal cases, were
sentenced. Unbridled sexual intercourse seems, according to the opinion of
the commissioner, almost universal, and that at a very early age. {200b}
In the iron district of Staffordshire the state of things is still worse. For the
coarse wares made here neither much division of labour (with certain
exceptions) nor steam-power or machinery can be applied. In
Wolverhampton, Willenhall, Bilston, Sedgeley, Wednesfield, Darlaston,

Dudley, Walsall, Wednesbury, etc., there are, therefore, fewer factories, but
chiefly single forges, where the small masters work alone, or with one or
more apprentices, who serve them until reaching the twenty-first year. The
small employers are in about the same situation as those of Birmingham;
but the apprentices, as a rule, are much worse off. They get almost
exclusively meat from diseased animals or such as have died a natural
death, or tainted meat, or fish to eat, with veal from calves killed too young,
and pork from swine smothered during transportation, and such food is
furnished not by small employers only, but by large manufacturers, who
employ from thirty to forty apprentices. The custom seems to be universal
in Wolverhampton, and its natural consequence is frequent bowel
complaints and other diseases. Moreover, the children usually do not get
enough to eat, and have rarely other clothing than their working rags, for
which reason, if for no other, they cannot go to Sunday school. The
dwellings are bad and filthy, often so much so that they give rise to disease;
and in spite of the not materially unhealthy work, the children are puny,
weak, and, in many cases, severely crippled. In Willenhall, for instance,
there are countless persons who have, from perpetually filing at the lathe,
crooked backs and one leg crooked, “hind-leg” as they call it, so that the
two legs have the form of a K; while it is said that more than one-third of
the working-men there are ruptured. Here, as well as in Wolverhampton,
numberless cases were found of retarded puberty among girls, (for girls,
too, work at the forges,) as well as among boys, extending even to the
nineteenth year. In Sedgeley and its surrounding district, where nails form
almost the sole product, the nailers live and work in the most wretched
stable-like huts, which for filth can scarcely be equalled. Girls and boys
work from the tenth or twelfth year, and are accounted fully skilled only
when they make a thousand nails a day. For twelve hundred nails the pay is
5¾d. Every nail receives twelve blows, and since the hammer weighs 1¼
pounds, the nailer must lift 18,000 pounds to earn this miserable pay. With
this hard work and insufficient food, the children inevitably develop ill-
formed, undersized frames, and the commissioners depositions confirm
this. As to the state of education in this district, data have already been
furnished in the foregoing chapters. It is upon an incredibly low plane; half
the children do not even go to Sunday school, and the other half go
irregularly; very few, in comparison with the other districts, can read, and in
the matter of writing the case is much worse. Naturally, for between the

seventh and tenth years, just when they are beginning to get some good out
of going to school, they are set to work, and the Sunday school teachers,
smiths or miners, frequently cannot read, and write their names with
difficulty. The prevailing morals correspond with these means of
education. In Willenhall, Commissioner Horne asserts, and supplies ample
proofs of his assertion, that there exists absolutely no moral sense among
the workers. In general, he found that the children neither recognised duties
to their parents nor felt any affection for them. They were so little capable
of thinking of what they said, so stolid, so hopelessly stupid, that they often
asserted that they were well treated, were coming on famously, when they
were forced to work twelve to fourteen hours, were clad in rags, did not get
enough to eat, and were beaten so that they felt it several days afterwards.
They knew nothing of a different kind of life than that in which they toil
from morning until they are allowed to stop at night, and did not even
understand the question never heard before, whether they were tired. {202}
In Sheffield wages are better, and the external state of the workers also. On
the other hand, certain branches of work are to be noticed here, because of
their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health. Certain operations
require the constant pressure of tools against the chest, and engender
consumption in many cases; others, file-cutting among them, retard the
general development of the body and produce digestive disorders; bone-
cutting for knife handles brings with it headache, biliousness, and among
girls, of whom many are employed, anæmia. By far the most unwholesome
work is the grinding of knife-blades and forks, which, especially when done
with a dry stone, entails certain early death. The unwholesomeness of this
work lies in part in the bent posture, in which chest and stomach are
cramped; but especially in the quantity of sharp-edged metal dust particles
freed in the cutting, which fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily inhaled.
The dry grinders’ average life is hardly thirty-five years, the wet grinders’
rarely exceeds forty-five. Dr. Knight, in Sheffield, says: {203}

“I can convey some idea of the injuriousness of this occupation only
by asserting that the hardest drinkers among the grinders are the
longest lived among them, because they are longest and oftenest absent
from their work. There are, in all, some 2,500 grinders in Sheffield.
About 150 (80 men and 70 boys) are fork grinders; these die between
the twenty-eighth and thirty-second years of age. The razor grinders,

who grind wet as well as dry, die between forty and forty-five years,
and the table cutlery grinders, who grind wet, die between the fortieth
and fiftieth year.”

The same physician gives the following description of the course of the
disease called grinders’ asthma:

“They usually begin their work with the fourteenth year, and, if they
have good constitutions, rarely notice any symptoms before the
twentieth year. Then the symptoms of their peculiar disease appear.
They suffer from shortness of breath at the slightest effort in going up
hill or up stairs, they habitually raise the shoulders to relieve the
permanent and increasing want of breath; they bend forward, and
seem, in general, to feel most comfortable in the crouching position in
which they work. Their complexion becomes dirty yellow, their
features express anxiety, they complain of pressure upon the chest.
Their voices become rough and hoarse, they cough loudly, and the
sound is as if air were driven through a wooden tube. From time to
time they expectorate considerable quantities of dust, either mixed
with phlegm or in balls or cylindrical masses, with a thin coating of
mucus. Spitting blood, inability to lie down, night sweat, colliquative
diarrhœa, unusual loss of flesh, and all the usual symptoms of
consumption of the lungs finally carry them off, after they have
lingered months, or even years, unfit to support themselves or those
dependent upon them. I must add that all attempts which have hitherto
been made to prevent grinders’ asthma, or to cure it, have wholly
failed.”

