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.