Transcribed from the January 1943 George Allen & Unwin reprint
of the March 1892 edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

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

by
FREDERICK ENGELS

Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky

London

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD

Museum Street

p. vPREFACE

The book, an English translation of which is here republished, was
first issued in Germany in 1845.  The author, at that time, was
young, twenty-four years of age, and his production bears the stamp
of his youth with its good and its faulty features, of neither of which
he feels ashamed.  It was translated into English, in 1885, by
an American lady, Mrs. F. Kelley Wischnewetzky, and published in the
following year in New York.  The American edition being as good
as exhausted, and having never been extensively circulated on this side
of the Atlantic, the present English copyright edition is brought out
with the full consent of all parties interested.

For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix were written
in English by the author.  The first had little to do with the
book itself; it discussed the American Working-Class Movement of the
day, and is, therefore, here omitted as irrelevant, the second—the
original preface—is largely made use of in the present introductory
remarks.

The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many
respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned.  Though
not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law
of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic
Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices
of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. 
The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative
in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him
so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds
to be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin;
and, again, the commission p. viagent,
who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or Christian, after frequenting
the Manchester Exchange for a few months, finds out that, in order to
buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightly
more refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are considered
the acme of cleverness in his native country.  The fact is, those
tricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money,
and where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed,
purely as a means of saving time and trouble.  And it is the same
with the relation between the manufacturer and his “hands.”

The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a
new industrial epoch.  The repeal of the Corn Laws and the financial
reforms subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce all
the elbow-room they had asked for.  The discovery of the Californian
and Australian gold-fields followed in rapid succession.  The Colonial
markets developed at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing
English manufactured goods.  In India millions of hand-weavers
were finally crushed out by the Lancashire power-loom.  China was
more and more being opened up.  Above all, the United States—then,
commercially speaking, a mere colonial market, but by far the biggest
of them all—underwent an economic development astounding even
for that rapidly progressive country.  And, finally, the new means
of communication introduced at the close of the preceding period—railways
and ocean steamers—were now worked out on an international scale;
they realised actually, what had hitherto existed only potentially,
a world-market.  This world-market, at first, was composed of a
number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries grouped around
one manufacturing centre—England—which consumed the greater
part of their surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return with
the greater part of their requirements in manufactured articles. 
No wonder England’s industrial progress was colossal and unparalleled,
and such that the status of 1844 now appears to us as comparatively
primitive and insignificant.  And in proportion as this increase
took place, in the same proportion did manufacturing industry become
apparently p. viimoralised. 
The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty
thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay.  Trade had outgrown
such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising
for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the
competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever
they could.  Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’
Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced—much
against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite
as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his
less favoured brother.  Moreover, the larger the concern, and with
it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused
by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came
over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid
unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’
Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes—at opportune times—a
powerful means to serve their own ends.  The largest manufacturers,
formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now
the foremost to preach peace and harmony.  And for a very good
reason.  The fact is, that all these concessions to justice and
philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration
of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions
of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances;
and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors,
who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites.  Thus
the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system
has of itself sufficed—at least in the leading industries, for
in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case—to
do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s
fate during its earlier stages.  And thus it renders more and more
evident the great central fact, that the cause of the miserable condition
of the working-class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances,
but in the Capitalistic System itself.  The wage-worker
sells to the capitalist his labour-force for a certain daily sum. 
After a p. viiifew
hours’ work he has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance
of his contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete
his working-day; and the value he produces during these additional hours
of surplus labour is surplus value, which cost the capitalist nothing,
but yet goes into his pocket.  That is the basis of the system
which tends more and more to split up civilised society into a few Rothschilds
and Vanderbilts, the owners of all the means of production and subsistence,
on the one hand, and an immense number of wage-workers, the owners of
nothing but their labour-force, on the other.  And that this result
is caused, not by this or that secondary grievance, but by the system
itself—this fact has been brought out in bold relief by the development
of Capitalism in England since 1847.

Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and
other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity
of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself
and family from falling victims to such diseases.  Accordingly,
the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared
or have been made less conspicuous.  Drainage has been introduced
or improved, wide avenues have been opened out athwart many of the worst
“slums” I had to describe.  “Little Ireland”
has disappeared, and the “Seven Dials” are next on the list
for sweeping away.  But what of that?  Whole districts which
in 1844 I could describe as almost idyllic, have now, with the growth
of the towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort,
and misery.  Only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longer
tolerated.  The bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art
of hiding the distress of the working-class.  But that, in regard
to their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place, is amply
proved by the Report of the Royal Commission “on the Housing of
the Poor,” 1885.  And this is the case, too, in other respects. 
Police regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but they can
only hedge in the distress of the workers, they cannot remove it.

But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist
exploitation described by me, other countries have only p. ixjust
attained it.  France, Germany, and especially America, are the
formidable competitors who, at this moment—as foreseen by me in
1844—are more and more breaking up England’s industrial
monopoly.  Their manufactures are young as compared with those
of England, but increasing at a far more rapid rate than the latter;
and, curious enough, they have at this moment arrived at about the same
phase of development as English manufacture in 1844.  With regard
to America, the parallel is indeed most striking.  True, the external
surroundings in which the working-class is placed in America are very
different, but the same economical laws are at work, and the results,
if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same order. 
Hence we find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-day,
for a legal limitation of the working-time, especially of women and
children in factories; we find the truck-system in full blossom, and
the cottage-system, in rural districts, made use of by the “bosses”
as a means of domination over the workers.  When I received, in
1886, the American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000
Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district, I seemed but
to read my own description of the North of England colliers’ strike
of 1844.  The same cheating of the workpeople by false measure;
the same truck-system; the same attempt to break the miners’ resistance
by the capitalists’ last, but crushing, resource,—the eviction
of the men out of their dwellings, the cottages owned by the companies.

I have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to
date, or to point out in detail all the changes that have taken place
since 1844.  And for two reasons: Firstly, to do this properly,
the size of the book must be about doubled; and, secondly, the first
volume of “Das Kapital,” by Karl Marx, an English translation
of which is before the public, contains a very ample description of
the state of the British working-class, as it was about 1865, that is
to say, at the time when British industrial prosperity reached its culminating
point.  I should, then, have been obliged again to go over the
ground already covered by Marx’s celebrated work.

p. xIt
will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint
of this book—philosophical, economical, political—does not
exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day.  Modern international
Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost exclusively
through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844.  My
book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and
as the human embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches
of our fish-ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of
the descent of modern Socialism from one of its ancestors,—German
philosophy.  Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that Communism
is not a mere party doctrine of the working-class, but a theory compassing
the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class,
from its present narrow conditions.  This is true enough in the
abstract, but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. 
So long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any
emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working-class,
so long the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out
by the working-class alone.  The French bourgeois of 1789, too,
declared the emancipation of the bourgeoisie to be the emancipation
of the whole human race; but the nobility and clergy would not see it;
the proposition—though for the time being, with respect to feudalism,
an abstract historical truth—soon became a mere sentimentalism,
and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary
struggle.  And to-day, the very people who, from the “impartiality”
of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism soaring
high above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to
reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending
classes—these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn
a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers,—wolves
in sheeps’ clothing.

The recurring period of the great industrial crisis is stated in
the text as five years.  This was the period apparently indicated
by the course of events from 1825 to 1842.  But the industrial
history from 1842 to 1868 has shown that the real period is one p. xiof
ten years; that the intermediate revulsions were secondary, and tended
more and more to disappear.  Since 1868 the state of things has
changed again, of which more anon.

I have taken care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies,
amongst others that of an imminent social revolution in England, which
my youthful ardour induced me to venture upon.  The wonder is,
not that a good many of them proved wrong, but that so many of them
have proved right, and that the critical state of English trade, to
be brought on by Continental and especially American competition, which
I then foresaw—though in too short a period—has now actually
come to pass.  In this respect I can, and am bound to, bring the
book up to date, by placing here an article which I published in the
London Commonweal of March 1, 1885, under the heading: “England
in 1845 and in 1885.”  It gives at the same time a short
outline of the history of the English working-class during these forty
years, and is as follows:

“Forty years ago England stood face to face with
a crisis, solvable to all appearances by force only.  The immense
and rapid development of manufactures had outstripped the extension
of foreign markets and the increase of demand.  Every ten years
the march of industry was violently interrupted by a general commercial
crash, followed, after a long period of chronic depression, by a few
short years of prosperity, and always ending in feverish over-production
and consequent renewed collapse.  The capitalist class clamoured
for Free Trade in corn, and threatened to enforce it by sending the
starving population of the towns back to the country districts whence
they came, to invade them, as John Bright said, not as paupers begging
for bread, but as an army quartered upon the enemy.  The working
masses of the towns demanded their share of political power—the
People’s Charter; they were supported by the majority of the small
trading class, and the only difference between the two was whether the
Charter should be carried by physical or by moral force.  Then
came the commercial crash of 1847 and the Irish famine, and with both
the prospect of revolution

p. xii“The
French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle-class.  The
Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen frightened
the small middle-class of England and disorganised the narrower, but
more matter-of-fact movement of the English working-class.  At
the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full
strength, it collapsed internally, before even it collapsed externally
on the 10th of April, 1848.  The action of the working-class was
thrust into the background.  The capitalist class triumphed along
the whole line.

“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole
capitalist class over the landed aristocracy.  The repeal of the
Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over
the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too,
whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest,—bankers,
stock-jobbers, fund-holders, etc.  Free Trade meant the re-adjustment
of the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of England
in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists—the
class which now represented the nation.  And they set about this
task with a will.  Every obstacle to industrial production was
mercilessly removed.  The tariff and the whole system of taxation
were revolutionised.  Everything was made subordinate to one end,
but that end of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist:
the cheapening of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living
of the working-class; the reduction of the cost of raw material, and
the keeping down—if not as yet the bringing down—of
wages.  England was to become the ‘workshop of the world;’
all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already
was,—markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return
with raw materials and food.  England the great manufacturing centre
of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and
cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. 
What a glorious prospect!

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

p. xiv“The
Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its predecessors, has had
strange bedfellows and successors.  The very people who put it
down have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary executors. 
Louis Napoleon had to create an independent and united Italy, Bismarck
had to revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian independence,
and the English manufacturers had to enact the People’s Charter.

“For England, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing
capitalists were at first startling.  Trade revived and extended
to a degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous
astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing compared
with the immense mass of productions of the twenty years from 1850 to
1870, with the overwhelming figures of exports and imports, of wealth
accumulated in the hands of capitalists and of human working power concentrated
in the large towns.  The progress was indeed interrupted, as before,
by a crisis every ten years, in 1857 as well as in 1866; but these revulsions
were now considered as natural, inevitable events, which must be fatalistically
submitted to, and which always set themselves right in the end.

“And the condition of the working-class during this period? 
There was temporary improvement even for the great mass.  But this
improvement always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the
great body of the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of
bands by new machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural population,
now, too, more and more superseded by machines.

“A permanent improvement can be recognised for two ‘protected’
sections only of the working-class.  Firstly, the factory hands. 
The fixing by Act of Parliament of their working-day within relatively
rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed
them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration. 
They are undoubtedly better off than before 1848.  The best proof
is that, out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers
in their own interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production. 
p. xvYou
can never get the masters to agree to work ‘short time,’
let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the workpeople
to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man.

“Secondly, the great Trades’ Unions.  They are the
organisations of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men
predominates, or is alone applicable.  Here the competition neither
of women and children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised
strength.  The engineers, the carpenters, and joiners, the bricklayers,
are each of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the
bricklayers and bricklayers’ labourers, they can even successfully
resist the introduction of machinery.  That their condition has
remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof
of this is in the fact, that for more than fifteen years not only have
their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon
exceedingly good terms.  They form an aristocracy among the working-class;
they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable
position, and they accept it as final.  They are the model working-men
of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice people indeed
nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and
for the whole capitalist class in general.

“But as to the great mass of working-people, the state of misery
and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower. 
The East End of London is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and
desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical
and moral, when in work.  And so in all other large towns—abstraction
made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller
towns and in the agricultural districts.  The law which reduces
the value of labour-power to the value of the necessary means
of subsistence, and the other law which reduces its average price,
as a rule, to the minimum of those means of subsistence, these laws
act upon them with the irresistible force of an automatic engine, which
crushes them between its wheels.

“This, then, was the position created by the Free Trade policy
of 1847, and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing p. xvicapitalists. 
But, then, a change came.  The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed
by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. 
We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was
due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state
of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry.  Neither will
the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to
which we used to be entitled before and after it.  A dull depression,
a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been
living in for nearly ten years.  How is this?

“The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that
England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural
world.  And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned
out to be a pure delusion.  The conditions of modern industry,
steam-power and machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel,
especially coals.  And other countries beside England,—France,
Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia,—have coals.  And
the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into
Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English
capitalists.  They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only
for themselves, but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is,
that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century
is irretrievably broken up.

“But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the pivot of
the present social system of England.  Even while that monopoly
lasted, the markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity
of English manufacturers; the decennial crises were the consequence. 
And new markets are getting scarcer every day, so much so that even
the negroes of the Congo are now to be forced into the civilisation
attendant upon Manchester calicos, Staffordshire pottery, and Birmingham
hardware.  How will it be when Continental, and especially American,
goods flow in in ever-increasing quantities—when the predominating
share, still held by British manufacturers, will become reduced from
year to year?  Answer, Free Trade, thou universal panacea.

“I am not the first to point this out.  Already, in 1883,
at the p. xviiSouthport
meeting of the British Association, Mr. Inglis Palgrave, the President
of the Economic section, stated plainly that ‘the days of great
trade profits in England were over, and there was a pause in the progress
of several great branches of industrial labour.  The country
might almost be said to be entering the non-progressive state.’

“But what is to be the consequence?  Capitalist production
cannot stop.  It must go on increasing and expanding, or
it must die.  Even now, the mere reduction of England’s lion’s
share in the supply of the world’s markets means stagnation, distress,
excess of capital here, excess of unemployed workpeople there. 
What will it be when the increase of yearly production is brought to
a complete stop?

“Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles, for capitalistic
production.  Its very basis is the necessity of constant expansion,
and this constant expansion now becomes impossible.  It ends in
a deadlock.  Every year England is brought nearer face to face
with the question: either the country must go to pieces, or capitalist
production must.  Which is it to be?

“And the working-class?  If even under the unparalleled
commercial and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1866, they have had
to undergo such misery; if even then the great bulk of them experienced
at best but a temporary improvement of their condition, while only a
small, privileged, ‘protected’ minority was permanently
benefited, what will it be when this dazzling period is brought finally
to a close; when the present dreary stagnation shall not only become
intensified, but this, its intensified condition, shall become the permanent
and normal state of English trade?

“The truth is this: during the period of England’s industrial
monopoly the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared
in the benefits of the monopoly.  These benefits were very unequally
parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but
even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. 
And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has
been no Socialism in England.  With the breakdown of that monopoly,
the English working-class will p. xviiilose
that privileged position; it will find itself generally—the privileged
and leading minority not excepted—on a level with its fellow-workers
abroad.  And that is the reason why there will be Socialism again
in England.”

To this statement of the case, as that case appeared to me in 1885,
I have but little to add.  Needless to say that to-day there is
indeed “Socialism again in England,” and plenty of it—Socialism
of all shades: Socialism conscious and unconscious, Socialism prosaic
and poetic, Socialism of the working-class and of the middle-class,
for, verily, that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only
become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges
lazily on drawing-room causeuses.  That shows the incurable
fickleness of that terrible despot of “society,” middle-class
public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we Socialists
of a past generation always held that public opinion.  At the same
time, we have no reason to grumble at the symptom itself.

What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among
bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even
more than the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally,
that is the revival of the East End of London.  That immense haunt
of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. 
It has shaken off its torpid despair, has returned to life, and has
become the home of what is called the “New Unionism;” that
is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of “unskilled”
workers.  This organisation may to a great extent adopt the form
of the old Unions of “skilled” workers, but it is essentially
different in character.  The old Unions preserve the traditions
of the time when they were founded, and look upon the wages system as
a once for all established, final fact, which they at best can modify
in the interest of their members.  The new Unions were founded
at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was severely
shaken; their founders and promoters were Socialists either consciously
or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough,
neglected, looked down upon by the working-class aristocracy; but p. xixthey
had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil,
entirely free from the inherited “respectable” bourgeois
prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated “old”
Unionists.  And thus we see now these new Unions taking the lead
of the working-class movement generally, and more and more taking in
tow the rich and proud “old” Unions.

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

F. Engels.
January 11th, 1892.

p. 1
INTRODUCTION

The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second
half of the last century, with the invention of the steam-engine and
of machinery for working cotton.  These inventions gave rise, as
is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered
the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is
only now beginning to be recognised.  England is the classic soil
of this transformation, which was all the mightier, the more silently
it proceeded; and England is, therefore, the classic land of its chief
product also, the proletariat.  Only in England can the proletariat
be studied in all its relations and from all sides.

We have not, here and now, to deal with the history of this revolution,
nor with its vast importance for the present and the future.  Such
a delineation must be reserved for a future, more comprehensive work. 
For the moment, we must limit ourselves to the little that is necessary
for understanding the facts that follow, for comprehending the present
state of the English proletariat.

Before the introduction of machinery, the spinning and weaving of
raw materials was carried on in the working-man’s home. 
Wife and daughter spun the yarn that the father wove or that they sold,
if he did not work it up himself.  These weaver families lived
in the country in the neighbourhood of the towns, and could get on fairly
well with their wages, because the home market was almost the only one,
and the crushing power of competition that p. 2came
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 p. 3the
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 p. 4merely
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.  p. 5Moreover,
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 p. 6on
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 p. 7driven
by machinery from one position after another.  The consequences
of this were, on the one hand, a rapid fall in price of all manufactured
commodities, prosperity of commerce and manufacture, the conquest of
nearly all the unprotected foreign markets, the sudden multiplication
of capital and national wealth; on the other hand, a still more rapid
multiplication of the proletariat, the destruction of all property-holding
and of all security of employment for the working-class, demoralisation,
political excitement, and all those facts so highly repugnant to Englishmen
in comfortable circumstances, which we shall have to consider in the
following pages.  Having already seen what a transformation in
the social condition of the lower classes a single such clumsy machine
as the jenny had wrought, there is no cause for surprise as to that
which a complete and interdependent system of finely adjusted machinery
has brought about, machinery which receives raw material and turns out
woven goods.

Meanwhile, let us trace the development of English manufacture {7}
somewhat more minutely, beginning with the cotton industry.  In
the years 1771-1775, there were annually imported into England rather
less than 5,000,000 pounds of raw cotton; in the year 1841 there were
imported 528,000,000 pounds, and the import for 1844 will reach at least
600,000,000 pounds.  In 1834 England exported 556,000,000 yards
of woven cotton goods, 76,500,000 pounds of cotton yarn, and cotton
hosiery of the value of £1,200,000.  In the same year over
8,000,000 mule spindles were at work, 110,000 power and 250,000 hand-looms,
throstle spindles not included, in the service of the cotton industry;
and, according to MacCulloch’s reckoning, nearly a million and
a half human beings were supported by this branch, of whom but 220,000
worked in the mills; the power used in these mills was steam, equivalent
to 33,000 horse-power, and water, equivalent to 11,000 horse-power. 
At present these figures are far from adequate, and it may be safely
assumed that, in the year 1845, p. 8the
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 p. 9growth
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 p. 10directly
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 p. 11machinery
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
p. 12only. 
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 p. 13to
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 p. 14Highlanders
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 p. 15Sheffield);
Leeds with Hull and Newcastle (via York).  There are also many
minor lines building or projected, which will soon make it possible
to travel from Edinburgh to London in one day.

As it had transformed the means of communication by land, so did
the introduction of steam revolutionise travel by sea.  The first
steamboat was launched in 1807, in the Hudson, in North America; the
first in the British empire, in 1811, on the Clyde.  Since then,
more than 600 have been built in England; and in 1836 more than 500
were plying to and from British ports.

Such, in brief, is the history of English industrial development
in the past sixty years, a history which has no counterpart in the annals
of humanity.  Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like
every other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin
but proportionally large agricultural population.  To-day
it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half
million inhabitants; with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry
that supplies the world, and produces almost everything by means of
the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense
population, of which two-thirds are employed in trade and commerce,
and composed of classes wholly different; forming, in fact, with other
customs and other needs, a different nation from the England of those
days.  The industrial revolution is of the same importance for
England as the political revolution for France, and the philosophical
revolution for Germany; and the difference between England in 1760 and
in 1844 is at least as great as that between France, under the ancien
régime and during the revolution of July.  But the mightiest
result of this industrial transformation is the English proletariat.

We have already seen how the proletariat was called into existence
by the introduction of machinery.  The rapid extension of manufacture
demanded hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the
agricultural districts to the towns.  Population multiplied enormously,
and nearly all the increase took place in the proletariat.  Further,
Ireland had entered upon an orderly development only since the beginning
of the eighteenth century.  There, too, the population, more than
decimated by English p. 16cruelty
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 p. 17forces
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, p. 18must
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.

p. 19THE
INDUSTRIAL PROLETARIAT.

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

Since, however, at the present moment, pretty much the whole industrial
proletariat is involved in the movement, and the condition of the separate
sections has much in common, because they all are industrial, we shall
have first to examine the condition p. 20of
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 p. 21consequence. 
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 p. 22stable
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.

p. 23THE
GREAT TOWNS.

A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together
without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest
hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within
reach, is a strange thing.  This colossal centralisation, this
heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point,
has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold;
has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the
giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover
the Thames.  I know nothing more imposing than the view which the
Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. 
The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from
Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever
closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains
in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers
shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man
cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England’s
greatness before he sets foot upon English soil. {23}

But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. 
After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway
with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles,
after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first
time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities
of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation
which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within
them have remained p. 24inactive,
have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully
and multiply through union with those of others.  The very turmoil
of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human
nature rebels.  The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks
crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same
qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? 
And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by
the same means?  And still they crowd by one another as though
they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their
only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the
pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while
it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. 
The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private
interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more these individuals
are crowded together, within a limited space.  And, however much
one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow
self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere,
it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here
in the crowding of the great city.  The dissolution of mankind
into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of
atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against
all, is here openly declared.  Just as in Stirner’s recent
book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits
the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker
under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything
for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence
remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds,
is true of all great towns.  Everywhere barbarous indifference,
hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere
social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere
reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless,
so openly avowed that one shrinks p. 25before
the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here
undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs
together.

Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence
and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried
on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall
upon the poor.  For him no man has the slightest concern. 
Cast into the whirlpool, he must struggle through as well as he can. 
If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., if the bourgeoisie does
him the favour to enrich itself by means of him, wages await him which
scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can get no work
he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which
case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive
manner.  During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty
persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances,
and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the
plain truth in the matter.  Let the testimony of the witnesses
be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury
is selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the
frightful verdict, death from starvation.  The bourgeoisie dare
not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation. 
But indirectly, far more than directly, many have died of starvation,
where long continued want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal
illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might
otherwise have remained inoperative, brought on severe illness and death. 
The English working-men call this “social murder,” and accuse
our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually.  Are
they wrong?

True, it is only individuals who starve, but what security has the
working-man that it may not be his turn to-morrow?  Who assures
him employment, who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason
his lord and master discharges him to-morrow, he can struggle along
with those dependent upon him, until he may find some one else “to
give him bread?”  Who guarantees that willingness to work
shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, p. 26industry,
thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie,
are really his road to happiness?  No one.  He knows that
he has something to-day, and that it does not depend upon himself whether
he shall have something to-morrow.  He knows that every breeze
that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade may
hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he has temporarily
saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep
his head above water.  He knows that, though he may have the means
of living to-day, it is very uncertain whether he shall to-morrow.

Meanwhile, let us proceed to a more detailed investigation of the
position, in which the social war has placed the non-possessing class. 
Let us see what pay for his work society does give the working-man in
the form of dwelling, clothing, food, what sort of subsistence it grants
those who contribute most to the maintenance of society; and, first,
let us consider the dwellings.

Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is
crowded together.  True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys
close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory
has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier
classes, it may struggle along as it can.  These slums are pretty
equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses
in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one or two-storied cottages
in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always
irregularly built.  These houses of three or four rooms and a kitchen
form, throughout England, some parts of London excepted, the general
dwellings of the working-class.  The streets are generally unpaved,
rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers
or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead.  Moreover,
ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the
whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a
small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men’s
quarters may readily be imagined.  Further, the streets serve as
drying grounds in fine weather; lines are stretched across from house
to house, and hung with wet clothing.

p. 27Let
us investigate some of the slums in their order.  London comes
first, and in London the famous rookery of St. Giles which is now, at
last, about to be penetrated by a couple of broad streets.  St.
Giles is in the midst of the most populous part of the town, surrounded
by broad, splendid avenues in which the gay world of London idles about,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Oxford Street, Regent Street, of Trafalgar
Square and the Strand.  It is a disorderly collection of tall,
three or four-storied houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets,
in which there is quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of
the town, except that, here, people of the working-class only are to
be seen.  A vegetable market is held in the street, baskets with
vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and hardly fit to use, obstruct
the sidewalk still further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers’
stalls, arises a horrible smell.  The houses are occupied from
cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is
such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them. 
But all this is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow
courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between
the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. 
Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling,
door-posts and window-frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed
together, or altogether wanting in this thieves’ quarter, where
no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal.  Heaps of garbage
and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before
the doors gather in stinking pools.  Here live the poorest of the
poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution
indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction,
and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which
surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of
their power to resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and
evil surroundings.

Nor is St. Giles the only London slum.  In the immense tangle
of streets, there are hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts lined
with houses too bad for anyone to live in, who can still spend p. 28anything
whatsoever upon a dwelling fit for human beings.  Close to the
splendid houses of the rich such a lurking-place of the bitterest poverty
may often be found.  So, a short time ago, on the occasion of a
coroner’s inquest, a region close to Portman Square, one of the
very respectable squares, was characterised as an abode “of a
multitude of Irish demoralised by poverty and filth.”  So,
too, may be found in streets, such as Long Acre and others, which, though
not fashionable, are yet “respectable,” a great number of
cellar dwellings out of which puny children and half-starved, ragged
women emerge into the light of day.  In the immediate neighbourhood
of Drury Lane Theatre, the second in London, are some of the worst streets
of the whole metropolis, Charles, King, and Park Streets, in which the
houses are inhabited from cellar to garret exclusively by poor families. 
In the parishes of St. John and St. Margaret there lived in 1840, according
to the Journal of the Statistical Society, 5,366 working-men’s
families in 5,294 “dwellings” (if they deserve the name!),
men, women, and children thrown together without distinction of age
or sex, 26,830 persons all told; and of these families three-fourths
possessed but one room.  In the aristocratic parish of St. George,
Hanover Square, there lived, according to the same authority, 1,465
working-men’s families, nearly 6,000 persons, under similar conditions,
and here, too, more than two-thirds of the whole number crowded together
at the rate of one family in one room.  And how the poverty of
these unfortunates, among whom even thieves find nothing to steal, is
exploited by the property-holding class in lawful ways!  The abominable
dwellings in Drury Lane, just mentioned, bring in the following rents:
two cellar dwellings, 3s.; one room, ground-floor, 4s.; second-storey,
4s. 6d.; third-floor, 4s.; garret-room, 3s. weekly, so that the starving
occupants of Charles Street alone, pay the house-owners a yearly tribute
of £2,000, and the 5,336 families above mentioned in Westminster,
a yearly rent of £40,000.

The most extensive working-people’s district lies east of the
Tower in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, where the greatest masses of
London working-people live.  Let us hear Mr. G. Alston, p. 29preacher
of St. Philip’s, Bethnal Green, on the condition of his parish. 
He says:

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

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

On the occasion of an inquest held Nov. 14th, 1843, by Mr. Carter,
coroner for Surrey, upon the body of Ann Galway, aged 45 years, the
newspapers related the following particulars concerning the deceased:
She had lived at No. 3 White Lion Court, Bermondsey Street, London,
with her husband and a nineteen-year-old son in a little room, in which
neither a bedstead nor any other furniture was to be seen.  She
lay dead beside her son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered
over her almost naked body, there being neither sheet nor coverlet. 
The feathers stuck so fast over the whole body that the physician could
not examine the corpse until it was cleansed, and then found it starved
and p. 30scarred
from the bites of vermin.  Part of the floor of the room was torn
up, and the hole used by the family as a privy.

On Monday, Jan. 15th, 1844, two boys were brought before the police
magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and
immediately devoured a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop. 
The magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and
received the following details from the policeman: The mother of the
two boys was the widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had
had a very hard time since the death of her husband, to provide for
her nine children.  She lived at No. 2 Pool’s Place, Quaker
Court, Spitalfields, in the utmost poverty.  When the policeman
came to her, he found her with six of her children literally huddled
together in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed
chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken
cup, and a small dish.  On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire,
and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s
apron, which served the whole family as a bed.  For bed clothing
they had only their scanty day clothing.  The poor woman told him
that she had been forced to sell her bedstead the year before to buy
food.  Her bedding she had pawned with the victualler for food. 
In short, everything had gone for food.  The magistrate ordered
the woman a considerable provision from the poor-box.

In February, 1844, Theresa Bishop, a widow 60 years old, was recommended,
with her sick daughter, aged 26, to the compassion of the police magistrate
in Marlborough Street.  She lived at No. 5 Brown Street, Grosvenor
Square, in a small back room no larger than a closet, in which there
was not one single piece of furniture.  In one corner lay some
rags upon which both slept; a chest served as table and chair. 
The mother earned a little by charring.  The owner of the house
said that they had lived in this way since May, 1843, had gradually
sold or pawned everything that they had, and had still never paid any
rent.  The magistrate assigned them £1 from the poor-box.

I am far from asserting that all London working-people live
in such want as the foregoing three families.  I know very well
that p. 31ten
are somewhat better off, where one is so totally trodden under foot
by society; but I assert that thousands of industrious and worthy people—far
worthier and more to be respected than all the rich of London—do
find themselves in a condition unworthy of human beings; and that every
proletarian, everyone, without exception, is exposed to a similar fate
without any fault of his own and in spite of every possible effort.

But in spite of all this, they who have some kind of a shelter are
fortunate, fortunate in comparison with the utterly homeless. 
In London fifty thousand human beings get up every morning, not knowing
where they are to lay their heads at night.  The luckiest of this
multitude, those who succeed in keeping a penny or two until evening,
enter a lodging-house, such as abound in every great city, where they
find a bed.  But what a bed!  These houses are filled with
beds from cellar to garret, four, five, six beds in a room; as many
as can be crowded in.  Into every bed four, five, or six human
beings are piled, as many as can be packed in, sick and well, young
and old, drunk and sober, men and women, just as they come, indiscriminately. 
Then come strife, blows, wounds, or, if these bedfellows agree, so much
the worse; thefts are arranged and things done which our language, grown
more humane than our deeds, refuses to record.  And those who cannot
pay for such a refuge?  They sleep where they find a place, in
passages, arcades, in corners where the police and the owners leave
them undisturbed.  A few individuals find their way to the refuges
which are managed, here and there, by private charity, others sleep
on the benches in the parks close under the windows of Queen Victoria. 
Let us hear the London Times:

“It appears from the report of the proceedings
at Marlborough Street Police Court in our columns of yesterday, that
there is an average number of 50 human beings of all ages, who huddle
together in the parks every night, having no other shelter than what
is supplied by the trees and a few hollows of the embankment. 
Of these, the majority are young girls who have been seduced from the
country by the soldiers and turned loose on the world in all the destitution
of friendless penury, and all the recklessness of early vice.

p. 32“This
is truly horrible!  Poor there must be everywhere.  Indigence
will find its way and set up its hideous state in the heart of a great
and luxurious city.  Amid the thousand narrow lanes and by-streets
of a populous metropolis there must always, we fear, be much suffering—much
that offends the eye—much that lurks unseen.

“But that within the precincts of wealth, gaiety, and fashion,
nigh the regal grandeur of St. James, close on the palatial splendour
of Bayswater, on the confines of the old and new aristocratic quarters,
in a district where the cautious refinement of modern design has refrained
from creating one single tenement for poverty; which seems, as it were,
dedicated to the exclusive enjoyment of wealth, that there want,
and famine, and disease, and vice should stalk in all their kindred
horrors, consuming body by body, soul, by soul!

“It is indeed a monstrous state of things!  Enjoyment
the most absolute, that bodily ease, intellectual excitement, or the
more innocent pleasures of sense can supply to man’s craving,
brought in close contact with the most unmitigated misery!  Wealth,
from its bright saloons, laughing—an insolently heedless laugh—at
the unknown wounds of want!  Pleasure, cruelly but unconsciously
mocking the pain that moans below!  All contrary things mocking
one another—all contrary, save the vice which tempts and the vice
which is tempted!

“But let all men remember this—that within the most courtly
precincts of the richest city of God’s earth, there may be found,
night after night, winter after winter, women—young in years—old
in sin and suffering—outcasts from society—rotting
from famine, filth, and disease.  Let them remember this,
and learn not to theorise but to act.  God knows, there is much
room for action nowadays.” {32}

I have referred to the refuges for the homeless.  How greatly
overcrowded these are, two examples may show.  A newly erected
Refuge for the Houseless in Upper Ogle Street, that can shelter three
hundred persons every night, has received since its opening, January
27th to March 17th, 1844, 2,740 persons for one or more nights; and,
although the season was growing more favourable, the number of applicants
in this, as well as in the asylums of Whitecross Street and Wapping,
was strongly on the increase, p. 33and
a crowd of the homeless had to be sent away every night for want of
room.  In another refuge, the Central Asylum in Playhouse Yard,
there were supplied on an average 460 beds nightly, during the first
three months of the year 1844, 6,681 persons being sheltered, and 96,141
portions of bread were distributed.  Yet the committee of directors
declare this institution began to meet the pressure of the needy to
a limited extent only when the Eastern Asylum also was opened.