All this Knight wrote ten years ago; since then the number of grinders and
the violence of the disease have increased, though attempts have been made
to prevent it by covered grindstones and carrying off the dust by artificial
draught. These methods have been at least partially successful, but the
grinders do not desire their adoption, and have even destroyed the
contrivance here and there, in the belief that more workers may be attracted
to the business and wages thus reduced; they are for a short life and a merry
one. Dr. Knight has often told grinders who came to him with the first
symptoms of asthma that a return to grinding means certain death, but with

no avail. He who is once a grinder falls into despair, as though he had sold
himself to the devil. Education in Sheffield is upon a very low plane; a
clergyman, who had occupied himself largely with the statistics of
education, was of the opinion that of 16,500 children of the working-class
who are in a position to attend school, scarcely 6,500 can read. This comes
of the fact that the children are taken from school in the seventh, and, at the
very latest, in the twelfth year, and that the teachers are good for nothing;
one was a convicted thief who found no other way of supporting himself
after being released from jail than teaching school! Immorality among
young people seems to be more prevalent in Sheffield than anywhere else.
It is hard to tell which town ought to have the prize, and in reading the
report one believes of each one that this certainly deserves it! The younger
generation spend the whole of Sunday lying in the street tossing coins or
fighting dogs, go regularly to the gin palace, where they sit with their
sweethearts until late at night, when they take walks in solitary couples. In
an ale-house which the commissioner visited, there sat forty to fifty young
people of both sexes, nearly all under seventeen years of age, and each lad
beside his lass. Here and there cards were played, at other places dancing
was going on, and everywhere drinking. Among the company were openly
avowed professional prostitutes. No wonder, then, that, as all the witnesses
testify, early, unbridled sexual intercourse, youthful prostitution, beginning
with persons of fourteen to fifteen years, is extraordinarily frequent in
Sheffield. Crimes of a savage and desperate sort are of common
occurrence; one year before the commissioner’s visit, a band, consisting
chiefly of young persons, was arrested when about to set fire to the town,
being fully equipped with lances and inflammable substances. We shall see
later that the labour movement in Sheffield has this same savage character.
{205}
Besides these two main centres of the metal industry, there are needle
factories in Warrington, Lancashire, where great want, immorality, and
ignorance prevail among the workers, and especially among the children;
and a number of nail forges in the neighbourhood of Wigan, in Lancashire,
and in the east of Scotland. The reports from these latter districts tell
almost precisely the same story as those of Staffordshire. There is one more
branch of this industry carried on in the factory districts, especially in
Lancashire, the essential peculiarity of which is the production of

machinery by machinery, whereby the workers, crowded out elsewhere, are
deprived of their last refuge, the creation of the very enemy which
supersedes them. Machinery for planing and boring, cutting screws,
wheels, nuts, etc., with power lathes, has thrown out of employment a
multitude of men who formerly found regular work at good wages; and
whoever wishes to do so may see crowds of them in Manchester.
North of the iron district of Staffordshire lies an industrial region to which
we shall now turn our attention, the Potteries, whose headquarters are in the
borough of Stoke, embracing Henley, Burslem, Lane End, Lane Delph,
Etruria, Coleridge, Langport, Tunstall, and Golden Hill, containing together
60,000 inhabitants. The Children’s Employment Commission reports upon
this subject that in some branches of this industry, in the production of
stoneware, the children have light employment in warm, airy rooms; in
others, on the contrary, hard, wearing labour is required, while they receive
neither sufficient food nor good clothing. Many children complain: “Don’t
get enough to eat, get mostly potatoes with salt, never meat, never bread,
don’t go to school, haven’t got no clothes.” “Haven’t got nothin’ to eat to-
day for dinner, don’t never have dinner at home, get mostly potatoes and
salt, sometimes bread.” “These is all the clothes I have, no Sunday suit at
home.” Among the children whose work is especially injurious are the
mould-runners, who have to carry the moulded article with the form to the
drying-room, and afterwards bring back the empty form, when the article is
properly dried. Thus they must go to and fro the whole day, carrying
burdens heavy in proportion to their age, while the high temperature in
which they have to do this increases very considerably the exhaustiveness
of the work. These children, with scarcely a single exception, are lean,
pale, feeble, stunted; nearly all suffer from stomach troubles, nausea, want
of appetite, and many of them die of consumption. Almost as delicate are
the boys called “jiggers,” from the “jigger” wheel which they turn. But by
far the most injurious is the work of those who dip the finished article into a
fluid containing great quantities of lead, and often of arsenic, or have to
take the freshly-dipped article up with the hand. The hands and clothing of
these workers, adults and children, are always wet with this fluid, the skin
softens and falls off under the constant contact with rough objects, so that
the fingers often bleed, and are constantly in a state most favourable for the
absorption of this dangerous substance. The consequence is violent pain,

and serious disease of the stomach and intestines, obstinate constipation,
colic, sometimes consumption, and, most common of all, epilepsy among
children. Among men, partial paralysis of the hand muscles, colica
pictorum, and paralysis of whole limbs are ordinary phenomena. One
witness relates that two children who worked with him died of convulsions
at their work; another who had helped with the dipping two years while a
boy, relates that he had violent pains in the bowels at first, then convulsions,
in consequence of which he was confined to his bed two months, since
when the attacks of convulsions have increased in frequency, are now daily,
accompanied often by ten to twenty epileptic fits, his right arm is paralysed,
and the physicians tell him that he can never regain the use of his limbs. In
one factory were found in the dipping-house four men, all epileptic and
afflicted with severe colic, and eleven boys, several of whom were already
epileptic. In short, this frightful disease follows this occupation universally:
and that, too, to the greater pecuniary profit of the bourgeoisie! In the
rooms in which the stoneware is scoured, the atmosphere is filled with
pulverised flint, the breathing of which is as injurious as that of the steel
dust among the Sheffield grinders. The workers lose breath, cannot lie
down, suffer from sore throat and violent coughing, and come to have so
feeble a voice that they can scarcely be heard. They, too, all die of
consumption. In the Potteries district, the schools are said to be
comparatively numerous, and to offer the children opportunities for
instruction; but as the latter are so early set to work for twelve hours and
often more per day, they are not in a position to avail themselves of the
schools, so that three-fourths of the children examined by the commissioner
could neither read nor write, while the whole district is plunged in the
deepest ignorance. Children who have attended Sunday school for years
could not tell one letter from another, and the moral and religious education,
as well as the intellectual, is on a very low plane. {207}
In the manufacture of glass, too, work occurs which seems little injurious to
men, but cannot be endured by children. The hard labour, the irregularity of
the hours, the frequent night-work, and especially the great heat of the
working place (100 to 130 Fahrenheit), engender in children general
debility and disease, stunted growth, and especially affections of the eye,
bowel complaint, and rheumatic and bronchial affections. Many of the
children are pale, have red eyes, often blind for weeks at a time, suffer from

