GIFT OF SEELEY W. MUDD and GEORGE I. COCHRAN MEYER ELSASSER DR JOHN R. HAYNES WILLIAM L. HONNOLD JAMES R. MARTIN MRS. JOSEPH F. SARTORI to the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SOUTHERN BRANCH TUs book is DUE on the last date stamped below // ti^-- THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND BY H. M. HYNDMAN London Kegan Paul. 'rRE\cii & Co., i Paternoster Square 1883 88327 < « I t ' t t c c t til «. < t ■■ t c c * « * • TO MY WIFE, WHOSE NBVKR-FAILING CHEERFULNESS AND COURAGE HAVE HELPED AND SUPPORTED ME WHEN ALL HAS LOOKED DARK FOR THE CAUSE OF THE PEOPLE, THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED WITH THE DEEPEST LOVE AND REGARD BY THE AUTPIOli. PREFACE. The object of this book is to give a sketch of the social and economical development of England from the fifteenth cen- tury to the present time. In doing this, it has been neces- sary to treat of political economy from a point of view which of late years, at any rate, has very rarely been taken by English writers. Political economy is that branch of human knowledge which deals with the production and the distri- :L) bution of Avealth ; but the relations in which such produc- er . ' ^ tion and distribution are carried on vary greatly in different ages and in different countries. Moreover, the manner in which wealth is produced, the power, that is, which man has over the forces of nature, is the basis of the whole social, political, and religious forms of the period at which the ex- amination is made. Forms of social intercourse, custom, law, political institutions, and religion no doubt influence even economical methods long after their origin has been forgotten, and constitute the conservative side of human society, keeping back the changes made necessary by the more or less rapid modification of the system of produc- tion below ; just as in the evolution of species the hereditary tendency struggles with the growing adaptation to altered conditions of life. My endeavour has been to apply these theories without fear or prejudice, and certainly without the slightest bias in favour of any existing political party, to viii PREFACE. the history of our own country. Hitherto the history of England, and particularly the history of our industry, our commerce, and our conquests, has been written almost exclusively from the middle-class point of view. Middle- class histories are still the text-books at all our schools and universities ; middle-class political economy likewise finds favour in all directions. Even men who pride themselves upon their sympathy with the democratic system of our ancient Anglo-Saxon village communities have failed to see beyond the limits of their own class when treating of the affairs of the last two hundred years. At most the landlord class has been denounced as the chief cause of the degrada- tion and impoverishment of the mass of the peoj)le during the period of the greatest increase of national wealth. In beginning with the fifteenth century I have of course evaded the necessity of explaining in full the feudal system based upon serfdom ; and the earher portion of the work makes no pretence to be a detailed historical record even of the struggles of the people. Later periods are treated more thoroughly. My indebtedness to the famous German historical school of political economy headed by Karl Marx, with Friedrich Engels and Rodbertus immediately following, I have fully acknowledged throughout. The chapters which deal with " Labour and Surplus Value " and " The Great Machine Industry" seemed to me essential to a right under- standing of our economical growth, though strictly speaking they are not historical. What a flood of light Marx's researches in this field have thrown upon the whole record of our development is not yet understood in this country. My references to the " Capital " are to the French edition, for the reason that French is unfortunately much more commonly known in England than German. An authorised PREFACE. X English translation will, I am told, certainly appear within the next few months, together with a translation of the un- published second part. The works of Engels, Rodbertus, Held, Meyer, &c., however, are only to be read in German. Since this work was in type an article on " Socialism in England " has appeared in the Quarterly Revieiv. Forty pages are devoted to a little book of mine entitled, " Eng- land for All," published about two years and a half ago. The criticism, which is very laboured, has been fully met, by anticipation, in the following pages. In leaving the book to the judgment of the public, I do so with the hope that, whatever errors and shortcomings I may have been guilty of, some readers will be induced to look more carefully than they otherwise would into the system of production and the social arrangements around them. My friends and fellow- workers of the Democratic Federation, whose zeal, enthusiasm, and self-sacrifice have given so great an impetus to the cause, will I trust find in it some help in the noble work they have undertaken. 10 Devonshire Street, Portland Place, London, W., November 8, 1883. CONTENTS. CHAPTEE I. PAGE THE GOLDEN AGE , . ■ . . . , . 1 CHAPTER II. THE IRON AGE •..,... 23 CHAPTEE III. THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS ..... 59 CHAPTEE IV. LABOUR AND SURPLUS VALUE • .... 98 CHAPTEE V. THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT .... 138 APPENDIX TO CHAPTER V. . . . . . 189 CHAPTEE VI. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE ..... 193 « CHAPTEE VII. THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY ..... 233 xii CONTENTS. CHAPTER VIII. PAGE THE PERIOD OF APATHY ...... 263 CHAPTER IX. THE LAND AND THE LABOURERS ..... 294 CHAPTER X. THE PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY PRODUCING CLASS . . 336 CHAPTER XL THE POOR LAWS ....... 377 CHAPTER XII. INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS .... 407 CHAPTER XIII. THE FUTURE ....... 434 APPENDIX 479 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. In looking back through the history of our country, there is one period when by common consent men and women who worked with their hands were better off than at any time before or since. It may be doubted indeed whether any European community ever enjoyed such rough plenty as the English yeomen, craftsmen, and labourers of the fifteenth century. These days of well-being for the mass of the people lasted from the end of the fourteenth until the first quarter of the sixteenth century. The period includes in foreign affairs the battles of Cressy and Agincourt, and the other exploits of Henry V. ; but it also saw the complete defeat of the English by Joan of Arc, and their expulsion from France. At home, the dethronement of Richard II. led up to the bloody Wars of the Roses, and the crowning victory of Bosworth Field, which seated Henry VII. on the throne. Great risings of the peasantry had obtained or confirmed for the people the freedom from personal slavery, and the security for their own property, which made the English of the fifteenth century the envy of Europe. Merry England it was then in spite of all drawbacks ; and the conditions of life which gave the workers such comfort ( A 2 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. and prosperity were not upset by any of the troubles of the time. Defeat abroad and pestilence at home, civil wars, and formidable insurrections did not seriously affect the general welfare. The main body of the workers fought their own fights, and returned peaceably to their towns or homesteads, looking on with the calmest indifference whilst the barons and their retainers cut one another's throats for the cause of York or Lancaster. Learning in onr modern sense the people certainly had not ; but the education of the time was wide-sj)read, the universities have never been so crowded since by all classes, and Piers Ploughman and Chaucer, Wyclif and Caxton, laid the ground- Avork of that homely English speech which, properly used, is to-day the strongest and the clearest of modern tongues. The homes of the people were filthy,* and much that we now hold to be necessary for health was thought quite useless ; nevertheless the finest buildings in these islands are of this date, whilst the stone-carving and woodwork, the stained glass and tapestry which remain, testify to taste and training of a very high order. As to the labourers, they ate, drank, and worked well, and foreigners gazed in wonder at the rich clothing, sturdy frames, and independent mien of our English common men. The truth, of course, is that below the troubles and disturb- ances on the surface the great main stream of human life and happiness flowed on unchecked, owing to the steady operation of economical and social causes which were pecu- liar to this epoch. The king, the nobles, and the clergy were the leaders of a free, and, in the main, prosperous community ; and, although cases of tyranny were not rare, and the upper classes then as ever lost no chance of * Not worse, however, than the cottages of onr agricultural labourers to-day in any respect, fcjee Chapter X. THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. 3 increasing tlieir wealth and power at the expense of those below, the craftsmen and labourers were nowise behindhand in championing the liberties they had so hardly won. At the end of the fourteenth century (1381-1400), serfdom and villenage were practically done away in Eng- land. The great risings of Wat Tyler and Flannoc (1381), though put down at the moment by treachery and false promises, really secured freedom for the mass of the people. Such an insurrection as the Peasants' War did not arise from the trifling cause commonly put forward.*''' The priest John Ball had genuine grievances to point to and definite reforms to propose when he addressed his stirring speeches to tens of thousands of his stalwart countrymen. Thus was he in the habit of addressing Tyler's followers in support of great social and political principles : — " My friends, things cannot be well for us in this England of ours, nor ever will, until all things shall be in common ; when there shall be neither lord nor vassal, and all grades shall be levelled ; when the nobles shall be no more masters than we. How ill have they treated us ! and why do they thus keep us in bondage ? Are not Adam and Eve their ancestors as well as ours ? What can tlie}^ show, and what reason can they give, why they should be more masters than Ave? except, maybe, because they make us labour and work for them to spend. They are clothed in velvets and rich stuffs, trimmed with ermine and other furs, whilst we are forced to wear coarse cloth. They have wines, spices, and nice bread, whilst we have only rye and straw refuse ; if we drink it must be water. They have grand houses and homesteads, but we must face wind and rain as we labour * Professor Thoi'old Rogers is undoubtedly right in his remarks :ls to the effect of the Peasants' War. Though the rising itself was defeated, the people practically ^v()n. 4 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. in the open ; yet our labour it is which keeps up their luxury. We are called slaves ; and if we fail at our tasks we are flogged ; and we have no king to complain to, nor anyone who will hear us and do justice. Let us go to the king, who is young, and remonstrate with him on our slavery, telling him we must have it otherwise, or we our- selves shall find the remedy. If we wait on him in a body, all those who come under the title of slaves, or are held in bondage, will follow us in hope of being free. When the king sees us we shall get a favourable answer, or we must seek ourselves to amend our lot."* Attempts were in fact being made, not only to reduce the wages of day labourers by enforcing anew the statute of King Edward III. in relation to payments to hinds and craftsmen, and to maintain the serfs who still existed in their degraded position, but to bring back the old forced labour, which had been gradually commuted for money payments. Throughout the country districts of England there were now established hundreds of thousands of yeomen and lifeholders, who had freed themselves from the more galling trammels of feudalism, and any such attacks upon their hard-won rights or the rights of the free labourers, met with a stout resistance. The tenants on the feudal estates, whether small or large, * It is well to show that the idea of socialism is no foreign importa- tion into England. Tyler, Cade, Ball, Kett, More, Bellers, Spence, Owen, read to me like sound English names: not a foreigner in the whole batch. They all held opinions which our capitalist-landlord House of Commons would denounce as direct plagiaidsms from " continental revolutionists." We islandei's have been revolutionists however, and will be again, ignorant as our capitalists are of the history of the people. Edmund Burke, with his fine sophistical Whiggery, of course sneered at coarse, vigorous John Ball. But then, so far as we know, Ball did not sell himself to the nobles as Burke did. THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. 5 bad also as good a right and title to their lands, subject to the dues which they paid to the lords or the church, as the nobles, the clergy, or the king had to theirs. Competition for farms in our modern sense was unknown. The relations between the various parties interested were in the main personal, and these continued even when the main fabric of feudalism was falling into decay. Such a body of tillers of the soil produced their crops as a whole for the use of their own people. Farming with a view to profit alone was only just beginning. Though England at this time exported its superfluity of grain, wool, and hides after the people had been well fed, well clothed, and well shod^ only a few large landed proprietors carried on this business with a direct view to commercial gain. The mass of the small farmers worked on their land in much the same spirit as the early settlers on the eastern coast of North America, or, as some farmers do to-day in the Western States, though with even less idea of exchanging the greater part of their crops. Their methods of tillage were rude, but they continued to get out of the soil an excellent subsistence for themselves and their families, as well as for the hinds who ordinarily fed at the yeoman farmer's own table. Holding the land, having the implements and the produce alike at their disposal, subject only to certain payments whose amount was well established, such people were free in every sense, economical and personal. No man could call upon them to work, none to fight save of their own free- Avill and consent ; they had at hand the means for feeding, clothing, and housing themselves and their families without being beholden to any. All records of the time go to show what a fine, vigorous folk were these iudepoudent 6 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. small farmers of the fifteenth century. The longer these favourable conditions continued, the sturdier and more independent became these people who were the backbone of the country. We can see how quickly even in our own time good food and healthy surroundings improve the character of a population, how misery and squalor fade away under sound economical conditions for the mass of the people.* This happy state of things for the English farmers lasted about four generations, and we need feel no surprise at the admirable result for England as a whole. The country labourers in regard to diet, clothing, and house-room were little worse off than the yeomen and farmers themselves. Indeed, the line between the two was not easy to draw. A small farmer would work, at the high wages then current, for his richer neighbour, for the lord, the priory, or the state, side by side with the hind who at other times might be in his own em- ploy. For the labourer himself owned land, and worked upon it for the support of himself and his family. From the produce of several acres he could obtain sufficient to render him a very independent bargainer for the use of his vital fo^ce on other men's business. Each labourer's cottage had land attached to it, and he lived, it may be said, almost rent free. After the abolition of villenage, the small money payment that might be due was a trifling percentage com- pared with what his labour could procure for him in wages, food, and clothing from work on his own land or work for * The children of our worn-ovit workpeople transplanted to Canada and New Zealand become magnificent specimens of the human race, far exceeding their parents in weight and stature. This I have often observed myself. The children on board the training-ships when well fed and well clad grow also into fine lads enough, though taken from very bad conditions of life in our cities. THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. 7 others. He was a wage-earner for the most part when it suited it him to be so : by no means a wage-earner at the disposal of the employing class in return for the bare means of subsistence his life through. For in addition to the land which he held with his cottage, there lay around every hamlet and village, there were to be seen on the outskirts of every country town, large stretches of common land on which the labourers might depasture their cattle, sheep, pigs, or geese. There were few, indeed, who could not avail themselves of this right of common property. Kates of wages by themselves show this. In all periods, in all countries, and under all systems of society there is but one test of the well-being of the great mass of the peoiDle, — that is, what can a man get in food, clothing, and housing in return for a day's or a week's work ? It matters not whether he gets this return directly or indirectly, provided he is master of his own body and is assured of steady employment. In the fifteenth century, then, the English country labourer with his cow, his sheep, or his geese on the common, and his four-acre patch at least round his cabin, received no less than 4d. a day without food. If fed at the farmer's own table, he got from 2d. to 2^d. But this same 4d. a day for plain un- skilled labour could buy something worth having in those times.* Less than eighteen days' work would purchase the * The prices of diverse sorts of provisions and fresh Achates spent in the prioiy of Southwick from A° 2 R. Henry V. to the end of 2 Henry VI. taken forth of an old jjarchmeut book written at the time : — Wheat, at 4s. and 5s. 4d. the qr., betwixt both. Malt, from 3s. 4d. to os. Barley, from 3s. 2d. to 4s. lOd. I Muttons, Is. 2d. to Is. 4d. Oats, from Is. lOd. to 2s. 4d. I Goats, 2s. 6d. to 4s. Salt, qr. 4s. Oxen and bulls, 12s. to 16s. Calves, Is. 4d. to 23. 8(1. 8 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. agricultural labourer a quarter of the best wheat. This, taking the market price, including transport ; and of course the labourer himself could get his portion of the harvest at a much lower rate on the spot. A good cow he could earn by less than six weeks' work ; a sow would cost him little more than ten days' work ; a fat sheep would be worth about three days' work ; and a fat goose rather more than one day's work. All these are market prices, whilst it is easy to see that the labourer in the country districts could obtain them at a much lower price on the average. Strong beer he could always have as much of as he wanted with- out greatly limiting his other expenditure or at all lowering his standard of life. The labourer's clothing was at higher prices in proportion ; but that the people were well clad will shortly appear from even stronger evidence than that of prices. So well did the people fare, that Piers Ploughman, who certainly has no sympathy with the nobles or the church, admits that even beggars after harvest would not eat other than wheaten bread.* Even the comparatively few labourers who did not hold any land were in very good case. That their houses were rough and their domestic utensils rude in the extreme are drawbacks which they Hogs for pork or bacon, from 2s. 3d. Lambs, from 4d. to 8d. Capons, at 3d. Hens, at 2d. Chickens, |d. to Id. Eggs, 25 a penny. Cheese, lb. id. Honey, quart 3d. Cider, tun 10s. to 14s. Mallard. IM. to 2d. Pigs (i.e., sucking), 2M. to 5d. Geese, 2M. to 5d. Pigeons, 3 a penny. Conies, 2d. Fresh congers, 4d. to Is. 8d. — Thorold Eogers, " History of Agi'iculture and Prices in England," vol. iv. p. 111. " Would no beggar eat bread that in it beans were, But of cockit and clemantyne or else clene whete." — " Vision of Piers Ploughman." THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. 9 shared with the highest in the land. The most extravagant kings and nobles were not well provided for in these respects, and the dirt of the farm-honse or cabin was not much, if at all, worse than that of the castle or palace. It would seem, then, that the oft-quoted passage in the work of the Chief-Justice Sir John Fortescue, is even on this showing no exaggeration of the condition of the Eng- lish people in the reign of Henry VI. He compares their condition with that of the French peasantry, " whose smock- frocks are make of hemp much like to sackcloth, woollen cloth they wear none, except it be very coarse, and that only in their coats under their said upper garments; neither use they any hose but from the knee upward. The women go barefoot saving on holydays. Neither men nor women eat any flesh, but only lard of bacon, with a small portion of which they fatten their potage and broths. As for roasted or sodden meat of flesh they taste none except it be of the inwards sometimes, and heads of beasts that be killed for gentlemen and merchants." How great is the contrast with the condition of the free Englishman. " The Kincr of Eno^land cannot alter the laws or make new ones without the express consent of the whole kingdom in Parlia- ment assembled. Every inhabitant is at his liberty fiilly to use and enjoy whatever his farm produccth, the fruits of the earth, the increase of his flock and the like ; all the improvements he makes, whether by his own proper in- dustry or of those he retains in his service, are his own to use and enjoy without the let, interruption, or denial of any. If he be in any wise injured or oppressed he shall have amends and satisfactions against the party offending. Hence it is that the inhabitants are rich in gold, silver, and in all the necessaries and conveniences of life. They drink no water un- lo THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. less at certain times and by way of doing penance. They are fed in great abundance with all sorts of flesh and fish, of which they have plenty everywhere ; they are clothed throughout in good woollens ; their bedding and other furniture in their houses are of wool, and that in great store. They are also provided with all other sort of household goods and necessary implements for husbandry. Every one according to his rank hath all things which conduce to make life easy and happy." In short, the wealth of the peasantry who made up the mass of the people was extraordinary. They were their own masters, and could speak their mind freely to all. Their sturdy freedom was based upon property and good living. Nor were the craftsmen at all behind the peasantry. The weavers, the masons, the carpenters, the thatchers, the smiths, the cobblers, the tailors, the saddlers were an ex- ceedingly prosperous folk, who earned on an average about half as much again as the unskilled labourer, or about 6d. to 7d., as against 4d. a day. They worked for the most part, with the exception of the masons, for the immediate needs of their own neighbourhood, forming a portion of the social body as essential as the peasants themselves, nor constitut- ing a special wage- earning class separated from their means of production. In the towns at this time the craft-guilds had gained strength, but still the step up from the journeyman to the master-craftsman was easy, and in most trades no man could be a master who had not himself passed through all the stages of the craft, from the unpaid apprentice to the highly skilled craftsman. The purchasing power of his wages, even making some slight allowance for house rent, may be judged from the scale of prices given above. Strikes, how- ever, of the journeymen against the masters, were not un- THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. ii common in all trades, and special acts were passed against combinations of workmen in the building-trades in the reigns of Edward III. and Henry VI. The organisation of the craft-guilds, when they really served the purpose of a combination of the workers for the maintenance of their freedom and privileges, was thoroughly democratic. "The very soul of the craft-guild was its meetings which brought all the guild-brothers together every week or quarter.'"'''' It is true that these guilds were barely constructed before they ceased to serve the purposes of the workers, and the competition of villein labourers from the country had been felt even earlier. Still these combinations did secure for the working, trading, and even mercantile class in the towns advantages which they could not have got in any other way. At any rate, it is clear that the skilled workmen of such towns as London, Nor- wich, or Bristol, and the masons, carvers, and carpenters who worked at the great ecclesiastical edifices and public buildings, were exceedingly well paid for their labour, had more certainty of work, and in the main, better conditions of life than the skilled artisans of to-day, who are liable at any moment to be brought into competition with machinery, or thrown out of employment suddenly by " bad times." Sumptuary laws prove, if possible, even more clearly how well-to-do the people were. Their luxurious living quite scandalised the upper classes, who thought they ought to restrain such woeful waste by special enactment. Accord- ingly a statute was framed in 1403, by which agricultural labourers were not allowed to use materials for clothing which cost more than two shillings a yard, nor were they to have a pair of stockings which cost more than fourteen- * Brenttiuo on English Guilds (Toulmin Smith). 1 2 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. pence a pair ; silver girdles were also prohibited. A wife was ordered not to give more than a shilling for a head- dress. These ordinances were wholly void of effect, and twenty years later the labourers were allowed to have stockings which cost eighteenpence a pair, and a wife might by law spend no less a sum than one shilling and eight- pence on her head-dress. Truly, considering the fall which has since taken place in the value of money, these statutes amount to pretty much the same thing as if to-day Parlia- ment passed an Act to prohibit common ploughmen from appearing in a garb of rich Genoa velvet, with silk stock- ings and gold buttons and studs, whilst their wives should on no account have caps of the most costly Brussels lace. Such, then, was the general condition of the people, peasantry and yeomen, labourers and craftsmen, in the fifteenth century. Above them stood the barons with their retainers, the church with its great possessions, and the king; the mercantile class was still in its infancy, though gaining strength towards the end of the century. The king's power was much restricted ; but the vast extent of crown lands, aiid his position as the head of the whole feudal system, gave an able monarch great opportunities, whilst it rendered a feeble one, no matter how well-mean- ing, a mere plaything for favourites and intriguers. Henry V. and Edward IV. could do almost what they pleased with the barons and the people ; Henry VI. was at the mercy of both. Jack Cade's great insurrection arose from the shameful misgovernment which went on. It is unfortunate that the whole history of the rising was written by his opponents. But it is clear, even from their admissions, that Cade's followers were no rowdy ruffians with empty bellies, but precisely the sort of men who have made THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. 13 serious revolutions in all ages ; and, at the same time, that the districts which he controlled, after his first victories, were well-governed and contented. The story that he pretended to be Mortimer is manifestly an invention, and had he succeeded in getting possession of the king's person, it is more than probable that our political history would have taken a different course. The temporary success of the insurrection, the admirable government of London, as admitted by his enemies, and the peaceable dispersion of Cade's army, on the promise of reform by the Parliament and the king, proves that it had the sympathy of the people. Cade, as his proclamation and demands show, was much in advance of his time ; there is certainly nothing whatever to prove that he was the mere empty-headed demagogue represented by the paid scribes of the nobility, but rather that he was the vigorous leader of free, vigorous men. The barons, indeed, were far greater disturbers of the public peace at this time than the people, and the economical effects of the Wars of the Roses were very serious in the following century, though little noted at the time. A great noble of this period, or even a baron of lower degree, held an enviable position in many respects. Secure of his dignity, surrounded by a number of retainers and dependents who looked to him for leadership, alike in peace and in war, with sufficient income as a rule to main- tain his household in comfort, and to go in full equipment to the wars, taking part in the festivals of the peoj^le, and enjoying the sports and jousts of his own class, the baron of the fifteenth century, though often rough and uncultured, put forward the best side of feudalism. The Wars of the Roses swept away very nearly the whole of the old nobility. During their continuance the number of retainers was 14 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. enormously increased. Tlie people at large taking no interest in the war, the barons on both sides were driven to increase their own personal following beyond all reason, at an enormous expense, which fell wholly upon their own resources, and ran them deeply into debt. Warwick, the king-maker, with his splendid array of retainers, was but the most formidable of a number of feudal magnates who went forth to fight for a cause which proved ruinous for the time to the nobles on both sides, and in the lono- run still more ruinous to the people as well. The relations of the Church, the monasteries, and the clergy to the people were also most important from every point of view. There is nothing more noteworthy in the history of the human mind than the manner in which this essential portion of English society in the middle-ages has been handled by our ordinary economists, chroniclers, and religionists. Even sober, and in the main tolerably con- scientious writers seem to lose their heads or become afraid to tell the truth on this matter. Just as the modern capitalist can see nothing but anarchy and oppression in the connection between the people and the feudal noble, so the authors who represent the middle-class economy of our time, the Protestant divines whose creed is the devil take the hindmost here and hereafter, fail to discover anything but luxury, debauchery, and hypocnsy in the Catholic Church of the fifteenth century. It is high time that, without any prejudice in favour of that Church, the nonsense which has been foisted on to the public by men interested in suppressing the facts, should be exposed. It is not true that the Church of our ancestors was the organised fraud which it suits fanatics to represent it; it is not true that the monasteries, priories, and nunneries THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. 15 were mere receptacles for all uncleanness and lewdness ; it is not true that the great revenues of the celibate clergy and the celibate recluses were squandered as a rule in riotous living. As a mere question of religion, Catholicism was as good as any creed which has ever found acceptance amongst men. Abuses doubtless there were, and most of them were bitterly attacked by members of the Church themselves ; tyranny and persecution there were too in many forms ; but the Church, as all know, was the one body in which equality of conditions was the rule from the start. There, at least, the man of ability, who outside her pale was forced to bow down before some Norman baron whose ruffianly ancestor had formed part of William's gang of marauders, could rise to a position in which this rough, unlettered swashbuckler grovelled before him. Sixtus V. was picked up out of the gutter ; our Englishman, Nicholas Breakspear, Adrian IV., was a poor labourer's son ; and these are but two instances, out of thousands, of distinguished ecclesiastics of humble birth. However dangerous, also, the spiritual authority of the Church may appear to us, it was used for the most part, notwithstanding all the hideous corruptions of the papal court in the days of the Borgias and others, for the people and against the dominant class ; and its influence, as his- tory shows, was almost unbounded. Kings and barons alike bowed and trembled before it. The great art of the time, too, was, like all other great art, for public uses, and devoted to religion. But all this was trifling compared with the work done in the way of general education. The con- ventual establishments and the parish priests did far more than is commonly supposed in the direction of elementary teaching. But the higher education, the universities ? i6 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Where would Oxford be to-day but for the splendid munifi- cence of bishops, monks, and nuns ? Fourteen of her finest colleges were founded by these celibate ecclesiastics and recluses for the benefit, above all, of the children of the people,* Our noble Church of England has turned these magnificent establishments into mere preserves for the upper and middle classes. So I might go on in refutation of the foolish idea that the greatest institution of the middle ages, the most complete and wide-spread religious organisation ever known on the planet, was a mere collection of idol- worshippers and incense-burners, and its ecclesiastical estab- lishments nothing but dens of iniquity. My purpose, how- ever, is not to champion the Catholic Church against the attacks of ignorant historians, but to show briefly the useful functions it fulfilled in the social economy of the time. At this period it is generally agreed that the Church held fully one-third of the whole landed property and wealth of the country apart from the tithes which were paid to the parish priests. The disposal of these tithes when the priest himself actually received them — and no doubt in some cases they were misapplied by order of his ecclesiastical superiors — was one-third for the maintenance and ornament of the church, one-third for the poor, and one-third for his own personal support. A parish priest would thus in gene- ral spend far more than one-half his legal income upon purposes quite apart from himself. But the books of the conventual establishments also show that a large portion of the income derived from their lands was spent by the monks in entertaining strangers, in relieving beggars, in attending the sick, and in other good works. Granting that large sums were wasted on the useless ceremonies of masses and * See Cobbett, "A History of the Protestant Eeformation." THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. 17 candles, that some of the monasteries had a well-managed refectory, and an admirable cellar of wine and beer, it is certain, nevertheless, that the abbots and priors were the best landlords in England, and that so long as the Church held its lands and its jaower, permanent pauperism was unknown.* Useless as monks and nuns seem to our money-making age, there can be no doubt whatever that they were on the whole popular in England ; even the jesting at their expense being far less bitter in the English than in the con- temporary foreign ballad literature. In those times to retire from the world in order to live in seclusion or devote life to good and charitable works was not reckoned a certain * Notwithstanding the complaints that have so often (and sometimes it may be not without justice) been made against the vices of the regu- lar clergy, it is probable that the earliest improvements in agricultiu'e in England are ascribable to their exertions. Their missions to foreign parts enabled them to introduce new articles of cultivation ; and the immense revenues belonging to religious houses afforded tliem the means of carrying on the operations of husbandry with more skill and success than could be expected from the nobility, who were frequently called away to the court or the camp ; and when they visited their castles, were generally occupied in some subject of domestic warfare. The clergy, we are informed by the canons of the Council of Lateran held in 1179, assisted in the cultivation of their lands. The Ai-chbishop of Can- terbury, Becket, when he visited a monastery in harvest did not disdain to labour in the fields. The trades necessary in agriculture seem like- wise to have been practised by the monks. All the clergy in the Saxon periods of our history were taught some mechanic art, and were obliged by the canons to exercise it at their leisure hours. St Duustan is reported to have been an excellent blacksmith ; and Bede remarks that the Abbot of Weremouth assisted his monks in their agricultural labours by guiding the plougli, by winnowing corn, and by making various implements of husbandry : indeed, I am fully persuaded that abbatial government was much more favourable to national jiros- perity than baronial authority. The ecclesiastics were mild and indul- gent landlords. — Eden, " Tlie State of the Poor ; or, History of the Labouring Classes in England," vol. i. p. 50. B i8 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. sign of more or less complete insanity. The idlers besides, at any rate, did not breed idlers, and their property went to the general church domain. The monkish ignorance and superstition of which we hear so much, the " drones " who slept away their lives in comfort and ease at the cost of other men's labour Avere no more ignorant and superstitious than a Church of England parson or a Wesleyan preacher, and were less dependent on the labour of their fellows than Baptist orators or radical capitalists of to-day. Of the work which they did as chroniclers and copyists of manuscripts it is needless to speak. But to give an idea of their functions, let us take the evidence of Professor Thorold Rogers, a typical bourgeois economist, imbued with the bit- terest hostility to the Catholic Church, and indeed to all forms of society or religion which do not fit in with huckster predominance. " The monasteries were the inns of the middle ages. They also fulfilled functions to a great extent identical with that of parochial relief. They were unpopu- lar (?), and were therefore easy landlords. Some of them, as was asserted, were very important factors in the social eco- nomy of the time. They supplied students to the univer- sities. The nuns were often leeches and midwives. The ditch round Godston nunnery is still full of the aristolochia which the nuns had introduced, because in the pharmacy of the middle ages it was supposed to assist women in child- birth It was the interest of the monastic orders, whose property was often scattered, to keep the means of communication open ; and as they were resident landlords who were consumers of their own market produce, it was their interest to keep the roads in good repair."* This general employment which as landlords resident * " History of Agriculture and Prices iu England,'' vol. iv. THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. 19 among the people they afforded, the improvements of the farms and of their own buildings which they carried out, the excellent work in road-making which they did — a task specially necessary in those times — in addition to their action as public alms-givers, teachers, doctors, and nurses, show what useful people many of these much-abused monks and nuns really were. Tliis will be made still more clearly manifest by the grave results which followed upon the sup- pression of the conventual establishments. That the church, as a whole, held its lauds in great part in trust for the people cannot be disputed ; and as the children of the people in great part formed the hierarchy of the Church, church property in land then meant something very different from church property in land now. To sigh for a restoration of Catholicism is as absurd as to mourn for yeomen and peasant proprietors, or to lament the destruction of the feudal system in its entirety ; but the denunciations of Protestant historians and shopkeeper economists are quite as foolish on the other side. To return to the more direct interests of the mass of the people. Already, even at the commencement of this period of prosperity and well-being for the many, efforts were being made to cut down the rate of wacres in the interest of employers. The famous Statute of Labourers, 2o Edward III., was passed by the Parliament of landowners in order to reduce the "excessive" wages of the year 1349 to the amounts which had been paid before the great plague of the Black Death ; another statute to a similar effect being passed a year later. In I3G3 these enactments having proved vain, a further attempt was made against the pre- vailing high wages. This time Parliament struck at the high standard of life among the wage-earners,'. wheth(T 20 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. labourers, artisans, or domestics. Agricultural labourers were not to eat or drink " excessively," or wear any cloth except " blanket and russet wool of twelvepence." The domestic servants were to have only one meal a day of meat or fish, the other meals being made out with " milk, butter, cheese, and other such victuals." These statutes thus in- directly give, like the later sumptuary laws, the best jDossible evidence of the well-being of the labourers of all kinds, at the same time that they prove the natural disposition of employers. The laws failed of effect. It is true that Brentano argues that the Statute of Labourers was passed in the interest of the whole country, and to prevent a small number of wage-earners from holding their neighbours by the throat and forcing them to pay more than was reason- able for absolutely necessary assistance after such a terrible scourge as the Black Death. But this contention falls to the ground in view of the later enactments, and the attempt to lower the scale of customary diet. Again in 1388 another statute was passed (12 Rich. II. cap. 4) to regulate wages on a low scale, and sixty years later the scale was raised. But all these laws, as the recorded payments of the period show, remained a dead letter. The emancipated bondmen, however, who flocked to the towns after slavery had become opposed to public feeling and contrary to the teachings of the Church — and there can be no doubt that Wat Tyler's rising contri- buted largely to bring about its complete abolition — formed economically the ancestors of our present working classes ; but the conditions were such that they could still hold their own against their employers, these laws notwithstanding; for here, as at later times, we find that laws by themselves cannot make head against the stream of social development. THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PEOPLE. 21 The wealth of the people at large prevented the immediate establishment of a capitalist class, though the germs of such a class were already prepared. Up to the beginning of the sixteenth century it may therefore be taken as established, that in spite of the hostile action of Parliament, economical causes beyond the control of the legislature kept the labourers in an independent position, although the contrary intention of the statutes is manifest. The East of England was at this time by far the most flourishing part of the country, and Norwich was, next to London, the most important town. Trade was rapidly grow- ing, but the principal country business was done at fairs held at intervals. The chief exports were wool, hides, and grain, for which wine, oil, spices, and manufactured goods of certain kinds were received in exchange. The wealthy cities of Flanders were the regular customers of England, whilst the ships of the great Mediterranean mercantile republics often found their way to our ports. Each country, however, worked up its own raw material principally, England its own wool, France its own silk, only the super- fluity being exchanged or exported. Most of the manu- facture also was carried on in a very small way, the simple machines being adapted only to individual work. Much was done by the farmers' wives themselves. In short, the special feature of the whole period was that freedom having been established, the means of production and exchange were alike at the disposal of the individual. They were small, imperfect, and, in a .certain sense, contemptible, and the difficulty of communication kept exchange even of super- fluities within limits : but as a result a wage-earner for a day was not necessarily a wage-earner for life ; production was carried on for use and not primarily for exchange or for 22 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. profit ; laud was regarded as the means for raising food and stock, not as a capital to return so mucli rent or profit for money invested ; and no one looked to international or even national markets as the great field for the disposal of his produce. Freedom of contract between employer and employed was then really possible to a great extent. But it was a period of small things in all respects, a period when in matters of business the individual counted for much when relations between landowner and tenant, between master- craftsman and journeyman, between farmer and hind, were personal and not purely commercial, when rent was paid not as a result of bitter competition but in return for personal service on both sides, when tithes to the Church meant also payment for clerical aid and provision for the poor. It was from this period that the sturdy character of Englishmen as a nation was developed, and the nature of the society was such as to encourage the growth of the finest qualities of self-reliance and independence among men. All the ideas of the mass of the people were different from those of our time, and many restrictions which seem to us harmful and injurious, as the stringent usury laws and the attempts to prevent free barter and sale, were meant to check the efforts of one portion of the community to get the better of the other. Grantinsr that much existed that to us seems O horribly rude, cruel, and disgusting, admitting that our ancestors suffered from plagues of a more deadly character than any known in modern times, the fact still remains that the common working Englishman of the fifteenth century fared better and was in every respect a more independent vigorous man than his descendant of any later age. CHAPTER II. THE IRON AGE. There are few modern historians who do not speak of the sixteenth century as perhaps the most splendid period in the annals of our country. The Glorious Reformation, as Henry VIII.'s strange ecclesiastical revolution is still called, the discovery of America, the grim rule of Philip and Mary, when Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were burnt at the stake, the long reign of good Queen Bess, with its defeat of the famous Spanish Armada, the wide extension of English piracy and commerce, and the formation of the noble literature which reached its highest embodiment in Shakspeare — such are the chief events of an epoch which has so often been spoken of as one of true greatness, dignity, and glory. It was indeed a stirring time. A new world was being discovered in art and in science in Europe, as well as in actual existence on the other side of the Atlantic. Statesmen and thinkers, churchmen and courtiers, soldiers and navigators, poets and dramatists sweep past us in mag- nificent array. All is full of life and colour. Few groups - stand out in bolder relief on the records of the past than the great men who gathered around the throne of the Tudors. Never before had so great an impulse been given to human enterprise and human imagination ; never in England have nobler minds been ready to embrace great opportunities. From the point of view of the dominant class of our day 24 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. nothing can be finer than the survey ; the rise of the middle class * is surrounded with a splendour which conceals from most observers the growth of misery among the people. Yet from the early years of the sixteenth century until the accession of James I., the lot of the great mass of working Englishmen, which was so flourishing and so wholesome, became miserable in the extreme, and the labourers of England, in the widest sense of the word, were reduced to destitution — plunged from the age of gold into the age of iron. The increase of wealth consequent upon the opening of foreign markets and the improvement in home agricultm'e, did but create a needy and desperate class in town and country alike. The rate of wages for various kinds of labour was stationary during the whole of the fifteenth and the earlier portion of the sixteenth century, nor does it appear that the purchasing power of such wages was greatly reduced. Nevertheless, with the close of the Wars of the Roses a change took place which led to much of the general distress and vagabondage that followed after. I have already spoken of the great increase in the numbers of the personal retainers of the barons during the troubled times which ended with the accession of Henr}^ VII. The number of personal retainers ready to fight under his banner or to follow him to court became, indeed, the measure of a noble's importance and power, and the bailiff or steward, who then managed the estates in the same way as the agent of an absentee's Irish property, had to strain all his lord's re- * The French word bourgeoisie has now been adopted in almost all languages as most clearly conveying the meaning I wish to express. The reign of the bourgeoisie includes the domination of town over country, the supremacy of the trading class, and the capitalist form of l)roduction as the main social forces. THE IRON AGE. 25 sources, and generally to run into debt into the bargain, in order to maintain the baron and these adherents of the house at the capital or in attendance on the King. Consequently when the struggle was over, even as early as the accession of Edward IV., the barons almost without exception found themselves in great poverty and debt. Their first and most obvious course was to reduce their expenditure by discharging their retainers. This they did, and these people, having for the most part no recognised position when thus cut adrift, fell back on the wasfe-earnincr class, or even formed bands of vagrants. Thus began the growth of the lack- land class as a class, and of the vagrants without house or home, which brought about such a serious state of affairs later on. But the impoverishment of the nobles and their greed for gain were the cause of still more grave events. Society is never stationary ; movement is going on even at times when, to all appearance, economical and social quiescence universally prevails. As in the lower, so in the higher forms of animal life and combination — these flourish, those decay. Thus when all seemed well for our people, the cruel process of uprooting them from the soil had begun which has continued up to the present date. Henry VII. came to the throne in 1485, marrying Eliza- beth of York in the following year. In the year 1489 a statute was enacted for the purpose of putting a stop to enclosures. The great gain which the common lands and open pastures were to the people has been seen, although the lord of the manor and richer commoners frequently took advantage of their superior wealth and strength to put on more cattle or other animals than they were entitled to. But the anxiety of the nobles to get in funds again led them to seize upon these lands and enclose them for their 26 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. own use and benefit, to the exclusion and injury of the people of the district. This was then something new, and the drawbacks of the enrichment of the few at the cost of the property of the many were clear, not only as afifecting the people themselves, but the monarch and the realm at large. Bacon, in his Henry YII,, thus describes the statute and its objects : — " Enclosures at that time began to be more frequent, whereby arable land which could not be manured without people and families was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a few herdsmen ; and the tenancies for years, lives, and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people, and by consequence a decay of towns, churches, tithes, and the like. The king likewise knew full well, and in nowise forgot, that there ensued withal upon this a decay and diminution of subsidies and taxes ; for the more gentlemen ever the lower books of subsidies. In remedying of this inconvenience the king's wisdom was admirable, and the parliament's at that time. Enclosures they would not forbid, for that had been to forbid the improvement of the patrimony of the kingdom ; nor tillage they would not compel, for that was to strive with nature and utility ; but they took a course to take away depopu- lating enclosures and depopulating pasturage, and yet not by that name, or by any imperious express prohibition, but by consequence. The ordinance was, ' That all houses of husbandry that were used with twenty acres of ground and upwards should be maintained and kept up for corn ; together with a competent proportion of land to be used and occupied with them ; ' and in nowise to be severed from them, as by another statute made afterwards in his successor's time was more fully declared : this upon for- feiture to be taken, not by popular action, but by seizure of THE IRON AGE. 27 the land itself by the kings and lords of fee, as to half the profits till the houses and lands were restored. By this means the houses being kept up did of necessity enforce a dweller ; and the proportion of land being kept up, did of necessity enforce that dweller not to be a beggar or a cottager, but a man of some substance, that might keep hinds and servants, and set the plough on going." From this passage we see that not only were the commons being enclosed at this period, but that the yeo- manry and tenants were being gradually expropriated by various devices. Such men as these were, as Bacon goes on to observe, the very mainstay of the king's armies, and invaluable to the country. Turned out they were never- theless, in spite of this and other statutes, swelling the numbers of the vagrants, beggars, and wage-earners who had sprung from the discharged retainers. Other causes combined to help on this process of enclosures and pasture farming, as well as to swell the ranks of well-to-do land- owners and farmers on the one side in the country and those of the mere wanderers on the other. The rate of wages in Henry VII's. reign was still high, the improvements now being gradually introduced into agriculture increased the abundance and cheapness of corn. Consequently tillage was less profitable, especially to large landowners, some of whom were even then producing for profit, than it had been. Wool had begun to rise in price owing to the demand for the Flanders markets and the increased manufacture at home. Sheep need far fewer hands than arable farming, and there was gain both ways by j)as- ture farming : in the saving on wages and in the increased profit on wool. Thus not only were the small farmers them- selves deprived of their holdings, but the farm labourers found themselves without employment, the houses of these 28 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. unfortunates were therefore torn down, and they themselves were cut adrift from the means of earning a livelihood at the only trade they knew, their few acres of land around their cottages being added at once to the great pastures that were formed. Employment in the country was decreasing, whilst men anxious for work were increasing every year. Notwithstanding all attempts to stop this removal of the people from the land, the change went steadily on from this time forward. All authorities of the period combine to lament the mischief which was being wrought. The change which had taken place by the middle of the sixteenth century would be incredible, but that we have irrefragable testimony as to what had been already done. Latimer and Sir Thomas More, Harrison and Ascham are all of one mind in regard to the injury suffered by the people. In place of the well- to-do yeomen of the previous period there was an ever- growing population of needy folk. Husbandmen thrust out of their own or cozened into forced sales, houses swept away, towns and villages decaying.* Sheep flourished in * Massinger's Sir Giles Overreach, in " New "Way to Pay Old Debts." shows clearly how large properties were made : — " I'll buy some cottage near his manor ; Which done I'll make my men break ope his fences, Ride o'er his standing corn, and in the night Set fire to his barns or break his cattle's legs ; Then tresjaass draw on suits, and suits expenses, "Which I can spare, but will soon beggar him. When I have harried him thus two or three year?-, Though he sue in forma paupei-is, in spite Of all his thrift and care he'll "row behindhand. Then with the favour of my man at law, I wiU pretend some title : want will force him To put it to arbitrament ; then, if he sell For half the value, he shall have ready money And I possess his land." THE IRON AGE. 29 placid stupidity where but now thousands of men had lived iu ease and abundance and happiness. So serious had this become that in 1533, the 25 Henry VIII., an act was passed denouncing the accumulation of farms, declaring that this system had reduced " a marvellous multitude " of people to poverty. It further stated that ten to twenty thousand sheep could now be seen on a single farm, and the statute ordained that no man should keep more than two thousand sheep except upon his own land, or rent more than two farms. This is the act referred to by Bacon. Like others before and after, it had not the slightest effect : accumulation of land still went on. Well might a husband- man be made to exclaim, " Marry these enclosures do undo us all, for they make us to pay dearer for our land that we occupy, and causeth that we can have no land to put to tillage ; all is taken up for pasture either for sheep or for grazing of cattle ; insomuch that I have known of late a dozen ploughs within less compass than six miles about me laid down within these seven years, and where threescore persons or upwards had their livings, now one man with his cattle hath all. Those sheep is the cause of all our mischief, for they have driven husbandry out of the country, by which was increased before all kinds of victuals, and now altogether sheep, sheep, sheep." Production for the profit of the landowning or large farming class was taking the place of that production for immediate use which had hitherto been in vogue. If sheep bring in more money than men, away with the men. But all this was not done without produciug the gravest discontent. The risings which occurred between 153G and 1568 may be classed under two heads — those which arose from religious bitterness consequent upon the Reformation 30 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. and the suppression of monasteries ; and those which had their origin in the enclosures and expropriations already spoken of, together with ancient grievances — such as the lingering in some districts of the claims on bondsmen — which still remained unredressed. But such separation is more in theory than in practice, for in most cases all the discontents were combined. The Duke of Somerset in his letter to Sir Philip Hoby, sums up these movements very fairly from his point of view. Admitting that the causes of the disturbances are various and uncertain in the different camps of the insurgents, he adds (August 24, 1549, ten years after the suppression of the monasteries), " Some crieth, pluck down enclosures and parks. Some for their commons. Others pretendeth religion. A number would rule another while, and direct things as gentlemen have done." The main reason of all the troubles which came was beyond doubt the heavy pressure upon the mass of the people during the entire period of Tudor domination. Before considering these the last organised efforts of the English people to keep hold of their own land, it is necessary to deal briefly with the most wholesale and unjustifiable robbery that has ever been committed upon them. The lands of the Church were, at the accession of Henry VIII., of an extent not less than one-third of the kingdom. But the}^ were held in great part in trust for the people, whose absolute right to assistance when in sickness or poverty was never disputed. What useful and even noble functions the priests and monks, friars and nuns fulfilled in the middle age economy have been stated in the last chapter. Universities, schools, roads, reception houses, hos- pitals, poor-relief, all were maintained out of Church funds. Even the retainers who were dismissed after the Wars of THE IRON AGE. 31 the Roses were in great part kept from actual starvation by these conventual establishments and the parish priests. Not a word was heard against them in high quarters, barely a sputter of ridicule came up from the people against the Church, until Henry YIII. wanted to form an adulterous if not an incestuous marriage in the first place, and to get possession of this vast property in order to fill his purse and bribe his favourites in the second. Abuses no doubt there were, but the object which the king had in view was plunder, and when booty is in the wind it should go hard indeed but king and barons between them would make out every monastery in the realm to be a den of iniquity and every abbess the keeper of a hotbed of harlotry. As to the whole infamous plot from the beginning to the end, it is almost enough to say that the heroes of the business were Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, the victims More and Fisher. The manner in which our middle-class history has been written is evidenced by the strenuous attempts made to whitewash the pander and the rogue, and to belittle the philosopher and the patriot. But what we have to do with is the effect of the action of the Defender of the Faith upon the condition of the people. Of course when the seizure of the Church lands was determined upon, no thought was taken of the interests of the people in general, or of those of the tenants on the estates in particular; the monasteries, priories, and nun- neries were destroyed, the tombs of the most illustrious of old times defaced, and the buildings, or such portions oi them as were left, became merely quarries for building materials. Their inhabitants, the monks and nuns, priests and friars, were turned out on to the world to swell the ranks of the have-nots. More vagrants, more needy, more J- THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. miserable, were added to the lack-land population, and those might think themselves fortunate who, instead of lingering for years in starvation, were more rapidly disembowelled or tortured to death. Now, if all this had been done in order that the lands held by the Church should be resumed by the State for the use and benefit of the whole population, due pro- vision being made for the maintenance of the fifty thou- sand monks and nuns in the monasteries, and the persons dependent upon them, if the evils which had undoubtedly arisen had been corrected, even sharply and cruelly, nothing could have been urged economically to any purpose against this action, sad as its results must have been to those who were deprived. But, as it was, the property was taken from men who used it in great part for public advantage to be held by those who then and ever after have used it against the interests of the people. Admitting to the fullest extent — as who save Catholics would not admit ? — the need for shaking off the yoke of Rome, a far heavier yoke was substituted in its place. The last hold of the English people on their soil was torn off for the benefit of a clique of oppressors. Thus the poor who had ever obtained ready relief from the Church, the wayfarers who could always find food and shelter in the religious houses, the children of the people who repaired to the convent for guidance and teaching, were deprived at one fell swoop of alms, shelter, and schools. This great and powerful estate, which naturally sided with the people against the monarch and the aristocracy, now became a means of oppression in the hands of the landowners and the middle-class. Rack- renting and usury were henceforth sanctified instead of being denounced, and the Protestant Reformation became THE IRON AGE. 33 a direct cause of the increasing misery of the mass of Englishmen.'"*^ * The advantaj^es which the nation derived from their revenues being transferred to noblemen were still more problematical. The revenues of monastic bodies (whose institutions and modes of life obliged them to reside where the presence of a landlord is most wanted) were usually consumed within a large circle of tenants, and offered a ready vent to the commodities of neighbouring markets. Church lands in the hands of noblemen were still shackled with the mortmain (if I may use the expression) oy/aHuY?/ settlements; and their produce was generally consumed by absentees. The abbots were most indulgent landlords, and their tenants found to their cost that (after their fall) their rents were raised while they had not the same facility in disposing of the produce. The money was spent in the capital, and the farmers living at a distance were exposed to all the oppressions of the new masters or to the still greater rapacity of their stewards. — Eden, " State of the Poor," vol. i. p. 97. Eden, it may be observed, was a Tory, a churchman, and a disciple of Adam Smith. But on this point the reader may compare Lingard, a Catholic priest ; Hume, a free- thiuker ; and Cobbett ; Alison, another Tory, follows on the same side. Eden even goes so far as to assert that the interests of the landlord and the State always coincide ! Our modern huckster economists never cease to assert that the interests of the capitalist and the State always coincide. The people will, perhaps, make themselves heard by and bye. Latimer in his sermons ascribes the increase of the price of pi'ovisions to landlords raising their rents. He says, "To much cometh this monstrous and portentous dearth made by man, notwithstanding God doth send us plentifully the fruits of the earth mei-cifully contrary to our deserts, notwithstanding too much which these rich men have causeth such dearth that poor men (which live of their labour) cannot with the sweat of their face have a living, all kind of victual is so dear, pigs, geese, capons, chickens, eggs, &c. ; these things with other are so unreasonably enhanced." Again, he says, "My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pound by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for an hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able and did hnd the king a harness with himself and his horse, while he came to the place that he should receive the king's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the king's majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles a-piece, so that he brought C 54 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. The suppression of the monasteries and seizure of the Church lands consequently redoubled the mischiefs resulting from the enclosures and the growth of sheep-farming, and we are now in a position to understand the serious insur- rections which were due to this long list of robberies. The chief risings before the suppression of the monasteries were the Lincolnshire rising and Aske's rebellion, or the pil- grimage for grace to the commonwealth in 1536. After the suppression came the Devonshire rising, and Kett's rebellion in Norfolk, which both took place in the same year, 1549, and were followed twenty years later by the insurrection of the Northern Earls, The Devonshire insurrection was put down b}' Lord Russell, who employed foreign troops for the purpose of shooting, torturing, and disembowelling his own countrymen.