Let us leave London and examine the other great cities of the three
kingdoms in their order.  Let us take Dublin first, a city the
approach to which from the sea is as charming as that of London is imposing. 
The Bay of Dublin is the most beautiful of the whole British Island
Kingdom, and is even compared by the Irish with the Bay of Naples. 
The city, too, possesses great attractions, and its aristocratic districts
are better and more tastefully laid out than those of any other British
city.  By way of compensation, however, the poorer districts of
Dublin are among the most hideous and repulsive to be seen in the world. 
True, the Irish character, which, under some circumstances, is comfortable
only in the dirt, has some share in this; but as we find thousands of
Irish in every great city in England and Scotland, and as every poor
population must gradually sink into the same uncleanliness, the wretchedness
of Dublin is nothing specific, nothing peculiar to Dublin, but something
common to all great towns.  The poor quarters of Dublin are extremely
extensive, and the filth, the uninhabitableness of the houses and the
neglect of the streets, surpass all description.  Some idea of
the manner in which the poor are here crowded together may be formed
from the fact that, in 1817, according to the report of the Inspector
of Workhouses, {33}
1,318 persons lived in 52 houses with 390 rooms in Barral Street, and
1,997 persons in 71 houses with 393 rooms in and near Church Street;
that:

p. 34“In
this and the adjoining district there exists a multitude of foul courts
and alleys; many cellars receive all their light through the door, while
in not a few the inhabitants sleep upon the bare floor, though most
of them possess bedsteads at least; Nicholson’s Court, for example,
contains twenty-eight wretched little rooms with 151 human beings in
the greatest want, there being but two bedsteads and two blankets to
be found in the whole court.”

The poverty is so great in Dublin, that a single benevolent institution,
the Mendicity Association, gives relief to 2,500 persons or one per
cent. of the population daily, receiving and feeding them for the day
and dismissing them at night.

Dr. Alison describes a similar state of things in Edinburgh, whose
superb situation, which has won it the title of the Modern Athens, and
whose brilliant aristocratic quarter in the New Town, contrast strongly
with the foul wretchedness of the poor in the Old Town.  Alison
asserts that this extensive quarter is as filthy and horrible as the
worst district of Dublin, while the Mendicity Association would have
as great a proportion of needy persons to assist in Edinburgh as in
the Irish capital.  He asserts, indeed, that the poor in Scotland,
especially in Edinburgh and Glasgow, are worse off than in any other
region of the three kingdoms, and that the poorest are not Irish, but
Scotch.  The preacher of the Old Church of Edinburgh, Dr. Lee,
testified in 1836, before the Commission of Religious Instruction, that:

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

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

“These streets,” says an English journal
in an article upon the sanitary condition of the working-people in cities,
“are often so narrow that a person can step from the window of
one house into that of its opposite neighbour, while the houses are
piled so high, storey upon storey, that the light can scarcely penetrate
into the court or alley that lies between.  In this part of the
city there are neither sewers nor other drains, nor even privies belonging
to the houses.  In consequence, all refuse, garbage, and excrements
of at least 50,000 persons are thrown into the gutters every night,
so that, in spite of all street sweeping, a mass of dried filth and
foul vapours are created, which not only offend the sight and smell,
but endanger the health of the inhabitants in the highest degree. 
Is it to be wondered at, that in such localities all considerations
of health, morals, and even the most ordinary decency are utterly neglected? 
On the contrary, all who are more intimately acquainted with the condition
of the inhabitants will testify to the high degree which disease, wretchedness,
and demoralisation p. 36have
here reached.  Society in such districts has sunk to a level indescribably
low and hopeless.  The houses of the poor are generally filthy,
and are evidently never cleansed.  They consist in most cases of
a single room which, while subject to the worst ventilation, is yet
usually kept cold by the broken and badly fitting windows, and is sometimes
damp and partly below ground level, always badly furnished and thoroughly
uncomfortable, a straw-heap often serving the whole family for a bed,
upon which men and women, young and old, sleep in revolting confusion. 
Water can be had only from the public pumps, and the difficulty of obtaining
it naturally fosters all possible filth.”

In the other great seaport towns the prospect is no better. 
Liverpool, with all its commerce, wealth, and grandeur yet treats its
workers with the same barbarity.  A full fifth of the population,
more than 45,000 human beings, live in narrow, dark, damp, badly-ventilated
cellar dwellings, of which there are 7,862 in the city.  Besides
these cellar dwellings there are 2,270 courts, small spaces built up
on all four sides and having but one entrance, a narrow, covered passage-way,
the whole ordinarily very dirty and inhabited exclusively by proletarians. 
Of such courts we shall have more to say when we come to Manchester. 
In Bristol, on one occasion, 2,800 families were visited, of whom 46
per cent. occupied but one room each.

Precisely the same state of things prevails in the factory towns. 
In Nottingham there are in all 11,000 houses, of which between 7,000
and 8,000 are built back to back with a rear parti-wall so that no through
ventilation is possible, while a single privy usually serves for several
houses.  During an investigation made a short time since, many
rows of houses were found to have been built over shallow drains covered
only by the boards of the ground floor.  In Leicester, Derby, and
Sheffield, it is no better.  Of Birmingham, the article above cited
from the Artisan states:

“In the older quarters of the city there are many
bad districts, filthy and neglected, full of stagnant pools and heaps
of refuse.  Courts are very numerous in Birmingham, reaching two
thousand, and containing the greater number of the working-people of
the city.  These courts are usually narrow, muddy, badly ventilated,
p. 37ill-drained,
and lined with eight to twenty houses, which, by reason of having their
rear walls in common, can usually be ventilated from one side only. 
In the background, within the court, there is usually an ash heap or
something of the kind, the filth of which cannot be described. 
It must, however, be observed that the newer courts are more sensibly
built and more decently kept, and that even in the old ones, the cottages
are much less crowded than in Manchester and Liverpool, wherefore Birmingham
shows even during the reign of an epidemic a far smaller mortality than,
for instance, Wolverhampton, Dudley, and Bilston, only a few miles distant. 
Cellar dwellings are unknown, too, in Birmingham, though a few cellars
are misused as workrooms.  The lodging-houses for proletarians
are rather numerous (over four hundred), chiefly in courts in the heart
of the town.  They are nearly all disgustingly filthy and ill-smelling,
the refuge of beggars, thieves, tramps, and prostitutes, who eat, drink,
smoke, and sleep here without the slightest regard to comfort or decency
in an atmosphere endurable to these degraded beings only.”

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

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

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

“I have seen wretchedness in some of its worse
phases both here and upon the Continent, but until I visited the wynds
of Glasgow I did not believe that so much crime, misery, and disease
could exist in any civilised country.  In the lower lodging-houses
ten, twelve, sometimes twenty persons of both sexes, all ages and various
degrees of nakedness, sleep indiscriminately huddled together upon the
floor.  These dwellings are usually so damp, filthy, and ruinous,
that no one could wish to keep his horse in one of them.”

And in another place:

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

p. 39The
great manufacturing district in the centre of the British Islands, the
thickly peopled stretch of West Yorkshire and South Lancashire, with
its numerous factory towns, yields nothing to the other great manufacturing
centres.  The woollen district of the West Riding of Yorkshire
is a charming region, a beautiful green hill country, whose elevations
grow more rugged towards the West until they reach their highest point
in the bold ridge of Blackstone Edge, the watershed between the Irish
Sea and the German Ocean.  The valleys of the Aire, along which
stretches Leeds, and of the Calder, through which the Manchester-Leeds
railway runs, are among the most attractive in England, and are strewn
in all directions with the factories, villages, and towns.  The
houses of rough grey stone look so neat and clean in comparison with
the blackened brick buildings of Lancashire, that it is a pleasure to
look at them.  But on coming into the towns themselves, one finds
little to rejoice over.  Leeds lies as the Artisan describes
it, and as I found confirmed upon examination: “on a gentle slope
that descends into the valley of the Aire.  This stream flows through
the city for about a mile-and-a-half and is exposed to violent floods
during thaws or heavy rain.  The higher western portions of the
city are clean, for such a large town.  But the low-lying districts
along the river and its tributary becks are narrow, dirty, and enough
in themselves to shorten the lives of the inhabitants, especially of
little children.  Added to this, the disgusting state of the working-men’s
districts about Kirkgate, Marsh Lane, Cross Street and Richmond Road,
which is chiefly attributable to their unpaved, drainless streets, irregular
architecture, numerous courts and alleys, and total lack of the most
ordinary means of cleanliness, all this taken together is explanation
enough of the excessive mortality in these unhappy abodes of filthy
misery.  In consequence of the overflows of the Aire” (which,
it must be added, like all other rivers in the service of manufacture,
flows into the city at one end clear and transparent, and flows out
at the other end thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse),
“the houses and cellars are often so full of water that they have
to be pumped out.  And at such times the water rises, even p. 40where
there are sewers, out of them into cellars, {40a}
engenders miasmatic vapours strongly impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen,
and leaves a disgusting residuum highly injurious to health.  During
the spring-floods of 1839 the action of such a choking of the sewers
was so injurious, that, according to the report of the Registrar of
Births and Deaths for this part of the town, there were three deaths
to two births, whereas in the same three months, in every other part
of the town, there were three births to two deaths.  Other thickly
populated districts are without any sewers whatsoever, or so badly provided
as to derive no benefit from them.  In some rows of houses the
cellars are seldom dry; in certain districts there are several streets
covered with soft mud a foot deep.  The inhabitants have made vain
attempts from time to time to repair these streets with shovelfuls of
cinders, but in spite of all such attempts, dung-heaps, and pools of
dirty water emptied from the houses, fill all the holes until wind and
sun dry them up. {40b} 
An ordinary cottage in Leeds occupies not more than five yards square
of land, and usually consists of a cellar, a living room, and one sleeping-room. 
These contracted dwellings, filled day and night with human beings,
are another point dangerous alike to the morals and the health of the
inhabitants.”  And how greatly these cottages are crowded,
the Report on the Health of the Working-Classes, quoted above, bears
testimony: “In Leeds we found brothers and sisters, and lodgers
of both sexes, sharing the parents’ sleeping-room, whence arise
consequences at the contemplation of which human feeling shudders.”

So, too, Bradford, which, but seven miles from Leeds at the junction
of several valleys, lies upon the banks of a small, coal-black, foul-smelling
stream.  On week-days the town is enveloped in a grey cloud of
coal smoke, but on a fine Sunday it offers a superb picture, when viewed
from the surrounding heights.  Yet within reigns the same filth
and discomfort as in Leeds.  The p. 41older
portions of the town are built upon steep hillsides, and are narrow
and irregular.  In the lanes, alleys, and courts lie filth and
debris in heaps; the houses are ruinous, dirty, and miserable,
and in the immediate vicinity of the river and the valley bottom I found
many a one, whose ground-floor, half-buried in the hillside, was totally
abandoned.  In general, the portions of the valley bottom in which
working-men’s cottages have crowded between the tall factories,
are among the worst built and dirtiest districts of the whole town. 
In the newer portions of this, as of every other factory town, the cottages
are more regular, being built in rows, but they share here, too, all
the evils incident to the customary method of providing working-men’s
dwellings, evils of which we shall have occasions to speak more particularly
in discussing Manchester.  The same is true of the remaining towns
of the West Riding, especially of Barnsley, Halifax and Huddersfield. 
The last named, the handsomest by far of all the factory towns of Yorkshire
and Lancashire, by reason of its charming situation and modern architecture,
has yet its bad quarter; for a committee appointed by a meeting of citizens
to survey the town, reported August 5th, 1844: “It is notorious
that in Huddersfield whole streets and many lanes and courts are neither
paved nor supplied with sewers nor other drains; that in them refuse,
debris, and filth of every sort lies accumulating, festers and
rots, and that, nearly everywhere, stagnant water accumulates in pools,
in consequence of which the adjoining dwellings must inevitably be bad
and filthy, so that in such places diseases arise and threaten the health
of the whole town.”

If we cross Blackstone Edge or penetrate it with the railroad, we
enter upon that classic soil on which English manufacture has achieved
its masterwork and from which all labour movements emanate, namely,
South Lancashire with its central city Manchester.  Again we have
beautiful hill country, sloping gently from the watershed westwards
towards the Irish Sea, with the charming green valleys of the Ribble,
the Irwell, the Mersey, and their tributaries, a country which, a hundred
years ago chiefly swamp land, thinly populated, is now sown with towns
and villages, p. 42and
is the most densely populated strip of country in England.  In
Lancashire, and especially in Manchester, English manufacture finds
at once its starting point and its centre.  The Manchester Exchange
is the thermometer for all the fluctuations of trade.  The modern
art of manufacture has reached its perfection in Manchester.  In
the cotton industry of South Lancashire, the application of the forces
of Nature, the superseding of hand labour by machinery (especially by
the power-loom and the self-acting mule), and the division of labour,
are seen at the highest point; and, if we recognise in these three elements
that which is characteristic of modern manufacture, we must confess
that the cotton industry has remained in advance of all other branches
of industry from the beginning down to the present day.  The effects
of modern manufacture upon the working-class must necessarily develop
here most freely and perfectly, and the manufacturing proletariat present
itself in its fullest classic perfection.  The degradation to which
the application of steam-power, machinery and the division of labour
reduce the working-man, and the attempts of the proletariat to rise
above this abasement, must likewise be carried to the highest point
and with the fullest consciousness.  Hence because Manchester is
the classic type of a modern manufacturing town, and because I know
it as intimately as my own native town, more intimately than most of
its residents know it, we shall make a longer stay here.

The towns surrounding Manchester vary little from the central city,
so far as the working-people’s quarters are concerned, except
that the working-class forms, if possible, a larger proportion of their
population.  These towns are purely industrial and conduct all
their business through Manchester upon which they are in every respect
dependent, whence they are inhabited only by working-men and petty tradesmen,
while Manchester has a very considerable commercial population, especially
of commission and “respectable” retail dealers.  Hence
Bolton, Preston, Wigan, Bury, Rochdale, Middleton, Heywood, Oldham,
Ashton, Stalybridge, Stockport, etc., though nearly all towns of thirty,
fifty, seventy to ninety thousand inhabitants, are almost wholly working-people’s
p. 43districts,
interspersed only with factories, a few thoroughfares lined with shops,
and a few lanes along which the gardens and houses of the manufacturers
are scattered like villas.  The towns themselves are badly and
irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking
of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally bright red brick,
turned black with time, which is here the universal building material. 
Cellar dwellings are general here; wherever it is in any way possible,
these subterranean dens are constructed, and a very considerable portion
of the population dwells in them.

Among the worst of these towns after Preston and Oldham is Bolton,
eleven miles north-west of Manchester.  It has, so far as I have
been able to observe in my repeated visits, but one main street, a very
dirty one, Deansgate, which serves as a market, and is even in the finest
weather a dark, unattractive hole in spite of the fact that, except
for the factories, its sides are formed by low one and two-storied houses. 
Here, as everywhere, the older part of the town is especially ruinous
and miserable.  A dark-coloured body of water, which leaves the
beholder in doubt whether it is a brook or a long string of stagnant
puddles, flows through the town and contributes its share to the total
pollution of the air, by no means pure without it.

There is Stockport, too, which lies on the Cheshire side of the Mersey,
but belongs nevertheless to the manufacturing district of Manchester. 
It lies in a narrow valley along the Mersey, so that the streets slope
down a steep hill on one side and up an equally steep one on the other,
while the railway from Manchester to Birmingham passes over a high viaduct
above the city and the whole valley.  Stockport is renowned throughout
the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks,
indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent. 
But far more repulsive are the cottages and cellar dwellings of the
working-class, which stretch in long rows through all parts of the town
from the valley bottom to the crest of the hill.  I do not remember
to have seen so many cellars used as dwellings in any other town of
this district.

p. 44A
few miles north-east of Stockport is Ashton-under-Lyne, one of the newest
factory towns of this region.  It stands on the slope of a hill
at the foot of which are the canal and the river Tame, and is, in general,
built on the newer, more regular plan.  Five or six parallel streets
stretch along the hill intersected at right angles by others leading
down into the valley.  By this method, the factories would be excluded
from the town proper, even if the proximity of the river and the canal-way
did not draw them all into the valley where they stand thickly crowded,
belching forth black smoke from their chimneys.  To this arrangement
Ashton owes a much more attractive appearance than that of most factory
towns; the streets are broad and cleaner, the cottages look new, bright
red, and comfortable.  But the modern system of building cottages
for working-men has its own disadvantages; every street has its concealed
back lane to which a narrow paved path leads, and which is all the dirtier. 
And, although I saw no buildings, except a few on entering, which could
have been more than fifty years old, there are even in Ashton streets
in which the cottages are getting bad, where the bricks in the house-corners
are no longer firm but shift about, in which the walls have cracks and
will not hold the chalk whitewash inside; streets, whose dirty, smoke-begrimed
aspect is nowise different from that of the other towns of the district,
except that in Ashton, this is the exception, not the rule.

A mile eastward lies Stalybridge, also on the Tame.  In coming
over the hill from Ashton, the traveller has, at the top, both right
and left, fine large gardens with superb villa-like houses in their
midst, built usually in the Elizabethan style, which is to the Gothic
precisely what the Anglican Church is to the Apostolic Roman Catholic. 
A hundred paces farther and Stalybridge shows itself in the valley,
in sharp contrast with the beautiful country seats, in sharp contrast
even with the modest cottages of Ashton!  Stalybridge lies in a
narrow, crooked ravine, much narrower even than the valley at Stockport,
and both sides of this ravine are occupied by an irregular group of
cottages, houses, and mills.  On entering, the very first cottages
are narrow, smoke-begrimed, old and ruinous; and as the first houses,
so the whole town.  A few streets p. 45lie
in the narrow valley bottom, most of them run criss-cross, pell-mell,
up hill and down, and in nearly all the houses, by reason of this sloping
situation, the ground floor is half-buried in the earth; and what multitudes
of courts, back lanes, and remote nooks arise out of this confused way
of building may be seen from the hills, whence one has the town, here
and there, in a bird’s-eye view almost at one’s feet. 
Add to this the shocking filth, and the repulsive effect of Stalybridge,
in spite of its pretty surroundings, may be readily imagined.

But enough of these little towns.  Each has its own peculiarities,
but in general, the working-people live in them just as in Manchester. 
Hence I have especially sketched only their peculiar construction, and
would observe, that all more general observations as to the condition
of the labouring population in Manchester are fully applicable to these
surrounding towns as well.

Manchester lies at the foot of the southern slope of a range of hills,
which stretch hither from Oldham, their last peak, Kersallmoor, being
at once the racecourse and the Mons Sacer of Manchester.  Manchester
proper lies on the left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and
the two smaller ones, the Irk and the Medlock, which here empty into
the Irwell.  On the left bank of the Irwell, bounded by a sharp
curve of the river, lies Salford, and farther westward Pendleton; northward
from the Irwell lie Upper and Lower Broughton; northward of the Irk,
Cheetham Hill; south of the Medlock lies Hulme; farther east Chorlton
on Medlock; still farther, pretty well to the east of Manchester, Ardwick. 
The whole assemblage of buildings is commonly called Manchester, and
contains about four hundred thousand inhabitants, rather more than less. 
The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it
for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with
a working-people’s quarter or even with workers, that is, so long
as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks.  This
arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as
well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working-people’s
quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved
for the middle-class; or, if p. 46this
does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of charity. 
Manchester contains, at its heart, a rather extended commercial district,
perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly
of offices and warehouses.  Nearly the whole district is abandoned
by dwellers, and is lonely and deserted at night; only watchmen and
policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns. 
This district is cut through by certain main thoroughfares upon which
the vast traffic concentrates, and in which the ground level is lined
with brilliant shops.  In these streets the upper floors are occupied,
here and there, and there is a good deal of life upon them until late
at night.  With the exception of this commercial district, all
Manchester proper, all Salford and Hulme, a great part of Pendleton
and Chorlton, two-thirds of Ardwick, and single stretches of Cheetham
Hill and Broughton are all unmixed working-people’s quarters,
stretching like a girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth, around
the commercial district.  Outside, beyond this girdle, lives the
upper and middle bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie in regularly laid
out streets in the vicinity of the working quarters, especially in Chorlton
and the lower lying portions of Cheetham Hill; the upper bourgeoisie
in remoter villas with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy
heights of Cheetham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome
country air, in fine, comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter
hour by omnibuses going into the city.  And the finest part of
the arrangement is this, that the members of this money aristocracy
can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts
to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the
midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. 
For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out
of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series
of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie,
which, out of self-interest, cares for a decent and cleanly external
appearance and can care for it.  True, these shops bear
some relation to the districts which lie behind them, and are more elegant
in the commercial and residential quarters than when they p. 47hide
grimy working-men’s dwellings; but they suffice to conceal from
the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves
the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth. 
So, for instance, Deansgate, which leads from the Old Church directly
southward, is lined first with mills and warehouses, then with second-rate
shops and alehouses; farther south, when it leaves the commercial district,
with less inviting shops, which grow dirtier and more interrupted by
beerhouses and gin palaces the farther one goes, until at the southern
end the appearance of the shops leaves no doubt that workers and workers
only are their customers.  So Market Street running south-east
from the Exchange; at first brilliant shops of the best sort, with counting-houses
or warehouses above; in the continuation, Piccadilly, immense hotels
and warehouses; in the farther continuation, London Road, in the neighbourhood
of the Medlock, factories, beerhouses, shops for the humbler bourgeoisie
and the working population; and from this point onward, large gardens
and villas of the wealthier merchants and manufacturers.  In this
way any one who knows Manchester can infer the adjoining districts,
from the appearance of the thoroughfare, but one is seldom in a position
to catch from the street a glimpse of the real labouring districts. 
I know very well that this hypocritical plan is more or less common
to all great cities; I know, too, that the retail dealers are forced
by the nature of their business to take possession of the great highways;
I know that there are more good buildings than bad ones upon such streets
everywhere, and that the value of land is greater near them than in
remoter districts; but at the same time I have never seen so systematic
a shutting out of the working-class from the thoroughfares, so tender
a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves
of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester.  And yet, in other respects,
Manchester is less built according to a plan, after official regulations,
is more an outgrowth of accident, than any other city; and when I consider
in this connection the eager assurances of the middle-class, that the
working-class is doing famously, I cannot help feeling that the liberal
manufacturers, the “Big Wigs” of Manchester, p. 48are
not so innocent after all, in the matter of this sensitive method of
construction.

I may mention just here that the mills almost all adjoin the rivers
or the different canals that ramify throughout the city, before I proceed
at once to describe the labouring quarters.  First of all, there
is the old town of Manchester, which lies between the northern boundary
of the commercial district and the Irk.  Here the streets, even
the better ones, are narrow and winding, as Todd Street, Long Millgate,
Withy Grove, and Shude Hill, the houses dirty, old, and tumble-down,
and the construction of the side streets utterly horrible.  Going
from the Old Church to Long Millgate, the stroller has at once a row
of old-fashioned houses at the right, of which not one has kept its
original level; these are remnants of the old pre-manufacturing Manchester,
whose former inhabitants have removed with their descendants into better-built
districts, and have left the houses, which were not good enough for
them, to a population strongly mixed with Irish blood.  Here one
is in an almost undisguised working-men’s quarter, for even the
shops and beerhouses hardly take the trouble to exhibit a trifling degree
of cleanliness.  But all this is nothing in comparison with the
courts and lanes which lie behind, to which access can be gained only
through covered passages, in which no two human beings can pass at the
same time.  Of the irregular cramming together of dwellings in
ways which defy all rational plan, of the tangle in which they are crowded
literally one upon the other, it is impossible to convey an idea. 
And it is not the buildings surviving from the old times of Manchester
which are to blame for this; the confusion has only recently reached
its height when every scrap of space left by the old way of building
has been filled up and patched over until not a foot of land is left
to be further occupied.

The south bank of the Irk is here very steep and between fifteen
and thirty feet high.  On this declivitous hillside there are planted
three rows of houses, of which the lowest rise directly out of the river,
while the front walls of the highest stand on the crest of the hill
in Long Millgate.  Among them are mills on the river, p. 49in
short, the method of construction is as crowded and disorderly here
as in the lower part of Long Millgate.  Right and left a multitude
of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts,
and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime,
the equal of which is not to be found—especially in the courts
which lead down to the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the most
horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld.  In one of these courts
there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage,
a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into
and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant
urine and excrement.  This is the first court on the Irk above
Ducie Bridge—in case any one should care to look into it. 
Below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole
neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction.  Below Ducie
Bridge the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow,
dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth.  The first court
below Ducie Bridge, known as Allen’s Court, was in such a state
at the time of the cholera that the sanitary police ordered it evacuated,
swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime.  Dr. Kay gives a
terrible description of the state of this court at that time. {49} 
Since then, it seems to have been partially torn away and rebuilt; at
least looking down from Ducie Bridge, the passer-by sees several ruined
walls and heaps of débris with some newer houses.  The view
from this bridge, mercifully concealed from mortals of small stature
by a parapet as high as a man, is characteristic for the whole district. 
At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black,
foul-smelling stream, full of débris and refuse, which it deposits
on the shallower right bank.  In dry weather, a long string of
the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on
this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly
p. 50arise
and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty
feet above the surface of the stream.  But besides this, the stream
itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime
and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses.  Above the bridge
are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse
find their way into the Irk, which receives further the contents of
all the neighbouring sewers and privies.  It may be easily imagined,
therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits.  Below the
bridge you look upon the piles of débris, the refuse, filth,
and offal from the courts on the steep left bank; here each house is
packed close behind its neighbour and a piece of each is visible, all
black, smoky, crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window frames. 
The background is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings. 
On the lower right bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second
house being a ruin without a roof, piled with débris; the third
stands so low that the lowest floor is uninhabitable, and therefore
without windows or doors.  Here the background embraces the pauper
burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and,
in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the “Poor-Law Bastille”
of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from
behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people’s
quarter below.

Above Ducie Bridge, the left bank grows more flat and the right bank
steeper, but the condition of the dwellings on both banks grows worse
rather than better.  He who turns to the left here from the main
street, Long Millgate, is lost; he wanders from one court to another,
turns countless corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and
alleys, until after a few minutes he has lost all clue, and knows not
whither to turn.  Everywhere half or wholly ruined buildings, some
of them actually uninhabited, which means a great deal here; rarely
a wooden or stone floor to be seen in the houses, almost uniformly broken,
ill-fitting windows and doors, and a state of filth!  Everywhere
heaps of débris, refuse, and offal; standing pools for gutters,
and a stench which alone would make it impossible for a human being
in any degree p. 51civilised
to live in such a district.  The newly-built extension of the Leeds
railway, which crosses the Irk here, has swept away some of these courts
and lanes, laying others completely open to view.  Immediately
under the railway bridge there stands a court, the filth and horrors
of which surpass all the others by far, just because it was hitherto
so shut off, so secluded that the way to it could not be found without
a good deal of trouble.  I should never have discovered it myself,
without the breaks made by the railway, though I thought I knew this
whole region thoroughly.  Passing along a rough bank, among stakes
and washing-lines, one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied,
one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen,
living and sleeping-room all in one.  In such a hole, scarcely
five feet long by six broad, I found two beds—and such bedsteads
and beds!—which, with a staircase and chimney-place, exactly filled
the room.  In several others I found absolutely nothing, while
the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned against it.  Everywhere
before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of pavement lay underneath
could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with the feet. 
This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded
on two sides by houses and a factory, and on the third by the river,
and besides the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow doorway alone led
out into another almost equally ill-built, ill-kept labyrinth of dwellings.

Enough!  The whole side of the Irk is built in this way, a planless,
knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness,
whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external
surroundings.  And how could the people be clean with no proper
opportunity for satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants? 
Privies are so rare here that they are either filled up every day, or
are too remote for most of the inhabitants to use.  How can people
wash when they have only the dirty Irk water at hand, while pumps and
water pipes can be found in decent parts of the city alone?  In
truth, it cannot be charged to the account of these helots of modern
society if their dwellings are not more cleanly than the pig-sties which
are here and there p. 52to
be seen among them.  The landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings
like the six or seven cellars on the quay directly below Scotland Bridge,
the floors of which stand at least two feet below the low-water level
of the Irk that flows not six feet away from them; or like the upper
floor of the corner-house on the opposite shore directly above the bridge,
where the ground floor, utterly uninhabitable, stands deprived of all
fittings for doors and windows, a case by no means rare in this region,
when this open ground floor is used as a privy by the whole neighbourhood
for want of other facilities!

If we leave the Irk and penetrate once more on the opposite side
from Long Millgate into the midst of the working-men’s dwellings,
we shall come into a somewhat newer quarter, which stretches from St.
Michael’s Church to Withy Grove and Shude Hill.  Here there
is somewhat better order.  In place of the chaos of buildings,
we find at least long straight lanes and alleys or courts, built according
to a plan and usually square.  But if, in the former case, every
house was built according to caprice, here each lane and court is so
built, without reference to the situation of the adjoining ones. 
The lanes run now in this direction, now in that, while every two minutes
the wanderer gets into a blind alley, or, on turning a corner, finds
himself back where he started from; certainly no one who has not lived
a considerable time in this labyrinth can find his way through it.

If I may use the word at all in speaking of this district, the ventilation
of these streets and courts is, in consequence of this confusion, quite
as imperfect as in the Irk region; and if this quarter may, nevertheless,
be said to have some advantage over that of the Irk, the houses being
newer and the streets occasionally having gutters, nearly every house
has, on the other hand, a cellar dwelling, which is rarely found in
the Irk district, by reason of the greater age and more careless construction
of the houses.  As for the rest, the filth, débris, and
offal heaps, and the pools in the streets are common to both quarters,
and in the district now under discussion, another feature most injurious
to the cleanliness of the inhabitants, is the multitude of pigs walking
about in all p. 53the
alleys, rooting into the offal heaps, or kept imprisoned in small pens. 
Here, as in most of the working-men’s quarters of Manchester,
the pork-raisers rent the courts and build pig-pens in them.  In
almost every court one or even several such pens may be found, into
which the inhabitants of the court throw all refuse and offal, whence
the swine grow fat; and the atmosphere, confined on all four sides,
is utterly corrupted by putrefying animal and vegetable substances. 
Through this quarter, a broad and measurably decent street has been
cut, Millers Street, and the background has been pretty successfully
concealed.  But if any one should be led by curiosity to pass through
one of the numerous passages which lead into the courts, he will find
this piggery repeated at every twenty paces.

Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description,
I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from
black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness,
the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and
health which characterise the construction of this single district,
containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants.  And
such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the
first manufacturing city of the world.  If any one wishes to see
in how little space a human being can move, how little air—and
such air!—he can breathe, how little of civilisation he
may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. 
True, this is the Old Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise
the fact whenever any one mentions to them the frightful condition of
this Hell upon Earth; but what does that prove?  Everything which
here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to
the industrial epoch.  The couple of hundred houses, which
belong to old Manchester, have been long since abandoned by their original
inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into them the swarms
of workers whom they now shelter; the industrial epoch alone has built
up every spot between these old houses to win a covering for the masses
whom it has conjured hither from the agricultural districts and from
Ireland; the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of p. 54these
cattle-sheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder
the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in
order that they alone, the owners, may grow rich.  In the
industrial epoch alone has it become possible that the worker scarcely
freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere material, a mere chattel;
that he must let himself be crowded into a dwelling too bad for every
other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys the right to let go utterly
to ruin.  This manufacture has achieved, which, without these workers,
this poverty, this slavery could not have lived.  True, the original
construction of this quarter was bad, little good could have been made
out of it; but, have the landowners, has the municipality done anything
to improve it when rebuilding?  On the contrary, wherever a nook
or corner was free, a house has been run up; where a superfluous passage
remained, it has been built up; the value of land rose with the blossoming
out of manufacture, and the more it rose, the more madly was the work
of building up carried on, without reference to the health or comfort
of the inhabitants, with sole reference to the highest possible profit
on the principle that no hole is so bad but that some poor creature
must take it who can pay for nothing better.  However, it is
the Old Town, and with this reflection the bourgeoisie is comforted. 
Let us see, therefore, how much better it is in the New Town.

The New Town, known also as Irish Town, stretches up a hill of clay,
beyond the Old Town, between the Irk and St. George’s Road. 
Here all the features of a city are lost.  Single rows of houses
or groups of streets stand, here and there, like little villages on
the naked, not even grass-grown clay soil; the houses, or rather cottages,
are in bad order, never repaired, filthy, with damp, unclean, cellar
dwellings; the lanes are neither paved nor supplied with sewers, but
harbour numerous colonies of swine penned in small sties or yards, or
wandering unrestrained through the neighbourhood.  The mud in the
streets is so deep that there is never a chance, except in the dryest
weather, of walking without sinking into it ankle deep at every step. 
In the vicinity of St. George’s Road, the separate groups of buildings
approach each p. 55other
more closely, ending in a continuation of lanes, blind alleys, back
lanes and courts, which grow more and more crowded and irregular the
nearer they approach the heart of the town.  True, they are here
oftener paved or supplied with paved sidewalks and gutters; but the
filth, the bad order of the houses, and especially of the cellars, remains
the same.

It may not be out of place to make some general observations just
here as to the customary construction of working-men’s quarters
in Manchester.  We have seen how in the Old Town pure accident
determined the grouping of the houses in general.  Every house
is built without reference to any other, and the scraps of space between
them are called courts for want of another name.  In the somewhat
newer portions of the same quarter, and in other working-men’s
quarters, dating from the early days of industrial activity, a somewhat
more orderly arrangement may be found.  The space between two streets
is divided into more regular, usually square courts.