violent nausea, vomiting, coughs, colds, and rheumatism. When the glass is
withdrawn from the fire, the children must often go into such heat that the
boards on which they stand catch fire under their feet. The glassblowers
usually die young of debility and chest affections. {208}
As a whole, this report testifies to the gradual but sure introduction of the
factory system into all branches of industry, recognisable especially by the
employment of women and children. I have not thought it necessary to
trace in every case the progress of machinery and the superseding of men as
workers. Every one who is in any degree acquainted with the nature of
manufacture can fill this out for himself, while space fails me to describe in
detail an aspect of our present system of production, the result of which I
have already sketched in dealing with the factory system. In all directions
machinery is being introduced, and the last trace of the working-man’s
independence thus destroyed. In all directions the family is being dissolved
by the labour of wife and children, or inverted by the husband’s being
thrown out of employment and made dependent upon them for bread;
everywhere the inevitable machinery bestows upon the great capitalist
command of trade and of the workers with it. The centralisation of capital
strides forward without interruption, the division of society into great
capitalists and non-possessing workers is sharper every day, the industrial
development of the nation advances with giant strides towards the
inevitable crisis.
I have already stated that in the handicrafts the power of capital, and in
some cases the division of labour too, has produced the same results,
crushed the small tradesmen, and put great capitalists and non-possessing
workers in their place. As to these handicraftsmen there is little to be said,
since all that relates to them has already found its place where the
proletariat in general was under discussion. There has been but little
change here in the nature of the work and its influence upon health since the
beginning of the industrial movement. But the constant contact with the
factory operatives, the pressure of the great capitalists, which is much more
felt than that of the small employer to whom the apprentice still stood in a
more or less personal relation, the influences of life in towns, and the fall of
wages, have made nearly all the handicraftsmen active participators in
labour movements. We shall soon have more to say on this point, and turn
meanwhile to one section of workers in London who deserve our attention

by reason of the extraordinary barbarity with which they are exploited by
the money-greed of the bourgeoisie. I mean the dressmakers and sewing-
women.
It is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve
the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie involves the saddest
consequences for the health of the workers. We have already seen this in
the case of the lacemakers, and come now to the dressmaking
establishments of London for further proof. They employ a mass of young
girls—there are said to be 15,000 of them in all—who sleep and eat on the
premises, come usually from the country, and are therefore absolutely the
slaves of their employers. During the fashionable season, which lasts some
four months, working-hours, even in the best establishments, are fifteen,
and, in very pressing cases, eighteen a day; but in most shops work goes on
at these times without any set regulation, so that the girls never have more
than six, often not more than three or four, sometimes, indeed, not more
than two hours in the twenty-four, for rest and sleep, working nineteen to
twenty hours, if not the whole night through, as frequently happens! The
only limit set to their work is the absolute physical inability to hold the
needle another minute. Cases have occurred in which these helpless
creatures did not undress during nine consecutive days and nights, and
could only rest a moment or two here and there upon a mattress, where food
was served them ready cut up in order to require the least possible time for
swallowing. In short, these unfortunate girls are kept by means of the moral
whip of the modern slave-driver, the threat of discharge, to such long and
unbroken toil as no strong man, much less a delicate girl of fourteen to
twenty years, can endure. In addition to this, the foul air of the workroom
and sleeping places, the bent posture, the often bad and indigestible food,
all these causes, combined with almost total exclusion from fresh air, entail
the saddest consequences for the health of the girls. Enervation,
exhaustion, debility, loss of appetite, pains in the shoulders, back, and hips,
but especially headache, begin very soon; then follow curvatures of the
spine, high, deformed shoulders, leanness, swelled, weeping, and smarting
eyes, which soon become short-sighted; coughs, narrow chests, and
shortness of breath, and all manner of disorders in the development of the
female organism. In many cases the eyes suffer, so severely that incurable
blindness follows; but if the sight remains strong enough to make continued

work possible, consumption usually soon ends the sad life of these milliners
and dressmakers. Even those who leave this work at an early age retain
permanently injured health, a broken constitution; and, when married, bring
feeble and sickly children into the world. All the medical men interrogated
by the commissioner agreed that no method of life could be invented better
calculated to destroy health and induce early death.
With the same cruelty, though somewhat more indirectly, the rest of the
needle-women of London are exploited. The girls employed in stay-making
have a hard, wearing occupation, trying to the eyes. And what wages do
they get? I do not know; but this I know, that the middle-man who has to
give security for the material delivered, and who distributes the work
among the needle-women, receives 1½d. per piece. From this he deducts
his own pay, at least ½d., so that 1d. at most reaches the pocket of the girl.
The girls who sew neckties must bind themselves to work sixteen hours a
day, and receive 4½s. a week. {210} But the shirtmakers’ lot is the worst.
They receive for an ordinary shirt 1½d., formerly 2d.-3d.; but since the
workhouse of St. Pancras, which is administered by a Radical board of
guardians, began to undertake work at 1½d., the poor women outside have
been compelled to do the same. For fine, fancy shirts, which can be made
in one day of eighteen hours, 6d. is paid. The weekly wage of these
sewing-women according to this and according to testimony from many
sides, including both needle-women and employers, is 2s. 6d. to 3s. for
most strained work continued far into the night. And what crowns this
shameful barbarism is the fact that the women must give a money deposit
for a part of the materials entrusted to them, which they naturally cannot do
unless they pawn a part of them (as the employers very well know),
redeeming them at a loss; or if they cannot redeem the materials, they must
appear before a Justice of the Peace, as happened a sewing-woman in
November, 1843. A poor girl who got into this strait and did not know what
to do next, drowned herself in a canal in 1844. These women usually live
in little garret rooms in the utmost distress, where as many crowd together
as the space can possibly admit, and where, in winter, the animal warmth of
the workers is the only heat obtainable. Here they sit bent over their work,
sewing from four or five in the morning until midnight, destroying their
health in a year or two and ending in an early grave, without being able to
obtain the poorest necessities of life meanwhile. {211} And below them

roll the brilliant equipages of the upper bourgeoisie, and perhaps ten steps
away some pitiable dandy loses more money in one evening at faro than
they can earn in a year.
*****
Such is the condition of the English manufacturing proletariat. In all
directions, whithersoever we may turn, we find want and disease permanent
or temporary, and demoralisation arising from the condition of the workers;
in all directions slow but sure undermining, and final destruction of the
human being physically as well as mentally. Is this a state of things which
can last? It cannot and will not last. The workers, the great majority of the
nation, will not endure it. Let us see what they say of it.

LABOUR MOVEMENTS.

It must be admitted, even if I had not proved it so often in detail, that the
English workers cannot feel happy in this condition; that theirs is not a state
in which a man or a whole class of men can think, feel, and live as human
beings. The workers must therefore strive to escape from this brutalizing
condition, to secure for themselves a better, more human position; and this
they cannot do without attacking the interest of the bourgeoisie which
consists in exploiting them. But the bourgeoisie defends its interests with
all the power placed at its disposal by wealth and the might of the State. In
proportion as the working-man determines to alter the present state of
things, the bourgeois becomes his avowed enemy.
Moreover, the working-man is made to feel at every moment that the
bourgeoisie treats him as a chattel, as its property, and for this reason, if for
no other, he must come forward as its enemy. I have shown in a hundred
ways in the foregoing pages, and could have shown in a hundred others,
that, in our present society, he can save his manhood only in hatred and
rebellion against the bourgeoisie. And he can protest with most violent
passion against the tyranny of the propertied class, thanks to his education,
or rather want of education, and to the abundance of hot Irish blood that
flows in the veins of the English working-class. The English working-man
is no Englishman nowadays; no calculating money-grabber like his wealthy
neighbour. He possesses more fully developed feelings, his native northern
coldness is overborne by the unrestrained development of his passions and
their control over him. The cultivation of the understanding which so
greatly strengthens the selfish tendency of the English bourgeois, which has
made selfishness his predominant trait and concentrated all his emotional
power upon the single point of money-greed, is wanting in the working-
man, whose passions are therefore strong and mighty as those of the
foreigner. English nationality is annihilated in the working-man.

