In speaking of the bourgeoisie I include the so-called aristocracy, for
this is a privileged class, an aristocracy, only in contrast with the
bourgeoisie, not in contrast with the proletariat. The proletarian sees
in both only the property-holder--_i.e_., the bourgeois. Before the
privilege of property all other privileges vanish. The sole difference
is this, that the bourgeois proper stands in active relations with the
manufacturing, and, in a measure, with the mining proletarians, and, as
farmer, with the agricultural labourers, whereas the so-called aristocrat
comes into contact with the agricultural labourer only.
I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by
selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English
bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper,
particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing
exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded.
It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing
gold. {276} In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not
possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted.
True, these English bourgeois are good husbands and family men, and have
all sorts of other private virtues, and appear, in ordinary intercourse,
as decent and respectable as all other bourgeois; even in business they
are better to deal with than the Germans; they do not higgle and haggle
so much as our own pettifogging merchants; but how does this help
matters? Ultimately it is self-interest, and especially money gain,
which alone determines them. I once went into Manchester with such a
bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building,
the frightful condition of the working-people's quarters, and asserted
that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to
the end, and said at the corner where we parted: "And yet there is a
great deal of money made here; good morning, sir." It is utterly
indifferent to the English bourgeois whether his working-men starve or
not, if only he makes money. All the conditions of life are measured by
money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic
bosh. Hence, Political Economy, the Science of Wealth, is the favourite
study of these bartering Jews. Every one of them is a Political
Economist. The relation of the manufacturer to his operatives has
nothing human in it; it is purely economic. The manufacturer is Capital,
the operative Labour. And if the operative will not be forced into this
abstraction, if he insists that he is not Labour, but a man, who
possesses, among other things, the attribute of labour force, if he takes
it into his head that he need not allow himself to be sold and bought in
the market, as the commodity "Labour," the bourgeois reason comes to a
standstill. He cannot comprehend that he holds any other relation to the
operatives than that of purchase and sale; he sees in them not human
beings, but hands, as he constantly calls them to their faces; he
insists, as Carlyle says, that "Cash Payment is the only nexus between
man and man." Even the relation between himself and his wife is, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, mere "Cash Payment." Money
determines the worth of the man; he is "worth ten thousand pounds." He
who has money is of "the better sort of people," is "influential," and
what _he_ does counts for something in his social circle. The
huckstering spirit penetrates the whole language, all relations are
expressed in business terms, in economic categories. Supply and demand
are the formulas according to which the logic of the English bourgeois
judges all human life. Hence free competition in every respect, hence
the _regime_ of _laissez-faire, laissez-aller_ in government, in
medicine, in education, and soon to be in religion, too, as the State
Church collapses more and more. Free competition will suffer no
limitation, no State supervision; the whole State is but a burden to it.
It would reach its highest perfection in a _wholly_ ungoverned anarchic
society, where each might exploit the other to his heart's content.
Since, however, the bourgeoisie cannot dispense with government, but must
have it to hold the equally indispensable proletariat in check, it turns
the power of government against the proletariat and keeps out of its way
as far as possible.
Let no one believe, however, that the "cultivated" Englishman openly
brags with his egotism. On the contrary, he conceals it under the vilest
hypocrisy. What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They
who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can
boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered
the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and
then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them,
placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity
when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what
belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who
takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust,
which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall
first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood,
shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape
of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow. But let us hear the
English bourgeoisie's own words. It is not yet a year since I read in
the _Manchester Guardian_ the following letter to the editor, which was
published without comment as a perfectly natural, reasonable thing:
"MR. EDITOR,--For some time past our main streets are haunted by
swarms of beggars, who try to awaken the pity of the passers-by in a
most shameless and annoying manner, by exposing their tattered
clothing, sickly aspect, and disgusting wounds and deformities. I
should think that when one not only pays the poor-rate, but also
contributes largely to the charitable institutions, one had done
enough to earn a right to be spared such disagreeable and impertinent
molestations. And why else do we pay such high rates for the
maintenance of the municipal police, if they do not even protect us so
far as to make it possible to go to or out of town in peace? I hope
the publication of these lines in your widely-circulated paper may
induce the authorities to remove this nuisance; and I remain,--Your
obedient servant,
"A LADY."