These courts were built in this way from the beginning, and communicate
with the streets by means of covered passages.  If the totally
planless construction is injurious to the health of the workers by preventing
ventilation, this method of shutting them up in courts surrounded on
all sides by buildings is far more so.  The air simply cannot escape;
the chimneys of the houses are the sole drains for the imprisoned atmosphere
of the courts, and they serve the purpose only so long as fire is kept
burning. {55} 
Moreover, the houses surrounding such courts are usually built back
to back, having the rear wall in common; and this alone suffices to
prevent any sufficient through ventilation.  And, as the police
charged with care of the streets, does not trouble itself about the
condition of these courts, as everything quietly lies where it is thrown,
there is no cause for wonder at the filth and heaps of ashes and offal
to be p. 56found
here.  I have been in courts, in Millers Street, at least half
a foot below the level of the thoroughfares, and without the slightest
drainage for the water that accumulates in them in rainy weather! 
More recently another different method of building was adopted, and
has now become general.  Working-men’s cottages are almost
never built singly, but always by the dozen or score; a single contractor
building up one or two streets at a time.  These are then arranged
as follows: One front is formed of cottages of the best class, so fortunate
as to possess a back door and small court, and these command the highest
rent.  In the rear of these cottages runs a narrow alley, the back
street, built up at both ends, into which either a narrow roadway or
a covered passage leads from one side.  The cottages which face
this back street command least rent, and are most neglected.  These
have their rear walls in common with the third row of cottages which
face a second street, and command less rent than the first row and more
than the second.

By this method of construction, comparatively good ventilation can
be obtained for the first row of cottages, and the third row is no worse
off than in the former method.  The middle row, on the other hand,
is at least as badly ventilated as the houses in the courts, and the
back street is always in the same filthy, disgusting condition as they. 
The contractors prefer this method because it saves them space, and
furnishes the means of fleecing better paid workers through the higher
rents of the cottages in the first and third rows.  These three
different forms of cottage building are found all over Manchester and
throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire, often mixed up together, but usually
separate enough to indicate the relative age of parts of towns. 
The third system, that of the back alleys, prevails largely in the great
working-men’s district east of St. George’s Road and Ancoats
Street, and is the one most often found in the other working-men’s
quarters of Manchester and its suburbs.

In the last-mentioned broad district included under the name Ancoats,
stand the largest mills of Manchester lining the canals, colossal six
and seven-storied buildings towering with their slender p. 57chimneys
far above the low cottages of the workers.  The population of the
district consists, therefore, chiefly of mill hands, and in the worst
streets, of hand-weavers.  The streets nearest the heart of the
town are the oldest, and consequently the worst; they are, however,
paved, and supplied with drains.  Among them I include those nearest
to and parallel with Oldham Road and Great Ancoats Street.  Farther
to the north-east lie many newly-built-up streets; here the cottages
look neat and cleanly, doors and windows are new and freshly painted,
the rooms within newly whitewashed; the streets themselves are better
aired, the vacant building lots between them larger and more numerous. 
But this can be said of a minority of the houses only, while cellar
dwellings are to be found under almost every cottage; many streets are
unpaved and without sewers; and, worse than all, this neat appearance
is all pretence, a pretence which vanishes within the first ten years. 
For the construction of the cottages individually is no less to be condemned
than the plan of the streets.  All such cottages look neat and
substantial at first; their massive brick walls deceive the eye, and,
on passing through a newly-built working-men’s street,
without remembering the back alleys and the construction of the houses
themselves, one is inclined to agree with the assertion of the Liberal
manufacturers that the working population is nowhere so well housed
as in England.  But on closer examination, it becomes evident that
the walls of these cottages are as thin as it is possible to make them. 
The outer walls, those of the cellar, which bear the weight of the ground
floor and roof, are one whole brick thick at most, the bricks lying
with their long sides touching; but I have seen many a cottage of the
same height, some in process of building, whose outer walls were but
one-half brick thick, the bricks lying not sidewise but lengthwise,
their narrow ends touching.  The object of this is to spare material,
but there is also another reason for it; namely, the fact that the contractors
never own the land but lease it, according to the English custom, for
twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or ninety-nine years, at the expiration
of which time it falls, with everything upon it, back into the possession
of the original holder, p. 58who
pays nothing in return for improvements upon it.  The improvements
are therefore so calculated by the lessee as to be worth as little as
possible at the expiration of the stipulated term.  And as such
cottages are often built but twenty or thirty years before the expiration
of the term, it may easily be imagined that the contractors make no
unnecessary expenditures upon them.  Moreover, these contractors,
usually carpenters and builders, or manufacturers, spend little or nothing
in repairs, partly to avoid diminishing their rent receipts, and partly
in view of the approaching surrender of the improvement to the landowner;
while in consequence of commercial crises and the loss of work that
follows them, whole streets often stand empty, the cottages falling
rapidly into ruin and uninhabitableness.  It is calculated in general
that working-men’s cottages last only forty years on the average. 
This sounds strangely enough when one sees the beautiful, massive walls
of newly-built ones, which seem to give promise of lasting a couple
of centuries; but the fact remains that the niggardliness of the original
expenditure, the neglect of all repairs, the frequent periods of emptiness,
the constant change of inhabitants, and the destruction carried on by
the dwellers during the final ten years, usually Irish families, who
do not hesitate to use the wooden portions for fire-wood—all this,
taken together, accomplishes the complete ruin of the cottages by the
end of forty years.  Hence it comes that Ancoats, built chiefly
since the sudden growth of manufacture, chiefly indeed within the present
century, contains a vast number of ruinous houses, most of them being,
in fact, in the last stages of inhabitableness.  I will not dwell
upon the amount of capital thus wasted, the small additional expenditure
upon the original improvement and upon repairs which would suffice to
keep this whole district clean, decent, and inhabitable for years together. 
I have to deal here with the state of the houses and their inhabitants,
and it must be admitted that no more injurious and demoralising method
of housing the workers has yet been discovered than precisely this. 
The working-man is constrained to occupy such ruinous dwellings because
he cannot pay for others, and because there are no others in the vicinity
of p. 59his
mill; perhaps, too, because they belong to the employer, who engages
him only on condition of his taking such a cottage.  The calculation
with reference to the forty years’ duration of the cottage is,
of course, not always perfectly strict; for, if the dwellings are in
a thickly-built-up portion of the town, and there is a good prospect
of finding steady occupants for them, while the ground rent is high,
the contractors do a little something to keep the cottages inhabitable
after the expiration of the forty years.  They never do anything
more, however, than is absolutely unavoidable, and the dwellings so
repaired are the worst of all.  Occasionally when an epidemic threatens,
the otherwise sleepy conscience of the sanitary police is a little stirred,
raids are made into the working-men’s districts, whole rows of
cellars and cottages are closed, as happened in the case of several
lanes near Oldham Road; but this does not last long: the condemned cottages
soon find occupants again, the owners are much better off by letting
them, and the sanitary police won’t come again so soon. 
These east and north-east sides of Manchester are the only ones on which
the bourgeoisie has not built, because ten or eleven months of the year
the west and south-west wind drives the smoke of all the factories hither,
and that the working-people alone may breathe.

Southward from Great Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, working-men’s
quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached, irregularly
built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty building lots,
uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet weather. 
The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to mind. 
The stretch cut through by the Birmingham railway is the most thickly
built-up and the worst.  Here flows the Medlock with countless
windings through a valley, which is, in places, on a level with the
valley of the Irk.  Along both sides of the stream, which is coal
black, stagnant and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and working-men’s
dwellings, the latter all in the worst condition.  The bank is
chiefly declivitous and is built over to the water’s edge, just
as we saw along the Irk; while the houses are equally bad, whether built
on the Manchester side or in Ardwick, Chorlton, or Hulme.  But
the p. 60most
horrible spot (if I should describe all the separate spots in detail
I should never come to the end) lies on the Manchester side, immediately
south-west of Oxford Road, and is known as Little Ireland.  In
a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all
four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings,
stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to
back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish. 
The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven,
fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse,
offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions;
the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and
darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys.  A horde
of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine
that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles.  In short,
the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as
can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the Irk.  The race
that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended
with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars,
in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if
with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage
of humanity.  This is the impression and the line of thought which
the exterior of this district forces upon the beholder.  But what
must one think when he hears that in each of these pens, containing
at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty
human beings live; that in the whole region, for each one hundred and
twenty persons, one usually inaccessible privy is provided; and that
in spite of all the preachings of the physicians, in spite of the excitement
into which the cholera epidemic plunged the sanitary police by reason
of the condition of Little Ireland, in spite of everything, in this
year of grace 1844, it is in almost the same state as in 1831! 
Dr. Kay asserts that not only the cellars but the first floors of all
the houses in this district are damp; that a number of cellars once
filled up with earth have now been emptied and are occupied p. 61once
more by Irish people; that in one cellar the water constantly wells
up through a hole stopped with clay, the cellar lying below the river
level, so that its occupant, a hand-loom weaver, had to bale out the
water from his dwelling every morning and pour it into the street!

Farther down, on the left side of the Medlock, lies Hulme, which,
properly speaking, is one great working-people’s district, the
condition of which coincides almost exactly with that of Ancoats; the
more thickly built-up regions chiefly bad and approaching ruin, the
less populous of more modern structure, but generally sunk in filth. 
On the other side of the Medlock, in Manchester proper, lies a second
great working-men’s district which stretches on both sides of
Deansgate as far as the business quarter, and in certain parts rivals
the Old Town.  Especially in the immediate vicinity of the business
quarter, between Bridge and Quay Streets, Princess and Peter Streets,
the crowded construction exceeds in places the narrowest courts of the
Old Town.  Here are long, narrow lanes between which run contracted,
crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular
that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps, or
comes out where he least expects to, unless he knows every court and
every alley exactly and separately.  According to Dr. Kay, the
most demoralised class of all Manchester lived in these ruinous and
filthy districts, people whose occupations are thieving and prostitution;
and, to all appearance, his assertion is still true at the present moment. 
When the sanitary police made its expedition hither in 1831, it found
the uncleanness as great as in Little Ireland or along the Irk (that
it is not much better to-day, I can testify); and among other items,
they found in Parliament Street for three hundred and eighty persons,
and in Parliament Passage for thirty thickly populated houses, but a
single privy.

If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find on a peninsula formed
by the river, a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, which, properly
speaking, is one large working-men’s quarter, penetrated by a
single wide avenue.  Salford, once more important than Manchester,
was then the leading town of the surrounding district to p. 62which
it still gives its name, Salford Hundred.  Hence it is that an
old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty, and ruinous locality is to
be found here, lying opposite the Old Church of Manchester, and in as
bad a condition as the Old Town on the other side of the Irwell. 
Farther away from the river lies the newer portion, which is, however,
already beyond the limit of its forty years of cottage life, and therefore
ruinous enough.  All Salford is built in courts or narrow lanes,
so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever seen, the
little lanes of Genoa.  The average construction of Salford is
in this respect much worse than that of Manchester, and so, too, in
respect to cleanliness.  If, in Manchester, the police, from time
to time, every six or ten years, makes a raid upon the working-people’s
districts, closes the worst dwellings, and causes the filthiest spots
in these Augean stables to be cleansed, in Salford it seems to have
done absolutely nothing.  The narrow side lanes and courts of Chapel
Street, Greengate, and Gravel Lane have certainly never been cleansed
since they were built.  Of late, the Liverpool railway has been
carried through the middle of them, over a high viaduct, and has abolished
many of the filthiest nooks; but what does that avail?  Whoever
passes over this viaduct and looks down, sees filth and wretchedness
enough; and, if any one takes the trouble to pass through these lanes,
and glance through the open doors and windows into the houses and cellars,
he can convince himself afresh with every step that the workers of Salford
live in dwellings in which cleanliness and comfort are impossible. 
Exactly the same state of affairs is found in the more distant regions
of Salford, in Islington, along Regent Road, and back of the Bolton
railway.  The working-men’s dwellings between Oldfield Road
and Cross Lane, where a mass of courts and alleys are to be found in
the worst possible state, vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in
filth and overcrowding.  In this district I found a man, apparently
about sixty years old, living in a cow stable.  He had constructed
a sort of chimney for his square pen, which had neither windows, floor,
nor ceiling, had obtained a bedstead and lived there, though the rain
dripped through his rotten roof.  This man was too old and weak
for regular p. 63work,
and supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart; the dung-heaps
lay next door to his palace!

Such are the various working-people’s quarters of Manchester
as I had occasion to observe them personally during twenty months. 
If we briefly formulate the result of our wanderings, we must admit
that 350,000 working-people of Manchester and its environs live, almost
all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which
surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition,
laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference
solely to the profit secured by the contractor.  In a word, we
must confess that in the working-men’s dwellings of Manchester,
no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family
life is possible; that in such dwellings only a physically degenerate
race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically
to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home.  And I am not
alone in making this assertion.  We have seen that Dr. Kay gives
precisely the same description; and, though it is superfluous, I quote
further the words of a Liberal, {63}
recognised and highly valued as an authority by the manufacturers, and
a fanatical opponent of all independent movements of the workers:

“As I passed through the dwellings of the mill hands in Irish
Town, Ancoats, and Little Ireland, I was only amazed that it is possible
to maintain a reasonable state of health in such homes.  These
towns, for in extent and number of inhabitants they are towns, have
been erected with the utmost disregard of everything except the immediate
advantage of the speculating builder.  A carpenter and builder
unite to buy a series of building sites (i.e., they lease them
for a number of years), and cover them with so-called houses. 
In one place we found a whole street following the course of a ditch,
because in this way deeper cellars could be secured without the cost
of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but for dwellings
for human beings.  Not one house of this street escaped the
cholera.  In general, the streets of these p. 64suburbs
are unpaved, with a dung-heap or ditch in the middle; the houses are
built back to back, without ventilation or drainage, and whole families
are limited to a corner of a cellar or a garret.”  I have
already referred to the unusual activity which the sanitary police manifested
during the cholera visitation.  When the epidemic was approaching,
a universal terror seized the bourgeoisie of the city.  People
remembered the unwholesome dwellings of the poor, and trembled before
the certainty that each of these slums would become a centre for the
plague, whence it would spread desolation in all directions through
the houses of the propertied class.  A Health Commission was appointed
at once to investigate these districts, and report upon their condition
to the Town Council.  Dr. Kay, himself a member of this Commission,
who visited in person every separate police district except one, the
eleventh, quotes extracts from their reports: There were inspected,
in all, 6,951 houses—naturally in Manchester proper alone, Salford
and the other suburbs being excluded.  Of these, 6,565 urgently
needed whitewashing within; 960 were out of repair; 939 had insufficient
drains; 1,435 were damp; 452 were badly ventilated; 2,221 were without
privies.  Of the 687 streets inspected, 248 were unpaved, 53 but
partially paved, 112 ill-ventilated, 352 containing standing pools,
heaps of débris, refuse, etc.  To cleanse such an Augean
stable before the arrival of the cholera was, of course, out of the
question.  A few of the worst nooks were therefore cleansed, and
everything else left as before.  In the cleansed spots, as Little
Ireland proves, the old filthy condition was naturally restored in a
couple of months.  As to the internal condition of these houses,
the same Commission reports a state of things similar to that which
we have already met with in London, Edinburgh, and other cities. {64}

It often happens that a whole Irish family is crowded into one bed;
often a heap of filthy straw or quilts of old sacking cover all in an
indiscriminate heap, where all alike are degraded by want, stolidity,
and wretchedness.  Often the inspectors found, in a single house,
two families in two rooms.  All slept in one, and p. 65used
the other as a kitchen and dining-room in common.  Often more than
one family lived in a single damp cellar, in whose pestilent atmosphere
twelve to sixteen persons were crowded together.  To these and
other sources of disease must be added that pigs were kept, and other
disgusting things of the most revolting kind were found.

We must add that many families, who had but one room for themselves,
receive boarders and lodgers in it, that such lodgers of both sexes
by no means rarely sleep in the same bed with the married couple; and
that the single case of a man and his wife and his adult sister-in-law
sleeping in one bed was found, according to the “Report concerning
the sanitary condition of the working-class,” six times repeated
in Manchester.  Common lodging-houses, too, are very numerous;
Dr. Kay gives their number in 1831 at 267 in Manchester proper, and
they must have increased greatly since then.  Each of these receives
from twenty to thirty guests, so that they shelter all told, nightly,
from five to seven thousand human beings.  The character of the
houses and their guests is the same as in other cities.  Five to
seven beds in each room lie on the floor—without bedsteads, and
on these sleep, mixed indiscriminately, as many persons as apply. 
What physical and moral atmosphere reigns in these holes I need not
state.  Each of these houses is a focus of crime, the scene of
deeds against which human nature revolts, which would perhaps never
have been executed but for this forced centralisation of vice. {65} 
Gaskell gives the number p. 66of
persons living in cellars in Manchester proper as 20,000.  The
Weekly Dispatch gives the number, “according to official
reports,” as twelve per cent. of the working-class, which agrees
with Gaskell’s number; the workers being estimated at 175,000,
21,000 would form twelve per cent. of it.  The cellar dwellings
in the suburbs are at least as numerous, so that the number of persons
living in cellars in Manchester—using its name in the broader
sense—is not less than forty to fifty thousand.  So much
for the dwellings of the workers in the largest cities and towns. 
The manner in which the need of a shelter is satisfied furnishes a standard
for the manner in which all other necessities are supplied.  That
in these filthy holes a ragged, ill-fed population alone can dwell is
a safe conclusion, and such is the fact.  The clothing of the working-people,
in the majority of cases, is in a very bad condition.  The material
used for it is not of the best adapted.  Wool and linen have almost
vanished from the wardrobe of both sexes, and cotton has taken their
place.  Shirts are made of bleached or coloured cotton goods; the
dresses of the women are chiefly of cotton print goods, and woollen
petticoats are rarely to be seen on the washline.  The men wear
chiefly trousers of fustian or other heavy cotton goods, and jackets
or coats of the same.  Fustian has become the proverbial costume
of the working-men, who are called “fustian jackets,” and
call themselves so in contrast to the gentlemen who wear broadcloth,
which latter words are used as characteristic for the middle-class. 
When Feargus O’Connor, the Chartist leader, came to Manchester
during the insurrection of 1842, he appeared, amidst the deafening applause
of the working-men, in a fustian suit of clothing.  Hats are the
universal head-covering in England, even for working-men, hats of the
most diverse forms, round, high, broad-brimmed, narrow-brimmed, or without
brims—only the younger men in factory towns wearing caps. 
Any one who does not own a hat folds himself a low, square paper cap.

The whole clothing of the working-class, even assuming it to be in
good condition, is little adapted to the climate.  The damp air
of England, with its sudden changes of temperature, more calculated
than any other to give rise to colds, obliges almost the whole p. 67middle-class
to wear flannel next the skin, about the body, and flannel scarfs and
shirts are in almost universal use.  Not only is the working-class
deprived of this precaution, it is scarcely ever in a position to use
a thread of woollen clothing; and the heavy cotton goods, though thicker,
stiffer, and heavier than woollen clothes, afford much less protection
against cold and wet, remain damp much longer because of their thickness
and the nature of the stuff, and have nothing of the compact density
of fulled woollen cloths.  And, if a working-man once buys himself
a woollen coat for Sunday, he must get it from one of the cheap shops
where he finds bad, so-called “Devil’s-dust” cloth,
manufactured for sale and not for use, and liable to tear or grow threadbare
in a fortnight, or he must buy of an old clothes’-dealer a half-worn
coat which has seen its best days, and lasts but a few weeks. 
Moreover, the working-man’s clothing is, in most cases, in bad
condition, and there is the oft-recurring necessity for placing the
best pieces in the pawnbroker’s shop.  But among very large
numbers, especially among the Irish, the prevailing clothing consists
of perfect rags often beyond all mending, or so patched that the original
colour can no longer be detected.  Yet the English and Anglo-Irish
go on patching, and have carried this art to a remarkable pitch, putting
wool or bagging on fustian, or the reverse—it’s all the
same to them.  But the true, transplanted Irish hardly ever patch
except in the extremest necessity, when the garment would otherwise
fall apart.  Ordinarily the rags of the shirt protrude through
the rents in the coat or trousers.  They wear, as Thomas Carlyle
says,—{67}

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

The Irish have introduced, too, the custom previously unknown in
England, of going barefoot.  In every manufacturing town there
is now to be seen a multitude of people, especially women and children,
going about barefoot, and their example is gradually being adopted by
the poorer English.

p. 68As
with clothing, so with food.  The workers get what is too bad for
the property-holding class.  In the great towns of England everything
may be had of the best, but it costs money; and the workman, who must
keep house on a couple of pence, cannot afford much expense.  Moreover,
he usually receives his wages on Saturday evening, for, although a beginning
has been made in the payment of wages on Friday, this excellent arrangement
is by no means universal; and so he comes to market at five or even
seven o’clock, while the buyers of the middle-class have had the
first choice during the morning, when the market teems with the best
of everything.  But when the workers reach it, the best has vanished,
and, if it was still there, they would probably not be able to buy it. 
The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables
wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat
lean, tough, taken from old, often diseased, cattle, or such as have
died a natural death, and not fresh even then, often half decayed. 
The sellers are usually small hucksters who buy up inferior goods, and
can sell them cheaply by reason of their badness.  The poorest
workers are forced to use still another device to get together the things
they need with their few pence.  As nothing can be sold on Sunday,
and all shops must be closed at twelve o’clock on Saturday night,
such things as would not keep until Monday are sold at any price between
ten o’clock and midnight.  But nine-tenths of what is sold
at ten o’clock is past using by Sunday morning, yet these are
precisely the provisions which make up the Sunday dinner of the poorest
class.  The meat which the workers buy is very often past using;
but having bought it, they must eat it.  On the 6th of January,
1844 (if I am not greatly mistaken), a court leet was held in Manchester,
when eleven meat-sellers were fined for having sold tainted meat. 
Each of them had a whole ox or pig, or several sheep, or from fifty
to sixty pounds of meat, which were all confiscated in a tainted condition. 
In one case, sixty-four stuffed Christmas geese were seized which had
proved unsaleable in Liverpool, and had been forwarded to Manchester,
where they were brought to market foul and rotten.  All the particulars,
with names and fines, were published at the p. 69time
in the Manchester Guardian.  In the six weeks, from July
1st to August 14th, the same sheet reported three similar cases. 
According to the Guardian for August 3rd, a pig, weighing 200
pounds, which had been found dead and decayed, was cut up and exposed
for sale by a butcher at Heywood, and was then seized.  According
to the number for July 31st, two butchers at Wigan, of whom one had
previously been convicted of the same offence, were fined £2 and
£4 respectively, for exposing tainted meat for sale; and, according
to the number for August 10th, twenty-six tainted hams seized at a dealer’s
in Bolton, were publicly burnt, and the dealer fined twenty shillings. 
But these are by no means all the cases; they do not even form a fair
average for a period of six weeks, according to which to form an average
for the year.  There are often seasons in which every number of
the semi-weekly Guardian mentions a similar case found in Manchester
or its vicinity.  And when one reflects upon the many cases which
must escape detection in the extensive markets that stretch along the
front of every main street, under the slender supervision of the market
inspectors—and how else can one explain the boldness with which
whole animals are exposed for sale?—when one considers how great
the temptation must be, in view of the incomprehensibly small fines
mentioned in the foregoing cases; when one reflects what condition a
piece of meat must have reached to be seized by the inspectors, it is
impossible to believe that the workers obtain good and nourishing meat
as a usual thing.  But they are victimised in yet another way by
the money-greed of the middle-class.  Dealers and manufacturers
adulterate all kinds of provisions in an atrocious manner, and without
the slightest regard to the health of the consumers.  We have heard
the Manchester Guardian upon this subject, let us hear another
organ of the middle-class—I delight in the testimony of my opponents—let
us hear the Liverpool Mercury: “Salted butter is sold for
fresh, the lumps being covered with a coating of fresh butter, or a
pound of fresh being laid on top to taste, while the salted article
is sold after this test, or the whole mass is washed and then sold as
fresh.  With sugar, pounded rice and other cheap adulterating materials
p. 70are
mixed, and the whole sold at full price.  The refuse of soap-boiling
establishments also is mixed with other things and sold as sugar. 
Chicory and other cheap stuff is mixed with ground coffee, and artificial
coffee beans with the unground article.  Cocoa is often adulterated
with fine brown earth, treated with fat to render it more easily mistakable
for real cocoa.  Tea is mixed with the leaves of the sloe and with
other refuse, or dry tea-leaves are roasted on hot copper plates, so
returning to the proper colour and being sold as fresh.  Pepper
is mixed with pounded nutshells; port wine is manufactured outright
(out of alcohol, dye-stuffs, etc.), while it is notorious that more
of it is consumed in England alone than is grown in Portugal; and tobacco
is mixed with disgusting substances of all sorts and in all possible
forms in which the article is produced.”  I can add that
several of the most respected tobacco dealers in Manchester announced
publicly last summer, that, by reason of the universal adulteration
of tobacco, no firm could carry on business without adulteration, and
that no cigar costing less than threepence is made wholly from tobacco. 
These frauds are naturally not restricted to articles of food, though
I could mention a dozen more, the villainy of mixing gypsum or chalk
with flour among them.  Fraud is practiced in the sale of articles
of every sort: flannel, stockings, etc., are stretched, and shrink after
the first washing; narrow cloth is sold as being from one and a half
to three inches broader than it actually is; stoneware is so thinly
glazed that the glazing is good for nothing, and cracks at once, and
a hundred other rascalities, tout comme chez nous.  But
the lion’s share of the evil results of these frauds falls to
the workers.  The rich are less deceived, because they can pay
the high prices of the large shops which have a reputation to lose,
and would injure themselves more than their customers if they kept poor
or adulterated wares; the rich are spoiled, too, by habitual good eating,
and detect adulteration more easily with their sensitive palates. 
But the poor, the working-people, to whom a couple of farthings are
important, who must buy many things with little money, who cannot afford
to inquire too closely into the quality of their purchases, p. 71and
cannot do so in any case because they have had no opportunity of cultivating
their taste—to their share fall all the adulterated, poisoned
provisions.  They must deal with the small retailers, must buy
perhaps on credit, and these small retail dealers who cannot sell even
the same quality of goods so cheaply as the largest retailers, because
of their small capital and the large proportional expenses of their
business, must knowingly or unknowingly buy adulterated goods in order
to sell at the lower prices required, and to meet the competition of
the others.  Further, a large retail dealer who has extensive capital
invested in his business is ruined with his ruined credit if detected
in a fraudulent practice; but what harm does it do a small grocer, who
has customers in a single street only, if frauds are proved against
him?  If no one trusts him in Ancoats, he moves to Chorlton or
Hulme, where no one knows him, and where he continues to defraud as
before; while legal penalties attach to very few adulterations unless
they involve revenue frauds.  Not in the quality alone, but in
the quantity of his goods as well, is the English working-man defrauded. 
The small dealers usually have false weights and measures, and an incredible
number of convictions for such offences may be read in the police reports. 
How universal this form of fraud is in the manufacturing districts,
a couple of extracts from the Manchester Guardian may serve to
show.  They cover only a short period, and, even here, I have not
all the numbers at hand:

Guardian, June 16, 1844, Rochdale Sessions.—Four dealers
fined five to ten shillings for using light weights.  Stockport
Sessions.—Two dealers fined one shilling, one of them having seven
light weights and a false scale, and both having been warned.

Guardian, June 19, Rochdale Sessions.—One dealer fined
five, and two farmers ten shillings.

Guardian, June 22, Manchester Justices of the Peace.—Nineteen
dealers fined two shillings and sixpence to two pounds.

Guardian, June 26, Ashton Sessions.—Fourteen dealers
and farmers fined two shillings and sixpence to one pound.  Hyde
p. 72Petty
Sessions.—Nine farmers and dealers condemned to pay costs and
five shillings fines.

Guardian, July 9, Manchester—Sixteen dealers condemned
to pay costs and fines not exceeding ten shillings.

Guardian, July 13, Manchester.—Nine dealers fined from
two shillings and sixpence to twenty shillings.

Guardian, July 24, Rochdale.—Four dealers fined ten
to twenty shillings.

Guardian, July 27, Bolton.—Twelve dealers and innkeepers
condemned to pay costs.

Guardian, August 3, Bolton.—Three dealers fined two
shillings and sixpence, and five shillings.

Guardian, August 10, Bolton.—One dealer fined five shillings.

And the same causes which make the working-class the chief sufferers
from frauds in the quality of goods make them the usual victims of frauds
in the question of quantity too.

The habitual food of the individual working-man naturally varies
according to his wages.  The better paid workers, especially those
in whose families every member is able to earn something, have good
food as long as this state of things lasts; meat daily, and bacon and
cheese for supper.  Where wages are less, meat is used only two
or three times a week, and the proportion of bread and potatoes increases. 
Descending gradually, we find the animal food reduced to a small piece
of bacon cut up with the potatoes; lower still, even this disappears,
and there remain only bread, cheese, porridge, and potatoes, until on
the lowest round of the ladder, among the Irish, potatoes form the sole
food.  As an accompaniment, weak tea, with perhaps a little sugar,
milk, or spirits, is universally drunk.  Tea is regarded in England,
and even in Ireland, as quite as indispensable as coffee in Germany,
and where no tea is used, the bitterest poverty reigns.  But all
this pre-supposes that the workman has work.  When he has none,
he is wholly at the mercy of accident, and eats what is given him, what
he can beg or steal.  And, if he gets nothing, he simply starves,
as we have seen.  The quantity of food varies, of course, like
its quality, according to the rate of wages, so that p. 73among
ill-paid workers, even if they have no large families, hunger prevails
in spite of full and regular work; and the number of the ill-paid is
very large.  Especially in London, where the competition of the
workers rises with the increase of population, this class is very numerous,
but it is to be found in other towns as well.  In these cases all
sorts of devices are used; potato parings, vegetable refuse, and rotten
vegetables are eaten for want of other food, and everything greedily
gathered up which may possibly contain an atom of nourishment. 
And, if the week’s wages are used up before the end of the week,
it often enough happens that in the closing days the family gets only
as much food, if any, as is barely sufficient to keep off starvation. 
Of course such a way of living unavoidably engenders a multitude of
diseases, and when these appear, when the father from whose work the
family is chiefly supported, whose physical exertion most demands nourishment,
and who therefore first succumbs—when the father is utterly disabled,
then misery reaches its height, and then the brutality with which society
abandons its members, just when their need is greatest, comes out fully
into the light of day.

To sum up briefly the facts thus far cited.  The great towns
are chiefly inhabited by working-people, since in the best case there
is one bourgeois for two workers, often for three, here and there for
four; these workers have no property whatsoever of their own, and live
wholly upon wages, which usually go from hand to mouth.  Society,
composed wholly of atoms, does not trouble itself about them; leaves
them to care for themselves and their families, yet supplies them no
means of doing this in an efficient and permanent manner.  Every
working-man, even the best, is therefore constantly exposed to loss
of work and food, that is to death by starvation, and many perish in
this way.  The dwellings of the workers are everywhere badly planned,
badly built, and kept in the worst condition, badly ventilated, damp,
and unwholesome.  The inhabitants are confined to the smallest
possible space, and at least one family usually sleeps in each room. 
The interior arrangement of the dwellings is poverty-stricken in various
degrees, down to the utter absence of even the most p. 74necessary
furniture.  The clothing of the workers, too, is generally scanty,
and that of great multitudes is in rags.  The food is, in general,
bad; often almost unfit for use, and in many cases, at least at times,
insufficient in quantity, so that, in extreme cases, death by starvation
results.  Thus the working-class of the great cities offers a graduated
scale of conditions in life, in the best cases a temporarily endurable
existence for hard work and good wages, good and endurable, that is,
from the worker’s standpoint; in the worst cases, bitter want,
reaching even homelessness and death by starvation.  The average
is much nearer the worst case than the best.  And this series does
not fall into fixed classes, so that one can say, this fraction of the
working-class is well off, has always been so, and remains so. 
If that is the case here and there, if single branches of work have
in general an advantage over others, yet the condition of the workers
in each branch is subject to such great fluctuations that a single working-man
may be so placed as to pass through the whole range from comparative
comfort to the extremest need, even to death by starvation, while almost
every English working-man can tell a tale of marked changes of fortune. 
Let us examine the causes of this somewhat more closely.

p. 75COMPETITION.

We have seen in the introduction how competition created the proletariat
at the very beginning of the industrial movement, by increasing the
wages of weavers in consequence of the increased demand for woven goods,
so inducing the weaving peasants to abandon their farms and earn more
money by devoting themselves to their looms.  We have seen how
it crowded out the small farmers by means of the large farm system,
reduced them to the rank of proletarians, and attracted them in part
into the towns; how it further ruined the small bourgeoisie in great
measure and reduced its members also to the ranks of the proletariat;
how it centralised capital in the hands of the few, and population in
the great towns.  Such are the various ways and means by which
competition, as it reached its full manifestation and free development
in modern industry, created and extended the proletariat.  We shall
now have to observe its influence on the working-class already created. 
And here we must begin by tracing the results of competition of single
workers with one another.

Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against
all which rules in modern civil society.  This battle, a battle
for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of
life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society
only, but also between the individual members of these classes. 
Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who
are in his way, and to put himself in their place.  The workers
are in constant competition among themselves as the members of the bourgeoisie
among themselves.  The power-loom weaver is in competition with
the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with
him who has work or p. 76is
better paid, each trying to supplant the other.  But this competition
of the workers among themselves is the worst side of the present state
of things in its effect upon the worker, the sharpest weapon against
the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie.  Hence the effort
of the workers to nullify this competition by associations, hence the
hatred of the bourgeoisie towards these associations, and its triumph
in every defeat which befalls them.

The proletarian is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single
day.  The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence
in the broadest sense of the word.  What the proletarian needs,
he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its
monopoly by the power of the State.  The proletarian is, therefore,
in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his
life or death.  It offers him the means of living, but only for
an “equivalent” for his work.  It even lets him have
the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with
free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained
his majority.

Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that
of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him,
or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts
of the forests!  A fine “equivalent” valued at pleasure
by the bourgeoisie!  And if one proletarian is such a fool as to
starve rather than agree to the equitable propositions of the bourgeoisie,
his “natural superiors,” another is easily found in his
place; there are proletarians enough in the world, and not all so insane
as to prefer dying to living.