Since, as we have seen, no single field for the exercise of his manhood is
left him, save his opposition to the whole conditions of his life, it is natural
that exactly in this opposition he should be most manly, noblest, most
worthy of sympathy. We shall see that all the energy, all the activity of the
working-men is directed to this point, and that even their attempts to attain
general education all stand in direct connection with this. True, we shall
have single acts of violence and even of brutality to report, but it must
always be kept in mind that the social war is avowedly raging in England;
and that, whereas it is in the interest of the bourgeoisie to conduct this war
hypocritically, under the disguise of peace and even of philanthropy, the
only help for the working-men consists in laying bare the true state of
things and destroying this hypocrisy; that the most violent attacks of the
workers upon the bourgeoisie and its servants are only the open,
undisguised expression of that which the bourgeoisie perpetrates secretly,
treacherously against the workers.
The revolt of the workers began soon after the first industrial development,
and has passed through several phases. The investigation of their
importance in the history of the English people I must reserve for separate
treatment, limiting myself meanwhile to such bare facts as serve to
characterise the condition of the English proletariat.
The earliest, crudest, and least fruitful form of this rebellion was that of
crime. The working-man lived in poverty and want, and saw that others
were better off than he. It was not clear to his mind why he, who did more
for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under these
conditions. Want conquered his inherited respect for the sacredness of
property, and he stole. We have seen how crime increased with the
extension of manufacture; how the yearly number of arrests bore a constant
relation to the number of bales of cotton annually consumed.
The workers soon realised that crime did not help matters. The criminal
could protest against the existing order of society only singly, as one
individual; the whole might of society was brought to bear upon each
criminal, and crushed him with its immense superiority. Besides, theft was
the most primitive form of protest, and for this reason, if for no other, it
never became the universal expression of the public opinion of the working-
men, however much they might approve of it in silence. As a class, they

first manifested opposition to the bourgeoisie when they resisted the
introduction of machinery at the very beginning of the industrial period.
The first inventors, Arkwright and others, were persecuted in this way and
their machines destroyed. Later, there took place a number of revolts
against machinery, in which the occurrences were almost precisely the same
as those of the printers’ disturbances in Bohemia in 1844; factories were
demolished and machinery destroyed.
This form of opposition also was isolated, restricted to certain localities,
and directed against one feature only of our present social arrangements.
When the momentary end was attained, the whole weight of social power
fell upon the unprotected evil-doers and punished them to its heart’s
content, while the machinery was introduced none the less. A new form of
opposition had to be found.
At this point help came in the shape of a law enacted by the old,
unreformed, oligarchic-Tory parliament, a law which never could have
passed the House of Commons later, when the Reform Bill had legally
sanctioned the distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and made
the bourgeoisie the ruling class. This was enacted in 1824, and repealed all
laws by which coalitions between working-men for labour purposes had
hitherto been forbidden. The working-men obtained a right previously
restricted to the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the right of free association.
Secret coalitions had, it is true, previously existed, but could never achieve
great results. In Glasgow, as Symonds {214} relates, a general strike of
weavers had taken place in 1812, which was brought about by a secret
association. It was repeated in 1822, and on this occasion vitriol was
thrown into the faces of the two working-men who would not join the
association, and were therefore regarded by the members as traitors to their
class. Both the assaulted lost the use of their eyes in consequence of the
injury. So, too, in 1818, the association of Scottish miners was powerful
enough to carry on a general strike. These associations required their
members to take an oath of fidelity and secrecy, had regular lists, treasurers,
bookkeepers, and local branches. But the secrecy with which everything
was conducted crippled their growth. When, on the other hand, the
working-man received in 1824 the right of free association, these
combinations were very soon spread over all England and attained great
power. In all branches of industry Trades Unions were formed with the

outspoken intention of protecting the single working-man against the
tyranny and neglect of the bourgeoisie. Their objects were to deal, en
masse, as a power, with the employers; to regulate the rate of wages
according to the profit of the latter, to raise it when opportunity offered, and
to keep it uniform in each trade throughout the country. Hence they tried to
settle with the capitalists a scale of wages to be universally adhered to, and
ordered out on strike the employees of such individuals as refused to accept
the scale. They aimed further to keep up the demand for labour by limiting
the number of apprentices, and so to keep wages high; to counteract, as far
as possible, the indirect wages reductions which the manufacturers brought
about by means of new tools and machinery; and finally, to assist
unemployed working-men financially. This they do either directly or by
means of a card to legitimate the bearer as a “society man,” and with which
the working-man wanders from place to place, supported by his fellow-
workers, and instructed as to the best opportunity for finding employment.
This is tramping, and the wanderer a tramp. To attain these ends, a
President and Secretary are engaged at a salary (since it is to be expected
that no manufacturer will employ such persons), and a committee collects
the weekly contributions and watches over their expenditure for the
purposes of the association. When it proved possible and advantageous, the
various trades of single districts united in a federation and held delegate
conventions at set times. The attempt has been made in single cases to
unite the workers of one branch over all England in one great Union; and
several times (in 1830 for the first time) to form one universal trades
association for the whole United Kingdom, with a separate organisation for
each trade. These associations, however, never held together long, and
were seldom realised even for the moment, since an exceptionally universal
excitement is necessary to make such a federation possible and effective.
The means usually employed by these Unions for attaining their ends are
the following: If one or more employers refuse to pay the wage specified by
the Union, a deputation is sent or a petition forwarded (the working-men,
you see, know how to recognise the absolute power of the lord of the
factory in his little State); if this proves unavailing, the Union commands
the employees to stop work, and all hands go home. This strike is either
partial when one or several, or general when all employers in the trade
refuse to regulate wages according to the proposals of the Union. So far go