There you have it! The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-
interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business
matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend this much upon
benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled
any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and
not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall
despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I
purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!" It is
infamous, this charity of a Christian bourgeois! And so writes "A Lady;"
she does well to sign herself such, well that she has lost the courage to
call herself a woman! But if the "Ladies" are such as this, what must
the "Gentlemen" be? It will be said that this is a single case; but no,
the foregoing letter expresses the temper of the great majority of the
English bourgeoisie, or the editor would not have accepted it, and some
reply would have been made to it, which I watched for in vain in the
succeeding numbers. And as to the efficiency of this philanthropy, Canon
Parkinson himself says that the poor are relieved much more by the poor
than by the bourgeoisie; and such relief given by an honest proletarian
who knows himself what it is to be hungry, for whom sharing his scanty
meal is really a sacrifice, but a sacrifice borne with pleasure, such
help has a wholly different ring to it from the carelessly-tossed alms of
the luxurious bourgeois.
In other respects, too, the bourgeoisie assumes a hypocritical, boundless
philanthropy, but only when its own interests require it; as in its
Politics and Political Economy. It has been at work now well on towards
five years to prove to the working-men that it strives to abolish the
Corn Laws solely in their interest. But the long and short of the matter
is this: the Corn Laws keep the price of bread higher than in other
countries, and thus raise wages, but these high wages render difficult
competition of the manufacturers against other nations in which bread,
and consequently wages, are cheaper. The Corn Laws being repealed, the
price of bread falls, and wages gradually approach those of other
European countries, as must be clear to every one from our previous
exposition of the principles according to which wages are determined. The
manufacturer can compete more readily, the demand for English goods
increases, and, with it, the demand for labour. In consequence of this
increased demand wages would actually rise somewhat, and the unemployed
workers be re-employed; but for how long? The "surplus population" of
England, and especially of Ireland, is sufficient to supply English
manufacture with the necessary operatives, even if it were doubled; and,
in a few years, the small advantage of the repeal of the Corn Laws would
be balanced, a new crisis would follow, and we should be back at the
point from which we started, while the first stimulus to manufacture
would have increased population meanwhile. All this the proletarians
understand very well, and have told the manufacturers to their faces;
but, in spite of that, the manufacturers have in view solely the
immediate advantage which the Corn Laws would bring them. They are too
narrow-minded to see that, even for themselves, no permanent advantage
can arise from this measure, because their competition with each other
would soon force the profit of the individual back to its old level; and
thus they continue to shriek to the working-men that it is purely for the
sake of the starving millions that the rich members of the Liberal party
pour hundreds and thousands of pounds into the treasury of the Anti-Corn
Law League, while every one knows that they are only sending the butter
after the cheese, that they calculate upon earning it all back in the
first ten years after the repeal of the Corn Laws. But the workers are
no longer to be misled by the bourgeoisie, especially since the
insurrection of 1842. They demand of every one who presents himself as
interested in their welfare, that he should declare himself in favour of
the People's Charter as proof of the sincerity of his professions, and in
so doing, they protest against all outside help, for the Charter is a
demand for the power to help themselves. Whoever declines so to declare
himself they pronounce their enemy, and are perfectly right in so doing,
whether he be a declared foe or a false friend Besides, the Anti-Corn Law
League has used the most despicable falsehoods and tricks to win the
support of the workers. It has tried to prove to them that the money
price of labour is in inverse proportion to the price of corn; that wages
are high when grain is cheap, and _vice versa_, an assertion which it
pretends to prove with the most ridiculous arguments, and one which is,
in itself, more ridiculous than any other that has proceeded from the
mouth of an Economist. When this failed to help matters, the workers
were promised bliss supreme in consequence of the increased demand in the
labour market; indeed, men went so far as to carry through the streets
two models of loaves of bread, on one of which, by far the larger, was
written: "American Eightpenny Loaf, Wages Four Shillings per Day," and
upon the much smaller one: "English Eightpenny Loaf, Wages Two Shillings
a Day." But the workers have not allowed themselves to be misled. They
know their lords and masters too well.
But rightly to measure the hypocrisy of these promises, the practice of
the bourgeoisie must be taken into account. We have seen in the course
of our report how the bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat in every
conceivable way for its own benefit! We have, however, hitherto seen
only how the single bourgeois maltreats the proletariat upon his own
account. Let us turn now to the manner in which the bourgeoisie as a
party, as the power of the State, conducts itself towards the
proletariat. Laws are necessary only because there are persons in
existence who own nothing; and although this is directly expressed in but
few laws, as, for instance, those against vagabonds and tramps, in which
the proletariat as such is outlawed, yet enmity to the proletariat is so
emphatically the basis of the law that the judges, and especially the
Justices of the Peace, who are bourgeois themselves, and with whom the
proletariat comes most in contact, find this meaning in the laws without
further consideration. If a rich man is brought up, or rather summoned,
to appear before the court, the judge regrets that he is obliged to
impose so much trouble, treats the matter as favourably as possible, and,
if he is forced to condemn the accused, does so with extreme regret, etc.