Here we have the competition of the workers among themselves. 
If all the proletarians announced their determination to starve
rather than work for the bourgeoisie, the latter would have to surrender
its monopoly.  But this is not the case—is, indeed, a rather
impossible case—so that the bourgeoisie still thrives.  To
this competition of the worker there is but one limit; no worker will
work for less than he needs to subsist.  If he must starve, he
will prefer to starve in idleness rather than in toil.  True, this
limit is relative; one needs more than another, one is accustomed p. 77to
more comfort than another; the Englishman who is still somewhat civilised,
needs more than the Irishman who goes in rags, eats potatoes, and sleeps
in a pig-sty.  But that does not hinder the Irishman’s competing
with the Englishman, and gradually forcing the rate of wages, and with
it the Englishman’s level of civilisation, down to the Irishman’s
level.  Certain kinds of work require a certain grade of civilisation,
and to these belong almost all forms of industrial occupation; hence
the interest of the bourgeoisie requires in this case that wages should
be high enough to enable the workman to keep himself upon the required
plane.

The newly immigrated Irishman, encamped in the first stable that
offers, or turned out in the street after a week because he spends everything
upon drink and cannot pay rent, would be a poor mill-hand.  The
mill-hand must, therefore, have wages enough to enable him to bring
up his children to regular work; but no more, lest he should be able
to get on without the wages of his children, and so make something else
of them than mere working-men.  Here, too, the limit, the minimum
wage, is relative.  When every member of the family works, the
individual worker can get on with proportionately less, and the bourgeoisie
has made the most of the opportunity of employing and making profitable
the labour of women and children afforded by machine-work.  Of
course it is not in every family that every member can be set to work,
and those in which the case is otherwise would be in a bad way if obliged
to exist upon the minimum wage possible to a wholly employed family. 
Hence the usual wages form an average according to which a fully employed
family gets on pretty well, and one which embraces few members able
to work, pretty badly.  But in the worst case, every working-man
prefers surrendering the trifling luxury to which he was accustomed
to not living at all; prefers a pig-pen to no roof, wears rags in preference
to going naked, confines himself to a potato diet in preference to starvation. 
He contents himself with half-pay and the hope of better times rather
than be driven into the street to perish before the eyes of the world,
as so many have done who had no work whatever.  This trifle, therefore,
this something more than nothing, is the p. 78minimum
of wages.  And if there are more workers at hand than the bourgeoisie
thinks well to employ—if at the end of the battle of competition
there yet remain workers who find nothing to do, they must simply starve;
for the bourgeois will hardly give them work if he cannot sell the produce
of their labour at a profit.

From this it is evident what the minimum of wages is.  The maximum
is determined by the competition of the bourgeoisie among themselves;
for we have seen how they, too, must compete with each other. 
The bourgeois can increase his capital only in commerce and manufacture,
and in both cases he needs workers.  Even if he invests his capital
at interest, he needs them indirectly; for without commerce and manufacture,
no one would pay him interest upon his capital, no one could use it. 
So the bourgeois certainly needs workers, not indeed for his immediate
living, for at need he could consume his capital, but as we need an
article of trade or a beast of burden,—as a means of profit. 
The proletarian produces the goods which the bourgeois sells with advantage. 
When, therefore, the demand for these goods increases so that all the
competing working-men are employed, and a few more might perhaps be
useful, the competition among the workers falls away, and the bourgeoisie
begin to compete among themselves.  The capitalist in search of
workmen knows very well that his profits increase as prices rise in
consequence of the increased demand for his goods, and pays a trifle
higher wages rather than let the whole profit escape him.  He sends
the butter to fetch the cheese, and getting the latter, leaves the butter
ungrudgingly to the workers.  So one capitalist after another goes
in chase of workers, and wages rise; but only as high as the increasing
demand permits.  If the capitalist, who willingly sacrificed a
part of his extraordinary profit, runs into danger of sacrificing any
part of his ordinary average profit, he takes very good care not to
pay more than average wages.

From this we can determine the average rate of wages.  Under
average circumstances, when neither workers nor capitalists have reason
to compete, especially among themselves, when there are just as many
workers at hand as can be employed in producing p. 79precisely
the goods that are demanded, wages stand a little above the minimum. 
How far they rise above the minimum will depend upon the average needs
and the grade of civilisation of the workers.  If the workers are
accustomed to eat meat several times in the week, the capitalists must
reconcile themselves to paying wages enough to make this food attainable,
not less, because the workers are not competing among themselves and
have no occasion to content themselves with less; not more, because
the capitalists, in the absence of competition among themselves, have
no occasion to attract working-men by extraordinary favours.  This
standard of the average needs and the average civilisation of the workers
has become very complicated by reason of the complications of English
industry, and is different for different sorts of workers, as has been
pointed out.  Most industrial occupations demand a certain skill
and regularity, and for these qualities which involve a certain grade
of civilisation, the rate of wages must be such as to induce the worker
to acquire such skill and subject himself to such regularity. 
Hence it is that the average wages of industrial workers are higher
than those of mere porters, day labourers, etc., higher especially than
those of agricultural labourers, a fact to which the additional cost
of the necessities of life in cities contributes somewhat.  In
other words, the worker is, in law and in fact, the slave of the property-holding
class, so effectually a slave that he is sold like a piece of goods,
rises and falls in value like a commodity.  If the demand for workers
increases, the price of workers rises; if it falls, their price falls. 
If it falls so greatly that a number of them become unsaleable, if they
are left in stock, they are simply left idle; and as they cannot live
upon that, they die of starvation.  For, to speak in the words
of the economists, the expense incurred in maintaining them would not
be reproduced, would be money thrown away, and to this end no man advances
capital; and, so far, Malthus was perfectly right in his theory of population. 
The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this,
that the worker of to-day seems to be free because he is not sold once
for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no
p. 80one
owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this
way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole
property-holding class.  For him the matter is unchanged at bottom,
and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom
on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one
guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at
any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation,
if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment, his
existence.  The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is far better off
under the present arrangement than under the old slave system; it can
dismiss its employees at discretion without sacrificing invested capital,
and gets its work done much more cheaply than is possible with slave
labour, as Adam Smith comfortingly pointed out. {80}

Hence it follows, too, that Adam Smith was perfectly right in making
the assertion: “That the demand for men, like that for any other
commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men, quickens it
when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast.” 
Just as in the case of any other commodity!  If there are
too few labourers at hand, prices, i.e. wages, rise, the workers
are more prosperous, marriages multiply, more children are born and
more live to grow up, until a sufficient number of labourers has been
secured.  If there are too many on hand, prices fall, want of work,
poverty, and starvation, and consequent diseases arise, and the “surplus
population” is put out of the way.  And Malthus, who carried
the foregoing proposition of Smith farther, was also right, in his way,
in asserting that there are always more p. 81people
on hand than can be maintained from the available means of subsistence. 
Surplus population is engendered rather by the competition of the workers
among themselves, which forces each separate worker to labour as much
each day as his strength can possibly admit.  If a manufacturer
can employ ten hands nine hours daily, he can employ nine if each works
ten hours, and the tenth goes hungry.  And if a manufacturer can
force the nine hands to work an extra hour daily for the same wages
by threatening to discharge them at a time when the demand for hands
is not very great, he discharges the tenth and saves so much wages. 
This is the process on a small scale, which goes on in a nation on a
large one.  The productiveness of each hand raised to the highest
pitch by the competition of the workers among themselves, the division
of labour, the introduction of machinery, the subjugation of the forces
of nature, deprive a multitude of workers of bread.  These starving
workers are then removed from the market, they can buy nothing, and
the quantity of articles of consumption previously required by them
is no longer in demand, need no longer be produced; the workers previously
employed in producing them are therefore driven out of work, and are
also removed from the market, and so it goes on, always the same old
round, or rather, so it would go if other circumstances did not intervene. 
The introduction of the industrial forces already referred to for increasing
production leads, in the course of time, to a reduction of prices of
the articles produced and to consequent increased consumption, so that
a large part of the displaced workers finally, after long suffering,
find work again.  If, in addition to this, the conquest of foreign
markets constantly and rapidly increases the demand for manufactured
goods, as has been the case in England during the past sixty years,
the demand for hands increases, and, in proportion to it, the population. 
Thus, instead of diminishing, the population of the British Empire has
increased with extraordinary rapidity, and is still increasing. 
Yet, in spite of the extension of industry, in spite of the demand for
working-men which, in general, has increased, there is, according to
the confession of all the official political parties (Tory, Whig, p. 82and
Radical), permanent surplus, superfluous population; the competition
among the workers is constantly greater than the competition to secure
workers.

Whence comes this incongruity?  It lies in the nature of industrial
competition and the commercial crises which arise from them.  In
the present unregulated production and distribution of the means of
subsistence, which is carried on not directly for the sake of supplying
needs, but for profit, in the system under which every one works for
himself to enrich himself, disturbances inevitably arise at every moment. 
For example, England supplies a number of countries with most diverse
goods.  Now, although the manufacturer may know how much of each
article is consumed in each country annually, he cannot know how much
is on hand at every given moment, much less can he know how much his
competitors export thither.  He can only draw most uncertain inferences
from the perpetual fluctuations in prices, as to the quantities on hand
and the needs of the moment.  He must trust to luck in exporting
his goods.  Everything is done blindly, as guess-work, more or
less at the mercy of accident.  Upon the slightest favourable report,
each one exports what he can, and before long such a market is glutted,
sales stop, capital remains inactive, prices fall, and English manufacture
has no further employment for its hands.  In the beginning of the
development of manufacture, these checks were limited to single branches
and single markets; but the centralising tendency of competition which
drives the hands thrown out of one branch into such other branches as
are most easily accessible, and transfers the goods which cannot be
disposed of in one market to other markets, has gradually brought the
single minor crises nearer together and united them into one periodically
recurring crisis.  Such a crisis usually recurs once in five years
after a brief period of activity and general prosperity; the home market,
like all foreign ones, is glutted with English goods, which it can only
slowly absorb, the industrial movement comes to a standstill in almost
every branch, the small manufacturers and merchants who cannot survive
a prolonged inactivity of their invested capital fail, the larger ones
suspend business during the p. 83worst
season, close their mills or work short time, perhaps half the day;
wages fall by reason of the competition of the unemployed, the diminution
of working-time and the lack of profitable sales; want becomes universal
among the workers, the small savings, which individuals may have made,
are rapidly consumed, the philanthropic institutions are overburdened,
the poor-rates are doubled, trebled, and still insufficient, the number
of the starving increases, and the whole multitude of “surplus”
population presses in terrific numbers into the foreground.  This
continues for a time; the “surplus” exist as best they may,
or perish; philanthropy and the Poor Law help many of them to a painful
prolongation of their existence.  Others find scant means of subsistence
here and there in such kinds of work as have been least open to competition,
are most remote from manufacture.  And with how little can a human
being keep body and soul together for a time!  Gradually the state
of things improve; the accumulations of goods are consumed, the general
depression among the men of commerce and manufacture prevents a too
hasty replenishing of the markets, and at last rising prices and favourable
reports from all directions restore activity.  Most of the markets
are distant ones; demand increases and prices rise constantly while
the first exports are arriving; people struggle for the first goods,
the first sales enliven trade still more, the prospective ones promise
still higher prices; expecting a further rise, merchants begin to buy
upon speculation, and so to withdraw from consumption the articles intended
for it, just when they are most needed.  Speculation forces prices
still higher, by inspiring others to purchase, and appropriating new
importations at once.  All this is reported to England, manufacturers
begin to produce with a will, new mills are built, every means is employed
to make the most of the favourable moment.  Speculation arises
here, too, exerting the same influence as upon foreign markets, raising
prices, withdrawing goods from consumption, spurring manufacture in
both ways to the highest pitch of effort.  Then come the daring
speculators working with fictitious capital, living upon credit, ruined
if they cannot speedily sell; they hurl themselves into this p. 84universal,
disorderly race for profits, multiply the disorder and haste by their
unbridled passion, which drives prices and production to madness. 
It is a frantic struggle, which carries away even the most experienced
and phlegmatic; goods are spun, woven, hammered, as if all mankind were
to be newly equipped, as though two thousand million new consumers had
been discovered in the moon.  All at once the shaky speculators
abroad, who must have money, begin to sell, below market price, of course,
for their need is urgent; one sale is followed by others, prices fluctuate,
speculators throw their goods upon the market in terror, the market
is disordered, credit shaken, one house after another stops payments,
bankruptcy follows bankruptcy, and the discovery is made that three
times more goods are on hand or under way than can be consumed. 
The news reaches England, where production has been going on at full
speed meanwhile, panic seizes all hands, failures abroad cause others
in England, the panic crushes a number of firms, all reserves are thrown
upon the market here, too, in the moment of anxiety, and the alarm is
still further exaggerated.  This is the beginning of the crisis,
which then takes precisely the same course as its predecessor, and gives
place in turn to a season of prosperity.  So it goes on perpetually,—prosperity,
crisis, prosperity, crisis, and this perennial round in which English
industry moves is, as has been before observed, usually completed once
in five or six years.

From this it is clear that English manufacture must have, at all
times save the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve
army of workers, in order to be able to produce the masses of goods
required by the market in the liveliest months.  This reserve army
is larger or smaller, according as the state of the market occasions
the employment of a larger or smaller proportion of its members. 
And if at the moment of highest activity of the market the agricultural
districts and the branches least affected by the general prosperity
temporarily supply to manufacture a number of workers, these are a mere
minority, and these too belong to the reserve army, with the single
difference that the prosperity of the moment was required to reveal
their connection p. 85with
it.  When they enter upon the more active branches of work, their
former employers draw in somewhat, in order to feel the loss less, work
longer hours, employ women and younger workers, and when the wanderers
discharged at the beginning of the crisis return, they find their places
filled and themselves superfluous—at least in the majority of
cases.  This reserve army, which embraces an immense multitude
during the crisis and a large number during the period which may be
regarded as the average between the highest prosperity and the crisis,
is the “surplus population” of England, which keeps body
and soul together by begging, stealing, street-sweeping, collecting
manure, pushing handcarts, driving donkeys, peddling, or performing
occasional small jobs.  In every great town a multitude of such
people may be found.  It is astonishing in what devices this “surplus
population” takes refuge.  The London crossing-sweepers are
known all over the world; but hitherto the principal streets in all
the great cities, as well as the crossings, have been swept by people
out of other work, and employed by the Poor Law guardians or the municipal
authorities for the purpose.  Now, however, a machine has been
invented which rattles through the streets daily, and has spoiled this
source of income for the unemployed.  Along the great highways
leading into the cities, on which there is a great deal of waggon traffic,
a large number of people may be seen with small carts, gathering fresh
horse-dung at the risk of their lives among the passing coaches and
omnibuses, often paying a couple of shillings a week to the authorities
for the privilege.  But this occupation is forbidden in many places,
because the ordinary street-sweepings thus impoverished cannot be sold
as manure.  Happy are such of the “surplus” as can
obtain a push-cart and go about with it.  Happier still those to
whom it is vouchsafed to possess an ass in addition to the cart. 
The ass must get his own food or is given a little gathered refuse,
and can yet bring in a trifle of money.  Most of the “surplus”
betake themselves to huckstering.  On Saturday afternoons, especially,
when the whole working population is on the streets, the crowd who live
from huckstering and peddling may be seen.  Shoe and corset laces,
braces, twine, cakes, p. 86oranges,
every kind of small articles are offered by men, women, and children;
and at other times also, such peddlers are always to be seen standing
at the street corners, or going about with cakes and ginger-beer or
nettle-beer.  Matches and such things, sealing-wax, and patent
mixtures for lighting fires are further resources of such venders. 
Others, so-called jobbers, go about the streets seeking small jobs. 
Many of these succeed in getting a day’s work, many are not so
fortunate.

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

When these people find no work and will not rebel against society,
what remains for them but to beg?  And surely no one can wonder
at the great army of beggars, most of them able-bodied men, with whom
the police carries on perpetual war.  But the beggary of these
men has a peculiar character.  Such a man usually goes about with
his family singing a pleading song in the streets or appealing, in a
speech, to the benevolence of the passers-by.  And it is a striking
fact that these beggars are seen almost exclusively in the working-people’s
districts, that it is almost exclusively the gifts of the poor from
which they live.  Or the family takes up its position in a busy
street, and without uttering a word, lets the mere sight of its helplessness
plead for it.  In this case, too, they reckon upon the sympathy
of the workers alone, who know from experience how it feels to be hungry,
and are liable to find themselves in the same situation at any moment;
for this dumb, yet most moving appeal, is met with almost solely in
such streets as are frequented by working-men, and at such hours as
working-men pass by; but especially on summer evenings, when the “secrets”
of the working-people’s quarters are generally revealed, and the
middle-class withdraws p. 87as
far as possible from the district thus polluted.  And he among
the “surplus” who has courage and passion enough openly
to resist society, to reply with declared war upon the bourgeoisie to
the disguised war which the bourgeoisie wages upon him, goes forth to
rob, plunder, murder, and burn!

Of this surplus population there are, according to the reports of
the Poor Law commissioners, on an average, a million and a half in England
and Wales; in Scotland the number cannot be ascertained for want of
Poor Law regulations, and with Ireland we shall deal separately. 
Moreover, this million and a half includes only those who actually apply
to the parish for relief; the great multitude who struggle on without
recourse to this most hated expedient, it does not embrace.  On
the other hand, a good part of the number belongs to the agricultural
districts, and does not enter into the present discussion.  During
a crisis this number naturally increases markedly, and want reaches
its highest pitch.  Take, for instance, the crisis of 1842, which,
being the latest, was the most violent; for the intensity of the crisis
increases with each repetition, and the next, which may be expected
not later than 1847, {87}
will probably be still more violent and lasting.  During this crisis
the poor-rates rose in every town to a hitherto unknown height. 
In Stockport, among other towns, for every pound paid in house-rent,
eight shillings of poor-rate had to be paid, so that the rate alone
formed forty per cent. of the house-rent.  Moreover, whole streets
stood vacant, so that there were at least twenty thousand fewer inhabitants
than usual, and on the doors of the empty houses might be read: “Stockport
to let.”  In Bolton, where, in ordinary years, the rents
from which rates are paid average £86,000, they sank to £36,000. 
The number of the poor to be supported rose, on the other hand, to 14,000,
or more than twenty per cent. of the whole number of inhabitants. 
In Leeds, the Poor Law guardians had a reserve fund of £10,000. 
This, with a contribution of £7,000, was wholly exhausted before
the crisis reached its height.  So it was everywhere.  A report
drawn up in January, 1843, by a committee of the Anti-Corn Law p. 88League,
on the condition of the industrial districts in 1842, which was based
upon detailed statements of the manufacturers, asserts that the poor-rate
was, taking the average, twice as high as in 1839, and that the number
of persons requiring relief has trebled, even quintupled, since that
time; that a multitude of applicants belong to a class which had never
before solicited relief; that the working-class commands more than two-thirds
less of the means of subsistence than from 1834-1836; that the consumption
of meat had been decidedly less, in some places twenty per cent., in
others reaching sixty per cent. less; that even handicraftsmen, smiths,
bricklayers, and others, who usually have full employment in the most
depressed periods, now suffered greatly from want of work and reduction
of wages; and that, even now, in January, 1843, wages are still steadily
falling.  And these are the reports of manufacturers!  The
starving workmen, whose mills were idle, whose employers could give
them no work, stood in the streets in all directions, begged singly
or in crowds, besieged the sidewalks in armies, and appealed to the
passers-by for help; they begged, not cringing like ordinary beggars,
but threatening by their numbers, their gestures, and their words. 
Such was the state of things in all the industrial districts, from Leicester
to Leeds, and from Manchester to Birmingham.  Here and there disturbances
arose, as in the Staffordshire potteries, in July.  The most frightful
excitement prevailed among the workers until the general insurrection
broke out throughout the manufacturing districts in August.  When
I came to Manchester in November, 1842, there were crowds of unemployed
working-men at every street corner, and many mills were still standing
idle.  In the following months these unwilling corner loafers gradually
vanished, and the factories came into activity once more.

To what extent want and suffering prevail among these unemployed
during such a crisis, I need not describe.  The poor-rates are
insufficient, vastly insufficient; the philanthropy of the rich is a
rain-drop in the ocean, lost in the moment of falling, beggary can support
but few among the crowds.  If the small dealers did not sell to
the working-people on credit at such times as long as p. 89possible—paying
themselves liberally afterwards, it must be confessed—and if the
working-people did not help each other, every crisis would remove a
multitude of the surplus through death by starvation.  Since, however,
the most depressed period is brief, lasting, at worst, but one, two,
or two and a half years, most of them emerge from it with their lives
after dire privations.  But indirectly by disease, etc., every
crisis finds a multitude of victims, as we shall see.  First, however,
let us turn to another cause of abasement to which the English worker
is exposed, a cause permanently active in forcing the whole class downwards.

p. 90IRISH
IMMIGRATION.

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

“The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity,
restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways
and byways.  The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the
p. 91Milesian
with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out
his hat to beg.  He is the sorest evil this country has to strive
with.  In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake
all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back—for
wages that will purchase him potatoes.  He needs only salt for
condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts
in outhouses, and wears a suit of tatters, the getting on and off of
which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals
and the high tides of the calendar.  The Saxon-man, if he cannot
work on these terms, finds no work.  The uncivilised Irishman,
not by his strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives the Saxon
native out, takes possession in his room.  There abides he, in
his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the
ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder.  Whoever struggles,
swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being
can exist not swimming, but sunk.  That the condition of the lower
multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of
the Irish, competing with them in all the markets: that whatsoever labour,
to which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done,
will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the
Irish price; at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior
to scarcity of potatoes for thirty weeks yearly; superior, yet hourly,
with the arrival of every new steamboat, sinking nearer to an equality
with that.”

If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish
national character, Carlyle is perfectly right.  These Irishmen
who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on
which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. 
The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes
them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread;
shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only;
whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink.  What
does such a race want with high wages?  The worst quarters of all
the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen.  Whenever a district
is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer
may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises
at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the p. 92native,
and the singing, aspirate brogue which the true Irishman never loses. 
I have occasionally heard the Irish-Celtic language spoken in the most
thickly populated parts of Manchester.  The majority of the families
who live in cellars are almost everywhere of Irish origin.  In
short, the Irish have, as Dr. Kay says, discovered the minimum of the
necessities of life, and are now making the English workers acquainted
with it.  Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. 
The lack of cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country, where
population is scattered, and which is the Irishman’s second nature,
becomes terrifying and gravely dangerous through its concentration here
in the great cities.  The Milesian deposits all garbage and filth
before his house door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and
so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working-people’s
quarters and poison the air.  He builds a pig-sty against the house
wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets
the pig sleep in the room with himself.  This new and unnatural
method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly of Irish origin. 
The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference
that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill.  Otherwise, he
eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll
in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in
all the great towns of England.  The filth and comfortlessness
that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to describe. 
The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of
straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly
couch.  A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table,
more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen,
which is also his sleeping and living room.  When he is in want
of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts,
mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney.  Moreover, why
should he need much room?  At home in his mud-cabin there was only
one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does
not need in England.  So the custom of crowding many persons into
a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the p. 93Irish
immigration.  And since the poor devil must have one enjoyment,
and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the
drinking of spirits.  Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman’s
life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he
revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. 
The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places
him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments,
in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth
and poverty, all favour drunkenness.  The temptation is great,
he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down
his throat.  What else should he do?  How can society blame
him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity
becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery?

With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle with
a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country,
who for this very reason requires less wages than any other.  Nothing
else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of
English working-men should be forced down further and further in every
branch in which the Irish compete with him.  And these branches
are many.  All such as demand little or no skill are open to the
Irish.  For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious
application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low
a plane.  To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt
the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main,
an Englishman.  But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it
is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as
the Englishman.  Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded
with Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such
workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure
of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. 
And even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations,
should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to
them to have a strong degrading influence upon their English companions
in toil, especially in view of the p. 94general
effect of being surrounded by the Irish.  For when, in almost every
great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children
of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder
if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status—in short, the
whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the
Irish characteristics.  On the contrary, it is easy to understand
how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our
modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more
degraded by the presence of Irish competition.

p. 95RESULTS.

Having now investigated, somewhat in detail, the conditions under
which the English working-class lives, it is time to draw some further
inferences from the facts presented, and then to compare our inferences
with the actual state of things.  Let us see what the workers themselves
have become under the given circumstances, what sort of people they
are, what their physical, mental, and moral status.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury
that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant
knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. 
But when society {95}
places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably
meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much
a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives
thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in
which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong
arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues
which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands
of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain,
its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual;
disguised, malicious murder, murder against which p. 96none
can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees
the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since
the offence is more one of omission than of commission.  But murder
it remains.  I have now to prove that society in England daily
and hourly commits what the working-men’s organs, with perfect
correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers
under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long;
that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little
by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. 
I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions
are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing
to improve these conditions.  That it knows the consequences
of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but
murder, I shall have proved, when I cite official documents, reports
of Parliament and of the Government, in substantiation of my charge.

That a class which lives under the conditions already sketched and
is so ill-provided with the most necessary means of subsistence, cannot
be healthy and can reach no advanced age, is self-evident.  Let
us review the circumstances once more with especial reference to the
health of the workers.  The centralisation of population in great
cities exercises of itself an unfavourable influence; the atmosphere
of London can never be so pure, so rich in oxygen, as the air of the
country; two and a half million pairs of lungs, two hundred and fifty
thousand fires, crowded upon an area three to four miles square, consume
an enormous amount of oxygen, which is replaced with difficulty, because
the method of building cities in itself impedes ventilation.  The
carbonic acid gas, engendered by respiration and fire, remains in the
streets by reason of its specific gravity, and the chief air current
passes over the roofs of the city.  The lungs of the inhabitants
fail to receive the due supply of oxygen, and the consequence is mental
and physical lassitude and low vitality.  For this reason, the
dwellers in cities are far less exposed to acute, and especially to
inflammatory, affections than rural populations, who live in a free,
normal atmosphere; but they suffer the more from chronic p. 97affections. 
And if life in large cities is, in itself, injurious to health, how
great must be the harmful influence of an abnormal atmosphere in the
working-people’s quarters, where, as we have seen, everything
combines to poison the air.  In the country, it may, perhaps, be
comparatively innoxious to keep a dung-heap adjoining one’s dwelling,
because the air has free ingress from all sides; but in the midst of
a large town, among closely built lanes and courts that shut out all
movement of the atmosphere, the case is different.  All putrefying
vegetable and animal substances give off gases decidedly injurious to
health, and if these gases have no free way of escape, they inevitably
poison the atmosphere.  The filth and stagnant pools of the working-people’s
quarters in the great cities have, therefore, the worst effect upon
the public health, because they produce precisely those gases which
engender disease; so, too, the exhalations from contaminated streams. 
But this is by no means all.  The manner in which the great multitude
of the poor is treated by society to-day is revolting.  They are
drawn into the large cities where they breathe a poorer atmosphere than
in the country; they are relegated to districts which, by reason of
the method of construction, are worse ventilated than any others; they
are deprived of all means of cleanliness, of water itself, since pipes
are laid only when paid for, and the rivers so polluted that they are
useless for such purposes; they are obliged to throw all offal and garbage,
all dirty water, often all disgusting drainage and excrement into the
streets, being without other means of disposing of them; they are thus
compelled to infect the region of their own dwellings.  Nor is
this enough.  All conceivable evils are heaped upon the heads of
the poor.  If the population of great cities is too dense in general,
it is they in particular who are packed into the least space. 
As though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets were not enough, they
are penned in dozens into single rooms, so that the air which they breathe
at night is enough in itself to stifle them.  They are given damp
dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from below, or garrets
that leak from above.  Their houses are so built that the clammy
air cannot escape.  They are p. 98supplied
bad, tattered, or rotten clothing, adulterated and indigestible food. 
They are exposed to the most exciting changes of mental condition, the
most violent vibrations between hope and fear; they are hunted like
game, and not permitted to attain peace of mind and quiet enjoyment
of life.  They are deprived of all enjoyments except that of sexual
indulgence and drunkenness, are worked every day to the point of complete
exhaustion of their mental and physical energies, and are thus constantly
spurred on to the maddest excess in the only two enjoyments at their
command.  And if they surmount all this, they fall victims to want
of work in a crisis when all the little is taken from them that had
hitherto been vouchsafed them.

How is it possible, under such conditions, for the lower class to
be healthy and long lived?  What else can be expected than an excessive
mortality, an unbroken series of epidemics, a progressive deterioration
in the physique of the working population?  Let us see how the
facts stand.

That the dwellings of the workers in the worst portions of the cities,
together with the other conditions of life of this class, engender numerous
diseases, is attested on all sides.  The article already quoted
from the Artisan asserts with perfect truth, that lung diseases
must be the inevitable consequence of such conditions, and that, indeed,
cases of this kind are disproportionately frequent in this class. 
That the bad air of London, and especially of the working-people’s
districts, is in the highest degree favourable to the development of
consumption, the hectic appearance of great numbers of persons sufficiently
indicates.  If one roams the streets a little in the early morning,
when the multitudes are on their way to their work, one is amazed at
the number of persons who look wholly or half-consumptive.  Even
in Manchester the people have not the same appearance; these pale, lank,
narrow-chested, hollow-eyed ghosts, whom one passes at every step, these
languid, flabby faces, incapable of the slightest energetic expression,
I have seen in such startling numbers only in London, though consumption
carries off a horde of victims annually in the factory towns of the
North.  In competition with consumption stands p. 99typhus,
to say nothing of scarlet fever, a disease which brings most frightful
devastation into the ranks of the working-class.  Typhus, that
universally diffused affliction, is attributed by the official report
on the sanitary condition of the working-class, directly to the bad
state of the dwellings in the matters of ventilation, drainage, and
cleanliness.  This report, compiled, it must not be forgotten,
by the leading physicians of England from the testimony of other physicians,
asserts that a single ill-ventilated court, a single blind alley without
drainage, is enough to engender fever, and usually does engender it,
especially if the inhabitants are greatly crowded.  This fever
has the same character almost everywhere, and develops in nearly every
case into specific typhus.  It is to be found in the working-people’s
quarters of all great towns and cities, and in single ill-built, ill-kept
streets of smaller places, though it naturally seeks out single victims
in better districts also.  In London it has now prevailed for a
considerable time; its extraordinary violence in the year 1837 gave
rise to the report already referred to.  According to the annual
report of Dr. Southwood Smith on the London Fever Hospital, the number
of patients in 1843 was 1,462, or 418 more than in any previous year. 
In the damp, dirty regions of the north, south, and east districts of
London, this disease raged with extraordinary violence.  Many of
the patients were working-people from the country, who had endured the
severest privation while migrating, and, after their arrival, had slept
hungry and half-naked in the streets, and so fallen victims to the fever. 
These people were brought into the hospital in such a state of weakness,
that unusual quantities of wine, cognac, and preparations of ammonia
and other stimulants were required for their treatment; 16½ per
cent. of all patients died.  This malignant fever is to be found
in Manchester; in the worst quarters of the Old Town, Ancoats, Little
Ireland, etc., it is rarely extinct; though here, as in the English
towns generally, it prevails to a less extent than might be expected. 
In Scotland and Ireland, on the other hand, it rages with a violence
that surpasses all conception.  In Edinburgh and Glasgow it broke
out in 1817, after the famine, and in 1826 and 1837 with especial violence,
after p. 100the
commercial crisis, subsiding somewhat each time after having raged about
three years.  In Edinburgh about 6,000 persons were attacked by
the fever during the epidemic of 1817, and about 10,000 in that of 1837,
and not only the number of persons attacked but the violence of the
disease increased with each repetition. {100a}

But the fury of the epidemic in all former periods seems to have
been child’s play in comparison with its ravages after the crisis
of 1842.  One-sixth of the whole indigent population of Scotland
was seized by the fever, and the infection was carried by wandering
beggars with fearful rapidity from one locality to another.  It
did not reach the middle and upper classes of the population, yet in
two months there were more fever cases than in twelve years before. 
In Glasgow, twelve per cent. of the population were seized in the year
1843; 32,000 persons, of whom thirty-two per cent. perished, while this
mortality in Manchester and Liverpool does not ordinarily exceed eight
per cent.  The illness reached a crisis on the seventh and fifteenth
days; on the latter, the patient usually became yellow, which our authority
{100b} regards
as an indication that the cause of the malady was to be sought in mental
excitement and anxiety.  In Ireland, too, these fever epidemics
have become domesticated.  During twenty-one months of the years
1817-1818, 39,000 fever patients passed through the Dublin hospital;
and in a more recent year, according to Sheriff Alison, {100c}
60,000.  In Cork the fever hospital received one-seventh of the
population in 1817-1818, in Limerick in the same time one-fourth, and
in the bad quarter of Waterford, nineteen-twentieths of the whole population
were ill of the fever at one time.

When one remembers under what conditions the working-people live,
when one thinks how crowded their dwellings are, how every nook and
corner swarms with human beings, how sick and well sleep in the same
room, in the same bed, the only wonder is that a contagious disease
like this fever does not spread p. 101yet
farther.  And when one reflects how little medical assistance the
sick have at command, how many are without any medical advice whatsoever,
and ignorant of the most ordinary precautionary measures, the mortality
seems actually small.  Dr. Alison, who has made a careful study
of this disease, attributes it directly to the want and the wretched
condition of the poor, as in the report already quoted.  He asserts
that privations and the insufficient satisfaction of vital needs are
what prepare the frame for contagion and make the epidemic widespread
and terrible.  He proves that a period of privation, a commercial
crisis or a bad harvest, has each time produced the typhus epidemic
in Ireland as in Scotland, and that the fury of the plague has fallen
almost exclusively on the working-class.  It is a noteworthy fact,
that according to his testimony, the majority of persons who perish
by typhus are fathers of families, precisely the persons who can least
be spared by those dependent upon them; and several Irish physicians
whom he quotes bear the same testimony.

