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 pounds. 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 regime_ 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.