etc., and the end of it all is a miserable fine, which the bourgeois
throws upon the table with contempt and then departs. But if a poor
devil gets into such a position as involves appearing before the Justice
of the Peace--he has almost always spent the night in the station-house
with a crowd of his peers--he is regarded from the beginning as guilty;
his defence is set aside with a contemptuous "Oh! we know the excuse,"
and a fine imposed which he cannot pay and must work out with several
months on the treadmill. And if nothing can be proved against him, he is
sent to the treadmill, none the less, "as a rogue and a vagabond." The
partisanship of the Justices of the Peace, especially in the country,
surpasses all description, and it is so much the order of the day that
all cases which are not too utterly flagrant are quietly reported by the
newspapers, without comment. Nor is anything else to be expected. For
on the one hand, these Dogberries do merely construe the law according to
the intent of the farmers, and, on the other, they are themselves
bourgeois, who see the foundation of all true order in the interests of
their class. And the conduct of the police corresponds to that of the
Justices of the Peace. The bourgeois may do what he will and the police
remain ever polite, adhering strictly to the law, but the proletarian is
roughly, brutally treated; his poverty both casts the suspicion of every
sort of crime upon him and cuts him off from legal redress against any
caprice of the administrators of the law; for him, therefore, the
protecting forms of the law do not exist, the police force their way into
his house without further ceremony, arrest and abuse him; and only when a
working-men's association, such as the miners, engages a Roberts, does it
become evident how little the protective side of the law exists for the
working-men, how frequently he has to bear all the burdens of the law
without enjoying its benefits.
Down to the present hour, the property-holding class in Parliament still
struggles against the better feelings of those not yet fallen a prey to
egotism, and seeks to subjugate the proletariat still further. One piece
of common land after another is appropriated and placed under
cultivation, a process by which the general cultivation is furthered, but
the proletariat greatly injured. Where there were still commons, the
poor could pasture an ass, a pig, or geese, the children and young people
had a place where they could play and live out of doors; but this is
gradually coming to an end. The earnings of the worker are less, and the
young people, deprived of their playground, go to the beer-shops. A mass
of acts for enclosing and cultivating commons is passed at every session
of Parliament. When the Government determined during the session of 1844
to force the all monopolising railways to make travelling possible for
the workers by means of charges proportionate to their means, a penny a
mile, and proposed therefore to introduce such a third class train upon
every railway daily, the "Reverend Father in God," the Bishop of London,
proposed that Sunday, the only day upon which working-men in work _can_
travel, be exempted from this rule, and travelling thus be left open to
the rich and shut off from the poor. This proposition was, however, too
direct, too undisguised to pass through Parliament, and was dropped. I
have no room to enumerate the many concealed attacks of even one single
session upon the proletariat. One from the session of 1844 must suffice.
An obscure member of Parliament, a Mr. Miles, proposed a bill regulating
the relation of master and servant which seemed comparatively
unobjectionable. The Government became interested in the bill, and it
was referred to a committee. Meanwhile the strike among the miners in
the North broke out, and Roberts made his triumphal passage through
England with his acquitted working-men. When the bill was reported by
the committee, it was discovered that certain most despotic provisions
had been interpolated in it, especially one conferring upon the employer
the power to bring before any Justice of the Peace every working-man who
had contracted verbally or in writing to do any work whatsoever, in case
of refusal to work or other misbehaviour, and have him condemned to
prison with hard labour for two months, upon the oath of the employer or
his agent or overlooker, _i.e_., upon the oath of the accuser. This bill
aroused the working-men to the utmost fury, the more so as the Ten Hours'
Bill was before Parliament at the same time, and had called forth a
considerable agitation. Hundreds of meetings were held, hundreds of
working-men's petitions forwarded to London to Thomas Duncombe, the
representative of the interests of the proletariat. This man was, except
Ferrand, the representative of "Young England," the only vigorous
opponent of the bill; but when the other Radicals saw that the people
were declaring against it, one after the other crept forward and took his
place by Duncombe's side; and as the Liberal bourgeoisie had not the
courage to defend the bill in the face of the excitement among the
working-men, it was ignominiously lost.