the lawful means of the Union, assuming the strike to take effect after the
expiration of the legal notice, which is not always the case. But these
lawful means are very weak when there are workers outside the Union, or
when members separate from it for the sake of the momentary advantage
offered by the bourgeoisie. Especially in the case of partial strikes can the
manufacturer readily secure recruits from these black sheep (who are
known as knobsticks), and render fruitless the efforts of the united workers.
Knobsticks are usually threatened, insulted, beaten, or otherwise maltreated
by the members of the Union; intimidated, in short, in every way.
Prosecution follows, and as the law-abiding bourgeoisie has the power in its
own hands, the force of the Union is broken almost every time by the first
unlawful act, the first judicial procedure against its members.
The history of these Unions is a long series of defeats of the working-men,
interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot
alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the
relation between supply and demand in the labour market. Hence the
Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence this
relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or
dissolve wholly; and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for
labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached
spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves. But
in dealing with minor, single influences they are powerful. If the employer
had no concentrated, collective opposition to expect, he would in his own
interest gradually reduce wages to a lower and lower point; indeed, the
battle of competition which he has to wage against his fellow-
manufacturers would force him to do so, and wages would soon reach the
minimum. But this competition of the manufacturers among themselves is,
under average conditions, somewhat restricted by the opposition of the
working-men.
Every manufacturer knows that the consequence of a reduction not justified
by conditions to which his competitors also are subjected, would be a strike,
which would most certainly injure him, because his capital would be idle as
long as the strike lasted, and his machinery would be rusting, whereas it is
very doubtful whether he could, in such a case, enforce his reduction. Then
he has the certainty that if he should succeed, his competitors would follow
him, reducing the price of the goods so produced, and thus depriving him of

the benefit of his policy. Then, too, the Unions often bring about a more
rapid increase of wages after a crisis than would otherwise follow. For the
manufacturer’s interest is to delay raising wages until forced by
competition, but now the working-men demand an increased wage as soon
as the market improves, and they can carry their point by reason of the
smaller supply of workers at his command under such circumstances. But,
for resistance to more considerable forces which influence the labour
market, the Unions are powerless. In such cases hunger gradually drives
the strikers to resume work on any terms, and when once a few have begun;
the force of the Union is broken, because these few knobsticks, with the
reserve supplies of goods in the market, enable the bourgeoisie to overcome
the worst effects of the interruption of business. The funds of the Union are
soon exhausted by the great numbers requiring relief, the credit which the
shopkeepers give at high interest is withdrawn after a time, and want
compels the working-man to place himself once more under the yoke of the
bourgeoisie. But strikes end disastrously for the workers mostly, because
the manufacturers, in their own interest (which has, be it said, become their
interest only through the resistance of the workers), are obliged to avoid all
useless reductions, while the workers feel in every reduction imposed by
the state of trade a deterioration of their condition, against which they must
defend themselves as far as in them lies.
It will be asked, “Why, then, do the workers strike in such cases, when the
uselessness of such measures is so evident?” Simply because they must
protest against every reduction, even if dictated by necessity; because they
feel bound to proclaim that they, as human beings, shall not be made to bow
to social circumstances, but social conditions ought to yield to them as
human beings; because silence on their part would be a recognition of these
social conditions, an admission of the right of the bourgeoisie to exploit the
workers in good times and let them starve in bad ones. Against this the
working-men must rebel so long as they have not lost all human feeling,
and that they protest in this way and no other, comes of their being practical
English people, who express themselves in action, and do not, like German
theorists, go to sleep as soon as their protest is properly registered and
placed ad acta, there to sleep as quietly as the protesters themselves. The
active resistance of the English working-men has its effect in holding the
money greed of the bourgeoisie within certain limits, and keeping alive the

opposition of the workers to the social and political omnipotence of the
bourgeoisie, while it compels the admission that something more is needed
than Trades Unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class. But
what gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real
importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to abolish
competition. They imply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of
the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the workers among
themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion. And precisely because the
Unions direct themselves against the vital nerve of the present social order,
however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they so dangerous to
this social order. The working-men cannot attack the bourgeoisie, and with
it the whole existing order of society, at any sorer point than this. If the
competition of the workers among themselves is destroyed, if all determine
not to be further exploited by the bourgeoisie, the rule of property is at an
end. Wages depend upon the relation of demand to supply, upon the
accidental state of the labour market, simply because the workers have
hitherto been content to be treated as chattels, to be bought and sold. The
moment the workers resolve to be bought and sold no longer, when in the
determination of the value of labour, they take the part of men possessed of
a will as well as of working-power, at that moment the whole Political
Economy of to-day is at an end.
The laws determining the rate of wages would, indeed, come into force
again in the long run, if the working-men did not go beyond this step of
abolishing competition among themselves. But they must go beyond that
unless they are prepared to recede again and to allow competition among
themselves to reappear. Thus once advanced so far, necessity compels them
to go farther; to abolish not only one kind of competition, but competition
itself altogether, and that they will do.
The workers are coming to perceive more clearly with every day how
competition affects them; they see far more clearly than the bourgeois that
competition of the capitalists among themselves presses upon the workers
too, by bringing on commercial crises, and that this kind of competition;
too, must be abolished. They will soon learn how they have to go about it.
That these Unions contribute greatly to nourish the bitter hatred of the
workers against the property-holding class need hardly be said. From them

proceed, therefore, with or without the connivance of the leading members,
in times of unusual excitement, individual actions which can be explained
only by hatred wrought to the pitch of despair, by a wild passion
overwhelming all restraints. Of this sort are the attacks with vitriol
mentioned in the foregoing pages, and a series of others, of which I shall
cite several. In 1831, during a violent labour movement, young Ashton, a
manufacturer in Hyde, near Manchester, was shot one evening when
crossing a field, and no trace of the assassin discovered. There is no doubt
that this was a deed of vengeance of the working-men. Incendiarisms and
attempted explosions are very common. On Friday, September 29th, 1843,
an attempt was made to blow up the saw-works of Padgin, in Howard
Street, Sheffield. A closed iron tube filled with powder was the means
employed, and the damage was considerable. On the following day, a
similar attempt was made in Ibbetson’s knife and file works at Shales Moor,
near Sheffield. Mr. Ibbetson had made himself obnoxious by an active
participation in bourgeois movements, by low wages, the exclusive
employment of knobsticks, and the exploitation of the Poor Law for his
own benefit. He had reported, during the crisis of 1842, such operatives as
refused to accept reduced wages, as persons who could find work but would
not take it, and were, therefore, not deserving of relief, so compelling the
acceptance of a reduction. Considerable damage was inflicted by the
explosion, and all the working-men who came to view it regretted only
“that the whole concern was not blown into the air.” On Friday, October
6th, 1844, an attempt to set fire to the factory of Ainsworth and Crompton,
at Bolton, did no damage; it was the third or fourth attempt in the same
factory within a very short time. In the meeting of the Town Council of
Sheffield, on Wednesday, January 10th, 1844, the Commissioner of Police
exhibited a cast-iron machine, made for the express purpose of producing
an explosion, and found filled with four pounds of powder, and a fuse
which had been lighted but had not taken effect, in the works of Mr.
Kitchen, Earl Street, Sheffield. On Sunday, January 20th, 1844, an
explosion caused by a package of powder took place in the sawmill of
Bently & White, at Bury, in Lancashire, and produced considerable
damage. On Thursday, February 1st, 1844, the Soho Wheel Works, in
Sheffield, were set on fire and burnt up.