* The house of Russell, it is needless to add, had very good reasons for thus treat- ing those whom they had robbed and whose lands — the lands of the people of England — their descendants hold to this day. Patriotism in the mouths of our English aristo- cracy nearly always means the best chance of fleecing the mass of their fellow-countrymen. The men of Devonshire, there is no doubt, were partly ac- tuated by religious feeling. But Kett's rising in Norfolk, inas- .miich as, according to the evidence of Kett himself and of Queen (then Lady) Mary, it was a purely civil rising to obtain tliem up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours. And some alms he gave to the poor, and all this did he of the same farm. Where he that now hath it, payeth sixteen pound by the year or more, and is not able to do anything for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor." — See Eden, vol. i. p. 100. * It i3 worthy of note, how at all periods the rulers of this country have relied upon foreign troops to crush freedom. Compare Cobbett. THE IRON AGE. 35 by force redress for social grievances, is the disturbance which most fully explains the general movement. The troubles began towards the year lo3G, and were fomented by men of means, some of whom were executed. Agitation went steadily on from that time forward, and in the year 1540 John Walker of Griston boldly counselled an appeal to arms, suofjestinof the removal of certain landowners as a beginning: "Let us kill them, yea, even their children in the cradles ; for it were a good thing if there were so many gentlemen in Norfolk as there be white bulls." A pro- clamation was issued by Edward VI. in April 1548 against the propagators of false rumours, and in June of the same year a proclamation against enclosures was issued, complaining that on tliis account " The force and puissance of the realm which was wont to be greatly feared of all foreign powers is very much decayed, the people wonder- fully abated, and those that remain grievously oppressed. The old story again in short. A commission was appointed for the Midland Counties, but did no. good. The insurrection in Norfolk began in June 1549, and Robert Kett, the leader of the people, was himself a man of substance, though a tcumer. The grievances against the nobility and gentry, of Avhicli they com- plained, were thus set forth in ))lain speech:* — " Compai'e our respective j)ositions : all power is in their hands, and they so use it as to make it unbearable ; while nothing is left for us but the extreme of misery. As for them, they abound in luxuries ; they are surrounded with all sorts of plenty ; they, when they are jaded with pleasure, are roused from their state of weariness and languor by the violence of their avarice, and the fierce- ♦ Kett's " Complaints," Eussell, p. 98. 36 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. ness of their lusts : while as for us, what is our condition ? We are half dead with the severity of our labours ; we have in deed and in truth to eat our bread in the sweat of our brow, and our whole lives are spent in nothing else than undergoing all the evils of hunger, cold, and thirst. And who will say that this is not a wretched and unworthy state of things ? and most wretched and unworthy it un- doubtedly is ; but, bad as it may be, we could have endured it if the gentry, besotted with pleasure and puffed up with pride, were not continually casting in our teeth, * What pitiful creatures these poor wretches are.' This then is what we find fault with, and it is such treatment as this that we complain of Urged on by their proud and haughty spirit, and either too idle or too careless to mind what they are doing, they actually make sport of our sufferings — a circumstance which, as indeed it ought to do, inflicts such pain upon our minds, and brings such disgrace upon our good name, that nothing worse can be mentioned, nothing more unfair can be endured. Again, take the con- ditions on which we may hold land: they are evidently of a shameful character, and more fit for slaves than for free men. We may hold it, it is true ; but on what terms ? just as it suits the will and pleasure of some great man. But let an unhappy wretch offend one of these high and mighty folks, and what becomes of him then ? why, he is stripped, deprived, and turned out of everything. How long are we to submit to this ? How long is so overbearing a spirit to remain unpunished ? Moreover, they have now arrived at such a height of cruelty and covetousness, that not content with seizing everything, and getting all they • can by fraud or force to spend it on pleasure and effeminate indulgences, they have sucked the very blood out of our THE IRON AGE. 37 veins, and the marrow out of our bones. The commons which were left by our forefathers for the relief of ourselves and our families are taken from us ; the lands which within the remembrance of our fathers were open are now surrounded with hedges and ditches, and the pastures are enclosed so that no one can go upon them. The birds of the air, the fish of the sea and all the fruits so unsparingly brought forth by the earth, they look upon as their own, and consequently use them as such. Nature, with all her abundance and variety, is unable to satisfy them, and so they think of new sources of enjoyment, such as sauces and perfumes, surrounding themselves with delicious scents, mixing sweet with sweet, and seeking on all sides whatever may gratify their desires and lusts. But what is the con- dition of the poor all this time ? What is our food ? Herbs and roots, and thankful may we be if, by incessant labour, we can get even these. Thankful ! that we may, for they are vexed Ave can live and breathe without their leave ; yes, they are vexed we can breathe the common air, or look up to the glorious sky without first asking and obtaining their permission. We cannot any longer endure injuries so great and so cruel ; nor can we, without being moved by it, behold the insolence of the nobility and gentry: we will sooner betake ourselves to arms, and mix heaven and eartli with confusion, than submit to such atrocities. Since nature has made the same provision for us as for them, and has given us also a soul and a body, we should like to know whether this is all that we are to ex- pect at her hands. Look at them and look at us: have we not all the same form ? are we not all born in the same way ? Why then should their mode of life, why should their lot, be so vastly ditferent from ours ? We sec plainly 88327 38 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. that matters are come to an extremity, and extremities we are determined to try. We will throw down hedges, fill up ditches, lay open the commons, and level to the ground whatever enclosures they have put up, no less shamefully than meanly and unfeelingly. We will not submit to be oppressed with burthens in spite of ourselves, nor undergo such disgrace as we should be labouring under, if by grow- ing old in suffering these evils, we left to our posterity the State full of wretchedness and misery, and in a much worse condition than we had found it. We will therefore leave no stone unturned to obtain our rights, nor will we give over until things are settled as we wish them to be. What we want is liberty, and the power in common with our so- called superiors of enjoying the gifts of nature: it is true our wish may not be gratified, but this one thing is certain, our attempt to obtain it will end only with our lives." Kett, who was adored by the common folk, was very successful at first ; but being encountered by the Earl of Warwick with trained foreign* troops, was defeated at Norwich on August 28th, 1549. Kett and his brother were taken and hanged after a mock trial ; many of his followers being slain. One great result of his rising was to put Queen Mary on the throne ; another and more impor- tant result was that his partial success, and the fear of similar disturbances after the rebellion of the Northern Earls, aided the establishment of the Poor Law many years later. As regards immediate advantage to the poor, this * The use of hired foreign troops to put down risings of free English- men at home] was coj^ied at a later period by the use of the like mercenaries to put down the rising of free Englishmen in America. Patriotic aristoci'ats employed foreign soldiers to reduce their country- men to subjection : patriotic capitalists use cheap foreign labour to the like end. THE IRON AGE. 39 rising, as well as that of the Northern Earls twenty years after, was of no avail. The condition of the people went constantly from bad to worse. For other causes were working at the same time to im- poverish the labouring population. Henry VIII. debased the currency to a fearful extent, the effect of which was to prevent wages from keeping pace with the rise in prices of food and clothing, especially as competition for employment was now becoming very severe among the needy. The dis- covery of America and the conquests of Mexico and Peru, with the great influx of the precious metals into Europe which followed thereupon, told in the .same direction. Wages increased but little, certainly not more than fifty per cent, on the average from the middle to the end of the sixteenth Century ; the price of necessaries of life during the same period, say 1550 to 1600, considerably more than doubled. 'Ihis alone is enough to prove what destitution must have prevailed. The husbandman's wages became, as Kett says, hardly sufficient for subsistence, and the only people who profited were the large landowners who produced for sale ; the large farmers with long leases, who must have accumu- lated capital rapidly, seeing that rent and wages both in reality fell, whilst the corn, wool, and hides which they exchanged all rose in price ; and the commercial and employ- ing classes in the towns which were now rising to im- portance, Now also Avere brought to bear those fearful statutes against vagrants, and laws for the regulation of the hours and wages of labour, which, together with the laws prevent- ing combination, slowly forced all workers alike into the grip of the class owning the means of production. The artisans of the great cities suffered at this time almost as 40 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. much as their unskilled brethren in the country districts. The history of the laws against vagrants is worth following in this connection as showing conclusively how the landless class were regarded as criminals. Sturdy beggars were not unknown in England even in the most flourishing times, and it was against such specimens of the Edie Ochiltree class that the preamble to the Statute of Labourers was probably directed, which, although speaking about " many seeing the necessity of masters and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages," yet mentions that others are " rather willing to beg in idleness, than by labour to get a living." Such beggars from choice there will probably be in every state of society until thorough physical and mental education has been carried on systematically for several generations. But in 1494, after the dismissal of the retainers, vagrancy became to thousands not a matter of choice, but of necessity. The first of the series of statutes is that passed in 1494, 11 Henry VII. cap. 2. Parliament seemed to imagine that the vagrants were still men and women who could get work if they would, and wandered from their respective parishes out of sheer perversity. Accordingly the stocks and whip- ping at the cart's tail were the portion of all able-bodied vagrants who, after being punished in this way, were to be sent back to their birthplace to set to work " as true men ought to do." In 1530, the aged and worn-out mendicants were given licences to beg, but in regard to sturdy beggars whipping and imprisonment were still the penalties, and they were then obliged to take an oath to go back to their late place of residence, or to their birthplace, and set to work. This, when it was precisely the want of work that forced them to roam. In 1535 it was, in fact, found out that THE IRON AGE. 41 the " valiant vagabonds " thus sent back, duly fustigated, could still ofet no work to do. Parliament therefore increased the punishment, and ordained that in case of a first back- sliding, tlie offender should have another sound flogging and half his ear cut off ; the second relapse he was to be treated as a felon, and executed out of hand. But in 1547, eight years after the final suppression of the monasteries, whilst the enclosures were going on at a fine rate, and two years before Kett's rising, as the beggars still rapidly increased notwithstanding the " godly acts and statutes " just men- tioned, another was passed of the most atrocious character, showing, as Thornton remarks, how genuine the distress of the poorer classes must have been, which even such infamous measures could not induce them to conceal. By this Act of 15 47 it was laid down as law that every able-bodied loiterer should be branded with a hot iron and handed over as a slave to the person who denounced him. Thus if an employer wanted a slave to work for him, he had only to drag the first vagrant he met before a magistrate, and his need was supplied. The slave might be kept on bread and water, and refused meat or good nourishment of any kind ; he might be compelled to undertake the most filthy tasks by means of flogging or other torture. If he ran away for a fortnight he was condemned to perpetual slavery, and to be branded with the letter S on his cheek and on his forehead ; if he ran away again, death as a felon was his doom. His master could sell him, bequeath him, or let him like a horse or a mule. Death is the punishment of slaves who " contrive aught against their masters." When one of the vagabonds is caught on the roads by the public officers he is to be branded with the letter V on his chest, and brought back to his birthplace, where he must work in chains 42 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. on the public works. If a vagrant gives a false birthplace be becomes a slave of the municijjality, and is branded again. His children become the apprentices of the first- comer who wants them — the lads to the age of twenty-four, the girls up to the age of twenty. If these poor creatures take to flight they then become — see the inducement to render the apprenticeship an unbearable tyranny — slaves to their masters, who may then put them in irons, whip them to their heart's content, put rings round their necks, and the like. In 1572, under the reign of "good Queen Bess," similar infamies were enacted. Unlicensed beggars over fourteen years of age were to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear if no one would take them into service for two years. If they begged again, all over eighteen years of age were to be executed unless some one was ready to employ them for two years. Caught a third time, death was the penalty without relief. There were other statutes of like import. In the reign of James I. all who beg are declared vagabonds. Justices of the peace, to wit landowners, manu- facturers, parsons, and so forth, who have the right of adjudicating on criminal matters, are authorised at their ordinary sittings to have such vagrants publicly whipped, and to give them six months of prison on a first relapse, two years on the second. During the whole period of im- prisonment they may be had out and flogged as often as the magistrates think advisable. Flog, brand, brand, flog, enslave, starve, enchain, execute — such is the pretty treat- ment thought beneficial by the rising capitalist class, such their idea of free-trade in labour. These statutes of James I. were only repealed in 1714, and one portion ordains that if a poor devil branded with the letter R, in token of having THE IRON AGE. 43 been caught once, is found begging again, he is hanged without benefit of clergy. Nor, let it be supposed that these frightful laws were allowed to remixin a dead letter. Hollinshed states that seventy-two thousand vagrants were despatched in the reign of Henry VIII. alone. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth sturdy beggars were hanged in batches strung together in long rows like flitches of bacon. Not a year passed but several hundreds were hauled up to the gibbets. Needless to add that enslavement and torture went on merrily the while : only the residuum whom the capitalist-farmers, and manufacturers could not make immediate use of were thus disposed of. But let us hear once again from the noble Sir Thomas More how these j)oor creatures came to be thus helpless. After mentioning the injury done to the common- wealth by noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and by certain Abbots who " leave no ground for tillage, they enclose all into pastures, they throw down houses," he proceeds, " Therefore that one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousands acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else by coveyn and fraud, or by violent oppression, they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wor- ried that they be compelled to sell all : by one means, therefore, or by other, either by hook or by crook, they must needs depart away poor, silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and their whole household, small in substance, and much in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All 44 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale, yet being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to sell it for a thing of naught. And when they have wandered about till that be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly, pardy, be hanged, or else go about a begging. And yet then, also, they be cast into prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not ; whom no man will set a work though they never so willingly proffer themselves thereto. For one shep- herd or herdman is enough to eat up that ground with cattle to the occupying whereof about husbandry many hands were requisite. And this is also the cause why victuals be now in many places dearer. Yea, besides this, the price of wool is so risen that poor folks which were wont to work it, and make cloth thereof, be now able to buy none at all. And by this means very many be forced to forsake work, and to give themselves to idleness." * Here the whole process is once more described. Driven from their homes, deprived of the means of production, hunted down as vagabonds, executed as felons, free English- men were at the mercy of anyone who chanced to want " cheap labour." Even the most fortunate could but sell their force of labour to those who owned the means of pro- duction at a miserable wage. Different, indeed, was the lot of these labourers from that of their fathers in the previous century. Then the wage-earner was really independent. His position was secured by economical and social arrange- ments alike in country and in town. Now the capitalist farmer was becoming absolute master in the country, whilst in the towns competition and labour-laws slowly established the domination of the mercantile man and the manufacturer. * More's " Utojoia," lutroduction. THE IRON AGE. 45 These historical and economical causes and results are closely intertwined. The very events which turned the cultivators and peasants into mere wage-earners, and their means of living and of working into elements for capital to use, furnished the capitalist also with a home market. Each peasant or yeoman family produced, and themselves for the most part consumed, the food and raw material, the fruits of their own labour. Now these products became saleable commodities, which were sold in large quantities by the farmers to the manufacturers. On the other hand, as Sir Thomas More shows, the common stuffs formerly worked up by every peasant's family were now gradually replaced by manufactured goods which were sold in the country, and the number of isolated workers producing on their own account were concentrated under the command of capital. Domestic industry was by degrees crushed down, and a home market created for the manufacturers' goods. Here is only the early stage of this great change to full capitalist production which has developed into the total separation of classes in our own time. But the social revolution from the happy days of the fifteenth century was sufficiently complete by the reign of James I. Thenceforward the absorption of wealth by one class at the expense of another went on unchecked. From the middle of the sixteenth century, however, various small attempts had been made, simultaneously with the blood-thirsty legislation summarised above, to provide some sort of relief for those who, on returning to their own birth place, were still unemployed. In 1535, as a pendant to the atrocious statute enacted in that year, the parish authorities were ordered to collect voluntary contributions to employ the " valiant vagabonds " who had been driven back from their wanderings, as well as to relieve the sick and 45 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. worn-out. lu 15 62 these voluntary contributions were found quite insufficient to supplement the flogging, branding, and mutilation which formed the principal recipes in the shape of poor relief, and the parishes (5 Elizabeth cap. 3) were given power to force persons to pay who refused to give anything of their own accord. Ten years later, beggars and vagrants being still as numerous as ever, the parish authorities were empowered to tax all the inhabitants for the relief of the poor. There were other similar acts in addition to these ; for paupers and vagrants literally swarmed the country, and even in London the Queen herself actually gave authority for martial law in the metropolis and neighbouring counties, to have such persons executed on the gallows and gibbet. In short, to such a pass had matters come, that in IGOl, the 43d year of Elizabeth's reign — the actual wealth of the country having increased greatly, though owing to the new system of production " over-population " had come about — it was absolutely necessary to make some general and solid provision for the poor if they were not to be exterminated outright. Accordingly the famous Poor Law of 1601 was enacted, which laid down regular ordinances for the relief of the poor, the maintenance of the indigent being charged upon the land, and payment of poor-rates enforced by summary process. Thus was pauperism established by law, the people having been robbed of their lands, common lands and church lands alike, and driven like beasts into the high- ways. Thenceforward till now we have had the able-bodied paupers at one end of the social scale balanced by the able- bodied sybarites who produce them at the other. The pro- vision for the poor was insufficient and wretched, the laws all favoured actual slavery of the needy to the rich, the THE IRON AGE. 47 accumulation of wealth was fostered in every way ; still if was at last recognised that a man or a woman born in Eng- land had a right to live, however miserably, in the land of their birth at the expense of those who bad taken unto themselves their entire means of support. The agricultural labourer had become a serf without land, the legislature had succeeded in enforcing laws which had been in operation witli regard to wages for two hundred years, and pauperism became the workers' last refuge. It is the rule to say that the position of the'^craftsmen was much better than that of the agricultural labourer, inasmuch as by the limitation of apprentices, competition was considerably restricted. This is to an extent true in certain trades, but even here the possibility of having a lad for bare food up to the age of twenty-four induced many employers to infringe the rules. Nor must it be forgotten that combinations among workmen — as we shall see more clearly in a later chapter — were expressly forbidden by law until far on into the present century. Moreover, the crafts- men became more and more capitalists, and confined the brotherhood of the craft-guild to those who could afford to pay very handsomely for the privilege.* The restrictions also became more numerous, and constant endeavours were made to turn the handicrafts into the monopoly of a few families controlling journeymen who worked for competition wages, and could never become masters. Masters and wardens under Henry VII. were admonished by law on this head, and in 1530, when an attempt was made to raise the fees for apprentices to 40s., the law cut them down to 2s. Cd. on becoming an apprentice, and 3s. 4d. on becoming a member of the guild. Other enactments were passed, but * Brentauo, p. cxlix. 48 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. to so little avail that the prices of apprenticeship rose to a preposterous height, and the difficulties offered to them on the road to becoming masters were almost insufferable. These abuses gave rise to grave discontents, and Lord Bacon speaks of some of these craft-guilds as "fraternities in evil." Already, too, the possession of considerable capital had begun to be necessary in the higher branches of manufacture, which of itself not only made it harder for the apprentices to become masters, but gave rise to a distinct antagonism between master and workman in place of the fellowship and good feeling supposed to prevail in the craft-guilds when they were founded. This chano^e of the craft-sruilds into associa- tions of capitalists " exercised of course also an influence on their government ; and it appears altogether natural when, in the sixteenth ceutury, we see that government entirely transferred into the hands of the richer guild members." * Instead of the old sovereign meeting of all the associates there now appeared a Court of Assistants, who governed the guild. Only the richer masters were admitted to the highest division, the Livery. The journeyman soon ceased to have any right of election. In short, the domination of the employers became paramount to the guilds, and no attempt to restore the old democratic character of the charters met with full success. To the apprentices aud journeymen aU this seemed by no means natural however. In Germany, France, and Flanders, the workers were organised at this time far better than in England, and certainly the Flemish cities were in the sixteenth century considerably ahead of our own in all that goes to make up the organisation and wealth of a manufacturing and trading community. The increase of competition from the country and from abroad * Brentano, clu THE IRON AGE. 45 could not be met here iu such shape as to be effectual, though downright riots against foreigners certainl}'- occurred. On the whole, therefore, it is clear that the artisans of the cities, especially in those branches of traile which were already coatrolled by masters with considerable capital, suffered heavily from the fall in wages due to the causes mentioned, and the rise in tlie price of the necessaries of life due to the debasement of the coinage and the influx of precious metals from America. Manufacture in the shape of simple co-operation, where, that is to say, several workmen worked together in one work- shop at various tasks, was now increasing. This business belonged to, and was controlled by the employer. Kett's insurrection had much thrown back Norwich as a manu- facturing centre, but London and other towns took up the work, and the real impetus given to our home manufactures during the sixteenth century is hard to estimate. Circum- stances could scarcely have been more favourable to the development of a class of caj)italists, and the instant they obtained influence, they of course laughed " freedom of contract" to scorn, and used the legislature to lengthen hours of work and cut down wasres for their benefit. Just as the sixteenth century, and especially the period covered by the reigns of Henry VIII. to Elizabeth created a miser- able body of agricultural labourers in the country, so the destruction of the democratic character of the craft-guilds, and the growth of capital couplcly than Englishmen of the same class. Notwithstanding the tram- mels of their creed, they have often displayed a political independence, and a power of combination for their own cause, be it what it might, which the English might well envy. But the economical and social effect of this Irish immigration upon the English workers showed no good side at all to our people. These immigi^ants were, in fact, almost destitute of civilisation : rough, drunken, careless about the future, they brought their manners and customs'from the wilds of the west into the densely peopled quarters of our English cities, which already, in all conscience, were uncivilised and brutal enough. Their voyage across from Ireland cost them a few pence ou the deck of a steamer. Once over, they settled in the most miserable rookeries. Wantinof few clothes, living almost entirely upon potatoes, requiring no furniture in their rooms, these people had discovered the very smallest amount of necessaries which a human being THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT. 175 could exist upon iu our climate, and were consequently specially useful to capitalists. All their filthy customs, which were comparatively harmless in Ireland, were perni- cious to the last degree in our great cities. The Irish quarter became proverbial for filth, drunkenness, and general unwholesomeness. Most of the occupants of cellars were Irish, and in these dungeons they bred children at an incredible rate, their very poverty here, as in other cases, being, within certain limits, favourable to generation. All the dust, offal, and other refuse, they threw out into the streets anyhow, preparing the way for pestilence and fevers, which swept off others as well as themselves ; besides, the pig is to the Irishman what his horse is to the Arab, and "the gentleman who pays the rint" had free quarters in the Irishman's cellar in Stockport, Manchester, or Glasgow, just as he had his privileged corner in the ramshackle cabin of Kerry or Donegal. Ragged clothes, a heap of straw, an empty case for a table, a pig, and just enough wages to buy potatoes and whisky, such was the standard of life of these new competitors with our English working class. The utter carelessness of existence, the very fire and life of the people which made them good soldiers, their vivacity and cleverness which gave them an opening in other parts of the world, here did but serve to deepen their own degradation, and to intensify the misery around them. How could the English labourers, still accustomed to some comfort, and anxious to maintain, some of them, a better lot for their class, how could they compete with such labourers as these iu the trades where brute force alone was required ? As a factory hand, it is true, the Irishman or Irishwoman was as yet of little use. But in simple unskilled labour he was quite the match for the Englishman, and was 176 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. •willing to work at a much lower wage, proportional, of course, to his lower standard of life. Down, therefore, came wages in all these unskilled trades to very nearl}^ the level of the Irish necessities, and more miserable became the lot of the whole labouring class. For the relentless law of wage-competition came into play at once, that in the long run, wages tend towards, or even tend to range below, the amount necessary for sub- sistence for a man and his family ; and the Irish being able and willing to live upon less wages than the English for equal expenditure of labour-force, wages in those branches of industry necessarily fell lower and lower. Thus the action of the dominant class in Ireland itself, by confiscat- ing the land from the people, by raising rents immediately improvements were made, by encouraging the competition for land, brought about a hideous poverty among the people of that island, which led to an inordinate increase of population after the introduction of the potato. There- upon these miserable Irish peasants, barely able to keep body and soul together, though quantities of food in every shape were exported from Ireland to England for the benefit of the rackrenters and luxurious classes, these poor cottiers, hopeless at home, flocked ovey to our English cities as their descendants have swarmed across the Atlantic, reducing, by their forced competition, the already low rate of wages obtained by the English labourer. When we find that between Englishmen and Irishmen there is no love lost, it is well, at any rate, to attribute the hostility to the right causes ; and to my mind it is clear that race-hatred, religious antipathy, objection to Celtic clannishness, each by itself, or all together, have had no such influence in producing ill- feeling as the knowledge forced upon English workers that THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT. 177 Irishmen by accepting lower wages from the class which owns the means of production and enslaves its brother men, necessarily give the capitalists an advantage, and rivet the chain yet tighter on the neck of the wage-earning class. The conditions of life noted above were consequently made, to an increasing extent, permanent for all. Between the middle-class, who lived in " respectable " fashion, between the capitalists, who prided themselves on their philanthropy to all human beings save the women, children, and men, out of whom they ground the wealth wherewith to endow churches and chapels, and to sub- scribe to the missionary societies for the heathen — between these most honourable persons and the wage-slave class there was a great gulf fixed. The capitalists knew and know more of the people of other countries than of the workers who live in poverty at their doors. All the misery, drunkenness, debauchery, prostitution, and degradation around them were, to their minds, the result of natural causes, or due to the nature of the people themselves. That bad surroundings and hopeless conditions of life, that low wages and unwholesome food, crowded lodg- ings and no pleasure, must necessarily beget a miserable and degraded population, who owe their misery and moral pollution to the very class which fancies itself so superior — these are ideas which the middle-class, the capitalists, the landowners, as a possessing class, never thought of, even in a slight degree, until hard facts were forced upon them by the efforts of a few self-sacrificing men and the organised risings of the operatives. We have seen that from 175 to 1795, although the power of production """ was daily growing at a rate pre- * In 1816, a population of 2500 persons working ten horn's a day M 178 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. viously unknown, and out of all proportion to the increase of the population, large as it was, that in this time wages had fallen most seriously in proportion to the price of the necessaries of life ; and that a furious competition had com- menced among the mass of the wage-earners for miserable wages. Between 1795 and 1810, prices were still higher than before, and though wages rose for the skilled artisans of the cities, they did not rise for the unskilled or for the agricultural labourers in the same proportion. At first the absorption of the agricultural labourers into the towns and the wide extension of agriculture, owincf to the great demand for corn, benefited this last class of workers somewhat. The lessened production in the countries which were the seat of war, the demand for grain to feed the armies in Spain, the high profits made by the farmers as a class — for once more, as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prices of country produce rose much more rapidly than either rent or wages of labour — all these causes gave a great impetus to agriculture during the time that the war lasted. Farmers in many cases " made money by hatfuls," as more than one of them confessed. The enormous cost of the American and French wars, chiefly met by borrowing, necessarily increased the power of the capitalist and money- lending class, and hid the drain of wealth which the con- could produce more cotton stuffs than a million persons engaged in the same business fifty years before, say 400 times as much. Almost the same in other textile manufactures and iron. Says Thornton, "Although some important sections of tlie people became impoverished, the aggregate wealth of the nation was fast and steadily increasing," p. 221. I take special pleasure in quoting this Malthusian writer, who evidently thought there could be no " over-population," save that of the pro- ducers of wealth ; nay, who contends that the way to produce most wealth is to curtail the numbers of the very people who produce it— the laboui-ers, namely ! THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT. 179 duct of tlie war occasioned. The funded debt in 17 5 G was £72,289,073; in 1813 it was £000,000,000. In 1815 the debt was £800,000,000. Suddenly all this inordinate expenditure came to an end, the army was disbanded, the market for agricultural produce was restricted. All nations had to return to a more sober, peaceful existence. Strange to say, England, the victor in the struggle, the countr}'- which had dictated the conditions of peace, which had obtained the spoils of France, Spain, and Holland, which was now absolutely supreme at sea and mistress of the markets and the colonial empire, we may say of the whole world, wealthy England suffered far more in the transition than France, who had been impoverished, conquered, and despoiled of her possessions. Yet that this should have been so seems at first sight wholly irreconcilable with the main facts. When the war ended, the extraordinary efforts and taxation ceased too. In 1814, the public expenditure reached the enormous total of £100,832,200; in 1815 it was £92,000,000 ; in 1810, £05,000,000; in 1817, the amount was reduced to £55,000,000. Here, surely, was a great opportunity for a new bound in our commercial prosperity, as English machinery, manufactures, and agriculture were all in a position to take the fullest advantage of the peaceful com- petition which had followed the war.* But so far from this being the case, the peace brought with it untold misery and depression. Foreign commerce languished, the exports fell from £51,000,000 in 1815 to £35,000,000 in 1817. Meanwhile the people were in the most miserable case, especially in the agricultural districts, and the popula- * Leon Faucher, 195; Porter's "Progress of the Nation," 515. I So THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. tion of England and Wales increased from 10,000,000 in 1811 to 12,000,000 in 1821. During the war the landowners and the farmers were gaining in increased rent and profit a greater share of the general production than they could possibly be entitled to under the ordinary conditions of a society such as ours had now become. Men had not taken account of the extra- ordinary changes which had been going on around them for the past thirty or forty years. The excitement of the war, the glorious victories, had to a great extent shut out any general understanding of the progress of events in England itself. Men for soldiers, and materials for their support, had been in urgent demand for full a quarter of a century. " Barns and farmyards were full, and warehouses were weighed down with all manner of productions, and prices fell much below the cost at which the articles could be produced. Farm servants were dismissed, and no employ- ment could be found for them, the manufacturers being in the same situation as the farmers, and obliged to discharge their hands by hundreds, and in many cases to discharge their hands by thousands. The distress among all work- people was so great that the upper and middle classes became alarmed, foreseeing that the support of the hundreds of thousands unemployed, if this state of things continued, must fall upon them."* Crime increased in an enormous ratio in all parts of the country, whilst outbreaks were common. The very superabundance of wealth, combined with the increased employment of machinery and the dis- charge of the soldiers and sailors was the cause of all the mischief. Machines were really continually diminishing he demand for labour, and the fall in prices drove em- * E. Owen, Autobiography, p, 121. THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT. i8i ployers to carry their economies to the highest pitch. At this very time it was calculated that in the cotton industry alone, machine power had been introduced equal to the labour of 80,000,000 of men, and much of this machinery was not worked by men at all, but by women and children. Thus it was that at the very time when the peace threw more men into the labour market, when prices fell to an unremunerative level, and consequently neither the farmers nor the manufacturers could produce at a profit — which, in our existing system, is their only reason for producing at all — when machinery was playing an ever-growing part in our production, when in short there were plenty of goods awaiting consumers on one side, and many unemployed anxious to consume on the other, no one saw how to bring the two together. Those who were most responsible for the war actually aggravated the position for the mass of the people. Landowners who had talked so loudly of patriotism shuffled off the income-tax very speedily, and introduced protective duties to help the farmers as they pretended, but really to maintain their rents. The landed aristocracy voted itself a civil list out of the food of the people ; the capitalists squeezed fortunes out of the very lives of women and children. For the people this meant hopeless pauperism, and the agricultural labourers suffered now, perhaps, more than ever. Up to this period (181G to 1820) there had still been a larire number of agricultural labourers who lived at the same table with the farmers and shared their lot in good or bad seasons. But from this date tliey too were discharged on to the highways, and the agricultural districts became the seat of permanent pauperism, as the manufacturing districts were of a floating pauperism. From one end of the king- 1 82 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. dora to the other the people suffered horribly. Upon them fell all the burdens of the war ; they had to pa}?- for the glory abroad, and to bear also the curse of the growth of the factory system at home. This went on for years, and is not at an end now. No wonder that " Captain Saving " started incendiary fires throughout the country, or that secret conspiracy flourished in the towns. Six or seven shillinn-s a week were the wages of the agricultural labourers who enabled the farmers to make a profit as times improved, and secured the landlords their enhanced rents out of their ill-paid labour. On the top of all this misery came the agitation for, and eventually the enactment of, the new Poor Law, " It was at this time when the sufferings of the unemployed were extreme that the political economists conspired against the just, natural, and legal rights of those who could not find employment, and who had no other means of living except from national support, stealing, or prostitution. They did not take into account that the wealth of the nation bad increased in a much greater ratio than the poor's-rate. The political economists by reasoning from a false principle, knowing little of human nature, and less of the powers of society when rightly directed, had hardened their hearts ao-ainst the natural feelings of humanity, and were determined, aided by their disciples (the Whigs), to starve the poor from the land. And their measures did starve millions in Great Britain and Ireland without attaining economy for the nation or diminishing the number of the poor. The plans which they induced the nation to adopt starved the weakest and best of the poor, drove others to theft and murder, and the poor females to prostitution. And these measures were adopted while there was abund- THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT. 183 ance of uncultivated land and an enormous accumulation of wealth squandered in useless wars, which a little common sense could easily have avoided, and in as ignorant foreign speculations in mines, loans, and all manner of wild schemes which promised, however fallaciously, a high interest for capital. The rapid accumulation of wealth, from the rapid increase of mechanical and chemical power, created capitalists who were among the most ignorant and injurious of the population. The wealth created by the industry of the people, now made abject slaves to these new artificial powers, accumulated in the hands of what are called the monied class, who created none of it^ and who misused all they had acquired." Leaving the history of the new Poor Law aside for the moment it is apparent how this plan of cutting off the relief of the poor at the moment when they stood most in need of help threw the producers still more hopelessly into the hands of the capitalist class. In 1831 the population of England and Wales was just 14,000,000, or an increase of 2,000,000 since 1821. The earnings of the employed were at this time insufficient to give them the commonest comforts of life. Although the harvests of 1835 and 1836 were peculiarly abundant and produced a temporary relief, thus justifying the new Poor Law of 1834 in the eyes of its promoters, this was followed by an amount of distress among the wage-earn- ing population in 1840, 1841, and 1842, which was almost as bad as in the years immediately succeeding the war. The distress affected manufacturing and agricultural popu- lation alike, and the whole of the working classes were In a miserable condition. Wages fell alike actually and re- latively, the numbers of the unemployed increased, and from 1837 onwards matters showed no improvement. i84 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Yet as it has been shown that in all manufactures a comparatively small number of people could, with new appliances, produce far more than a great number a generation or two before, so in agriculture the return was much gi-eater, though a smaller proportion of the popula- tion worked at this branch of industry. The decrease in the proportion of the whole population engaged in agricul- ture in Great Britain between 1811 and 1841 was most marked. Whereas the proportion employed in agriculture in 1801 was 35 per cent., in 1841 it was but 25 per cent. Between 1801 and 1831, though the addition to the number of families altogether was at the rate of 34 per cent, the addition to the agricultural class was but 7| per cent. In some counties, such as Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Bedford, the change in the proportions was quite surprising. Yet in the course of forty years the production of wheat alone had increased in amount equal to the con- sumption of 5,500,000 persons, at the rate of 8 bushels a year per head. Thus then, a comparatively trifling addition to the number of producers had enormously increased the amount of available food in the shape of wheat, and similar pro- gress had been made in every department of agriculture. The country was indeed, notwithstanding the increase of population, to a very small extent dependent upon foreign sources for grain, owing to the great improvements in manuring and all agricultural processes since the begin- ning of the century. But the agricultural labourers bene- fited by these improved systems and the development of agriculture, as little as the factory operatives did by the new inventions and the steam power. On the contrary, * Porter's " Procrress of the Nation." O THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT. 185 the depression among them was terrible, in every county, and the introduction of the " gang-system " brouglit with it into the country similar break-up of family life, gross immorality, excessive overwork for women and children, and general deterioration. The landlords and farmers were almost as bad as the factory-owners and cotton- capitalists. The Report on women and children employed in Agriculture of the year 1843, discloses a truly abominable state of things in the country districts, under the very eyes and noses of our " patriotic " nobles and squires. Children of five and six years old were employed at the most ex- hausting labour, after walking several miles to their work. The gang-master, who was (and is) literally a slave-driver in the old sense, simply gets his gang together and under- takes a contract. All he has to do is to finish the work as quickly as possible, and to pay his gang as little as possible. He is not in the least responsible for the morals, conduct, or lodgment of his gang. The result to the girls, as set forth in this report, is disgusting.* At least seventy per cent, of the young girls were habitually unchaste. They slept together in hovels, men and women, under circum- stances where cleanliness and decency were alike impossible. This gang-system was not of course universal, but it had spread widely at the date of this report, whilst the state of the agi'icultural labourers was worse than before. Thus, in agriculture as in manufacture, an immense increase of pro- duction with fewer hands was accompanied by an increase of misery and degradation. But it was the same in every direction. Let any portion of English production and trade between ISOl and 1848 * Compare Report of 18G7 given later on Child Euiploynieut. 'S6 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. be examined, and it will be found that the increase in the total national wealth was enormous beyond all precedent. Even in years of apparent depression and crisis, the ex- pansion really went on steadily for the benefit of the well- to-do classes. Exports and imports are not a test of prosperity ; but public buildings, inhabited houses above a certain rental, the vast development of large factories, the value of real and personal property, the improved communi- cations — in every branch the change was marvellous. The amounts insured against fire rose from £230,000,000 for the whole United Kingdom in 1801 to over £800,000,000 in 1848. The increased rental of real property in England and Wales alone in the thirty years, 1815 to 1845, actually amounted to £40,000,000 a year. The total cost of domestic servants — a non-producing class, administering only to the luxuries of others — was little less than £50,000,000 a year. The tonnage of vessels trading to British ports had swollen six-fold since the beginning of the century. That very improvement in means of communication also which had been one of the most marked features of the period, was carried out, not in the interest or under the organised direction of the nation at large, but in a strange hap-hazard competitive fashion, which greatly injured their usefulness and inflamed the cost. Even a thorough middle- class writer, so early as 1845, could not but see the mischiefs of this anarchical policy. Railways were essential to the in- dustrial progress of the country. The development of the home trade, the vast importations of raw material, the un- precedented out-put of our coal and iron mines, following upon the revolution in the methods of manufacture already described, led up to this improvement by a necessary THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT. 187 progression. George Stephenson was like Hargreaves or Crompton, bat the happy individual who gave the last practical push to ideas which would have been turned to account almost at the same time if he had never existed. But by this time the laissez-faire system had gained full control in matters of public business. The State, which should only mean the power of the people organised and used for the good and welfare of the whole community, had come to be regarded as hostile to progress and its influence as sure to be exerted to the general detriment. As a result, sums were spent on the construction of the railway system of England altogether out of proportion to the real necessary cost, legal expenses were piled up to a height which was nothing short of monstrous, landowners were granted vast sums for rights of way, which they had no title what- ever to hold against the English people, competing lines were sanctioned which involved the worst kind of waste of labour. More permanently injurious to the country than all, a monopoly was gradiuilly created, arising even out of the nature of this competition, which put the traffic of the country as well as its production under the control of another branch of the great system of capitalism. It was indeed a most short-sighted arrangement this, which the landlord's Parliament began prior to 1832, and the middle-class Parliament has sanctioned ever since. In any case, by the year 1848 the main railway system, as we now know it, was laid down and constructed, though not fully used, and from that time to this the great railway interest in the House of Commons has been the repi-esentation of a monopoly which takes its share out of the produce of the country, as a permanent return payable by the labour of the livinassing under their eyes, and make themselves the expression of it. So long as they search for science and only erect systems, so long as they are at the opening of the struggle, they see in misery only misery without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overturn the ancient society. From this moment science, produced by the historical movement and associating itself with it in full know- ledge of its basis, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolution- ary.— Karl Marx, " Misere de la Philosophic," pp. 113-119. 1847. CHAPTER VI. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. The history of the external affairs of England from the accession of George III. in 17G0 until the revolt of the American Colonies in 1775, was little more than the con- tinuance of the long career of victory which had gained her the first jDlace as a commercial and colonial power. Clive's great victory at Plassey was followed by a succession of almost equally noteworthy achievements, which put India at the mercy of this country, whilst in the West Wolfe's triumph over Montcalm practically decided that the English, not the French, should be masters of North America ; though the magnificent colony of Louisiana still remained to recall to the minds of Frenchmen Law's splendid but visionary scheme of colonial Empire. That the Dutch and afterwards Hanoverian connection, led us into wasting resources on the continent of Europe, which could have been far more profitably expended at home, cannot be doubted : but the Seven Years' War was an engagement which not even Lord Chatham's genius could clear us from, and the growth of Prussian power was regarded as a counter- poise to that of our "natural enemy." With the revolt of the American Colonies a new era began, wliich threatened England with a complete over- throw. It is remarkable that separation should have been forced upon the colonists at a time when they were proudest N 194 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. of their connection with the mother country, and so soon after the conquest of Canada had relieved them from fear of French aggression. " The English plantations being ours should be us ; and the more, considering the many advan- tages they bring us, whilst the dividing of countries in interest may be a preface to their future troubles. English- men under the Eno-lish Government are, and should be accounted, in the interest of England in any part of the world." So wrote John Bellers at the end of the seven- teenth century. And the famous Benjamin Franklin almost echoed his words nearly a centur}^ later, when he looked forward to the day that a great English-speaking empire should extend under the British flag from the Arctic region to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific slope. But the hopes and visions of the Quaker economist and the American philosopher, were alike to be blighted by the incredible folly of a German king and tlie silly perverseness of a bigoted aristocracy.* Foreign mer- cenaries and murderous Indian savages were vainly employed to put down the justifiable insurrection of free Englishmen, who wished nothing better than to remain in connection with their old home, so long as they were not taxed without representation, or prevented from making the best use of their adopted country. With the miserable record of that great struggle, which was opposed by the noblest names in Great Britain, we have nothing to do, save in so far as its result influenced the course of opinion at home. Already', prior to 1775, the writings of Wilkes, Tooke, * I am quite content to bear the reproach of Chauvinism in regard to what I say about the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples. It is necessary to begin any combination, and the combination of modern prolectarians will, I am convinced, begin with the Celto-Teutonic peoples. Their constructive instincts will help in this direction. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE 195 Junius, Paine, and others, had produced a great effect upon the English public. The king was very roughly handled in such writings ; the dominant aristocracy was painted in its true colours ; and the current religion was ridiculed. At this time, also, the works of the French Encyclopedists, as well as of Voltaire and Rousseau, became known on this side of the channel, and their " subversive " doctrines made way among the people. But the success of the American revolt and the publication of the noble Declaration of Independ- ence, had, at the moment, a still greater apparent effect on men's minds. An organised agitation was set on foot in order to obtain those elementary political rights which the Americans had so boldly declared to be the heritage of all free-born men ; and the period of failure and depression in our foreign policy which followed the loss of the American colonies, helped on the general discontent, then rapidly in- creasing by reason of the economical pressure recorded in the last chapter. London at this period, and for many years after, was by no means the orderly, law-abiding city which we of the present generation have come to consider it. The mob had a shrewd idea that the interests of the few did not exactly fall in with the interests of the many, and that the law, which might very well suit the aristocracy then — as it has been fashioned to suit the middle-class now — only repre- sented the determination of those who lived upon labour to maintain their domination over the classes who lived by labour. This turbulence was apparent in the great riot of the Spitalfields weavers, in 17G5, when the working classes of that part of London banded themselves together as they had done thirty years before against cheap Irish labour, which was brought into competition with them, as well as 196 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. to put down certain other arrangements, to which they objected. The great no-Popery Kiot of Lord George Gordon in 1780, however, exhibited the power of the London mob in a still more serious shape. Beginning with a religious manifestation, it soon took a different turn ; for it was scarcely mere religious bigots who set to work to throw open the gaol doors, to burn down the houses of the aristocracy, and who maintained themselves as practical masters of the metropolis for six whole days. The fact un- questionably is, that at this period, there was the gravest dis- satisfaction with the entire system of government throughout the country, and the agitation might well have been prepara- tory to a thorough political, if not a thorough social change. Even the earlier stages of the French Revolution were watched with satisfaction by the people and by the popular leaders. Reform had come to be considered absolutelj^ essential. Englishmen had apparently had enough of seeing their affairs controlled entirely by the landlord class, who not only held the House of Lords in their hands but practically owned the House of Commons, carefully using able men, such as Burke, the Pitts, Canning, Sheridan, to serve their turn. Tory and Whig, those two aristocratic factions whose sole agreement was that they alone should enjoy the plunder of the people, and manage the whole machine of government for their own behoof, held between them absolute sway. It was, as Paine said, a game of " ride and tie," which entirely disregarded the true interests of the nation that bore the whole burden. Statesmen who busied themselves almost solely with foreign affairs or the invention of new taxes to pay for enlarged armaments neither under- stood nor cared for the great development of industrial power taking place before their eyes. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 197 True, the neglect at first was not quite so cruel, nor were the penalties on poverty quite so bitter then as now. The old landed gentry had some little consideration for the people around them, and some sense, however slight, of their direct responsibility for the poor. Yet had it not been for the great foreign war which followed upon the French Revolution, and lasted for a quarter of a century, it seemed at least probable that reforms which we have not even now attained would have been secured by the people at the end of tlie last century. The younger Pitt himself was at one time strongly in favour of changes which would have greatly modified the constitution in the democratic direction, and though the aristocracy feared greatly for their predominance, some, at least, were prepared to make a virtue of necessity, and to yield to the rising tide of public opinion. Manhood suffrage, and annual parliaments, are still looked upon by the mass of the middle, and by too many even of the working class, as little short of revolutionary proposals in politics. Never- theless, the Duke of Richmond brought a Bill into the House of Lords embodying these changes a hundred years ago, and notwithstanding the strong repressive measures which were thought reasonable after the so-called reign of terror on the other side of the Channel, the cobbler. Hardy, who formed an association to call together a National Conven- tion in opposition to Parliament, was acquitted by a middle class jury. Of the men who were at this time, and for many years after, most active in agitating for political reforms, Major Cartwright, the brother of I)r Cartwright the inventor, was chief, and it is surprising to read the names and standing of the men who were prepared to work with this upright single-hearted enthusiast in favour of a thorough rcorganisa- 198 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. of the representation.* Cartwright himself, a well-to-do squire, was almost as noble and unselfish a character as Robert Owen, but whereas the latter saw that political reforms were useless unless the mass of the people were imbued with true ideas of social improvement, Cart- wright held that freedom, being the right of every man, the suffrage could not be in justice withheld, and would of itself work social reforms. Throuochout his career, which has been too much overlooked by modern historians, this reformer was greatly opposed to the use of brute force by the people, nor had he any mercy upon the Lincolnshire farm-labourers, who, like the Spitalfield weavers, rose in 1791 against the competition of Irish cheap labour. His economical views were in fact far behind his political ideas. In spite of his exertions and those of his friends, notwith- standing the vigorous writing and speaking that went on in the face of great danger from spies and informers, it is clear to us now that neither the final declaration of Independence by our American Colonies nor the great revolutionary out- break of 1789 produced the practical permanent influence which might have been looked for when the stir they made at the moment is considered. In 1789 the working classes of England, far more turbulent, and as some might say independent than they are now, though they could make riots and shout aloud for the champions of freedom were in no case to organise a social and political revolution. They had every chance and they failed. There was not as yet the same direct personal oppression as in France to compel insurrection, nor did London hold the same position with * A statue to Cartwright stands in Burton Crescent, Loudon — a thorough middle-class locality. The inscription records that he stood up for the political reforms with which his name is identified. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 199 reference to England that Paris held in regard to France. Still more important was the fact that the English middle class had secured a great portion of their objects long before.'" The nominal control of the House of Commons was in their hands, their economical position was assured, freedom of person and sanctity of property were the law of the land. The land itself had been seized too long to be the cause of further serious agitation ; corvde and seigneurial rights were unknown. Consequently, at the first serious bloodshed in France, the middle-class here was scared, and the workers had not the power without their assistance to carry on an agitation which could produce any favourable result for them. There was an undoubted reaction which the aristocracy took every advantage of Burke prostituted his great abilities to the defence of despotism and turned his back upon the opinions of his youth to write rhapsodies in praise of feudal " chivalry." Men like Priestley and Cartwriglit, who refused to denounce the uprising of a people against their oppressors, because of the ou traces which followed, have found less favour with our middle class essayists and biographers than the venal whig who could forget all the wrongs of the French people in his anxiety to earn fees and pensions by whitewashing Marie Antoinette. The former suffered for his opinions by having his house burnt over his head at Birmingham, and the latter was arrested as a revolutionary " suspect" by the English police. Long before the war with France ended, however, the * " What made tlie revolution of 1789 possible in France was tlie fact that a coiniuon sentiment animated tlie lower classes and the middle class." So writes M. Leon Faucher, but he omits to add that 1789 w;ia but a bourgeois revolution in the long run. Babanif's consjiiracy was of course, a genuine labour movement, the records of wJiich are not so well kuciwii by the workers as they ought to be. 200 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. pressure of capital and the wealth of the middle class had become so great tliat any hope of combination between them and the workers for a thorough social movement had passed away for the time. Though the agitation went on, therefore, during the whole period, and often seemed to attain fresh vigour from some accidental circumstance such as Sir Francis Burdett's trial, the prospect of success was m reality becom- ing more remote. It is depressing to all who imagine that the history of human improvement can be other than that of slow, and at times almost imperceptible progress, until the moment has come for a new departure, to study the works of the journalists, economists, and thinkers who championed the cause of the people at the end of the last century and the beginning of this. When Cobbett's vehement weekl}^ attacks were circulating at the rate of tens of thousands of copies, wdien Spence was able to obtain a considerable following for his scheme of land nationalisa- tion, and when a little later Owen could get assistance and encouragement in his socialist projects from leading members of the aristocracy and princes of the blood, few would have believed that the advance had only begun, or that the very completeness of the victory of the class to which these men belonged would throw still farther back the political and social enfranchisement of the mass of the people. Force or fear of force is unfortunately the only reasoning which can appeal to a dominant estate or will ever induce them to surrender any portion of their property or privileges. And the force was becoming more and more at the disposal of the capitalist class, at the same time that the energies of the workers were being to a large extent turned from political agitation to the attempted amelioration of their social condition against this very bourgeoisie. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 201 It may, indeed, be doubted whether mere extension of the suffrage or reform of the constitution ever really changed the position of the workers of a country relatively to other classes until change in the methods of production and consequent spread of new ideas had so modified the conditions of existence that a revolution or an evolution would have been brought about in any case. Political forms are but the outcome of social relations below. It is true, of course, that given favourable opportunities, the enthusiasm of an individual and still more the organised enthusiasm of a group of individuals, may increase the rate of progress by preparing men's minds to take the earliest opportunity of giving shape to ideas which have Ions: been floating hither and thither on the surface of the popular intelligence. But this is only to say in turn that stirring times necessarily produce active men, that the successful are remembered whilst those who have nobly led the way to the border of the promised land are forgotten. In politics as in industry, the long weary work of generations of thinkers who see the truth, but fail to influence in practice the current of their own day, the never-ceasing toil of self-sacrificing enthusiasts who strive in vain to rouse their countrymen to a sense of their own degradation only to be swept aside by the first eddy of passion or prejudice, such men show the path which at last leads to the emancipation of the people. So it certainly was in England in the years between the French Revolution and the Reform Bill of 1832, or indeed until this very day. The antagonism of classes, the struggle first between the feudal aristocracy and the mercantile or bourgeois class, and then between the bourgeois class and the labourers has not developed in all countries, even in Europe, at the same time or with the same rapidity. As 202 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. in the peasant's risings in England of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries in the hopeless upheavals of the Jacquerie in France, and the later insurrections of the populace in the cities of the Netherlands we can discern the first revolts of the labourers, of the producers, whether in agriculture or manufacture, against those who profit by their toil ; so the long struggle between the mercantile class and their efforts at enfranchisement began ages before their position was recognised as a class with rights to assert and privileges to protect. Upon such antagonism all pro- gress hitherto has depended. But in England the vast expansion of machine industry gave a different turn to the whole struggle from that which might perhaps have been looked for. The workers of the cities found straight in front of them something to attack which was more tangible and at the same time more clearly the cause of their depressed condition than the need of any political reform or even of any economical reform which related to the land. In France and partly in Germany, the effect of the French revolution and the ideas which its leaders spread far and wide through Europe was to bring about or rather to hasten on the settlement of the people upon the land in the form of peasant proprietors. England had passed through this economical phase as early as the fifteenth century. Our free sturdy yeomen of old time answer closely enough to the French peasant proprietors and the small German farmers of the present century, Witliout insisting too much upon such an analogy or upon the undoubted fact that the tendency in England has for the past three centuries been towards farming upon a larger and larger scale with ever-increasing capital, it is neverthe- less apparent that the social antagonism between men who MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 203 were being driven to starvation by machinery on the one hand and the owners of that machinery on the other was certain to be very different alike in aim and in means from that which could be seen where the main object was to hold the soil on which the labourers already lived, without excessive dues or seigneurial oppression. There are no accidents in history. It was no chance that occasioned the failure of the agitation for parliamentary reform between the date of the accession of George III. and the end of the French war ; though the facts that the rise in wages by no moans kept pace with the rise in the price of grain, and that the country was engaged in a most doubtful struggle, gave the agitators an exceptional oppor- tunity ; it was no chance that led to the miserable compro- mise of 1832 which placed England completely in the hands of the very class against which the workers should have most striven ; it was again no cliance that brought about the downfall of the great Chartist movement, and has given over the whole English proletariat to apathy and indiffer- ence from 1848 to the present time. Owen, almost alone of the middle-class men of the earlier time, saw clearly what was going on, and appreciated the relentless hostility whicli must in the nature of the case arise sooner or later between the class whicli owns the means of production and the machinery and the class whose members must compete against one anotlier for subsistence-wages. But he hoped that the struggle might be peacefully bridged over, certainly he never anticipated that the very ideas of the capitalists themselves would be accepted as indisputable truths by the workmen from political economists who systematised the views of the class opposed to them. Yet so it has proved. 204 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. The first effect of the new methods, however, was to bring about a series of attacks by the workmen upon the machinery itself. They very soon discovered that when a machine is introduced into any trade, which a few boys and girls can manage just as well as trained men, the immediate result is to send " hands," to the number of hundreds and often thousands, out on to the streets to bid against one another for unskilled employment. What was to be done ? Was it likely that workmen almost destitute of education as they then were, should understand that their enemy was not the machine, but the manner in which it was employed 1 They only saw as the poor German weavers had seen (if we are to believe the record of an Italian traveller) three centuries before that the machine injured them, and the first step was to destroy it. The long fight of the labourers against machinery, first by actual violence, and then by combination against the class which owns it, has lasted until our own time, and is by no means at an end yet. Of the earlier attacks upon machinery in this country it is unnecessary to speak at length, but the opposition on the part of the populace to its introduction led to some serious outbreaks. In 1758, for instance, Everet's first machine for dressing wool by machinery moved by water power, was reduced to ashes. But the principal riots were occasioned by organised bodies who under the name of Luddites destroyed machinery wholesale in Nottingham and other large towns, alleging, what was perfectly true, that these machines were one great cause of their miserable condition. The risings reached such a pitch in the years 1810 and 1811 that the Government became alarmed and resorted to all sorts of infamous devices to foment premature insurrections, in order to be able to crusb MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 205 these the more safely. Spies were sent through the country with direct orders to lay traps for all radicals, and too often succeeded in drawing heedless men into treasonable practices for which they were hanged.* From the conclusion of the war onwards, matters grew worse and worse owing to the fearful condition of the people. When the corn laws were brought in in the year 1815, the populace of London rose in open revolt against the measure, and meetings were held throughout the king- dom in favour of complete revolution.! The movement had in fact become both social and political, and the use of such agents as the spy Oliver, the famous Green Bag Inquiry of Lord Sidmouth, and other nefarious means at length gave the Government the desired opportunity of suspending the Habeas Corpus Act in 1817. But an impetus was given to agitation by this reactionary policy of the Government itself. Many of the middle-class could scarcely fail to see that these systematic attacks upon the whole basis of free- dom and such shameful behaviour as that of the cavalry and yeomanry when they rode upon the unarmed meeting at Petersfield, Manchester, since called the massacre of Peterloo (in 1819) would soon lead to an infringement of their own liberties. Consequently they too began to side for the time with the populace. From 1815 to 1832, and indeed until 1842, so long that is as the middle-class and the working class made common cause even partially, Radicalism in its genuine sense of opposition to all class * It is the fashion to say that English Governments never employ spies or agents provocateurs. When there is the slightest advantage to be gained by it either in Ireland or England, no Government is more ready to resort to the most nefarious devices than our own. t Before this law wheat could be imported, when the ])rice of home- grown grain rose to 68s. a (quarter j after the limit was raised to 80s. ! 2o5 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. domination and a thorough organisation of the collective voting power of the people, made headway. Never was the promulgation of revolutionary opinions more actively carried on in England than during this period. Now too all the work which had before been done by Cobbett, Bentham, Cartwright, Burdett, began to be felt. The educa- tion of the people went on apace. Carlile, Carpenter, Thomp- son, Hunt, Lovett, Bronterre O'Brien, now came to the front in the systematic agitation which went on ; .and so monstrous was the exisiting system of representation that every out- break could be pointed to by men even of good position as the natural result of political injustice. Yet it is too true that there seemed little spontaneity in these movements when they came, that there was not that general acceptance of revolutionary ideas among the people as a whole, which must precede a full assertion of the rights of the labouring class. Such risings as occurred can be largely traced to the action of circumstances external to the people them- selves. Thus the troubles which commenced in 1815, and which led to the arrest or flight of so many earnest reformers in 1817, were due to a great extent to general depression and want among the people, aggravated partly by the introduction of the corn laws. The continuous acritation which followed until 1819, was the result of the inconceivable folly of the Government in forcing on im- necessary measures of repression, and eventually the impulse which drove the aristocracy into granting the Reform Bill of 1832, came at least in part from the July Revolution in Paris. But whether the growing disturbance was one of ideas forcing their way up from within, or due to extraneous causes, which influenced the people from without, the fact MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 207 remains, tliat throughout these years the populace were slowly learning to assert their rights to public meetings aiul due representation,"^' and that publications found a ready sale among the people, which contained views in reference to relations of the labourers to the landlords and capitalists far in advance of anything which appears in the most popu- lar journals of to-day. The French Revolution, that middle- class bug-bear which every boy has been steadily educated to look upon as a horror of horrors, even until now, was held up as an example of what a people could achieve under leaders who were ready to carry out their principles in active political life. The middle-class itself was unceasingly denounced in some quarters as more really hostile to the people than the landlords themselves. And yet all this preparation only Ijrought about the compromise of 1832 ; which though it did away with rotten boroughs, and slightly crippled the power of the aristocrats, handed over the mass of the people to a still meaner domination than before. All the work of the advanced school had apparently been thrown away ; manhood suffrage, payment of members, equal electoral districts, the ballot, were no more within hail than nationalisation of the land, or Owen's scheme of organisation of labour. Lord John Kussell once said that it took forty years in England to carry a reform which was generally admitted to be necessary : this is a revolutionary rate of progress com- pared with our usual pace. A hundred years we are told has * No one who reads the history of tlie time can doubt that the men like Frost, Vincent, Stephens, and, above all, Bronterre O'Brien, wlio were persecuted and oppressed by our Tories and Whigs, secured us a free ]n-ess and right of public meeting. It was "treason" in those days to strive fur such manifest rights of free men. It would be " treason " to-morrow to attempt to interfere with the " sacred rights" of property. 2o8 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. not sufficed to bring even manhood suffrage within the region of " practical politics." But after the great Reform Bill of 1882, which was to have wrought such marvels for the people, affairs grew worse, depression was, if possible, more severely felt, the New Poor Law shut down a safety valve, and in 1884-35 the organised Chartist movement befan which, though it reached its culminating point, as some consider, in 1842 — the year of most excitement and open riot — was certainly alive and ready to take ad- vantage of any good opportunity six years later. The Chartist political programme was little more than a repro- duction of the old demands of the earlier years of the century, or of those formulated still sooner by Cartvvright and the Duke of Richmond. But most of the leaders had social objects in view as well, which the political reforms would afford only the machinery peaceably to carry out. They were, in any case, a noble body of men, leaders and followers alike. Unlike continental revolutionists, they founded their claims upon the history of their country, and clamoured for the restoration of rights which their fathers had been deprived of. Their agitation was conducted in such a manner as to recall the old struggles of the people in the centuries gone by. Nevertheless, it is the fact that, for want of organisation, for want of sufficient confidence in one another, every one of their armed risings was put down by a handful of soldiers or police, with great loss to the insurgents, and next to none to the guardians of order ; and their entire political work ended in less of practical gain at the time than was the result the outbreak of a single Parisian faubouro-. It was no want of courage that caused them to fail, nor were numbers lacking to support them ; but the deficiency of MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 209 any complete social plan, the absence of sound social ideas of reconstruction — in short, the now manifest truth that the development of the resisting power of the working- class had not kept pace with the growth of the power of the middle and upper class, together with certain external causes, brought the entire movement to a standstill. But the Chartists were the first real working-class party that had come to the front in this country for many genera- tions. It is not out of place, therefore, to record here the "five points " which were long regarded as the gospel of democracy — (1) Manhood suffrage; (2) Vote by ballot; (8) Annual Parliaments ; (4) Removal of all jDroperty qualifications, and payment of members ; (5) Equal electoral districts. These five points were accepted as the basis of a petition to the House of Commons, at Birmingham, on August 6, 1838, and actually received, in a few months, 1,280,000 signa- tures, the proposals having been confirmed at more than 500 large public meetings. The assembly of delegates, under the name of the National Convention, in London, in April 1830, was an imposing democratic parliament, which might, perhaps, have led to some real step in advance, had its proceedings been conducted with coolness, determination, and sagacity. Unfortunately, the Chartist leaders over- estimated their own strengtli, and passed resolutions at their meetings which only provoked, without frightening, the dominant classes. Motions to the effect that the House of Commons did not represent the people, and that every man should possess a musket to defend himself, ill accorded with support given to the reactionary party in Parliament, in the hope that organised democracy miglit gain by disorder and tumult.* * You cauuot, said oue uf the leaders, found a Republic without O 2TO THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. The Chartists, at the suggestion of Feargus O'Connor, left London, where they found, owing to these proceedings, less support than they had looked for from the people, and went off into the provinces to organise abortive insurrection. In Wales, in Birmingham, in Newcastle-under-Ljnae, in Bristol, Glasgow, Nottingham, and Manchester, as well as in London itself, risings took place. The commercial depression and consequent misery of the people hel23ed to swell the numbers of those who met to attack the existing authority. In the serious affrays which followed, most bloodshed took place in Wales, and in the neighbourhood of Manchester. It was as well, said many, to die by the sword as by star- vation. Attacks upon the property of the middle-class were counselled by the leaders. At Birmingham this advice was taken to the letter ; for ten days the town was in the hands of the people, and the middle-class in fear of sack and pillage. In the end, the police having been beaten, and many houses sacked and burnt, the military Avere called in and " order " was restored among the starv- ing people at the cost of many lives. The most serious of these disturbances took place between 1839 and 1842, and so menacing was the attitude of the people that, to the most experienced observers from other coun- tries, and even to Englishmen themselves, this country seemed on the eve of a revolutionary outbreak exceeding in fury and in its ultimate aims any which history records.* A French writer of this period says, in 184 2, that there had been per- manent revolt in Great Britain for seven whole years. This Republicans. This, W. J. Linton and others discovered, and tried to remedy. But a middle-class Republic may easily be worse than a monarchy for the mass of the people. "Witness France to-day (1883). *The records of Chartist agitation are to be found in the Northern Star, and other advanced journals. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 21 1 . is in some sense an exaggeration, but matters were certainly in a very different and far more troublous condition in our great industrial centres during these long years of oppression for the workers than our middle-class chroniclers have ever set forth. The Chartists, in the north of England at any rate, combined social with political demands ; they meant, if they gained the upper hand, to put the people on a very different plane in regard to all which goes to make the health and comfort of civilised men from that in which they then moved. Chartism, said Stephens, to an enor- mous gathering on Kersall Moor, is no mere political ques- tion, it is a knife and fork question : the Charter for us means good lodging, good eating and drinking, good wages^ and short hours of labour. Henry Vincent, Ernest Jones, Feargus O'Connor, Frost, held at times little different language. After the collapse of the " physical force men," in 1842 attempts were made to combine the reformers again in favour of peaceful methods, Owen's schemes of home colonisation, socialism, and co-operation gaining ground at the same time.* The Government still continued the system of spying and employment of agents provocateurs, which had found favour at the beginning of the century. Many arrests took place, Bronterre O'Brien was imprisoned for eighteen mouths for words he never uttered, Ernest Jones was likewise put in gaol, and his health injured by confine- ment. Such men as these, and those who fell in the * The two jiai'ties among the Chartists, those who were for peaceful methods, aud those wlio were for physical force, were both i)artly right aud partly wrong. The " physical force " men had not tlie force to carry their programme, and might, therefore, well have preached peace till they had ; the peaceable men could never hope to carry wholesale measures by vote, and, therefore, might as well have set to work to orjranise their force. 212 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. fighting were the martyrs of the English proletariat, and whenever again the workers of our country combine in earnest to free their class from capitalist thraldom, let them not be unmindful of those who, in less happy days, struggled and suffered to save the poor who should come after from oppression and wrong. The Chartist movement came to an end on the 10th April 1848, when a public meeting was held on Kennington Common. London was filled with troops by the Duke of Wellington, who was careful to keep them out of sight ; and special constables were sworn in by the thousand among the middle-classes, who were seriously afraid that the wage-slaves had at last awakened to a sense of their power. Nor can it be fairly contended that resort to force was not meant. Taught by their failure six years before, the Chartists had tampered with the loyalty of several regiments in the country districts, if not in London. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the leaders were daunted at the preparations made by the Government, and Chartism disappeared as an active force in English politics. That it was at last a distinct protest against capitalist rule cannot be disputed by anyone who studies the litera- ture which was distributed, or the speeches made at the meetino-s. The republican sentiments, besides, which found full and free expression at this time among the Chartists, were not very palatable to the trading class, who saw that the denunciations of the Guelphs were coupled with clamours for the repudiation of the National Debt, and proposals for alterations in banking and ex- change, which could not but interfere with the profitable monopolies enjoyed by themselves. In any event, the Chartist at^itation died dov/n just at the moment when all MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 213 Europe was astir as it had not been since the shock of 1789 ; and England, where the antagonism between labour and capital was even then more marked than elsewhere, passed through the last period of international excitement with less disturbance than any other country. It must not be supposed, however, that, whilst the agita- tion had beeen going on, the working-classes had desisted from those rough-and-ready attacks on machinery which had created so much alarm at an earlier period, or had abandoned the secret combinations into which they were forced prior to 1824-. The truth, on the contrary, is that the two movements kept pace with one another. In town and country alike, isolated outrages were frequent ; but these, of course, were to very little purpose.* Far more important was the growth of definite working-class com- binations for economical objects. In 1824, the repeal of the law which absolutely prevented free association gave the Trade Unions an opportunity of carrying out openly, and on a large scale, the operations which they had previously con- ducted secretly on a small one. Trades Unions were then extended to every branch of industry, with the unconcealed intention of protecting the workers against the tyranny of the masters. This was a very different business from the iso- lated assaults upon specially obnoxious masters hitherto in vogue. The objects of the Trades Unions are now well understood, and they have forced from the middle-class — thanks to the repeal of the law against combination, in 1824 : a concession which would hardly have been gained from the House of Commons after 1832 — reforms which * "Captain Swing" had again a fine time of it in the agricultural dis- tricts. Incendiary fires were of constant occurrence. The thing became of serious national import. No wonder, for the condition of the agri- cultural labourers was nothing short of infamous to England. 214 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. could never have been obtained but by such general com- binations. The Trades Unionists themselves frequently threw in their lot with the Chartists, and in Manchester and its neighbourhood in particular the whole movement was quite as much directed against the manufacturers as against the injustice of existing parliamentary representation. Those who imagine that the working classes of this country gained such freedom as they have secured without resort to force should carefully study the history of this entire period from the end of the great war onwards. It was force, and the fear of force which really enabled the workers to get any measures whatever passed for their benefit. Nor is it to be disguised that the Trade Unions enforced combination and maintained the rule of each for all among themselves by fierce terrorism, not only at the outset, but for years afterwards. The recent outrages in Ireland upon traitors to the Land League were paralleled in every particular by the vengeance wrought upon " knob- sticks " and others, who betrayed their fellows in the class war which was being waged. Women were maltreated as well as men, and discipline was maintained in the industrial array by fear of death or mutilation. In regard to raising wages, the strikes and collective action have not, in the long run, produced as much effect as Trade Unionists imagine, and of course it is always said when this point is uro-ed that the first object of these associations is to maintain their members when in sickness, &c. But by o-iving an organised siq^port to the Ten Hours Bill and other Factory and Mine Legislation, they conferi'ed an enormous benefit upon the people at large. Though an aristocracy of labour early developed itself as a caste among the workers, it had no such injurious influence as it has MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 215 now, when points such as these were to be striven for, and at a time when the capitalists denounced and vilified instead of courting and feeing the Trade Union leaders. The steady pressure which the Trade Unions brought to bear from without, while so much serious trouble was going on, helped materially to secure the reforms in factory legisla- tion. Owen, the noble enthusiast, who first insisted upon the need -for labour laws, Sadler, who took the lead in the House of Commons, Oastler, who agitated so vigorously, not to say furiously, outside would probably all have failed but for the organised action of the Trade Unions in regard to restrictions upon women and children's labour. The bitter hatred which about the period of the commence- ment of the agitation for the Repeal of the Corn Laws manifested itself between the aristocracy and the capitalists, inducinof the former to throw their influence for the time on the side of the people must also be taken account of. Thus, the main causes of the enaction of effective Labour Laws in the interest of the working classes during the first half of the present century, apart from the shock to the whole moral sense of Euroj^e, which was given by the disclosures in the Reports of the Factory and j\Iines Commissions as to the awful slavery involved in capitalist tyranny, were — 1. The dangerous, though unsuccessful, risings of the people which caused even the most heedless to give some attention to the condition of the proletariat. 2. The earnest efforts of Owen, Sadler, Oastler, the Trade Unionists, and later of the present Lord Shaftesbury to effect a change. 3. The rivalry between the landlords and the capitalists which made the former anxious to have the opportunity of exposing and crippling their enemies. At first the dominion of capitalism came upon the 2i6 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIAUSM. country with such a rush that the " barriers imposed by nature and morals, age and sex, day and night," were, as we have already seen, completely swept away. The one idea of the capitalist class was to increase the hours of work and to employ " cheap " labour, because in this way, under the system of unrestrained competition, they could make unheard-of profits at the expense of those whom they employed. For thirty years, notwithstanding the horrors set out in the official reports, the workers could obtain no real protection. Though between 1802, when the first act was passed, and 1833 three laws were placed on the Statute Book to regulate labour, not a farthing was voted to give them effect. They were consequently useless to all intents and purposes. The Factory Act of 1833, which affected the cotton, wool, linen, and silk trades, was the first regulation which really benefited the Avorkers. By this law the day's work in factories was to begin at half-past five o'clock in the morning, and to come to an end at half-past eight o'clock in the evening, that is to say fifteen hours. Within these limits any young person between thirteen and eighteen years of age might work, provided that not more than twelve hours labour w^as exacted, and that an hour and a-half was allowed for meal times. The employment of children of less than nine years of age was, save in a few exceptional cases, prohibited : children between nine and thirteen might work eight hours a day — the average day's work of a horse if he is to be kept in health and strength. Night work was prohibited for all children between nine and eighteen. But the House of Commons did its utmost to meet the views of the capitalists. Relays of children were permitted to work so that " freedom of MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 217 contract " might be maintained for adults to work as long- as they pleased. It was at this time that Dr Farre said, " Legislation is equally necessary for the prevention of death in any form in which it can be prematurely inflicted, and certainly tliis must be viewed as a Tnost cruel mode of inflicting it." But that did not in the least prevent the capitalists from agitating vigorously for the repeal of the law of 1833. They did worse than this ; they contrived by all sorts of devices to evade the Act itself, all the while keeping up a bitter clamour against its provisions. Having fifteen hours in which they could do what they pleased, they shifted the " hands " about so that the factory inspectors found it almost impossible to check the breaches of the law. From 1838, however, the factory workers had combined to make a ten hours bill their battle cry in the economical field, as they had made the Charter their political manifesto. More- over, a few manufacturers found that ten hours' work might be made almost as profitable as a longer spell if skill were used in adapting improved machinery ; and others were anxious to obtain the support of the workers in the agita- tion for the repeal of the Corn Laws, as the aristocracy desired to gain their assistance against that measure. Hence the Factory Act of the 7th June 1844. By this Act " freedom of contract " on the part of women was put an end to. Women over eighteen years of age Avere placed under the same rules as young persons, and their toil limited to twelve hours a day. Children under thirteen were not allowed to work more than six hours and a half a day ; the trickery of the relay system was also sternly repressed, and the times for meals were fully secured. The result of all these regulations was that the hours of the adult male 2i8 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. workers were likewise limited, owing to the manner in whicli, under the factory system, all workers dovetail into one another, and the co-operation of women, children, and " young persons " had become indispensable in the work of the day. This day's work of twelve hours lasted, therefore, from 1844 till 1847. Then by the new law of 8th June 1847, eleven hours was fixed as the day's work up to 1st May 1848 ; but from and after that date, ten hours became the rule. This first victory was not gained without a last and fierce effort on the part of the capitalist class to prevent its becom- ing effective. Everything, also, seemed in their favour. In 1846-47, there was a great crisis in the commercial affairs of the country. Short time and closed factories were the rule, rather than the exception. Many of the workpeople were in need and in debt. It might have been thought, therefore, that they would gladly accept longer hours to make up for lost time, pay their debts, redeem their goods from pawn, get new clothes for themselves and their families.* The manufacturers did their best to push them into such a frame of mind. They reduced wages wherever possible to the largest amount they could ; they got up sham petitions and wrote forged letters to the papers in the name of the workers. They denounced the inspectors as revolutionary ogres who devoured the workers with their insatiable humanitarianism. All to no purpose. The factory hands v/ould have nothing to say to the philanthropic views of their good employers in their favour. They failed, therefore, for the moment ; but after the downfall of the Chartists, on the 10th April 1848, and the general rising on the continent of Europe, they made a last * Eeport, Inspector of Factories, 31st October 1848, p. 16. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 219 determined effort to upset the whole scheme of legislation which thus interfered with them. Taking advantage of clauses in the still unrepealed Acts of 1833, 184;4, and 1847, they resorted to every device which could irritate the adult male workers, and evaded the laws in relation to women and children. The county magistrates abso- lutely aided the capitalists in their shameful slave- driving, and failed to support the inspectors. Even the government was intimidated to such an extent that Sir George Grey actually wrote, on the 5th August 1849, to the factory inspectors that they need not enforce the law. Luckily the English inspectors, headed by that fearless, vigorous, and noble champion of the well-being of the people, Mr Leonard Horner, refused to pay any attention to this cowardly direction. But the system of relays which rendered inspection nugatory, was carried out vigorously, in spite of the law, and the Court of Exchequer decided on the 8th February 1850, that the factory owners were practically acting legally in their wholesale evasion of the clauses which restricted the labour of women and young persons. This decision led at once to an agitation among the workers. They knew well that the great motive of the capitalists in all this chicanery was to return to the happy period of fifteen hours a day for adults, either by fair means or foul. Their agitation became so menacing that the iactory owners gave way, and the law of the 5th August 1850 was a compromise between masters and men. Not, however, until 1853 was an Act passed which finally rendered the Acts of 1850 and 1847, in combination with the previous Acts of 1833 and 1844, really valid against the never-ceasing efforts of the capitalists to evade them. 220 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Thus half-a-century had passed since the enactment of the first Factory Act, and all this while our philanthropists Avere sending out missionaries to all parts of the earth, and were declaimitig about the infamies of the slave trade, though women and children at home were perishing for the want of protection,* Then, at last, the absolute necessity for * The Factory Girl's Last Day. 'Twas on a wiuter's morning, The weather wet and wild, Three hours before the dawning The father roused his child ; Her daily morsel bringing, The darksome room he paced, And cried " The bell is ringing, My hapless darliug, haste ! " " Father, I'm up, but weary, I scarce can reach the door, And long the way and dreary — Oh, carry me once more ! To hel]) us we've no mother ; And you have no employ ; They killed my little brother- Like him I'll work and die." Her wasted form seemed nothing— The load was at his heart ; The sufferer he kept soothing Till at the mill they jjart. The overlooker met her, As to her frame she crept. And with his thong he beat her And cursed her as she wept. Alas ! what hours of horror, Made up her latest day ; In toil, and pain, and sorrow They slowly passed away. It seemed, as she grew weaker, The threads the ofteuer broke ; The rapid wheels ran quicker. And heavier fell the stroke. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 221 interfering to prevent women from being completely broken down by the greed for surplus value, the unavoidable duty devolving upon the State to see that the population does The sun had long descended, But night made no repose ; Her day began and ended As cruel tyrants chose. At length a little neighbour Her halfpenny she paid, To take her last hour's labour. While by her frame she laid. At last, the engine ceasing, The captives homeward rushed ; She thought her strength increasing — 'Twas hope her spirits flushed. She left, but oft she tarried \ She fell and rose no more, Till, by her comrades carried, She reached her father's door. All night, with tortured feeling, He watched his speechless child ; While, close beside her kneeling, She knew him not, nor smiled. Again the factory's ringing Her last perceptions tried ; When, from her straw bed springing, " 'Tis time ! " she shrieked, and died ! That night a chariot passed her, While on the ground she lay ; Tlie daughters of her master An evening visit pay ; Their tender hearts were sighing As negro wrongs were told, Wliile the white slaves lay dying Who gained their father's gold ! Michael Sadler, the autlior of these verses, was a Member of Parlia- ment, and author of a work on Population, refuting the foolish theories of Malthus. He was a fearless champion of tiio riglits of the peo2)le iii Ireland, as Avell as in England, though, strange to say, he sat on the Oonseivative side of the House. 222 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. not utterly deteriorate to satisfy the capitalists' lust for gain was recognised with regard to the greater part of the Factory industry. From 1847, "freedom of contract" cannot be said to be a portion of our State policy. The pseudo-science of political economy which bourgeois economists have for- mulated, here met with its first great check. But any survey of the movements of this period would be very imperfect which failed to touch upon the great agita- tion for the Repeal of the Corn Laws. This, let us remem- ber, was said to be undertaken in the interests of the working classes especially. They were to gain more than any others from the removal of those taxes upon food, which had been imposed after the great war, in order to secure additional rents for landlords, or additional profits for farmers. Unquestionably, the landlords did in some considerable measure benefit by a system which secured their tenants against outside competition ; and a method of taxation which, under existing conditions of production for profit, taxes the community at large for the benefit of any special class is highly objectionable. The people whose wages did not by any means keep pace with the rise in the price of provisions during the war, and who were in miserable case afterwards at once detected in the Corn Laws an attempt to maintain those prices. They showed, by their riots in 1815, very clearly what they thought of the matter then. But in considering the Repeal agitation, and the effects which it pro- duced, it is necessary to go. a little deeper into the economi- cal facts of the case, to take account of the time at which it was started, and to recall the representations made to the working-classes by the men who were the principal movers in the business. For it mu.st not be forgotten that the reputation of an MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 223 entire political party has been built np on the success of this repeal agitation. Free Trade has been the capitalist's one cry to the people. When any democrat has ventured to doubt whether manufacturers who are daily engaged in making profit out of the unpaid labour of their " hands," whether the very men who most bitterly opposed the Factory Acts and all other measures which limited their right to gain as much as possible at the expense of their countrymen, when any fearless writer or speaker has questioned whether such people as these could, as a class, fairly represent the workers out of whose toil they gained enormous fortunes, the answer has always been : — " Just think of the Corn Laws ; see how we spent money and never spared ourselves to bring about the repeal of those obnoxious regulations. Would you fly in the face of Free Trade and talk flat blasphemy against men who have secured the country cheap food ? "* Mr John Brig1)t, in particular, has never ceased to hold up himself and his class as the benefactors of England on the strenfjth of this glorious achievement against landlord selfish- ness and tyranny, and his successors have taken up the wondrous tale. But how stand the facts in relation to this marvellous act of devotion and self-sacrifice on the part of a class whose motto in all the ordinary affairs of life is nothing for something ? Surely there must be something below the surface here, some trifle at least of personal gain which should induce — as it certainly did induce — people who are so keenly alive to their own interests to subscribe hundreds of thousands of pounds to ensure the repeal of these particular laws. We shall see there was. * A few of the chartists steadily preached to the workers that if they accepted Free Trade in Corn without Nationalisation of the Land and other wide reforms, they might easily find themselves worse off than before. 224 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. According to the law which regulates competition wages in all countries where the workers are divorced from the means of pi'oduction, a law which is admitted by the chief middle-class economists, wages on the average amount to just so much as enable the workers to maintain themselves in the " standard of life " of their class or trade as long as capital needs them, and to hand on the same lot to their successors. Now this being the case it is manifest that anything which tends to cheapen the abso- lutely necessary products that make up this " standard of life " tends also to reduce the number of hours in the day during which the worker toils to replace the labour-value of the wages paid in order to enable him to buy the goods which shall keep him in the usual conditions of his class. That is to say, if workers as a class can be induced to live on a cheaper sort of food, to lodge worse, or to clothe them- selves in cotton instead of in wool, if they are driven to compete against one another on this lower scale then the capitalist gets more hours of unpaid labour for himself and those who divide this surplus-value so produced with him. But, if instead of taking worse food or clothing the cost of that which the workers are accustomed to is reduced, then the same result follows. Wheat costing less than it did before, for instance, the competition wage-earners can afford to take lower wages than they would otherwise get, and the differ- ence must go in the long run not into the worker's but into the capitalist's pocket. Repeal of the Corn Laws therefore meant increased profits for the capitalist, possibly even, owing to increased population, increased rents for the landlord ; but it did not of itself benefit the working class one atom in theory, and I shall be able to prove later irrefragably that it has not in practice. The agitation fur the Eepeal of the MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 225 Corn Laws was a capitalist move entered upon for their own benefit, pushed with vigour expressly in order to baulk the chartists and socialists, at the same time that it crippled the landlords, and was carried to completion in the capitalist interests alone. Cobden, himself essentially a buy-cheap-and-sell-dear economist, admits that it was distinctly a middle-class movement, and that it met with very little unpaid sup- port from the workers.* Why should it ? When the agitation first began in 1838, the chartist movement was just organising itself in earnest. Such men as the socialist leaders of course had seen through the trick at once. The big loaf and the little loaf which were paraded through the streets, the tons of literature calling for cheap bread which were distributed through the country could not gull anyone who saw even a little below the surface. At this very period, 1838 to 184G, Mr Bright and Mr Cobden were denouncing Trade Unions with all the force of their oratory as tyrannous and illegal combinations,! and were declaring that the Factory Acts were monstrous interferences with the liberty of the subject. Others of their class were more shrewd, for they proclaimed to the factory hands that if only they would gain Free Trade for them then it would no longer be necessary for the capitalists to oppose the enact- ment of the Ten Hours Bill. By degrees the middle-class * Mr .Joliu Morley's Life of Cobdeu is ])erliaps tlie worst service which could have been done to the memory of that worthy. It will remain a well-written record of middle-class humbug when the hoUowness of capitalist free trade has long been exposed. t " Depend upon it nothing can be got by fraternising with trades unions. They are founded upon principles of brutal tyranny, and monopoly. I would rather live under a Dey of Algiers than a Trades Committee." — Cobden. Cajjitalism being, as we have seen above, full of true tolerance and brotherly love. P 226 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. programme, backed as it was by heaps of money and sup- ported by at least two orators of the first rank, Mr Bright and Mr Fox, made head against the working men's Charter and their Ten Hours Bill. Visions of the magnificent condition of the labourers when England should once have free imports were held out to the gaze of the inhabitants of the great cities. Poverty and want should flee away from all who were willing to work, misery should be unknown, the poor- houses would have no inmates.* Many of the workers were quite taken in. The political economists made common cause with their capitalist friends in thus misrepresenting the truth. In the end, as all know, the agitation became too strong to be resisted. Sir Robert Peel gained credit by playing into the hands of the capitalists he belonged to at the expense of the landlords who had adopted him as their leader; the working class were completely cajoled out of the genuine reforms in a political direction which they might fairly have hoped to obtain, and the success gave fresh vigour to the capitalists who, when once the measure in which they were directly interested was carried, turned round and opposed the Ten Hours' Bill more furiously than ever.t * The dark colours in which thej' painted the misery of the people did something of course to call public attejition to other points than the taxes on food. But the nonsense talked to gull the workers almost surpasses belief. Mr Fox, for instance, speaking at a great public meeting in Covent Garden Theatre, declared that the abolition of protection would put an end to pauperism, and predicted, in a passage of the most stirring eloquence, that ere many years had passed, work- houses in ruins would recoi'd the break up of protection in the same way that castles in ruins recal the downfall of feudalism. t That Free Trade is beneficial to the whole community when exchange is controlled by the producers no man would, I should hope, contest. There is no reason why each country should not grow and manufacture that which it can produce with least expenditure of human labour, and exchange such produce on equal terms. This must MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 227 Unquestionably the anti-Corn-Law agitation, was one of the great causes of the failure of the Chartists to carry any portion of their political j)rogramme. It was a red herring trailed across the path of the democracy. If the working class had held aloof from their most dangerous enemies the capitalists, and had used their organised force to insist upon concessions before they moved at all, they would scarcely have failed to secure some advantage. Bigoted as the landlord party was and is, opposed as its members are to almost all that real reformers hold dear, the workers were then in a position, but for this subsidised Free Trade agitation, to have formed a party of their own which would have held the balance between Tories and Liberals. Their failure, as I have said, was the result of no accident. The workers and their leaders were too unorganised to act. The middle-classes had not yet reached their full development, nor proved as they have now their utter incompetence to deal with the problems of the near future. So they won. It was a great triumph indeed for the manufacturers, and well might they give Mr Cobden £80,000. Not only had they utterly defeated their enemies, the landed gentry, but they had completely cajoled the mass of the working class leaders. From this time forward the political economy which has found favour with labouring Englishmen, has been precisely that which their employers would naturally be most anxious that they should accept. In place of Ernest Jones and Julian Harney, Lovett, Stephens, Bronterre O'Brien, and Feargus O'Connor, instead of Cartwright, Cobbett, and Owen, a whole gang of self-seeking manufacturers who call be advantageous to all. But capitalist fi-ee trade means simply com- mercial war carried on at the direct expense of the producing class for the benetit of the capitalist class. 228 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. all below the aristocracy of labour the " residuum," and denounce attempts to free the people from their thraldom, as playing into the hands of the Tories, have come forward as " Tribunes of the People." The time is close at hand when the pretensions of these men will be scouted, and their record of selfishness and greed will be contemned. Englishmen, indeed, are too apt to forget their own history. But when they look back at the long struggle which lasted through the first half of this century, they will see clearly, that bad as was the action of the aristocracy, infamous as were the devices to which they resorted to prevent free Englishmen from taking advantage of their freedom, the worst enemies of the true welfare of the people throughout were those hypocritical employers who, whilst pretending to champion the cause of the workers, never ceased to oppose all measures which should help in any degree to release women and children from their tyranny, and never hesitated to misrepresent and to denounce the combinations by which alone men could help themselves. Nor were they without weapons to bend the workers to their will. Any workman who took an active part in political or social movements was liable to be at once discharged by his employer. This would probably mean his ruin, for other employers would refuse to give him work, the man being thus reduced to starvation or driven into the poor-house. Such cases of • " boycotting" were frequent throughout this social struggle. It was on this account that the Trade Unions were at first compelled to pay their secretaries or other active officials a salary. Happily, since 1 824, the workers have secured more and more freedom of combination ; and the growth of classes who do not directly live upon the labourers, has strengthened their resistance to immediate capitalist brutality. MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 229 Tims it will be seen that the hundred years from 1750, or the accession of George III. in 17G0, to the collapse of the Chartist movement in 1848, was a period of continuous, and at times, embittered struggle on the part of the working classes, first for political, and next for social as well as political rights. The loss of the American Colonies, though serious from many points of view, did not gravely injure our trade ; what mischief was done, in fact, was more than made up by the con- quest of India, and the establishment of our maritime suprem- acy over France, Spain, and Holland. The long war with France no doubt set back political and social progress, and greatl}'^ exhausted the country. But here again our conquests abroad, and still more the extraordinary development of the great machine industry at home, which gave us command of the markets of the world, resulted in a vast increase of national wealth after all expenditure and sacrifices had been allowed for. Unfortunately no attempt was made to secure the mass of the people against the effects of reaction at the end of the war, or against the inevitable results of the faulty distribution of wealth, due to the concentration of the means of production in so few hands. Hence the riots, the turbulence, and at length the organised but futile revolt of the workers as shown in the Chartist movement. The Reform Bill of 1832 gave power into the hands of the middle class completely, as the Civil War of the seven- teenth century and accession of William III. had given it partially; and this, the result of a compromise in which the workers who had formed the propelling power were left with the shells, whilst their middle-class allies took the oyster, has been paraded as a glorious political victory for the people. 230 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Even the success of the working classes in restricting the hours of labour was not achieved without outrages which frightened the whole community. There was a manifest antagonism between the wage-earners and their masters, which, but for extraneous circumstances, might easily have led to a grave social war. But the main point is that from the end of the French war until 1848, a period which we have almost come to consider as one of perpetual peace and prosperity, because there were no European complications of importance, England was suffering from continuous internal turmoil more than any other great power. The middle class remained masters of the field in the end, it is true ; but none the less the wage-earners had opened the campaign against the capitalists, which, though conducted in very tame fashion of late years, can scarcely fail to lead to grave difficulty in the near future, unless singular discretion is used by the luxurious classes. As it was, the great Revolutionary wave of '48 produced little effect in this country. Then, for the first time, it became apparent to keen observers, that, apart even from the economical issues involved, nothing short of an inter- national combination among the working classes of Europe could possibly secure for them political victory. At the outset success seemed probable. But although in Paris, Utopian Socialist experiments were tried in earnest, and all over Europe kings were toppled from their thrones and Re- publics took their place, there can be no doubt that the move- ment was, in the main, more national than social. The ideas of nationalist middle-class men, such as Mazzini, Kossuth, or Blind, had far more influence than the far-reaching views of international socialists. Gradually, therefore, each people was in turn subdued by the help of the military force of its MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE. 231 neighbour, barbarous Russia leading the reactionary host. The French bourgeois Repubhc drove the Italian Republicans from Rome, the Hungarians helped to defeat the Croats, and England, not yet recovered from the Chartist scare or the Irish rising, was content to mutter liberal principles under her breath, and leave those whom we had promised to assist to be crushed without our aid. All this, however, is but a portion of middle-class history. The workers were beaten back to their hovels and workshops all over the civilised world. In 1848, as in 1789, the bourgeoisie had the organisation, the money, and an accurate knowledge of their own objects. Yet those who held that in England, at least, a great social upheaval was inevitable, had some justification for their opinion. The awful famine of 1847 in Ireland had been followed by an organised revolt, which seemed more formidable than it really was, and the crisis of the same year had intensified the contrasts here at home. England with its great factories and impoverished workpeople, its great landlords and miserable agricultural labourers, its political freedom and social oppression, its balanced con- stitution and general disfranchisement, seemed the very country where such ideas as those embodied in the famous Socialist manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would find acceptance. The first point in that programme. Nationalisation of the Land, had been handed on from Thomas Spence to the most active of the Chartist leaders, the Irish in the great cities openly sympathised with their brethren on the other side of St George's Channel, and for the time were at one with English revolutionists. In short, the situation looked so threatening that the upper and middle classes drew together in anticipation of grave trouble, 232 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. regarding every meeting of Trade Union representatives as indicative of organised revolt. Wild schemes of all sorts were discussed among the workers. Nevertheless with April 10th, 1848, all the serious agitation may be said to have come to an end, and for the leaders there was nothing left save to try to educate the working classes of their countrymen up to a higher standard of social and political intelligence. A few may still be found who are imbued with the teaching of the men of '48 ; but the mass of Englishmen of the producing class are at present far behind their brethren on the continent of Europe and in America, in all the qualities which can eventually lead to the emancipation of their fellows. A new genera- tion, however, is now rising up, and new economical forces are at work which will probably renew in more formidable shape the agitations of the first half of the present century before its close. CHAPTER VII. THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTEY. By the introduction of the great machine industry, where steam or water power replaced the motive power of human beings or animals, capital necessarily became more com- pletely master of the situation than ever. From the end of the eighteenth century until the present time the econo- mical history of England has been little more than the record of its conquests, and the annals of the increase of its domination, together with the growth of resistance by the workers. Middle- class economists define capital as simply the accumulation of the results of past labour devoted to assist present production. This is of course true, in a certain sense. Where capital, in the form of accumulated labour, belongs to the family or household, it is used for the benefit of all members of that family or household. So with the wider circle of a village com- munity or tribe, where the accumulation of past labour is turned to the advantage of all who belong to the village, tribe, or collection of tribes, whose members live in collective communities, and all gain by the common industry. But capital, in our modern sense, is something quite different from the results of past labour accumulated to serve the purposes of all. It constitutes an epoch in social production when the accumulated labour and the means of production, including the land, are in the hands of 234 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. one class, and are used, not for the advantage of all, but to pile up wealth for the few. The workers, where this system is in full development, are obliged to sell their labour-force for mere subsistence- wages, and the object of all production is to make a profit for the classes who own the capital. Dead labour and living labour are, so to say, placed in direct, and, for the living labour, ruinous antagon- ism. The labourers are not employed until it is quite clear to the capitalist that, on the average, the wage-earners will return the full value of the wages which he pays them out of the commodities they produce, and a surplus value, that is to say a good deal more than the value of their wages into the bargain for the benefit of the non-producers, who own the accumulated labour or capital. In a society such as ours, where this system has been going on for generations, it is natural that men should think that there is really something in the very nature of labour itself which should produce a profit — that the labourers ought, of necessity, to give a profit to the class which is so good as to employ them and organise their labour for them. Or it has been urged that, for example, there is something in the " natural " increase of sheep or cattle, or the fecundity of seed-corn, a portion of which is but the due return to the capitalist who has made an advance to the agriculturist destitute of such cattle and sheep, or seed- grain, in the first instance.* In like manner, some have contended that machinery itself, being .a labour-saving apparatus alike in agriculture and manufacture, producing, that is, a larger amount of wealth for a less expenditure of human labour-force, also gives large extra value in addition to the wear and tear, and to this extra value the capitalist * See Heury George, for instance, " Progress and Poverty," p. 168. THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 235 IS entitled. But here is manifestly a grave error. The value of cattle or of corn in exchange depends, on the average, simply upon the amount of social human labour needed to bring them forward for exchange. A good Season means only that less labour has been required to produce a given number of beasts, or to grow a given weight of grain, and that, therefore, other things being equal, their value in exchange for other articles is less than it would be in a bad season, when the same amount of labour produced less of the same goods or food. So in manufacture. What does a machine do in itself ? It works up a useful article with less of human labour than if such a machine did not exist, and, therefore, if the same quantity of human labour is employed as before, produces a far greater amount of wealth. But the machine adds no value to the commodity beyond the wear and tear, or the amount of labour which would be needed, after having been used for a certain time, to put it in as good a condition as when work was begun. The value added to the raw material during the process of manufacture — and, strictly speaking, no material is so " raw " but that human labour has been expended upon it — is, therefore, no more than the quantity of human labour embodied in the commodity dur- ing such manufacture, including the necessary amount required to replace the oil, gas, coal, waste, and wear-and- tear of the machine. But the owner of a machine is of course anxious to make as much profit as he can, no matter whence the profit may be derived, and he, therefore, pushes on the work of the machine as quickly as he can. For the capitalist has to face another danger besides the natural wearing-out of his machine, the possibility, namely, indeed the certainty, 236 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. that a machine of improved construction will sooner or later be produced, which will turn out goods of the same descrip- tion with less labour, and, therefore, cheaper than his own. In this way, not only will his machine itself be of less value, but his power of making a profit will be greatly reduced, or altogether destroyed. When this takes place, the capitalist invariably tries to indemnify himself against this most injurious form of competition by reducing the rate of wages which he pays to his labourers, so as to be able to sell as cheap, at their expense, as the owner of the new and superior machine ; just as when a superior machine is first intro- duced, the fortunate possessor always strives to get the fullest possible gain from this temporary advantage by an excessive extension of the hours of labour for his " hands." Thus in the same way that the workers compete against one another to get employment so fiercely that their average wages constantly tend below the level where the price of labour, or the standard of life, suffices for healthy existence ; so the capitalists, though making large profits, as a class, out of labour, carry on their competition with one another by a reduction of prices towards the point where profit for many individuals among them becomes impossible. Now, when a labour-saving machine is first introduced i' regard to any article which is in common use, its effect is to depreciate the value of the force of labour, both directly and indirectly, inasmuch as less wages are needed to maintain the same standard of life, thus giving a relatively larger surplus value to the capitalist.* The labour employed, * Wheu national production and exchange are carried on without any regulation, the development of society and the increased productiveness of social labour results in giving the working-class an ever-decreasing proportion of such national production in the shape of wages. Eod- bertus, 1850. THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 237 also, produces articles of a higher value in the social ex- change of the day than the actual quantity of human labour embodied in them. That is to say, these articles, though produced with less labour than others of the same quality, are worth the same as they are in the market to the capitalist. Consequently, and by reason of these effects of the machine, the capitalist can replace the value of the wages he pays to his competition wage- earners by a smaller fraction of their total day's work than he could before. But in order that he may derive the full profit from this cheaper production, and consequent large relative increase of surplus value, he must have a wider market for the sale of his goods. So he begins to imdersell his neighbours all round, at that price between the actual price current and the cost of production to himself, which, on calculation, will give him the largest and the quickest profit. For instance, if the article were selling before the new machine came into play at two shillings the yard or the pound, the capitalist would sell at eighteen pence or a shilling (as he should judge for his best advantage), if he himself were producing at sixpence.* But now consider how the machine affects the total * " It is important to insist on this point, that what determines vahie is not the time in which a thing has been produced, but the minimum of time in which it can be produced, and this minimum is fixed by com- petition." Marx, " MisOrede la Philosophic," p. 45. " Every new invention which enables that to be pi'oduced in one liour which has hitherto been the product of two hours, depreciates all pro- ducts of the same description which are found on the market. Comj)eti- tion compels the producer to sell the product of two hours as cheap as the product of one hour. Competition realises the law according to which the relative value of a product is determined by the time of labour necessary to produce it. The time of labour serving as measure of the sale value, becomes thus the law of a continual depreciation of labour." P. 44. 