Another category of diseases arises directly from the food rather
than the dwellings of the workers.  The food of the labourer, indigestible
enough in itself, is utterly unfit for young children, and he has neither
means nor time to get his children more suitable food.  Moreover,
the custom of giving children spirits, and even opium, is very general;
and these two influences, with the rest of the conditions of life prejudicial
to bodily development, give rise to the most diverse affections of the
digestive organs, leaving life-long traces behind them.  Nearly
all workers have stomachs more or less weak, and are yet forced to adhere
to the diet which is the root of the evil.  How should they know
what is to blame for it?  And if they knew, how could they obtain
a more suitable regimen so long as they cannot adopt a different way
of living and are not better educated?  But new disease arises
during childhood from impaired digestion.  Scrofula is almost universal
among the working-class, and scrofulous parents have scrofulous children,
especially when the original influences continue in full force to operate
upon the inherited tendency of the children.  A second consequence
of this insufficient bodily p. 102nourishment,
during the years of growth and development, is rachitis, which is extremely
common among the children of the working-class.  The hardening
of the bones is delayed, the development of the skeleton in general
is restricted, and deformities of the legs and spinal column are frequent,
in addition to the usual rachitic affections.  How greatly all
these evils are increased by the changes to which the workers are subject
in consequence of fluctuations in trade, want of work, and the scanty
wages in time of crisis, it is not necessary to dwell upon.  Temporary
want of sufficient food, to which almost every working-man is exposed
at least once in the course of his life, only contributes to intensify
the effects of his usual sufficient but bad diet.  Children who
are half-starved, just when they most need ample and nutritious food—and
how many such there are during every crisis and even when trade is at
its best—must inevitably become weak, scrofulous and rachitic
in a high degree.  And that they do become so, their appearance
amply shows.  The neglect to which the great mass of working-men’s
children are condemned leaves ineradicable traces and brings the enfeeblement
of the whole race of workers with it.  Add to this, the unsuitable
clothing of this class, the impossibility of precautions against colds,
the necessity of toiling so long as health permits, want made more dire
when sickness appears, and the only too common lack of all medical assistance;
and we have a rough idea of the sanitary condition of the English working-class. 
The injurious effects peculiar to single employments as now conducted,
I shall not deal with here.

Besides these, there are other influences which enfeeble the health
of a great number of workers, intemperance most of all.  All possible
temptations, all allurements combine to bring the workers to drunkenness. 
Liquor is almost their only source of pleasure, and all things conspire
to make it accessible to them.  The working-man comes from his
work tired, exhausted, finds his home comfortless, damp, dirty, repulsive;
he has urgent need of recreation, he must have something to make
work worth his trouble, to make the prospect of the next day endurable. 
His unnerved, uncomfortable, hypochondriac state of mind and body p. 103arising
from his unhealthy condition, and especially from indigestion, is aggravated
beyond endurance by the general conditions of his life, the uncertainty
of his existence, his dependence upon all possible accidents and chances,
and his inability to do anything towards gaining an assured position. 
His enfeebled frame, weakened by bad air and bad food, violently demands
some external stimulus; his social need can be gratified only in the
public-house, he has absolutely no other place where he can meet his
friends.  How can he be expected to resist the temptation? 
It is morally and physically inevitable that, under such circumstances,
a very large number of working-men should fall into intemperance. 
And apart from the chiefly physical influences which drive the working-man
into drunkenness, there is the example of the great mass, the neglected
education, the impossibility of protecting the young from temptation,
in many cases the direct influence of intemperate parents, who give
their own children liquor, the certainty of forgetting for an hour or
two the wretchedness and burden of life, and a hundred other circumstances
so mighty that the workers can, in truth, hardly be blamed for yielding
to such overwhelming pressure.  Drunkenness has here ceased to
be a vice, for which the vicious can be held responsible; it becomes
a phenomenon, the necessary, inevitable effect of certain conditions
upon an object possessed of no volition in relation to those conditions. 
They who have degraded the working-man to a mere object have the responsibility
to bear.  But as inevitably as a great number of working-men fall
a prey to drink, just so inevitably does it manifest its ruinous influence
upon the body and mind of its victims.  All the tendencies to disease
arising from the conditions of life of the workers are promoted by it,
it stimulates in the highest degree the development of lung and digestive
troubles, the rise and spread of typhus epidemics.

Another source of physical mischief to the working-class lies in
the impossibility of employing skilled physicians in cases of illness. 
It is true that a number of charitable institutions strive to supply
this want, that the infirmary in Manchester, for instance, receives
or gives advice and medicine to 2,200 patients annually.  But p. 104what
is that in a city in which, according to Gaskell’s calculation,
{104} three-fourths
of the population need medical aid every year?  English doctors
charge high fees, and working-men are not in a position to pay them. 
They can therefore do nothing, or are compelled to call in cheap charlatans,
and use quack remedies, which do more harm than good.  An immense
number of such quacks thrive in every English town, securing their clientèle
among the poor by means of advertisements, posters, and other such devices. 
Besides these, vast quantities of patent medicines are sold, for all
conceivable ailments: Morrison’s Pills, Parr’s Life Pills,
Dr. Mainwaring’s Pills, and a thousand other pills, essences,
and balsams, all of which have the property of curing all the ills that
flesh is heir to.  These medicines rarely contain actually injurious
substances, but, when taken freely and often, they affect the system
prejudicially; and as the unwary purchasers are always recommended to
take as much as possible, it is not to be wondered at that they swallow
them wholesale whether wanted or not.

It is by no means unusual for the manufacturer of Parr’s Life
Pills to sell twenty to twenty-five thousand boxes of these salutary
pills in a week, and they are taken for constipation by this one, for
diarrhœa by that one, for fever, weakness, and all possible ailments. 
As our German peasants are cupped or bled at certain seasons, so do
the English working-people now consume patent medicines to their own
injury and the great profit of the manufacturer.  One of the most
injurious of these patent medicines is a drink prepared with opiates,
chiefly laudanum, under the name Godfrey’s Cordial.  Women
who work at home, and have their own and other people’s children
to take care of, give them this drink to keep them quiet, and, as many
believe, to strengthen them.  They often begin to give this medicine
to newly-born children, and continue, without knowing the effects of
this “heartsease,” until the children die.  The less
susceptible the child’s system to the action of the opium, the
greater the quantities administered.  When the cordial ceases to
act, laudanum alone is given, often to the extent of fifteen to twenty
drops at a dose.  p. 105The
Coroner of Nottingham testified before a Parliamentary Commission {105a}
that one apothecary had, according to his own statement, used thirteen
hundredweight of laudanum in one year in the preparation of Godfrey’s
Cordial.  The effects upon the children so treated may be readily
imagined.  They are pale, feeble, wilted, and usually die before
completing the second year.  The use of this cordial is very extensive
in all great towns and industrial districts in the kingdom.

The result of all these influences is a general enfeeblement of the
frame in the working-class.  There are few vigorous, well-built,
healthy persons among the workers, i.e., among the factory operatives,
who are employed in confined rooms, and we are here discussing these
only.  They are almost all weakly, of angular but not powerful
build, lean, pale, and of relaxed fibre, with the exception of the muscles
especially exercised in their work.  Nearly all suffer from indigestion,
and consequently from a more or less hypochondriac, melancholy, irritable,
nervous condition.  Their enfeebled constitutions are unable to
resist disease, and are therefore seized by it on every occasion. 
Hence they age prematurely, and die early.  On this point the mortality
statistics supply unquestionable testimony.

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

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

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

The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Working-Class contains
information which attests the same fact.  In Liverpool, in 1840,
the average longevity of the upper-classes, gentry, professional men,
etc., was thirty-five years; that of the business men and better-placed
handicraftsmen, twenty-two years; and that of the operatives, day-labourers,
and serviceable class in general, but fifteen years.  The Parliamentary
reports contain a mass of similar facts.

The death-rate is kept so high chiefly by the heavy mortality among
young children in the working-class.  The tender frame of a child
is least able to withstand the unfavourable influences of an inferior
lot in life; the neglect to which they are often subjected, when both
parents work or one is dead, avenges itself promptly, and no one need
wonder that in Manchester, according to the report last quoted, more
than fifty-seven per cent. of the children of the working-class perish
before the fifth year, while but twenty per cent. of the children of
the higher classes, and not quite thirty-two per cent. of the children
of all classes in the p. 108country
die under five years of age. {108a} 
The article of the Artisan, already several times referred to,
furnishes exacter information on this point, by comparing the city death-rate
in single diseases of children with the country death-rate, thus demonstrating
that, in general, epidemics in Manchester and Liverpool are three times
more fatal than in country districts; that affections of the nervous
system are quintupled, and stomach troubles trebled, while deaths from
affections of the lungs in cities are to those in the country as 2½
to 1.  Fatal cases of smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, and whooping
cough, among small children, are four times more frequent; those of
water on the brain are trebled, and convulsions ten times more frequent. 
To quote another acknowledged authority, I append the following table. 
Out of 10,000 persons, there die—{108b}

Apart from the divers diseases which are the necessary consequence
of the present neglect and oppression of the poorer classes, there are
other influences which contribute to increase the mortality among small
children.  In many families the wife, like the husband, has to
work away from home, and the consequence is the total neglect of the
children, who are either locked up or given out to be taken care of. 
It is, therefore, not to be wondered at if hundreds of them perish through
all manner of accidents.  Nowhere are so many children run over,
nowhere are so many killed p. 109by
falling, drowning, or burning, as in the great cities and towns of England. 
Deaths from burns and scalds are especially frequent, such a case occurring
nearly every week during the winter months in Manchester, and very frequently
in London, though little mention is made of them in the papers. 
I have at hand a copy of the Weekly Despatch of December 15th,
1844, according to which, in the week from December 1st to December
7th inclusive, six such cases occurred.  These unhappy children,
perishing in this terrible way, are victims of our social disorder,
and of the property-holding classes interested in maintaining and prolonging
this disorder.  Yet one is left in doubt whether even this terribly
torturing death is not a blessing for the children in rescuing them
from a long life of toil and wretchedness, rich in suffering and poor
in enjoyment.  So far has it gone in England; and the bourgeoisie
reads these things every day in the newspapers and takes no further
trouble in the matter.  But it cannot complain if, after the official
and non-official testimony here cited which must be known to it, I broadly
accuse it of social murder.  Let the ruling class see to it that
these frightful conditions are ameliorated, or let it surrender the
administration of the common interests to the labouring-class. 
To the latter course it is by no means inclined; for the former task,
so long as it remains the bourgeoisie crippled by bourgeois prejudice,
it has not the needed power.  For if, at last, after hundreds of
thousands of victims have perished, it manifests some little anxiety
for the future, passing a “Metropolitan Buildings Act,”
under which the most unscrupulous overcrowding of dwellings is to be,
at least in some slight degree, restricted; if it points with pride
to measures which, far from attacking the root of the evil, do not by
any means meet the demands of the commonest sanitary policy, it cannot
thus vindicate itself from the accusation.  The English bourgeoisie
has but one choice, either to continue its rule under the unanswerable
charge of murder and in spite of this charge, or to abdicate in favour
of the labouring-class.  Hitherto it has chosen the former course.

Let us turn from the physical to the mental state of the workers. 
Since the bourgeoisie vouchsafes them only so much of life as is p. 110absolutely
necessary, we need not wonder that it bestows upon them only so much
education as lies in the interest of the bourgeoisie; and that, in truth,
is not much.  The means of education in England are restricted
out of all proportion to the population.  The few day schools at
the command of the working-class are available only for the smallest
minority, and are bad besides.  The teachers, worn-out workers,
and other unsuitable persons who only turn to teaching in order to live,
are usually without the indispensable elementary knowledge, without
the moral discipline so needful for the teacher, and relieved of all
public supervision.  Here, too, free competition rules, and, as
usual, the rich profit by it, and the poor, for whom competition is
not free, who have not the knowledge needed to enable them to
form a correct judgment, have the evil consequences to bear.  Compulsory
school attendance does not exist.  In the mills it is, as we shall
see, purely nominal; and when in the session of 1843 the Ministry was
disposed to make this nominal compulsion effective, the manufacturing
bourgeoisie opposed the measure with all its might, though the working-class
was outspokenly in favour of compulsory school attendance.  Moreover,
a mass of children work the whole week through in the mills or at home,
and therefore cannot attend school.  The evening schools, supposed
to be attended by children who are employed during the day, are almost
abandoned or attended without benefit.  It is asking too much,
that young workers who have been using themselves up twelve hours in
the day, should go to school from eight to ten at night.  And those
who try it usually fall asleep, as is testified by hundreds of witnesses
in the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report. 
Sunday schools have been founded, it is true, but they, too, are most
scantily supplied with teachers, and can be of use to those only who
have already learnt something in the day schools.  The interval
from one Sunday to the next is too long for an ignorant child to remember
in the second sitting what it learned in the first, a week before. 
The Children’s Employment Commission’s Report furnishes
a hundred proofs, and the Commission itself most emphatically expresses
the opinion, that neither the week-day nor p. 111the
Sunday schools, in the least degree, meet the needs of the nation. 
This report gives evidence of ignorance in the working-class of England,
such as could hardly be expected in Spain or Italy.  It cannot
be otherwise; the bourgeoisie has little to hope, and much to fear,
from the education of the working-class.  The Ministry, in its
whole enormous budget of £55,000,000, has only the single trifling
item of £40,000 for public education, and, but for the fanaticism
of the religious sects which does at least as much harm as good, the
means of education would be yet more scanty.  As it is, the State
Church manages its national schools and the various sects their sectarian
schools for the sole purpose of keeping the children of the brethren
of the faith within the congregation, and of winning away a poor childish
soul here and there from some other sect.  The consequence is that
religion, and precisely the most unprofitable side of religion, polemical
discussion, is made the principal subject of instruction, and the memory
of the children overburdened with incomprehensible dogmas and theological
distinctions; that sectarian hatred and bigotry are awakened as early
as possible, and all rational mental and moral training shamefully neglected. 
The working class has repeatedly demanded of Parliament a system of
strictly secular public education, leaving religion to the ministers
of the sects; but, thus far, no Ministry has been induced to grant it. 
The Minister is the obedient servant of the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie
is divided into countless sects; but each would gladly grant the workers
the otherwise dangerous education on the sole condition of their accepting,
as an antidote, the dogmas peculiar to the especial sect in question. 
And as these sects are still quarrelling among themselves for supremacy,
the workers remain for the present without education.  It is true
that the manufacturers boast of having enabled the majority to read,
but the quality of the reading is appropriate to the source of the instruction,
as the Children’s Employment Commission proves.  According
to this report, he who knows his letters can read enough to satisfy
the conscience of the manufacturers.  And when one reflects upon
the confused orthography of the English language which makes reading
p. 112one
of the arts, learned only under long instruction, this ignorance is
readily understood.  Very few working-people write readily; and
writing orthographically is beyond the powers even of many “educated”
persons.  The Sunday schools of the State Church, of the Quakers,
and, I think, of several other sects, do not teach writing, “because
it is too worldly an employment for Sunday.”  The quality
of the instruction offered the workers in other directions may be judged
from a specimen or two, taken from the Children’s Employment Commission’s
Report, which unfortunately does not embrace mill-work proper:

“In Birmingham,” says Commissioner Grainger,
“the children examined by me are, as a whole, utterly wanting
in all that could be in the remotest degree called a useful education. 
Although in almost all the schools religious instruction alone is furnished,
the profoundest ignorance even upon that subject prevailed.”—“In
Wolverhampton,” says Commissioner Horne, “I found, among
others, the following example: A girl of eleven years had attended both
day and Sunday school, ‘had never heard of another world, of Heaven,
or another life.’  A boy, seventeen years old, did not know
that twice two are four, nor how many farthings in two pence even when
the money was placed in his hand.  Several boys had never heard
of London nor of Willenhall, though the latter was but an hour’s
walk from their homes, and in the closest relations with Wolverhampton. 
Several had never heard the name of the Queen nor other names, such
as Nelson, Wellington, Bonaparte; but it was noteworthy that those who
had never heard even of St. Paul, Moses, or Solomon, were very well
instructed as to the life, deeds, and character of Dick Turpin, and
especially of Jack Sheppard.  A youth of sixteen did not know how
many twice two are, nor how much four farthings make.  A youth
of seventeen asserted that four farthings are four half pence; a third,
seventeen years old, answered several very simple questions with the
brief statement, that he ‘was ne jedge o’ nothin’.’”
{112a} 
These children who are crammed with religious doctrines four or five
years at a stretch, know as little at the end as at the beginning. 
One child “went to Sunday school regularly for five years; does
not know who Jesus Christ is, but had heard the name; had never heard
of the twelve Apostles, Samson, Moses, Aaron, etc.” {112b} 
p. 113Another
“attended Sunday school regularly six years; knows who Jesus Christ
was; he died on the Cross to save our Saviour; had never heard of St.
Peter or St. Paul.” {113a} 
A third, “attended different Sunday schools seven years; can read
only the thin, easy books with simple words of one syllable; has heard
of the Apostles, but does not know whether St. Peter was one or St.
John; the latter must have been St. John Wesley.” {113b} 
To the question who Christ was, Horne received the following answers
among others: “He was Adam,” “He was an Apostle,”
“He was the Saviour’s Lord’s Son,” and from
a youth of sixteen: “He was a king of London long ago.” 
In Sheffield, Commissioner Symonds let the children from the Sunday
school read aloud; they could not tell what they had read, or what sort
of people the Apostles were, of whom they had just been reading. 
After he had asked them all one after the other about the Apostles without
securing a single correct answer, one sly-looking little fellow, with
great glee, called out: “I know, mister; they were the lepers!”
{113c} 
From the pottery districts and from Lancashire the reports are similar.

This is what the bourgeoisie and the State are doing for the education
and improvement of the working-class.  Fortunately the conditions
under which this class lives are such as give it a sort of practical
training, which not only replaces school cramming, but renders harmless
the confused religious notions connected with it, and even places the
workers in the vanguard of the national movement of England.  Necessity
is the mother of invention, and what is still more important, of thought
and action.  The English working-man who can scarcely read and
still less write, nevertheless knows very well where his own interest
and that of the nation lies.  He knows, too, what the especial
interest of the bourgeoisie is, and what he has to expect of that bourgeoisie. 
If he cannot write he can speak, and speak in public; if he has no arithmetic,
he can, nevertheless, reckon with the Political Economists enough to
see through a Corn-Law-repealing bourgeois, and to get the better of
him in argument; if celestial matters remain very mixed for him in spite
of all the effort of the preachers, he sees all the more clearly into
terrestrial, political, p. 114and
social questions.  We shall have occasion to refer again to this
point; and pass now to the moral characteristics of our workers.

It is sufficiently clear that the instruction in morals can have
no better effect than the religious teaching, with which in all English
schools it is mixed up.  The simple principles which, for plain
human beings, regulate the relations of man to man, brought into the
direst confusion by our social state, our war of each against all, necessarily
remain confused and foreign to the working-man when mixed with incomprehensible
dogmas, and preached in the religious form of an arbitrary and dogmatic
commandment.  The schools contribute, according to the confession
of all authorities, and especially of the Children’s Employment
Commission, almost nothing to the morality of the working-class. 
So short-sighted, so stupidly narrow-minded is the English bourgeoisie
in its egotism, that it does not even take the trouble to impress upon
the workers the morality of the day, which the bourgeoisie has patched
together in its own interest for its own protection!  Even this
precautionary measure is too great an effort for the enfeebled and sluggish
bourgeoisie.  A time must come when it will repent its neglect,
too late.  But it has no right to complain that the workers know
nothing of its system of morals, and do not act in accordance with it.

Thus are the workers cast out and ignored by the class in power,
morally as well as physically and mentally.  The only provision
made for them is the law, which fastens upon them when they become obnoxious
to the bourgeoisie.  Like the dullest of the brutes, they are treated
to but one form of education, the whip, in the shape of force, not convincing
but intimidating.  There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if
the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can
maintain their consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most
glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie
in power.  They are men so long only as they burn with wrath against
the reigning class.  They become brutes the moment they bend in
patience under the yoke, and merely strive to make life endurable while
abandoning the effort to break the yoke.

p. 115This,
then, is all that the bourgeoisie has done for the education of the
proletariat—and when we take into consideration all the circumstances
in which this class lives, we shall not think the worse of it for the
resentment which it cherishes against the ruling class.  The moral
training which is not given to the worker in school is not supplied
by the other conditions of his life; that moral training, at least,
which alone has worth in the eyes of the bourgeoisie; his whole position
and environment involves the strongest temptation to immorality. 
He is poor, life offers him no charm, almost every enjoyment is denied
him, the penalties of the law have no further terrors for him; why should
he restrain his desires, why leave to the rich the enjoyment of his
birthright, why not seize a part of it for himself?  What inducement
has the proletarian not to steal!  It is all very pretty and very
agreeable to the ear of the bourgeois to hear the “sacredness
of property” asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness
of property dies out of itself.  Money is the god of this world;
the bourgeois takes the proletarian’s money from him and so makes
a practical atheist of him.  No wonder, then, if the proletarian
retains his atheism and no longer respects the sacredness and power
of the earthly God.  And when the poverty of the proletarian is
intensified to the point of actual lack of the barest necessaries of
life, to want and hunger, the temptation to disregard all social order
does but gain power.  This the bourgeoisie for the most part recognises. 
Symonds {115a}
observes that poverty exercises the same ruinous influence upon the
mind which drunkenness exercises upon the body; and Dr. Alison explains
to property-holding readers, with the greatest exactness, what the consequences
of social oppression must be for the working-class. {115b} 
Want leaves the working-man the choice between starving slowly, killing
himself speedily, or taking what he needs where he finds it—in
plain English, stealing.  And there is no cause for surprise that
most of them prefer stealing to starvation and suicide.

True, there are, within the working-class, numbers too moral to p. 116steal
even when reduced to the utmost extremity, and these starve or commit
suicide.  For suicide, formerly the enviable privilege of the upper
classes, has become fashionable among the English workers, and numbers
of the poor kill themselves to avoid the misery from which they see
no other means of escape.

But far more demoralising than his poverty in its influence upon
the English working-man is the insecurity of his position, the necessity
of living upon wages from hand to mouth, that in short which makes a
proletarian of him.  The smaller peasants in Germany are usually
poor, and often suffer want, but they are less at the mercy of accident,
they have at least something secure.  The proletarian, who has
nothing but his two hands, who consumes to-day what he earned yesterday,
who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee
for being able to earn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis,
every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this proletarian is
placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human
being.  The slave is assured of a bare livelihood by the self-interest
of his master, the serf has at least a scrap of land on which to live;
each has at worst a guarantee for life itself.  But the proletarian
must depend upon himself alone, and is yet prevented from so applying
his abilities as to be able to rely upon them.  Everything that
the proletarian can do to improve his position is but a drop in the
ocean compared with the floods of varying chances to which he is exposed,
over which he has not the slightest control.  He is the passive
subject of all possible combinations of circumstances, and must count
himself fortunate when he has saved his life even for a short time;
and his character and way of living are naturally shaped by these conditions. 
Either he seeks to keep his head above water in this whirlpool, to rescue
his manhood, and this he can do solely in rebellion {116}
against the class which plunders him so mercilessly and then abandons
him to his fate, which strives to hold him in this position so demoralising
to a human being; or he gives up the struggle against his fate as hopeless,
and strives to p. 117profit,
so far as he can, by the most favourable moment.  To save is unavailing,
for at the utmost he cannot save more than suffices to sustain life
for a short time, while if he falls out of work, it is for no brief
period.  To accumulate lasting property for himself is impossible;
and if it were not, he would only cease to be a working-man and another
would take his place.  What better thing can he do, then, when
he gets high wages, than live well upon them?  The English bourgeoisie
is violently scandalised at the extravagant living of the workers when
wages are high; yet it is not only very natural but very sensible of
them to enjoy life when they can, instead of laying up treasures which
are of no lasting use to them, and which in the end moth and rust (i.e.,
the bourgeoisie) get possession of.  Yet such a life is demoralising
beyond all others.  What Carlyle says of the cotton spinners is
true of all English industrial workers: {117a}

“Their trade, now in plethoric prosperity, anon
extenuated into inanition and ‘short time,’ is of the nature
of gambling; they live by it like gamblers, now in luxurious superfluity,
now in starvation.  Black, mutinous discontent devours them; simply
the miserablest feeling that can inhabit the heart of man.  English
commerce, with its world-wide, convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable
Proteus Steam demon, makes all paths uncertain for them, all life a
bewilderment; society, steadfastness, peaceable continuance, the first
blessings of man are not theirs.—This world is for them no home,
but a dingy prison-house, of reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancour,
indignation against themselves and against all men.  Is it a green,
flowery world, with azure everlasting sky stretched over it, the work
and government of a God; or a murky, simmering Tophet, of copperas fumes,
cotton fuz, gin riot, wrath and toil, created by a Demon, governed by
a Demon?”

And elsewhere: {117b}

“Injustice, infidelity to truth and fact and Nature’s
order, being properly the one evil under the sun, and the feeling of
injustice the one intolerable pain under the sun, our grand question
as to the condition of these working-men would be: Is it just? 
And, first of all, what belief have they themselves formed about the
p. 118justice
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?  p. 119Not
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, p. 120they
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 p. 121there
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 p. 122League,
Dr. Andrew Ure, {122}
betrays the other side.  He tells us that life in great cities
facilitates cabals among the workers and confers power on the Plebs. 
If here the workers are not educated (i.e., to obedience to the
bourgeoisie), they may view matters one-sidedly, from the standpoint
of a sinister selfishness, and may readily permit themselves to be hoodwinked
by sly demagogues; nay, they might even be capable of viewing their
greatest benefactors, the frugal and enterprising capitalists, with
a jealous and hostile eye.  Here proper training alone can avail,
or national bankruptcy and other horrors must follow, since a revolution
of the workers could hardly fail to occur.  And our bourgeois is
perfectly justified in his fears.  If the centralisation of population
stimulates and develops the property-holding class, it forces the development
of the workers yet more rapidly.  The workers begin to feel as
a class, as a whole; they begin to perceive that, though feeble as individuals,
they form a power united; their separation from the bourgeoisie, the
development of views peculiar to the workers and corresponding to their
position in life, is fostered, the consciousness of oppression awakens,
and the workers attain social and political importance.  The great
cities are the birthplaces of labour movements; in them the workers
first began to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against
it; in them the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first
made itself manifest; from them proceeded the Trades-Unions, Chartism,
and Socialism.  The great cities have transformed the disease of
the social body, which appears in chronic form in the country, into
an acute one, and so made manifest its real nature and the means of
curing it.  Without the great cities and their forcing influence
upon the popular intelligence, the working-class would be far less advanced
than it is.  Moreover, they have destroyed the last remnant of
the patriarchal relation between working-men and employers, a result
to which manufacture on a large scale has contributed by multiplying
the employés dependent upon a single employer.  The bourgeoisie
deplores all this, it is true, and has good reason to do p. 123so;
for, under the old conditions, the bourgeois was comparatively secure
against a revolt on the part of his hands.  He could tyrannise
over them and plunder them to his heart’s content, and yet receive
obedience, gratitude, and assent from these stupid people by bestowing
a trifle of patronising friendliness which cost him nothing, and perhaps
some paltry present, all apparently out of pure, self-sacrificing, uncalled-for
goodness of heart, but really not one-tenth part of his duty. 
As an individual bourgeois, placed under conditions which he had not
himself created, he might do his duty at least in part; but, as a member
of the ruling class, which, by the mere fact of its ruling, is responsible
for the condition of the whole nation, he did nothing of what his position
involved.  On the contrary, he plundered the whole nation for his
own individual advantage.  In the patriarchal relation that hypocritically
concealed the slavery of the worker, the latter must have remained an
intellectual zero, totally ignorant of his own interest, a mere private
individual.  Only when estranged from his employer, when convinced
that the sole bond between employer and employé is the bond of
pecuniary profit, when the sentimental bond between them, which stood
not the slightest test, had wholly fallen away, then only did the worker
begin to recognise his own interests and develop independently; then
only did he cease to be the slave of the bourgeoisie in his thoughts,
feelings, and the expression of his will.  And to this end manufacture
on a grand scale and in great cities has most largely contributed.

Another influence of great moment in forming the character of the
English workers is the Irish immigration already referred to. 
On the one hand it has, as we have seen, degraded the English workers,
removed them from civilisation, and aggravated the hardship of their
lot; but, on the other hand, it has thereby deepened the chasm between
workers and bourgeoisie, and hastened the approaching crisis. 
For the course of the social disease from which England is suffering
is the same as the course of a physical disease; it develops, according
to certain laws, has its own crisis, the last and most violent of which
determines the fate of the patient.  And as the English nation
cannot succumb under the final crises, p. 124but
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 p. 125any
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
p. 126the
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.  p. 127In
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 p. 128the
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
p. 129thirst
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!  p. 130Verily
the requirements are naïve, which the self-satisfied bourgeois
makes upon the working-man!

The contempt for the existing social order is most conspicuous in
its extreme form—that of offences against the law.  If the
influences demoralising to the working-man act more powerfully, more
concentratedly than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water
abandons the fluid for the vaporous state at 80 degrees, Réaumur. 
Under the brutal and brutalising treatment of the bourgeoisie, the working-man
becomes precisely as much a thing without volition as water, and is
subject to the laws of nature with precisely the same necessity; at
a certain point all freedom ceases.  Hence with the extension of
the proletariat, crime has increased in England, and the British nation
has become the most criminal in the world.  From the annual criminal
tables of the Home Secretary, it is evident that the increase of crime
in England has proceeded with incomprehensible rapidity.  The numbers
of arrests for criminal offences reached in the years: 1805,
4,605; 1810, 5,146; 1815, 7,898; 1820, 13,710; 1825, 14,437; 1830,18,107;
1835, 20,731; 1840, 27,187; 1841, 27,760; 1842, 31,309 in England and
Wales alone.  That is to say, they increased sevenfold in thirty-seven
years.  Of these arrests, in 1842, 4,497 were made in Lancashire
alone, or more than 14 per cent. of the whole; and 4,094 in Middlesex,
including London, or more than 13 per cent.  So that two districts
which include great cities with large proletarian populations, produced
one-fourth of the total amount of crime, though their population is
far from forming one-fourth of the whole.  Moreover, the criminal
tables prove directly that nearly all crime arises within the proletariat;
for, in 1842, taking the average, out of 100 criminals, 32.35 could
neither read nor write; 58.32 read and wrote imperfectly; 6.77 could
read and write well; 0.22 had enjoyed a higher education, while the
degree of education of 2.34 could not be ascertained.  In Scotland,
crime has increased yet more rapidly.  There were but 89 arrests
for criminal offences in 1819, and as early as 1837 the number had risen
to 3,176, and in 1842 to 4,189.  In Lanarkshire, where Sheriff
Alison himself made out p. 131the
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 p. 132burglary,
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 p. 133crime. 
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.

p. 134SINGLE
BRANCHES OF INDUSTRY.  FACTORY HANDS.

In dealing now with the more important branches of the English manufacturing
proletariat, we shall begin, according to the principle already laid
down, with the factory-workers, i.e., those who are comprised
under the Factory Act.  This law regulates the length of the working-day
in mills in which wool, silk, cotton, and flax are spun or woven by
means of water or steam-power, and embraces, therefore, the more important
branches of English manufacture.  The class employed by them is
the most intelligent and energetic of all the English workers, and,
therefore, the most restless and most hated by the bourgeoisie. 
It stands as a whole, and the cotton-workers pre-eminently stand, at
the head of the labour movement, as their masters the manufacturers,
especially those of Lancashire, take the lead of the bourgeois agitation.

We have already seen in the introduction how the population employed
in working up the textile materials were first torn from their former
way of life.  It is, therefore, not surprising that the progress
of mechanical invention in later years also affected precisely these
workers most deeply and permanently.  The history of cotton manufacture
as related by Ure, {134a}
Baines, {134b}
and others is the story of improvements in every direction, most of
which have become domesticated in the other branches of industry as
well.  Hand-work is superseded by machine-work almost universally,
nearly all manipulations are conducted by the aid of steam or water,
and every year is bringing further improvements.