Meanwhile the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the
proletariat is Malthus' Law of Population and the New Poor Law framed in
accordance with it. We have already alluded several times to the theory
of Malthus. We may sum up its final result in these few words, that the
earth is perennially over-populated, whence poverty, misery, distress,
and immorality must prevail; that it is the lot, the eternal destiny of
mankind, to exist in too great numbers, and therefore in diverse classes,
of which some are rich, educated, and moral, and others more or less
poor, distressed, ignorant, and immoral. Hence it follows in practice,
and Malthus himself drew this conclusion, that charities and poor-rates
are, properly speaking, nonsense, since they serve only to maintain, and
stimulate the increase of, the surplus population whose competition
crushes down wages for the employed; that the employment of the poor by
the Poor Law Guardians is equally unreasonable, since only a fixed
quantity of the products of labour can be consumed, and for every
unemployed labourer thus furnished employment, another hitherto employed
must be driven into enforced idleness, whence private undertakings suffer
at cost of Poor Law industry; that, in other words, the whole problem is
not how to support the surplus population, but how to restrain it as far
as possible. Malthus declares in plain English that the right to live, a
right previously asserted in favour of every man in the world, is
nonsense. He quotes the words of a poet, that the poor man comes to the
feast of Nature and finds no cover laid for him, and adds that "she bids
him begone," for he did not before his birth ask of society whether or
not he is welcome. This is now the pet theory of all genuine English
bourgeois, and very naturally, since it is the most specious excuse for
them, and has, moreover, a good deal of truth in it under existing
conditions. If, then, the problem is not to make the "surplus
population" useful, to transform it into available population, but merely
to let it starve to death in the least objectionable way and to prevent
its having too many children, this, of course, is simple enough, provided
the surplus population perceives its own superfluousness and takes kindly
to starvation. There is, however, in spite of the violent exertions of
the humane bourgeoisie, no immediate prospect of its succeeding in
bringing about such a disposition among the workers. The workers have
taken it into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are the
necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing, the surplus
population.
Since, however, the rich hold all the power, the proletarians must
submit, if they will not good-temperedly perceive it for themselves, to
have the law actually declare them superfluous. This has been done by
the New Poor Law. The Old Poor Law which rested upon the Act of 1601
(the 43rd of Elizabeth), naively started from the notion that it is the
duty of the parish to provide for the maintenance of the poor. Whoever
had no work received relief, and the poor man regarded the parish as
pledged to protect him from starvation. He demanded his weekly relief as
his right, not as a favour, and this became, at last, too much for the
bourgeoisie. In 1833, when the bourgeoisie had just come into power
through the Reform Bill, and pauperism in the country districts had just
reached its full development, the bourgeoisie began the reform of the
Poor Law according to its own point of view. A commission was appointed,
which investigated the administration of the Poor Laws, and revealed a
multitude of abuses. It was discovered that the whole working-class in
the country was pauperised and more or less dependent upon the rates,
from which they received relief when wages were low; it was found that
this system by which the unemployed were maintained, the ill-paid and the
parents of large families relieved, fathers of illegitimate children
required to pay alimony, and poverty, in general, recognised as needing
protection, it was found that this system was ruining the nation, was--
"A check upon industry, a reward for improvident marriage, a stimulus
to increased population, and a means of counterbalancing the effect of
an increased population upon wages; a national provision for
discouraging the honest and industrious, and protecting the lazy,
vicious, and improvident; calculated to destroy the bonds of family
life, hinder systematically the accumulation of capital, scatter that
which is already accumulated, and ruin the taxpayers. Moreover, in
the provision of aliment, it sets a premium upon illegitimate
children."
(Words of the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners.) {286} This
description of the action of the Old Poor Law is certainly correct;
relief fosters laziness and increase of "surplus population." Under
present social conditions it is perfectly clear that the poor man is
compelled to be an egotist, and when he can choose, living equally well
in either case, he prefers doing nothing to working. But what follows
therefrom? That our present social conditions are good for nothing, and
not as the Malthusian Commissioners conclude, that poverty is a crime,
and, as such, to be visited with heinous penalties which may serve as a
warning to others.
But these wise Malthusians were so thoroughly convinced of the
infallibility of their theory that they did not for one moment hesitate
to cast the poor into the Procrustean bed of their economic notions and
treat them with the most revolting cruelty. Convinced with Malthus and
the rest of the adherents of free competition that it is best to let each
one take care of himself, they would have preferred to abolish the Poor
Laws altogether. Since, however, they had neither the courage nor the
authority to do this, they proposed a Poor Law constructed as far as
possible in harmony with the doctrine of Malthus, which is yet more
barbarous than that of _laissez-faire_, because it interferes actively in
cases in which the latter is passive. We have seen how Malthus
characterises poverty, or rather the want of employment, as a crime under
the title "superfluity," and recommends for it punishment by starvation.
The commissioners were not quite so barbarous; death outright by
starvation was something too terrible even for a Poor Law Commissioner.
"Good," said they, "we grant you poor a right to exist, but only to
exist; the right to multiply you have not, nor the right to exist as
befits human beings. You are a pest, and if we cannot get rid of you as
we do of other pests, you shall feel, at least, that you are a pest, and
you shall at least be held in check, kept from bringing into the world
other "surplus," either directly or through inducing in others laziness
and want of employment. Live you shall, but live as an awful warning to
all those who might have inducements to become "superfluous."