238 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. amount of surplus value produced. The object of the machine is, of course, to produce the same amount of wealth, that is to say, of commodities for exchange, by employing a few hands that was formerly obtained by the employment of many. But when the capitalist employs fewer hands — though he may obtain, as stated above, a much larger re- lative surplus value out of each — the fewer hands he employs the less surplus value will be produced ; since each individual worker, even where no restriction exists, can give no more than a certain amount of surplus labour-value in the day. No man, that is, can work twenty-four hours in the day continuously, and even if he did, the fewer hands would produce a smaller total surplus value than some greater number who each produced a smaller surplus value. Here, then, is another reason for getting the most out of the hands possible, by an extreme length of hours to make up for the decrease in the numbers at work, owing to the superior machinery — the total amount of surplus value depending, of course, upon the total number of hours of unpaid labour the workers altogether give to the capitalist, after they have earned the value of their wasfes. Even, therefore, when the number of hours are reduced and regulated by law, steps are at once taken to increase the amount of surplus value attainable by the capitalist by in- creasing the rapidity of the machinery, and thus greatly adding to the intensity of the work. It stands to reason, for instance, that a man who attends to 120 revolutions of a machine in ten hours, really does one-fifth more work than he did when he followed but 100 revolutions of a machine for twelve hours. More work is got out of him in less time. This was actually done in our mills and factories directly the Ten Hours Act was enforced, THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 239 and the same or a larger quantity of labour was compressed into the ten hours that had formerly been spread over twelve. Thus under the dominance of the machine industry the workers are in theory, as in practice, the slaves of the machine instead of usirm the machines as their inanimate slaves. They must work in accordance with the will of the machine, over whose greater or less rapidity the}'' have no control whatsoever any more than they have over the higher or lower price at which their master may sell the labour- value which tliey have provided him with. Men and women no longer use tools, they are used by their own tools in the shape of the machines moved by steam or water power. The labourers, in such circumstances, become mere fiesh and blood mechanism, at the mercy of a great mechani- cal force, are literally and truly slaves of their own produc- tion, and their bodies and minds are stunted and enfeebled by the very nature of their employment, even apart from its length or its intensity. No great strength and no great skill are required : deftness of hand and enduring persistence of toil are all that is needed. Further, as has been seen in practice,, the effect of the machine is constantly to throw men out of employment, and to create, under existing conditions of production, a permanent over-population, in the face of increasing wealth. The amount of surplus value produced, the return, that is, to the total capital embarked in machine industry, is increased at the expense of increasing uncertainty and ex- cessive competition for the labourers. The machines soon beat the hand-workers out of the field in every trade ; but, in revenge, the workers at the machine themselves are liable to the same uncertainty any day. \.u instance of this in actual life may here be given. A 240 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. coDtractor, furnishing stamps to the Post-Office, was em- ploying three hundred men on skilled work, at the average wages of twenty-eight shillings a week. These were good wages, as times go, and the contractor being engaged on a Government job, the men might fairly look upon their positions as secure for life. Many of them had actually been in the service of that same firm twenty or thirty years. But now, what happened ? Suddenly, without a word of warning beyond the week's or fortnight's notice demanded by the law, the men were sent about their business — were discharged without recourse. Machines had been introduced which could do all, and more than all, the work the machines previously used could do, and women and children took the places of the men. Their average wages were about fourteen shillings a week, against the twenty-eight shillings paid to the men. Here, then, was a saving, an increase of the surplus value, for the capitalist at the rate of fourteen shillings per head of the men discharged. In all, the gain was 800x14, or not less than 4,200 shillings, or £210 per week on the total number of three hundred men discharged. An increase of profit of upwards of £10,000 a year, during the whole period of his contract, was the result, to the happy con- tractor, of the introduction of this labour-saving machine. But what of the result to the " hands " thus discharged ? They went out upon the labour-market as unskilled labourers, most of them failing to find employment, as times were dull. The contractor did no worse than others are doing constantly, nor could he, individually, be blamed. Yet, here, one man gains an enormous fortune, whilst hundreds are thrown workless on the streets. And this is civilisation, this is the organisation of labour THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 241 wliich some enthusiasts for what exists tell us workers should rightly pay for, this is that " order " which to disturb or rudely handle would bring upon us anarchy. Hear the workers in turn : listen to what they say — '' What is order to you capitalists is anarchy to us workers : the system you hope to maintain Ave must — there is no other alternative before us — either master or destroy. We will not hand on to our children the misery, the uncertainty, the hopeless- ness which crush us who toil to-day. The machines which give you wealth give us the most grinding poverty. Nay, as you see, we are not even certain of the pittance we but now gained for your profit. What should improve our con- dition and lessen our labour renders our lot one of perman- ent insecurity. None can tell this week whether his wages shall be secure the next." Thus, theory and practice accord, and the superfluous portion of the population created by the machine crowd into other businesses, to depress wages by their competition, or sink into the ''fringe of labour " and pauperism. These are the " temporary inconveniences " of the capitalist system of production recognised by middle-class economists. But they are not temporary. Tlie machine constantly throws adults out of employment. Ricardo, MacCulloch, Ure, even Fawcett and Mill confess that the tendency of the machines as they are improved is to do without male labour, or to decrease the price of that labour. Meanwhile, too, let us bear in mind that wages of labour are lowest precisely in those trades where the hours are longest. It is the excessive toil which receives the least remuneration ; and women who work fourteen or sixteen hours a day can, as recent cases in the police court show, barely gain a liveli- hood or keep body and soul together. In the factories Q 242 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. where the ten hours law is in force wages have risen ; where it still lasts fourteen or fifteen hours wages have fallen.* Here, then, in the very basis of our machine industry, we find the causes of perpetual discontent if only the men who work understood what is going on around them. But on the other hand, urge the economists, there is com- pensation to all this, " If men are throwai out here they are employed there if capital invested in machinery reduces wages, or renders less money available for pa3anent of wages which amounts to the same thing, still additional work at higher, or at any rate equal, remuneration can be found. Thus, though individuals may be harmed for the moment, the community, as a whole, is benefited, and even the dis- charged workers gain in the long run." Without taking account of the thousands of weavers in India absolutely starved to death by the competition of our cheap goods, it is enough to show that the compensations do not take place in the way supposed for our own people. The instance given above proves that, in that case at least, the break between the workmen and their means of gaining subsist- ence, or their undeserved reduction to a lower scale of wages through no fault of their own but simply to increase the gains of their employer, did not meet with any compensation. Moreover, the handloom weavers, whose miseries are recorded in all the reports of the earlier portion of this century, found themselves in the pauper graveyard long before any compen- * Eeport of Inspector of Factories 31st October, 1863, p. 9. Cited in Marx, " Capital," p. 237. It is needless to point out how this under-pay- ment of women fosters prostitution. It practically provides a never- ceasing stream of recruits to that misei'able business. Hunger is the first cause of prostitution, wrote Parent Duchatelet, after having carefully examined all the causes of prostitution in Paris. Our great capitalists turn hundreds and thousands of young women on to the .street every year. THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 243 sation began for their class. The only people who gain any- thing are the capitalists, who can buy the labour-force of these men out of work at a lower price than before. For, say that a man has a capital of £10,000 carefully accumulated from the unpaid labour of the free workmen whom he has been so philanthropic as to employ. If he employs half of it in buying materials and half in paying wages, he could pay a hundred labourers £50 a year con- tinuously. But now suppose he changes the proportions altogether. To start with, he employed £5,000 as constant capital, and £5,000 as variable capital for the payment of wages. Now he dismisses fifty labourers and buys a machine which costs him £2,500; Here £2,500 has become constant capital and has ceased to be available for payment of wages. Henceforth the capital of £10,000 will never employ more than fifty labourers, and will employ fewer at each improvement in the machine. Where is the compen- sation ? Does the payment to the mechanics for the machine compensate the hands thrown out of employment ? In any case the £2,500 originally went to pay salaries altogether.* In paying for the machine the £2,500 not only pays wages to the mechanics, but the materials necessary for its construction, and the surplus value taken by the owner as well. Besides, when once the machine is made it lasts till it is worn out, and to employ the mechanics continuously all the manufacturers in the line of business originally chosen must buy machines and discharge their hands. Every such operation, look at it how we may, means that the hands * The difference between constant capital and fixed capital is of course vi-ell known to economists, but for the general reader it is enough to say that constant capital consists of what is expended in law materials, &c., which are worked up in process of manufacture. Fixed capital applies only to buildings, machinery, &c. 244 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. discharged are deprived of their drafts upon food which were given to them by the employer in the first instance, and may be half-starved or find their way into the work-house before they are able to get similar drafts upon sustenance again. If they get fresh employment and renew the severed connection between themselves and their victuals, this is due to some new capital which comes on to the labour market and not to the capital which is already spent on the machine.* Moreover, under our degrading system of division of labour, men cannot turn to any other work at a moment's notice. The aptitude has been ground out of them ; conse- quently their position when discharged from employment is miserable in the extreme. The only marvel is that any compensation should have been claimed by middle-class economists as existing under our present competitive system. Unquestionably the machine produces more and cheaper commodities than could otherwise be obtained, but used by a class against a class it becomes the means of enslaving a man to his own physical power ; the wealth of the community is amassed for all but the worker. But the great machine industry and capitalist produc- tion bring about other results which seriously imperil the labourer's steady employment or continuous well-being. Improved machinery needs fresh markets, as well as ex- tended regions devoted to furnishing raw materials, India, America, Australia, China, become the providers of raw materials for English manufacturers, until such time as they build up factories of their own. Cotton, wheat, wool, silk are exported as our raw material from countries which, * Marx, "Capital," p. 190. THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 245 however distant, or however varying iu climate or govern- ment, become, in an economical sense, the hangers-on of our great industry at home. Being dependent upon other countries for our necessary food is, on many accounts, a most serious matter; but in effect, to be dependent even for our raw material binds up our welfare with the peace and stability of men in other lands to a degree which at times we scarcely appreciate. The war between the North and the South in the United States caused as much distress in Lancashire as if the food supply from America had been temporarily curtailed. A short supply of silk, or jute, or indigo at once makes itself felt in our industrial centres. The market, despite of all the efforts of governments to im- pose artificial restrictions, has become world-wide. There is a vast division of labour, whereby continents become practi- cally the agricultural districts of our great industrial centres. More than this, competition remains unrestrained, save by tariffs, in all the great dealings in the markets of the world, as it is at home. Manufacturers do not know, as a rule, what one another are doing. For instance, news reaches a house from its correspondent in India, or Australia, or China, that the goods previously encumbering that par- ticular market have at last found a sale ; that there has been a good harvest, a fine silk crop, an admirable season for wool or cattle, a splendid return from jute, or opium, or indigo ; in fact that, in the judgment of the writer, business ill that part of the world will not only be better for the moment, but that a heavier demand will certainly follow. Meanwhile, he recommends that large quantities of such and such goods should be shipped at once, so tliat rival exporters may not step iu first after the troubling of the )iool of prosperity. Similar advices reach other great firms 246 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. from their correspondents about the same time. Then the wholesale exporters give orders in hot haste, the manufac- turers, who have probably heard of the improvement them- selves, take heart and cautiously raise prices. They feel that dulness and short time and depression have passed away. There is lightness in the commercial air, and exhilaration pervades the whole atmosphere of business operations. Mills or factories begin to set to work in earnest to fill the orders which pour in from all quarters. More " hands " are needed to do the work. The "over-population" which Malthusians had been denouncing is absorbed in a twink- ling, to enable the manufacturers to take advantage of the " fjood times." The good news spreads, and with it the change of " tone." Those manufacturers who are first in the field order new and improved machinery.* This, for the time being, gives more work to mechanics and iron-masters. Their pros- perity reacts in turn upon the miners and colliers. Prices rise all along the line, the people are in full employ- ment at good pay, for they have soon demanded a rise in wages. Tn short, the manufacturers are in haste to get rich, the railways get full freights, the growers of raw mate- rial find that they can, at ruling rates, profitably grow more of the special staple in which they are interested. There is what, in American parlance, might be called a universal " boom." It seems impossible that a collapse can ever come again, for are not all interested in maintaining this general interchange of products ? The working classes, in particular, hope that at last permanent employment at o-ood wages is assured to them ; pauperism falls off, and the * Which, be it said in passing, increases the avaihxble supply of labour, and tends, besides, to keep wages from rising excessively. THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 247 reports in the columns of the daily newspapers from the great industrial centres are most satisfactory. The very whirl of business prevents men from seeing clearly what is going on around them. For at this very moment the highest point has been reached. Those same correspondents who but now were so jubilant, send home doleful tidings to the effect that goods are not moving off as fast as they were, and counsel prudence as to further shipments. In the home market also, the rise in wages, the higher rate of interest, the increase of speculation in all sorts of hopeless enterprises or investments in foreign bonds, combine to produce a check ut the same time. It is found that a portion of the demand has been due to speculation from the outset, or to the pur- chase of our own goods with our loaned capital. Further- more, the rise of wages has driven manufacturers to get the better of their neighbours by introducing im- proved machinery, and thus to produce more at a lower price with fewer hands. At the very time, therefore, when all looks most hopeful, when business is most prosperous, and employment is most brisk — just at that instant the highest point has been reached in the progress of the industrial cycle, and ere long the downward movement commences. Suddenly then there is a great difficulty found in disposing of goods at a profit. The home and foreign markets are alike glutted. Even the cheaper raw material and improved machinery will not suf^ce to put matters on a better footing. Rather, those manufacturers who have such advantages intensify the crisis by pouring yet more goods at a lower price on an already overburdened market. Hence short time becomes the rule : men are discharged wholesale from all departments of industry. 248 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. There are plenty of people wanting clothes, food, house- room ; but in order to give them employment, and thus to enable them to obtain these necessaries, the capitalist class must be able to employ them at a profit, and such profit the very glut of goods in the markets prevents. Hence comes the renewal of over-population on an enormous and oven dangerous scale ; whole districts are reduced to the very lowest level : it seems as if such misery could not longer endure.* The depression spreads to every department as prosperity had affected every interest. Where the first check comes matters little, sooner or later all are more or less injured, and we are in the midst of one of those ten- year crises, which, since the year 1825, have had world-wide effect. Such industrial crises, which are sometimes con- nected with financial upsets, but which may not always bring about the same results, have occurred every ten years for the last half-century. But the recurring periods have been shortened, and the crisis in each particular trade may not be absolutely contemporaneous with that in others. The destruction they involve to men and material is inconceivable. When the pressure has lasted long enough for the over-production, as it is called, to work off, then the renewed demand begins, and the wheel works round once more. Again the workers who have been forced into the workhouse or out on the " tramp," again the unfortunate hands who have " clemmed " in silence and sadness, hoping for better times, are taken back to labour for their em- * The depression in the Cleveland iron district during the last great industrial crisis was in itself awful to witness. It was anarchy and bloodshed to all intents and purposes — for men, women, and children were hopelessly impoverished though ready to work — and yet our " scientific " political economists accept such horrors as inevitable. THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 249 ployer's advantage and profit, only to be thrust down into deeper despair at the next stagnation, which is as sure to recur as are the seasons. Thus, in addition to all the uncertainty of new machines and inventions, which may interfere with his scanty wages at any moment, over and above all the evils a workman has to suffer from the revolutionary basis of modern production so opposed to the conservative, the too conservative, methods of old time — on the top of such never-ceasing chances and changes in the conditions of his daily labour, he is certain once in every ten years at least to suffer from a congestion in the labour market, owing to no fault of his own, which may throw him out of his former comparative comfort into the lowest abyss of misery and despair. For the working class have no control whatsoever over the disposal of the goods which they themselves produce. They are not consulted as to whether these steps should be taken or that course abandoned. Labour has no say, cannot compare notes. There is socialisation in the work- shop, in the factory, in the mine, on the farm; and anarchy, absolute unrestrained anarchy, in the exchange. Yet this, I say again, is the organisation of labour for which the labourers arc asked to pay and be thankful for : this is the skilful management of production which the capitalist class and their hangers-on make a merit of Wealth, wealth, ever more wealth here : uncertainty, depression, starvation, degradation for the men, women, and children w^hose labour alone gives value or produces goods. The sole object of the capitalist class being to obtain surplus value by extra and unpaid labour, the relative over-population produced by machines and the alternating series of elation and depression are greatly to their advantage. Tliey are able to 250 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. make more profit in a shorter time. But these crises tend also to crush out the small factories, the small dealers, the small distributors, and the small handicraftsmen more than ever. Each period of this description culminates in a whole series of bankruptcies, which, as a rule, means that the trade is driven into the hands of larger and yet larger producers and distributors. Thus the uncertainty of existence extends far even above the mere producer him- self, and results in that feverish lust for gain which is one of the worst features in our modern society. All are in haste to get rich, partly because of the desire to live luxuriously, but much more because they hope to be clear of the possibility of being left in hopeless penury in their old age. The capitalist system renders essential the economy of the means of production in each separate establishment, but, on the other hand, this is effected by the most wholesale waste of the physical strength of the producers and their means of production, not to speak of the innumerable parasites engendered by the luxury it develops. Capitalist production, to repeat, depends upon the men and women Avho work being deprived of the means of production and obliged to sell themselves on the market for what is little more than a bare subsistence wage. But when once the system is established its continuance is necessarily ensured upon an ever-growing scale, until the producers themselves combine to take control of the whole means of production in the collective interest. For the products of the producer continually escape from him into the hands of the class opposed to him. His force of labour is worked up, not only into merchandise, but into capital — into means of production which control him, into means of subsistence, which actually buy the worker him- THE GREA T MA CHINE IND US TRY. 251 self body and soul.* He is the slave of his own production, and is bought witli his own necessaries of life, which he himself furnishes in the form of exchangeable commodities. All this is disguised from the workers themselves by the daily or weekly sale of their labour-force ; and the fiction tliat they enter uj^ou a free contract with their employers induces them to stunt themselves permanently by serving the machines of another and hostile class. Their consumption of daily necessaries forces them to come day after day upon the market in order to sell themselves afresh to their employers who keep them thus in economical servitude. The relation of capitalist and wage-slave is day by day perpetuated. " But higher wages," say some, " surely this would in some sort remedy the miserable position you describe. English labourers nowadays are at any rate free to combine, the voting power is increasing in their hands, cannot they master the situation in that way, and secure for themselves some comfort and security?" The conditions need stronger measures, valuable as combination is for every i:)urpose. For the relative over-population which occasions such endless misery in times of depression, and is ever close at hand in the flushest times of trade, is directly due to the control by the capital class of the whole process of exchange, the in- creasing employment of machines owned by that class, and the growing proportion of constant to variable capital in every business. A man cannot keep his capital without increasing it ; accumulation on a larger and larger scale is forced upon the capitalist, and at the same time the increase of the wage-earning class to be employed as administering to luxury, or in producing more and more surplus value continues. The very payment of wages presupposes a cer- * Marx, " Capital," p. 249. 252 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. tain amount of labour given for nothing, which on the average of cases in England is at least two-thirds of the day's work. Wages in fact, as already stated, are but an order upon a fraction of the value of the wage-earner's production.* Take the best explanation by a middle-class economist of the phenomena of inflation and depression which has just been considered. What says Mr John Stuart Mill ? This : — " A manufacturer finding a slack demand for his commodity forbears to employ labourers in increasing a stock which he finds it difficult to dispose of ; or if he goes on until all his capital is locked up in unsold goods, then at least he must of necessity pause until he can get paid for some of them. But no one expects either of these states to be permanent ; if he did he would at the first opportunity remove his capital to some other occupation in which it would still continue to employ labour. The capital remains unemployed for a time during which the labour-market is over-stocked, and wages fall. Afterwards the demand revives and perhaps becomes unusually brisk, enabling the manufacturer to sell his com- modity even faster than he can produce it ; his whole capital is then brought into complete efficiency, and if he is able he borrows capital in addition, which would otherwise have gone into some other employment. At such times wages, in his particular occupation, rise. If we suppose what in strict- ness is not absolutely impossible, that one of these fits of briskness or of stagnation should affect all occupations at the same time, wages altogether might undergo a rise or a fall. These, however, are but temporary fluctuations ; the capital now lying idle will next year be in active employment, that which is this year unable to keep up with the demand will in its turn be locked up in crowded warehouses, and wages * See Chapter lY. THE GREA T MA CHINE IND USTR Y. 253 in these several departments will ebb and flow accordingly ; but nothing can permanently alter general wages except an increase or diminution of capital itself (always meaning by the term the funds of all sorts destined for the payment of labour), compared with the quantity of labour offering itself to be hired."* Again, " Wages depend, then, on the pro- portion between the number of the labouring population and the capital or other funds devoted to the purchase of labour ; we will say for shortness the capital. If the wages are higher at one time or place than another, if the subsistence and comfort of the hired labourers are more ample, it is for no other reason than because capital bears a greater propor- tion to population. It is not the absolute amount of accumulation or of production that is of importance to the labouring class; it is not the amount even of the funds destined for distribution among the labourers; it is the pro- portion between those funds and the numbers among whom they are shared. The condition of the class can be bettered in no other way than by altering that proportion to their advantage ; and every scheme for their benefit which does not proceed on this as its foundation, is, for all permanent purposes, a delusion." Mr John Stuart Mill was a Malthusian. His idea was that the working-classes ought to keep down their families to the number which should enable them to get each a larger amount of this imaginary wages-fund. Strange to say it never occurred to him that this phenomenon of inflation and depression takes place in countries where the population is stationary or even decreasing, as well as in lands Avhere the * J, S. Mill, "Principles of Political Economy," vol. i. p. 411. Mi- Mill's deep sympathy with the people, and his life-long work on their behalf, gain him the respect even of those who differ most widely from his economical views. 254 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. number of the people increases. That there has been no want of capital in England to employ the people, is apparent to the most casual thinker. Without anticipating here a survey of the present condition of the labouring class, it is enough to say that the assessment to income-tax alone in 1882 was more than the total production of the United Kingdom in 1842, or roughly speaking, nearly XGOO, 000,000 in the one case, and £500,000,000 in the other. The total income in 1882 maybe put at not less than £1,800,000,000. Meanwhile the population of the United Kingdom has increased only from 28,000,000 to 85,000,000, and the number of those employed in actual production has very slightly increased. Neither the over-population theory to account for the miserable wages of the workers, nor the abstinence theory to account for the accumulation of capital, will hold water for a moment. What abstinence is there in taking so much extra labour for nothing, and then merely debating as to whether such surplus-value taken from the labourer shall be used to build larger factories or to expend in luxury in Paris ? In either case the enforced abstinence is on the part of the labourer who gets less for his day's work than the labour-value he provides. The capitalist class takes relatively to the total production of the country an ever-increasing proportion of the wealth for its own use. Under our system of unregulated competition, the worker on the average gains nothing, and if he limits his family as a class and reduces the numbers of available hands — a thing practically impossible — he but accelerates the introduction of new machines, and in due time the re-creation of a relative over-population. Here, however, is the true law of capitalist production, which completely cuts the ground from under the feet of THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 255 the bourgeois expounders of political economy. As Mr Mill speaks of the relative profit to be derived from slave and free labourers, as dependent upon the wages of the free labourer — that is to say, upon the amount of necessary wages or standard of life — he at least ought to have seen the truth, which is: — "The relation between the accumula- tion of capital and the rate of wages is only a relation between unpaid labour converted into capital, and the over- plus of paid labour which this additional capital needs in order to set to work. This, then, is in no sense a relation betAveen two terms independent of one another — that is to say, the magnitude of the capital on one side, and the number of the working population on the other — but it is only a relation between the unjoctid and the paid labour of the same working 'population. If the quantum of unpaid labour which the working class supplies and the caj)italist class accumulates increases itself with such rapidity, that in order to turn it into additional capital an extraordinary addition to the quantity of paid labour must be made, wages rise. Other things remain the same, unpaid labour diminishes in proportion. So soon, however, as this diminution reaches the point where the extra labour which feeds capital is no longer offered in the usual quantity, a reaction follows, a less portion of the income is turned into capital, and the accumulation slackens, the rise in wages receives a check. The price of labour can therefore never raise itself except within limits which leave untouched the foundations of the capitalist system, and ensure its repro- duction on an increasing scale. How could it be otherwise when the labourer exists only to increase other people's wealth which he himself has created?"* With all this con- ♦ Marx, "Caintal," p. 273. 256 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. traction and expansion, inflation and depression, the increase of population has in practice little or nothing to do. It occurs in France as well as in England, in America as well as in Germany or Belgium. Never, then, until the working classes shake themselves clear of the notion that a mere rise in vv-ages is all they have to strive for, will they be able to dominate the causes of their own enslavement. Here and there better conditions of life may be obtained by combination, healthier houses, superior education, shorter hours of labour, more nourish- ing food, no labour for women and children. Such points as these may be gained just as slaves may be more kindly treated or more adequately fed in one country than in another ; but that does not alter the foundation of the whole arrangement, which is that the wage-earning class is, under present social conditions, at the disposal of the machinery and the owners of the machinery and raw materials. The tendency of our system of production, and the increasing accumulation of capital, is of necessity to increase the amount of over-population relatively to the means of employment. And thus as we have seen in practice, an industrial army of reserve is maintained ever at the disposal of capital for the enhancement of profit, ready to be absorbed into the whirl of production during times of expansion, only to be thrown workless on to the streets in periods of collapse. The increase of capital to a certain point is essential to the increase of power of production, but this stage once reached, the creation of a relative over-population becomes a definite means for the accumulation of wealth. During the periods of stagnation this industrial army of reserve presses on the army in active employment, THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 257 and serves to restrain its demands when the moment of over-production and great apparent prosperity at length comes. Capital increases in the hands of the few, because it has been taken completely out of the hands of the many. This arrangement whereby the over-population becomes a direct method for increasing wealth, and the increase of wealth and machinery tends to increase the over-population, is a see-saw quite peculiar to the capitalist system of production from its earliest growth, and is unknown under other conditions. The very excess of labour dragged from those who are employed, in order to raise the rate of surplus value taken from each worker, increases the numbers of the over-population, whilst the competition from without serves to keep down the rate of wages among the employed. Whilst some are over-worked to give extra profit, others are condemned to forced idleness who would gladly work were they permitted to do so. Thus, as a general result, the law by which an ever-increasing amount of wealth can be produced with an ever-lessening ex- penditure of human labour- force — this law which enables man, as a social being working in concert with others, to produce more and more wealth with less labour, is turned by our capi- talist system, where the means of production are not at the disposal of the labourer, but the labourer is at the mercy of his means of production, directly to his disadvantage. As an immediate consequence, the more power and resources placed at the command of labour, and the greater the competition of the labourers, the more precarious becomes the position of the wage-earner, and his chances of selling his labour.* But all this escapes notice, or is accounted for in slipshod fashion, because few of the educated classes care to examine * Marx, " Capital," chapter xxv. 258 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. too closely into existing conditions. Spots on the sun, mental obliquity, chance, bad harvests — as if an ordered civilisation would not average its food supply over a long period of years — all have been put forward as the causes of the troubles we suffer from. To analyse the real causes of misery is to work for their removal, is to take the first steps towards a social overturn. The antagonism of classes which has hitherto been the history of all progress, is ever ignored by all but the clearest heads or most sympathetic natures of their time. That the poor shall never cease out of the land is thought by some a sufficient answer to all comments upon the infamous arrangements whereby the mass of the people are sunk in degradation in order that luxury and idleness may be maintained. But utility itself is relative, and the necessaries of life even depend upon the state of society or the position which each holds in that society. Why is more work devoted to this article than another ? Because there is more demand. But the demand itself arises from the construction of society, that is, from needs and desires engendered by endless evolutions or by persistent education. Mere metaphysical or theological explanations fail utterly to account for the present or to forecast the future. If we follow now such an analysis as this, its suggestive- ness is surely at once apparent : " The consumption of products is determined by the social conditions in which the consumers find themselves placed, and these conditions themselves rest on the antagonism of classes. Cotton, potatoes, and spirits are articles of the commonest consump- tion. Potatoes have brought on scrofula ; cotton has to a great extent disj)laced linen and wool, although wool and linen are, in many cases, of greater utility, if only on the ground of health ; spirits, finally, have beaten beer and wine THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 259 •out of the field in many places, although spirits when used as a food are generally admitted to be a poison. For an entire century the governments strove vainly against the European opium ; economy gained the day, and gave the word of com- mand to consumption. " Why, then, are cotton, potatoes, and spirits the pivots of bourgeois society ? Because less labour is needed to produce them, and they are consequently at the lowest price. Why does the minimum price decide the maximum consumption ? Would it by chance be on account of the absolute utility of these articles, of their intrinsic utility, of their utility in so far as they correspond in the most useful manner to the needs of the workman as man, and not of man as workman ? No ; it is because in a society founded on misery, the most miserable products have the fatal prerogative of serving for the use of the greatest number. " To say now that because the least costly things are most largely consumed they must be of the greatest utility, is to say that the wide consumption of gin on account of its small cost of production is conclusive proof of its utility ; it is to tell the wage -earner that the potato is more wholesome for him than meat ; it is to accept the existing state of things. In a society to come where the antagonism of classes would cease, where there would be no more classes, consumption would no longer be determined by the minimum time of production ; but the time of production that would be devoted to an article would be determined by its degree of utility." * Whatever, then, is the least costly in point of food, clothing, and housing, becomes a portion of the " standard of life," towards which the working classes tend under our ■ Marx, "MisOre de la Pliilosophie," pp. 41, 42. 26o THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. gi-eat capitalist system ; and though special causes may for a, time prevent the minimum from being reduced to as low a level as is most conducive to the capitalist's view of utility, when once the tendency has resulted in actual fact, the standard is rarely raised again. Shoddy clothing, adulter- ated bread, poisonous gin are, as we can all see, the main supports of a large population in the great cities. It has been urged that a change might be brought about by influencing the nature of the demand for commodities, by inducing men and women to adopt greater simplicity of life, and thus by directing the work of the world in a better direction, to mitigate the injustice, and do away with the waste of labour which now prevails. But this is really a metaphysi- cal view of the situation, and presumes a complete change in society itself, svich as can only be the result of a great historical evolution or revolution in the methods of produc- tion, exchange, and education extending perhaps over generations, and ending in the final victory of the produc- ing class, which will then be the entire community,* Even while we are discussing the conditions around us, the historical movement, which, if neglected, renders all political economy utterly worthless, is pressing steadily on- wards. The Utopian socialists and reorganisers of society passed over the details of growth almost as lightly as the bourgeois economists. " The eagle eye of the idealist " saw the imperfections of the society of his own day, and could suggest a better form for the future, but the develop- ment proceeding from the past and going on relentlessly * It is amusing to note that ■writers in the capitalist press call our shallow middle-class political economy, which does not even rightly analyse how the spoils of the workers are divided, a science. It is a science in much the same sense that alchemy and astrology were sciences. THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY. 261 through the present into the future, was too often hidden from even his gaze. The really scientific process takes account of the past and of the present, knowing right well that in this way alone is it possible to forecast, in any sound sense, the economy of the future. Those who desire to trace the origin and the effect of the machine industry must first grasp that antagonism of classes which has led irresistibly to our existing anarchy. Alike in agriculture and in manufacture, the constant improvements of machinery, the incalculable revolutions which may be wrought by new discoveries and inventions, render absolute plans or fore- casts impossible. But this we can discern, that by great corporations, made up of many shareholders, who employ salaried ofiicials to organise production or distribution ; by the growing disposition of the State, even in its present bourgeois form, to take control of various departments also with a hierarchy of salaried oflScials, the old individualism, pure and simple, is being broken down, and collective in some degree substituted for individual effort. The revolt of the organised method of production, Avhere each worker is more and more dependent on his fellow, against the anarchical system of exchange, where each is against all, becomes more pronounced with every successive crisis. The middle-class is incapable of handling its own social system, and the proletariat must at last come by its own. From the worse side of our existing civilisation a new and better form must be evolved, if any beneficial change takes place. Thus, then, the examination of the existing conditions of capitalist production with the great machine industry, where wealth consists in a vast accumulation of commodi- ties, and articles are produced with a view to their exchange for profit on the markets of the world, where also the 262 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. means of production, and the control of the exchange of products, are in the hands of one class, and nothing beyond bare subsistence is accorded to the other — this analysis, which takes account of the fierce competition that goes on among the capitalists for gain above, gradually crushing out the less powerful, and the yet fiercer competition among the wage-earners below, for the privilege of gaining an uncertain livelihood, gradually crushing the weaker there too — all proves clearly that the domination of capitalism must involve perpetual uncertainty and inferior production for profit, whilst the wealth created through improved machinery, instead of giving increased well-being to all, serves but to depress the mass of the people more and more relatively to the well-to-do. CHAPTEK VIII. THE PERIOD OF APATHY. With the collapse of the Chartist movement on the 10th April 1848, through the want of thorough education and combination among the working-classes, anything like organised resistance, on the part of the proletariat, to the domination of the landlords and middle-class came to an end.* Henceforth, the trifling changes brought about have been due rather to the unavoidable advance of society than to any special activity. Freedom of the press, freedom of speech and right of public meeting had been secured by the Chartists and their sympathisers ; the right to combine had been partially conquered by the Trade Unionists ; some of the more grievous evils of the factory system had been checked by the Ten Hours Bill ; but no definite step had been taken towards the organisation of labour in the interest of the workers themselves, nor had any restriction been placed upon the power of the landowners and capitalists to avail themselves to the fullest extent of freedom of contract within the limits prescribed. Free- trade, as the abler thinkers on the side of the people had predicted would be the case, if that measure were earned * Of course Chartism loug survived this date, and many of its active supporters did admirable work in securing a really free press. But, as an effective revolutionary force, it died down after the meeting at Kennington. 264 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. without any compensating advantage for the workers, resulted only in increased profits for the capitalist class, and in securing for them more complete control over the entire field of production and exchange. But how is it that our working countrymen have been induced thus to rest since 1848 in contented, or, at any rate, apparently contented subjection, though, relatively to the wealth being piled up around them, their condition was getting worse and worse every day ? There must be some good reason for this strange quiescence when, continuously, from 1815 to 1848, there had been agitation, disturbance, and even bloodshed throughout the kingdom. The general explanation is that all grievances have been removed, that the working-classes have been too well off to complain, that education has softened their manners, that free-trade has increased their well-being, that the power to combine and write and speak freely has enabled them to bring sufficient pressure to bear, without resort to more threatening demon- strations. There is of course some truth in such a statement, but it is by no means sufficient to account for the almost sudden stillness which fell upon the people. The real causes of the remarkable change are, however, not far to seek. First among them must be placed the great impetus given to emigration by the improvement and the cheapening of the passage across the Atlantic to America, and to our own colonies, as well as by the great gold discoveries in California and Australia. The period in England was one of serious depression; 1847 was the year of the third general indus- trial crisis, the first having taken place in 1825. Nothing could be more gloomy than the outlook at home. The Irish were already being hurried across the Atlantic by the hundreds THE PERIOD OF APATHY. 265 of thousands, under conditions which have rendered them and theirs our undying enemies ; but with the gold discoveries in California, and the extraordinary change which was gradually wrought in American agriculture, a voluntary rush of English emigrants began as well. Attention was directed not only to California, but to the whole magnificent con- tinent of North America. Such a new opening was precisely suited to men who having failed to secure at home that control over the forces of their own country to which they thought themselves entitled, could scarcely accept quietly the permanent establishment of the mean middle-class rule. Accordingly the more energetic spirits of the rank and file, the very men who were, by disposition and training, the best calculated to keep alive in the minds of the people those ideas of political and social reconstruction which they had .striven to put in practice, joined in the " rush " to the Pacific slope and the newly opened agricultural regions, as they then were of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. The leaders of the democratic army were left, so to say, with- out either non-commissioned officers or veteran troops. Once away from England, in the free air of the Kepublic of the West, these English emigrants, unlike their Irish com- panions, too often forgot all about the degradation and misery they left behind them, threw themselves heart and soul into the great strife for individual gain which they found the ruling principle in the new country of their adoption, and have made what the Americans call " some of our best Colonists." The impulse which the gold discoveries in California gave to trade may be easily traced. The general prosperity seemed even greater than it was. Instead of a dearth of the precious metals, such as previously threatened, there 266 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. was now an adequate supply for all purposes. The increase of production of all kinds in the United States from this time forward was something marvellous, whilst England was naturally the country which provided the chief quantity of manufactured articles in response to the growing demand. Barely, however, had mankind at large begun to under- stand the effect of the gold discoveries in California, first made known in 1847, than similar discoveries were an- nounced in the English Colonies of Australia. This was in the middle of the year 1851. Another extraordinary rush followed to New South Wales and Victoria. It is interest- ing even now to read the records of these strange adventures of the modern Argonauts: ships left without crews, masters without servants, farmers without hands. All were absorbed in the one idea of mining for gold. Nor was this excite- ment merely temporary. From that date to the present the flow of English emigrants to the English-speaking settle- ments, whether in the United States or under our own flag, has been unceasing. Whenever an active energetic man has found himself shut out from all prospect of being politically useful or personally comfortable at home, he has sooner or later turned his attention to the great field open to him across the sea. The cleverest of our artisans, the finest of our labourers, the clearest-sighted of our working- class politicians have too many of them abandoned the apparently hopeless struggle against class inequality and class greed at home to seek a wider field in new countries where they could be sure for some years of obtaining a fair return for their labour if sober and industrious, and could besides look upon the growth of a young family as some- thing better than a drag upon themselves now, and a grave probability of misery for the children in the future. THE PERIOD OF APATHY. 267 But the political and social effect of this emigration immediately after 1848 was greater even than it has been since. Those who left became, in the majority of cases, prosperous and wealthy, those who remained at home Avere assured of comparatively " good times for a season. With good reason, therefore, could the capitalist class point to their great exhibition of 1851 with triumph. It was the celebration of bourgeois reaction in every country, the proclamation of the victory of the buy-cheap-and-sell-dear economy all the world over. All struggles, national or international, had been crushed by the brute force of the exploiting classes. Italy, Hungary, Ireland, Germany were once more under the heel of the oppressors. The French Republic, with Louis Napoleon as its President, was but the stepping-stone to that empire of stock-jobbers and prostitutes more degrading and injurious to the French people than even the direct bourgeois rule which preceded and followed it. The danger to the fabric of class domination was over-past for the time, and capitalist tyranny was fairly riveted again upon the necks of the people. The stoutest opponents of the whole system throughout Europe were seeking refuge, like our own people, in America, and were becoming, in spite of themselves, the means of widening the gulf between the wealth of the few and the poverty of the many in the " old home," by the demand for goods which their wants occasioned, and the enormous profits which the new markets they provided secured for the capitalist class. Unquestionably, therefore, the gold dis- coveries and the great increase of emigration consequent upon those discoveries, was the main cause of the change in the attitude of the working: class in Euixland towards their 268 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. social and political masters immediately after the great series of agitations and risings which lasted from 1835 to 1848. A few figures will show this very clearly. In 184G the total emigration from Great Britain and Ireland was 129,851, in 1847 this had increased to 258,270, in 1848 the numbers were 248,089. For the six years from 1848, the following were the figures :— in 1849, 299,498; in 1850, 280,849; in 1851, 335,996; in 1852, 368,764; in 1853, 329,937; in 1854, 323,429; two thirds of this emigration being from England, and the majority of the number adult males of English birth. A great outlet had in fact been found for the disaffected and adventurous, which they were not slow to take advantage of. The Crorawells and the Hampdens of the Chartist movement were rather helped than hindered in their resolution to try their fortune in new countries. This great exodus has, however, rarely been considered from the political point of view. It certainly came most unexpectedly to the aid of the possessing classes, and com- pletely falsified the predictions of even the most acute thinkers as to the immediate recurrence of a dangerous class struggle. For not only did the active workers leave continuously, but the men who had " made their pile " in other regions frequently returned to European countries with their accumulations, and thus strengthened, especially in England, the capitalist hierarchy to which they now naturally belonged. Historians have partially pointed out what a serious effect the emigration to the New "World and the vast inflow of precious metals had upon the greatness and development of Spain, how the most energetic of the rising generations hurried off to Peru, Mexico, and Cuba, whilst the riches which were poured into the hands of the king and the Church, enabled them to enter upon danger- THE PERIOD OF APATHY. 269 ous policies abroad at the same time that all movement at home was rendered hopeless. The great emigration from Europe' since 1847, and the development of the virgin resources of America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, &c., answers in some sort to that marvellous expansion of trade in the sixteenth century. Until within the last few years, when the Irish in America have begun to work for the political enfranchise- ment of their people in Ireland itself, the influence of the emigration upon Europe and England has been not dissimilar from that of the old emigration upon Spain. The great international banking, funding, loan-monger- ing, capitalist combination, took a wider and ever wider extensioD. Men who might have been of the greatest service in nobler fields, were drawn into the whirl of pro- duction for gain. England, the country in which the most serious social movement had begun — where political economy had first been studied, where Robert Owen had laid the foundations of true education, and the working- classes had organised alike the first peaceful, and the first forcible movement as a class against the capitalist tyranny, became wholly dead to all revolutionary propaganda ; and the middle-class could absolutely insult the English workers by flattering them with being content, as mere machines, to give forth profit, whilst " wild continental theorists " were urging them to rise against such economical oppression,* Thus it is clear to me that the gold discoveries, the in- creased emigration which they at once fostered, and the * Moreover, at lliis time, the iiiiddle-class bribed mauy of the Chart- ists wlio remained by posts in this or that office to turn against the cause of the people. This system has been carried on regularly up to the present day. 270 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. great improvement in steam shipping which still further accelerated the exodus, together with the immense wealth created by those who thus devoted their labour to develop- ment of virgin resources — the great movement of popula- tion, in short, which began about 1848, was the main reason why, when the revolutionary wave of that period quieted down, it did not rise again, in spite of the continuance and even the greater intensity of economical pressure. The United States and Australia were the safety-valves which allowed the capitalist machine to be driven at a higher speed than ever, without immediate danger to those who handled it. In addition to this, however, we must consider that at this time the full effect of our vast railway system, which in 1847 had led to a more than ordinarily severe crisis owing to the excessive amount of capital which had been invested in this direction and the inordinate speculation which orew up around the whole business, had begun to be felt in our home trade, and pushed the whole industrial popu- lation into ever increasing activity. England, too, had the advantage of being first in the field with improved machinery, and the cheap concentrated labour of our great towns. We had the start in every direction, and England became more than ever the workshop of the world. The purchasing power of wages increased more rapidly than com- petition among the labourers, and thus rendered them for the time more satisfied with their lot. Free-trade, of course, helped on the development by reducing the cost of raw material to the manufacturer, and of the necessaries of life to the workers ; but it was only one, and by no means the chief, cause of the great upward bound in the accumulation of wealth. All duties and restrictions were not removed THE PERIOD OF APATHY. 271 from the importation of food until 1867; but in the twenty years between 1 8 4 G the imports of corn mounted from 10,000,000 cwt. before 1846, to 66,789,024 cwt. in 1867, an amount which has since doubled ; so that England is now dependent for fully two-thirds of her food, as she was before for the raw material of her manufactures, upon foreign countries. More complete figures show the increasing dependence more clearly. During the nine years from 1840-48 the average total import yearly was 18,500,000 cwt, ; from 1849-1869, the average import yearly was 50,000,000 cwt.; from 1870-1881, the average import yearly was 110,000,000 cwt. No doubt this importation prevented great pressure from arising during periods of bad harvests, such as we have recently experienced, by a sudden increase of the price of the necessaries of life in comparison with the rate of wages — a rate which all experience in this country and abroad, shows that the w^orkers cannot even by the most complete combinations suddenly change. But although this free import has prevented serious evils to the workers and consequent troubles and risings, such as occurred at other periods of bad seasons, it has in no sense interfered with the general law that wages under existing conditions tend towards the starvation level, nor with the vast increase of our manufacturing industries which has resulted in such a concentration of our town population that almost unheard- of misery exists side by side with enormous wealth. Mean- while the imports of raw materials were growing still more rapidly. The quantity of raw cotton imported, allowance being made for re-export, which had been 400,000,000 lbs. in 1846 and 1847, increased to 1,140,000,000 lbs. in 1860. Such a development seems almost incredible within HE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. so [short a time ; but at this period the Indian market may be said to have been completely conquered, whilst European countries and America had not yet begun to manufacture for themselves upon a large scale.* Then came the collapse, owing to the war between the North and South in the United States ; but the truth was, that the production had been overdone before. In their anxiety to find a market, the Lancashire manufacturers had produced to excess. From 1860 came a period of depres- sion which, during the years 1862-66, reached the point of absolute starvation. India was used to fill up the void caused by the American falling-off, and the factory hands suffered in patience from the misery which the loss of employment occasioned. When, however, emigration was proposed as a remedy for the evil, when philanthropic men * Mr Hem-y Asliwortb, quoted by Mr Hoyle in "Our National Eesoiu'ces," p. 22, gives the following table of the increase of the value of land in Lancashire in 1692 and 1865. Eeal Property Assessed for Land-Tax in Lancashire at Two Periods. - Annual Value, 1692. £ 5,774 8,500 10,288 11,131 25,907 35,642 97,242 Annual Value, 1865. Increase of Value. Rate of Increase, per cent. Hundred of Ley land, „ Lonsdale, „ Amounderness, ,, Blackburn, . „ Salford, . „ West Derby, . £ 249,284 423,967 526,239 950,916 4,084,888 3,801,585 £ 243,510 415,467 515,951 939,785 4,058,931 3,765,943 or 4,317 „ 4,987 „ 5,115 „ 8,542 „ 15,767 „ 10,666 10,036,879 9,939,637 It is a pity Mr Ashworth did not give the rate of his own profits and those of his brother capitalists, say only from 1832 to 1865, at the same time. THE PERIOD OF APA THY. 273 desired that Government should assist those who were pin- ing in misery in Lancashire to regions where they might take themselves out of the wage-earning class for life, the Lancashire manufacturers most vigorously protested against this course. They wanted the " hands," they said, upon the return of trade. What would they do if the only means whereby they could make their capital fructify were to be taken from them. Throughout the whole of the dispute they argued as if they had some vested interest in the people, who could want nothing better than to act as fuel for capital, and to provide surplus value, in accordance with middle-class economy, for their masters. Unluckily, all the officials took the capitalist view. Emigration was far from being a permanent remedy for the mischief, but it was monstrous, indeed, that scarcely any steps should have been taken in this direction, merely in order that the masters might not be deprived of their wage-slaves on the return of brisk trade. Worse than this, however, the employers frequently ran their mills full time for a short period rather than half-time for a longer, because in this way they made greater profit out of the hands they employed, though other men had to stand idle all the day. The people themselves seemed to have lost all pluck. Middle-class rule, and middle-class economy had led them to believe that they were born only to labour, that, no matter how much wealth they might create, tlicy themselves should rest satisfied with their daily or weekly wage. They had absolutely been led, many of tliom, to believe that over- population was the real difficulty thiy had to contend with, and that such typical capitalists as Mr Cobden and Mr Bright were the friends of the working-classes, instead of their bitterest, because most hypocritical and insidious s 274 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. enemies. That the Lancashire lads should have submitted without a murmur to the misery they endured during the great cotton famine, when they themselves could look round upon the wealth which they had created, and the lands they liad been robbed of, is surely a sufficient answer to those who contend that mere hunger and oppression must of themselves engender insurrection. Not until 1870 did the cotton industry return to the same activity which it had attained in 1859-60. Thence- forward, the amount of raw material imported has remained nearly stationary at 1,400,000,000 lbs., though the years 1877 and 1878 fell almost to the level of 18G0. Almost the same expansion may be noted in other branches, the import of raw wool having trebled between 1843 and 1881, whilst coal, iron, and other industries have developed in to the full as great a proportion. We have but to look around us, in fact, to note the changes which have taken place. The contrast between what was and what is can barely be expressed in plain words. On every side the accumulation of wealth and its effects, in the increasing luxury and uselessness of large portions of the population may be observed, the growth of great lounger-towns such as Brighton, Cheltenham, Scarborough, Eastbourne, Torquay, &c., where no production whatever goes on in an economical sense, the vast additions to the palaces at the west end of London, and similar erections in other cities, bear witness to the fact that the classes which live upon the labour of their own countrymen, or upon the wealth derived from impoverished India are constantly acquiring greater strength. This growth of the lounger-towns is in itself a most remarkable phenomenon. A comparison of the population of such THE PERIOD OF APATJIY. 275 towns census by census shows at once what a development has taken place in this direction ; and here, at any rate, there can be no pretence that the wealthy inhabitants of these cities of pleasure " organise " labour, and thus are entitled to large remuneration. Those who thus live at ease upon their incomes, and maintain a useless fringe of hangers-on to live upon differences of value, or to administer to luxury, are simply pensioners upon labour, who seize the wealth of the producers under the laws made by the possessing class, whilst thousands or millions exist on starvation waores. The mere returns of income alone above £150 a year show the extraordinary amassing of wealth which has gone on since 1848. Thus in 1848 the total annual value assessed to income-tax in Great Britain,* Ireland being excluded, was £256,000,000 in 1882 the total annual value was actually £578,000,000 showing an increase ol at least £300,000,000 in the thirty-five years. Yet all know that the returns to income-tax are immensely under- stated, and that in all probability the amount if properly returned would reach close upon £700,000,000. The population of Great Britain has increased from 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 in the meantime. Thus even at the rate given by the owners of incomes admitted to be above £150 a year, the wealth of the non-producing classes as represented only by annual returns and without considering the vast amounts on which no tax fur income can be claimed, or estimating the false returns in any way, has increased more than two fold since 1848, whilst the poj)ulation has in- creased only one-half. It is amazing in tlu' face of these * This is really an unfair compai-ison, seeing that the limit of taxa- tion has been greatly raised since 1865. 2/6 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. figures that some partisans of the discredited school of Malthus should still be found to declare that it is to " over- population" that we must attribute the fearful contrasts which lie around us. But an estimate of the total income at the two periods taken for contrast is still more instructive. In 1848 the entire income of the United Kingdom was put at £520,000,000, in 1882 the total income was estimated at close on £1,3 00, 00 0,0 00.'''' Here then was an increase of two-and-a-half times, and although such estimates are really very difficult to frame accurately, the above tallies closely enough with the official income-tax returns to render it probable that they are very nearly correct. Nor for the purpose we have in view does an assumed fall in the value of the precious metals make much difference in the calculation. For according to the same authority the actual producers by labour who received in wages £278,000,000 out of a total estimated income of £520,000,000 in 1848, receive no more than, at the outside, £338,000,000 out of a total income of £1,300,000,000 in 1882, much of which they pay back again to the possessing class. Thus then whereas in 1848 the landlords, the capitalists, and the middle class absorbed less than one- half of the total income, in 1882 thirty-four years later they took just three-fourths of such income.! Mr Mulhall * EobertGiffen. + According to Mr Robert Giffen's calculations, the following are the total amounts of wealth in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at the respective dates. Mr Giffen it is well to state is the liead of the Statistical Department of the Board of Trade. The totals are in round figures. 1814 £2,300,000,000 1865 £6,100,000,000 1875 £8,500,000,000 Let any worker or thinker consider these figures, and bearing in THE PERIOD OF APATHY. 277 estimates further that 222,500 families absolutely possess property to the value of £5,728,000,000, while 4,629,000 families possess together only £398,000,000 at the out- side. The same authority estimates the total wealth in 1882 at £8,750,000,000. Here, then, is a conclusive answer to those who contend that the working-classes share our vast development of wealth. They do nothing of the kind. It may be added here that in addition to the profit made out of their own countrymen, it is calculated that the capitalist class receive from £65,000,000 to £80,000,000 a year as a return for their investments made abroad. Thus the working-classes are more and more divided from the classes who live upon their labour, whilst the in- creasing amount of capital needed to enable a man to begin to produce on his own account, renders it impossible for any worker who is not born with a complete genius for "acquisition," to rise out of his own class into the class of the oppressors. So far from reduction of taxation upon imports having raised the workers relatively to the wealthy, this very measure has depressed them, in comparison, mind that between 1865 and 1875 a greater addition was raade to the wealth of the country than the total amount of wealth existing in 1814, let him further retlect on the condition of the working classes, as set forth in the Blue Books and Reports of Factory Insj)ectors for 1875. Arthur Young's estimates of population and production in the latter half of the last century are worth giving for the sake of com- parison. Total population 9,000,U00. Dependent on agriculture (less landlords, clergy and poor) 2,800,000. Capital value of land £536,000,000. Capital value of houses £100,000,000. Farmers' capital £110,000,0(10. Rent £16,000,000. Rent of houses £.'),000,000. "Product of the soil in husbandry," not including woods and forests, etc., £83,237,691. "Expendituie of husbandry," including rent and wages £65,000,000. Farmers' profit £18,237,691. Labourei-s' wages £14,500,000. 