Here are six such cases in four months, all of which have their sole origin in
the embitterment of the working-men against the employers. What sort of a
social state it must be in which such things are possible I need hardly say.
These facts are proof enough that in England, even in good business years,
such as 1843, the social war is avowed and openly carried on, and still the
English bourgeoisie does not stop to reflect! But the case which speaks
most loudly is that of the Glasgow Thugs, {221a} which came up before the
Assizes from the 3rd to the 11th of January, 1838. It appears from the
proceedings that the Cotton-Spinners’ Union, which existed here from the
year 1816, possessed rare organisation and power. The members were
bound by an oath to adhere to the decision of the majority, and had during
every turnout a secret committee which was unknown to the mass of the
members, and controlled the funds of the Union absolutely. This committee
fixed a price upon the heads of knobsticks and obnoxious manufacturers
and upon incendiarisms in mills. A mill was thus set on fire in which
female knobsticks were employed in spinning in the place of men; a Mrs.
M’Pherson, mother of one of these girls, was murdered, and both murderers
sent to America at the expense of the association. As early as 1820, a
knobstick named M’Quarry was shot at and wounded, for which deed the
doer received twenty pounds from the Union, but was discovered and
transported for life. Finally, in 1837, in May, disturbances occurred in
consequence of a turnout in the Oatbank and Mile End factories, in which
perhaps a dozen knobsticks were maltreated. In July, of the same year, the
disturbances still continued, and a certain Smith, a knobstick, was so
maltreated that he died. The committee was now arrested, an investigation
begun, and the leading members found guilty of participation in
conspiracies, maltreatment of knobsticks, and incendiarism in the mill of
James and Francis Wood, and they were transported for seven years. What
do our good Germans say to this story? {221b}
The property-holding class, and especially the manufacturing portion of it
which comes into direct contact with the working-men, declaims with the
greatest violence against these Unions, and is constantly trying to prove
their uselessness to the working-men upon grounds which are economically
perfectly correct, but for that very reason partially mistaken, and for the
working-man’s understanding totally without effect. The very zeal of the
bourgeoisie shows that it is not disinterested in the matter; and apart from

the indirect loss involved in a turnout, the state of the case is such that
whatever goes into the pockets of the manufacturers comes of necessity out
of those of the worker. So that even if the working-men did not know that
the Unions hold the emulation of their masters in the reduction of wages, at
least in a measure, in check, they would still stand by the Unions, simply to
the injury of their enemies, the manufacturers. In war the injury of one
party is the benefit of the other, and since the working-men are on a war-
footing towards their employers, they do merely what the great potentates
do when they get into a quarrel. Beyond all other bourgeois is our friend
Dr. Ure, the most furious enemy of the Unions. He foams with indignation
at the “secret tribunals” of the cotton-spinners, the most powerful section of
the workers, tribunals which boast their ability to paralyse every
disobedient manufacturer, {222a} “and so bring ruin on the man who had
given them profitable employment for many a year.” He speaks of a time
{222b} “when the inventive head and the sustaining heart of trade were
held in bondage by the unruly lower members.” A pity that the English
working-men will not let themselves be pacified so easily with thy fable as
the Roman Plebs, thou modern Menenius Agrippa! Finally, he relates the
following: At one time the coarse mule-spinners had misused their power
beyond all endurance. High wages, instead of awakening thankfulness
towards the manufacturers and leading to intellectual improvement (in
harmless study of sciences useful to the bourgeoisie, of course), in many
cases produced pride and supplied funds for supporting rebellious spirits in
strikes, with which a number of manufacturers were visited one after the
other in a purely arbitrary manner. During an unhappy disturbance of this
sort in Hyde, Dukinfield, and the surrounding neighbourhood, the
manufacturers of the district, anxious lest they should be driven from the
market by the French, Belgians, and Americans, addressed themselves to
the machine-works of Sharp, Roberts & Co., and requested Mr. Sharp to
turn his inventive mind to the construction of an automatic mule in order
“to emancipate the trade from galling slavery and impending ruin.” {223a}
“He produced in the course of a few months a machine apparently instinct
with the thought, feeling, and tact of the experienced workman—which
even in its infancy displayed a new principle of regulation, ready in its
mature state to fulfil the functions of a finished spinner. Thus the Iron Man,
as the operatives fitly call it, sprung out of the hands of our modern

Prometheus at the bidding of Minerva—a creation destined to restore order
among the industrious classes, and to confirm to Great Britain the empire of
art. The news of this Herculean prodigy spread dismay through the Union,
and even long before it left its cradle, so to speak, it strangled the Hydra of
misrule.” {223b}
Ure proves further that the invention of the machine, with which four and
five colours are printed at once, was a result of the disturbances among the
calico printers; that the refractoriness of the yarn-dressers in the power-
loom weaving mills gave rise to a new and perfected machine for warp-
dressing, and mentions several other such cases. A few pages earlier this
same Ure gives himself a great deal of trouble to prove in detail that
machinery is beneficial to the workers! But Ure is not the only one; in the
Factory Report, Mr. Ashworth, the manufacturer, and many another, lose no
opportunity to express their wrath against the Unions. These wise
bourgeois, like certain governments, trace every movement which they do
not understand, to the influence of ill-intentioned agitators, demagogues,
traitors, spouting idiots, and ill-balanced youth. They declare that the paid
agents of the Unions are interested in the agitation because they live upon
it, as though the necessity for this payment were not forced upon them by
the bourgeois, who will give such men no employment!
The incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all to what extent
the social war has broken out all over England. No week passes, scarcely a
day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some direction, now against a
reduction, then against a refusal to raise the rate of wages, again by reason
of the employment of knobsticks or the continuance of abuses, sometimes
against new machinery, or for a hundred other reasons. These strikes, at
first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty struggles; they decide nothing,
it is true, but they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between
bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of
the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle
which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamentos of single branches
of industry that these too have joined the labour movement. And when one
examines a year’s file of the Northern Star, the only sheet which reports all
the movements of the proletariat, one finds that all the proletarians of the
towns and of country manufacture have united in associations, and have
protested from time to time, by means of a general strike, against the