In a well-ordered state of society, such improvements could only
be a source of rejoicing; in a war of all against all, individuals p. 135seize
the benefit for themselves, and so deprive the majority of the means
of subsistence.  Every improvement in machinery throws workers
out of employment, and the greater the advance, the more numerous the
unemployed; each great improvement produces, therefore, upon a number
of workers the effect of a commercial crisis, creates want, wretchedness,
and crime.  Take a few examples.  The very first invention,
the jenny, worked by one man, produced at least sixfold what the spinning-wheel
had yielded in the same time; thus every new jenny threw five spinners
out of employment.  The throstle, which, in turn, produced much
more than the jenny, and like it, was worked by one man, threw still
more people out of employment.  The mule, which required yet fewer
hands in proportion to the product, had the same effect, and every improvement
in the mule, every multiplication of its spindles, diminished still
further the number of workers employed.  But this increase of the
number of spindles in the mule is so great that whole armies of workers
have been thrown out of employment by it.  For, whereas one spinner,
with a couple of children for piecers, formerly set six hundred spindles
in motion, he could now manage fourteen hundred to two thousand spindles
upon two mules, so that two adult spinners and a part of the piecers
whom they employed were thrown out.  And since self-acting mules
have been introduced into a very large number of spinning-mills, the
spinners’ work is wholly performed by the machine.  There
lies before me a book from the pen of James Leach, {135}
one of the recognised leaders of the Chartists in Manchester. 
The author has worked for years in various branches of industry, in
mills and coal mines, and is known to me personally as an honest, trustworthy,
and capable man.  In consequence of his political position, he
had at command extensive detailed information as to the different factories,
collected by the workers themselves, and he publishes tables from which
it is clear that in 1841, in 35 factories, 1,060 fewer mule spinners
were employed than in 1829, though the number of spindles in these 35
factories had increased by 99,239.  He cites five factories p. 136in
which no spinners whatever are employed, self-actors only being used. 
While the number of spindles increased by 10 per cent., the number of
spinners diminished more than 60 per cent.  And Leach adds that
since 1841, so many improvements have been introduced by double-decking
and other means, that in some of the factories named, half the operatives
have been discharged.  In one factory alone, where eighty spinners
were employed a short time ago, there are now but twenty left; the others
having been discharged or set at children’s work for children’s
wages.  Of Stockport Leach tells a similar story, that in 1835,
800 spinners were employed, and in 1840 but 140, though the manufacture
of Stockport has greatly increased during the last eight or nine years. 
Similar improvements have now been made in carding frames, by which
one-half the operatives have been thrown out of employment.  In
one factory improved frames have been set up, which have thrown four
hands out of eight out of work, besides which the employer reduced the
wages of the four retained from eight shillings to seven.  The
same process has gone on in the weaving industry; the power-loom has
taken possession of one branch of hand-weaving after another, and since
it produces much more than the hand-loom, while one weaver can work
two looms, it has superseded a multitude of working-people.  And
in all sorts of manufacture, in flax and wool-spinning, in silk-twisting,
the case is the same.  The power-loom, too, is beginning to appropriate
one branch after another of wool and linen-weaving; in Rochdale alone,
there are more power than hand-looms in flannel and other wool-weaving
branches.  The bourgeoisie usually replies to this, that improvements
in machinery, by decreasing the cost of production, supply finished
goods at lower prices, and that these reduced prices cause such an increase
in consumption that the unemployed operatives soon find full employment
in newly-founded factories. {136} 
The bourgeoisie is so far correct that under certain conditions favourable
for the general development of manufacture, every reduction in price
of goods in which the raw material is cheap, greatly increases
consumption, and gives rise to the building of new p. 137factories;
but every further word of the assertion is a lie.  The bourgeoisie
ignores the fact that it takes years for these results of the decrease
in price to follow and for new factories to be built; it is silent upon
the point that every improvement in machinery throws the real work,
the expenditure of force, more and more upon the machine, and so transforms
the work of full-grown men into mere supervision, which a feeble woman
or even a child can do quite as well, and does for half or two-thirds
wages; that, therefore, grown men are constantly more and more supplanted
and not re-employed by the increase in manufacture; it conceals
the fact that whole branches of industry fall away, or are so changed
that they must be learned afresh; and it takes good care not to confess
what it usually harps upon, whenever the question of forbidding the
work of children is broached, that factory-work must be learned in earliest
youth in order to be learned properly.  It does not mention the
fact that the process of improvement goes steadily on, and that as soon
as the operative has succeeded in making himself at home in a new branch,
if he actually does succeed in so doing, this, too, is taken from him,
and with it the last remnant of security which remained to him for winning
his bread.  But the bourgeoisie gets the benefit of the improvements
in machinery; it has a capital opportunity for piling up money during
the first years while many old machines are still in use, and the improvement
not yet universally introduced; and it would be too much to ask that
it should have an open eye for the disadvantages inseparable from these
improvements.

The fact that improved machinery reduces wages has also been as violently
disputed by the bourgeoisie, as it is constantly reiterated by the working-men. 
The bourgeoisie insists that although the price of piece-work has been
reduced, yet the total of wages for the week’s work has rather
risen than fallen, and the condition of the operatives rather improved
than deteriorated.  It is hard to get to the bottom of the matter,
for the operatives usually dwell upon the price of piece-work. 
But it is certain that the weekly wage, also, has, in many branches
of work, been reduced by the improvement of machinery.  The so-called
fine p. 138spinners
(who spin fine mule yarn), for instance, do receive high wages, thirty
to forty shillings a week, because they have a powerful association
for keeping wages up, and their craft requires long training; but the
coarse spinners who have to compete against self-actors (which are not
as yet adapted for fine spinning), and whose association was broken
down by the introduction of these machines, receive very low wages. 
A mule spinner told me that he does not earn more than fourteen shillings
a week, and his statement agrees with that of Leach, that in various
factories the coarse spinners earn less than sixteen shillings and sixpence
a week, and that a spinner, who years ago earned thirty shillings, can
now hardly scrape up twelve and a half, and had not earned more on an
average in the past year.  The wages of women and children may
perhaps have fallen less, but only because they were not high from the
beginning.  I know several women, widows with children, who have
trouble enough to earn eight to nine shillings a week; and that they
and their families cannot live decently upon that sum, every one must
admit who knows the price of the barest necessaries of life in England. 
That wages in general have been reduced by the improvement of machinery
is the unanimous testimony of the operatives.  The bourgeois assertion
that the condition of the working-class has been improved by machinery
is most vigorously proclaimed a falsehood in every meeting of working-men
in the factory districts.  And even if it were true that the relative
wage, the price of piece-work only, has fallen, while the absolute wage,
the sum to be earned in the week, remained unchanged, what would follow? 
That the operatives have had quietly to look on while the manufacturers
filled their purses from every improvement without giving the hands
the smallest share in the gain.  The bourgeois forgets, in fighting
the working-man, the most ordinary principles of his own Political Economy. 
He who at other times swears by Malthus, cries out in his anxiety before
the workers: “Where could the millions by which the population
of England has increased find work, without the improvements in machinery?”
{138}  As
though the bourgeois p. 139did
not know well enough that without machinery and the expansion of industry
which it produced, these “millions” would never have been
brought into the world and grown up!  The service which machinery
has rendered the workers is simply this: that it has brought home to
their minds the necessity of a social reform by means of which machinery
shall no longer work against but for them.  Let the wise bourgeois
ask the people who sweep the streets in Manchester and elsewhere (though
even this is past now, since machines for the purpose have been invented
and introduced), or sell salt, matches, oranges, and shoe-strings on
the streets, or even beg, what they were formerly, and he will see how
many will answer: “Mill-hands thrown out of work by machinery.” 
The consequences of improvement in machinery under our present social
conditions are, for the working-man, solely injurious, and often in
the highest degree oppressive.  Every new advance brings with it
loss of employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like England
where, without that, there is usually a “surplus population,”
to be discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative. 
And what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his
position in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery,
must exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without
it!  To escape despair, there are but two ways open to him; either
inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and
general demoralisation.  And the English operatives are accustomed
to take refuge in both.  The history of the English proletariat
relates hundreds of uprisings against machinery and the bourgeoisie;
we have already spoken of the moral dissolution which, in itself, is
only another form of despair.

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

p. 141Let
us examine somewhat more closely the fact that machinery more and more
supersedes the work of men.  The human labour, involved in both
spinning and weaving, consists chiefly in piecing broken threads, as
the machine does all the rest.  This work requires no muscular
strength, but only flexibility of finger.  Men are, therefore,
not only not needed for it, but actually, by reason of the greater muscular
development of the hand, less fit for it than women and children, and
are, therefore, naturally almost superseded by them.  Hence, the
more the use of the arms, the expenditure of strength, can be transferred
to steam or water-power, the fewer men need be employed; and as women
and children work more cheaply, and in these branches better than men,
they take their places.  In the spinning-mills women and girls
are to be found in almost exclusive possession of the throstles; among
the mules one man, an adult spinner (with self-actors, he, too, becomes
superfluous), and several piecers for tying the threads, usually children
or women, sometimes young men of from eighteen to twenty years, here
and there an old spinner {141}
thrown out of other employment.  At the power-looms women, from
fifteen to twenty years, are chiefly employed, and a few men; these,
however, rarely remain at this trade after their twenty-first year. 
Among the preparatory machinery, too, women alone are to be found, with
here and there a man to clean and sharpen the carding-frames. 
Besides all these, the factories employ numbers of children—doffers—for
mounting and taking down bobbins, and a few men as overlookers, a mechanic
and an engineer for the steam-engines, carpenters, porters, etc.; but
the actual work of the mills is done by women and children.  This
the manufacturers deny.

They published last year elaborate tables to prove that machinery
does not supersede adult male operatives.  According to these tables,
rather more than half of all the factory-workers employed, p. 142viz.,
52 per cent., were females and 48 per cent. males, and of those operatives
more than half were over eighteen years old.  So far, so good. 
But the manufacturers are very careful not to tell us, how many of the
adults were men and how many women.  And this is just the point. 
Besides this, they have evidently counted the mechanics, engineers,
carpenters, all the men employed in any way in the factories, perhaps
even the clerks, and still they have not the courage to tell the whole
truth.  These publications teem generally with falsehoods, perversions,
crooked statements, with calculations of averages, that prove a great
deal for the uninitiated reader and nothing for the initiated, and with
suppressions of facts bearing on the most important points; and they
prove only the selfish blindness and want of uprightness of the manufacturers
concerned.  Let us take some of the statements of a speech with
which Lord Ashley introduced the Ten Hours’ Bill, March 15th,
1844, into the House of Commons.  Here he gives some data as to
the relations of sex and age of the operatives, not yet refuted by the
manufacturers, whose statements, as quoted above, cover moreover only
a part of the manufacturing industry of England.  Of 419,560 factory
operatives of the British Empire in 1839, 192,887, or nearly half, were
under eighteen years of age, and 242,296 of the female sex, of whom
112,192 were less than eighteen years old.  There remain, therefore,
80,695 male operatives under eighteen years, and 96,569 adult male operatives,
or not one full quarter of the whole number.  In the cotton
factories, 56¼ per cent.; in the woollen mills, 69½ per
cent.; in the silk mills, 70½ per cent.; in the flax-spinning
mills, 70½ per cent. of all operatives are of the female sex. 
These numbers suffice to prove the crowding out of adult males. 
But you have only to go into the nearest mill to see the fact confirmed. 
Hence follows of necessity that inversion of the existing social order
which, being forced upon them, has the most ruinous consequences for
the workers.  The employment of women at once breaks up the family;
for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill,
and the husband works the same length of time there or elsewhere, what
becomes of the children?  p. 143They
grow up like wild weeds; they are put out to nurse for a shilling or
eighteenpence a week, and how they are treated may be imagined. 
Hence the accidents to which little children fall victims multiply in
the factory districts to a terrible extent.  The lists of the Coroner
of Manchester {143a}
showed for nine months: 69 deaths from burning, 56 from drowning, 23
from falling, 77 from other causes, or a total of 225 {143b}
deaths from accidents, while in non-manufacturing Liverpool during twelve
months there were but 146 fatal accidents.  The mining accidents
are excluded in both cases; and since the Coroner of Manchester has
no authority in Salford, the population of both places mentioned in
the comparison is about the same.  The Manchester Guardian
reports one or more deaths by burning in almost every number. 
That the general mortality among young children must be increased by
the employment of the mothers is self-evident, and is placed beyond
all doubt by notorious facts.  Women often return to the mill three
or four days after confinement, leaving the baby, of course; in the
dinner hour they must hurry home to feed the child and eat something,
and what sort of suckling that can be is also evident.  Lord Ashley
repeats the testimony of several workwomen: “M. H., twenty years
old, has two children, the youngest a baby, that is tended by the other,
a little older.  The mother goes to the mill shortly after five
o’clock in the morning, and comes home at eight at night; all
day the milk pours from her breasts, so that her clothing drips with
it.”  “H. W. has three children, goes away Monday morning
at five o’clock, and comes back Saturday evening; has so much
to do for the children then that she cannot get to bed before three
o’clock in the morning; often wet through to the skin, and obliged
to work in that state.”  She said: “My breasts have
given me the most frightful pain, and I have been dripping wet with
milk.”  The use of narcotics to keep the children still is
fostered by this infamous system, and has reached a great extent in
the factory districts.  Dr. Johns, Registrar p. 144in
Chief for Manchester, is of opinion that this custom is the chief source
of the many deaths from convulsions.  The employment of the wife
dissolves the family utterly and of necessity, and this dissolution,
in our present society, which is based upon the family, brings the most
demoralising consequences for parents as well as children.  A mother
who has no time to trouble herself about her child, to perform the most
ordinary loving services for it during its first year, who scarcely
indeed sees it, can be no real mother to the child, must inevitably
grow indifferent to it, treat it unlovingly like a stranger.  The
children who grow up under such conditions are utterly ruined for later
family life, can never feel at home in the family which they themselves
found, because they have always been accustomed to isolation, and they
contribute therefore to the already general undermining of the family
in the working-class.  A similar dissolution of the family is brought
about by the employment of the children.  When they get on far
enough to earn more than they cost their parents from week to week,
they begin to pay the parents a fixed sum for board and lodging, and
keep the rest for themselves.  This often happens from the fourteenth
or fifteenth year. {144} 
In a word, the children emancipate themselves, and regard the paternal
dwelling as a lodging-house, which they often exchange for another,
as suits them.

In many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment
of the wife, but turned upside down.  The wife supports the family,
the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks. 
This case happens very frequently; in Manchester alone, many hundred
such men could be cited, condemned to domestic occupations.  It
is easy to imagine the wrath aroused among the working-men by this reversal
of all relations within the family, while the other social conditions
remain unchanged.  There lies before me a letter from an English
working-man, Robert Pounder, Baron’s Buildings, Woodhouse, Moorside,
in Leeds (the bourgeoisie may hunt him up p. 145there;
I give the exact address for the purpose), written by him to Oastler:
{145}

He relates how another working-man, being on tramp, came to St. Helens,
in Lancashire, and there looked up an old friend.  He found him
in a miserable, damp cellar, scarcely furnished; and when my poor friend
went in, there sat poor Jack near the fire, and what did he, think you?
why he sat and mended his wife’s stockings with the bodkin; and
as soon as he saw his old friend at the door-post, he tried to hide
them.  But Joe, that is my friend’s name, had seen it, and
said: “Jack, what the devil art thou doing?  Where is the
missus?  Why, is that thy work?” and poor Jack was ashamed,
and said: “No, I know this is not my work, but my poor missus
is i’ th’ factory; she has to leave at half-past five and
works till eight at night, and then she is so knocked up that she cannot
do aught when she gets home, so I have to do everything for her what
I can, for I have no work, nor had any for more nor three years, and
I shall never have any more work while I live;” and then he wept
a big tear.  Jack again said: “There is work enough for women
folks and childer hereabouts, but none for men; thou mayest sooner find
a hundred pound on the road than work for men—but I should never
have believed that either thou or any one else would have seen me mending
my wife’s stockings, for, it is bad work.  But she can hardly
stand on her feet; I am afraid she will be laid up, and then I don’t
know what is to become of us, for it’s a good bit that she has
been the man in the house and I the woman; it is bad work, Joe;”
and he cried bitterly, and said, “It has not been always so.” 
“No,” said Joe; “but when thou hadn’t no work,
how hast thou not shifted?”  “I’ll tell thee,
Joe, as well as I can, but it was bad enough; thou knowest when I got
married I had work plenty, and thou knows I was not lazy.” 
“No, that thou wert not.”  “And we had a good
furnished house, and Mary need not go to work.  I could work for
the two of us; but now the world is upside down.  Mary has to work
and I have to stop at home, mind the childer p. 146sweep
and wash, bake and mend; and, when the poor woman comes home at night,
she is knocked up.  Thou knows, Joe, it’s hard for one that
was used different.”  “Yes, boy, it is hard.” 
And then Jack began to cry again, and he wished he had never married,
and that he had never been born; but he had never thought, when he wed
Mary, that it would come to this.  “I have often cried over
it,” said Jack.  Now when Joe heard this, he told me that
he had cursed and damned the factories, and the masters, and the Government,
with all the curses that he had learned while he was in the factory
from a child.

Can any one imagine a more insane state of things than that described
in this letter?  And yet this condition, which unsexes the man
and takes from the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow
upon the man true womanliness, or the woman true manliness—this
condition which degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and,
through them, Humanity, is the last result of our much-praised civilisation,
the final achievement of all the efforts and struggles of hundreds of
generations to improve their own situation and that of their posterity. 
We must either despair of mankind, and its aims and efforts, when we
see all our labour and toil result in such a mockery, or we must admit
that human society has hitherto sought salvation in a false direction;
we must admit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes
can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false
position from the beginning.  If the reign of the wife over the
husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman,
the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman
too.  If the wife can now base her supremacy upon the fact that
she supplies the greater part, nay, the whole of the common possession,
the necessary inference is that this community of possession is no true
and rational one, since one member of the family boasts offensively
of contributing the greater share.  If the family of our present
society is being thus dissolved, this dissolution merely shows that,
at bottom, the binding tie of this family was not family affection,
but private interest lurking under the cloak of a pretended community
of possessions.  p. 147The
same relation exists on the part of those children who support unemployed
parents {147a}
when they do not directly pay board as already referred to.  Dr.
Hawkins testified in the Factories’ Inquiry Commission’s
Report that this relation is common enough, and in Manchester it is
notorious.  In this case the children are the masters in the house,
as the wife was in the former case, and Lord Ashley gives an example
of this in his speech: {147b}
A man berated his two daughters for going to the public house, and they
answered that they were tired of being ordered about, saying, “Damn
you, we have to keep you!”  Determined to keep the proceeds
of their work for themselves, they left the family dwelling, and abandoned
their parents to their fate.

The unmarried women, who have grown up in mills, are no better off
than the married ones.  It is self-evident that a girl who has
worked in a mill from her ninth year is in no position to understand
domestic work, whence it follows that female operatives prove wholly
inexperienced and unfit as housekeepers.  They cannot knit or sew,
cook or wash, are unacquainted with the most ordinary duties of a housekeeper,
and when they have young children to take care of, have not the vaguest
idea how to set about it.  The Factories’ Inquiry Commission’s
Report gives dozens of examples of this, and Dr. Hawkins, Commissioner
for Lancashire, expresses his opinion as follows: {147c}

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

But that is the least of the evil.  The moral consequences of
the employment of women in factories are even worse.  The collecting
of persons of both sexes and all ages in a single workroom, the inevitable
contact, the crowding into a small space of people, to whom neither
mental nor moral education has been given, is not calculated for the
favourable development of the female character.  The manufacturer,
if he pays any attention to the matter, can interfere only when something
scandalous actually happens; the permanent, less conspicuous influence
of persons of dissolute character, upon the more moral, and especially
upon the younger ones, he cannot ascertain, and consequently cannot
prevent.  But precisely this influence is the most injurious. 
The language used in the mills is characterised by many witnesses in
the report of 1833, as “indecent,” “bad,” “filthy,”
etc. {148b} 
It is the same process upon a small scale which we have already witnessed
upon a large one in the great cities.  The centralisation of population
has the same influence upon the same persons, whether it affects them
in a great city or a small factory.  The smaller the mill the closer
the packing, and the more unavoidable the contact; and the consequences
are not wanting.  A witness in Leicester said that he would rather
let his daughter beg than go into a factory; that they are perfect gates
of hell; that most of the prostitutes of the town had their employment
in the mills to thank for their present situation. {148c} 
Another, in Manchester, “did not hesitate to assert that three-fourths
of the young factory employees, from fourteen to twenty years of age,
were unchaste.” {149a} 
p. 149Commissioner
Cowell expresses it as his opinion, that the morality of the factory
operatives is somewhat below the average of that of the working-class
in general. {149b} 
And Dr. Hawkins {149c}
says:

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

It is, besides, a matter of course that factory servitude, like any
other, and to an even higher degree, confers the jus primæ
noctis upon the master.  In this respect also the employer
is sovereign over the persons and charms of his employees.  The
threat of discharge suffices to overcome all resistance in nine cases
out of ten, if not in ninety-nine out of a hundred, in girls who, in
any case, have no strong inducements to chastity.  If the master
is mean enough, and the official report mentions several such cases,
his mill is also his harem; and the fact that not all manufacturers
use their power, does not in the least change the position of the girls. 
In the beginning of manufacturing industry, when most of the employers
were upstarts without education or consideration for the hypocrisy of
society, they let nothing interfere with the exercise of their vested
rights.

To form a correct judgment of the influence of factory-work upon
the health of the female sex, it is necessary first to consider the
work of children, and then the nature of the work itself.  From
the beginning of manufacturing industry, children have been employed
in mills, at first almost exclusively by reason of the smallness of
the machines, which were later enlarged.  Even children from the
workhouses were employed in multitudes, being rented out for a number
of years to the manufacturers as apprentices.  They were lodged,
fed, and clothed in common, and were, p. 150of
course, completely the slaves of their masters, by whom they were treated
with the utmost recklessness and barbarity.  As early as 1796,
the public objection to this revolting system found such vigorous expression
through Dr. Percival and Sir Robert Peel (father of the Cabinet Minister,
and himself a cotton manufacturer), that in 1802 Parliament passed an
Apprentices’ Bill, by which the most crying evils were removed. 
Gradually the increasing competition of free workpeople crowded out
the whole apprentice system; factories were built in cities, machinery
was constructed on a larger scale, and workrooms were made more airy
and wholesome; gradually, too, more work was found for adults and young
persons.  The number of children in the mills diminished somewhat,
and the age at which they began to work rose a little; few children
under eight or nine years were now employed.  Later, as we shall
see, the power of the State intervened several times to protect them
from the money-greed of the bourgeoisie.

The great mortality among children of the working-class, and especially
among those of the factory operatives, is proof enough of the unwholesome
conditions under which they pass their first year.  These influences
are at work, of course, among the children who survive, but not quite
so powerfully as upon those who succumb.  The result in the most
favourable case is a tendency to disease, or some check in development,
and consequent less than normal vigour of the constitution.  A
nine years old child of a factory operative that has grown up in want,
privation, and changing conditions, in cold and damp, with insufficient
clothing and unwholesome dwellings, is far from having the working force
of a child brought up under healthier conditions.  At nine years
of age it is sent into the mill to work 6½ hours (formerly 8,
earlier still, 12 to 14, even 16 hours) daily, until the thirteenth
year; then twelve hours until the eighteenth year.  The old enfeebling
influences continue, while the work is added to them.  It is not
to be denied that a child of nine years, even an operative’s child,
can hold out through 6½ hours’ daily work, without any
one being able to trace visible bad results in its development directly
p. 151to
this cause; but in no case can its presence in the damp, heavy air of
the factory, often at once warm and wet, contribute to good health;
and, in any case, it is unpardonable to sacrifice to the greed of an
unfeeling bourgeoisie the time of children which should be devoted solely
to their physical and mental development, withdraw them from school
and the fresh air, in order to wear them out for the benefit of the
manufacturers.  The bourgeoisie says: “If we do not employ
the children in the mills, they only remain under conditions unfavourable
to their development;” and this is true, on the whole.  But
what does this mean if it is not a confession that the bourgeoisie first
places the children of the working-class under unfavourable conditions,
and then exploits these bad conditions for its own benefit, appeals
to that which is as much its own fault as the factory system, excuses
the sin of to-day with the sin of yesterday?  And if the Factory
Act did not in some measure fetter their hands, how this “humane,”
this “benevolent” bourgeoisie, which has built its factories
solely for the good of the working-class, would take care of the interests
of these workers!  Let us hear how they acted before the factory
inspector was at their heels.  Their own admitted testimony shall
convict them in the report of the Factories’ Inquiry Commission
of 1833.

The report of the Central Commission relates that the manufacturers
began to employ children rarely of five years, often of six, very often
of seven, usually of eight to nine years; that the working-day often
lasted fourteen to sixteen hours, exclusive of meals and intervals;
that the manufacturers permitted overlookers to flog and maltreat children,
and often took an active part in so doing themselves.  One case
is related of a Scotch manufacturer, who rode after a sixteen years
old runaway, forced him to return running after the employer as fast
as the master’s horse trotted, and beat him the whole way with
a long whip. {151} 
In the large towns where the operatives resisted more vigorously, such
things naturally happened less often.  But even this long working-day
failed to satisfy the greed of the capitalists.  Their aim was
to make the capital invested in the building and machinery produce p. 152the
highest return, by every available means, to make it work as actively
as possible.  Hence the manufacturers introduced the shameful system
of night-work.  Some of them employed two sets of operatives, each
numerous enough to fill the whole mill, and let one set work the twelve
hours of the day, and the other twelve hours of the night.  It
is needless to picture the effect upon the frames of young children,
and even upon the health of young persons and adults, produced by permanent
loss of sleep at night, which cannot be made good by any amount of sleep
during the day.  Irritation of the whole nervous system, with general
lassitude and enfeeblement of the entire frame, were the inevitable
results, with the fostering of temptation to drunkenness and unbridled
sexual indulgence.  One manufacturer testifies {152a}
that during the two years in which night-work was carried on in his
factory, the number of illegitimate children born was doubled, and such
general demoralisation prevailed that he was obliged to give up night-work. 
Other manufacturers were yet more barbarous, requiring many hands to
work thirty to forty hours at a stretch, several times a week, letting
them get a couple of hours sleep only, because the night-shift was not
complete, but calculated to replace a part of the operatives only.

The reports of the Commission touching this barbarism surpass everything
that is known to me in this line.  Such infamies, as are here related,
are nowhere else to be found—yet we shall see that the bourgeoisie
constantly appeals to the testimony of the Commission as being in its
own favour.  The consequences of these cruelties became evident
quickly enough.  The Commissioners mention a crowd of cripples
who appeared before them, who clearly owed their distortion to the long
working-hours.  This distortion usually consists of a curving of
the spinal column and legs, and is described as follows by Francis Sharp,
M.R.C.S., of Leeds: {152b}

“I never saw the peculiar bending of the lower
ends of the thigh bones before I came to Leeds.  At first I thought
it was p. 153rachitis,
but I was soon led to change my opinion in consequence of the mass of
patients who presented themselves at the hospital, and the appearances
of the disease at an age (from the fourteenth to the eighteenth year)
in which children are usually not subject to rachitis, as well as by
the circumstance that the malady had first appeared after children began
to work in the mills.  Thus far I have seen about a hundred such
cases, and can, most decidedly, express the opinion that they are the
consequences of overwork.  So far as I know they were all mill
children, and themselves attributed the evil to this cause.  The
number of cases of curvature of the spine which have fallen under my
observation, and which were evidently consequent upon too protracted
standing, was not less than three hundred.”

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

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

Surgeons Beaumont and Sharp, of Bradford, bear the same testimony. 
The reports of Drinkwater, Power, and Dr. Loudon contain a multitude
of examples of such distortions, and those of Tufnell and Sir David
Barry, which are less directed to this point, give single examples.
{153b} 
The Commissioners for Lancashire, Cowell, Tufnell, and Hawkins, have
almost wholly neglected this aspect of the physiological results of
the factory system, though this district rivals Yorkshire in the number
of cripples.  I have p. 154seldom
traversed Manchester without meeting three or four of them, suffering
from precisely the same distortions of the spinal columns and legs as
that described, and I have often been able to observe them closely. 
I know one personally who corresponds exactly with the foregoing description
of Dr. Ray, and who got into this condition in Mr. Douglas’ factory
in Pendleton, an establishment which enjoys an unenviable notoriety
among the operatives by reason of the former long working periods continued
night after night.  It is evident, at a glance, whence the distortions
of these cripples come; they all look exactly alike.  The knees
are bent inward and backwards, the ankles deformed and thick, and the
spinal column often bent forwards or to one side.  But the crown
belongs to the philanthropic manufacturers of the Macclesfield silk
district.  They employed the youngest children of all, even from
five to six years of age.  In the supplementary testimony of Commissioner
Tufnell, I find the statement of a certain factory manager Wright, both
of whose sisters were most shamefully crippled, and who had once counted
the cripples in several streets, some of them the cleanest and neatest
streets of Macclesfield.  He found in Townley Street ten, George
Street five, Charlotte Street four, Watercots fifteen, Bank Top three,
Lord Street seven, Mill Lane twelve, Great George Street two, in the
workhouse two, Park Green one, Peckford Street two, whose families all
unanimously declared that the cripples had become such in consequence
of overwork in the silk-twisting mills.  One boy is mentioned so
crippled as not to be able to go upstairs, and girls deformed in back
and hips.

Other deformities also have proceeded from this overwork, especially
flattening of the foot, which Sir D. Barry {154a}
frequently observed, as did the physicians and surgeons in Leeds. {154b} 
In cases, in which a stronger constitution, better food, and other more
favourable circumstances enabled the young operative to resist this
effect of a barbarous exploitation, we find, at least, pain in the back,
p. 155hips,
and legs, swollen joints, varicose veins, and large, persistent ulcers
in the thighs and calves.  These affections are almost universal
among the operatives.  The reports of Stuart, Mackintosh, and Sir
D. Barry contain hundreds of examples; indeed, they know almost no operative
who did not suffer from some of these affections; and in the remaining
reports, the occurrence of the same phenomena is attested by many physicians. 
The reports covering Scotland place it beyond all doubt, that a working-day
of thirteen hours, even for men and women from eighteen to twenty-two
years of age, produces at least these consequences, both in the flax-spinning
mills of Dundee and Dunfermline, and in the cotton mills of Glasgow
and Lanark.

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

“The unfavourable influences of mill-work upon
the hands are the following: (1) The inevitable necessity of forcing
their mental and bodily effort to keep pace with a machine moved by
a uniform and unceasing motive power.  (2) Continuance in an upright
position during unnaturally long and quickly recurring periods. 
(3) Loss of sleep in consequence of too long working-hours, pain in
the legs, and general physical derangement.  To these are often
added low, crowded, dusty, or damp workrooms, impure air, a high temperature,
and constant perspiration.  Hence the boys especially very soon
and with but few exceptions, lose p. 157the
rosy freshness of childhood, and become paler and thinner than other
boys.  Even the hand-weaver’s bound boy, who sits before
his loom with his bare feet resting upon the clay-floor, retains a fresher
appearance, because he occasionally goes into the fresh air for a time. 
But the mill child has not a moment free except for meals, and never
goes into the fresh air except on its way to them.  All adult male
spinners are pale and thin, suffer from capricious appetite and indigestion;
and as they are all trained in the mills from their youth up, and there
are very few tall, athletic men among them, the conclusion is justified
that their occupation is very unfavourable for the development of the
male constitution; females bear this work far better.”  (Very
naturally.  But we shall see that they have their own diseases.)

So, too, Power: {157a}

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

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

“When I moved from Scarborough to Leeds, I was
at once struck by the fact that the general appearance of the children
was much paler, and their fibre less vigorous here than in Scarborough
and its environs.  I saw, too, that many children were exceptionally
small for their age.  I have met with numberless cases of scrofula,
lung trouble, mesenteric affections, and indigestion, concerning which
I, as a medical man, have no doubt that they arose from mill work. 
I believe that the nervous energy of the body is weakened by the long
hours, and the foundation of many diseases laid.  If people from
the country were not constantly coming in, the race of mill-hands would
soon be wholly degenerate.”

So, too, Beaumont, surgeon in Bradford:

“To my thinking, the system, according to which
work is done in the mills here, produces a peculiar relaxation of the
whole p. 158organism,
and thereby makes children in the highest degree susceptible to epidemic,
as well as to incidental illness.  I regard the absence of all
appropriate regulations for ventilation and cleanliness in the mills
very decidedly as the chief cause of that peculiar tendency or susceptibility
to morbid affections which I have so frequently met in my practice.”

Similar testimony is borne by Dr. Ray:

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

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

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

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

“I believe that most travellers are struck by the
lowness of stature, the leanness and the paleness which present themselves
so commonly to the eye at Manchester, and above all, among the factory
classes.  I have never been in any town in Great Britain, nor in
Europe, in which degeneracy of form and colour from the national standard
has been so obvious.  Among the married women all the characteristic
peculiarities of the English wife are conspicuously wanting.  I
must confess that all the boys and girls brought before me from the
Manchester mills had a depressed p. 159appearance,
and were very pale.  In the expression of their faces lay nothing
of the usual mobility, liveliness, and cheeriness of youth.  Many
of them told me that they felt not the slightest inclination to play
out of doors on Saturday and Sunday, but preferred to be quiet at home.”

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

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

For all this testimony of the physicians and commissioners, the report
itself offers hundreds of cases of proof.  That the growth of young
operatives is stunted, by their work, hundreds of statements testify;
among others, Cowell gives the weight of 46 youths of 17 years of age,
from one Sunday school, of whom 26 employed in mills, averaged 104.5
pounds, and 20 not employed in mills, 117.7 pounds.  One of the
largest manufacturers of Manchester, leader of the opposition against
the working-men, I think Robert Hyde Greg himself, said, on one occasion,
that if things went on as at present, the operatives of Lancashire would
soon be a race of pigmies. {159a} 
A recruiting officer {159b}
testified that operatives are little adapted for military service, looked
thin and nervous, and were frequently rejected by the surgeons as unfit. 
In Manchester he could hardly get men of five feet eight inches; they
were usually only five feet six to seven, whereas in the agricultural
districts, most of the recruits were five feet eight.

The men wear out very early in consequence of the conditions p. 160under
which they live and work.  Most of them are unfit for work at forty
years, a few hold out to forty-five, almost none to fifty years of age. 
This is caused not only by the general enfeeblement of the frame, but
also very often by a failure of the sight, which is a result of mule-spinning,
in which the operative is obliged to fix his gaze upon a long row of
fine, parallel threads, and so greatly to strain the sight.

Of 1,600 operatives employed in several factories in Harpur and Lanark,
but 10 were over 45 years of age; of 22,094 operatives in diverse factories
in Stockport and Manchester, but 143 were over 45 years old.  Of
these 143, 16 were retained as a special favour, and one was doing the
work of a child.  A list of 131 spinners contained but seven over
45 years, and yet the whole 131 were rejected by the manufacturers,
to whom they applied for work, as “too old,” and were without
means of support by reason of old age!  Mr. Ashworth, a large manufacturer,
admits in a letter to Lord Ashley, that, towards the fortieth year,
the spinners can no longer prepare the required quantity of yarn, and
are therefore “sometimes” discharged; he calls operatives
forty years of age “old people!”  Commissioner Mackintosh
expresses himself in the same way in the report of 1833:

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

Surgeon Smellie, of Glasgow, who treated operatives chiefly, says
that forty years is old age for them. {160a} 
And similar evidence may be found elsewhere. {160b} 
In Manchester, this premature old age among the operatives is so universal
that almost every man of forty would be taken for ten to fifteen years
older, while the prosperous classes, men as well as women, preserve
their appearance exceedingly well if they do not drink too heavily.

The influence of factory-work upon the female physique also is marked
and peculiar.  The deformities entailed by long hours of p. 161work
are much more serious among women.  Protracted work frequently
causes deformities of the pelvis, partly in the shape of abnormal position
and development of the hip bones, partly of malformation of the lower
portion of the spinal column.