273 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. more than they were before. Still clearer proof of this will be given in the next chapter, but in 1863, seventeen years after the Repeal of the Corn Laws, Mr Gladstone said, in introducing tlie Budget for that year : — " It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state of the country, that while there is a decrease in the consuming power of the people, and an increase in the privations and distress of the labouring class and operatives, there is at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes , and a constant increase of It is indeed generally allowed that nothing could well be worse than the position of the people in our great cities, and of large portions of our agricultural population side by side with unheard-of wealth. The popular movements during this period have been of the feeblest description, owing to the circumstances narrated. It is true that the ballot has become the law for elections — a measure which was a portion of a high Tory programme a century ago — and in 1867 a Conservative cabinet carried household suffrage for the towns, after a certain amount of popular agitation, and for fear that their political rivals might get the better of them if they declined to take the matter in hand themselves ; true, also, that progress has been made in some directions in protecting the workers against the oppression of employers, and in public instruc- tion ; but in the main no great changes have taken place in the distribution of power or in the organisation of produc- * I had intended to insert here the statistics of the various occupa- tions of the people in 1861, 1871 and 1881, showing the decrease of the rural population and the increasing employment of women in industry. But the census for 1881 is not available yet (October 1883) ! THE PERIOD OF APATHY. 279 tion. The progress has been simply of a character wliich on the whole suited the views of the capitalist class, subject to the absolutely necessary yielding to the pressure brought to bear by the workers and the less selfish of the professional classes, who have made common cause with them. By still maintaining an inordinate cost for political elections, and refusing to charge the expenses on the rates or the public revenue, by still insisting on gratuitous service from Members of Parliament, the working-classes, even where they have roused themselves from their apathy and indifference, have been forced to return to the so-called popular chamber members whose interests are directly opposed to those of the labourers, and who, on any real knife-and-fork question, would resolutely vote against measures for the welfare of the great majority, on the ground that the principles of political economy, manufactured for their advantage, would be out- rasred if this or that change were made for the benefit of the many. An analysis of the House of Commons shows at once how completely it is still in the hands of the owners of the means of production and their hangers-on. The only marvel is that such an assembly should ever have brought itself to carry any popular measures whatever. The aristo- crats are directly or indirectly represented by 272 members ; the landed interests are represented by 207 members; there arc 122 lawyers who live upon the complications of the laws they themselves pass; 18 members of great influence represent the drink interest; 25 members speak for the bankers; 113 hang together on all matters which concern their clients, the railway shareholders; 155 arc capitalists and merchants.* Out of the total of 058 ♦ "The Financial Eeforra Almarack," 1883, p. 55. This publication 28o THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. members, but two in any sense represent those who provide the wealth which the other portions of the community use and enjoy, and even these two have, on more than one occasion, deliberately betrayed the interests of their own class. To, talk, therefore, of progress in any wide sense between 1848 and 1883 is almost ridiculous. Capital still controls all legislation, though pressure from without may force on a few minor reforms. Since 1867 as since 1832 middle-class rule has had it all its own way. A Reform Bill means little when all the political forces are in the hands of the possessing class, when the press of the country is almost entirely in their hands, and when, as before said, it is cheap and easy to bribe some of the active intelligent men who too often are obliged by the consideration of maintaining their wife and family outside the workhouse, to accept help from the natural enemies of their own class. The truth is that Constitutional Government and Representation of the People, as at present organised, are in the 'strictest sense middle-class institutions, arising out of the same conditions which give the middle-class pre- dominance in the field of production. The fictitious free- dom of contract which serves so well to disguise practical slavery in the economical struggle is translated into a fictitious freedom of speech and freedom of election in the political struggle, though in existing arrangements such freedom means in both cases only the right to change the name of the master or of the representative, leaving the real compulsion all the while as oppressive as if liberty were unknown. Forms of Government, in short, matter is issued entirely in the interests of capitalists and against the workers ; but it contains figures which are useful as showing the unblushing robbery which goes on in every direction under middle-class rule. THE PERIOD OF APATHY. 281 not at all to the mass of our workers, so long as tliey are prevented from organising their own labour ; and elections as at present conducted simply mean that a portion of the wage-slave class have the privilege of sanctioning the system by which they and their fellows are enslaved. Our external policy has been conducted on the same lines as our domestic. We welcomed Louis Napoleon as an ally with open arms because his despotism, begun in fraud and treachery and established on cold-blooded massacre, secured for the trading classes of France that " order " which enabled them to keep down the workers and repress their ideas. Men professed a regard for op- pressed nationalities just in so far as their enfranchisement might strengthen the bourgeoisie. The moment the pro- letariat showed any signs of fighting for their own hand our own middle-class at once took alarm. The Crimean War and the Mutiny in India scarcely ruffled the stream of placid contentment at home. In Turkey, after the peace of 18.3 6, our financiers found another field for the practice of their familiar chicanery ; whilst Russia herself was forced by the pressure of defeat, or the supposed necessity for im- mediate construction of railroads, to become tributary to our loan-mongers. India since 18o7 has fallen under the same control; and capital draining from the country yearly enormous sums for the benefit of the wealtliy, has aggra- vated dearth and famine to a pitch unknown in all the long history of Hindostan. Everything has been turiud to the account of English capital, which draws its return from all quarters of the globe. Liebig called England the vampire of the naticms, fur he saw the inevitable effect upon the immediate future of a system whicii forced foreign countries to exhaust alike their soil and their inhabitants by 282 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. paying heavy tribute for loans to the capitalist class of Great Britain. But hitherto our own leading thinkers have congratulated the country upon all this, as if the ravening greed for gain which neglects all real scientific organization of labour at home or abroad, and enriches the few in the present at the expense of permanent injury to the many now and in the future were the sole object of human life. Although, however, capital has thus gained power, and great social and political movements have almost died down since 1848, in one quarter so much progress has been made that now what was in some degree advantageous to the people at large is becoming harmful to the general interest. I refer to the Trade Unions and the right of com- bination which they have at length conquered from the exploiting classes.* The right of combination was con- ceded, as stated, in 1824, but it was subject to a number of restrictions which, when enforced, still placed the workers at the mercy of the masters in many respects. It was a conspiracy to combine to the injury of third parties. It was a conspiracy to combine to affect the wages of people not present at the meeting of the workers interested, " in fact, there was scarcely an act performed by any workman as a member of a trade-union which was not an act of conspiracy and misdemeanour."-f- The case of the six Dorchester labourers, one of the most infamous cases of tyranny in all the long record of class oppression, shows that there clauses of the Act were not allowed to remain a dead letter. These men were actually convicted and sentenced to seven years' * It is worthy of note that Eobert Owen presided at the first organised Congress of Trade Unions, t Howell, p. 1, 34. THE PERIOD OF APATHY. 283 transportation for the crime of combination. But this was in the days prior to 1848. The spirit of resistance to middle-ckss oppression was still alive among the people. A public meeting of 400,000 persons was held in London. A procession of nearly 50,000 working men attended on Lord Melbourne to present an enormous petition on behalf of these six men. The Whigs and their capitalist allies resisted as long as they dared, but at last the men were pardoned. Pardoned ; but they had been hurried out of the country and sold for slaves in New South Wales at £1 a-head. No notice was ever sent to them of their reprieve, and none of them heard of it for years. Such is English justice when the law is handled by a class. It was from this unbearable tyranny that the trade- unionists had to free themselves. In 1848 a serious prosecution was instituted against twenty-one masons for conspiracy under the Act of 6 George IV. A prolonged agitation followed, which resulted in the discharge of the workmen on appeal, though heavy costs were incuiTcd. It is upon these heavy costs the capitalist class rely, to break down the resistance of the workers in all cases, and similar cases at Sheffield, where the sentence of the men accused of combination to ten years penal servitude was reversed on appeal proved specially expensive. No damages be it remembered were ever given to the workers for false im- prisonment, nor were the hardships to which they were put in the least considered. It was the " law " enacted and enforced by the class hostile to the labourers, but the law which they must submit to nevertheless though wholly unrepresented. The costs of some of these prosecutions to the Unions are worth noting, three such cases at Newton, Sheffield 284 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. and Wolverhampton, absolutely costing in all no less than £7,658 9s, Od.* This was indeed, as the workmen said, persecution not prosecution under the shameful law of conspiracy then existing, and a definite agitation now began for the repeal of the Act itself under which such infamous injustice could be done. The great strikes at Preston from 1853 to 1854, and the Wolverhampton strike 1855, above all the OT-eat builders' strike and lock-out in London in 1859, kept public attention constantly fixed on those disputes. The strike of 1859 resulted in the condemnation of one man to two months imprisonment for picketing, and from this time forward the agitation for the repeal of this oppressive law was continuous and thoroughly organised. The trade-unionists demanded an entire repeal of the com- bination laws, not merely their modification or mitigation, as well as the final abandonment of all prosecutions for con- spiracy arising from labour disputes. I will here quote Mr George Howell, who, having done good service in his day, has now unfortunately thrown in his lot with the very capitalist class he began by resisting. The capitalist " press as usual met these demands by re- viving all the old stories about trade-union tyranny and oppression ; instances of intimidation and outrage were raked up from the blue-books of the past ; sometimes the picture was coloured by pure inventions for the sake of eifect ; the unions were denounced as secret societies, whose power was sustained only by the terrorism which they exercise over the minds of the more timid and ignorant of the workmen."! But the result was not what the opponents of the Trade Unions hoped. Even the horrible outrages at Sheffield in 186G, which created so great a * Howell, p. 141, t Ibid., p. 14.3, THE PERIOD OF APA i HY. 285 sensation throngliout the country, and were identified with the name of Broadhead did not overshadow the important truth which lay below — that the only hope of the workers is in combination, and tliat to refuse such right to combine means injustice, which must sooner or later lead to graver conspiracy and violence.* What, however, is not even yet fully admitted is, that all combination is based in the long run upon force and fear of punishment. This may be very objectionable to state in so many words, but it is a portion of the human nature of the upper and middle classes as well as of the workers. Publicity and freedom undoubtedly tend to lessen the likelihood of such appeals to force as showing more and more conclusively on which side the real strength lies. Yet in the long run members of any class association know well that the onl)"- real basis of authority is the power of compelling obedience, either by social or other force, to the rules framed by the majority. The result of the Royal Commission in 18(57 was, how- ever, the Trade Union Act of 1871, and at last after a further vigorous and persistent agitation carried on in every shape, the Trade Unions gained the full repeal of the penal laws affecting labour combinations. This was not, however, * I nmat here record my sincere adminition for the noble conduct of the band of Positivists, l)r C-ongrevo, Professor P>eesly, Mr Frederick Harrison, Dr Bridges, Mr Henry Cronipton, and others, who stood forward to champiou the rights of the workers of Great Britain when the whole cajiitalist press was denouncing the Trade Unionists, and when many who now court the Trade Union leaders refused to say a Word in tlieir defence. Such men deserve, and I liope will receive, tlie personal thanks of the lovers of freedom in every country. I say this mj'self with the less reserve that I am entirely opposed t:>2 sore and grievous want in East London as in any of those parts of Ireland where such a cry has been raised ; and the worst of it is that those under-fed people continue to have children, who, having been brought up in the same state of semi-starvation, have no chance in the present condition of growing up into strong, healthy men and women." They are being starved and stunted, in fact, with wealth all around them. If any one wisl cs to hire the lowest class of labour in the world, the board-men who parade the streets with placards affixed to them, what does he find 1 That hundreds, nay, even thousands, of such poor creatures are ready to undertake the job at from Is. to Is. 6d. a day. Consider the prostitution again throughout our city popu- lation, from the mistress of the aristocrat and plutocrat, who rivals her aristocratic and plutocratic sisters in laces and luxury, to the miserable, drunken harlot of the rookeries, or the still more pitiable case of the starving seamstress or factory girl, driven to sell herself to the first buyer for a, few shillings or a few pence. There are thousands of such women produced by our present system every year apart from the girls who from their earliest infancy are brought up in conditions which render purity almost impossible. Case after case has lately appeared in the police court where girls have been proved to be earning from 4s. to 7s. a week for the most exhausting toil from week's end to week's end. One large establishment, which is supposed to pay rather better than the rest, gives out cravats to its re- gular "sweaters" at the rate of Is. ]^d. the dozen, the sweater making them up and providing his own silk for sewing, &c. These cravats are then made up by the sewing girls at 9d. a dozen. Now, working thirteen hours a day in conjunction with others for six days in the week, a 356 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. skilled seamstress can just earn 12s. a week in good times. What can she save when food and house-rent are paid ? what can she do when bad times come ? She has her choice between the streets and the workhouse. And there are thousands worse off. The factory inspectors never fail to denounce the system of slow torture which is going on, the medical authorities, true as of old to the cause of the people, lift up their voices against such anarchy which produces moral, mental, and physical degradation, but all to no purpose. Evidence of the horrors which go on may be found in every direction. Men and women of the luxurious classes in London or in Liverj)ool, in Manchester, Glasgow, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bradford, in every great centre of population, have but to apply to the health officers, the policemen, the out-surgeons at the hospitals, or the workhouse officials, to find out speedily what manner of political economy it is •with which they are contented. In almost every direction things are getting worse instead of better. For instance, a few years ago some truly bene- volent persons established a hospital to deal with young girls affected with diseases arising out of prostitution. Whilst the numbers of these poor creatures applying for attention have steadily and rapidly increased, the age of the appli- cants have as steadily and rapidly fallen. Mere children constantly appear with the clearest evidence that the life which has brought them there is habitual to them. To give the horrible details is impossible, yet such putrefaction as this can scarcely mine below without bringing fearful physical retribution on coming generations; and the most squeamish may even in our own day have social problems forced home to them which now they keep a whole stafif of PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. 357 paid agents to ward off from between the wind and their gentility. But I will now take the wages and actual conditions of work in some of the great trades, in order that we may see how far that great improvement has taken place actually — relatively no one claims an improvement — in the face of the vast accumulation which has been going on. To begin with, a recent discussion in the Manchester Guardian has proved conclusively that in proportion to the labour which they do owing to the increased rapidity of the machinery and the consequently enhanced intensity of labour which they exert, the workers in cotton mills are not paid more in proportion, nor even so much, as they were thirty years ago.* The manufacturer, Mr Fielden, who argued that wages had increased enormously, was evidently surprised to find the truth. No doubt great advances have been made as already recounted in ihe conditions of Avork, by the reduction of hours for women and children, and the better ventilation of the larger mills ; but matters are still very bad even in this respect. The hot close unhealthy atmosphere, the dust which flies about, are most injurious, whilst the adulterating processes of sizing and steaming are carried on at the ex- pense of the health of the workers. This is specially notice- able of course in the smaller mills, where "anoemia, debilit}^ diarrhoea, and other formidable symptoms of pulmonary mis- chief are the result." f A woman employed as a " can- minder," it may be mentioned here, has to move cans • Wlieruas iu the spinning of medium or coarse coi-sets forty years ago, the mule stretches were from 1700 to 1800 per day of twelve hours, they now average 2161 per day of ten hours, so that considerably more attention and movement is required on the part of the piecers. t G. Phillips Bevau, "Textile Industries," p. 15. This gentleman is a sworn cham])ion of the capitalists. That is why I quote him. 03^ THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. weighing 16 to 18 lbs. more than 900 times a day, the work being unremitting. In the spinning room the heat is very great, and the amount of walking done in the day about a sixth more than at the time of Lord Shaftesbury's calculations,* Bearing in mind, however, the talk we sometimes hear of the enormous wages now earned by the cotton operatives, consider the following table of weekly earnings in a Man- chester spinning factory a little while ago :— ^ Spinning Department. Doubling Department. s. d. s. d. Scutcliing tenters, . 13 6 Cop windei's, . 10 6 Strippers, , . 22 Clear, .... 12 Grinders, . . 23 "Warp, .... 12 Card-tenters, . 11 Doublers, .... 11 Overlookers, . 30 „ doffers. 3 Draw- frame tenters, . 14 3 „ bobbin carriers, 3 Eoving, . 15 6 Reelers, .... 12 Jack, . 13 Makers up. 27 Spinners, . . 20 4 Warjaers, .... 45 „ piecers, . 13 6 Eoller coverers, 12 6 ,, creelers, . . 13 6 Overlookers, . 38 It will be observed that there are only two classes of workers, very small in number, who get what would be called high wages in this whole mill. The wages are lower to-day, and no allowance is made for slack time or sickness. Now, when house-rent is paid for, when clothing has been obtained, when some account is taken of the cost of tending children and the house, how much is left out of such wages for really good wholesome nourish- ment for all members of the family ? The fact is, the race degenerates under such food and such work. This fact is proved beyond doubt. The surgeons who rei^lied to the * See Chapter v., p. 168 ; also note to Chapter iv. PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. J 3"; questions put seven or eight years ago are all of one mind. One attributes the deterioration chiefly to the neglect of the family duties by the mother, another to " the intemperate habits of the people, the innutritious food and the excessive use of tobacco by the very young.* A third writes, " The physical strength suffers much in factories from confined heated atmosphere, loaded with fine cotton fibres, flinty sand, and cutaneous exhalations," — the old story of fifty and sixty years ago retold — " the number of gas-lights, each light destroying oxygen equal to one man ; transitions from the mills and the irregular temperature to their own dwell- ings ; diet and drinks adapted to a heated employment, and stimulants to soothe an excited nervous tension ; vision always on the nerve ; perception and volition from the nature of their work always in action. But unfortunately drink, stimulants, and mental excitement are resorted to, and want, improvidence, poor houses, and bad food tell against healthy offspring. No doubt factory physique is not good, but it is made worse by factory associates of vice and iniquity." Bad food and over-work, miserable housing, and bad education force the people to gin and debauchery. Once more I ask what sort of econom}', what sort of states- manship, what sort of humanity is that which leaves the workers in one of our most important industries in such a condition of degeneracy as this, because to interfere or to rouse the workers to protect themselves might mean social- ism ? I grant that something has been done by law ; but how much remains to do? The wages in the flax, linen, and jute industry arc some- what lower than in the cotton factories, and the employment is very unhealthy. The room where the tow is carded is * Factory Reports, 1875. 36o THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. specially injurious, being filled with noisome dust which lies thick on the clothes of the workers in spite of heavy venti- lating fans. Speaking of the mills in Belfast, Dr Purdon says, " Nearly three-fifths of those that die annually in this trade are taken off by, diseases of the respiratory organs. In the preparing rooms the death-rate from chest affections is exceedingly high, being 31 per 1000, and amongst the hecklers the deaths usually amount to 11*1 per 1000, amongst the weavers to 9 per 1000. In wet spinning the children often get their clothes wet with the spray that comes off from the spindles, and on coming out of the hot room with their clothes damp in the evening, it brings on bronchial affection." * The average life of the flax-workers is of course proportionately short, and the capitalist works him into the pauper grave-yard at a higher rate of profit to himself. In the woollen and shoddy and kindred industries there are exceedingly unhealthy departments, notwithstand- ing the improvements which have been made of late years, dnd the tendency of factory legislation in the right direction. The laws have been good, but owing to the pernicious cheese-paring of the middle-class government, enough factory inspectors have not been appointed. t The saving of a few hundreds a year in the Budget always outweighs the saving of a few thousands of lives in the factories. Consequently we still read that in this woollen and shoddy industry the work is often carried on in conditions dangerous to health. In the shoddy mills the dust which arises when the old worn-out cloths are being torn to pieces is highly unwhole- * Factory and Workshops Commission, 1875, + In the session of 1882, Sir William Hai'court answering Mr Henry Bi'oadhuvst's request that more Factory Inspectors should be aj^pointed, said he did not know where the money was to come from to pay them. PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. 361 some. The process is called " devilling," and the result to the workers is a permanent catarrh and irritation of the mucous membrane known as " shoddy fever." Let anyone imagine going day after day for ten hours into an atmos- phere such as that arising from the tearing up of the worst description of garments, with the shoddy fever already upon him or her, for the privilege of earning the noble recompense of from 10s. to 25s. a week according to the class of labour. The wool-sorting is better paid, wool-sorters earning from 24s. to 30s. a week ; but in the majority of cases they run the risk of their health, or even of a painful and lingering death from blood-poisoning, in order to gain this magnificent revenue. Even where great precautions are taken frightful mis- chiefs arise. A wool-sorter, employed by Messrs Titus Salt & Co., gave the following evidence : — He had suffered from illness from sorting bags of fleeces from animals which had died before they were sheared — technically called " fallen fleeces," which had a very bad smell.* '' On eaoli occasion of his illness he Avas engaged on these offensive bags ; and the symptoms of his illness were similar in each case. He was subject to cold and shivering and vomiting, followed by insensibility. He had had no eruptions from the skin ; but the nails left his fingers on the last attack. He attributed their decay to the sorting of the material on which he was enffasred He had known several other workmen who suffered from illness, and he had stayed with them during portions of their illness. He believed ten or more of these men had died, and many others like himself had recovered and had returned to work. He had known one instance where a man left his work, and was dead on *" Factory Keports," 1880, p. 32. 362 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. the following morning from this cause. His name was Semple Fox ; and another of these men, Robert Naylor, was also at work one day and died the next." Wages, 24s. to 30s. a week at the outside. And all this takes place in one of the greatest firms in the trade ; what, therefore, must have been the state of things in the smaller factories ? " At factories at Glasgow and Leicester, in which noxious hair and wool are constantly used, fatal cases had occurred, and illnesses had been endured which were attributable to the operation of sorting." '^ Let us recall once again that the average " lease of life " of these poor fellows is less than half that of their well-to-do neighbours, and then, if we can, thank the benevolent capitalists for providing them work in this deadly fashion. In the same report from which these quotations are made will be found "the horrible manner" in which workers in phosphorus suffer, how the jaw becomes ulcerated, "and in some cases the jaw-bone is destroyed." t The silk industry is in much the same condition as the cotton in regard to the methods of work and the wages paid, though the Spitalfields silk trade has never recovered from its long period of depression, and those who were dependent upon it sank into the most miserable state. In Macclesfield, Derby, and Nottingham the wages vary somewhat, but in good years adult women earn from 8s. 6d. to 12s. for a week's work of sixty hours, and men 18s. to 24s., some few get 30s. for the same. In all these averages no allowance is made for sickness or slack time, and the rents are fre- quently heavy. But it is scarcely necessary to go through all the different trades. In every one we find the same facts — wages even for the highest class of workers only just sufficient to enable them to live in fair comfort, so long as strength, * P. 37. t P. 15. PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. 363 eyesight, or dexterity last, but with an ever-increasing strain upon vitality, and a certainty of early death. Of the state of the milliners' girls in the shops in London, of the slaves to the sweaters in the east, I have spoken elsewhere.* Here, perhaps, even more clearly than in the factories can be seen the hideous effect of the laws of supply and demand on people Avorking for a bare subsistence wage. All individu- ality, all hope of improvement is crushed out of these un- fortunates by the fearful monotony of the work, the starva- tion wages, and the poisonous atmosphere in which the w^ork is carried on. Of the dressmakers Mr Inspector Gerald says — " I know of no large class of female workers whose vital interests are so entirely neglected, and who labour under such disadvantageous conditions (the nature of their work itself being so perfectly free from any necessarily concomitant evils), as the unlucky victims of the dressmak- ing industry. Of the thousands of young and delicate girls who are engaged in trying to earn a bare subsistence in a deleterious atmosphere, no one can tell how many go down in the struggle. No statistics can be formed of the percentage of deaths, of enfeebled constitutions, of the amount of disease engendered in the first instance by the deadly atmosphere of the workrooms in second and third class establishments devoted to the dressmaking and ladies' clothing trade in the west end of London."! In addition, the inspector gives the following table of some of the work dens he visited. (1) 112 cubic feet per employee. (2) 180 (3) 102 (4) 80 (5) 94 * " England for All," chapter ii t P. 23. Full details in Report of 1881. 364 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Similar cases were commoD, though the minimum space allowed in factories is 2 5 cubic feet per employee, and in this case no deduction is made for gas jets. How can we wonder that unfortunate girls doomed to life-long slavery in such " black holes " as these should furnish perpetual recruits to the ranks of prostitution, ready to accept any unknown ills rather than continue in such hideous misery as this ? Throughout England, wherever cheap millinery and cheap tailoring are provided, there will be found similar frightful oppression. What dreadful overwork goes on among the shop-assistants is also well known. Girls frequently stand for thirteen hours a day, no seats being provided for them, with the result, according to repeated medical evidence, that all sorts of diseases of the spine, womb, and joints are brought on. Yet the advocates of women's suffrage and the rights of women are for leaving that freedom of contract untouched which bring^s about these abominations. Taking other fields of work, such as the iron industry, the coal mining industry, the potteries, and brick-fields, in each and all we find the same state of things. Wages high here and there, but on the average very low for hard, excessive, and unwholesome labour. Recent revelations of the nail-trade, for instance, show that women work in that trade for four- teen hours a day to gain a pittance of 6s. a week.* In the iron trade, as a whole, wages are somewhat higher, but the men are subject to periods of enforced idleness, such as those whicli fell upon the Cleveland district a few years ago, reducing the people to complete destitution, whilst the ordinary labour is extremely heavy.-j- Recent meetings of * " The nailers during this year have been brought to extreme want owing to a droi) of thirty per cent, in their wages since August 1878, they being considered at that time at a low ebb." Eeport, 18S0. t The truck system still goes on in the midland counties. Eeport, 1880. PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. 365 the coal-miners in the North of England and in Wales, clearly prove that the tales which flippant conservative publicists sometimes see tit to invent about the luxurious lives of such men are not only untrue but absurd. The averao-e earninsfs of a collier are under £1 a week. And then read of the work that has to be done for this pittance, bearino- in mind the fact that the whole trade is carried on, even with all the precautions and mines regulations Acts, at tlie risk of the men's lives. The pitman has to labour hour after hour in a close packed position which is liable to render him crook-backed and lame, the air is in many cases bad, and his " lease of life " is necessarily short* Yet it is skilled labour, and no man not brought up to the trade could earn a living at it. When the trade was in its most flourishing condition, men earned, at the outside, £2 a week on the average, though the profits of the capitalists were enormous, and Lord Dudley alone took £1,000,000 in one year in royalties. In the brick and pottery works heavy un- wholesome work is rather the rule. Girls carry 11 tons of clay a day to and fro for 10s. to 14s. a week, and the state of the people in some districts is that of savages, so miserable are the social conditions in which they are brought up. Here is an official description. " A most barbarous, semi-civilized, ignorant set. Men and boys look like Red-Indians; the sand used in brickmaking being burned red, and with which their bodies are covered, working bareheaded, barefooted, with * Dr Lee, the healtlx officer for Manchester, states, 15th January 1875, that the average " lease of life " for the well-to-do class is thirty-eight years, whilst that of the workers is only seventeen ; in Liverpool the average is thirty-five for the well-to-do, and only fifteen for the workers. Thus showing that in these two great centres of industry, the average duration of life is, as in London, twice as long for the easy classes as for the labouring portion of the population . 366 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. exposed breasts, and witli wild looks. Drinking all day Sunday ; Monday, Tuesday, dog-fighting and man-fighting. They resume work on Wednesday, when the poor little unfortunates are made to toil away, stamping, and carry- ing, and pressing a good fortnight's work into three or four days." Well may my friend, Mr Henry George, point to our modern civilisation and tell us that the barbarians of the British Empire, the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals of our wage-slave civilisation are in our midst. Only lately a famous fugleman of the capitalist class. Professor Leone Levi, has been examining into the condi- tion of another important body of men, our fishermen, the back-bone, in years gone by, of our navy and commercial marine. It is the fashion to say that fishermen are thrift- less ; that they make good wages and drink them away. Mr Levi now tells us that there are in round figures, 130,000 men engaged in this industry, 70,000 regularly, 00,000 irregularly. Those who work regularly get about 20s. a week, but when slack times are taken into account they do not earn on the average more than 12s. a week,* What wonder that the percentage of paupers among them is high ? What room is there for thrift on such wages ? The work that these men do, and the risks that they run to gain these wages, can be judged of by anyone who has ever been much at our seaside resorts or has sailed along our coasts in even moderate weather in a well-found craft. There can * Mr Mulhall estimates, iu terrible contrast with these figm-es, that each fisherman earns an average net value of £300 a year, after all allow- ances are made for the cost of distribution and waste. The difference, therefore, between 12s. a week and £6 a week is taken by the various profitmongers who stand between the fisherman and the consumer. The worker is, in fact, legally robbed of £5, 8s. a week. PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. 367 scarcely be a harder life, and though, on the whole, it is not an unhealthy oue, the danger to the men is great. One other instance, and enough has been said to show the existing anarchy. Nothing can be more important than that the making of bread should be carried on with proper care and cleanliness. In the country this is now reasonably assured ; but the report about London shows how matters are conducted, with the underselling which goes on. The inspector himself says : "It is undeniable that many of the bakehouses in my London district were unfit for their purpose, and some are so now, being underground, dark, ill ventilated, damp, very small, unduly hot, often filled with vapour, cobwebs and dust ornamenting the walls, the holes and corners of these converted dwelling-houses not cleaned out. Sinks were found without traps and uncovered in the bakehouse ; the lime-washing done in an imperfect manner ; water-closets in the bakehouses, some without w^ater supply or ventilation, the smell from them not agreeable ; the refuse was swept under the troughs, where it lay until a large quantity was collected ; this most objectionable practice, which was universal, I am gradually beating down, for I am credibly informed that the said refuse when acted upon by damp and heat generates insects innumer- able. ... I have seen liquid manure from a stable run- ning under sacks of flour, and the imperfect drain of a privy overflowing on the bakehouse floor. I have also seen an open drain two feet square, into which liquid from adjoin- ing premises flowed, and over which tins of buns were laid to cool." The inspector, Mr Lakeman, mildly adds also : " I consider it objectionable to smoke tobacco from pipes and cigarettes during the kneading of dough. I do not think it cleanly for men, semi -nude, with profuse 368 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. perspiration dripping down their shoulders and arms, to lean over trovighs and work up bread in such a state ; nor do I believe that wholesome bread can be made out of unclean utensils." This trade is now chiefly in the hands of Germans who are hideously overworked, and adulteration of the bread is common. As to the effect of adulteration of our cotton and other goods upon our foreign trade it is unnecessary to sa}^ anything here : enough that our workers are injured for the temporary profit of the capitalist class, whilst the very basis of our external commerce is sapped by their shortsighted greed. But the deterioration of the physique of the factory workers calls for more elaborate evidence. This is for- tunately or unfortunately at hand in the Factory Report for 1875, already quoted, in the form of distinct answers from the certifying surgeons. In 1870, Mr Ferguson, cer- tifying surgeon at Bolton-le-Moors, said at a public meeting at Bolton : " I am perfectly satisfied, from close observa- tion during the last ten years in a situation which gave me the best opportunities of judging, that the children of the mill population were steadily year by year, for their age, getting smaller and physically less caj)able of doing their work. If you ask me how that is, I will tell you. In the first place, it is owing in a great extent to the inte')nperate habits of the parents transmitting feehle constitutions to the children, and in the next, to the mistaken manner in which the mill people fed their children. They brought them up on tea and coffee instead of more substantial food. As an example, during the last month in the great Bolton district I have had to reject as many as nineteen children, simply because they had not the strength and development required by the Factory Act ; and these numbers are PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. 369 steadily increasing year by year. .... What is to be- come of the factory population if this physical degeneration goes on ? " * This evidence was confirmed by Mr Ferguson some years later, and he said before the Factory and Work- shops Commission, " the result of my observations was, and is, that the number of children physically unfit goes on increasing year by year." In answer to Mr Robert Baker's circular on this most vital subject, the majority of certifying surgeons agreed with Mr Ferguson. Mr Leech of Hey- wood's opinion has already been given. Mr Thomas Bolt of Bury says : " I am compelled to admit that in my ex- perience the children employed in the factories are, as a class, and compared with the children in other employ- ments, of a diminished stature and deteriorated physique. I admit also there is something injurious in the employ- ment, as blooming children fresh from the agricultural dis- tricts become pale-looking after being at work a few weeks." t Mr Fames of Stoneclough, since appointed certifying surgeon, " remarked a gradual deterioration in the condi- tion of children both in stature and physique." This he attributes to unwholesome food, the very early period after confinement when mothers leave their children and return to work in the mills, and other causes, t Mr Hugh Robin- son of Preston says that " a considerable proportion of the children presented to me for examination are not only stunted in growth but generally deficient in physical strength and development. " He attributes this to hereditary weak- ness, owing to fathers and mothers having worked too young ; the greed of the parents in overworking the chil- * P. 99. t 1875, p. 102. : Report, 1882, p, 32. 2a 370 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. dren when weak and ill ; overwork generally — " factories and workshops, whose rate of wages depends on the amount of work turned out, get as much out of their hands as they can without the slightest regard to their health or strength;" * unsatisfactory condition of sanitary arrangements ; insuffi- ciency of food and improper food ; numbers of pregnant women who work in the factory " almost up to the very day of their confinement, and return again to work almost immediately after their delivery," which cannot but be detrimental to the child both before and after. Dr Brown of Preston has found " stature of children diminished and general physique deteriorated." This arises from neglect and unhealthy conditions of life and work. " In many of the factories the privies are at the end of the rooms where the operatives work, and in consequence have to breathe an atmosphere which is filled with fetid exhalations." Mr William Aspinall of Haslingden agrees as to deterioration. " The moral, physical, and intellectual condition of the chil- dren is totally ignored." Mr F. H. Walmsley of Manches- ter is of opinion that the stature of the children is dimi- nished and the general physique deteriorated ; he further speaks of the " low stature and enfeebled condition of chil- dren." Mr T. C. Law of Padiham holds the children have deteriorated, " and very perceptibly so." In the silk industries, Mr J. H. Eitchie says : " I give it as my opinion that there is a steady deterioration going on in the general physique of factory children." In the Staffordshire Potteries, Dr Arlidge is " convinced that the stature and general physique of the children em- ployed in the potteries are considerably below the standard in relation to their ages. It is not possible to cite any one * P. 104. PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. 371 special cause of the conditiou alluded to ; many causes con- cur. For instance, hereditary influences are accountable for much. The generation of the children by diseased and dissolute parents must be largely credited with ill-shapen weakly offspring. But what probably more seriously still affects the growth and physique of children is the mode of feeding in early infancy and childhood. The breast milk is denied to many infants in a greater or less degree by mothers engaged in labour at factories or given to drunken- ness and dissipation. In place of it improper and insuffi- cient food is supplied, of which bread soaked in water is the commonest form," * Dr Arlidge's whole statement is indeed horrible. The whole conditions of life at home and in the factory tend to produce " a population of stunted and feeble individuals." In summing up, Mr Baker says that the deterioration and degeneracy of " physique amongst factory children appears to be sufficiently authenticated to be no longer doubtful." And this deterioration and degeneracy is still going on in this year 1883, and prac- tically no steps are taken to remedy a system which is sap- ping the very life of the nation. Now I beg any man, no matter to what class he belongs, to look rapidly again over the official facts and figures given in this chapter and the last, and then ask himself whether as an Englishman he can wish to perpetuate a system which results in such misery and degradation for the workers ? Some there are who will not be convinced by official re- ports, or who believe perhaps that these things are in the nature of the case. Examine them yourselves. Take a very simple test. Rise early in any great industrial city and watch the working men and women going to their * P. 111. 372 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. work between five and six o'clock in the morning ; note their appearance, their height, their weight, their general bear- ing ; wait four or five hours, you can go to bed again and have breakfast, and then go out and consider the middle and upper middle class as they come into their various businesses. The contrast is but too sad and too conclusive. As an American writer has well put it, " Let those who make light of the effects of the monotony of factory work and call it easy, try the effect of sitting down for ten hours at a stretch to make short parallel strokes with a pen on a sheet of white paper. Twelve hours fatiguing bodily labour may be borne in one occupation without physical deterioration, while ten hours may be killing in another. Compare the exertions of the domestic servant with the worker of the sewing machine. The one is constantly on the move, and the same set of nerves are seldom subjected to any particu- lar strain for any length of time, while the other, like the machine she attends to, must ever remain in the same position. She must watch every one of the hundred and twenty or more stitches that are put in per minute ; her eyes are intensely and constantly fixed upon a line, her hands and feet must move with the regularity of any piece of mechanism ; a turning of the eye, a slip of the hand or foot spoils the work. The same set of nerves are constantly strained and overstrained, while the rest of the body is en- feebled, perhaps paralysed by inaction." The factory hands and others engaged in similar employments are, as I have said before, slaves to the machine which uses them up for the profit of the capitalist class. How completely this is the case may be judged from the recorded fact that constant work, which means over- work, is more dangerous to life than actual privation. During the cotton -famine the death-rate fell in PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. 373 Manchester and Lancashire ; and when work stopped in the east-end of London in 18G9, the death-rate there at once sank to the level of that of the more comfortable classes.* What then are we to say ? that the capitalist system of production to-day, as ever since it first obtained power, is the curse of every man and woman who labours, and that the political economists who maintain it and elucidate its advantages are either wilfully ignorant or studiously blind. Want, vice, disease, death brood over the wage-earners of town and country alike : over-work and under-feeding pro- duce their inevitable effects. The never-ceasing complaints that we cannot get men for our army should be traced to their true cause — the degeneration of the national stamina under this crushing capitalist domination. How can men grow up fit to fight for the country when from childhood to manhood they scarcely obtain a full and wholesome meal ? Nay, is a country which so crushes them worth fighting for at all? Education itself means but too often the exhaus- tion of underfed starvelings, who want food more than they do instruction, t So long as the people thought that all this misery was inevitable, so long might they possibly bow down in silence and quiet. Now that they learn each day how they suffer and arc oppressed in order that others may wax fat on the fruits of their labour, is it probable that they will eternally submit ? When revolution is prepared in the worab of society, he is a fool indeed who thinks he caa * Eccarius. " The Hours of Labour," p. 17. t The Archbishop of Canterbury lately called public attention to the fact that children at the East End of London were getting only 2M. for making a gross (144) match boxes. " There is not much civilisation in that,' 'he added. No, there is not ; even though one of the employers of these poor little creatures could allbrd to spend £2500 on a statue of Mr Gladstone. 374 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. prevent it from manifesting itself in open and declared shape. That very decay of Parliamentarism and so-called representative government which is now apparent to all helps on and is in itself indicative of the coming change. Politics, it cannot be too often repeated, are but the out- come and manifestation of the form of production and the class antagonism below. No doubt the form of government reacts in part upon the production, as religious ideas in time react in the same way. But the conflict between the socialised system of production and the individualist system of exchange has in England reached a most critical point. Though the workers of all nations must of necessity com- bine in order to bring about a new and better system, England is the country where the economical evolution has reached its highest development, and where the reconstruc- tion must consequently begin. It is a noble rivalry in which all nations may fitly take a part. The day when an abstract theorist will be a practical statesman may never come; the day when the practical statesman can dispense with being a well-grounded theorist is gone by already. Nowhere is this more true than in our own country. For to sum up our present position — First. In no civilised country in the world is there such a monopoly of land as in Great Britain. Second. In no country are capital, machiner}'-, credit, and the means of production generally so concentrated in the hands of a class. Third. In no country is there such a complete social separation between classes. Fourth. In no country is the contrast between the exces- sive wealth and luxury of the few and the grinding and degrading poverty of the many so striking. PRESENT POSITION OF THE CITY WORKER. 375 Fifth. In no country is the machinery of government so entirely in the hands of the non-producing classes, or are the people so cajoled out of voting power and due repre- sentation. Sixth. In no country are the people so dependent for their necessary food on sources of supply thousands of miles away. Seventh. In no country is it so difficult for a man to rise out of the wage-earning class. Eighth. In no country is justice so dear or its administra- tion so completely in the hands of the non-producing classes who make the laws.* Here then, are a series of indisputable facts, to which may be added the truth that the revolutionary character of our present system of production already noted is becoming more marked each day. Electricity threatens to subvert entirely the whole of our processes in every department of industry ; education, imperfect as it is, teaches our workers to appreciate their surroundings, and circumstances force them to combine. No change can be for the worse in their condition. Let, then, all classes take account of the inevitable antagonism, and endeavour to help those who produce the wealth of the country to enter upon their inheritance Avithout bloodshed, to the glory of England and to the benefit of all. Those who urge that class ouQ-ht not be set against class, belong themselves to that very class which is producing and intensifying the antagonism they hypocritically deplore. Let the capitalists and their hangers-on, the landowners, strive with the workers for a jDeaceable change, and England may set an example of * See "The Coming Revolution in England," in The North American lleviexo, October, 1882. 376 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. peaceful reconstruction to the world. But at present there is very little sign of any such wise and far-sighted action on the part of the classes in possession ; history teaches us that only resolute combination on the part of the oppressed classes has ever gained them anything. It is sad that the men in possession should be thus blind to their own best interests, and refuse to recognise facts in the society around them which point steadily in one direction. But with the misery due to the existing system, it is impossible to hold any terms. That has reached a point where national decrepitude and decay must inevitably follow, unless wholesale changes are immediately brought about. These changes are being steadily prepared all the while by the very oppression and misery themselves, as well as by the new forces placed at the disposal of humanity. It is to the control of these forces by the whole community that we must look for improvement in the near future. CHAPTER XL THE POOR LAWS. The Poor Laws, as has been well said, form and have formed for three hundred years a Socialist basis to English society. It has been in practice recognised throughout this long period that in sickness and in age men and women of the working or any other class could obtain shelter, food, and medicine at the cost of the community, that people out of employment should be maintained, and that destitute children should be taken care of, and to a certain extent educated. Provision for the helpless, food for the able-bodied out of work ; these were the two sides to the English poor-law system, supplemented as it was by the efforts of private charity. That the system itself was often harshly and sometimes cruelly administered, that the parochial relief and law of settlement produced much injustice in many ways, and that at its best the whole arrangement is but a poor substitute for a proper organisation of labour by the producing class, all these drawbacks in nowise alter the fact that our poor laws are distinctly socialist in character, and founded upon the principle that the community has duties towards all its members, no matter how unthrifty or even how absolutely wasteful they may have been as individuals. Of the causes which led up to vagrancy and permanent pauperism after the break-up of the peasant-proprietary of the fifteenth century a brief account has been given. Commerce and 378 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. manufactures helped to intensify the evil effects of the seizure of the land. In a rather obscure passage even Eden seems to have felt his way to this conclusion when he says, " Manufacturers, although they added to the capital stock of the nation, yet by creating a necessity for free hands, and consequently enabling men to make use of the most valuable of all property, their own industry, subjected those who were in any way incapacitated from availing themselves of that fund to the miserable alternative of starving independently. Without the most distant idea therefore of disparaging the numberless benefits derived to this country from manufactures and commerce, the result of this investigation seems to lead to the inevitable con- clusion that manufactures and commerce are the true parents of our national poor." * But they were merely portions of the general gTowth of wealth, which crushed the many for the sake of the few, though unquestionably the necessity for " free " hands, that is to say, for a reserve of labour, owing to the continued expansion and contraction of the capitalist system, accounts for the permanence of pauperism in the midst of increasing riches. It is not here necessary to go through the various statutes dealing with the relief of the poor before and after the famous Statute 43 Eliz. cap. 2, but the view taken of the poor in the eighteenth century, under aristocratic rule, and before the complete victory of middle-class economy, is well worthy of consideration. During the whole of the eighteenth century, even in the years immediately succeeding the formation of workhouses in 1723 — which were set on foot owing to the increasing number of idlers who were maintained by the country — it was generally admitted by statesmen that the * Eden, vol. i. p. 61. THE POOR LA WS. 379 poor had a right to be well fed at the public expense. The result was that, though in many parishes there was a superfluity of labour for the work to be had, wages did not fall. Pitt, Fox, and Whitbread, at the end of the century, freely admitted that a man's wages should be proportionate not to the work he did, but to the wants of himself and his family.* Thus a single man ought not to be paid so much as a man with a family, a man with a small family so much as a man with a large one, and any deficiency should be made up out of the poor-rate. Pitt himself, speaking in opposition to Mr Whitbread's motion in 1796, when the rise in the prices of the necessaries of life had produced a ter- rible effect upon the poor, whilst he denounced the Laws of Settlement, " which prevented the workman from going to that market where he could dispose of his industry to the greatest advantage, and the capitalist from employing the person who was qualified to procure him the best return for his advances. These laws had at once increased the burdens of the poor, and taken from the collective resources of the State, to supply wants which their operation had occasioned, and to alleviate a poverty which they tended to perpetuate," whilst also he supported the unrestricted competition of the labour-market, which Mr Whitbread's motion was directed to restrain, yet admitted that relief should be granted in pro- portion to the number of the children, that friendly socie- ties should be encouraged by the State, and that industrial schools should be established. Mr Pitt was also in favour of advancing sums of money to persons who still possessed property. The prohibition of such relief whilst property remains he stigmatises as a " degrading condition." * "To each accordiug to his wants : from each according to his abili- ties." — St Simon. 38o THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Although, therefore, the opinion that the poor were only not criminal was rapidly growing even then among a cer- tain class, the more humane view still held its ground in Parliament, and, indeed, had passed beyond what is reason- able. It is the very foundation of all socialism, that no able-bodied person should be allowed to live upon the fruits of the labour of others without work, and this is as true of the pauper as of the sybarite. But by an Act passed in 1782, called Gilbert's Act, the able-bodied were not obliged to go into the workhouse, and the guardians of the poor were called upon to find work for all able-bodied people who applied for it near their own homes, and to make up any deficiency out of the rates. Later, in 1815, by East's Act, the workhouse test, which had been imposed by the 9th of George I., was altogether removed, and justices were empowered to make allowances in money to people at their own homes. Now there was every possible reason for this relaxation of the stringency of the old administration where it had been stringent. The period from 1782, the year of the passing of Gilbert's Act, to 1815, the year in which East's Act became law, was the most fearful period which the poor of England had passed through since the sixteenth century. The rise in the price of provisions owing to the war, the displacement of labour, alike in agriculture and in industry, by the introduction of improved machinery, the discharge of sailors and soldiers in 1815 after the long war, all combined to bring about a state of things for the poor which called for immediate intervention on the part of the community at large in favour of the necessitous. Common humanity dictated that all ordinary restrictions should be set aside in the face of such dire misery as fell upon the working peoi^le during those thirty or forty years, and that THE POOR LAWS. 381 some effort should be made to deal with the frightful indus- trial anarchy which prevailed. Even as it was, the condi- tion of the poor was deplorable in every respect, though the country as a whole was getting richer. Thornton admits that in consequence of the richer class of men who took to farming with large capital, renting one or two thousand acres apiece, great improvements were made. By these capitalist farmers, in fact, " more expe- rience and more scientific implements and processes were introduced, and the productiveness of the soil was probably increased, but at the same time a saving of labour was effected which rendered the services of a smaller number of persons necessary." * Thus in agriculture, where machinery had least influence, the increase of production due to im- proved methods absolutely took the bread out of men's mouths and increased the number of the necessitous. It was surely the duty of the Government to counteract as far as possible the mischievous effects of this great industrial revolution, and of the war upon the condition of the workers in town and country, no matter how much the ideas of the rising middle-class economy might be outraged thereby. Unfortunately, the relief was given at first in the worst possible way. No attempt was made to organise labour; the only object was temporarily to relieve distress. In 179 G the law was passed which entitled all persons with large families to grants in aid of wages, and a direct pre- mium was placed upon early and prolific marriages without any clear view of what the system would lead to. No wonder that economists like Mr Fawcett and Mr Thornton, v.ho think the individual should at all times shift for him- • Thornton, " Over-population," p. 217. 