supremacy of the bourgeoisie. And as schools of war, the Unions are
unexcelled. In them is developed the peculiar courage of the English. It is
said on the Continent that the English, and especially the working-men, are
cowardly, that they cannot carry out a revolution because, unlike the
French, they do not riot at intervals, because they apparently accept the
bourgeois régime so quietly. This is a complete mistake. The English
working-men are second to none in courage; they are quite as restless as the
French, but they fight differently. The French, who are by nature political,
struggle against social evils with political weapons; the English, for whom
politics exist only as a matter of interest, solely in the interest of bourgeois
society, fight, not against the Government, but directly against the
bourgeoisie; and for the time, this can be done only in a peaceful manner.
Stagnation in business, and the want consequent upon it, engendered the
revolt at Lyons, in 1834, in favour of the Republic: in 1842, at Manchester,
a similar cause gave rise to a universal turnout for the Charter and higher
wages. That courage is required for a turnout, often indeed much loftier
courage, much bolder, firmer determination than for an insurrection, is self-
evident. It is, in truth, no trifle for a working-man who knows want from
experience, to face it with wife and children, to endure hunger and
wretchedness for months together, and stand firm and unshaken through it
all. What is death, what the galleys which await the French revolutionist, in
comparison with gradual starvation, with the daily sight of a starving
family, with the certainty of future revenge on the part of the bourgeoisie,
all of which the English working-man chooses in preference to subjection
under the yoke of the property-holding class? We shall meet later an
example of this obstinate, unconquerable courage of men who surrender to
force only when all resistance would be aimless and unmeaning. And
precisely in this quiet perseverance, in this lasting determination which
undergoes a hundred tests every day, the English working-man develops
that side of his character which commands most respect. People who
endure so much to bend one single bourgeois will be able to break the
power of the whole bourgeoisie.
But apart from that, the English working-man has proved his courage often
enough. That the turnout of 1842 had no further results came from the fact
that the men were in part forced into it by the bourgeoisie, in part neither
clear nor united as to its object. But aside from this, they have shown their

courage often enough when the matter in question was a specific social
one. Not to mention the Welsh insurrection of 1839, a complete battle was
waged in Manchester in May, 1843, during my residence there. Pauling &
Henfrey, a brick firm, had increased the size of the bricks without raising
wages, and sold the bricks, of course, at a higher price. The workers, to
whom higher wages were refused, struck work, and the Brickmakers’ Union
declared war upon the firm. The firm, meanwhile, succeeded with great
difficulty in securing hands from the neighbourhood, and among the
knobsticks, against whom in the beginning intimidation was used, the
proprietors set twelve men to guard the yard, all ex-soldiers and policemen,
armed with guns. When intimidation proved unavailing, the brick-yard,
which lay scarcely a hundred paces from an infantry barracks, was stormed
at ten o’clock one night by a crowd of brickmakers, who advanced in
military order, the first ranks armed with guns. They forced their way in,
fired upon the watchmen as soon as they saw them, stamped out the wet
bricks spread out to dry, tore down the piled-up rows of those already dry,
demolished everything which came in their way, pressed into a building,
where they destroyed the furniture and maltreated the wife of the
overlooker who was living there. The watchmen, meanwhile, had placed
themselves behind a hedge, whence they could fire safely and without
interruption. The assailants stood before a burning brick-kiln, which threw
a bright light upon them, so that every ball of their enemies struck home,
while every one of their own shots missed its mark. Nevertheless, the firing
lasted half-an-hour, until the ammunition was exhausted, and the object of
the visit—the demolition of all the destructible objects in the yard—was
attained. Then the military approached, and the brickmakers withdrew to
Eccles, three miles from Manchester. A short time before reaching Eccles
they held roll-call, and each man was called according to his number in the
section when they separated, only to fall the more certainly into the hands
of the police, who were approaching from all sides. The number of the
wounded must have been very considerable, but those only could be
counted who were arrested. One of these had received three bullets (in the
thigh, the calf, and the shoulder), and had travelled in spite of them more
than four miles on foot. These people have proved that they, too, possess
revolutionary courage, and do not shun a rain of bullets. And when an
unarmed multitude, without a precise aim common to them all, are held in
check in a shut-off market-place, whose outlets are guarded by a couple of

policemen and dragoons, as happened in 1842, this by no means proves a
want of courage. On the contrary, the multitude would have stirred quite as
little if the servants of public (i.e., of the bourgeois) order had not been
present. Where the working-people have a specific end in view, they show
courage enough; as, for instance, in the attack upon Birley’s mill, which had
later to be protected by artillery.
In this connection, a word or two as to the respect for the law in England.
True, the law is sacred to the bourgeois, for it is his own composition,
enacted with his consent, and for his benefit and protection. He knows that,
even if an individual law should injure him, the whole fabric protects his
interests; and more than all, the sanctity of the law, the sacredness of order
as established by the active will of one part of society, and the passive
acceptance of the other, is the strongest support of his social position.
Because the English bourgeois finds himself reproduced in his law, as he
does in his God, the policeman’s truncheon which, in a certain measure, is
his own club, has for him a wonderfully soothing power. But for the
working-man quite otherwise! The working-man knows too well, has
learned from too oft-repeated experience, that the law is a rod which the
bourgeois has prepared for him; and when he is not compelled to do so, he
never appeals to the law. It is ridiculous to assert that the English working-
man fears the police, when every week in Manchester policemen are beaten,
and last year an attempt was made to storm a station-house secured by iron
doors and shutters. The power of the police in the turnout of 1842 lay, as I
have already said, in the want of a clearly defined object on the part of the
working-men themselves.
Since the working-men do not respect the law, but simply submit to its
power when they cannot change it, it is most natural that they should at
least propose alterations in it, that they should wish to put a proletarian law
in the place of the legal fabric of the bourgeoisie. This proposed law is the
People’s Charter, which in form is purely political, and demands a
democratic basis for the House of Commons. Chartism is the compact form
of their opposition to the bourgeoisie. In the Unions and turnouts
opposition always remained isolated: it was single working-men or sections
who fought a single bourgeois. If the fight became general, this was
scarcely by the intention of the working-men; or, when it did happen
intentionally, Chartism was at the bottom of it. But in Chartism it is the

whole working class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and attacks, first
of all, the political power, the legislative rampart with which the
bourgeoisie has surrounded itself. Chartism has proceeded from the
Democratic party which arose between 1780 and 1790 with and in the
proletariat, gained strength during the French Revolution, and came forth
after the peace as the Radical party. It had its headquarters then in
Birmingham and Manchester, and later in London; extorted the Reform Bill
from the Oligarchs of the old Parliament by a union with the Liberal
bourgeoisie, and has steadily consolidated itself, since then, as a more and
more pronounced working-men’s party in opposition to the bourgeoisie. In
1835 a committee of the General Working-men’s Association of London,
with William Lovett at its head, drew up the People’s Charter, whose six
points are as follows: (1) Universal suffrage for every man who is of age,
sane and unconvicted of crime; (2) Annual Parliaments; (3) Payment of
members of Parliament, to enable poor men to stand for election; (4) Voting
by ballot to prevent bribery and intimidation by the bourgeoisie; (5) Equal
electoral districts to secure equal representation; and (6) Abolition of the
even now merely nominal property qualification of £300 in land for
candidates in order to make every voter eligible. These six points, which
are all limited to the reconstitution of the House of Commons, harmless as
they seem, are sufficient to overthrow the whole English Constitution,
Queen and Lords included. The so-called monarchical and aristocratic
elements of the Constitution can maintain themselves only because the
bourgeoisie has an interest in the continuance of their sham existence; and
more than a sham existence neither possesses to-day. But as soon as real
public opinion in its totality backs the House of Commons, as soon as the
House of Commons incorporates the will, not of the bourgeoisie alone, but
of the whole nation, it will absorb the whole power so completely that the
last halo must fall from the head of the monarch and the aristocracy. The
English working-man respects neither Lords nor Queen. The bourgeois,
while in reality allowing them but little influence, yet offers to them
personally a sham worship. The English Chartist is politically a republican,
though he rarely or never mentions the word, while he sympathises with the
republican parties of all countries, and calls himself in preference a
democrat. But he is more than a mere republican, his democracy is not
simply political.