They accordingly brought in the New Poor Law, which was passed by
Parliament in 1834, and continues in force down to the present day. All
relief in money and provisions was abolished; the only relief allowed was
admission to the workhouses immediately built. The regulations for these
workhouses, or, as the people call them, Poor Law Bastilles, is such as
to frighten away every one who has the slightest prospect of life without
this form of public charity. To make sure that relief be applied for
only in the most extreme cases and after every other effort had failed,
the workhouse has been made the most repulsive residence which the
refined ingenuity of a Malthusian can invent. The food is worse than
that of the most ill-paid working-man while employed, and the work
harder, or they might prefer the workhouse to their wretched existence
outside. Meat, especially fresh meat, is rarely furnished, chiefly
potatoes, the worst possible bread and oatmeal porridge, little or no
beer. The food of criminal prisoners is better, as a rule, so that the
paupers frequently commit some offence for the purpose of getting into
jail. For the workhouse is a jail too; he who does not finish his task
gets nothing to eat; he who wishes to go out must ask permission, which
is granted or not, according to his behaviour or the inspector's whim,
tobacco is forbidden, also the receipt of gifts from relatives or friends
outside the house; the paupers wear a workhouse uniform, and are handed
over, helpless and without redress, to the caprice of the inspectors. To
prevent their labour from competing with that of outside concerns, they
are set to rather useless tasks: the men break stones, "as much as a
strong man can accomplish with effort in a day;" the women, children, and
aged men pick oakum, for I know not what insignificant use. To prevent
the "superfluous" from multiplying, and "demoralised" parents from
influencing their children, families are broken up, the husband is placed
in one wing, the wife in another, the children in a third, and they are
permitted to see one another only at stated times after long intervals,
and then only when they have, in the opinion of the officials, behaved
well. And in order to shut off the external world from contamination by
pauperism within these bastilles, the inmates are permitted to receive
visits only with the consent of the officials, and in the
reception-rooms; to communicate in general with the world outside only by
leave and under supervision.
Yet the food is supposed to be wholesome and the treatment humane with
all this. But the intent of the law is too loudly outspoken for this
requirement to be in any wise fulfilled. The Poor Law Commissioners and
the whole English bourgeoisie deceive themselves if they believe the
administration of the law possible without these results. The treatment,
which the letter of the law prescribes, is in direct contradiction of its
spirit. If the law in its essence proclaims the poor criminals, the
workhouses prisons, their inmates beyond the pale of the law, beyond the
pale of humanity, objects of disgust and repulsion, then all commands to
the contrary are unavailing. In practice, the spirit and not the letter
of the law is followed in the treatment of the poor, as in the following
few examples:
"In the workhouse at Greenwich, in the summer of 1843, a boy five years
old was punished by being shut into the dead-room, where he had to sleep
upon the lids of the coffins. In the workhouse at Herne, the same
punishment was inflicted upon a little girl for wetting the bed at night,
and this method of punishment seems to be a favourite one. This
workhouse, which stands in one of the most beautiful regions of Kent, is
peculiar, in so far as its windows open only upon the court, and but two,
newly introduced, afford the inmates a glimpse of the outer world. The
author who relates this in the _Illuminated Magazine_, closes his
description with the words: "If God punished men for crimes as man
punishes man for poverty, then woe to the sons of Adam!"
In November, 1843, a man died at Leicester, who had been dismissed two
days before from the workhouse at Coventry. The details of the treatment
of the poor in this institution are revolting. The man, George Robson,
had a wound upon the shoulder, the treatment of which was wholly
neglected; he was set to work at the pump, using the sound arm; was given
only the usual workhouse fare, which he was utterly unable to digest by
reason of the unhealed wound and his general debility; he naturally grew
weaker, and the more he complained, the more brutally he was treated.