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

That factory operatives undergo more difficult confinement than other
women is testified to by several midwives and accoucheurs, and also
that they are more liable to miscarriage. {161} 
Moreover, they suffer from the general enfeeblement common to all operatives,
and, when pregnant, continue to work in the factory up to the hour of
delivery, because otherwise they lose their wages and are made to fear
that they may be replaced if they stop away too soon.  It frequently
happens that women are at work one evening and delivered the next morning,
and the case is none too rare of their being delivered in the factory
among the machinery.  And if the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie find
nothing particularly shocking in this, their wives will perhaps admit
that it is a piece of cruelty, an infamous act of barbarism, indirectly
to force a pregnant woman to work twelve or thirteen hours daily (formerly
still longer), up to the day of her delivery, in a standing position,
with frequent stoopings.  But this is not all.  If these women
are not obliged to resume work within two weeks, they are thankful,
and count themselves fortunate.  Many come back to the factory
after eight, and even after three to four days, to resume full work. 
I once heard a manufacturer ask an overlooker: “Is so and so not
back yet?”  “No.”  “How long since
she was confined?”  “A week.”  “She
might surely have been back long ago.  That one over there only
stays three days.”  Naturally, fear of being discharged,
dread of starvation drives her to the factory in spite of p. 162her
weakness, in defiance of her pain.  The interest of the manufacturer
will not brook that his employees stay at home by reason of illness;
they must not be ill, they must not venture to lie still through a long
confinement, or he must stop his machinery or trouble his supreme head
with a temporary change of arrangements, and rather than do this, he
discharges his people when they begin to be ill.  Listen: {162a}

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

Or Sir D. Barry: {162b}

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

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

Children of such mothers, particularly of those who are obliged to
work during pregnancy, cannot be vigorous.  They are, on the contrary,
described in the report, especially in Manchester, as very feeble; and
Barry alone asserts that they are healthy, but says further, that in
Scotland, where his inspection lay, almost no married women worked in
factories.  Moreover, most of the factories there are in the country
(with the exception of Glasgow), a circumstance which contributes greatly
to the invigoration of the children.  The operatives’ children
in the neighbourhood of Manchester are nearly all thriving and rosy,
while those within the city look pale and scrofulous; but with the ninth
year the colour vanishes suddenly, because all are then sent into the
factories, when it soon becomes impossible to distinguish the country
from the city children.

But besides all this, there are some branches of factory-work which
have an especially injurious effect.  In many rooms of the cotton
and flax-spinning mills, the air is filled with fibrous dust, which
produces chest affections, especially among workers in the carding and
combing-rooms.  Some constitutions can bear it, some cannot; but
the operative has no choice.  He must take the room in which he
finds work, whether his chest is sound or not.  The most common
effects of this breathing of dust are blood-spitting, hard, noisy breathing,
pains in the chest, coughs, sleeplessness—in short, all the symptoms
of asthma ending in the worst cases in consumption. {163b} 
Especially unwholesome is the wet spinning of linen-yarn which is carried
on by young girls and boys.  The water spirts over them from the
spindle, so that the front of their clothing is constantly wet through
to the skin; and there is p. 164always
water standing on the floor.  This is the case to a less degree
in the doubling-rooms of the cotton mills, and the result is a constant
succession of colds and affections of the chest.  A hoarse, rough
voice is common to all operatives, but especially to wet spinners and
doublers.  Stuart, Mackintosh, and Sir D. Barry express themselves
in the most vigorous terms as to the unwholesomeness of this work, and
the small consideration shown by most of the manufacturers for the health
of the girls who do it.  Another effect of flax-spinning is a peculiar
deformity of the shoulder, especially a projection of the right shoulder-blade,
consequent upon the nature of the work.  This sort of spinning
and the throstle-spinning of cotton frequently produce diseases of the
knee-pan, which is used to check the spindle during the joining of broken
threads.  The frequent stooping and the bending to the low machines
common to both these branches of work have, in general, a stunting effect
upon the growth of the operative.  In the throstle-room of the
cotton mill at Manchester, in which I was employed, I do not remember
to have seen one single tall, well-built girl; they were all short,
dumpy, and badly-formed, decidedly ugly in the whole development of
the figure.  But apart from all these diseases and malformations,
the limbs of the operatives suffer in still another way.  The work
between the machinery gives rise to multitudes of accidents of more
or less serious nature, which have for the operative the secondary effect
of unfitting him for his work more or less completely.  The most
common accident is the squeezing off of a single joint of a finger,
somewhat less common the loss of the whole finger, half or a whole hand,
an arm, etc., in the machinery.  Lockjaw very often follows, even
upon the lesser among these injuries, and brings death with it. 
Besides the deformed persons, a great number of maimed ones may be seen
going about in Manchester; this one has lost an arm or a part of one,
that one a foot, the third half a leg; it is like living in the midst
of an army just returned from a campaign.  But the most dangerous
portion of the machinery is the strapping which conveys motive power
from the shaft to the separate machines, especially if it contains buckles,
which, however, are p. 165rarely
used now.  Whoever is seized by the strap is carried up with lightning
speed, thrown against the ceiling above and floor below with such force
that there is rarely a whole bone left in the body, and death follows
instantly.  Between June 12th and August 3rd, 1843, the Manchester
Guardian reported the following serious accidents (the trifling
ones it does not notice): June 12th, a boy died in Manchester of lockjaw,
caused by his hand being crushed between wheels.  June 16th, a
youth in Saddleworth seized by a wheel and carried away with it; died,
utterly mangled.  June 29th, a young man at Green Acres Moor, near
Manchester, at work in a machine shop, fell under the grindstone, which
broke two of his ribs and lacerated him terribly.  July 24th, a
girl in Oldham died, carried around fifty times by a strap; no bone
unbroken.  July 27th, a girl in Manchester seized by the blower
(the first machine that receives the raw cotton), and died of injuries
received.  August 3rd, a bobbins turner died in Dukenfield, caught
in a strap, every rib broken.  In the year 1843, the Manchester
Infirmary treated 962 cases of wounds and mutilations caused by machinery,
while the number of all other accidents within the district of the hospital
was 2,426, so that for five accidents from all other causes, two were
caused by machinery.  The accidents which happened in Salford are
not included here, nor those treated by surgeons in private practice. 
In such cases, whether or not the accident unfits the victim for further
work, the employer, at best, pays the doctor, or, in very exceptional
cases, he may pay wages during treatment; what becomes of the operative
afterwards, in case he cannot work, is no concern of the employer.

The Factory Report says on this subject, that employers must be made
responsible for all cases, since children cannot take care, and adults
will take care in their own interest.  But the gentlemen who write
the report are bourgeois, and so they must contradict themselves and
bring up later all sorts of bosh on the subject of the culpable temerity
of the operatives.

The state of the case is this: If children cannot take care, the
employment of children must be forbidden.  If adults are reckless,
p. 166they
must be mere over-grown children on a plane of intelligence which does
not enable them to appreciate the danger in its full scope; and who
is to blame for this but the bourgeoisie which keeps them in a condition
in which their intelligence cannot develop?  Or the machinery is
ill-arranged, and must be surrounded with fencing, to supply which falls
to the share of the bourgeoisie.  Or the operative is under inducements
which outweigh the threatened danger; he must work rapidly to earn his
wages, has no time to take care, and for this, too, the bourgeoisie
is to blame.  Many accidents happen, for instance, while the operatives
are cleaning machinery in motion.  Why?  Because the bourgeois
would otherwise oblige the worker to clean the machinery during the
free hours while it is not going, and the worker naturally is not disposed
to sacrifice any part of his free time.  Every free hour is so
precious to the worker that he often risks his life twice a week rather
than sacrifice one of them to the bourgeois.  Let the employer
take from working-hours the time required for cleaning the machinery,
and it will never again occur to an operative to clean machinery in
motion.  In short, from whatever point of view, the blame falls
ultimately on the manufacturer, and of him should be required, at the
very least, life-long support of the incapacitated operative, and support
of the victim’s family in case death follows the accident. 
In the earliest period of manufacture, the accidents were much more
numerous in proportion than now, for the machinery was inferior, smaller,
more crowded, and almost never fenced.  But the number is still
large enough, as the foregoing cases prove, to arouse grave question
as to a state of things which permits so many deformities and mutilations
for the benefit of a single class, and plunges so many industrious working-people
into want and starvation by reason of injuries undergone in the service
and through the fault of the bourgeoisie.

A pretty list of diseases engendered purely by the hateful money
greed of the manufacturers!  Women made unfit for childbearing,
children deformed, men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked,
afflicted with disease and infirmity, p. 167purely
to fill the purses of the bourgeoisie.  And when one reads of the
barbarism of single cases, how children are seized naked in bed by the
overlookers, and driven with blows and kicks to the factory, their clothing
over their arms, {167a}
how their sleepiness is driven off with blows, how they fall asleep
over their work nevertheless, how one poor child sprang up, still asleep,
at the call of the overlooker, and mechanically went through the operations
of its work after its machine was stopped; when one reads how children,
too tired to go home, hide away in the wool in the drying-room to sleep
there, and could only be driven out of the factory with straps; how
many hundreds came home so tired every night, that they could eat no
supper for sleepiness and want of appetite, that their parents found
them kneeling by the bedside, where they had fallen asleep during their
prayers; when one reads all this and a hundred other villainies and
infamies in this one report, all testified to on oath, confirmed by
several witnesses, deposed by men whom the commissioners themselves
declare trustworthy; when one reflects that this is a Liberal report,
a bourgeois report, made for the purpose of reversing the previous Tory
report, and rehabilitating the pureness of heart of the manufacturers,
that the commissioners themselves are on the side of the bourgeoisie,
and report all these things against their own will, how can one be otherwise
than filled with wrath and resentment against a class which boasts of
philanthropy and self-sacrifice, while its one object is to fill its
purse à tout prix?  Meanwhile, let us listen to the
bourgeoisie speaking through the mouth of its chosen apostle, Dr. Ure,
who relates in his “Philosophy of Manufactures” {167b}
that the workers have been told that their wages bore no proportion
to their sacrifices, the good understanding between masters and men
being thus disturbed.  Instead of this, the working-men should
have striven to recommend themselves by attention and industry, and
should have rejoiced in the prosperity of their masters.  They
would then become overseers, superintendents, and finally partners,
and would thus—(Oh!  Wisdom, thou speakest as the dove!)—p. 168“have
increased at the same time the demand for their companions’ labour
in the market!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ruinous influence of the factory system began at an early day
to attract general attention.  We have already alluded to the Apprentices’
Act of 1802.  Later, towards 1817, Robert Owen, p. 170then
a manufacturer in New Lanark, in Scotland, afterwards founder of English
Socialism, began to call the attention of the Government, by memorials
and petitions, to the necessity of legislative guarantees for the health
of the operatives, and especially of children.  The late Sir Robert
Peel and other philanthropists united with him, and gradually secured
the Factory Acts of 1818, 1825, and 1831, of which the first two were
never enforced, and the last only here and there.  This law of
1831, based upon the motion of Sir J. C. Hobhouse, provided that in
cotton mills no one under twenty-one should be employed between half-past
seven at night and half-past five in the morning; and that in all factories
young persons under eighteen should work no longer than twelve hours
daily, and nine hours on Saturday.  But since operatives could
not testify against their masters without being discharged, this law
helped matters very little.  In the great cities, where the operatives
were more restive, the larger manufacturers came to an agreement among
themselves to obey the law; but even there, there were many who, like
the employers in the country, did not trouble themselves about it. 
Meanwhile, the demand for a ten hours’ law had become lively among
the operatives; that is, for a law which should forbid all operatives
under eighteen years of age to work longer than ten hours daily; the
Trades Unions, by their agitation, made this demand general throughout
the manufacturing population; the philanthropic section of the Tory
party, then led by Michael Sadler, seized upon the plan, and brought
it before Parliament.  Sadler obtained a parliamentary committee
for the investigation of the factory system, and this committee reported
in 1832.  Its report was emphatically partisan, composed by strong
enemies of the factory system, for party ends.  Sadler permitted
himself to be betrayed by his noble enthusiasm into the most distorted
and erroneous statements, drew from his witnesses by the very form of
his questions, answers which contained the truth, but truth in a perverted
form.  The manufacturers themselves, incensed at a report which
represented them as monsters, now demanded an official investigation;
they knew that an exact report must, in this case, be advantageous to
p. 171them;
they knew that Whigs, genuine bourgeois, were at the helm, with whom
they were upon good terms, whose principles were opposed to any restriction
upon manufacture.  They obtained a commission, in due order, composed
of Liberal bourgeois, whose report I have so often cited.  This
comes somewhat nearer the truth than Sadler’s, but its deviations
therefrom are in the opposite direction.  On every page it betrays
sympathy with the manufacturers, distrust of the Sadler report, repugnance
to the working-men agitating independently and the supporters of the
Ten Hours’ Bill.  It nowhere recognises the right of the
working-man to a life worthy of a human being, to independent activity,
and opinions of his own.  It reproaches the operatives that in
sustaining the Ten Hours’ Bill they thought, not of the children
only, but of themselves as well; it calls the working-men engaged in
the agitation demagogues, ill-intentioned, malicious, etc., is written,
in short, on the side of the bourgeoisie; and still it cannot whitewash
the manufacturers, and still it leaves such a mass of infamies upon
the shoulders of the employers, that even after this report, the agitation
for the Ten Hours’ Bill, the hatred against the manufacturers,
and the committee’s severest epithets applied to them are all
fully justified.  But there was the one difference, that whereas
the Sadler report accuses the manufacturers of open, undisguised brutality,
it now became evident that this brutality was chiefly carried on under
the mask of civilisation and humanity.  Yet Dr. Hawkins, the medical
commissioner for Lancashire, expresses himself decidedly in favour of
the Ten Hours’ Bill in the opening lines of his report, and Commissioner
Mackintosh explains that his own report does not contain the whole truth,
because it is very difficult to induce the operatives to testify against
their employers, and because the manufacturers, besides being forced
into greater concessions towards their operatives by the excitement
among the latter, are often prepared for the inspection of the factories,
have them swept, the speed of the machinery reduced, etc.  In Lancashire
especially they resorted to the device of bringing the overlookers of
workrooms before the commissioners, and letting them testify as working-men
to the humanity of the employers, the p. 172wholesome
effects of the work, and the indifference, if not the hostility of the
operatives, towards the Ten Hours’ Bill.  But these are not
genuine working-men; they are deserters from their class, who have entered
the service of the bourgeoisie for better pay, and fight in the interests
of the capitalists against the workers.  Their interest is that
of the capitalists, and they are, therefore, almost more hated by the
workers than the manufacturers themselves.

And yet this report suffices wholly to exhibit the most shameful
recklessness of the manufacturing bourgeoisie towards its employees,
the whole infamy of the industrial exploiting system in its full inhumanity. 
Nothing is more revolting than to compare the long register of diseases
and deformities engendered by overwork, in this report, with the cold,
calculating political economy of the manufacturers, by which they try
to prove that they, and with them all England, must go to ruin, if they
should be forbidden to cripple so and so many children every year. 
The language of Dr. Ure alone, which I have quoted, would be yet more
revolting if it were not so preposterous.

The result of this report was the Factory Act of 1834, which forbade
the employment of children under nine years of age (except in silk mills),
limited the working-hours of children between 9-13 years to 48 per week,
or 9 hours in any one day at the utmost; that of young persons from
14-18 years of age to 69 per week, or 12 on any one day as the maximum,
provided for an hour and a half as the minimum interval for meals, and
repeated the total prohibition of night-work for persons under eighteen
years of age.  Compulsory school attendance two hours daily was
prescribed for all children under fourteen years, and the manufacturer
declared punishable in case of employing children without a certificate
of age from the factory surgeon, and a certificate of school attendance
from the teacher.  As recompense, the employer was permitted to
withdraw one penny from the child’s weekly earnings to pay the
teacher.  Further, surgeons and inspectors were appointed to visit
the factories at all times, take testimony of operatives on oath, and
enforce the law by prosecution before p. 173a
Justice of the Peace.  This is the law against which Dr. Ure inveighs
in such unmeasured terms!

The consequence of this law, and especially of the appointment of
inspectors, was the reduction of working-hours to an average of twelve
to thirteen, and the superseding of children as far as possible. 
Hereupon some of the most crying evils disappeared almost wholly. 
Deformities arose now only in cases of weak constitution, and the effects
of overwork became much less conspicuous.  Nevertheless, enough
testimony remains to be found in the Factory Report, that the lesser
evils, swelling of the ankles, weakness and pain in the legs, hips,
and back, varicose veins, ulcers on the lower extremities, general weakness,
especially of the pelvic region, nausea, want of appetite alternating
with unnatural hunger, indigestion, hypochondria, affections of the
chest in consequence of the dust and foul atmosphere of the factories,
etc. etc., all occur among employees subject to the provisions of Sir
J. C. Hobhouse’s law (of 1831), which prescribes twelve to thirteen
hours as the maximum.  The reports from Glasgow and Manchester
are especially worthy of attention in this respect.  These evils
remained too, after the law of 1834, and continue to undermine the health
of the working-class to this day.  Care has been taken to give
the brutal profit-greed of the bourgeoisie a hypocritical, civilised
form, to restrain the manufacturers through the arm of the law from
too conspicuous villainies, and thus to give them a pretext for self-complacently
parading their sham philanthropy.  That is all.  If a new
commission were appointed to-day, it would find things pretty much as
before.  As to the extemporised compulsory attendance at school,
it remained wholly a dead letter, since the Government failed to provide
good schools.  The manufacturers employed as teachers worn-out
operatives, to whom they sent the children two hours daily, thus complying
with the letter of the law; but the children learned nothing. 
And even the reports of the factory inspectors, which are limited to
the scope of the inspector’s duties, i.e., the enforcement
of the Factory Act, give data enough to justify the conclusion that
the old evils inevitably remain.  Inspectors Horner and Saunders,
in their reports for October and p. 174December,
1844, state that, in a number of branches in which the employment of
children can be dispensed with or superseded by that of adults, the
working-day is still fourteen to sixteen hours, or even longer. 
Among the operatives in these branches they found numbers of young people
who had just outgrown the provisions of the law.  Many employers
disregard the law, shorten the meal times, work children longer than
is permitted, and risk prosecution, knowing that the possible fines
are trifling in comparison with the certain profits derivable from the
offence.  Just at present especially, while business is exceptionally
brisk, they are under great temptation in this respect.

Meanwhile the agitation for the Ten Hours’ Bill by no means
died out among the operatives; in 1839 it was under full headway once
more, and Sadler’s place, he having died, was filled in the House
of Commons by Lord Ashley {174}
and Richard Oastler, both Tories.  Oastler especially, who carried
on a constant agitation in the factory districts, and had been active
in the same way during Sadler’s life, was the particular favourite
of the working-men.  They called him their “good old king,”
“the king of the factory children,” and there is not a child
in the factory districts that does not know and revere him, that does
not join the procession which moves to welcome him when he enters a
town.  Oastler vigorously opposed the New Poor Law also, and was
therefore imprisoned for debt by a Mr. Thornley, on whose estate he
was employed as agent, and to whom he owed money.  The Whigs offered
repeatedly to pay his debt and confer other favours upon him if he would
only give up his agitation against the Poor Law.  But in vain;
he remained in prison, whence he published his Fleet Papers against
the factory system and the Poor Law.

The Tory Government of 1841 turned its attention once more to the
Factory Acts.  The Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, proposed,
in 1843, a bill restricting the working-hours of children to six and
one-half, and making the enactments for compulsory school attendance
more effective; the principal point in this connection being a provision
for better schools.  This bill was, however, p. 175wrecked
by the jealousy of the dissenters; for, although compulsory religious
instruction was not extended to the children of dissenters, the schools
provided for were to be placed under the general supervision of the
Established Church, and the Bible made the general reading-book; religion
being thus made the foundation of all instruction, whence the dissenters
felt themselves threatened.  The manufacturers and the Liberals
generally united with them, the working-men were divided by the Church
question, and therefore inactive.  The opponents of the bill, though
outweighed in the great manufacturing towns, such as Salford and Stockport,
and able in others, such as Manchester, to attack certain of its points
only, for fear of the working-men, collected nevertheless nearly two
million signatures for a petition against it, and Graham allowed himself
to be so far intimidated as to withdraw the whole bill.  The next
year he omitted the school clauses, and proposed that, instead of the
previous provisions, children between eight and thirteen years should
be restricted to six and one-half hours, and so employed as to have
either the whole morning or the whole afternoon free; that young people
between thirteen and eighteen years, and all females, should be limited
to twelve hours; and that the hitherto frequent evasions of the law
should be prevented.  Hardly had he proposed this bill, when the
ten hours’ agitation was begun again more vigorously than ever. 
Oastler had just then regained his liberty; a number of his friends
and a collection among the workers had paid his debt, and he threw himself
into the movement with all his might.  The defenders of the Ten
Hours’ Bill in the House of Commons had increased in numbers,
the masses of petitions supporting it which poured in from all sides
brought them allies, and on March 19th, 1844, Lord Ashley carried, with
a majority of 179 to 170, a resolution that the word “Night”
in the Factory Act should express the time from six at night to six
in the morning, whereby the prohibition of night-work came to mean the
limitation of working-hours to twelve, including free hours, or ten
hours of actual work a day.  But the ministry did not agree to
this.  Sir James Graham began to threaten resignation from the
Cabinet, p. 176and
at the next vote on the bill the House rejected by a small majority
both ten and twelve hours!  Graham and Peel now announced that
they should introduce a new bill, and that if this failed to pass they
should resign.  The new bill was exactly the old Twelve Hours’
Bill with some changes of form, and the same House of Commons which
had rejected the principal points of this bill in March, now swallowed
it whole.  The reason of this was that most of the supporters of
the Ten Hours’ Bill were Tories who let fall the bill rather than
the ministry; but be the motives what they may, the House of Commons
by its votes upon this subject, each vote reversing the last, has brought
itself into the greatest contempt among all the workers, and proved
most brilliantly the Chartists’ assertion of the necessity of
its reform.  Three members, who had formerly voted against the
ministry, afterwards voted for it and rescued it.  In all the divisions,
the bulk of the opposition voted for and the bulk of its own
party against the ministry. {176} 
The foregoing propositions of Graham touching the employment of children
six and one-half and of all other operatives twelve hours are now legislative
provisions, and by them and by the limitation of overwork for making
up time lost through breakdown of machinery or insufficient water-power
by reason of frost or drought, a working-day of more than twelve hours
has been made well-nigh impossible.  There remains, however, no
doubt that, in a very short time, the Ten Hours’ Bill will really
be adopted.  The manufacturers are naturally all against it, there
are perhaps not ten who are for it; they have used every honourable
and dishonourable means against this dreaded measure, but with no other
result than that of drawing down upon them the ever deepening hatred
of the working-men.  The bill will pass.  What the working-men
will do they can do, and that they will have this bill they proved last
spring.  The economic arguments of the manufacturers that a Ten
Hours’ Bill would increase the cost of production and incapacitate
the English producers for p. 177competition
in foreign markets, and that wages must fall, are all half true;
but they prove nothing except this, that the industrial greatness of
England can be maintained only through the barbarous treatment of the
operatives, the destruction of their health, the social, physical, and
mental decay of whole generations.  Naturally, if the Ten Hours’
Bill were a final measure, it must ruin England; but since it must inevitably
bring with it other measures which must draw England into a path wholly
different from that hitherto followed, it can only prove an advance.

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

Further, the slavery in which the bourgeoisie holds the proletariat
chained, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the factory system. 
Here ends all freedom in law and in fact.  The operative must be
in the mill at half-past five in the morning; if he comes a couple of
minutes too late, he is fined; if he comes ten minutes too late, he
is not let in until breakfast is over, and a quarter of the day’s
wages is withheld, though he loses only two and one-half hours’
work out of twelve.  He must eat, drink, and sleep at command. 
For satisfying the most imperative needs, he is vouchsafed the least
possible time absolutely required by them.  Whether his dwelling
is a half-hour or a whole one removed from p. 179the
factory does not concern his employer.  The despotic bell calls
him from his bed, his breakfast, his dinner.

What a time he has of it, too, inside the factory!  Here the
employer is absolute law-giver; he makes regulations at will, changes
and adds to his codex at pleasure, and even, if he inserts the craziest
stuff, the courts say to the working-man: “You were your own master,
no one forced you to agree to such a contract if you did not wish to;
but now, when you have freely entered into it, you must be bound by
it.”  And so the working-man only gets into the bargain the
mockery of the Justice of the Peace who is a bourgeois himself, and
of the law which is made by the bourgeoisie.  Such decisions have
been given often enough.  In October, 1844, the operatives of Kennedy’s
mill, in Manchester struck.  Kennedy prosecuted them on the strength
of a regulation placarded in the mill, that at no time more than two
operatives in one room may quit work at once.  And the court decided
in his favour, giving the working-men the explanation cited above. {179a} 
And such rules as these usually are!  For instance: 1.  The
doors are closed ten minutes after work begins, and thereafter no one
is admitted until the breakfast hour; whoever is absent during this
time forfeits 3d. per loom. 2.  Every power-loom weaver detected
absenting himself at another time, while the machinery is in motion,
forfeits for each hour and each loom, 3d.  Every person who leaves
the room during working-hours, without obtaining permission from the
overlooker, forfeits 3d. 3.  Weavers who fail to supply themselves
with scissors forfeit, per day, 1d. 4.  All broken shuttles, brushes,
oil-cans, wheels, window panes, etc., must be paid for by the weaver.
5.  No weaver to stop work without giving a week’s notice. 
The manufacturer may dismiss any employee without notice for bad work
or improper behaviour. 6.  Every operative detected speaking to
another, singing or whistling, will be fined 6d.; for leaving his place
during working-hours, 6d. {179b} 
Another copy of factory regulations lies before me, according to which
every operative who p. 180comes
three minutes too late, forfeits the wages for a quarter of an hour,
and every one who comes twenty minutes too late, for a quarter of a
day.  Every one who remains absent until breakfast forfeits a shilling
on Monday, and sixpence every other day of the week, etc, etc. 
This last is the regulation of the Phœnix Works in Jersey Street,
Manchester.  It may be said that such rules are necessary in a
great, complicated factory, in order to insure the harmonious working
of the different parts; it may be asserted that such a severe discipline
is as necessary here as in an army.  This may be so, but what sort
of a social order is it which cannot be maintained without such shameful
tyranny?  Either the end sanctifies the means, or the inference
of the badness of the end from the badness of the means is justified. 
Every one who has served as a soldier knows what it is to be subjected
even for a short time to military discipline.  But these operatives
are condemned from their ninth year to their death to live under the
sword, physically and mentally.  They are worse slaves than the
negroes in America, for they are more sharply watched, and yet it is
demanded of them that they shall live like human beings, shall think
and feel like men!  Verily, this they can do only under glowing
hatred towards their oppressors, and towards that order of things which
place them in such a position, which degrades them to machines. 
But it is far more shameful yet, that according to the universal testimony
of the operatives, numbers of manufacturers collect the fines imposed
upon the operatives with the most heartless severity, and for the purpose
of piling up extra profits out of the farthings thus extorted from the
impoverished proletarians.  Leach asserts, too, that the operatives
often find the factory clock moved forward a quarter of an hour and
the doors shut, while the clerk moves about with the fines-book inside,
noting the many names of the absentees.  Leach claims to have counted
ninety-five operatives thus shut out, standing before a factory, whose
clock was a quarter of an hour slower than the town clocks at night,
and a quarter of an hour faster in the morning.  The Factory Report
relates similar facts.  In one factory the clock was set back during
working-hours, so that the operatives worked overtime without extra
pay; in another, p. 181a
whole quarter of an hour overtime was worked; in a third, there were
two clocks, an ordinary one and a machine clock, which registered the
revolutions of the main shaft; if the machinery went slowly, working-hours
were measured by the machine clock until the number of revolutions due
in twelve hours was reached; if work went well, so that the number was
reached before the usual working-hours were ended, the operatives were
forced to toil on to the end of the twelfth hour.  The witness
adds that he had known girls who had good work, and who had worked overtime,
who, nevertheless, betook themselves to a life of prostitution rather
than submit to this tyranny. {181a} 
To return to the fines, Leach relates having repeatedly seen women in
the last period of pregnancy fined 6d. for the offence of sitting down
a moment to rest.  Fines for bad work are wholly arbitrary; the
goods are examined in the wareroom, and the supervisor charges the fines
upon a list without even summoning the operative, who only learns that
he has been fined when the overlooker pays his wages, and the goods
have perhaps been sold, or certainly been placed beyond his reach. 
Leach has in his possession such a fines list, ten feet long, and amounting
to £35 17s. 10d.  He relates that in the factory where this
list was made, a new supervisor was dismissed for fining too little,
and so bringing in five pounds too little weekly. {181b} 
And I repeat that I know Leach to be a thoroughly trustworthy man incapable
of a falsehood.

But the operative is his employer’s slave in still other respects. 
If his wife or daughter finds favour in the eyes of the master, a command,
a hint suffices, and she must place herself at his disposal.  When
the employer wishes to supply with signatures a petition in favour of
bourgeois interests, he need only send it to his mill.  If he wishes
to decide a Parliamentary election, he sends his enfranchised operatives
in rank and file to the polls, and they vote for the bourgeois candidate
whether they will or no.  If he desires a majority in a public
meeting, he dismisses them half-an-hour earlier than usual, and secures
them places close to the platform, where he can watch them to his satisfaction.

p. 182Two
further arrangements contribute especially to force the operative under
the dominion of the manufacturer; the Truck system and the Cottage system. 
The truck system, the payment of the operatives in goods, was formerly
universal in England.  The manufacturer opens a shop, “for
the convenience of the operatives, and to protect them from the high
prices of the petty dealers.”  Here goods of all sorts are
sold to them on credit; and to keep the operatives from going to the
shops where they could get their goods more cheaply—the “Tommy
shops” usually charging twenty-five to thirty per cent. more than
others—wages are paid in requisitions on the shop instead of money. 
The general indignation against this infamous system led to the passage
of the Truck Act in 1831, by which, for most employees, payment in truck
orders was declared void and illegal, and was made punishable by fine;
but, like most other English laws, this has been enforced only here
and there.  In the towns it is carried out comparatively efficiently;
but in the country, the truck system, disguised or undisguised, flourishes. 
In the town of Leicester, too, it is very common.  There lie before
me nearly a dozen convictions for this offence, dating from the period
between November, 1843, and June, 1844, and reported, in part, in the
Manchester Guardian and, in part, in the Northern Star. 
The system is, of course, less openly carried on at present; wages are
usually paid in cash, but the employer still has means enough at command
to force him to purchase his wares in the truck shop and nowhere else. 
Hence it is difficult to combat the truck system, because it can now
be carried on under cover of the law, provided only that the operative
receives his wages in money.  The Northern Star of April
27th, 1843, publishes a letter from an operative of Holmfirth, near
Huddersfield, in Yorkshire, which refers to a manufacturer of the name
of Bowers, as follows (retranslated from the German):

“It is very strange to think that the accursed
truck system should exist to such an extent as it does in Holmfirth,
and nobody be found who has the pluck to make the manufacturer stop
it.  There are here a great many honest hand-weavers suffering
through this damned system; here is one sample from a good many out
of p. 183the
noble-hearted Free Trade Clique.  There is a manufacturer who has
upon himself the curses of the whole district on account of his infamous
conduct towards his poor weavers; if they have got a piece ready which
comes to 34 or 36 shillings, he gives them 20s. in money and the rest
in cloth or goods, and 40 to 50 per cent. dearer than at the other shops,
and often enough the goods are rotten into the bargain.  But, what
says the Free Trade Mercury, the Leeds Mercury? 
They are not bound to take them; they can please themselves.  Oh,
yes, but they must take them or else starve.  If they ask for another
20s. in money, they must wait eight or fourteen days for a warp; but
if they take the 20s. and the goods, then there is always a warp ready
for them.  And that is Free Trade.  Lord Brougham said we
ought to put by something in our young days, so that we need not go
to the parish when we are old.  Well, are we to put by the rotten
goods?  If this did not come from a lord, one would say his brains
were as rotten as the goods that our work is paid in.  When the
unstamped papers came out “illegally,” there was a lot of
them to report it to the police in Holmfirth, the Blythes, the Edwards,
etc.; but where are they now?  But this is different.  Our
truck manufacturer belongs to the pious Free Trade lot; he goes to church
twice every Sunday, and repeats devotedly after the parson: ‘We
have left undone the things we ought to have done, and we have done
the things we ought not to have done, and there is no good in us; but,
good Lord, deliver us.’  Yes, deliver us till to-morrow,
and we will pay our weavers again in rotten goods.”

The Cottage system looks much more innocent and arose in a much more
harmless way, though it has the same enslaving influence upon the employee. 
In the neighbourhood of the mills in the country, there is often a lack
of dwelling accommodation for the operatives.  The manufacturer
is frequently obliged to build such dwellings and does so gladly, as
they yield great advantages, besides the interest upon the capital invested. 
If any owner of working-men’s dwellings averages about six per
cent. on his invested capital, it is safe to calculate that the manufacturer’s
cottages yield twice this rate; for so long as his factory does not
stand perfectly idle he is sure of occupants, and of occupants who pay
punctually.  He is therefore spared the two chief disadvantages
under which other house-owners labour; his cottages never stand p. 184empty,
and he runs no risk.  But the rent of the cottages is as high as
though these disadvantages were in full force, and by obtaining the
same rent as the ordinary house-owner, the manufacturer, at cost of
the operatives, makes a brilliant investment at twelve to fourteen per
cent.  For it is clearly unjust that he should make twice as much
profit as other competing house-owners, who at the same time are excluded
from competing with him.  But it implies a double wrong, when he
draws his fixed profit from the pockets of the non-possessing class,
which must consider the expenditure of every penny.  He is used
to that, however, he whose whole wealth is gained at the cost of his
employees.  But this injustice becomes an infamy when the manufacturer,
as often happens, forces his operatives, who must occupy his houses
on pain of dismissal, to pay a higher rent than the ordinary one, or
even to pay rent for houses in which they do not live!  The Halifax
Guardian, quoted by the Liberal Sun, asserts that hundreds
of operatives in Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham, and Rochdale, etc., are
forced by their employers to pay house-rent whether they occupy the
house or not. {184} 
The cottage system is universal in the country districts; it has created
whole villages, and the manufacturer usually has little or no competition
against his houses, so that he can fix his price regardless of any market
rate, indeed at his pleasure.  And what power does the cottage
system give the employer over his operatives in disagreements between
master and men?  If the latter strike, he need only give them notice
to quit his premises, and the notice need only be a week; after that
time the operative is not only without bread but without a shelter,
a vagabond at the mercy of the law which sends him, without fail, to
the treadmill.