382 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM, self, and that large families among the producing class are the chief cause of all our economical and social evils, should write strongly about what followed. " Thenceforward a poor man might lay aside all thought for to-morrow," writes Mr Thornton, " and might solace himself with the belief that whatever family he might bring around him he should be maintained in the position which he actually occupied ; nay, it might almost be said that a positive bounty was placed on procreation, for as the more children a man had the more money he received, a large family might be regarded as a source of wealth. Even this was not all. If any resolute bachelor were found capable of withstanding every temptation to marriage, and anxious to gain a livelihood by other means than by begetting a pauper progeny, it often happened that no choice was offered to liim. If married and single men were applying for work at the same time, the farmers sagely argued that as the former would be the heaviest burden on the poor-rates, it would be most politic to enable them to earn something for themselves, and the rejected bachelor found that he would not be allowed to maintain himself unless he first got a wife and children for the parish to maintain." That, of course, is funny enough. Mr Fawcett's denunciations of the whole arrangement are also worth quoting. " The extent to which the industrial classes were demoralised by these relaxations of the Poor Law soon became evident. The most pernicious influence was exerted not only upon the poor but upon their em- ployers ; every agency which could most powerfully promote pauperism had been brought into operation ; men were virtually told that no amount of recklessness, self-indulgence, or improvidence would in the slightest degree affect their THE POOR LA WS. 383 claim to be supported at other people's expense. If they married when they had no reasonable chance of being able to maintain a family, they were treated as if they had per- formed a meritorious act, for the more children they had the greater was the amount of relief they obtained. All the most evident teachinsfs of common sense were set at naught ; labour was bribed to remain in localities where it was not wanted ; and it was prevented passing to those districts where there was a demand for it. Thus, if wages in any parish were below what it was thought would pro- vide a reasonable maintenance, the local authorities were empowered to grant an allowance in aid of wages. These evils were aggravated by various enactments known under the general name of the Laws of Settlement, which were passed with a view of hindering labourers from leaving the localities in which they were born. The allowance system and the Laws of Settlement, though acting in very different ways, combined to impede the natural flow of labour. However great a surplus of labour there might be in any locality, the employed had no inducement to leave it as long as their wages were made up to the average amounts by grants from the rates. The employer, not caring about or understanding vilterior consequences, was apparently in- terested in keeping a supply of surplus labour about him ; it produced a low rate of wages, and he was virtually able to put his hand into the pockets of the neighbouring rate- payers to make up the deficiency to those whom he em- ployed." The results of such a series of blunders as this could not fail to be injurious, especially by keeping the people in dis- tricts where their services were not wanted, and iu paying from the parish funds higher wages than an independent 384 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. man could earn in the same neighbourhood — a case which was not uncommon. There was also no reason why a woman should receive more for a child born out of marriage, than for a child born in wedlock. It is further perfectly true that encouragement was given to the increase of population, whilst no effort was made to provide special labour for the surplus, owing to the remissness of the overseers and guar- dians. But whilst we may admit, to the fullest extent, the drawbacks to this indiscriminate granting of relief in aid of wages, are ready to allow that forcing pauper labour on farmers was an error, and can recognise, as clearly as any middle-class economist, the mischiefs involved in the Law of Settlement and in local rating, it is necessary to point out that the total amount of the poor-rates for England and Wales in 1831 was not much above £7,000,000, as against £6,000,000 in 1810, though the population had increased during the twenty-one years from just over 10,000,000 in 1810, to nearly 14,000,000 in 1881 ; the actual increase being 3,700,000, much of which was due to immigration. But at this very time the wealth of the country was increas- ing more rapidly than ever, the profits of manufacture and trade astonished Europe, and even the men who made them. " The aggregate wealth of the country increased faster than ever," says Thornton.'" What nonsense then is it for Mr Fawcett to declare that " England was brought nearer to the brink of ruin by the old Poor Law than she ever was by a hostile army." Of course, as a hostile army never did bring us to the " brink of ruin," the illustration is not a very happy one ; but it is quite clear from what follows that, in Mr Fawcett's judgment, the old Poor Law would have meant utter I ruin if the system had been con- * P. 226. THE POOR LA WS. 385 tiuued. " It was demonstrated by the experience gained previous to the year 1834, that if due restrictions are not imj)osed, it is impossible for a country long to fulfil the obligation to give relief to all applicants ; the fund required for such a purpose would soon absorb the whole produce raised from the land, and would require a larger amount than is represented by the entire annual income of the nation." This, I say, is nonsense ; no such experience was ever gained. What was needed was a better organisation of labour in return for State or parish assistance, in order to relieve the congestion of labour and the undue pressure of the rates in particular districts. The supporters of the new Poor Law conveniently overlook the fact that by the Act of 59 George III. c. 12, the churchwardens and overseers in each parish were empowered to hire or purchase 2 5 acres of land on which to employ the poor ; and that by the 1 and 2 William IV. c. 2, this amount was increased to 50 acres in each parish. Here, obviously, was the beginning of that communal or State employment, which, in proper hands, might have led to the greatest improvements. But by the Act of 1834 all such wise tentative legislation was swept entirely away. The idea that poverty was due to overpopulation was accepted as beyond all cavil or dispute, though the fact that wealth was increasing in a far greater ratio than population was manifest to all the world. A clique of economical fanatics got hold of the machine of legislation and drove it completely over the interests of the mass of the people and the scruples of the more sensitive of the well - to - do. Men like Malthus and Chalmers, and Ricardo, and James Mill argued that there 2b 386 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. ought to be no Poor Law at all. This may easily be admitted if all have equal rights in the country, and the State, as the representative of the whole community, undertakes the organisation of labour and the control of fresh inventions and machines, either directly or through local administrators. But to have no Poor Law at all in a country where all the means of production are at the disposal of the wealthy, and the workers may be thrown on to the streets at a day's notice from no fault whatever of their own, must mean either starvation for thousands and tens of thousands, an enormous increase of wasteful private charity and public begging, or a bloody insurrection, led probably by the more thoughtful of the well-to-do class themselves. No Poor Law therefore seemed too strong a measure even to the pitiless class which obtained predominance after the Reform Bill of 1 S3 2. Holding, however, that all poverty was due not to the greed of the upper and middle classes, but to "the improvi- dence, the indolence, and the self-indulgence " of the producing class. Parliament set to work to establish fresh workhouses — " bastiles," they were called by the poor — all over the country ; to reduce out-door relief — which, properly administered, can alone help a man through a bad period without absolute ruin, or enable him to seek work in another locality — to the lowest possible point ; and to force everyone they could into these new workhouses, where the sexes were separated. No one can read the records of this legislation, and the evidence on which it is based, without seeing clearly that the economists who got the law passed and the statesmen who passed it, had persuaded themselves that a poor man was priTnd facie little short of a criminal if he could not support himself, or that his parents THE POOR LAWS. 387 had been criminal in bringing him into the world, and that therefore " the workhouse test " ought to be rigidly- enforced. No attempt was made on their side to analyse the complicated society which had grown up owing to the great industrial revolution of the end of the eighteenth century ; and those who, like Owen and Cobbett and Sadler, pointed out the real state of the case, were set down as foolish enthusiasts or factious agitators. Kot content with reform- ing the abuses of the system, which might easily have been done by repeating the Laws of Settlement, by taking advan- tage of the powers given to acquire land with a view to employing the people upon it, and by founding a system of equitable rating, the promoters of the new Poor Law accepted the so-called Malthusian theories in their fullest meaning, and based their whole action upon the assumption that increase of population was the chief cause of the mis- chief. It is true that the very people who argued thus, somewhat inconsistently pointed to the enclosure of commons, to the monopoly of the soil, and to the excessive concentra- tion of wealth in few hands, as likewise tending to produce poverty. Nevertheless, the views of the Maltliusian school were chiefly instrumental in bringing about the change in 1834, and are accepted more or less completely by the leading Eughsh economists of the bourgeois school to-day. On this point Mill, Fawcett, and Rogers, Walker and Sidgwick are at one. According to them, the tendency of population, if freed from restraint, is to increase in a higher ratio than the means of subsistence. But Mr Sidgwick, by giving up in part at least the doctrine of "diminishing returns" to more and more labour expended, to my mind gives up the whole theory. For if, as already stated, the opinion of skilled agriculturists, such 388 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. as Sir James Caird, Sir John Lawes, Lord Leicester, Mr Boyd Kinnear, and others, is that at least twice the quantity of food could be profitably grown in England to-day that is now grown, how are we to limit the powers of man in the near future ? If one person working on the soil will feed twenty or even ten people to-day, surely with improved machinery, increased knowledge of artificial manures, utilisation of sewage, and improved feeding of animals, combined with judicious use of co- operative labour, far greater results may be obtained in the future, which would more than counterbalance any probable increase of population. In England, at any rate, the production of wealth as a whole has increased much faster than the population since the beginning of this century. But it is contended that if men and' women married at the age they felt inclined to do so, were not in want of means of subsistence, and were protected against war and preventible diseases, the population of Europe would double itself in every twenty or thirty years. What right have we to assume that even this would be so in conditions that have never been tried ? What we know is, that all over the world those people who can marry when they feel inclined to do so, and are not in want of the means of subsistence, are less prolific than their poorer compatriots. It is the same with man as with animals. Plentiful food is by no means necessarily a stimulus to population, and I am myself of opinion that in a community where all were well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well educated, the average increase of population would be much more on a level with that of the upper and middle classes in Europe and America, which notoriously increase very slowly, than with that of the THE POOR LAWS. 38; poor whOj despite the heavy death-rate of the children, in- crease very fast. In hypothetical conditions, we can only reason from the nearest approach] to those conditions which we see around us. Predictions of economists are proverbially fallacious in matters of population. One of the principal authorities, reasoning from Ireland, declared in':1823 that within fifty years France would be the greatest pauper warren in Europe. During those fifty years the population of the country has scarcely increased, and at the end of the period she astonished Europe by the ease with which she paid an enormous indemnity to a foreign conqueror. The small pro- perties told in favour of restriction of population rather than of its increase, yet wealth was being accumulated all the time. No doubt the followers of Malthus may argue that this was due to what they call " the preventive check." But the voluntary preventive check followed and did not precede the great social and political revolution. Further, even in France the relative over-population has made itself most seriously felt, in spite of the increasing wealth; and the poverty of the small peasant proprietors crushed down under the weight of taxation and debt, the miserable condition of the workers in many of the French cities, show clearly that a stationary population may develope a very poor class as well as an increasing population, side by side with rapidly- gi-owing wealth. The condition of the workers in Paris, Lyons, Rouen, Marseilles, or Roubaix in periods of crisis and depression is even worse than that of the same class in England. In Western Germany, on the other hand, small properties have not checked the increase of population, and from no country has there been a greater or more con- tinuous emigi\ition, at the same time that the numbers at 390 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. home have risen. Yet both in Germany and in France many of the small cultivators, as the reports from our consuls show, are wretchedly poor, live on miserable food, and seem going from bad to worse, owing to American competition and other causes. In the one country, small properties ap- parently bring about small families, in the other, large families. Thus the law of the increase of population is very obscure, and beyond the probable fact that poverty is favourable to generation, we have nothing much to go upon. How, then, can the enthusiasts for the new Poor Law base a whole system of economy — for that is what it comes to — on this hypothetical law of the tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence ? It is a remarkable instance of the complete incapacity of men who are brought up with certain set theories, to cast them aside and think for themselves. The attempt made to apply Darwin's theories on the struggle for life among animals to man is quite beside the point. Man is the onl}'' animal wlio deliberately modifies nature on a large scale, and increases the amount of his own food. To my mind, the Malthusian theory in the present condition of poj^ulation on the planet, and of human civilisation among the progressive races, is utterly misleading and foolish. Such cases as Ireland and India merely prove that where mankind has, from any cause, been brought down to a very low standard of life, there until famine and disease begin to do their work population does increase very rapidly. In England, as we have seen, although not more than one-fourth of the people are useful producers, wealth has been increasing much faster than population. It is a better distribution alike of labour and the results of labour that is needed, not a deliberate THE POOR LA WS. 391 attempt to curtail the numbers of the producers, or sugges- tions as to limitation of relief. The new Poor Law, however, went upon the strict prin- ciple that poverty is due to over-breeding among the workers, and steps were taken first to force the necessitous into the workhouses, and then, by separating the sexes, to prevent them from bringing children into the world ; though those children, properly educated and trained, would become most useful citizens. It is strange indeed that men who pride themselves upon their rigid scientific statistical method should in this particular matter proceed in a wholly un- scientific metaphysical manner, proclaiming as true a ten- dency which, among the well-to-do of our existing society, does not exist, which, therefore, may be entirely changed by a new order of things, and which cannot be worth consideration, even if true, for some ages, among progressive peoples. The recommendation of continence to fathers and mothers who have to support and bring up their own children is quite another matter. No one, I judge, would dispute for a moment that in many cases a man and woman who have no children may in our present individualistic, competitive, capitalist society come off better than a married couple who have several children. But economists who argue in that way ought logically to urge that the workers should not marry, or at any rate have children, at all ; and then the problem of subsistence would become a problem indeed, unless some of the idlers themselves turned workers. In short, the modern bourgeois economists, whilst frequently lamenting the inequalities of wealth, and the sad poverty of the many, overlook the class robbery and monopoly of machinery, which creates and keeps up a plentiful supply 392 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. of paupers ; and refuse to see that in the more civilised countries the class antagonism can only be settled in one of two ways, either by still worse slavery, or by a complete enfranchisement of the workers. In either case conditions of life would be so changed that, even if we had — what we have not — a trustworthy theory of population to-day, it would be wholly inapplicable to-morrow. Once more I repeat that, speaking of the population at large, it is absurd to talk of an excess of hands in countries where wealth is increasing in a higher ratio than the numbers of the inhabitants, as is the case in every country in Western Europe and in the United States of America. Whether the Poor Law should be administered in this way or that, ought, therefore, to be considered without any reference whatever to this over-popu- lation fallacy. Needless to add that, were labour and distri- bution organised for the benefit of all, there would be only one side to the relief — the obligation upon the community to provide for those who are too young, too old, or too sickly to labour. Able-bodied pauperism would, under such circumstances, be unknown.* At present, however, we are dealing with the Poor Law as it is, and with proposals to do away with or remedy its defects. Enough has been seen in the course of this book to show that the Poor Law was to a large extent forced upon the possessing classes by revolution and threat of revolution. It is in effect a safety-valve for the high pressure of the competitive system, and has possibly staved off downright rebellion in this island at critical times. But * It is strange that, until very lately at any rate, Malthus was far better known than William GodwLu. Yet the latter was in every respect the superior thinker and writer. As the middle-class school of thought fades, some of our forgotten worthies will be put in their right place. THE POOR LA WS. 393 the right to relief has always seemed very debasing to a certain class of minds, who are by no means inclined, never- theless, to give up those sacred rights of property which, of necessity, produce the poverty that calls for relief. One precious scheme of a kind which is thought calculated to remove pauperism, brought forward by a clergyman, Mr Lewery Blackley, has actually found acceptance among economists, who themselves deplore the petty wages of the workers, and was meant to apply, in the first instance, to the worst paid class of all — the agricultural labourers. Troubled by the sad poverty of these people, and their almost inevit- able drifting into the workhouse in old age, it is proposed that the labourers should insure themselves against sickness and old age by stinting themselves of food or raiment at the most critical period of their whole life. Of course, the con- tention is, that as all classes would be " compelled " to insure, and the class which is specially liable to pauperism spends a certain amount — too much perhaps — upon beer, no injustice would be done. In return for a compulsory payment of £10 before reaching the age of twenty-one, every insurer would be entitled to the sum of 8s. a week in case of sickness or incompetence before the age of seventy, and 4s. a week permanently after the age of seventy. This fund, so obtained by compulsion from all classes, the State is to manage. Now we all know well that even as it is there is a great deal of thrift among the very poor, that they contrive out of their small wages to pay surprising amounts to friendly societies and burial clubs. But when a system of compul- sory State insurance is proposed, let it at least be one worth having. Accumulated wealth is not due in our present society to thrift, but to the fact that one class has obtained 394 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM the means of making continuous profit out of the labour of another class. Let, then, the reverend gentleman and those who work with him first obtain for the producers the right to a fair share of the labour- value they produce by means of State organisation, and then compulsory insurance is a necessary part of the functions and duties of the State ; as necessary as education, or postal arrangements, or organisa- tion of transport. In short, what we have to-day is a rough and rude method of compelling the rich to provide subsistence and a refuge in old age for men and women who have worked themselves into sickness and premature debility for their profit. Grant that this assurance of support is in some sense harmful, can anything be more monstrous than that the State — which at present is merely the organised force of the well-to-do class — should force insurance upon all by compelling the young hind with some nine or ten or at most twelve shillings a week to pay the same sum as the young lordling at Oxford or Cambridge with perhaps £10 a week for which he never did a stroke of work ? That a well-meaning parson should bring forward such a plan is perhaps not very surprising, for to his mind Christianity itself is based upon class distinctions, and servility for the multitude is the very essence of his creed ; but that well-read economists like Mr Henry Sidg- wick and Mr Foxwell should take up the idea at the end of the nineteenth century and champion it as a means for elevating the working classes, is only evidence that they themselves are unable to clear their minds of that bourgeois cant which is as injurious to clear thought as are any theo- logical prejudices. So long as men will argue as if the poor child born in a labourer's hovel or in a cellar in Drury THE POOR LAWS. 395 Lane and brought up too often with insufficient food and under bad sanitary conditions is really a free independent individual and not almost certainly doomed for life as a wage- slave to the possessing class, it is impossible for them to deal adequately with this important question of national insur- ance, or indeed with the removal of pauj)erism in any way. Fortunately the working classes, ignorant as they still are, can see through such suggestions for their regeneration as those which call upon them to vote for compulsory insur- ance out of their meagre wages. Much as they detest " the House," while yet availing themselves of it, deficient as they are in power of combination and political force, they are able to understand that that is a calculating hypocrisy which leads an array of capitalists and middle-class econo- mists to counsel thrift, thrift ever more thrift to the only portion of the community which produces wealth, whilst taking no steps whatever to change the conditions of society that embrute and degrade the people about whose welfare they pretend to be deeply in earnest. What, after all, is the total amount paid by the rich towards the support of the poor 1 Not £8,000,000, or about I per cent, upon the total income of the country, and comparatively little of this goes to the real work it is paid to perform. The proportion which the working class at large takes of that total income is less than one quarter, and yet there is this outcry. The truth, of course, is that on any theory of justice the poor are entitled to a far better provision in old age and sickness than that which they now get, though under our jobbing middle-class system of administration even the £8,000,000 is to a larq-e extent wasted. That State assistance is neces- sarily degrading is absurd. State help in return for 396 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. labour rendered is no more degrading than State employ- ment in any other form ; and this will become more and more clear as the State itself becomes only the organised force of the whole people free from class greed or class domination. Meantime, the true remedy for pauperism is in precisely the opposite direction to that in which Mr Blackley seeks it, namely, in good food, education, com- bination, and a serious effort to sink individual advantage for the good of all. Personal thrift, though better than extravagance, is but a low form of selfishness. Where there is plenty for all there is no need for stinting at any age, least of all by the producing class. Leaving aside, then, a proposal for compulsory insurance in our present state of society as merely a scheme, however well meant, to relieve the rich from rates at the expense of the poor, it is worth while to consider hov/ the Poor Law is administered now. It would, of course, be foolish to deny that there is a certain proportion of our people who claim support from the parish when they have little need for it, or rather when they might earn enough for themselves if they tried. But this is after all a very small minority. All admit that the poor as a whole are very slow to apply for help or to go into the workhouse. Thousands live in our great cities from hand to mouth in squalor, misery, and disease, who rarely or never apply for aid : they prefer to trust to chance employment or to the help of those who are luckier than themselves. Yet the whole Poor Law is administered as if the skulkers were the most numerous body of all. The object is to make application for relief unpleasant, and there is no doubt about the success. Yet if the lands and benefactions given of old for the poor had been kept as rigidly for that purpose as the estates and THE POOR LA WS. 397 property of the nobility and gentry liave been kept for them ; if even a moderate part of the belongings of the Church had been devoted to the ends to which the abbots and monks of old applied them so long as they held power ; if, to come to more recent times, the commons had been preserved untouched, the system of allotments carried out, and the methods prior to 1834 maintained, the amount available for poor relief would be many times the £8,000,000 which are at present spent in that way. But the new Poor Law took it for granted that to be poor was very nearly a crime, and the economists of to-day better the instructions of their teachers of the last generation. At present this view is held more stanchly than ever. Not only is out-door relief being curtailed as much as possible — and Mr Fawcett and Mr Courtney are in favour of doing away with it altogether — but it is given in a more grudging spirit than ever. Now, of course, there is a great deal to be said against a lavish administration of out-door relief from the standpoint taken by the middle-class economists. Their object is to increase the severity of the " test " of poverty, to force men and women to admit that tliey have no hope of life outside before they come into the workhouse, and thus to reduce the rates and "foster independence." But surely our arrangements are none too lax as it is. Certainly the relief given is not excessive in the individual cases any more than it is a heavy proportion of the national income altogether. But it is too much for the hide-bound theorists of the so-called Radical party. Full of the gall of economical bitterness, their one idea is to cut out what little softness is left in a relieving officer. As a result of recent ordinances on this subject pauperism 39^ THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. has decreased — of that there is no doubt — at the very time when poverty has increased. That the numbers of paupers has diminished means therefore only that the rigid methods now adopted keep the people from obtaining relief. The effect may be a little different from what the supporters of these methods imagine ; for there are ideas abroad among the people as to the disposal of the fruits of their labour, which will ere long take outward expression if at the very time when the number of unemployed is increasing the penalties of poverty are made more severe.* But take the ordinary work of the workhouse and the casual ward even now. What difference is there between the pauper and the criminal ? Both are set as a rule to useless and degrading tasks, no effort is made for the most part to render the work attractive or beneficial. To pick oakum is as hard, and at the same time as miserable, a task as human beings can be set to.t Breaking stones can now be so easily done by machinery that it is a waste of human force to employ men at such work. These are the customary duties for men : laundry work for women. The whole arrangements too, both for men and women, assume an inferiority and a slavishness on the part of those who are driven to ask for aid. Workhouses vary, but as a general rule the management of these places is such, that there is no wonder that the people regard them with dread. The casual wards are worse than the parts kept for permanent inmates. The abuses of these dens have * A wide experience among the jDOor of London and the country enables me to say confidently that never, within my memory, was there such bitter class feeling among the needy as there is to-day. + Recent cases in the Police-Courts have shown what disgusting, use- less work this oakum-picking is, and what tyranny is practised towards weak old men in the workhouses. THE POOR LA WS. 399 often been described. So dirty are they, so inconvenient and harmful are the arrangements, alike in regard to time of leaving: in the morninsr and the work exacted, and such is the misery of the whole surroundings, that men or women of respectable character forced to tramp in search of work avoid them as far as possible, though to sleep under a hay- stack is an offence, and to beg for a bit of bread a crime. Yet our existing methods of jDroduction directly foster and increase what economists euphemistically call the " mobility of labour." That is to say men and women are driven by causes beyond their control to roam in search of work. Not long since, alarmed at the numbers of such people going about the country, a Radical professor (Mr Bryce) and a Conservative plutocrat (Mr Pell) made common cause, and passed an Act through the House of Commons, which was accepted by the House of Lords, in imitation of the old barbarous legislation against sturdy beefirars. Not a word was said about the causes which led to this persistent movement of the " fringe of labour," not an attempt was made to examine into their condition or to provide them with steady work. It was taken for granted that a constant vagrant must be a criminal, and as such he is now treated. Of course, vagrancy like pauperism has been much reduced by this means. But does any one suppose the poor victims of political economy are better off or more contented ? Not at all : they are merely crushed into deeper and deeper misery, from which it will be well for plutocrats and professors alike if they do not rise as a horrible spectre of rapine and bloodshed before their oppres- sors. In short, the whole of our present Poor Law adminis- tration is based upon the notion that the people themselves 400 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. and not society are to blame for the poverty, thriftlessness, and vagrancy into which so many of the workers are driven, and they are treated accordingly. Pauperism in our modern sense can only be put an end to finally by securing every one who works enough to live upon in health, and this can again only be brought about by the collective ownership of the means of production. But smaller attempts have been made to improve the condition of the paupers in our workhouses, both the able-bodied and the sickly, by giving them work on wares which are useful to themselves and others, and paying them a portion of the results of their sale. This is, of course, in itself a step in the right direction, being far better for the poor inmates in every respect than wearing away their days upon hopeless tasks, or being employed upon work for which they get no pay, no matter how thoroughly they do it — as sweeping the streets, and the like. Pauper labour, by the way, in such cases, is invari- ably dear labour in proportion to the amount spent in keep, lodging, clothing, &c. The effect, therefore, of this new system upon the paupers is very pleasing wherever it has been tried. Men and women who were before dull and lifeless, looking forward with despair to a pauper's grave, gain new hope, take an interest in the work, and raj)idly improve in vigour and intelligence. Moreover, the rate- payers are to a certain extent relieved from payment, and that also is for them a charming feature of the plan. Wherever tried, paupers, guardians, and ratepayers have all been satisfied. But outside, the irony of our existing society at once speaks out. Those with whom the paupers — secure at least of shelter, warmth, food, and bed — enter into com- petition, look upon the matter from a very different point THE POOR LAWS. 401 of view. They fmd themselves undersold in their own trade by these pauper or prison productions, and are very soon forced down into the needy class themselves. It is a distinct upset of the market, which no skill or industry on their part can right any more than they could the disturb- ance due to the introduction of a new machine. Thus the paupers are benefited, and the hard-working men outside suffer seriously. An interesting feature in the experiment is, that the whole scheme now being tried in the East End of London and elsewhere was brought forward as a deliberate policy for all the workhouses in the kingdom at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and passed the House of Commons by a large majority " amid loud cheers." In 1704 Sir Hum- phrey Mackworth carried his bill in favour of startino- parochial manufactures. The object of the bill was to start a factory in each parish at which the poor should be set to work on profitable articles. Daniel Defoe saw at once how this would work against the labourers competing outside, and in his pamphlet entitled, " Giving Alms no Charity,"^ expressed himself thus : " Suppose, now, a workhouse for the employment of poor children sets them to spinnino- of worsted. For every skein of worsted these poor children spin there must be a skein the less spun by some poor per- son or family that spun it before ; suppose the manufacture of making baize to be erected in Bishopsgate Street, unless the makers of these baize can find out at the same time a ti-ade or consumption for more baize tlian were ever made before, for every piece so made in London there must be a piece the less made at Colchester ... it is only trans- posing manufacture from Colchester to London, and takino- the bread out of the mouths of the poor of Essex to put it 2c 402 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. into the mouths of the poor of Middlesex." Defoe's opinion was that the business of the State is not to find employment for the poor but to compel the people to work for the em- ploying class. Mack worth's bill was due to a long series of proposals outside the House of Commons for the formation of parish factories, and probably the famous John Bellers' " College of Industry " produced a direct effect at that par- ticular time. But the bill was rejected by the House of Lords on the same grounds as Defoe placed his objections. Precisely what Defoe said in 1704 is going on now. Trades such as basket-making, mat-making, and so forth are being crushed out by workhouse and prison competition. Yet this is clearly not the last word on the subject. We cannot, even in the present anarchical state of society, keep human beings, driven into poverty by no fault of their own, tearing their hands over oakum or uselessly pottering at jobs in which they have no interest and for which they get little or no reward, when by working at really useful articles they benefit themselves and the whole community. Nor, on the other hand, is competition with outside workers on such terms reasonable. First, then, there is no reason whatever for the harsh administration of the Poor Law favoured by the present school of economists : secondly, it would be easy, even assuming our present competitive system generally to go on, to organise the labour of town and country work- houses so that they might be mutually dependent, and supply one another without coming on to the market and .ruining other poor folk by their low-priced competition. There is little doubt, indeed, that from this side the organ- isation of labour would have gradually developed had the course recommended by some of the wiser economists of the eighteenth century been adopted. Nothing is easier than THE POOR LA WS. 403 for people working on tlie land to support those who pro- vide them with clothes from factories. Granted able-bodied paupers to the number of so many thousands yearly in town and country, and nothing but the prejudices born of our competitive system prevents us from enabling them to sup- port one another in happiness and contentment. Admit- ting that the continual displacement of workers by machinery, and the return of a severe industrial crisis at least once in every ten years forces people to wander as vagrants in search of work, and again only the narrow-minded views bred by bourgeois bigotry prevent us from ordering casual wards, so that the State or the parish may supply the place which the guilds of old time' filled towards the journeymen, and the trade unions partially take now. That there are some in- corrigible idlers is no reason why the whole system of relief should be based upon the assumption that all who need help are of the same character. Good education brings up workers, not idlers; and the habit of work once acquired, mere idling becomes wearisome to the great majority of mankind. Such considerations as these, I repeat, are entirely left aside by men who begin by taking for granted that poverty is due to over-population, and then contend that the poverty so engen- dered is made worse by thriftlessness and drink, for which the individual, and, in no sense, society, is responsible. A thorough change in our social and political system is, there- fore, needed, even to bring about so small a reform as the better administration of the Poor Laws. The fact is, that in this as in other directions, the period of middle-class rule is at an end, and we are in a period of transition to the supremacy of the entire community, in which the liability of all to labour shall be fully recognised. The mere parochial system under the control of the parson. 404 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. the squire, or the local attorney has been tried and found utterly Avanting. Yet local and municipal matters are of greater importance than they ever were. In 1880 the total yield of local taxation was £31,000,000, and the total revenue £58,000,000, the loans reaching the figure of nearly £140,000,000. Yet we are told by a writer who publishes under the auspices of the Cobden Club, and can- not certainly be accused of any socialist tendencies, that " the parochial system, as it exists in English country parishes, is singularly ill-calculated to supply any democratic training for self-government, or to promote the recognition of common interests and mutual duties in village communi- ties." In fact, the common-sense of the people educated in public free schools, and accustomed from their earliest youth to debate their own affairs and those of the country at large with a view to their best administration, is absolutely needed in order to combine local management with centralised design. So in the great towns and municipalities, where educated democracy alone can help to put down jobbery and lead the way to thorough reorganisation. Political, economical, and social questions really become identical when we have to consider the welfare of the whole community and not the advantages of a class. The Poor Law is, of course, but a part, though a most important part, of a series of institutions which embrace school-boards, sanitary arrangements, water supply, and should cover hospitals, erection of dwellings, and organisation of labour. To quote again from Mr George Brodrick, the writer cited above. "But it must not be forgotten that of all classes in the community the working classes are most directly interested in local government, and above all, in sanitary regulation, upon which their health and domestic comfort so vitally THE POOR LA WS. 405 depend. Yet most members of the working classes are disabled, for want of a ratepajdng qualification, from voting either for town councillors in boroughs, or for vestrymen in London, or for guardians of the poor."'"" Thus we are brought to the same conclusion by every route, that only through the working classes themselves taking control of the administration, and looking after the manage- ment of the wealth which they produce, can any permanent reform be looked for. The Poor Law has lasted for just three hundred years, and only now that the wealthy are trying to do away with it by one plan or another, are the workers slowly awakening to the truth that the sums spent in relieving the miserable, come really, in the first instance, from the labour of those very unfortunates, in common with the other members of their class ; that, therefore, to look upon such relief merely from the ratepayers' point of view, or to reckon it as charity and almsgiving, is to forget the truth that labour is the source of all wealth, and has the right, if it had the power, to take all instead of resting content with a pittance. The Poor Laws, then, whether left to be administered by the county, the parish, the municipality, the union, or taken, as would be best, under the direct control of the State, form, if looked at without middle-class prejudice, a valuable starting-point in connection with other State departments, for that organisation of labour combined with relief of the distressed, and provision for the sick and aged, which, under full control by universal suffrage, will supplant our present competitive system. No doubt the tendency in ])arliament at the moment is all the other way. But the very pressure resulting from the supremacy of middle-class * Cobden Club. " Local Taxatiou," p. 66. 4o6 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. ideas will as surely lead to their overthrow as the feudal system was broken at the time of its greatest apparent power. It is true that the bourgeois, like the baron, will not disappear all at once ; but in the one case as in the other, the new development is coming from the class most despised by the ruling body — from the residuum, the mob, the proletariat, whom ratepayers and vestrymen, middle-class economists and capitalist statesmen cannot speak of without sneering and contempt. The very success which has attended the trainino,- and feedinir of the little street arabs on board well-managed vessels shows how the moment any real attempt is made at organisation the growing physical deterioration is checked. Paupers breed paupers a,s the weakly breed the weakly. In a community such as ours the proportion of both would become infinitesimal in the course of two or three generations of good feeding and good education. The Poor Laws which grew up as a neces- sity in the cruel system of unrestrained middle-class com- petition will become useless in the gradually evolving period of working co-operation for all. CHAPTER XII. INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. At the time of the great national upheavals of 1848-49, when French, Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Croats were all fighting their way, as they hoped, to some sort of republic, or more less complete independence and unity, there were some in every country who longed and strove for a deeper and more thorough revolution than any which could be the result of mere republican or national risings. The Socialist party in France which, from Baboeuf to Blanqui and Louis Blanc, from Rousseau to Saint Simon and Fourier, had never lacked men of action as well as writers and thinkers to champion the cause, scarcely grasped the full idea of such international action, or at any rate the few who did so were unable to make their views prevail at the critical time. In 1848, 10,000 Frenchmen fell fighting in the streets of Paris for Socialist principles, but there was no general move- ment outside in their support, and the attemjjt failed. Notwithstanding the anarchist Proudhon's famous phrase, " la propriete c'est le vol," notwithstanding Lamennais' powerful denunciations of the capitalist class from a very different point of view, in spite of all the efforts of Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin, and Victor Hugo, coupled with the more earnest and determined agitation of the noble, self-sacrificing Blanqui,* in the face of the fact that the workers of Paris, * The true greatness of this noble enthusiast will be better appre- 4o8 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Lyons, and Marseilles were thoroughly imbued with the communistic teaching, Socialism failed in France because the time had not fully come for success, because the attempts were organised on no scientific basis, and because the leaders did not take sufficient account, even in the partial experi- ments which they made, either of the strength of the opposing forces or of the incapacity of the people, after years of separate work, to make common cause for the general advantage. National workshops, no matter how sound the principle on which they were started — and there were many defects in the scheme of Louis Blanc, even from an economical point of view — could not be carried on successfully save in close connection with national agriculture and national distribu- tion of products. And France, with its millions of small peasant proprietors, the hardest, the most griping, the most individual of men, was perhaps the nation least suited to begin such an experiment. France had passed far beyond the stage of village communal life, and yet had attained but in a small degree the level of the great machine, socialised industry. Paris certainly could not be a socialist centre by itself, vs^hen the city depended for its well-being upon the sale of its goods on the markets- of the world, and was surrounded by a people each of whom was fighting for his own hand. That great struggle for emancipation failed. The time was not ripe ; and five-and-thirty years later, we can see that even yet it has scarcely come. Ignorance and race hatred, national pride and difference of language still ciatecl as years go on. No French revolutionary leader will, I venture to think, stand so high in the eyes of posterity as he. Out of his long life he spent forty years in gaol. All the working-class of Paris, who could, followed his corpse to its grave. INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 409 shut the workers out from the great field of international co-operation. Yet there were in 1848 Socialists of estab- lished character and reputation in every country in Europe who were ready to make common cause with their brethren elsewhere. In England — though the fact is now too often forgotten or conveniently pushed aside — there was perhaps more practical Socialism than in any other nation. For the teaching of Robert Owen, Sadler, and Oastler, to say nothing of others, had been very widely accepted. Robert Owen held out his hand to the French Socialists, and -vvi'ote to them some remarkable letters. Others were in constant correspondence with advanced newspapers in France and Germany ; more than one of the leaders in Ireland was on good terms with English revolutionists, as well as with their continental brethren. Further afield, Mazzini, Kossuth, and their fellow-revolutionists were ready to accept assistance in their work from men of any nationality, though their ener- gies were directed chiefly to the enfranchisement of their own countries from the yoke of the stranger ; and Mazzini, though a noble moral teacher, had no sympathy with the great class struggle which underlies all national movements, and will end by reducing them all to insignificance. The necessity for absolutely united action upon the part of the workers in all civilised countries against the capital- ist class and the governments which were then as now merely boards of dii-ectors elected in the interest of that class, was first made plain in a scientific form in the famous Communist Manifesto signed by Marx and Engels, already referred to more than once, which was printed and published in 1847. This manifesto is by no means written in a popular form. It is rather a historical and philosophical disquisition upon the growth of the bourgeoisie and the 4IO THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. proletariat as the two great antagonistic forces of the present and the future. As a scientific statement of the reasons for combination among the workers of all lands, it remains most valuable. This manifesto was in fact an open declaration of a class war as a necessity for the enfran- chisement of the workers. Everything that the respect- able bourgeois holds as most sacred — private property only for the well-to-do, higher education for the income-tax payer alone, capital as the benefactor of mankind, pecuniary relations as the eternal basis of the best possible society, are denounced as merely the ruling ideas of the profit-monger- ing class now dominant, and the ultimate victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie is shadowed forth as a his- torical necessity, in the same way that the conquest of the feudal system by the bourgeoisie itself was also a historical necessity. The concluding sentences are as follows : — " Communists help every revolutionary movement against existing social and political conditions wherever it may be. In all such movements their object is to point to the question of property as the most important feature in the movement, no matter what the degree of development which property may have reached. Communists lastly strive everywhere for the unity and combination of the democratic parties in all countries. Communists disdain to hide their aims and objects. They openly declare that their ends can only be compassed by the forcible overthrow of all existing social arrangements. Let the governing classes tremble at a Communist Revolution. The working classes have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working-men of the world. Unite ! " But this appeal, able as it was, produced little practical eflfect at the time. One of its authors, Marx, was driven to INTERNA TIONAL LA BO UR MO VEMENTS. 4 1 1 take up his abode in England, where, although he kept up an active correspondence with Socialists of all countries, he devoted himself for many years chiefly to working out his economical and social views in a scientific shape. Even Germany long gave no response to these ideas. In France the success of the Empire was fatal for the time to an active Socialist propaganda. Elsewhere than in England and France, Socialism as an organised force did not exist and never had existed. The agitation, there- fore, may be said to have remained almost stationar}'- from 1848 until 1864, a period of sixteen years of com- plete middle-class ascendancy in every country ; although in England the Trade Unions gained something for the workers by their improved organisation. In 18G4, how- ever, on the 24th September, a meeting was held at St Martin's Hall, London, with Professor Beesly in the chair, which renewed the Socialist agitation and gave it an inter- national basis. This meeting had been gradually led up to by attempts on the part of the English, French, and German working-men to make common cause with the Poles ; nor should the extraordinary effect produced by Garibaldi's visit to England in 1863 be overlooked, as showing that the working-men of London were far more ready to greet a noble popular leader than to bow down before kings and emperors. Throughout the war between the North and the South the same spirit was shown by the workers. Whilst the upper and middle classes were in favour of the Slave-States, the English working-men who suffered most from the civil war were from beginning to end earnestly on the side of the Northerners. The growing power of the Trade Unions and the capacity shown at this time by their leaders, Odgcr, 412 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Howell, Lucraft, &c. — those who are still living having been far more advanced men and far more genuine repre- sentatives of the workers then than they are to-day — helped on the general cause. A more favourable opportunity, there- fore, so far as Englishmen were concerned, could not have been chosen. The best known names of the active Inter- nationalists were those given above, together with Marx, Engels, Eccarius, Lelubez, Tolain, Bosquet, and Hermann Jung. The first executive had Odger for president, Wheeler as treasurer, Cremer as secretary, and correspond- ing secretaries were appointed for the different European countries. At first Mazzini, with whom Major Wolff was closely connected, joined in the movement, which, in so far as it was merely international, he himself had frequently championed and tried to set on foot. But Mazzini, with all his noble principles and readiness to sacrifice himself for the sake of his cause, had no idea of the economical class struggle which was necessary to right the evils he saw around him. He thought that appeals to the moral nature of the capita- list class, that the doctrines of Christian brotherly love among all classes would be successful ; and that when once the national struggles were over, the nations might unite on the basis of a genial middle-class supremacy which should still care for the interests of the workers. Mazzini, in fact, was opposed to the declaration of war, which of course was the very reason for international combination among Socialists at all. His views, however, naturally met with little acceptance among working-men, who found themselves more and more at the mercy of the possessing classes and reduced to the level of mere machines. Mazzini therefore withdrew, and from that time forward Marx was the guiding spirit of the International, the formation of INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 413 which his genius had first seen to be necessary for the Avorkers. Throufrhout all the documents and manifestoes of the International runs the idea which concludes the great manifesto of 1847 — " Proletarians of all countries, unite " — throughout it is plainly stated that the bourgeoisie, and their hangers-on the modern landlords, with their domestic ser- vants, and others who contribute to their luxury, are the real enemies of the working class. By their monopoly of the means of production, by their monopoly of the higher education, in short, by the entire supremacy of the middle class over the whole field of social economy and human knowledge, they have become complete masters of the wage- earners, whom they use as mere machines. Hence the object of the workers in every coimtry must be to obtain peaceably if possible, forcibly if necessary, the complete control of political power in order to turn it to account in social reconstruction. To do this, community of action is essential between men of all nations who work witli their hands ; and success can only be obtained by the action of the working classes themselves. These views were fully accepted and the need for combination admitted at the meeting in St Martin's Hall, where the rules for the guid- ance of the International Working Man's Association were laid down. Nothing can be nobler in spirit or more just in expression than these rules, which, based upon the formula, " no duties without rights, no rights without duties," bind each of the members to act towards one another and all men with truth, uprightness, and morality, without reference to colour, creed, or nationality. The members are also pledged to help thoso who may change their place of abode, and to receive new- 414 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. comers who are members as friends. Though the demands made are adapted to the social conditions of each country, none of the branches are to lose sight of the fact that only by a common movement can the great result aimed at be achieved. The International rapidly grew in strength and ofave much assistance to the workers in strikes alike in England and on the continent of Europe. In England, the International was happily instrumental in inducing the return to their own country of workmen who came over or were brought over at a time of strike in order to reduce wages, thus helping to defeat the capitalists, or at any rate to bring them to terms sooner than would other- wise have been possible. The first Congress was held at Geneva in 1866, at which attempts were made to form a common basis of action for all labour organisations, and to draw the trade unions from the narrow ground of mere struggles for raising wages on to the wider field of international combination for the general good. At this same Congress the question arose between those who wished to exclude the men who merely used brain work from common action with the hand workers, for whose benefit the International was founded. The exclu- sion of the brain- workers was not carried ; which was lucky, seeing that with Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, and others out of the way the International would have had small chance of success. But the organisation was still growing in numbers, and met with denunciation and persecution at the hands of different European Governments. Social emanci- pation clearly meant political warfare in one shape or an- other ; so in France, in particular, the proceedings of the International were considered as treasonable. The fear of the International was really greater among European states- INTERNA TIONAL LABO UR MO VEMENTS. 41 5 men at this time than its power at this or any other period altogether justified. Marx's great ideas were never fully accepted by enough people to give them effect; and although much has been made by outsiders of the secret propaganda, it is at least doubtful whether this ever reached the dimen- sions which the natural dread of capitalists imagined. The International beyond question gained ground until the year 1870, and the views which found favour were set forth in increasing detail upon an economical foun- dation. Thus at the Congress of Brussels in 1868, it was decided that all quarries, coal and other mines, as well as railways, should belong to the State, and be worked by com- panies of workmen instead of by companies of capitalists, so that under no circumstances could they become a monopoly. With respect to the agricultural land, it was resolved that as land is the primary source of all wealth, and is more and more worked on a large scale with improved machinery, that also should be handled as a State enterprise like the mines and the railways. Canals, roads, telegraphs, and forestry would naturally fall under the same management. Machinery must in like manner belong to the workers, and new machines should only be introduced under recognised guarantees and compensations."'^ These, of course, are the ideas of the old economists, English and others, taken and applied to a further stage in the evolution of human society ; and Robert Owen's Utopian " Association of all Classes of all Nations," together with the various international middle- class combinations, are changed into an international or- ganisation of one special class for the purpose of gaining a complete victory in a great class struggle throughout the world. The object is to secure for all the full fruits of their * Compare Sir James Steuart, quoted in chapter iii. 41 6 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM, labour, and as the market for the exchange of goods is as wide as the world, as also capitalism acts without reference to race, creed, or nationality, so must eventually the labourers combine all over the globe to sweep away rent, interest, and profit in every form. Each nation must deal first with its own profit-making class and remove exchange from the con- trol of the individual, as production has already ceased to be individual and has become social ; but in the long run com- plete victory will only be gained for mankind by universal combination among the workers. Needless to say that the man who, more than any other, was the brain of the International, saw himself that, no matter how rapidly the power of man- kind over nature might develop, such a complete combina- tion — involving as it does agreement between Europe and Asia, to which the calming-down of race-hatred in Europe is child's-play — must be a long, very long, process. In Europe alone progress might be more rapid. At first, indeed, notwithstanding the hostility of the Governments of France, Austria, Italy, and Spain, the International made way rapidly. The idea was a great one, the thinker who virtually controlled the organisation and was in receipt of the most correct information had na personal objects to serve, whilst possessing the strange depth and subtlety of the Jewish intellect, combined with the never-ceasing industry of the German. The time, a& already stated, was favourable ; for strikes were frequent in all countries, and the year 1866 was a period of serious- financial and industrial collapse. Further, Lassalle had begun his agitation in Germany in 1862, and had produced an effect upon the workmen of that country which the philo- sophical turn of his speeches makes it rather difficult for an Englishman to understand. His success, however, was quite INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 417 extraordinary, and German workmen who heard him during his brief and stirring career as a public orator, can scarcely speak of him even now without emotion. Lassalle was, like Karl Marx, a Jew, and had been received by Marx him- self in 1848 into the Communist or^^anisation — the Leao^ue of the Just. But after that date Lassalle took no part in the work for fourteen years, devoting himself to studies in a widely different field ; nor indeed could it ever be said that the agitator had any economical ideas of his own in the sense that he pushed a step further forward the investigations of his immediate teachers — Marx and Rodbertus. None the less he did a great work. His "Arbeiter- lesebuch," the reprint of a long speech delivered at Leipsig in April 1863, had an astonishing success, although, of course, he met with the usual misrepresentation which all Socialists expect from the capitalist press. His attacks upon the Schulze-Delitsch co-operation trickery, his denun- ciations of the Manchester School, his proposals for the foundation of large industrial establishments by the help of loans of capital or credit from the State were received with enthusiasm. Moreover, Lassalle was, unlike Blanqui or Marx, essentially a national Socialist, who wished, above all things, to rai^e the Fatherland to a high level of greatness and glory. Eager to beat down the sham Liberalism rampant in Germany as in England, he wished to do so in order that Germany might be the gainer. And this national turn, though a grave weakness economically, when we see tliat the market of the world has completely taken the place of the old restricted national market, was nevertheless a help rather than a hindrance to an agitator who wished to rouse his countrymen from along and apparently hopeless apathy. 2d 41 8 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. He took up, in fact, the programme of the English social agitators of the Chartist times, and applied it with additions to Germany, hoping to bring about the success of his ideas by peaceful and constitutional means, through the ballot and universal suffrage. In fact, the social movement which was at its heiofht in England from 1835 to 1848 and then died down, was reproduced in Germany, and carried to a point which even Robert Owen scarcely foresaw. Lassalle un- fortunately was killed in a duel just as he was at the height of his reputation and popularity ; but his death in such circumstances gave almost as great an impetus to his teaching as his continued activity could have done. Lassalle was allowed an amount of latitude in his agita- tion which was certainly surprising. He was supported rather than checked by Prince Bismarck in his attacks upon the Fortschritt-Partei and the Liberals generally ; though could that statesman have foreseen that the result of the Lassalle agitation would be the strengthening of the Marx or International party, which has steadily advocated the use of force when success seemed feasible, and has invariably proposed, wherever possible, to act with the Socialists of foreign countries, we may be quite sure that the agitator would have been more annoyed by officials than he was. In any case, Lassalle's agitation, though in it'self national, gained many adherents later for the International Working Man's Association and the German Social-Democratic party. This, which is to-day the only really organised or formidable Socialist body in Germany, made great way through the energetic work of Liebknecht and Bebel, who are now, as they have been for years past, its principal leaders, Germany took the lead in the renewed Socialist agitation, as might have been expected from the long uphill work done by the INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 419 scientific writers of the party, and the superior education of the work-people themselves. Other causes also tended to give Germany the leadership in the agitation, thoucjh the men at the head of the move- ment knew well that the real reorganisation must begin in England ; and from Germany the movement spread easily to Austria, where Rodbertus and Stein, and even the confused Schcfiffle,* had their share in preparing the way for a thorough agitation. The capitalist system came upon Germany and Austria in a shape and at a time specially favourable to resistance by the people. To begin with, it has crushed down the peasantry and small land- owners, by the pressure of indebtedness to Jews and mort- gage-banks through methods which are equally applicable in all countries where the crops or the capital-value of the land are hj^pothecated to money-dealers ; next, it has, by the law of large capitals and the growth of factory industry, shut out from rising young men Avho have been thoroughly educated that improvement in position which they had been taught to look forward to; thirdly, the political situation, with the crushing weight of the army, and especially in Austria, the domination of Jews in finance and of hide-bound bureau- crats in administration, has increased the discontent. Hence constant emigration, which has drawn away the small capi- talists and has left the people face to face with their oppres- sors. The rapidity with which the Socialist teaching made head was therefore scarcely surprising. The people were . * Schoeffle's criticisms of what he supposes the Socialists to mean are not deficient in acuteness. They are at any rate much better than Mr Fawcett's recent article in " Macmillan's Magazine." But Schreffle has no more grasped Marx's tlieories than M. de Laveleye has. Scho-ffle's best remarks against Socialist views, as he understands them, are to be found at p. 340, et seq., of his " Kapitalismus und Sociidisraus." 420 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. educated and the lower middle-class disappointed. Socialist journals sprang up in every direction, and when the war with France was prepared on both sides of the frontier, it was the Social-Democrats of Germany who, to their eternal honour, proclaimed that there could be no real cause of quarrel between the people of Germany and the people of France ; that, on the contrary, war between the two countries meant a danger to civilisation. Prior to 1870, the International reached the height of its power under Marx's guidance, and it seemed not impossible that his gigantic programme of a general rising of the European proletariat, at any rate in the great centres of population, might be brought about in his lifetime. In the years just before the war indeed, the struggle between labour and capital was everywhere taking a threatening shape, and the International was the only body which had either the information or the brains at command to give these various, movements in different countries a definite and, eventually, a combined organisation. The war between France and Germany did much to destroy the hopes of the people. Old national and race hatreds were stirred afresh, especially among the French, and Sedan and Metz, with the occupation of France, swept away for the time all idea of fraternity. The war over, the rising of the Commune in Paris began, and then Marx, who saw that the movement was hopeless unless others rose at the same time, was denounced as a German Jew because he tried to dissuade the French revolutionists from uselessly sacrificing their own lives.* Yet the Commune * None the less the principal organ of the International cheered the Commune on when the stiiiggle had once begun, and spoke of this great Paris insurrection against the foundation of the mean bourgeois Ee- public as a necessary prologvie to the coming international federation and reorganisation of society. The Paris Commune was indeed a land- INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 421 startled Europe, and the atrocities committed by Thiers and Galhfet, the 30,000 people killed in cold blood in Paris, the horrors, in short, which accompanied " the triumph of order," have remained fast fixed in the minds of the labour- ing people all the world over. Whilst the middle-class is content, as a rule, to think of the insurrection as an affair of petroleuses and dynamitards, the Socialist party con- stantly recalls that, in spite of all the furious blundering, unfortunate rashness, and sad personal jealousies, Paris was never so peaceful nor were so few crimes ever committed within a like period as during the supremacy of the much abused Commune."^'" When the rising had been crushed with ferocious cruelty, and the plain of Satory had become a mere shambles, the International issued a manifesto, defending the action of the men who had lost the day, and whose certain defeat its leaders had predicted. This document excited much atten- tion at the time. But with the downfall of the Commune of Paris, and the ill-feeling thence resulting against the Inter- national and its great leader, the organisation received its quietus for the time. Thenceforth the working-men seemed to lose heart in England and France, whilst at the same time differences which had before been kept under, now came fully to light in the International itself. Personal bitternesses, which should have been sunk in the greatness of the cause, now had full swing. In vain did Marx at the mark in the history of peoples. If it had done no more than show the world the nobleness of such a man as Delescluze, or of such a woman as Louise Michel, that alone would have been much. * English Liberals and Conservatives who were in Paris are agreed about this. The government of Paris during the three months, with all the miserable results of the siege to contend with — famine within and the enemy without — was good in every respect. 