When his wife tried to bring him her drop of beer, she was reprimanded,
and forced to drink it herself in the presence of the female warder. He
became ill, but received no better treatment. Finally, at his own
request, and under the most insulting epithets, he was discharged,
accompanied by his wife. Two days later he died at Leicester, in
consequence of the neglected wound and of the food given him, which was
utterly indigestible for one in his condition, as the surgeon present at
the inquest testified. When he was discharged, there were handed to him
letters containing money, which had been kept back six weeks, and opened,
according to a rule of the establishment, by the inspector! In
Birmingham such scandalous occurrences took place, that finally, in 1843,
an official was sent to investigate the case. He found that four tramps
had been shut up naked under a staircase in a black hole, eight to ten
days, often deprived of food until noon, and that at the severest season
of the year. A little boy had been passed through all grades of
punishment known to the institution; first locked up in a damp, vaulted,
narrow, lumber-room; then in the dog-hole twice, the second time three
days and three nights; then the same length of time in the old dog-hole,
which was still worse; then the tramp-room, a stinking, disgustingly
filthy hole, with wooden sleeping stalls, where the official, in the
course of his inspection, found two other tattered boys, shrivelled with
cold, who had been spending three days there. In the dog-hole there were
often seven, and in the tramp-room, twenty men huddled together. Women,
also, were placed in the dog-hole, because they refused to go to church;
and one was shut four days into the tramp-room, with God knows what sort
of company, and that while she was ill and receiving medicine! Another
woman was placed in the insane department for punishment, though she was
perfectly sane. In the workhouse at Bacton, in Suffolk, in January,
1844, a similar investigation revealed the fact that a feeble-minded
woman was employed as nurse, and took care of the patients accordingly;
while sufferers, who were often restless at night, or tried to get up,
were tied fast with cords passed over the covering and under the
bedstead, to save the nurses the trouble of sitting up at night. One
patient was found dead, bound in this way. In the St. Pancras workhouse
in London (where the cheap shirts already mentioned are made), an
epileptic died of suffocation during an attack in bed, no one coming to
his relief; in the same house, four to six, sometimes eight children,
slept in one bed. In Shoreditch workhouse a man was placed, together
with a fever patient violently ill, in a bed teeming with vermin. In
Bethnal Green workhouse, London, a woman in the sixth month of pregnancy
was shut up in the reception-room with her two-year-old child, from
February 28th to March 20th, without being admitted into the workhouse
itself, and without a trace of a bed or the means of satisfying the most
natural wants. Her husband, who was brought into the workhouse, begged
to have his wife released from this imprisonment, whereupon he received
twenty-four hours imprisonment, with bread and water, as the penalty of
his insolence. In the workhouse at Slough, near Windsor, a man lay dying
in September, 1844. His wife journeyed to him, arriving at midnight; and
hastening to the workhouse, was refused admission. She was not permitted
to see her husband until the next morning, and then only in the presence
of a female warder, who forced herself upon the wife at every succeeding
visit, sending her away at the end of half-an-hour. In the workhouse at
Middleton, in Lancashire, twelve, and at times eighteen, paupers, of both
sexes, slept in one room. This institution is not embraced by the New
Poor Law, but is administered under an old special act (Gilbert's Act).
The inspector had instituted a brewery in the house for his own benefit.
In Stockport, July 31st, 1844, a man, seventy-two years old, was brought
before the Justice of the Peace for refusing to break stones, and
insisting that, by reason of his age and a stiff knee, he was unfit for
his work. In vain did he offer to undertake any work adapted to his
physical strength; he was sentenced to two weeks upon the treadmill. In
the workhouse at Basford, an inspecting official found that the sheets
had not been changed in thirteen weeks, shirts in four weeks, stockings
in two to ten months, so that of forty-five boys but three had stockings,
and all their shirts were in tatters. The beds swarmed with vermin, and
the tableware was washed in the slop-pails. In the west of London
workhouse, a porter who had infected four girls with syphilis was not
discharged, and another who had concealed a deaf and dumb girl four days
and nights in his bed was also retained.
As in life, so in death. The poor are dumped into the earth like
infected cattle. The pauper burial-ground of St. Brides, London, is a
bare morass, in use as a cemetery since the time of Charles II., and
filled with heaps of bones; every Wednesday the paupers are thrown into a
ditch fourteen feet deep; a curate rattles through the Litany at the top
of his speed; the ditch is loosely covered in, to be re-opened the next
Wednesday, and filled with corpses as long as one more can be forced in.
The putrefaction thus engendered contaminates the whole neighbourhood. In
Manchester, the pauper burial-ground lies opposite to the Old Town, along
the Irk: this, too, is a rough, desolate place. About two years ago a
railroad was carried through it. If it had been a respectable cemetery,
how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the
desecration! But it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the
outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter. It
was not even thought worth while to convey the partially decayed bodies
to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it
happened, and piles were driven into newly-made graves, so that the water
oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and
filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases. The
disgusting brutality which accompanied this work I cannot describe in
further detail.
Can any one wonder that the poor decline to accept public relief under
these conditions? That they starve rather than enter these bastilles? I
have the reports of five cases in which persons actually starving, when
the guardians refused them outdoor relief, went back to their miserable
homes and died of starvation rather than enter these hells. Thus far
have the Poor Law Commissioners attained their object. At the same time,
however, the workhouses have intensified, more than any other measure of
the party in power, the hatred of the working-class against the property-
holders, who very generally admire the New Poor Law.