Such is the factory system sketched as fully as my space permits,
and with as little partisan spirit as the heroic deeds of the bourgeoisie
against the defenceless workers permit—deeds to wards which it
is impossible to remain indifferent, towards which indifference were
a crime.  Let us compare the condition of the free Englishman of
1845 with the Saxon serf under the lash of p. 185the
Norman barons of 1145.  The serf was glebæ adscriptus,
bound to the soil, so is the free working-man through the cottage system. 
The serf owed his master the jus primæ noctis, the right
of the first night—the free working-man must, on demand, surrender
to his master not only that, but the right of every night.  The
serf could acquire no property; everything that he gained, his master
could take from him; the free working-man has no property, can gain
none by reason of the pressure of competition, and what even the Norman
baron did not do, the modern manufacturer does.  Through the truck
system, he assumes every day the administration in detail of the things
which the worker requires for his immediate necessities.  The relation
of the lord of the soil to the serf was regulated by the prevailing
customs and by-laws which were obeyed, because they corresponded to
them.  The free working-man’s relation to his master is regulated
by laws which are not obeyed, because they correspond neither
with the interests of the employer nor with the prevailing customs. 
The lord of the soil could not separate the serf from the land, nor
sell him apart from it, and since almost all the land was fief and there
was no capital, practically could not sell him at all.  The modern
bourgeois forces the working-man to sell himself.  The serf was
the slave of the piece of land on which he was born, the working-man
is the slave of his own necessaries of life and of the money with which
he has to buy them—both are slaves of a thing.  The
serf had a guarantee for the means of subsistence in the feudal order
of society in which every member had his own place.  The free working-man
has no guarantee whatsoever, because he has a place in society only
when the bourgeoisie can make use of him; in all other cases he is ignored,
treated as non-existent.  The serf sacrificed himself for his master
in war, the factory operative in peace.  The lord of the serf was
a barbarian who regarded his villain as a head of cattle; the employer
of operatives is civilised and regards his “hand” as a machine. 
In short, the position of the two is not far from equal, and if either
is at a disadvantage, it is the free working-man.  Slaves they
both are, with the single difference that the slavery of the one is
undissembled, open, p. 186honest;
that of the other cunning, sly, disguised, deceitfully concealed from
himself and every one else, a hypocritical servitude worse than the
old.  The philanthropic Tories were right when they gave the operatives
the name white slaves.  But the hypocritical disguised slavery
recognises the right to freedom, at least in outward form; bows before
a freedom-loving public opinion, and herein lies the historic progress
as compared with the old servitude, that the principle of freedom
is affirmed, and the oppressed will one day see to it that this principle
is carried out. {186}

p. 188THE
REMAINING BRANCHES OF INDUSTRY.

We were compelled to deal with the factory system somewhat at length,
as it is an entirely novel creation of the industrial period; we shall
be able to treat the other workers the more briefly, because what has
been said either of the industrial proletariat in general, or of the
factory system in particular, will wholly, or in part, apply to them. 
We shall, therefore, merely have to record how far the factory system
has succeeded in forcing its way into each branch of industry, and what
other peculiarities these may reveal.

The four branches comprised under the Factory Act are engaged in
the production of clothing stuffs.  We shall do best if we deal
next with those workers who receive their materials from these factories;
and, first of all, with the stocking weavers of Nottingham, Derby, and
Leicester.  Touching these workers, the Children’s Employment
Commission reports that the long working-hours, imposed by low wages,
with a sedentary life and the strain upon the eyes involved in the nature
of the employment, usually enfeeble the whole frame, and especially
the eyes.  Work at night is impossible without a very powerful
light produced by concentrating the rays of the lamp, making them pass
through glass globes, which is most injurious to the sight.  At
forty years of age, nearly all wear spectacles.  The children employed
at spooling and hemming usually suffer grave injuries to the health
and constitution.  They work from the sixth, seventh, or eighth
year ten to twelve hours daily in small, close rooms.  It is not
uncommon for them to faint at their work, to become too feeble for the
most ordinary household occupation, and so near-sighted as to be obliged
to wear glasses during childhood.  p. 189Many
were found by the commissioners to exhibit all the symptoms of a scrofulous
constitution, and the manufacturers usually refuse to employ girls who
have worked in this way as being too weak.  The condition of these
children is characterised as “a disgrace to a Christian country,”
and the wish expressed for legislative interference.  The Factory
Report {189} adds
that the stocking weavers are the worst paid workers in Leicester, earning
six, or with great effort, seven shillings a week, for sixteen to eighteen
hours’ daily work.  Formerly they earned twenty to twenty-one
shillings, but the introduction of enlarged frames has ruined their
business; the great majority still work with old, small, single frames,
and compete with difficulty with the progress of machinery.  Here,
too, every progress is a disadvantage for the workers.  Nevertheless,
Commissioner Power speaks of the pride of the stocking weavers that
they are free, and had no factory bell to measure out the time for their
eating, sleeping, and working.  Their position to-day is no better
than in 1833, when the Factory Commission made the foregoing statements,
the competition of the Saxon stocking weavers, who have scarcely anything
to eat, takes care of that.  This competition is too strong for
the English in nearly all foreign markets, and for the lower qualities
of goods even in the English market.  It must be a source of rejoicing
for the patriotic German stocking weaver that his starvation wages force
his English brother to starve too!  And, verily, will he not starve
on, proud and happy, for the greater glory of German industry, since
the honour of the Fatherland demands that his table should be bare,
his dish half empty?  Ah! it is a noble thing this competition,
this “race of the nations.”  In the Morning Chronicle,
another Liberal sheet, the organ of the bourgeoisie par excellence,
there were published some letters from a stocking weaver in Hinckley,
describing the condition of his fellow-workers.  Among other things,
he reports 50 families, 321 persons, who were supported by 109 frames;
each frame yielded on an average 5½ shillings; each family earned
an average of 11s. 4d. weekly.  Out of this there was required
for house rent, frame rent, fuel, p. 190light,
soap, and needles, together 5s. 10d., so that there remained for food,
per head daily, 1½d., and for clothing nothing.  “No
eye,” says the stocking weaver, “has seen, no ear heard,
and no heart felt the half of the sufferings that these poor people
endure.”  Beds were wanting either wholly or in part, the
children ran about ragged and barefoot; the men said, with tears in
their eyes: “It’s a long time since we had any meat; we
have almost forgotten how it tastes;” and, finally, some of them
worked on Sunday, though public opinion pardons anything else more readily
than this, and the rattling noise of the frame is audible throughout
the neighbourhood.  “But,” said one of them, “look
at my children and ask no questions.  My poverty forces me to it;
I can’t and won’t hear my children forever crying for bread,
without trying the last means of winning it honestly.  Last Monday
I got up at two in the morning and worked to near midnight; the other
days from six in the morning to between eleven and twelve at night. 
I have had enough of it; I sha’n’t kill myself; so now I
go to bed at ten o’clock, and make up the lost time on Sundays.” 
Neither in Leicester, Nottingham, nor Derby have wages risen since 1833;
and the worst of it is that in Leicester the truck system prevails to
a great extent, as I have mentioned.  It is therefore not to be
wondered at that the weavers of this region take a very active part
in all working-men’s movements, the more active and effective
because the frames are worked chiefly by men.

In this stocking weavers’ district the lace industry also has
its headquarters.  In the three counties mentioned there are in
all 2,760 lace frames in use, while in all the rest of England there
are but 786.  The manufacture of lace is greatly complicated by
a rigid division of labour, and embraces a multitude of branches. 
The yarn is first spooled by girls fourteen years of age and upwards,
winders; then the spools are set up on the frames by boys, eight years
old and upwards, threaders, who pass the thread through fine openings,
of which each machine has an average of 1,800, and bring it towards
its destination; then the weaver weaves the lace which comes out of
the machine like a broad p. 191piece
of cloth and is taken apart by very little children who draw out the
connecting threads.  This is called running or drawing lace, and
the children themselves lace-runners.  The lace is then made ready
for sale.  The winders, like the threaders, have no specified working-time,
being called upon whenever the spools on a frame are empty, and are
liable, since the weavers work at night, to be required at any time
in the factory or workroom.  This irregularity, the frequent night-work,
the disorderly way of living consequent upon it, engender a multitude
of physical and moral ills, especially early and unbridled sexual licence,
upon which point all witnesses are unanimous.  The work is very
bad for the eyes, and although a permanent injury in the case of the
threaders is not universally observable, inflammations of the eye, pain,
tears, and momentary uncertainty of vision during the act of threading
are engendered.  For the winders, however, it is certain that their
work seriously affects the eye, and produces, besides the frequent inflammations
of the cornea, many cases of amaurosis and cataract.  The work
of the weavers themselves is very difficult, as the frames have constantly
been made wider, until those now in use are almost all worked by three
men in turn, each working eight hours, and the frame being kept in use
the whole twenty-four.  Hence it is that the winders and threaders
are so often called upon during the night, and must work to prevent
the frame from standing idle.  The filling in of 1,800 openings
with thread occupies three children at least two hours.  Many frames
are moved by steam-power, and the work of men thus superseded; and,
as the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report mentions
only lace factories to which the children are summoned, it seems to
follow either that the work of the weavers has been removed to great
factory rooms of late, or that steam-weaving has become pretty general;
a forward movement of the factory system in either case.  Most
unwholesome of all is the work of the runners, who are usually children
of seven, and even of five and four, years old.  Commissioner Grainger
actually found one child of two years old employed at this work. 
Following a thread which is to be withdrawn by a needle from an intricate
p. 192texture,
is very bad for the eyes, especially when, as is usually the case, the
work is continued fourteen to sixteen hours.  In the least unfavourable
case, aggravated near-sightedness follows; in the worst case, which
is frequent enough, incurable blindness from amaurosis.  But, apart
from that, the children, in consequence of sitting perpetually bent
up, become feeble, narrow-chested, and scrofulous from bad digestion. 
Disordered functions of the uterus are almost universal among the girls,
and curvature of the spine also, so that “all the runners may
be recognised from their gait.”  The same consequences for
the eyes and the whole constitution are produced by the embroidery of
lace.  Medical witnesses are unanimously of the opinion that the
health of all children employed in the production of lace suffers seriously,
that they are pale, weak, delicate, undersized, and much less able than
other children to resist disease.  The affections from which they
usually suffer are general debility, frequent fainting, pains in the
head, sides, back, and hips, palpitation of the heart, nausea, vomiting
and want of appetite, curvature of the spine, scrofula, and consumption. 
The health of the female lacemakers especially, is constantly and deeply
undermined; complaints are universal of anæmia, difficult childbirth,
and miscarriage. {192a} 
The same subordinate official of the Children’s Employment Commission
reports further that the children are very often ill-clothed and ragged,
and receive insufficient food, usually only bread and tea, often no
meat for months together.  As to their moral condition, he reports:
{192b}

“All the inhabitants of Nottingham, the police,
the clergy, the manufacturers, the working-people, and the parents of
the children are all unanimously of opinion that the present system
of labour is a most fruitful source of immorality.  The threaders,
chiefly boys, and the winders, usually girls, are called for in the
factory at the same time; and as their parents cannot know how long
they are wanted there, they have the finest opportunity to form improper
connections and remain together after the close of the work.  This
has contributed, in no small degree, to the immorality p. 193which,
according to general opinion, exists to a terrible extent in Nottingham. 
Apart from this, the quiet of home life, and the comfort of the family
to which these children and young people belong, is wholly sacrificed
to this most unnatural state of things.”

Another branch of lace-making, bobbin-lacework, is carried on in
the agricultural shires of Northampton, Oxford, and Bedford, chiefly
by children and young persons, who complain universally of bad food,
and rarely taste meat.  The employment itself is most unwholesome. 
The children work in small, ill-ventilated, damp rooms, sitting always
bent over the lace cushion.  To support the body in this wearying
position, the girls wear stays with a wooden busk, which, at the tender
age of most of them, when the bones are still very soft, wholly displace
the ribs, and make narrow chests universal.  They usually die of
consumption after suffering the severest forms of digestive disorders,
brought on by sedentary work in a bad atmosphere.  They are almost
wholly without education, least of all do they receive moral training. 
They love finery, and in consequence of these two influences their moral
condition is most deplorable, and prostitution almost epidemic among
them. {193}

This is the price at which society purchases for the fine ladies
of the bourgeoisie the pleasure of wearing lace; a reasonable price
truly!  Only a few thousand blind working-men, some consumptive
labourers’ daughters, a sickly generation of the vile multitude
bequeathing its debility to its equally “vile” children
and children’s children.  But what does that come to? 
Nothing, nothing whatsoever!  Our English bourgeoisie will lay
the report of the Government Commission aside indifferently, and wives
and daughters will deck themselves with lace as before.  It is
a beautiful thing, the composure of an English bourgeois.

A great number of operatives are employed in the cotton-printing
establishments of Lancashire, Derbyshire, and the West of Scotland. 
In no branch of English industry has mechanical ingenuity produced such
brilliant results as here, but in no other p. 194has
it so crushed the workers.  The application of engraved cylinders
driven by steam-power, and the discovery of a method of printing four
to six colours at once with such cylinders, has as completely superseded
hand-work as did the application of machinery to the spinning and weaving
of cotton, and these new arrangements in the printing-works have superseded
the hand-workers much more than was the case in the production of the
fabrics.  One man, with the assistance of one child, now does with
a machine the work done formerly by 200 block printers; a single machine
yields 28 yards of printed cloth per minute.  The calico printers
are in a very bad way in consequence; the shires of Lancaster, Derby,
and Chester produced (according to a petition of the printers to the
House of Commons), in the year 1842, 11,000,000 pieces of printed cotton
goods: of these, 100,000 were printed by hand exclusively, 900,000 in
part with machinery and in part by hand, and 10,000,000 by machinery
alone, with four to six colours.  As the machinery is chiefly new
and undergoes constant improvement, the number of hand-printers is far
too great for the available quantity of work, and many of them are therefore
starving; the petition puts the number at one-quarter of the whole,
while the rest are employed but one or two, in the best case three days
in the week, and are ill-paid.  Leach {194}
asserts of one print-work (Deeply Dale, near Bury, in Lancashire), that
the hand-printers did not earn on an average more than five shillings,
though he knows that the machine-printers were pretty well paid. 
The print-works are thus wholly affiliated with the factory system,
but without being subject to the legislative restrictions placed upon
it.  They produce an article subject to fashion, and have therefore
no regular work.  If they have small orders, they work half time;
if they make a hit with a pattern, and business is brisk, they work
twelve hours, perhaps all night.  In the neighbourhood of my home,
near Manchester, there was a print-work that was often lighted when
I returned late at night; and I have heard that the children were obliged
at times to work so long there, that they would try to catch a moment’s
rest and sleep on the stone steps p. 195and
in the corners of the lobby.  I have no legal proof of the truth
of the statement, or I should name the firm.  The Report of the
Children’s Employment Commission is very cursory upon this subject,
stating merely that in England, at least, the children are mostly pretty
well clothed and fed (relatively, according to the wages of the parents),
that they receive no education whatsoever, and are morally on a low
plane.  It is only necessary to remember that these children are
subject to the factory system, and then, referring the reader to what
has already been said of that, we can pass on.

Of the remaining workers employed in the manufacture of clothing
stuffs little remains to be said; the bleachers’ work is very
unwholesome, obliging them to breathe chlorine, a gas injurious to the
lungs.  The work of the dyers is in many cases very healthful,
since it requires the exertion of the whole body; how these workers
are paid is little known, and this is ground enough for the inference
that they do not receive less than the average wages, otherwise they
would make complaint.  The fustian cutters, who, in consequence
of the large consumption of cotton velvet, are comparatively numerous,
being estimated at from 3,000 to 4,000, have suffered very severely,
indirectly, from the influence of the factory system.  The goods
formerly woven with hand-looms, were not perfectly uniform, and required
a practised hand in cutting the single rows of threads.  Since
power-looms have been used, the rows run regularly; each thread of the
weft is exactly parallel with the preceding one, and cutting is no longer
an art.  The workers thrown out of employment by the introduction
of machinery turn to fustian cutting, and force down wages by their
competition; the manufacturers discovered that they could employ women
and children, and the wages sank to the rate paid them, while hundreds
of men were thrown out of employment.  The manufacturers found
that they could get the work done in the factory itself more cheaply
than in the cutters’ workroom, for which they indirectly paid
the rent.  Since this discovery, the low upper-storey cutters’
rooms stand empty in many a cottage, or are let for dwellings, while
the cutter has lost his p. 196freedom
of choice of his working-hours, and is brought under the dominion of
the factory bell.  A cutter of perhaps forty-five years of age
told me that he could remember a time when he had received 8d. a yard
for work, for which he now received 1d.; true, he can cut the more regular
texture more quickly than the old, but he can by no means do twice as
much in an hour as formerly, so that his wages have sunk to less than
a quarter of what they were.  Leach {196}
gives a list of wages paid in 1827 and in 1843 for various goods, from
which it appears that articles paid in 1827 at the rates of 4d., 2¼d.,
2¾d., and 1d. per yard, were paid in 1843 at the rate of 1½d.,
1d., ¾d., and 0.375d. per yard, cutters’ wages.  The
average weekly wage, according to Leach, was as follows: 1827, £1
6s. 6d.; £1 2s. 6d.; £1; £1 6s. 6d.; and for the same
goods in 1843, 10s. 6d.; 7s. 6d.; 6s. 8d.; 10s.; while there are hundreds
of workers who cannot find employment even at these last named rates. 
Of the hand-weavers of the cotton industry we have already spoken; the
other woven fabrics are almost exclusively produced on hand-looms. 
Here most of the workers have suffered as the weavers have done from
the crowding in of competitors displaced by machinery, and are, moreover,
subject like the factory operatives to a severe fine system for bad
work.  Take, for instance, the silk weavers.  Mr. Brocklehurst,
one of the largest silk manufacturers in all England, laid before a
committee of members of Parliament lists taken from his books, from
which it appears that for goods for which he paid wages in 1821 at the
rate of 30s., 14s., 3½s., ¾s., 1½s., 10s., he paid
in 1839 but 9s., 7¼s., 2¼s., 0.333s., 0½s., 6¼s.,
while in this case no improvement in the machinery has taken place. 
But what Mr. Brocklehurst does may very well be taken as a standard
for all.  From the same lists it appears that the average weekly
wage of his weavers, after all deductions, was, in 1821, 16½s.,
and, in 1831, but 6s.  Since that time wages have fallen still
further.  Goods which brought in 4d. weavers’ wages in 1831,
bring in but 2½d. in 1843 (single sarsnets), and a great number
of weavers in the country can get work only when they undertake these
goods at 1½d.-2d.  Moreover, p. 197they
are subject to arbitrary deductions from their wages.  Every weaver
who receives materials is given a card, on which is usually to be read
that the work is to be returned at a specified hour of the day; that
a weaver who cannot work by reason of illness must make the fact known
at the office within three days, or sickness will not be regarded as
an excuse; that it will not be regarded as a sufficient excuse if the
weaver claims to have been obliged to wait for yarn; that for certain
faults in the work (if, for example, more weft-threads are found within
a given space than are prescribed), not less than half the wages will
be deducted; and that if the goods should not be ready at the time specified,
one penny will be deducted for every yard returned.  The deductions
in accordance with these cards are so considerable that, for instance,
a man who comes twice a week to Leigh, in Lancashire, to gather up woven
goods, brings his employer at least £15 fines every time. 
He asserts this himself, and he is regarded as one of the most lenient. 
Such things were formerly settled by arbitration; but as the workers
were usually dismissed if they insisted upon that, the custom has been
almost wholly abandoned, and the manufacturer acts arbitrarily as prosecutor,
witness, judge, law-giver, and executive in one person.  And if
the workman goes to a Justice of the Peace, the answer is: “When
you accepted your card you entered upon a contract, and you must abide
by it.”  The case is the same as that of the factory operatives. 
Besides, the employer obliges the workman to sign a document in which
he declares that he agrees to the deductions made.  And if a workman
rebels, all the manufacturers in the town know at once that he is a
man who, as Leach says, {197}
“resists the lawful order as established by weavers’ cards,
and, moreover, has the impudence to doubt the wisdom of those who are,
as he ought to know, his superiors in society.”

Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does
not force them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them
what Leach translates into plain English with the words: “If you
don’t like to be frizzled in my frying-pan, you p. 198can
take a walk into the fire.”  The silk weavers of London,
and especially of Spitalfields, have lived in periodic distress for
a long time, and that they still have no cause to be satisfied with
their lot is proved by their taking a most active part in English labour
movements in general, and in London ones in particular.  The distress
prevailing among them gave rise to the fever which broke out in East
London, and called forth the Commission for Investigating the Sanitary
Condition of the Labouring Class.  But the last report of the London
Fever Hospital shows that this disease is still raging.

After the textile fabrics, by far the most important products of
English industry are the metal-wares.  This trade has its headquarters
at Birmingham, where the finer metal goods of all sorts are produced,
at Sheffield for cutlery, and in Staffordshire, especially at Wolverhampton,
where the coarser articles, locks, nails, etc., are manufactured. 
In describing the position of the workers employed in these trades,
let us begin with Birmingham.  The disposition of the work has
retained in Birmingham, as in most places where metals are wrought,
something of the old handicraft character; the small employers are still
to be found, who work with their apprentices in the shop at home, or
when they need steam-power, in great factory buildings which are divided
into little shops, each rented to a small employer, and supplied with
a shaft moved by the engine, and furnishing motive power for the machinery. 
Leon Faucher, author of a series of articles in the Revue des Deux
Mondes, which at least betray study, and are better than what has
hitherto been written upon the subject by Englishmen or Germans, characterises
this relation in contrast with the manufacture of Lancashire as “Démocratie
industrielle,” and observes that it produces no very favourable
results for master or men.  This observation is perfectly correct,
for the many small employers cannot well subsist on the profit divided
amongst them, determined by competition, a profit under other circumstances
absorbed by a single manufacturer.  The centralising tendency of
capital holds them down.  For one who grows rich ten are ruined,
and a hundred placed at a p. 199greater
disadvantage than ever, by the pressure of the one upstart who can afford
to sell more cheaply than they.  And in the cases where they have
to compete from the beginning against great capitalists, it is self-evident
that they can only toil along with the greatest difficulty.  The
apprentices are, as we shall see, quite as badly off under the small
employers as under the manufacturers, with the single difference that
they, in turn, may become small employers, and so attain a certain independence—that
is to say, they are at best less directly exploited by the bourgeoisie
than under the factory system.  Thus these small employers are
neither genuine proletarians, since they live in part upon the work
of their apprentices, nor genuine bourgeois, since their principal means
of support is their own work.  This peculiar midway position of
the Birmingham iron-workers is to blame for their having so rarely joined
wholly and unreservedly in the English labour movements.  Birmingham
is a politically radical, but not a Chartist, town.  There are,
however, numerous larger factories belonging to capitalists; and in
these the factory system reigns supreme.  The division of labour,
which is here carried out to the last detail (in the needle industry,
for example), and the use of steam-power, admit of the employment of
a great multitude of women and children, and we find here {199}
precisely the same features reappearing which the Factories’ Report
presented,—the work of women up to the hour of confinement, incapacity
as housekeepers, neglect of home and children, indifference, actual
dislike to family life, and demoralisation; further, the crowding out
of men from employment, the constant improvement of machinery, early
emancipation of children, husbands supported by their wives and children,
etc. etc.  The children are described as half-starved and ragged,
the half of them are said not to know what it is to have enough to eat,
many of them get nothing to eat before the midday meal, or even live
the whole day upon a pennyworth of bread for a noonday meal—there
were actually cases in which children received no food from eight in
the morning until seven at night.  Their clothing is very often
scarcely p. 200sufficient
to cover their nakedness, many are barefoot even in winter.  Hence
they are all small and weak for their age, and rarely develop with any
degree of vigour.  And when we reflect that with these insufficient
means of reproducing the physical forces, hard and protracted work in
close rooms is required of them, we cannot wonder that there are few
adults in Birmingham fit for military service.  “The working
men,” says a recruiting surgeon, “are small, delicate, and
of very slight physical power; many of them deformed, too, in the chest
or spinal column.”  According to the assertion of a recruiting
sergeant, the people of Birmingham are smaller than those anywhere else,
being usually 5 feet 4 to 5 inches tall; out of 613 recruits, but 238
were found fit for service.  As to education, a series of depositions
and specimens taken from the metal districts have already been given,
{200a} to which
the reader is referred.  It appears further, from the Children’s
Employment Commission’s Report, that in Birmingham more than half
the children between five and fifteen years attend no school whatsoever,
that those who do are constantly changing, so that it is impossible
to give them any training of an enduring kind, and that they are all
withdrawn from school very early and set to work.  The report makes
it clear what sort of teachers are employed.  One teacher, in answer
to the question whether she gave moral instruction, said, No, for threepence
a week school fees that was too much to require, but that she took a
great deal of trouble to instil good principles into the children. 
(And she made a decided slip in her English in saying it.)  In
the schools the commissioner found constant noise and disorder. 
The moral state of the children is in the highest degree deplorable. 
Half of all the criminals are children under fifteen, and in a single
year ninety ten-years’-old offenders, among them forty-four serious
criminal cases, were sentenced.  Unbridled sexual intercourse seems,
according to the opinion of the commissioner, almost universal, and
that at a very early age. {200b}

In the iron district of Staffordshire the state of things is still
worse.  For the coarse wares made here neither much division of
p. 201labour
(with certain exceptions) nor steam-power or machinery can be applied. 
In Wolverhampton, Willenhall, Bilston, Sedgeley, Wednesfield, Darlaston,
Dudley, Walsall, Wednesbury, etc., there are, therefore, fewer factories,
but chiefly single forges, where the small masters work alone, or with
one or more apprentices, who serve them until reaching the twenty-first
year.  The small employers are in about the same situation as those
of Birmingham; but the apprentices, as a rule, are much worse off. 
They get almost exclusively meat from diseased animals or such as have
died a natural death, or tainted meat, or fish to eat, with veal from
calves killed too young, and pork from swine smothered during transportation,
and such food is furnished not by small employers only, but by large
manufacturers, who employ from thirty to forty apprentices.  The
custom seems to be universal in Wolverhampton, and its natural consequence
is frequent bowel complaints and other diseases.  Moreover, the
children usually do not get enough to eat, and have rarely other clothing
than their working rags, for which reason, if for no other, they cannot
go to Sunday school The dwellings are bad and filthy, often so much
so that they give rise to disease; and in spite of the not materially
unhealthy work, the children are puny, weak, and, in many cases, severely
crippled.  In Willenhall, for instance, there are countless persons
who have, from perpetually filing at the lathe, crooked backs and one
leg crooked, “hind-leg” as they call it, so that the two
legs have the form of a K; while it is said that more than one-third
of the working-men there are ruptured.  Here, as well as in Wolverhampton,
numberless cases were found of retarded puberty among girls, (for girls,
too, work at the forges,) as well as among boys, extending even to the
nineteenth year.  In Sedgeley and its surrounding district, where
nails form almost the sole product, the nailers live and work in the
most wretched stable-like huts, which for filth can scarcely be equalled. 
Girls and boys work from the tenth or twelfth year, and are accounted
fully skilled only when they make a thousand nails a day.  For
twelve hundred nails the pay is 5¾d.  Every nail receives
twelve blows, and since the hammer weighs 1¼ pounds, the nailer
must p. 202lift
18,000 pounds to earn this miserable pay.  With this hard work
and insufficient food, the children inevitably develop ill-formed, undersized
frames, and the commissioners depositions confirm this.  As to
the state of education in this district, data have already been furnished
in the foregoing chapters.  It is upon an incredibly low plane;
half the children do not even go to Sunday school, and the other half
go irregularly; very few, in comparison with the other districts, can
read, and in the matter of writing the case is much worse.  Naturally,
for between the seventh and tenth years, just when they are beginning
to get some good out of going to school, they are set to work, and the
Sunday school teachers, smiths or miners, frequently cannot read, and
write their names with difficulty.  The prevailing morals correspond
with these means of education.  In Willenhall, Commissioner Horne
asserts, and supplies ample proofs of his assertion, that there exists
absolutely no moral sense among the workers.  In general, he found
that the children neither recognised duties to their parents nor felt
any affection for them.  They were so little capable of thinking
of what they said, so stolid, so hopelessly stupid, that they often
asserted that they were well treated, were coming on famously, when
they were forced to work twelve to fourteen hours, were clad in rags,
did not get enough to eat, and were beaten so that they felt it several
days afterwards.  They knew nothing of a different kind of life
than that in which they toil from morning until they are allowed to
stop at night, and did not even understand the question never heard
before, whether they were tired. {202}

In Sheffield wages are better, and the external state of the workers
also.  On the other hand, certain branches of work are to be noticed
here, because of their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health. 
Certain operations require the constant pressure of tools against the
chest, and engender consumption in many cases; others, file-cutting
among them, retard the general development of the body and produce digestive
disorders; bone-cutting for knife handles brings with it headache, biliousness,
and among p. 203girls,
of whom many are employed, anæmia.  By far the most unwholesome
work is the grinding of knife-blades and forks, which, especially when
done with a dry stone, entails certain early death.  The unwholesomeness
of this work lies in part in the bent posture, in which chest and stomach
are cramped; but especially in the quantity of sharp-edged metal dust
particles freed in the cutting, which fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily
inhaled.  The dry grinders’ average life is hardly thirty-five
years, the wet grinders’ rarely exceeds forty-five.  Dr.
Knight, in Sheffield, says: {203}

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

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

“They usually begin their work with the fourteenth
year, and, if they have good constitutions, rarely notice any symptoms
before the twentieth year.  Then the symptoms of their peculiar
disease appear.  They suffer from shortness of breath at the slightest
effort in going up hill or up stairs, they habitually raise the shoulders
to relieve the permanent and increasing want of breath; they bend forward,
and seem, in general, to feel most comfortable in the crouching position
in which they work.  Their complexion becomes dirty yellow, their
features express anxiety, they complain of pressure upon the chest. 
Their voices become rough and hoarse, they cough loudly, and the sound
is as if air were driven through a wooden tube.  From time to time
they expectorate considerable quantities of dust, either mixed with
phlegm or in balls or cylindrical masses, with a thin coating of mucus. 
Spitting blood, inability to lie down, night sweat, colliquative diarrhœa,
unusual loss of flesh, and all the usual symptoms of consumption p. 204of
the lungs finally carry them off, after they have lingered months, or
even years, unfit to support themselves or those dependent upon them. 
I must add that all attempts which have hitherto been made to prevent
grinders’ asthma, or to cure it, have wholly failed.”

All this Knight wrote ten years ago; since then the number of grinders
and the violence of the disease have increased, though attempts have
been made to prevent it by covered grindstones and carrying off the
dust by artificial draught.  These methods have been at least partially
successful, but the grinders do not desire their adoption, and have
even destroyed the contrivance here and there, in the belief that more
workers may be attracted to the business and wages thus reduced; they
are for a short life and a merry one.  Dr. Knight has often told
grinders who came to him with the first symptoms of asthma that a return
to grinding means certain death, but with no avail.  He who is
once a grinder falls into despair, as though he had sold himself to
the devil.  Education in Sheffield is upon a very low plane; a
clergyman, who had occupied himself largely with the statistics of education,
was of the opinion that of 16,500 children of the working-class who
are in a position to attend school, scarcely 6,500 can read.  This
comes of the fact that the children are taken from school in the seventh,
and, at the very latest, in the twelfth year, and that the teachers
are good for nothing; one was a convicted thief who found no other way
of supporting himself after being released from jail than teaching school! 
Immorality among young people seems to be more prevalent in Sheffield
than anywhere else.  It is hard to tell which town ought to have
the prize, and in reading the report one believes of each one that this
certainly deserves it!  The younger generation spend the whole
of Sunday lying in the street tossing coins or fighting dogs, go regularly
to the gin palace, where they sit with their sweethearts until late
at night, when they take walks in solitary couples.  In an ale-house
which the commissioner visited, there sat forty to fifty young people
of both sexes, nearly all under seventeen years of age, and each lad
beside his lass.  Here and there cards were played, at other p. 205places
dancing was going on, and everywhere drinking.  Among the company
were openly avowed professional prostitutes.  No wonder, then,
that, as all the witnesses testify, early, unbridled sexual intercourse,
youthful prostitution, beginning with persons of fourteen to fifteen
years, is extraordinarily frequent in Sheffield.  Crimes of a savage
and desperate sort are of common occurrence; one year before the commissioner’s
visit, a band, consisting chiefly of young persons, was arrested when
about to set fire to the town, being fully equipped with lances and
inflammable substances.  We shall see later that the labour movement
in Sheffield has this same savage character. {205}

Besides these two main centres of the metal industry, there are needle
factories in Warrington, Lancashire, where great want, immorality, and
ignorance prevail among the workers, and especially among the children;
and a number of nail forges in the neighbourhood of Wigan, in Lancashire,
and in the east of Scotland.  The reports from these latter districts
tell almost precisely the same story as those of Staffordshire. 
There is one more branch of this industry carried on in the factory
districts, especially in Lancashire, the essential peculiarity of which
is the production of machinery by machinery, whereby the workers, crowded
out elsewhere, are deprived of their last refuge, the creation of the
very enemy which supersedes them.  Machinery for planing and boring,
cutting screws, wheels, nuts, etc., with power lathes, has thrown out
of employment a multitude of men who formerly found regular work at
good wages; and whoever wishes to do so may see crowds of them in Manchester.