422 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Hague Congi'ess strive to save the work of his life from even temporary injury by a noble appeal to all for absolute union and solidarity. '' Solidarity. We shall attain the great end which we strive for if we establish this life-giving principle as the firm foundation for the workers of all countries. The Revolution must be absolutely unified, and we find a great example in the Commune in Paris, which fell because a great revolutionary movement did not break out in all the capitals of Europe, in Berlin, in Madrid, at the same time — a movement which should have made common cause with this powerful rising of the proletariat of Paris." That was the idea of the International and its founder, the simultaneous and concerted action of the workers of Europe and the world against the class which by inter- national agreement took their labour for nothing. But once more the time was not yet, and there arose that great difierence between the Collectivists and the Anarchists which answers to the disputes between the Petreans and Paulists, or the Arians and the Athanasians, in the early days of the Christian Church. The Socialist Church of material salvation was split up in the same way. The his- torical collectivist school of which Marx and Engels are the chief scientific exponents, and the Social-Democratic party in all countries is the organised social and political expression, desires to obtain control of all the forces of production as now developed, owing to the social and economical evolution partly traced in this volume, and by means of State management and international action and agreement to turn all present machinery and future improvements to the advantage of mankind at large — all class distinctions being done away, and all contributing their share of the slight manual labour that would then be needed. Force would INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 423 be used to bring this about ; * but only in organised fashion and in order to give the workers complete command of existing forms, not certainly to destroy those forms entirely on the chance that something better would grow up out of chaos come again. Revolution being the unavoidable result of causes long prepared through history, and the minds of men being framed by a series of previous circum- stances, the most which could be done was to help on the development and to a certain extent direct its course. These collectivist views had been accepted partly con- sciously and jDartly unconsciously by a large proportion of the thinkers among the working-men of Europe. In the Teutonic countries in particular, as well as in> Scandinavia and in Switzerland, these opinions were prevalent. The failure of the Commune of Paris and the attitude which the International assumed towards the rising in the first instance gave an impetus to a form of revolution which, notwithstanding the great abilities and noble enthusiasm of many of its champions, is really nothing but reaction in disguise. Though Proudhon may be looked upon as the founder of this so-called anarchist school, the Russian Bakunin was certainly the chief apostle of the sect, and it was in great part due to his energy that the anarchist doctrines spread in the " Latin " countries where previously the ideas of the International had obtained a reasonable foothold. t In Spain, especially, Bakunin had a great success, and the recent underground workings of the Mano Negra * "Force is the midwife of progi'ess, and delivers the old society pregnant with the new," says Marx. t I am free to admit that I have never been able to get a clear description of aiiarcliism from any of its champions, nor can I gra>>p the views of Bakunin himself ; but I try to give as plain a statement in brief as I can. 424 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. are the results of the propaganda which he carried on so assiduously in that country. The revolutionists of France, Italy, and Russia also accepted his views in an increasing degree, but few Germans and no Englishmen have ever followed Bakunin. Marx, who was of course as much superior to Bakunin in original capacity and acquired knowledge as Faraday to Edison, not content with refuting Bakunin's hasty theories, denounced him as a paid agent of the Russian Government. Other German writers have called the man " the evil spirit of the International," a " hell-hound," and the like pretty names. They have regarded all his movements as dictated by the one object of rendering Germany, and through Germany Europe, an easy prey to Russian barbarism. That Bakunin was at one time, if not always, an ardent champion of the Slavonic race crusade against Germans cannot be questioned, nor possibly that he was, as Lassalle in Germany was, on good terms with more than one member of the Russian Government ; to say also that his methods were semi-Asiatic is only to reaffirm that he was a Russian. But that he meant to be a revolutionist and an active one is as clear as that his influence in most countries of Western Europe has been distinctly reactionary. In place of the centralised system with local developments which the Collectivists predict as the necessary result of the economi- cal evolution in the highest forms of civilisation, Bakunin and the anarchists strive for a communal system where each commune shall do what it pleases, and each indi- vidual of that commune shall make a little heaven — or hell — for himself. Whether the commune is to be a nation like London or a hamlet like Eye is never explained ; possibly for the good reason that the first object of every true revolu- INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 425 tionist should be to destroy everything as soon as possible and leave the rest to chance. Anarchism in a word is individualism gone mad. Bakunin's instructions are at any rate plain enough, " Every genuine revolutionist/' he says, " has but one science — simple destruction — and to this end he studies mechanics, physics, chemistry, and perhaps also medicine. With the same object he studies the science of living — men, characters, relationships, as well as all the condi- tions of existing social order in all possible directions. The object is ever the same, the quickest and surest pos- sible destruction of this disgusting arrangement of the world. He despises public opinion and hates the present social ethics in all their motives and manifestations. For him everything is moral which favours the triumph of the revo- lution, everything immoral and criminal which hinders it. War to the knife is declared between him and society, open or secret as the case may be, but never-ending, implacable war." * Again, since utter and entire destruction of what exists can alone benefit the people, there must be no inten- tion whatever of attempting to map out a plan of society for the future. " The future organisation will doubtless be developed from the movement and life of the people, but that is the business of future generations. Our work is frightful, complete, implacable, and universal destruction." Thus Bakunin's " New Moral World," with its complete transformation of human sentiments and duties, is to be brought about by wholesale devastation. * See Bakmiin's " Catechism of Revolution," Meyer Emancipations — Kampf des Vicrtcn Standes, vol. ii., p. .391. Very pretty reading it all is for comfortable fathers of snug, respectable middle-class house- holds. 426 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. This advice, which extends to the minutest details of conduct for male and female revolutionists, alike as indi- viduals and as members of a revolutionary organisation, was meant in the first place for Russians. How faithfully the so-called Nihilists have followed Bakunin's injunctions may be read in " Underground Russia," where the figure of the man in the printing office, who worked steadily on in the most frightfully insanitary conditions with successive bands of revo- lutionists, his very name and identity having been forgotten, and his whole being sunk in the cause, is at least an evi- dence of what extraordinary enthusiasm this creed of uni- versal devastation for the sake of humanity can arouse. There are many similar instances ; nor can it be said that a revolutionary sect which numbers among its adherents such men as M. Elis^e Reclus, or Prince Krapotkin, or such a woman as the late Sophie Perovskaia, is wanting in men of knowledge and science or in women of rank and beauty. In France, Italy, and Spain also, anarchist groups have been formed, who ever and anon give evidence of their existence by a sjDlutter of volcanic action. " Nothing," say the an- archists, " can be worse than the anarchy and bloodshed which are ever going on daily in the midst of what is called in irony, civilisation. Against that civilisation we have de- clared war ; that civilisation we mean to sweep away utterly by war — war by the individual and war in concert when- ever and wherever we can. To us all weapons are lawful, and all your talk of morality is simply fiddlesticks. Force is being used against the people every hour ; we use force — the scientific resources of your blessed civilisation — in reply. Thus it is that dynamite and pikrate of potash, and ful- minate of silver and other less known and more dangerous chemicals, are being handled in the most scientific manner INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. \2- for our purpose. Thus only can the peoples be finally freed." Desperate as is the condition of our present society in many respects, it is, I think, difficult for any Englishman to doubt that the anarchist is in reality only a reactionist and the helper of reaction. Those very powers, that very enthusiasm, which is being devoted to bring about complete destruction and to organise perfect vengeance, might, if applied to organised effort, obtain control of the forces of modern society to some good end. Holding such opinions, however, it is not surprising that Bakunin withdrew from the International which Marx had organised, and tried to found one of an anarchist type, which his followers since his death have vainly striven to put in the place of the Social- Democratic organisation. Between the two sections of Revolutionists there is, as already stated, no love lost ; and though at times they act in the same direction, they do so from motives as different as those which would actuate a Protestant and a Catholic in fighting for their common Chris- tianity, It was probably the growing power of the anarchist party in the Latin countries more than any belief that America was the best centre of action which led to the transfer of the Central Committee of the International Collectivist organisation from London to New York. But in the meantime the force of circumstances, the increasing weight of the recurring depressions due to our capitalist system, the rapid development of new forms of production are forcing the labouring classes into interna- tional understandings apart from the more conscious action of collcctivists or anarchists. The Trades Union Congi-ess held at Nottinoham in 1883 had before its members little better than middle-class measures of the mildest type, the 428 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. whole tone of the delegates was such that the capitalist press once more complimented them all round as being no longer in the least dangerous to the class which oppresses the workers as a body. The delegates even went so far as to declare against Nationalisation of the Land, which they voted for in 1882, one delegate actually stating, in my hearing and amid some applause, that the people had no right and could have no right to the land of their own country.* Yet this aristocracy of labour, representing but a small fraction of the workers of the country, and wholly incompetent as they have shown themselves of late years to organise or control strikes such as that of the ironworkers of Staffordshire, or the cotton operatives of Lancashire, were fain to accept an invitation from Paris to an International Congress of representatives of various trades. The minority of more advanced men among the English Trade Unionists may ere long have an opportunity of making their voices heard throughout the civilised world, and the fact that the interests of the labouring class are identical in all countries as opposed to the interests of the possessing classes will become yet more apparent than it is to-day. Meanwhile, since the muzzle-law of 1878, the Socialist party in Germany, the only thoroughly organised labour party as yet in existence, has been driven to secret pro- paganda and secret combination. After the final fusion of the Lassalle party with the Marx party in 1876, the Social- Democrats were really the coming political force in Germany, the only one which had genuine enthusiasm combined with thorough political knowledge at its command. The attempts of Hodel and Nobiling, who were not Socialists, on the life * Mr Battersby of Glasgow. It is well to record the name of such a champion of his class as this ! INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 429 of the Emperor, gave the pretext for persecution, though if the Socialists themselves had shown a bolder front it is doubtful whether the shameful legislation could have been carried. It is no small matter for a reactionary govern- ment that all adult male Germans should be trained soldiers, and that few are without some knowledge of political economy. But the leaders held their hand. Their numer- ous newspapers were therefore suppressed, their meetings put down, and their funds seized. The principal cities of Germany are to-day in a state of siege, and any active Socialist may be called upon to break up his home and quit his place of residence at a moment's notice. The unity of Germany has been dearly purchased indeed at the cost of the infamous tyranny which crushes down the people. For no publicity whatever being- allowed to the working classes, all the laws in their favour are outraged by the capitalists with impunity, and German competition beats that of other nations by grinding down the men, women, and children of the Fatherland for the profit of the few."|* But unless all the teachiugs of history are falsified a terrible upset is being steadily pre- pared. Even as it is, the party makes way under all discouragement and persecution, and the return of Bebel for Hamburg this year, without newspapers, public meetings, or any means save a secret propaganda for carrying on his * The chief organ of the Social-Democratic party iu Germany is now the Sozial-Demokrat of Zurich. This little sheet is worthy of more attention than it receives from English students of foreign social and political movements. Such students are alas few and far between. t Cheap and nasty (billig und sclilccht) wa.s the Imperial Commissioner de Reuleaux's report on the goods of his countrymen. The best recent account of the Social-Democratic party in Germany appeared iu the NouvdU Revue for March 1882. 430 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. electoral canvass, shows what progress is being made. In the army, at the same time, proselytism goes on apace, and the Socialists were probably never so strong in Germany, especially in the fortresses, as they are to-day. Ready as they are to make common cause with revolutionary move- ments elsewhere, such men are, of course, doubly formidable. How fast the movement has progressed in Austria may be partly gathered from recent events. The condition of the people alike in town and country, more especially in Vienna itself, favours the spread of Socialist doctrines, whilst the attack upon the Jews is a convenient cover for a more direct attack at an early date upon the great landlords and Chris- tian capitalists. The position which the Jews hold in Austria — the whole political forces of the Empire are com- pletely corrupted and Judaised — renders attacks upon them still more dangerous to the powers that be than similar movements in Russia or Germany. In France the miser- able'! middle-class Republic which has stretched the law asrainst agitators and men on strike to an extent which even the Empire would scarcely have dared to attempt, is mani- festly tottering, and the only hope for the future rests in a more or less socialistic party coming to the head of affairs. Few Englishmen fully understand how the weight of taxa- tion and the money-lending system in vogue in France crush down the body of the peasantry, and how wretched are the workers in the large towns. Unfortunately the reactionary efforts of the anarchists may render organised revolution difficult. The same is true, to a still greater extent, in Italy and Spain, where the communal system may be best suited to the people, but where a period of downright anarchy seems likely to precede any fresh development. INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 43I What is more interesting and important for us, as Englishmen, is the unquestionable spread of Collectivist Socialism throughout the United States.* Here, where but yesterday all middle-class writers thought that individualism must necessarily dominate for ever, the great labour move- ment is growing into a Socialist shape more rapidly every day.. Mr Henry George's interesting book has produced even more effect in his own country than it has in England. The growth of the land monopoly, the fearful economical tyranny and wholesale corruption practised by the great railroad kings, the monstrous exactions of corporations such as the Standard Oil Well Company and similar capitalist associations, are forcing the workers to combine more closely in orsranisations of a similar character to that of the knights of labour or the genuine Socialist bodies which are now springing up in every direction. Such a man as John Swinton of New York, who has worked for years in the cause, now begins to see some result for his unremitting labour. The constant influx of Socialists from Germany also aids the spread of the scientific economical socialism which alone can afford a sound basis for reconstruction. Even as I write the Committee of the Senate on Labour and Education is taking evidence as to the condition of the working people, and the state of things disclosed — the low wages, the bad lodging, the tyranny of capital, the uncer- tainty of employment — has rivalled what may be seen in Europe. All thinking Americans have been shocked at the talc of misery which has been told. Nevertheless, the * When I pointed out two or three years ago in the Fortnujhtly Review that tlie class struggle in the United States threatened to be very bitter at no distant date, the c;ii)italist junrnals on both sides of the Atlantic laughed a contemptuous laugh at my ignorance and silly pessimism. 432 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. workers as a whole in America are far better off than in Europe ; but there, as here, it is the contrast between ex- treme wealth and excessive poverty which is so distressing, and the workers have made up their minds to remedy it. The United States is entering on another grave commercial crisis ; during the last there were 3,000,000 tramps wan- dering through the country, whilst the risings in Pittsburg and Baltimore in 1876 showed clearly what elements of discord lay below the surface even then. Now matters are much more serious, inasmuch as the depression threatens to be more grievous and of longer duration. In the meantime, also, the number of the labour journals has multiplied ex- ceedingly, and such newspapers as Truth of San Francisco, the papers of the same name in New York and Chicago, the Voice of the People of New York, the Volhs Zeitung, &c., have a wide and an increasing circulation throughout the working population of the United States. What, how- ever, is most essential to Europe is, that there is a growing feeling among the leaders of all sections that international action on the part of the labourers is essential. Already the organised Socialist bodies are stretching their hands across the Atlantic to their fellow-labourers in Europe, anxious to make common cause with them in an economical movement which shall shorten the hours of labour, regulate production and exchange, so as to remove the existing anarchy, put an end to recurrent crises, secure the workers the fruits of their industry, and eventually give them final control over the entire field of production and commerce — the power over the labourers being thus taken out of the hands of the capitalist class in all countries. The difficulties in the way of the realisation of such a programme arise from the fact, which perhaps even Marx scarcely acknowledged INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS. 433 in public to the extent that he ought to liave done, that the different civilised countries have arrived at widely different stages in the social and economical growth. How many gene- rations, calculated according to the past rate of progress, separate semi-Asiatic Russia, for instance, with its village- communities only now in process of disintegration,* from Eng- land with its enormous city proletariat and vast centralised industry ? Common action seems almost impossible in such a case, though education may do much to abridge the transition period. And what is true of Russia and England is true in a less degree of the workers of other civilised countries. To my mind we have to base the first real socialistic combina- tion upon the common interests and affinities of the great Celto-Teutonic peoples in America, in Australia, in these islands, and possibly in Germany, ready to accept assistance and help from any other quarter, and prepared to organise this power upon a democratic basis for the industrial wel- fare of all portions of the federation, but determined to organise independently if others have mere anarchy in view. It is impossible to jjursue the subject further at present. I am aware that, as it is, I have given but a meagre sketch of the great movement of the peoples which has been and is going on ; but to have omitted a survey (however incom- plete) of international movements altogether would have been to neglect a most important feature in the historical development of Socialism. * The condition of Russia with her people just rising from barbarism below, and all the corruption of western civilisation at the top, is indeed a study. There, east and west, Asia and Europe meet, and the ideas of both continents ferment together. Russia in contact with Germany on the one side and with China on the other, is in a strange position indeed, apart from internal difficulties. ^ E CHAPTER XIII. THE FUTURE. In considering the future in any branch of Imman know- ledge, it is absolutely necessary to base all attempts at prognostication upon the most careful records of past events. This is true of every field of inquiry, and specially true, though not always so clearly admitted, in regard to the most complicated field of all, that of human society. The study of social and economical problems is now seen to be as hopeless when divorced from sound historical methods as anatomy or surgery which took no account of lower forms of life on the work of previous generations. Not many centuries have elapsed since any man who said he could predict the return of a comet or calculate the recurrence of an eclipse would have been set down as a magician or a maniac. The elaborate diagnosis which will to-day enable a first-rate pathologist to state precisely the course of phy- sical, and through physical of mental disease in a manner surprising even to the educated, is due to as carefully recorded observations as those which have guided the astronomer to his irrefragable conclusion. Rigid accuracy, so far as possible, in the tabulation of facts, guided all the while by scientific imagination, has taken the place of the slip-shod guess-work of old time led astray by theological crazes. The same with the study of the movements and rela- tions of mankind in civilised society to-day. Just in so far THE FUTURE. 435 as we can trace the evolution throusrh the lonsc ages of social development, precisely to that extent may we fairly hope to forecast correctly the next stages of our growth.* And this is precisely the object of all historical research. The mere facts that men did thus and so in periods long gone by have no practical or scientific bearing upon us, the men of to-day, save that they may lead to a wiser under- standing of our present society, and point out the road to an earlier improvement in the conditions of existence for the race. Mankind are modified by their surroundings from generation to generation ; but just as the individual man can to some extent, at least, modify his own character and change his own surroundings, so within far wider limits can a complete human society mould the character and modifv the surroundinsfs of the next and comino^ genera- tions.t It is with a view to learn how, taking the fullest * That this scientific method sliould now be generally adapted by Socialists we owe above all other men to Karl Marx, who himself, however, was too gi-eat a man to claim that absolute originality which some of his followers are foolish enough to assert on his behalf. Marx is the Darwin of modern sociology, and it is not a little remarkable that though in the " Misere de la Philosophic" in 1847, and in earlier writings, as well as in the famous Communist Manifesto which he wrote in conjunction with Engels, he puts forward his theories, the groundwork of his greatest work, "Zur Kritik der politischen (Ekonomie," appeared in the same year as the " Oi'igin of Species." t The truly remarkable experiment which the Jesuits made in the development of social life among the inhabitants of Paraguay seems to me never to have received sufficient attention. Eobert Owen's experi- ment at New Lanark in unfavourable circumstances has been already referred to. What may be done by man in the way of developing hereditary qualities in the higher animals is, of course, a matter of common knowledge. In India we can see clearly that skill in handi- craft becomes distinctly hereditary. What the animal man in associa- tion may develop into, it is, of course, absurd to imagine, but the power of development as a society is, so faa- as I can see, illimitable. 436 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. account of our fundamentally animal nature, such modifica- tions may most safely be made that we should study the history of Rome, Greece, Egypt, India, China, and modern Europe. But, in all such work, to be of any use, the study of the present must go hand in hand with examina- tion of the past. The man who cannot see and understand the complications of the society in which he himself lives has but a poor chance of comprehending social relations based upon**totally different forms of production, exchange, and class interests in the remote past. The difficulty in Europe is that the various nations though passing slowly through the same or very similar stages in the same material evolution, are seen at different points in the growth in the same way that our highly complex capitalist civilisation is contemporaneous with the nomad of Australia or North America, with the stone age and cannibalism in Polynesia, with village communities in Russia, or with feudalism in Japan. As a consequence of this unequal growth, each country must to a great extent work out its own social problems, though there is no hope of a complete solution until the proletariat of Europe and America at any rate unite on the basis of the common interests of labour. My attempt has been to give a sketch of the develop- ment as regards Great Britain alone, though the circle of our commercial interests being now world-wide, the whole globe necessarily enters into the sphere of our economical relations. In this chapter I shall touch briefly upon external questions, such as the treatment of Ireland and India, the operation of capitalism in America and our Colonies, and the steady growth of Socialism in all civilised countries ; but England is still the centre of modern indus- trial relations, even states apparently most independent being THE FUTURE. 437 to a large extent providers of food and raw materials for our all-devouring industrialism. With England, therefore, and the reconstruction of English society we have in the future as in the past chiefly to deal. What, tlien, to resume briefly, has been the course our evolution has followed ? What generally is it likely to be ? Strictly speaking, of course, it is impossible to take the history of human development at any point, and say " we will begin here." The thousands, the millions of years of the growth of mankind can no more be divided at any special epoch than could the growth of an ancient tree. Change, development, evolution, revolution, decay are going on all the time : there is no statical con- dition in Imman society, though movement may be more or less rapid. But the end of the feudal period in England aflfords a convenient starting-point for such a survey as I have undertaken, and the scientific record of progress can be satisfactorily traced from that point. ""'" In the society of the middle ages we saw then a petty form of isolated pro- duction ; in which the means of production were adapted to the use of the individual, and on that account were necessarily themselves small, mean, and of limited power. But these means of production, poor and inefficient as they seem to us, were generally owned by the producers them- selves, Avho were consequently independent and practically free, personally and economically. They produced for immediate use — for the use of the producers themselves, or of the feudal lord to whom they had personal relations. Their products were only offered for sale and entered into exchange when there was an overplus beyond what was needed for actual consumption. This is the first stej* * The passage which follows is freely translated from Friedrich Eugels' latest work. 438 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. towards tlie production of articles not for use, but as commodities, articles produced with a view to their exchange, at first in small quantities, but already bearing with them in their earliest infancy the germ of social anarchy in production. Production for profit, in fact, gradually slips into a society based upon production for immediate use," " Upon this follows the capitalist revolution. We traced the entire transformation of the industrial system first through manufacture and simple co-operation, which in themselves necessitate association. Then came the con- centration of the means of production which were hitherto scattered. Great workshops at this time are formed ; that is to say, the means of production become social, instead of being at the disposal of the individual— this transformation scarcely affects the exchange, and con- sequently the old methods of appropriation are continued. There is already a socialised method of production, and to give it full development the capitalist appears. He is the owner of the means of production, and he it is who takes possession of the products and turns them into goods for exchange, or merchandise. Production has become a social business, but exchange, and with it appropriation, remain individual actions ; the social product is seized by the individual capitalist. Here, then, is the fundamental antagonism — the origin of all the antagonisms which our existence is moved by. As a result the producer is separated from his means of production, and the labourer is con- demned to wage-slavery his life long : the antagonism referred to at the end of the last chapter between the pro- letariat and the bourgeoisie shows itself. Secondly, there follows the development of the laws which govern the produc- THE FUTURE. ' 439 tion of mere commodities, especially through the action of the great machine industry since the end of the eighteenth century, the inventions of Hargreaves, Watt, Cartwright, &c. This brings on an unbridled struggle by means of com- petition at low prices. Here, too, we saw the antagonism between the rigid social organisation of production which prevails in each factory and the social anarchy in the general production. Thirdly, there was on the one side the con- stant improvement and perfection of machinery, rendered compulsory upon every manufacturer by competition, which amounted to an ever-increasing displacement of workers, thus creating an industrial army of reserve. On the other hand was to be observed an unlimited extension of production, which was equally compulsory upon every manufacturer. All round appeared an unheard-of development of produc- tive forces and an excess of supply over demand. We had then over-production, glut of the markets, a crisis every ten years, and a vicious circle from which our very production itself could not escape. In one place a superabundance of the means of production and of goods ; not far off a super- abundance of labourers, without work and without the means of existence. Here are coats, hats, boots, stockings, cotton, and even food, unsaleable, with great factories standing idle ; there are men and women half-naked and ill-fed, yet only too ready to work at any employment either in or out of the factories. But these two great powers of production and social well-being cannot come together, because the capitalist form of production forbids the productive forces to act, the goods to move off unless they are first changed into capital, and afford a profit, which the very glut itself prevents. Tlie antagonism has been pushed to the point of absurdity. The method of production revolts against the form of exchange. 440 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. The bourgeoisie is henceforward shown clearly to be in- capable of directing the social forces of production. Fourthly, Ave notice a partial recognition of the social character of the productive forces absolutely imposed upon the capitalists themselves ; the great engines of production and distribu- tion, including the communications by land and sea, are taken possession of first by companies made up of many shareholders, and then by the State.* The bourgeoisie has now become a useless class, all its active work being done and its place filled by wage-earners. From this record of the past we can foresee the revolu- tion of the wage-earners who will lay hold of the, political power and by means of this power transform into public property the social means of production which slip from the hands of the bourgeoisie. By so doing they lose their capitalist character, their social character is allowed free play, and social production, according to a predetermined plan, is rendered possible. The very development of production renders the existence of social classes obsolete. The political authority of the State disappears with the social anarchy of production. Men, masters at length of their own mode of association, become masters of nature, masters of them- selves — become, in a word. Freer Such is the scientific and abstract record of the past and analysis of the future. The idea of the appropriation of the land and the other means of production by the State has long had a hazy existence in the minds of men who wished * It is an amusing illustration of this necessity to see a thorough middle-class economist like Mr Fawcett obliged to throw over all his played-out princijiles as an administrator and carry out the State Savings Banks and the State Parcel Post ! It is worth noting, also, that the latest writer on this subject, Mr Henry Sidgwick, who belongs to the eclectic bourgeois school, gives up laissez-faire as a " principle." THE FUTURE. 441 well to their kind. The Utopian Socialist bears the same relation to the Socialist of science as the able alchemist or astrolog-er bears to the chemist or the astronomer of the nineteenth century. There is no possibility of bringing about the gi'eat change until men's minds are prepared for it, and the evolution has reached the necessary point. Then utopia ends and actual practice begins. " The aboli- tion of classes, like every other social progress, becomes possible, not from simple conviction among the mass of the people that the existence of these classes is contrary to either equality or justice or fraternity, nor by the simple desire to destroy these classes, but by the advent of new economical conditions. The division of society into a predatory class, and a class preyed upon, into a governing class and an op- pressed class, has been the fatal consequence of the small pro- ductive power of society. Where social labour furnishes only an amount of products which scarcely exceed what is strictly necessary to maintain the existence of all, where labour con- sequently occupies all, or nearly all, the time of the great majority of the individuals of whom the society is composed, this society is necessarily divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority exclusively devoted to labour is formed a minority exempt from directly productive labour, and charged with the conduct of the common affairs of the society, the general direction of labour, government, justice, science, arts, &c. It is the law of the division of labour which lies at the bottom of this division of society into classes ; which nowise hinders that this division should be brought about by means of force, rapine, trickery, and fraud ; which also does not prevent that the dominant class once established should never fail to consolidate its power to the injury of the work- ing class, and to turn mere social management into exploita- 442 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. tion of the mass of the people. But if the institution of classes has a certain historical right, this is only for a given period, for a group of known social conditions. It rested on the insufficiency of production ; it will be swept away by its complete development." The ideals of Plato, More, Bellers, Rousseau, Saint Simon, Fourier, even Owen, are replaced in fact by the scientific ideals, so to say, of the student of modern social conditions, who sees in the future near or far human society with its production, its education, its life, its entire existence, organised not to the advantage of any classes however well-born or however dexterous in accumulation, but for the benefit, the well-being, and the true happiness of all. In England the early commencement of this great class struggle is assured. We have seen how small a pro- portion out of a total population of 30,000,000 are actually engaged in the work of production, and numbers of these upon articles of luxury fashion or sheer waste which merely degrade those who make as well as those who buy them. The condition of this wage-slave class we have also seen — how their lives are short, weary, and miserable, how the paltry philanthropy of those who live upon their labour is grudgingly extended, how impossible it is to hope for anything better in present economical and social arrange- ments. Yet although the powers at our disposal are so badly and inefficiently applied, and the number of domestic servants alone if turned to useful work would enormously increase our present production, even under such imperfect and degrading conditions as our capitalist system supplies there is enough in actual wealth for all* * The domestic wage-slave is a sad specimen of our social system. What life can be more humiliating from the pompous over-fed Jearaes THE FUTURE. 443 Whilst these truths are being learnt by the people, and ideas of complete change are abroad at the same time also that education of a certain kind, which at least enables boys and girls to read and write, is being widely diffused, just at such a period chemistry has placed at the disposal of the desperate and the needy cheap and powerful explo- sives the full effects of which are as yet unknown. Every day adds new discoveries in this field ; the dynamite of ideas is accompanied in the background by the dynamite of material force. These modern explosives may easily prove to capitalism what gunpowder was to feudalism. Gun- powder did not destroy feudalism ; but its discovery and application were contemporaneous with the change in the forms of production and the spread of the new learning which ended by the total subversion of the entire feudal system and the establishment of middle-class domination. We I are face to face with a similar but more thorough evolution at this very time. The complications of class antagonism in the old times have been swept away, and we are now in presence of the struggle between the monopolists of the means of production and those who are enslaved b}* the very production they are instrumental in creating. In England the land where the monopoly of land, indus- trialism, and the great factory system have attained the highest development, where the middle-class methods of unpaid parliamentary representation and constitutional government were first instituted, it is the fashion to say that Socialism is unknown and that class antagonism de la Pluche to the starved and worn-out " slavey " of all work, who lives in a cellar all day and sleeps in a garret a few hours at night ? All due to our system of production and exchange, and to be altered only by overthrowing that system. 444 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. does not exist. Yet under our eyes parliamentary govern- ment has proved an utter failure. State rule, which is the stepping-stone to organised Socialism, is making way as the only possibility of saving the mass of the people from permanent degradation and ignorance ; or middle-class government from anarchy in administration similar to the anarchy in production which already prevails. It is high time, therefore, that we should consider, with- out any feeling of bigotry or passion — save such as cannot but be aroused by the physical misery unnecessarily brought about by the present system — how the present, the next, and succeeding generations may grow up in better social condi- tions, organising their labour and distributing its products for the benefit of the whole community. If the wage-earning class have nothing to lose and all to gain by a change, so assuredly have the lovers of beauty, happiness, and freedom among the upper and middle classes. Art fades away, literature dwindles under the huckster principles which now guide society. The life of our great cities is devoid of all real beauty or magnificence ; that rampant individualism which has hitherto exercised such baneful effects below still produces hideousness above. Can anything be imagined uglier than the great English cities of the nineteenth century 1 That there hangs around them a sense of power as well as a cloud of fetid smoke may be admitted. But the factory-owner and the jerry-builder, the advertisement contractors and the railroad companies, telegraphs and chimney-pots have taken possession, and we see a positive chaos of ugliness before which the most vigorous art-reformer slinks away hopeless. We of to-day are even worse than our immediate predecessors. They at least loved green trees and gardens even in the midst of the towns they built THE FUTURE. 445 for us. But the greed of the speculator has taken order with the greenery too, and now there, as elsewhere, only municipal or State organisation comes in to remedy but too feebly the anarchy brought about by individual grasping and indifference. Again, returning to the field of production and exchange, what do we find ? Not merely that individual enterprises are being turned into companies with shareholders sitting back in their arm-chairs and gaining their interests and profits through superintendents, managers, salaried officials of all kinds — as in railways, banks, factories, mines, which are now really handled by the modern form of the villicus who organises the wage-slave labour and receives in return a fair salary from the easy capitalist class ;* not only do Ave find this process, as remarked above, going on whilst we are talking of individual action and so forth, but we observe that great capitalists and great houses discover, in innumer- able instances, that it is more to their advantage to combine than to compete. Time after time on the eve of an in- dustrial crisis has a weak financial house or a weak bank been aided by its competitors, not from any love of the concern itself but for fear of damaging the delicate machinery of credit which enables the surplus value — profits, interest, income — to be piled up out of other men's labour more rapidly. But this very tendency to combine serves in the long run to crush out the weaker vessels. In every direc- * I am aware that Vanderbilt, Mackay, Jay Gould, and other American capitalists may be quoted as instances against this view that indivi- dualism is being supplanted ; but even tlicy have worked tlirough com- panies, and the State is coming in America as here to restrict the practical monopoly which has been brought about by competition. My argument is that competition is historically and actually proving a failure, and that the great stream of human progress sets steadily towards a State organisation in which there are no classes. 446 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. tion we see that the law of larger capitals is telling with increasing effect as time rolls on. In the sphere of inter- national banking and trade small houses are being steadily crushed out ; they can make no head against the advantages which are given by wider ramifications and larger funds. In industry this is even more clear, large iron-works, large cotton-mills, large ship-building yards will completely shut out small men from the field as time goes on. So in distribution, where co-operative stores and limited companies slowly break down or absorb the small individual trader, however energetic he may be. Here, indeed, is to be witnessed a strange modification in the method of distribu- tion. For many centuries the division of labour in the workshop went hand in hand with division of labour in the shop. Shop-keepers devoted themselves to the sale of articles in one " line," as grocery, meat, dry-goods, &c., thus gaining special skill as buyers. Now this system is being broken down in every direction, and goods of all kinds, from a pin to a houseful of furniture, from a ham to a cofiin, are sold under the same roof, and under the control of the same capital, each department being managed by a salaried official, who perhaps was but yesterday a trader on his own account. Of the hardships to individuals, of the relentless action of this portion of the evolution, it is needless to speak; enough that the small distributors suffer almost as much in return for excessive toil as the " fringe of labour " amonar the workers themselves, when exposed to this competition of irresistible combination. * It need scarcely be explained that a large concern being able to give heavy discounts, or even to carry on for a time at a loss, can undersell in such fashion as to render competition on the part of small men out of the question. When even a partial monopoly is secured prices can he pushed up again. As a balance to this come real co-operative stores for distribution. Cheapness, however, does not benefit the worker. THE FUTURE. Consider also how the individual absolutely counts for nothing in all this, paradoxical as it may seem in a society where the individual is supposed to be supreme. In produc- tion, it is quite clear that where machines are used the individual who works has no influence whatever on the form, texture, or design of his product. From boyhood to manhood, and on to age, the operations on which he is engaged are purely mechanical, whilst the persistent over- work grinds all life, all spontaneity, all power of invention out of the labourer. He becomes, not an individual, but simply so much " food for capital," a mere " hand " to pro- vide surplus value. As Marx has pointed out, whereas the old handicraftsman and the modern artisan have invented many things, the mere factory wage-slaves have invented nothing. Individuality has disappeared, mental power is sapped. The same with the domestic wage-slaves. What individuality as a class is left for them ? They are mere appendages to the luxurious, and though they may change their place, they in nowise change their social situation. But when we look further, what individuality is there in our domestic architecture as a whole, what in our dress ? — I speak, of course, of the mass of the people. Surely we have but to look around us to be oppressed by an intermin- able monotony, so much so that even those who strive for originality, are but too apt to develop mere mannerism. Thus as a mere revolt against monotony men may well hail the approach of a changeful period. When also we have reached such a point that men and women of the same race, language, religion, manners, and, up to a certain point, education, cannot sit down side by side at the same table with comfort, as is the case with employers and servants in our modern household, surely the anarchy of the existing society strikes us from another point of view. 448 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. What, then, it may be asked, is the end of all this, to what do these various economical and social statements tend ? Admitting that the historical survey is accurate, that the economical exposition is sound, — a large admission no doubt for many, — that the social observations are in accordance with what all of us can see for ourselves, what practical remedies are proposed for this state of things ? Such questions are perhaps natural, and yet they are in nine cases out of ten but the outcome of impatience and incapacity. For any man to attempt to chart down actual remedies as a physician would — in how many cases injuriously — pre- scribe pills, is simple presumption. The utmost that can be done is to show clearly how* the movement of ideas is pro- gressing ; how after millions of years of evolution and revolution, mankind in the most civilised, or rather most highly developed country, has attained such power over nature that it is possible to organise in the future a socialist community which shall use those powers for the benefit of all. The reorganisation may be helped by the educated classes above, but it mvist inevitably grow up from below. And it is growing. For instance, we have seen how in England the monopoly of land has been the result of centuries of economical, social, political pressure. From generation to generation the idea of nationalising the land has been kept alive among the people. A hundred years ago, Thomas Spence of Newcastle formulated a complete sjcheme to bring about this result through the action of parishes and municipalities.* The time was not ripe. Since then the land has got into fewer and fewer hands. And now the idea of nationalisation, of the right and the power * This pamphlet I reprinted at a penny last year. It has sold to the number of many thousands. THE FUTURE. 449 of the nation at large to take up its heritage, springs afresh among the people. The sale of 100.000 copies of Mr Henry George's book in a few months, the passing of the resolution in favour of the nationalisation of the land at the Trade Union Congress of 1882 by a large majority, the adoption of the same by the miners of the North of England — all shows that in this direction at least the desire for a real collective liberty, though not yet fully understood, is making way. Nationalisation of the land, in short, is passing out of the sphere of mere theory into the domain of what is foolishly called " practical politics," by pressure from below. But no thinking worker stops at Mr George ; he sees that the antagonism of class interest lies far deeper than the mere monopoly of the landlord ; consequently the social- ist body is increasing ^vdth a rapidity not even the most sanguine could have supposed possible a few years ago. Once more, economical necessities are reflected in the thoughts of men. But take another field — education. We are educating in effect under the control of the State, but the ill-fed children can barely support the fatigue of learning. Here, too, ideas are turning in a direction quite opposed to parental autho- rity which already has been largely curtailed by legislation. Of the tendency now exhibiting itself to turn workhouses into wholesome phalansteries and the anarchic effect of such action in present economical conditions! spoke in the eleventh chapter. But the ideas and the organisation must grow up from below. They are growing. The population of England has become practically nomadic to a degree which few have any idea of, both within and without the city limits. What do we find among these very nomads ? what is generally admitted to be true in relation to the most materialised, 2 F 450 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. embruted, and, to all appearance, hopeless class among us ? That destitute of religion, devoid of what we call morality, terribly unclean, and in some senses brutal, " the fringe of labour," the poorest of the poor display towards one another the noblest charity, and divide with one another in the purest spirit of communism all that they may earn. Know- ing what uncertainty, misery, and privation were yesterday, expecting themselves the like misery to-morrow, they relieve their brethren and their sisters of the human kind in fellow- ship and true philanthropy to-day. Here, then, once more, out of the rottenness and ruin of our decaying society a new and higher organ- isation may be slowly evolved ; out of the depths of degradation a truer morality may arise. In the evidence of the Rev. S. A. Barnett of St Jude's, Whitechapel, before the Artisans and Labourers Committee, he says, speaking of the dwellers in the lowest sort of common lodging houses, " they are largely communists ; that is if one earns more one day, he shares it with a neighbour who earns little, so that they could not afford to separate. This is quite a common practice ; I do not say that it is done according to any rule ; but as a matter of fact, if a man does well one day he helps his neighbour, and they get through the bad times by those means." " That is the constant practice?" "Yes, they help one another largely. Nothing surprises one more than the way in which the poor help the poor." " It is not according to any rule 1" "No." "A man who is helped at one time will feel bound to help others at another time ?" "When his good turn comes." "Is that engagement faithfully kept ?" " Very faithfully kept, though there are no rules or contract." I believe that Mr Barnett's experience accords with that of all who have seen much of THE FUTURE. 451 the lives of the very poor ; it is*certainly in agreement with what I have observed myself. This tacit agreement to help one another is, of course, very different from the recognised engagements in the higher ranks of labour to make common cause against the capitalist in order to reduce the hours of labour, to raise wages, or the like ; but it certainly shows that just as the new methods of production force the workers to combine in some degree against the capitalists, and the capitalists to take measures against the workers in combina- tion, so the uncertainty of existence among the fringe of labour compels those who live in this happy-go-lucky manner into a rude Socialism of their own. Thus breaking down and building up go slowly on together, and new forms arise to displace the old.* It is the * The Democratic Federation propose the following as " stepping- stones to a happier period " — The compulsory construction of healthy artisans' and agricultural labourers' dwellings in proportion to the population, such dwellings to be let at rents to cover the cost of construction and maintenance alone. Free compulsory education for all classes, together with the provision of at least one wholesome meal a day in each school. Eight houi's or less to be the normal working day in all trades. Cvimulative taxation upon all incomes above a fixed minimum not exceeding £300 a year. The establishment of national banks which shall absorb all private institutions that derive a profit from operations in money or credit. Kapid extinction of the national debt. Nationalisation of the land, and organisation of industrial and agricultural armies under State control on co-operative principles. The principal objections I have heard in regard to this are to the first and last pi-oposals. But from the point of view of the jjroducers there can surely be no objection to any of them. The object is to give full development to that organisation of industry and collective effort which is gradually growing up around us. Compulsory labour on all should be considered as taken for granted. For my own part I have little doubt that land in the sense of organised production under State control 452 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. same with the family. That, in the German-Christian sense of marriage for life and responsibility of the parents for the children born in wedlock, is almost at an end even now. Divorce and the habitual nse of prostitution among the men of the upper and middle classes are but symptoms of the complete change in all family relations which is going on among the mass of the people. It has been absolutely necessary, as recounted, that the State should step in between parents and children to protect them from over-work, and to take care that the next generation does not grow up wholly ignorant ; meanwhile the connection between the two sexes is, as the official records show us, quite free from any sense of responsibility or permanence among a large portion of the population. Manifestly when such modifications are taking place society is undergoing a great and crucial revolution within, which may show itself openly either five, ten, or fifty years hence, but which cannot in the nature of the case be delayed beyond a calculable period. The socialist tendencies are clearly developing themselves, and the next stage in the history of the human race must be a widely extended communism.* But whilst we may thus foresee that in time to come the forces which mankind can bring to bear upon nature will be used not to enslave the workers but to bring about general will be the last portion of our system which will be "nationalised," though landlords will probably be expropriated first. Peasant pro- prietorship is of course hopeless. * But that it may seem too fanciful I would urge that the only field of art in which our bourgeois society has produced anything great is music. And in music the greatest effects are produced by the orchestra and chorus — truly socialist organisations in which, vmder a conductor, the ablest performers contribute to the general effect and subordinate their individual capacity to that. That the first violin is paid more than the beginner does not affect the illustration. THE FUTURE. 453 happiness ; whilst, further, it would be absurd indeed to lay down any hard and fast line along which progress shall be made, there are certain general principles which, if applied by the men of the present generation, cannot fail to secure better conditions of life for themselves and their succes- sors. Such a measure is the providing good, sound, healthy dwellings forlabourers in townand country alike. Here private enterprise has been tried and has been found utterly wanting. The facts are so well known that it is scarcely necessary to re-state them. In the cities, as in the rural districts, over- crowded and unhealthy homes are the rule rather than the exception. If society is not to remain utterly anarchical, the truest political economy recommends that the wealth- producers should be well housed, even at the cost of the community.* Yet any definite proposal that steps should be taken at once to remedy the hideous evils exposed is met by the old middle-class objections — first, that to build houses and rent them at cost involves a burden on the rate- payers ; second, that no portion of the working population has a right to an advantage over the rest. The answer to the first objection is, of course, that as the labourers alone produce any wealth, the ratepayers must have derived the means they possess from those labourers, and but give back a por- tion of what they have individually taken for social pur- poses. Besides, it may be reasonably contended that the well-to-do classes are, as a rule, a good deal overhoused ; and some have urged that direct expropriation should be resorted * Since this was iu type Lord Siilisbuiy's article urging State action has appeared in the National Review. Both parties are now agreed to apply semi-Socialist inetliods iu this matter of housing the poor ; but both still assume a dependence by the State upon tlie capitalist class for loans ! Nothing can be done without paying toll to the profit-mongers. On this point also landlords and capitalists agree. 454 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. to the instant the workers are stroncr enough to act. Thi;s the erection of healthy dwellings with public funds to be rented at cost is, in a wide sense, a conservative measure, for a continuance of the present state of things must inevit- ably lead to violence. Tn addition to which it would act favourably in many ways ; for the State or municipal com- petition being constant in its operation, the rents of existing dwellings would steadily fall — no compensation, of course, being given for unhealthy houses removed — whilst the rise in the rates would compel the well-to-do to throw good houses on to the market, thus enlarging the sphere of action. It will be observed that in all such proposals it is taken for granted that as the producers obtain the power, they will use it to secure good conditions of life for themselves. Nor can I see that any Political Economist is other than a pedant who refuses to recognise that the well-being of the workers should be the supreme object of the creation of all wealth. The familiar objection about jobbery I consider it unnecessary to deal with. Those who use this argument against constructive Socialism always either pass over or actually champion the robbery and jobbery, legal and illegal, which goes on under our present system. How by com- bination and co-operation, by the planting of garden ground, by the erection of common kitchens, baths, halls of recrea- tion, reading-rooms, splendid buildings and surroundings might be created rivalling in beauty the monasteries of the middle ages or the palaces of Moorish Spain, I will leave to my friend William Morris to depict — only saying that here imagination may proceed on the sure footing of what has been accomplished in many countries by communal effort, and may be done again.''" Theory and practice, * " Therefore it is the wise man's part to use the world and delight THE FUTURE. 455 imagination and reality, blend togetlier when men have such engines of construction as they possess to-day. The present arrangements for housing the poor are admitted on all hands to be chaotic, whilst tending to perpetuate class distinctions. Here, at any rate, are proposals which, within a short period, would bring about a new state of things, whilst tending all the time to abolish such distinc- tions, and lead to the period when all shall labour and none shall toil. Once admit that the present state of things is monstrous, and even middle-class men and aristocrats will be driven fast, as they have already been driven slowly, towards Socialist measures. Good housing being taken as the first essential in our present conditions of existence — for how can any health or morality be looked for without this ? — education may fairly be considered as second. Education for adults means, of course, merely an endeavour to rouse them to consider the facts by which they are surrounded, with a view to chang- ing the present social and political arrangements. But education of children involves, especially now that it is being made more and more every day a communal and State matter, the gravest considerations as to what education should mean for all classes. Our present School Board edu- cation does not in practice perpetuate the class differences himself in it as best he may, not indeed to satiety, for that is no delight. A wise man, I say, will recruit and refresh himself with tempei-ate and pleasant meat and drink : yea, and with perfumes, the fair prospect of green woods, apparel, music, sports, and exercises, stage-plays, and the like, which every man may onjoy without harm to his neighboui*. For the human body is compounded of very many parts different of kind, which ever stand in need of new and various nourishment, that the whole body ahke may be fit for all action incident to its kind, and that by consequence the mind may be equally fit for apprehending many things at once.''— Pollock's " Spinoza," p. 26-4. 456 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. which education in the best sense should remove. It is clear that we shall have compulsory and free education within the next few years, and no compulsion is possible in the lonsr run which does not affect all classes in a com- munity which has democracy for its basis. The time, therefore, is coming when the public free schools .of Eng- land will be the best, cheapest, and easiest means for parents to educate their children, if compulsion did not exist. But here at the outset three grave questions arise : 1. At what age should the education begin, and what food should be given ? 2. What sort of education should be given ? 8. How are the teachers to be taught ? The first question is the most important of all. In considering it we cannot overlook the terrible neglect of children during their early years in all our industrial centres. Good food in childhood is the basis of all good education. At present the majority of the children of the workers in town and country do not get such good food. Consequently the in- struction they receive on empty or insufficiently filled stomachs is physically harmful to them. Robert Owen, whose system of education at New Lanark was the most successful ever seen, took the children at two years of age and kept them during the whole of the day, feeding them, giving them amusement, and returning them to their parents at night. That j)ublic creches should be provided in factory towns is a necessity, and the necessity for food in them is equally apparent. Thus the creche and the kinder- garten would lead up to the school. But in each the best plain, well-cooked food should be given to the children, delicate babies receiving such extra nourishment as may be required. Physical health is the basis of mental health ; THE FUTURE. 457 and it is practically impossible to have the one without the other. It is unfortunately beyond the power of society to correct at once the circumstances in which these children are born, or to secure immediately good housing and food for the fathers and mothers ; but it is easy to arrange good food for the children, and to get this important social reform in all schools serious efforts should be made. Thus at public creches, public kinder-gartens, and public schools, food would be provided as a matter of course for the average attendance of children. Education, in fact, would begin as soon as the child could leave its mother ; or at an age fixed by law, if the child was properly fed and tended at home. The community has the right to protect and care for the interests of the next generation, whether the parents like it or not. Secondly, What sort of education should be given ? Un- questionably an education in which instruction in the mechanism of learning should be combined with physical and industrial education as well as with the most complete amusement. Only of late years have physical education and amusement been admitted as desirable. Yet all experi- ence has shown that drilling, dancing, gymnastic exercise, indoor and outdoor srames, make the task alike of children and teachers far easier. The mistake of keeping too long at one thing, and the worse mistake of forcing the clever by emulation vitiate our entire present system. Children should be educated to work and play for, instead of against, one another, whilst industrial education, in the sense of pre- paring the child to do a certain share of the work of life every day by actual labour, is most important. In a matter of this kind it is impossible to lay down any hard and fast line, but if education were adapted to each child's capacities, 458 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. and the children were trained up to be useful citizens in an organised society, education might and would be profitably continued for all far beyond the limits of the age now fixed. There need be no more difficulty in arranghig to give each child full play for its special faculties than there is in a family : the individual, in fact, would have the fullest outlet and consideration. Where the liability of all to work with their hands is once established the anxiety of all will be to give the best opportunities to each of developing himself or herself to the highest point.* In this respect physical his- tory is of the highest importance. In our chaotic society of to-day we individually know little or nothing, as Mr Herbert Spencer has truly urged, of the science of our own physical structure, and far less of the characteristics and the antecedent physical circumstances of the persons who have combined to brincj into the w^orld a human animal with such and such aptitudes and such and such weaknesses. In any scientific education the facts about each individual child and his progenitors would be as far as possible known, and care taken to watch the development of the germs of physical disease which might be inherited. Thus, without overwork or excessive application, the majority of children would arrive at the age when steady work was demanded of them physically strong and well-trained, accustomed to look upon labour as a necessary portion of the daily life, and would be clear of class prejudice or theological bigo- try.! How rapidly children improve in strength and char- * "Past society was formed for war and by war, future society must be formed by labour for labour."— Saint Simon. t I lay stress upon the hahit of work, because in our present con- dition of production it is the habit of work at machines which is in effect chiefly needed. My own opinion is that in the future the in- dustrial work and agricultural work will be shared by all if desired. THE FUTURE. 459 acter under good food, fresh air, and kindly treatment, may- be seen in numberless instances at home without going to the emigrant fields of America and New Zealand.