Chartism was from the beginning in 1835 chiefly a movement among the
working-men, though not yet sharply separated from the bourgeoisie. The
Radicalism of the workers went hand in hand with the Radicalism of the
bourgeoisie; the Charter was the shibboleth of both. They held their
National Convention every year in common, seeming to be one party. The
lower middle-class was just then in a very bellicose and violent state of
mind in consequence of the disappointment over the Reform Bill and of the
bad business years of 1837-1839, and viewed the boisterous Chartist
agitation with a very favourable eye. Of the vehemence of this agitation no
one in Germany has any idea. The people were called upon to arm
themselves, were frequently urged to revolt; pikes were got ready, as in the
French Revolution, and in 1838, one Stephens, a Methodist parson, said to
the assembled working-people of Manchester:

“You have no need to fear the power of Government, the soldiers,
bayonets, and cannon that are at the disposal of your oppressors; you
have a weapon that is far mightier than all these, a weapon against
which bayonets and cannon are powerless, and a child of ten years can
wield it. You have only to take a couple of matches and a bundle of
straw dipped in pitch, and I will see what the Government and its
hundreds of thousands of soldiers will do against this one weapon if it
is used boldly.”

As early as that year the peculiarly social character of the working-men’s
Chartism manifested itself. The same Stephens said, in a meeting of
200,000 men on Kersall Moor, the Mons Sacer of Manchester:

“Chartism, my friends, is no political movement, where the main point
is your getting the ballot. Chartism is a knife and fork question: the
Charter means a good house, good food and drink, prosperity, and
short working-hours.”

The movements against the new Poor Law and for the Ten Hours’ Bill were
already in the closest relation to Chartism. In all the meetings of that time
the Tory Oastler was active, and hundreds of petitions for improvements of
the social condition of the workers were circulated along with the national
petition for the People’s Charter adopted in Birmingham. In 1839 the
agitation continued as vigorously as ever, and when it began to relax

somewhat at the end of the year, Bussey, Taylor, and Frost hastened to call
forth uprisings simultaneously in the North of England, in Yorkshire, and
Wales. Frost’s plan being betrayed, he was obliged to open hostilities
prematurely. Those in the North heard of the failure of his attempt in time
to withdraw. Two months later, in January, 1840, several so-called spy
outbreaks took place in Sheffield and Bradford, in Yorkshire, and the
excitement gradually subsided. Meanwhile the bourgeoisie turned its
attention to more practical projects, more profitable for itself, namely the
Corn Laws. The Anti-Corn Law Association was formed in Manchester,
and the consequence was a relaxation of the tie between the Radical
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The working-men soon perceived that for
them the abolition of the Corn Laws could be of little use, while very
advantageous to the bourgeoisie; and they could therefore not be won for
the project.
The crisis of 1842 came on. Agitation was once more as vigorous as in
1839. But this time the rich manufacturing bourgeoisie, which was
suffering severely under this particular crisis, took part in it. The Anti-Corn
Law League, as it was now called, assumed a decidedly revolutionary tone.
Its journals and agitators used undisguisedly revolutionary language, one
very good reason for which was the fact that the Conservative party had
been in power since 1841. As the Chartists had previously done, these
bourgeois leaders called upon the people to rebel; and the working-men
who had most to suffer from the crisis were not inactive, as the year’s
national petition for the charter with its three and a half million signatures
proves. In short, if the two Radical parties had been somewhat estranged,
they allied themselves once more. At a meeting of Liberals and Chartists
held in Manchester, February 15th, 1842, a petition urging the repeal of the
Corn Laws and the adoption of the Charter was drawn up. The next day it
was adopted by both parties. The spring and summer passed amidst violent
agitation and increasing distress. The bourgeoisie was determined to carry
the repeal of the Corn Laws with the help of the crisis, the want which it
entailed, and the general excitement. At this time, the Conservatives being
in power, the Liberal bourgeoisie half abandoned their law-abiding habits;
they wished to bring about a revolution with the help of the workers. The
working-men were to take the chestnuts from the fire to save the
bourgeoisie from burning their own fingers. The old idea of a “holy

month,” a general strike, broached in 1839 by the Chartists, was revived.
This time, however, it was not the working-men who wished to quit work,
but the manufacturers who wished to close their mills and send the
operatives into the country parishes upon the property of the aristocracy,
thus forcing the Tory Parliament and the Tory Ministry to repeal the Corn
Laws. A revolt would naturally have followed, but the bourgeoisie stood
safely in the background and could await the result without compromising
itself if the worst came to the worst. At the end of July business began to
improve; it was high time. In order not to lose the opportunity, three firms
in Staleybridge reduced wages in spite of the improvement. {232} Whether
they did so of their own motion or in agreement with other manufacturers,
especially those of the League, I do not know. Two withdrew after a time,
but the third, William Bailey & Brothers, stood firm, and told the objecting
operatives that “if this did not please them, they had better go and play a
bit.” This contemptuous answer the hands received with cheers. They left
the mill, paraded through the town, and called upon all their fellows to quit
work. In a few hours every mill stood idle, and the operatives marched to
Mottram Moor to hold a meeting. This was on August 5th. August 8th they
proceeded to Ashton and Hyde five thousand strong, closed all the mills and
coal-pits, and held meetings, in which, however, the question discussed was
not, as the bourgeoisie had hoped, the repeal of the Corn Laws, but, “a fair
day’s wages for a fair day’s work.” August 9th they proceeded to
Manchester, unresisted by the authorities (all Liberals), and closed the
mills; on the 11th they were in Stockport, where they met with the first
resistance as they were storming the workhouse, the favourite child of the
bourgeoisie. On the same day there was a general strike and disturbance in
Bolton, to which the authorities here, too, made no resistance. Soon the
uprising spread throughout the whole manufacturing district, and all
employments, except harvesting and the production of food, came to a
standstill. But the rebellious operatives were quiet. They were driven into
this revolt without wishing it. The manufacturers, with the single exception
of the Tory Birley, in Manchester, had, contrary to their custom, not
opposed it. The thing had begun without the working-men’s having any
distinct end in view, for which reason they were all united in the
determination not to be shot at for the benefit of the Corn Law repealing
bourgeoisie. For the rest, some wanted to carry the Charter, others who
thought this premature wished merely to secure the wages rate of 1840. On