"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 employes 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 employe 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 naive,
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, Reaumur. 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.