* Thirdly, how are we to get the teachers ? This is one of the most serious drawbacks to our present arrangements. The teachers themselves are brought up to attach an undue and injurious importance to mere instruction. They too often forget owing to this how complicated a structure even babydom is. Getting good teachers has been the greatest difficulty encountered up to the present time in every national scheme of education. Every great educa- tional reformer that ever lived has experienced this. My impression is, that the very change in the methods of education advocated above, the combination of teaching with physical improvement, games, excursions, open-air lectures, will of themselves gradually supply another school of teachers. Great advances have been made already, and an enthusiasm for instruction is spreading. The people are certainly more willing that their children should learn — the heavy tax upon them from their small wages notwithstanding — and teaching is no longer regarded as a mean employment. It * I have not attempted to deal here with the manner in which present educational iustitutions might be turned to account in giving complete free education of tlie highest kind to all classes. But, as a member of one of the two great univei'sities, I see with regret that Oxford and Cambridge have been turned into mere middle-class preserves. Here are universities with a noble histor}', founded for the most part by ecclesiastics in order to provide cheap education of the higher class for the poor, used as a rule by the well-to-do. Steps are being taken, I know, to place these great institutions on a wider and more stable basis, bi;t they are only trifling compared with the need. The same with our so-called "public schools." The "governing classes" cry down free education for the poor, but they grali free education for their own children — or whatever reduces its cost — whenever and Avherever they can. To consider these matters in detail would require a se])arate volume. 46o THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. is really the noblest employment on which men and women can be engased, and the establishment of a free, rational, pleasant system of education for all, based upon good food and physical and industrial training, will of itself tend to produce teachers who will carry on and extend the best methods of unsectarian instruction. Children who are brought up unforced, unbeaten, and well fed, will certainly take care that the State or municipal schools for their chil- dren shall be no worse than those in which they passed their own earlier years. In this way the tendency of good educa- tion for all classes on the same basis will be to produce better education still, just as bad education tends towards greater ignorance and prejudice. The improvement of the new rational society founded on science and guided by knowledge will then be simple and easy. Good housing and good education are easily attainable, and the cost of both are trifling to a nation which by the work of less than 8,000,000 of its members and their families enjoys a total income of £1,300,000,000 a year without the most scientific application of the means of pro- duction. But this income is only obtained by the excessive overwork of a large proportion of the producers, both in re- gard to hours and intensity of labour. Further, a great part of this vast gross income is most wastefuUy spent on drink, useless luxuries, domestic servants, and the like. There would be distinct gain, therefore, if on the one hand the hours of labour were reduced by law to eight, seven, six a day, at the same time that the expenditure on luxury were reduced, and all were compelled by degrees to do their share of work. How little the necessary share of work to pro- vide food and comfort for all need be if all worked, few perhaps, at any rate of the upper and middle classes, ever THE FUTURE. 461 consider. But let us for a moment reflect that on the one hand the cheapness of labour — that is to say, the small amount of produce on which human beings can exist and work — absolutely keeps back the introduction of labour- saving machines in many directions ; whilst on the other a single agricultural labourer, even as it is with machinery and manures insufficiently used, produces enough food for ten to twenty persons, and a single workman in a cotton,* cloth, or boot factory, enough cotton, woollen stuff or boots to clothe and shoe hundreds, t Useless classes are also not con- fined to domestic servants or mere loungers. The whole noble array of barristers, solicitors, accountants, surveyors, agents, and about ninetj^-nine hundredths of the present distributors, would be wholly useless in a properly organised society. They live upon the existing bourgeois system, out of which the}^ suck no small advantage ; they will disappear with the huckster arrangements on which they thrive. The following statistics for 1869, compiled by Mr William Hoyle to show the results of the drink traffic in Lancashire alone, give some idea of the waste which goes on in other directions : — % 1. £18,299,750 directly spent upon intoxicating liquors. 2. £1,113,244 paid in poor and police rates, 3. 102,694 paupers. 4. 30,000 (or more) vagrants idling as vagabonds about the streets. * " One person will supply as mucli cotton cOS will give 550 people 18 yards a head per year." — Hoyle t In America where labour is dear, mechanical appliances are far more freely used in every direction, and " dirty work " is largely avoided by contrivances to that end. In England women still pull boats on canals ; they are cheaper than horses. X " Our National Resources." 462 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. 5. 4,7 OG lunatics. 6. 3,749 inquests. 7. 90,257 persons brougiit before the magistrates and convicted of crime. 8. 5,913 depredators, offenders, and suspected per- sons who are abroad. 9. 2,749 houses of bad character, brothels, receivers of stolen goods, &c. 10. 3,31 G policemen employed to protect society from the dangers arising therefrom. 11. 17,733 public-houses and beershops. 12. 70,932 drunkards filling innumerable houses with misery. 13. 7,000,000 or more bushels of grain destroyed in manufacturing the drink, or equal to 105,000,000 4-lb loaves. 14. 4,000 or 5,000 persons have emj^loyment found in the manufacture of drink. Here at once is a summary which proves that, whatever be the causes, the existing state of things is injurious and in the highest degree wasteful. A man need not be a tee- totaller to appreciate the force of the statement that '' if all the money which intoxicating liquors cost this nation were invested in building houses for half-a-dozen years, there would be a new house built for every family in the United Kino-dom." But let us hear Mr William Hoyle a little farther. He says, p. 33, "The total amount of labour needed to provide for our wants will be as follows : — Food, half an hour's labour daily ; clothing, fifteen minutes' labour daily ; bonus, &c. half an hour's labour ; that is (assuming every person did their share) a total of 1| hour's daily labour would suffice to supply us in abundance with the THE FUTURE. 463 comforts of life. The progress of invention and the increas- ing application of machinery are daily reducing even this amount of labour, so that the part which has now to be played by man is simply to superintend the machinery which does the work."* Precisely. And yet there are those who contend in the face of the shameful over- work going on in every direction, that it would be an inter- ference with individual rights and " freedom of contract " to ordain that eight hours or less should be the extreme limit of work in all trades, though there are thousands of people out of work all over the country at the very same time.t Such a curtailment of the hours of labour has lono- been fitfully agitated for, but unluckily the workers have never made common cause as a class in favour of such action.! * Compare Aristotle, " Politics." t Bear in mind those wlio work the lono-est hours have on the average lowest wages. X " For seeing they bestow but six hours in work, perchance you may think that the lack of some necessary things hereof may ensue. But this is nothing so ; for that small time is not only enough, but also too much for the store and abundance of all things that be requisite either for the necessity or commodity of life. The which thing you shall also see and perceive, if you weigh and consider with yourselves how great a part of the people in other countries liveth idle. . . . And truly you shall find them much fewer than you thought by wliose labour all these things are wrought, that in men's affairs are now daily used and frequented. Now consider with yourself of these few that do work, how few be occupied in necessary work \ . . . But if all these that be now busied about unprotitable occupations, with all the whole flock of them that live idly and slothfuUy, which consume and waste every one of them more of these things that come by other men's labour, than two of the workmen themselves do : if all these (I say) were set to profitable occupations, you will easily perceive how little time would be enough ; yea, and too much to store us with all things that may be requisite either for necessity or commodity, yea, or for plea^sure, so that the same pleasure be true and natural.'' — Sir Thomas Mure, " Utopia," chapter iv. 464 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. It would be well that in all Government departments and dock^'ards a beginning should be made by appointing eight hours or less as the working day, and fixing also a minimum wage. In this way State employment might be advantageously extended from the Post, Telegraphs, Parcels, Revenue, Savings Banks, Arms Factories, Dock- yards, &c,, to the wider fields of Railways, Shipping, the Land and general production, a department already invaded in cases where special supplies are needed. Organisation of labour under State control is absolutely injurious to the workers if based upon the ruinous competition brought about by our capitalist system. But by introducing the principle of short hours and still more of minimum payments, a great step forward may be made.* The three measures named above, then, are necessary forerunners or accompaniments of that organisation of industry towards which we are moving. Good housing at cost, good food and education in childhood at expense of the community, short hours and equal payments which allow fully for good clothing and good food for labour done under State or Municipal control are at any rate practical enough.! Even as it is the State is the greatest individual employer * " Take England, for example : how marvellous the mass, the number, the perfection of technical appliances which are set to work to economise labour ! Nevertheless, if work were reduced to-morrow to a normal scale, proportional to the age and sex of the wage-earners, the actual working population would fall far short of the national work of produc- tion. Will they nill they, the so-called 'unproductive labourers' would have to turn 'productive labourers.'" — Marx, " Le Capital," chapter XXV., p. 281, French edition. t " In case there be no overplus then 'tis fit to retrench a little from the delicacy of others feeding in quantity or qualit3', few men spending less than double of what might suffice them as the bare necessities of nature."— Sir W. Petty. THE FUTURE. 465 of labour, and sucli changes would soon produce an enormous effect.* Here, too, it is necessary to point out that these matters can- not be dealt with separately, or as if working men to-day were mere subjects for experiment on the part of the " governing classes." The whole social problem must be dealt with in its entirety by the class which produces wealth, assisted by such of the educated class as feel the absolute necessity for changing our present system. It is natural that those who gain by the present state of things should consider only how little they can surrender, maintaining all the while the existing bitter competition. The middle-class ideas of personal freedom, equality before the law and freedom of contract, have meant simply economical and social tyranny, worse in its physical results for the proletariat than any direct despotism ever known. Therefore this sham * The effect produced upon the general mind of the people by the declaration of a high wages minimum and a short day's work — at first, say eight or seven hours — in all State employ would be very gi-eat, "Workers outside would begin to hold very strong language in the matter of overwork and underpay. Capitalists would be forced to take public opinion into account. At the same time I am not at all hopeful that the break up of the existing miserable competition will be brought about in the way proposed, or at all, until the workers have conquered their right to the collective ownership of the means of production in a great class struggle. Lassalle proposed that the State should advance several millions sterling in order to set on foot co-operative industries to be worked by the labourers themselves. But, whether this plan would succeed or not, there is really no need for any such action in this country at any rate. The vast joint-stock companies are precisely the sort of organisation which is needed, and these are now worked by superintendents, imder boards for the benefit of shareholders. They might far better be managed, and ought to be managed by the State for tlie benefit of the workers. Lassalle's expositions did a great deal of good in showing the utter anarchy of our existing arrangements, and it is a pity that our English Lassalles, Owen, Cobbett, and others, are not more read even to-day, 2g 466 777^ HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. liberty which invokes such shameful oppression must be swept away, and real liberty based upon social and econo- mical equality of conditions substituted. How much of what we now consider essential will disappear in this new period when the entire means of production, including the land, are at the disposal of the people, and collective is substituted for individual exchange, need not be insisted upon. The least thoughtful must understand that it involves a complete overthrow of the existing domination maintained by a paid standing army, carried on by political factions, and trusting for permanence to a production for profit which will then necessarily disappear. Labour organised alike in town and country for the benefit of the workers, exchange conducted to the same end, international agreements for purely industrial objects, — the spread of such ideas must bring about great results even in the long period of transi- tion which may precede their final realization. We cannot return if we would to the small primitive individualised methods of our ancestors, nor continue their individual plan of exchange : consequently social production must be accom- panied by social exchange ; and a regulated application of these joint social arrangements, and all improvements thence resulting, to the advantage of the community at large will be the rule. This process we see going on under our eyes, and the only question is whether we wish to hasten or to slacken an advance inevitable in either case. The succes- sion of world-wide crises, of which we have now had six in this century, the last having been almost a permanent crisis since 1878, prove conclusively that apart from any mere currency questions or local difficulties the workers are subject to periods of fearful privation, owing to the manner in which production at large is carried on and international THE FUTURE. 46; exchange is conducted. No mere half measures, no ingenious sophistries evolved out of fortnightly settlements, three months' bills and bankers' balances, will suffice to deal with the anarchy due to a radically injurious system. We in England must face this question at once. The increasing dependence upon foreign sources of food supply, the growth of foreign competition in open markets, the fearful condition of the fringe of labour, force us to national and international socialism as the only way of escape from an insupportable situation at home for the mass of the people. That the land, and with the land, mines, rivers, &c., will come under the control of the people we have already seen, nor is it reasonable to suppose that any compensation will be given to the landholders, the fund-holders, or the rail- way or water shareholders, when it has been determined to assume administration of all for the public benefit. To com- promise in order to avoid bloodshed, may be a course that would recommend itself to the workers; but this would be a mere transfer of holdings for a time. In the end the entire power and means of production will belong to the State or its delegates, who will then be like the State itself, simply one great body of equal men organised to act in concert, with leaders chosen by themselves. It is for this purpose and not from any theoretical political grievance, that the proletariat or wage-earners must necessarily take hold of the governing power, through the medium of universal suffrage, putting an end for ever to hereditary authority and class distinctions. Centralisation and decentralisation would thus have free play in the politics of the whole community, as collective action in production would leave the freest play to individual faculty in every direction, save the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the labour of others. Towards this organisa- 468 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. tion national banks (already foreshadowed in the Government Savings Banks), national insurance, and provision against bad seasons would be essential steps. Credit is the most vulnerable portion of our present system, and will tumble to pieces at the first severe shock of class warfa.re; but with the beginnings of collective exchange, -a better foundation than that of such individual credit will be found for international transactions. But it may be asked, how is value to be determined save by competition and higgling of the market ? Value is not so determined to-day. Supply and demand only regulate relative values of commodities over short periods ; cost of production, that is, the average quantity of social human labour needed to bring them forward for exchange, governs the exchange value of the mass of commodities in the long run. A letter is sent nearly the world over for 2^d., no matter how important the nature of its contents, or how anxious the sender to have it delivered ; public advantage has produced an international post in spite of all international jealousies. A traveller takes a passage at a fixed cost, though may be he would pay fifty times the sum asked rather than not go. Even in cities the government or the municipalities regulate cab-fares, in order to check the working of that very higgling of the market, to regulate the action of those very supply and demand, and caveat emptor maxims which middle-class economists never weary of proclaiming as the law of all laws, not to be set aside without positive danger. Here then, we may foresee with the accuracy of scientific knowledge a community in which the social forces will be used for determinate social ends. Take, for instance, the ownership of communications by the people. We see at once how the cheapening of transport which would thence THE FUTURE. 469 result would enable people to move from country to city, or from city to country, in accordance with a regular arrange- ment. By more careful prognostication of the weather, men will be able to judge far more accurately than to-day of the critical periods of harvest, and could throw a whole army of workers, with the most perfect machinery, on the threatened point. No longer also should inventions be used against instead of for mankind. At the end of the last century steam, with all its enormous powers, went without heed or protest into the hards of the capitalist class. A natural power, which is to steam what steam was to the old horse-power, electricity, is again going into the hands of the capitalist class. But now the protest against this is loud and clear. The workers have begun to understand that the great forces of nature, which none invented and which none produce, can only be adequately handled by men in social union. When we know that such a force as Niagara, such a power as the tides, such an agent as the wind, such a universal and all-pervading force as the heat of the sun, may be turned to account and stored for human use within the next few years, the portals of the future open wide before us and we gaze upon a long vista of golden ages for mankind. Such powers could not permanently belong and cannot be safely handled by a clique or a class. Wealth may easily be made as plentiful as water, but it's distribution must be for each according to his needs, as the rule will be for each according to his abilities. Doubtless centuries may pass before the goal is reached ; but that is no reason to question that the last great class struggle has begun nor why we should be deterred from helping on the evolution as far as we may.* * "Croyez-vous dit Caudide que les hommes se soient tonjours mutu- 470 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. To all this, however, the objection still remains which is constantly urged. To strive for Socialism, so it is said, is to attempt to stamp out the individual, to reduce mankind to one dead level of monotony and uniformity, where each acts like a machine. How true this description is of our present society, how for the mass of mankind the individual life is becoming more and more one of monotonous and hopeless drudgery must be clear to all who have read the foregoing pages. The workers surely would not find it monotonous or a deadening of individuality to have only two or three hours' necessary work at the outside in place of their present excessive and exhausting drudgery. They at least might consider that during these hours of leisure or refreshing employment they had some chance of asserting an individuality now crushed into the mire by the greedy class individualism above. What powers of invention, what instincts of beauty, what poetry and art and imagination are not now utterly ruined under existing conditions. But no man will strive save for individual or family gain, none will invent or discover save for individual profit ? Is this so ? The whole history of mankind tells the contrary. The greatest works ever achieved, and the noblest sacrifices of self tliat have ever been made, have been due to fidelity to a ellement massacres comme ils font aujourdhui, qu'ils aient tonjours etd menteurs, fourbes, perfides, ingrats, brigands, faibles, volages, l§,ches, envieux, gourmands, ivrognes, avares, ambitieux, sanguinaires, calomni- ateurs, debauches, fanatiques, hypocrites et sots? Croyez-vous dit Martin que les eperviers aient tou jours mange des pigeons quand ils en ont trouvd ] Oui sans doute dit Candide. Eh bien dit Martin, si les eperviers ont toujours eu le meme caractere pom-quoi voulez-vous que les hommes aient change le leur? Oh ! dit Candide, il y a bien de la difference, car le libre arbitre ... en raisonnant ainsi ils arriverent a Bordeaux."— Voltaire, " Candide," chap. 21. Happily Socialism does not rest on free will, nor even on the characteristics of individual men. THE FUTURE Ml great organisation or to love for the human race. It is not true that men, as a rule, risk life and pass weary days simply and solely for money or personal gain ; it is not true that an}'- great discovery or invention has been made by the spur of pecuniary reward. From the early days of Greek and Roman civilisation to the rise of the Christian Church or Mohammedism through the period of the great organisations of Catholicism and Islam ; from the labours of Hypocrates and Pythagoras, through the noble work done by the great Arabians, by Roger Bacon, and Galileo, and others, onwards to the social and political enthusiasts, or the Newtons, Faradays, Simpsons, Darwins, of our own country, I chal- lenge the chamjDions of individualism to point to any single great discovery, great invention, or even great book, which has been made or written for the sake of pay.* Do doctors or surgeons strive the less to find useful drugs or to discover better methods of dealing with wounds, or fractures, or tumours, because by the unwritten law of the profession the man who patents a medicine or makes profit out of a new anaesthetic or splint is " boycotted " by his brethren for life ? Why, we know well that in no profession is there such zeal for improvement, such enthusiasm for the general advance. The danger indeed there is that some forget what is due to the individual in their anxiety for the in- terests of the race. But it is needless to go further, the craze for sham individuality is but the last absurdity of a discredited school of thought which has shown itself in- capable either to understand or to control even the middle- class society it worships. Those great social problems which are being solved as we discuss them, are being thus unriddled by social organisation and social force, t * See also the opening pages of Chapter IV. t "According to our j)resont social arrangements scarcely any free 472 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Looking outside this island we can trace in every direc- tion the baneful effect of our capitalist production and the hopeless immorality of our existing commercialism. Force masters the world ; but organised force should be used not to weaken and destroy the very basis of human happiness — physical well-being — but to strengthen and develop it for the common good. Landlordism and capitalism serve but to stunt and brutify abroad as at home. What is our connection with Ireland ? what has it been but one record of organised ferocity and " legalised " rapine ? Every famine in Ireland has been brought about by the drain of produce to this country. At the very time when people have been perishing miserably of starvation on the barren hill-sides and irreclaimable bogs to which they have been driven by their heartless oppressors, food far more than sufficient to keep them in comfort has been shipped over to us Englishmen, who have allowed our force to be used to keep the people in subjection to a few thousand landlords. There is no famine in Ireland, wrote Cobbett in the early part of the century ; there was no famine in Ireland two years ago. The famines in Ireland are artificial famines, occasioned by the greed of those who own the soil. In India, capital and officialism act the part which the landlord class plays in Ireland. We are drawing from that unfortunate country year by year as interest on scope is afforded for individuality. The careers of men and women are almost unalterably fixed before they are born. One man is born a peer and another a ploughman ; and each must through life run in the groove that has been prepared for him, however unfitted for it his natural faculties may render him." — Fawcett on Pauperism, p. 156. I leave it to Mr Fawcett to reconcile this excellent description of our present " individuality " with his very tame and weak article on State Socialism and Land Nationalisation in Macmillan. In that article, by the way, Mr Fawcett spoke of the national agitator Lassalle as founder of the International ! / THE FUTURE. 473 railways, interest on debt, profits for transmission, pensions for work done and salaries in the country, agricultural pro- duce to the amount of not less, certainly, than £30,000,000 a year — that is to say, the food of fifteen million human beings a year. Here at once is enough to account for the appalling increase of poverty and the deterioration alike of the soil and of the people in India.* Poverty tends to increase of population : increase of population tends to poverty where production is stationary. We extend the area of the vicious circle by our shameful economical greed, and English rule is ruining that great country for genera- tions. In Bengal where the drain of produce is far less than elsewhere, we have put the people at the mercy of landowners as merciless as those of Ireland ; whilst our Civil Courts have introduced new powers for the money- lending class, new terrors for the miserable labourer all over India. We are now obliged to check the native money-lender ; but our upper and middle classes at home demand their yearly pound of flesh, though an ancient civilisation and a helpless people are destroyed thereby. The capitalism of the past twenty-five years with its pretended benefits to India has been more injurious than any invasion of Mogul hordes that ever poured down through the passes of the Himalayas. In India as in Ireland, the petty money-lender also stands ready to take advantage by pro- cess of law of what the government, or the landlord, or the large farmer may leave. This problem of the pressure of the money-lender * My articles 011 the Bankru])tcy of India in the Nineteenth Century for October 1878 and Mai'ch 1879 proved this conclusively. I have never yet found an Anglo-Indian oflicial, I may add, from Sir John Strachey upwards or downwards, who could hold his own for half-au- hour on this point. 474 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. extends all over the civilised world.* The land-holder, the peasant-proprietor, the farmer, each and all feel the hand of the capitalist upon them. In India the land is " nationalised " over a large portion of the territory, yet the Deccan ryot in the grip of the remorseless soucar, the process of the courts conspiring with him to turn the peasant cultivator into a slave, is but typical of what is going on in more or less disguised shape under the operation of Jews, land-banks, Credits Fonciers, Mortgage Loan Companies in every European country, in America, and in the Colonies. Once more it is necessary to recall the truth that capital in its present sense means not the accumulation of a store for the common good, but of itself records in a word a whole series of social relations and social conventions which enables one class to prey upon another under pretence of conferring a benefit. It is not a question of individual and individual, it is a question of class and class. And the operation is world-wide. How little has the conquest of separate nationality benefited any people. The workers of Italy to-day are worse off than they were under Austrian oppression and petty tyranny.! Heavy taxes, military service, and pressure of capitalism have forced the people down to worse food and more exhausting labour. Germany has obtained her long-desired unity, and how does it fare with her? Since 1878 all combinations among the working-classes have been rendered illegal, their newspapers have been suppressed, the laws for the protection of women and children rendered nugatory, ■* See as to Germany and Austria, Eodbertus' " Der heutigen Credit- Noth des Grundbezitzes," which deals with the question from a Conser- vative point of view. + See article in the June number of the Edinhurgh Review, 1883, for an awful record from oflBcial reports of the state of the peasantry. THE FUTURE. 475 and competition has been carried on successfully with other countries at the expense of the ruinous enslavement of the producing class to the capitalists. The pressure of the land- banks in the poorer parts of the empire have meanwhile been severely felt by the cultivators. In Russia the break up of the Mir and the enfranchisement of the serfs have given the Jews greater opportunities ; the condition of the mass of the people is, according to all official reports, worse physically than it was before the Emperor Alexander II.'s reforms. Even in France, the land of the peasant proprietor, the wretched foorl to which the peasant is driven, and the injury even he experiences from American competition are to be found revealed in official reports. The tale is dismal enough. In the United States itself, splendid as are its resources, and high as is the average of health and well-being among the people, even there the pressure of capitalism is beginning to tell seriously against the mass of the workers. The monopoly of the railroads which has developed from competition, the manner in which the great factory farms of the West crush the smaller producers by agreement with these same railroads, the operations of such corporations as the Central Pacific Railroad, the Standard Oil Well Company, or such indi- viduals as Vanderbilt, Gould, Mackay, &c., are bringing about even in the great territory of the West that contrast between wealth and poverty which, unless forcibly checked, inevitably means degradation in the long run for the mass of the people. Already in New York, in Boston, in Phila- delphia, in Chicago, in San Francisco, the same phenomena are to be observed that we can see nearer home. Bad pay, bad housing for heavy work, and girls driven to prostitution to eke out a starvation wage. 476 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. Monopoly by a class of land, of machinery, of capital, of credit, dominates the globe. But if the power of capitalism is thus world-wide, so also is the power of Socialism, which is slowly but surely organising for its overthrow. Throughout the civilised world the workers are learning slowly that they at least have no interests at variance. The commercial wars which are waged in Asia, in South Africa, in Cochin China, in Egypt, do not profit them ; the returns they bring to the capitalist class do but strengthen the domestic tyranny. In every country new associations of workers and thinkers are being formed to-day, and old associations are gain- ing strength, which have for their sole object to- bring mankind together on the safe ground of a common interest. That there are different schools, some of which desire at once to resort to that destruction which modern explosives so readily lend themselves to, is undoubted. But the desire for common social organised action grows with working-class education, just as mere individual anarchism has its founda- tion in middle-class ideas and middle-class ignorance. It is true that the great International organisation of 1864 fel] to pieces after the Paris Commune, but the basis of inter- national agreement remains, and common action is being everywhere prepared for which cannot but have stupendous results. We are approaching the end of the century; 1889 is the centenary of the great French Revolution. The ideas of the enfranchisement of mankind from capitalist domina- tion are everywhere abroad among the working men. In these days, when communication is so rajaid and news spreads so fast, simultaneous action has a cumulative effect, economical, social, and political. It is childish to overlook class anta- gonism as the great factor in all human progress throughout history from the break-up of village communities to our THE FUTURE. 477 own time. Rather is it wise to reflect that the present capitalism, with its attendant mercenary militarism and dominant officialism, bears with it the certainty of early destruction ; rather is it well to make ready, soberly and scientifically, for the Socialist organisation of production, exchange, and international relations which — however threatening the aspect of affairs at this moment — must inevitably take its place as the future of our race. It is in no spirit of narrow patriotism or petty jealousy of other peoples that I long to see my own country cut out the canker that gnaws away her prosperity, and stand forth before the world as the leader in a reorganisation which will mean enlightenment and happiness for the entire human race. APPENDIX. The opinions of Rodbei-tus are almost unknown to English economists, and as his views are of importance to the study of modern socialist economy, I here give an abstract of his opinions translated from Dr Rudolph Meyer's learned work, " Der Emanci- pations kamjif des Yierten Standes." In brief, Eodbertus' view was that, under unrestricted free trade and free contract, present social aiTangements for the production and distribution of wealth result in giving to the workers in. the shape of wages a smaller and smaller proportional share of the wealth created by improved methods of production. This position lie thus maintains : — 1. The wages of labour, Eent, gi-ound-rent, profit on capital are social facts and ideas which only exist because the individuals who are interested in them are united in a single society by the lo7'd of division of labour. 2. Rent is all income which is receiA^ed without a man's own labom' solely on the ground of a possession. 3. Since there can be no income which has not been created beforehand by labour. Rent rests on two absolutely essential pi-e- liminary conditions. First, there can be no Rent unless labour produces at least more than is needed for the labourers to con- tinue their labour — for it is impossible for anyone to have an in- come I'egularly without working himself, unless such a surplus exists. Secondly, there can be no Rent unless institutions exist which deprive the labourers wholly or in part of this surplus, and hand it over to those who do not labour — for the labourers are naturally always in possession of their product in the first place. That labour should yield such a surplus is due to econo- mical causes which increase the productiveness of labour. That this surphis should wholly or partly be taken from the labourers and given to others is due to positive law,* which, as it is allied with physical force, enforces this abstraction by constant pressure. • " Positive law" is a vile phrase, but it is an exact translation. 48o THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. *' 4. Originally slavery, an institution whose development coin- cided witli agriculture and landed property, practised this com- pulsion.* Labourers who produced such a surplus by their labour became slaves, and the master who owned the labourers as well as their product gave the slaves only just so much of it as was needful for them to carry on their work ; the remainder, or the surplus, he took himself. If all the land of a country and all the capital in a country have become private property, landed property and capitalist property exercise similar compulsion on the free labourers. For this will have the same effect as slavery first, inas- much as the prodvict belongs not to the labourers, but to the owners of the land and capital ; and secondly, because the labourers who own nothing as against the masters who own land and capital will be glad to take a pai-t of the j^roduce of their own labour to keep body and soul together, that is to carry on their labour. Thus, instead of the mastery of the slave-owner, the free-contract of the wage-labourer with his employer is introduced ; but this contract is only nominally and not really fi-ee, and hunger fully makes up for the scourge. What then was called sustenance is now called "O"^ wages. " 5. Rent and wages are thus shares into which the product is divided so far as it is income. Whence it follows that the larger one share is tlie smaller must the other be. If the Rent takes a larger share, of the product, a smaller share must remain for wages. As one share varies in size, so must the other in inverse ratio. Since the size of the share of the product rules at the same time the rate of value, the expressions ' high ' and ' low ' and ' rise ' and ' fall,' which are relative ideas, are used in this connection for the permanence and variation of Rent and of wages. We say Rent is high or rises, and wages are low or fall, if the one takes a greater or increasing share of the product, and conse- quently the other a smaller or diminishing share of it. "6. Wages, however, are spoken of in another connection than as regards a high or low level, or with respect to a rise or a fall. The degrading conception of a necessary wage has been inti'oduced into the theory of wages — a wage, namely, which contains in itself only just so much as the labourer needs to reproduce his laboiu- force ; and thus insensibly the free labourer is regarded from the point of view of a slave, who, in fact, costs just so much susten- * Slavery existed in the nomadic state, and this Eodbertus should have recognised. APPENDIX. 481 ance as a machine costs fuel. This amount of necessary wages is used as a scale, and people say that wages are high or rise, or on the contrary are low or fall, accordmg as they approach to or re- cede fx'om this point to the profit or loss of the labourer. Never- theless, in this conception of a necessary wage it is not stated that the actual wages of labour cannot fall below this point, or that it miist represent an equal quantity of provisions for all periods and all covintries. "7. The position and movement of the wages of labour must be distinguished in both these relations. Wages can in the one con- nection be high or rise, whilst in the other they may be low or fall, and vice versa. It depends solely on the degree of or the change in the productiveness of labour how far this is possible. If, for instance, the same qviantity of labour produces more or in- creasing wealth, wages may, considered as a share of the product, be low or fall, whilst in relation to the point of necessary re- quii'ements they may be high or actually rise. " 8. Division of labour originally took the shape in which the lords of the soil were also masters of the capital. Capital in- cludes raw material, incidental material, and tools ; it is product which is used for further production ; it is, when reduced to labour, expended labour. So long as the lords of the soil are also masters of the capital, the raw material is necessarily worked up, whether by slaves or free labourers, in the same service of the landowner ; the lando^vner is at the same time a ' manufacturer,' and generally a wholesale dealer in the finished articles into the bargain. In such a case the entire Rent falls to the lot of one combined owner of land and capital, and no distinction is made in general between ground-rent and capital-rent. This arrange- ment predominated in Greek and Roman antiquity, and is one reason why the rich region of political economy remained undis- covered by the ancients ; because they never had the conception of capital in its economical meaning, but only as capital in the shape of money (geld-capital). " 9. But division of labour develops itself, because capital has by degrees other masters than the land, and because in this way the raw material which is produced by one set of labourers in the service of the landowner now passes into the possession of the owner of the capital, and is worked uj) by labourers in his employ ; the Rent therefore is divided, and one part falls to the share of the owner of the raw material, namely the landowner, 2h 482 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. the other to the owner of the capital who has had the raw material worked iip. The separation between town and country, the legal division of ' city affairs ' from agriculture first called into being the distinction between landlord and capitalist, and consequently the separation of ground-rent and capital-rent as an all-pervading decisive rule transforming the division of lab6ur. "10. This division into ground-rent and 'capital-rent' takes place in proportion to the value which the raw material bears to the value which is added to the raw material through the labour (manufacture or transportation) set to work by the capitalist, in other words, in proportion to the share of the value of the completed product which the raw material takes. The smaller the value of the I'aw material in proportion to tlie manufactured article, or the reverse, the smaller or larger is the share of the total return which falls to the share of the raw material, and consequently the lai'ger or the smaller the share of the total return which belongs to the manufactured article. "11. The capitalists call the last share profit on capital. This profit they reckon in proportion to the amount of the capital — or usually in proportion to the hundred, that is so much per cent. This proportion expresses the rate of profit on capital. Thus we have at the same time a measure of the profit of all capital (capital-vermogens) employed. No one will employ capital where it does not obtain a return at this rate ; and when capital is needed for the production of the raw material, a deduction of the ordinaiy rate of profit on capital must be made from the share of the return which belongs to the raw material in proportion to the amount of capital employed at that rate. If there is then a por- tion still over that is called ground-rent, because the landowner receives it only as landowner, apart altogether from his position as a capitalist or a labourer. And his land is then usually reckoned on its capital value, or the rent is capitalised, '* 12. Since the higher the profit on capital the larger percentage is reckoned as the share of the capital, that percentage must rise or fall as the value of the raw material is lower or higher. For the value of the raw material which the capitalists buy with their capital is reckoned in the capital on which the share of the Eeiit as profit, at so much per cent., is calculated. " 1 3. If the profit on capital is high the ground-rent must be low. APPENDIX. 483 " 14. The relation of value between the raw material and the manufactured article only determines the proportion of the di^d- sion of the Rent between the landowner and the capitalist as ground-rent and profit on capital. No rise or fall in the value of the raw material or of the completed product by itself can raise or lower the profit on the capital or raise or lower the ground- rent unless a similar movement takes ];)lace in the opposite direc- tion in. the other share of the Rent. " 15. Such a change in one share of the Rent which does not affect the other, or a change in similar sense in both shares of the Rent — as, for instance, a lise of the ground-rent without a fall of profit on capital, or a rise of gi'ound-i-ent and of profit on capital (we are speaking here always of shares in the pro- duct) — can only take place if the proportion of division between wages and Rent changes genei-ally, if the Rent generally, that is, rises or falls. " 16. It is clear that a simultaneous rise of both shares in Rent, the ground-rent and profit on capital, or a rise in one portion of the Rent which is not obtained at the cost of the other, since both can only occur in consequence of a rise in the Rent as a whole, can therefore only result at the expense of the wages of labour. The wages of labour must in this case be limited to a smaller share of the product, must be changed in the contrary direction, as one or the other or both portions of the Rent must fall in the case stated above. Whether also it must fall at the same time as a share of the product in relation to the point of necessary sub- sistence depends solely on whether the productiveness of labour has inci'eased or not. " 1 7. If the productiveness of labour has not risen, and both or one of the two shares of the Rent rise, the wages of labour must fall in both connections alike as shai-e of the product and in re- lation to the wage-point of necessary subsistence. " 18. In the same way if the wages of labour as a share of the product are modified, this must produce the opposite effect on one or both shares of the Rent. If a modification of the wages of labour takes place without an accompanying modification of pro- ductiveness, the ground-rent and profit on capital into which the Rent has hitherto been divided will to that extent be advantaged or injured; for the relation between the raw material and the manu- factured article cannot have changed on its side through a change in the remuneration of labour without a simultaneous alteration in productiveness. If the former modification in the wages 484 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. of labour is accompanied by modification of productiveness, for example if the wages of labour have fallen whilst the productive- ness has risen, it will thence depend in which proportion the raw material and the manufactured article have shared in this increase of productiveness, and that share of the Rent alone or chiefly profits, from the increase of the Rent on the whole in consequence of the fall in the wages of labour, in which the increase of pi-oductiveness has not taken place at all, or has done so in the smallest degree. " 19. So far only the efiects of the changes of the different shares in the product — of the wages of labour, of ground-rent, and of pro- fit on capital, and at the same time similar and changing pro- ductiveness — have been considered without reference to a change in the total forces of production. A change in the total pro- ductive forces — that is, in the number of labourers — apart from the change in productiveness and the proportionate shares in the production taken by the labourer, the landowner, and the capitalist, only changes the total amount of the national production, and therewith only the total of the wages of labour and of both por- tions of the Rent, without exerting any influence upon the rela- tions which the shares of the labourer, of the landlord, and of the capitalist have to one another. More or less ground-rent is taken according as the total of the productive forces expended has in- creased or diminished ; inore or less profit on capital is deducted. For since the productiveness and the relative shares in the pi'O- duct of the labourer, the landowner, and capitalist are taken as stationary, the newly developed wealth-production through in- creased population, is divided only in the old fashion. " 20. The increase or diminution of the Rent, however, in conse- quence of the increase or diminution of the productive forces, has therefore apparently a different influence on the gTOund-rent from that which it has on the profit on capital. It raises or depresses, indeed, the ground-rent, but not the profit on capital. For the in- creased or diminished ground-rent must always be reckoned on an equally large area, since the countiy and the estates do not grow, but are confined within fixed boundaries. The increased or dim- inished profit on capital is on the contrary calculated on the in- creased or diminished capital, without which the assumed deduc- tion from or addition to the product as a whole cannot be considered, and the rate of profit cannot rise or fall, but only more or less profit on capital can be received in the nation. If therefore the ground-rent of a particular piece of land can rise for the same reasons for which the profit on capital can APPENDIX. 485 rise as well, namely, because the Eent as a whole can rise at the cost of the labourer's participation in the product, as also because the one share of the Rent can rise at the expense of the other, the gi'ound-rent can so rise for yet a third reason — the total in- crease of Rent — whilst this is not the case with respect to the profit on capital. This last reason is perhaps the most powerful cause of a rise of ground-rent. "21. The separation of the rights of property does not alter these principles of Rent. The gi-ound-rent is divided between various parties only in pi-oportion to the positive legal relation. Just as little does the intermediate position of the conti'actor alter the above principles. The farmer obtains only the profit on his capital, and if he has concluded a profitiible lease, a part of the ground-rent at the same time. No regular interest can arise from any enterpi-ise in any other way than by profit on capital. I am not here speaking of capital lent on mortgage ; the interest on this is only a product of the gi'Ound-rent, the impropriation of a plot of land only a purchase of rent. " 22. The wages of labour can equally change as well as portion of the product, as in relation to the ' wage-jioint ' of absolute necessaries; they can change in both relations independently and even opposed to one another, the wages can fall for instance as a fraction of the product, and nevertheless rise in relation to the point of absolute necessaries. If a settled proportional share is generally assumed between wages of labour and Rent, both por- tions of the Rent, ground-rent and profit on capital, taken as shares in the product can only change in opposite senses ; as much as the one rises or falls, so much must the other fall or rise. If one poi-tion of the Rent changes without the other being afiected thereby, or if they both change equally, this change can only take j)lace if a change in the opposite sense takes place at the same time in the wages of labour ; a rise in the ground-rent, for example — as a share of the product — without a fall in the pro- fit on capital, must reduce the wages of labour as a share of the product. An increase of the Rent in consequence of the increase of the national product raises, however, the ground-rent also with- out cutting down the rate of profit on capital and the wages of labour as shares of the product, and it is also a conceivable case in the combination of these various changes that profit on capital wages of labour, — the latter, however, as share of the product, — and even the ground-rent may simultaneously rise, then namely. 486 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. when the ground-rent falls as shai-e of the product, and this fall tells to the advantage of the other shares provided that this fall is more than made up in consequence of the total increase of Rent. "It is only necessary to grasp this indisputable relation between Wages, Interest, and Rent to comprehend the utter hollowness of the declaration of liberal economists about tlie harmony between Capital and Labour. Capital wants high interest, the landowner high ground-rent, the labourer high wages — and nevertheless one of them can only see his wish fulfilled at the cost of the others." Passing over the sections which deal with exchange, market value, «tc., Dr Meyer takes up Rodbertus' conclusion prior to the later paragraphs. Rodbertus says, " Positive law lays down that land and capital belong just as much to private individuals as the forces of labour to the laboiu-er. Hence the labourers are compelled as a rule, in order only to be able to produce, to enter into an engagement with the possessors of the land and the capital, and to share the product with them. A false and superficial abstraction has in- deed infei*red backwai'ds special and diverse productive services as rendered respectively by labour, land, and capital, in explana- tion of which landowners and capitalists participate in that enforced division ; and then, further, it has been conceived that the assumed product of this combination is the resultant of their various services in co-operation. But who cannot see that this is the most flagrant petitio principii that a science has ever been chargeable with, and we may add the most pernicious error through which the human reason has ever had to make its way-l The above combination does not change one atom the natural pro- ductive elements of all wealth, but only removes a social obstacle to production — the arbitrary dead-weight of the possessors of land and capital — and removes this by a division of the product. In the form, therefore, which the division of labour actually takes to-day, product is exchanged against product as the economists tell us, but the purchasing power which each sharer possesses, is not, as the economists have falsely concluded, regulated by the value of his product, but according to his share in the product. " 29. In a society such as is here assumed, and such as to-day actually exists, the shares of the labourer, landowner, and capitalist in the product are not i-egulated by social foresight by a rational social law, but by the effects of the unregulated ex- change, or by the so-called natural social laws. It thus depends on APPENDIX. "487 the chance of the market how high shall be the share of each class in the national product. The relative shares of the landowner and capitalist are indeed fixed by the relative value of the raw material or manufactured product, and this tends towards the cost of the respective products, or according to the law of the produc- tiveness of the respective labours ; only for this reason that the supreme economical good, the principle of all products, labour, has become an object of exchange is the division between rent- owners and labourers sacrificed to the power of exchange. A similar degi-ading conception to that which allowed the wages of labour to be valued according to the necessary subsistence, or as the requisites for a machine, has also spoken with reference to the labour thus turned into a commodity of a ' natural price ' or of the ' cost ' as in reference to the product itself ; and this natural price, this cost of labour, has been fixed at the production of such goods as may be necessary in order always to bring the laboiu' back again on to the market, that is to place the labourer in the position to propagate his species. What a silly indescribable con- tradiction is the conception of that political economy which settles the labourers in their rightful position as the arbiters of the fate of society, and at the same time always treats them economically as mere commodities. For in this connection the labourers are the labour, " 30. The division of the national production according to the ' natural ' laws of commerce involves the result that with the rising productiveness of labour the wages of the labourer should be an ever smaller share of the product. Since the labourers, even if they could perceive how through a changed combination of the same simple operations on their part theii' labour becomes constantly more productive, are not economically in the position to cope with their employers on this point, that theii- labour in consequence of its productiveness, and in consequence of the addition to this productiA-eness ought to be reimbursed in exchange. The motives of exchange for them are those which fix the disposal of their property, labour, at the lowest point ; and so the higliost economical property, the basis of all production, becomes a conimon and almost worthless commodity. The labour(;rs own several hours of labour but nothing more, and in the front rank of the exchange business their own hunger and the suffering of their family fight against them. Hence they easily dispose uf their labour if only their most painful privations are satisfied by tliis 488 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. exchange, if what they get amounts to only so much as to give them the strength to set to work again ; that is to say, to be able still further to supj^ly their most pressing necessities. Only when wages amount to less — this is the result of experience — when wages are so small that in carrying on their labour they are obliged to sacrifice their actual strength, do they idle and prefer to steal, from a deep natural instinct that under such rela- tions the moral conditions of social existence are violated against them. But the amount which suffices to supply the direst needs is a quantitative product and no fixed proportion ; and indeed in the course of the life of a labourer in the same country and on the average of years is about the same qiiantity. "31. The more populous the country, the more productive on that accoimt the labour and the greater the individual freedom, the more, in a completely unrestrained system of exchange, are the labourers compelled to work ' cheap,' since more and more on these accounts is the labour assimilated to a commodity which comes under the law of competition, and of an injurious competi- tion ; and therefore for this reason the contractors are placed in the position to give work to those who ask least. As if the con- tractors gave work and did not receive it. " 32. If every sharer in the exchange always received the entire product of his labour, if his power of purchase consisted in the market value of the entire product, as it is well known the political economists of the school of Ricardo as well as of Say- Bastiat used falsely to assert, then no increase of productiveness could bring about a glut of one commodity or of all commodities until all co-operators had received enough thereof to satisfy their needs, untU more of them had been produced than generally was requii*ed in the society. For since the market value of the pro- duct is in inverse ratio to the productiveness, the market value of the pi'oduct of each, according to the above assumption, re- mains the same for those whose product has been produced with an increased scale of productiveness, and consequently therefore its piu'chasing power is the same as with those in whose case this has not happened. Every sharer would be able to buy a larger quantity of that jiroduct where productiveness had risen in the proportion in which it had risen, and the undiminished purchasing power of each would be able so long to control the increased amount of products due to the increased productive- ness, until the need of each individual were satisfied, until he APPENDIX. 489 would not be able to purchase more, even if lie could purchase more. In this case, therefore, the purchasing power in society- remains always equal to its productiveness or so much value in use as society produced so much value in exchange and so much purchasing jjower it would also possess, until all the needs of each co-operator in the production were satisfied. Over-produc- tion could therefore only exist when the members of the society had already fully satisfied their wants, whilst the present com- mercial crises consist precisely in the fact that at the very time of glut four-fifths or five-sixths of society are in want. " The increase of productiveness would have the same result if indeed the product were divided as it is to-day into three shares, but the share of each indi\T.dual were to remain a fixed portion. According to this assumption also the purchasing power of each participator in the exchange would remain the same no matter how the productiveness might rise, and overproduction could likewise only occur when the wants of all participators were satisfied. . . . " Only if neither of these two assumptions fits, if the pro- duct is not simply shared in thx*ee fixed portions, but accord- ing to the ' natural ' laws of self-regulating exchange, the share of the working classes, that is of the great majority of society, does not remain a fixed unchangeable fraction of the product, but on the contrary is a smaller fraction of the product in precisely the same proportion as the pi'oductiveness increases, then this happy consequence of the increase of productiveness cannot follow. For in this third assumption purchasing power and productiveness remain no longer in proportionate I'elation. The purchasing power of the greater part of society reduces itself much more in relation to the rising productiveness, and society is placed in the position to produce utility value which is no longer value in exchange and power of purchase ; while further, the gi-eatcr num- ber have their wants unsatisfied on that account. " 33. It is manifest that where and when the 'natural' laws of exchange have such effects, and no rational laws interpose an obstacle to these effects, necessarily there must be what are to-day called glut and pauperism. There must then necessarily arise contradictory phenomena so remarkable as these, that the pro- diictiveness of society may yet rise so high, may rise so high that all its members could live in luxiiry from its product, never- theless on this account, and precisely for this reason the majority 490 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM. is plunged in the depths of poverty, the minority lives in exces- sive luxury. There must be produced in consequence of the inseparable connection between political economy and the legal and political development, which at the same time brings with it an ever greater equality before the law, and greater political free- dom, there must be produced, I say, that fatal contradiction in society, that the more equal and the more fi-ee all its members become before the law and politically, the more unequal and de- pendent are the majority of the woi'king classes economically. Then such monstrosities as commercial crises and pauperism must arise. As concerns the commercial crisis this must be so, because since the purchasing power of the majority of society, of the work- ing classes, is always as a whole less as the productiveness rises, over-production must always arise sooner than the wants of society are fully satisfied. And as concerns pauperism, this must happen, because the material claims of the majority of society, the work- ing classes, are continually enhanced, their desires are continually inflamed by the increase of the vv'ealth of the minority, whilst the amount of income of those whose economical position is ruined falls. It must come then to such incredible nonsense as this, that whilst the majority of society languish in poverty, they are never- theless not allowed to exert their productive forces to their full extent by a long way, because if they did the smaller section "would be plunged into poverty. "34. In this 'natural ' law of a perfectly unfettered exchange Hes the key to the economical problem of the present time. The assumptions from which such phenomena as pauperism and com- mercial crises follow as natural consequences come forth to-day in actual practice, and society has enacted no rational laws to keep in check the practical results of these now practical assumptions. Productiveness has increased in a very high degree, and if not in so great a degree in the production of raw material as in manu- facture and transport, nevertheless even there to a very consider- able extent. The national product has also greatly increased, through the increase of productive forces in consequence of the growing population. The wages of labour, on the contrary, in Europe, where they are not favourably influenced by colonial relations, as in North America or Australia, but have developed from the wage relations of the serf (through much denser population, and at the same time through the land being entii-ely occupied), wages in such conditions are nowhere much or far above the point of APPENDIX. 491 absolute necessaries. Further, the above-mentioned social relations have developed themselves in such manner that they have exerted a constantly increasing pressui'e. Whence the conclusion follows that the existing form of division of the national product camiot continue. The wages of labour have, in fact, become in Europe an ever smaller relative share of the product. . . . This form of division of the national product has therefore also inflicted pauperism and commercial crises upon society. They have both become facts as real as that division and its premises. No optimism is blinder, no selfishness more naiTOW, than that which is not shaken out of its slumber by the violence with which these phenomena have taken shape, and manifested their universal significance. Those who deny them we need not count. The dispute is no longer about their existence, but about their remedy, and cniefly only against the opinion which assumes their absolute necessity in the same way that social anomalies are assumed to be God's will." Rodbertus goes on to assert that society can never permit this paviperism and these crises to continue. His proposed remedies are, however, in nowise of a revolutionary character. They are — (1) a regular scale of wages and a normal wox'king day ; (2) State circulating capital in. some such general shape as labour notes, together with a reasoned regulation of production in the collective interest ; and (3) general centres of distribution in the form of State co-operative stores. Rodbertus was, in fact, essentially a conservative ; and living a I'etii-ed life as a landed proprietor he devoted himself to working out, from his point of \dew, the problems of his time undisturbed, as far as possible, by the move- ment of the world without. His principal theories were put forward as early as 1850, and his influence upon Lassalle has already been spoken of. Rodbertus' correspondence with that agitator, as well as with other economists, is of high importance. His pupil and the editor of his letters, Dr R. Meyer, argues that as Europe no longer has a monopoly of machinery, and is brought into competition with the clieap food and wares produced in America and Russia, or China and India, but especially in America, the assumption of rising productiveness in Europe no longer holds good. The total income to be divided up will be constantly less per head on an increasing population, whilst the plutocracy take an increasing share. Europa verarmt, " Europe is being impoverished " cries Meyer. But whatever 492 THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF SOCIALISM, view we may take of the problems of the future — and it is almost impossible to forecast the effects of electricity on the market of the world — or however much some of Rodbertus' assumptions may be open to criticism, his analysis given above seems to me well worthy of the attention of our English middle- class economists. For the last thirty years Germany has taken the lead completely in political economy, and so far our econo- mical writers appear to be quite ignorant of the fact. CRKBtlLL AND SPEAKS, PBINTEES. A LIST OF KEG AN PAUL, TRENCH & CO/S PUB Lie A TIONS. fv i: S5 I, Paternoster Square, London, A LIST OF KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. CONTENTS. 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