From Newcastle to Dover, there is but one voice among the workers--the
voice of hatred against the new law. The bourgeoisie has formulated so
clearly in this law its conception of its duties towards the proletariat,
that it has been appreciated even by the dullest. So frankly, so boldly
had the conception never yet been formulated, that the non-possessing
class exists solely for the purpose of being exploited, and of starving
when the property-holders can no longer make use of it. Hence it is that
this new Poor Law has contributed so greatly to accelerate the labour
movement, and especially to spread Chartism; and, as it is carried out
most extensively in the country, it facilitates the development of the
proletarian movement which is arising in the agricultural districts. Let
me add that a similar law in force in Ireland since 1838, affords a
similar refuge for eighty thousand paupers. Here, too, it has made
itself disliked, and would have been intensely hated if it had attained
anything like the same importance as in England. But what difference
does the ill-treatment of eighty thousand proletarians make in a country
in which there are two and a half millions of them? In Scotland there
are, with local exceptions, no Poor Laws.
I hope that after this picture of the New Poor Law and its results, no
word which I have said of the English bourgeoisie will be thought too
stern. In this public measure, in which it acts _in corpore_ as the
ruling power, it formulates its real intentions, reveals the animus of
those smaller transactions with the proletariat, of which the blame
apparently attaches to individuals. And that this measure did not
originate with any one section of the bourgeoisie, but enjoys the
approval of the whole class, is proved by the Parliamentary debates of
1844. The Liberal party had enacted the New Poor Law; the Conservative
party, with its Prime Minister Peel at the head, defends it, and only
alters some petty-fogging trifles in the Poor Law Amendment Bill of 1844.
A Liberal majority carried the bill, a Conservative majority approved it,
and the "Noble Lords" gave their consent each time. Thus is the
expulsion of the proletariat from State and society outspoken, thus is it
publicly proclaimed that proletarians are not human beings, and do not
deserve to be treated as such. Let us leave it to the proletarians of
the British Empire to re-conquer their human rights. {293}
Such is the state of the British working-class as I have come to know it
in the course of twenty-one months, through the medium of my own eyes,
and through official and other trustworthy reports. And when I call this
condition, as I have frequently enough done in the foregoing pages, an
utterly unbearable one, I am not alone in so doing. As early as 1833,
Gaskell declared that he despaired of a peaceful issue, and that a
revolution can hardly fail to follow. In 1838, Carlyle explained
Chartism and the revolutionary activity of the working-men as arising out
of the misery in which they live, and only wondered that they have sat so
quietly eight long years at the Barmecide feast, at which they have been
regaled by the Liberal bourgeoisie with empty promises. And in 1844 he
declared that the work of organising labour must be begun at once "if
Europe or at least England, is long to remain inhabitable." And the
_Times_, the "first journal of Europe," said in June, 1844: "War to
palaces, peace unto cabins--that is a battle-cry of terror which may come
to resound throughout our country. Let the wealthy beware!"
* * * * *
Meanwhile, let us review once more the chances of the English
bourgeoisie. In the worst case, foreign manufacture, especially that of
America, may succeed in withstanding English competition, even after the
repeal of the Corn Laws, inevitable in the course of a few years. German
manufacture is now making great efforts, and that of America has
developed with giant strides. America, with its inexhaustible resources,
with its unmeasured coal and iron fields, with its unexampled wealth of
water-power and its navigable rivers, but especially with its energetic,
active population, in comparison with which the English are phlegmatic
dawdlers,--America has in less than ten years created a manufacture which
already competes with England in the coarser cotton goods, has excluded
the English from the markets of North and South America, and holds its
own in China, side by side with England. If any country is adapted to
holding a monopoly of manufacture, it is America. Should English
manufacture be thus vanquished--and in the course of the next twenty
years, if the present conditions remain unchanged, this is inevitable--the
majority of the proletariat must become forever superfluous, and has no
other choice than to starve or to rebel. Does the English bourgeoisie
reflect upon this contingency? On the contrary; its favourite economist,
M'Culloch, teaches from his student's desk, that a country so young as
America, which is not even properly populated, cannot carry on
manufacture successfully or dream of competing with an old manufacturing
country like England. It were madness in the Americans to make the
attempt, for they could only lose by it; better far for them to stick to
their agriculture, and when they have brought their whole territory under
the plough, a time may perhaps come for carrying on manufacture with a
profit. So says the wise economist, and the whole bourgeoisie worships
him, while the Americans take possession of one market after another,
while a daring American speculator recently even sent a shipment of
American cotton goods to England, where they were sold for
re-exportation!
But assuming that England retained the monopoly of manufactures, that its
factories perpetually multiply, what must be the result? The commercial
crises would continue, and grow more violent, more terrible, with the
extension of industry and the multiplication of the proletariat. The
proletariat would increase in geometrical proportion, in consequence of
the progressive ruin of the lower middle-class and the giant strides with
which capital is concentrating itself in the hands of the few; and the
proletariat would soon embrace the whole nation, with the exception of a
few millionaires. But in this development there comes a stage at which
the proletariat perceives how easily the existing power may be
overthrown, and then follows a revolution.
Neither of these supposed conditions may, however, be expected to arise.
The commercial crises, the mightiest levers for all independent
development of the proletariat, will probably shorten the process, acting
in concert with foreign competition and the deepening ruin of the lower
middle-class. I think the people will not endure more than one more
crisis. The next one, in 1846 or 1847, will probably bring with it the
repeal of the Corn Laws {296} and the enactment of the Charter. What
revolutionary movements the Charter may give rise to remains to be seen.
But, by the time of the next following crisis, which, according to the
analogy of its predecessors, must break out in 1852 or 1853, unless
delayed perhaps by the repeal of the Corn Laws or hastened by other
influences, such as foreign competition--by the time this crisis arrives,
the English people will have had enough of being plundered by the
capitalists and left to starve when the capitalists no longer require
their services. If, up to that time, the English bourgeoisie does not
pause to reflect--and to all appearance it certainly will not do so--a
revolution will follow with which none hitherto known can be compared.
The proletarians, driven to despair, will seize the torch which Stephens
has preached to them; the vengeance of the people will come down with a
wrath of which the rage of 1793 gives no true idea. The war of the poor
against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged. Even the union of a
part of the bourgeoisie with the proletariat, even a general reform of
the bourgeoisie, would not help matters. Besides, the change of heart of
the bourgeoisie could only go as far as a lukewarm _juste-milieu_; the
more determined, uniting with the workers, would only form a new Gironde,
and succumb in the course of the mighty development. The prejudices of a
whole class cannot be laid aside like an old coat: least of all, those of
the stable, narrow, selfish English bourgeoisie. These are all
inferences which may be drawn with the greatest certainty: conclusions,
the premises for which are undeniable facts, partly of historical
development, partly facts inherent in human nature. Prophecy is nowhere
so easy as in England, where all the component elements of society are
clearly defined and sharply separated. The revolution must come; it is
already too late to bring about a peaceful solution; but it can be made
more gentle than that prophesied in the foregoing pages. This depends,
however, more upon the development of the proletariat than upon that of
the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the proletariat absorbs socialistic
and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed,
revenge, and savagery. Communism stands, in principle, above the breach
between bourgeoisie and proletariat, recognises only its historic
significance for the present, but not its justification for the future:
wishes, indeed, to bridge over this chasm, to do away with all class
antagonisms. Hence it recognises as justified, so long as the struggle
exists, the exasperation of the proletariat towards its oppressors as a
necessity, as the most important lever for a labour movement just
beginning; but it goes beyond this exasperation, because Communism is a
question of humanity and not of the workers alone. Besides, it does not
occur to any Communist to wish to revenge himself upon individuals, or to
believe that, in general, the single bourgeois can act otherwise, under
existing circumstances, than he does act. English Socialism, _i.e_.
Communism, rests directly upon the irresponsibility of the individual.
Thus the more the English workers absorb communistic ideas, the more
superfluous becomes their present bitterness, which, should it continue
so violent as at present, could accomplish nothing; and the more their
action against the bourgeoisie will lose its savage cruelty. If, indeed,
it were possible to make the whole proletariat communistic before the war
breaks out, the end would be very peaceful; but that is no longer
possible, the time has gone by. Meanwhile, I think that before the
outbreak of open, declared war of the poor against the rich, there will
be enough intelligent comprehension of the social question among the
proletariat, to enable the communistic party, with the help of events, to
conquer the brutal element of the revolution and prevent a "Ninth
Thermidor." In any case, the experience of the French will not have been
undergone in vain, and most of the Chartist leaders are, moreover,
already Communists. And as Communism stands above the strife between
bourgeoisie and proletariat, it will be easier for the better elements of
the bourgeoisie (which are, however, deplorably few, and can look for
recruits only among the rising generation) to unite with it than with
purely proletarian Chartism.
If these conclusions have not been sufficiently established in the course
of the present work, there may be other opportunities for demonstrating
that they are necessary consequences of the historical development of
England. But this I maintain, the war of the poor against the rich now
carried on in detail and indirectly will become direct and universal. It
is too late for a peaceful solution. The classes are divided more and
more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the
bitterness intensifies, the guerilla skirmishes become concentrated in
more important battles, and soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the
avalanche in motion. Then, indeed, will the war-cry resound through the
land: "War to the palaces, peace to the cottages!"--but then it will be
too late for the rich to beware.