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The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844

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Title: The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844

Author: Friedrich Engels

Translator: Florence Kelley


        
Release date: December 13, 2005 [eBook #17306]
                Most recently updated: June 21, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17306

Credits: Transcribed from the January 1943 George Allen & Unwin reprint of the March 1892 edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING-CLASS IN ENGLAND IN 1844 ***





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


by
FREDERICK ENGELS

_Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky_

_London_

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD

_Museum Street_




PREFACE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   "But what is to be the consequence?  Capitalist production _cannot_
   stop.  It must go on increasing and expanding, or it must die.  Even
   now, the mere reduction of England's lion's share in the supply of the
   world's markets means stagnation, distress, excess of capital here,
   excess of unemployed workpeople there.  What will it be when the
   increase of yearly production is brought to a complete stop?

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

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

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

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

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

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

F. ENGELS.
_January_ 11_th_, 1892.




 INTRODUCTION


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

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

Before the introduction of machinery, the spinning and weaving of raw
materials was carried on in the working-man's home.  Wife and daughter
spun the yarn that the father wove or that they sold, if he did not work
it up himself.  These weaver families lived in the country in the
neighbourhood of the towns, and could get on fairly well with their
wages, because the home market was almost the only one, and the crushing
power of competition that came later, with the conquest of foreign
markets and the extension of trade, did not yet press upon wages.  There
was, further, a constant increase in the demand for the home market,
keeping pace with the slow increase in population and employing all the
workers; and there was also the impossibility of vigorous competition of
the workers among themselves, consequent upon the rural dispersion of
their homes.  So it was that the weaver was usually in a position to lay
by something, and rent a little piece of land, that he cultivated in his
leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he
could weave whenever and as long as he pleased.  True, he was a bad
farmer and managed his land inefficiently, often obtaining but poor
crops; nevertheless, he was no proletarian, he had a stake in the
country, he was permanently settled, and stood one step higher in society
than the English workman of to-day.

So the workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence,
leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their
material position was far better than that of their successors.  They did
not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet
earned what they needed.  They had leisure for healthful work in garden
or field, work which, in itself, was recreation for them, and they could
take part besides in the recreations and games of their neighbours, and
all these games--bowling, cricket, football, etc., contributed to their
physical health and vigour.  They were, for the most part, strong, well-
built people, in whose physique little or no difference from that of
their peasant neighbours was discoverable.  Their children grew up in the
fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was
only occasionally; while of eight or twelve hours work for them there was
no question.

What the moral and intellectual character of this class was may be
guessed.  Shut off from the towns, which they never entered, their yarn
and woven stuff being delivered to travelling agents for payment of
wages--so shut off that old people who lived quite in the neighbourhood
of the town never went thither until they were robbed of their trade by
the introduction of machinery and obliged to look about them in the towns
for work--the weavers stood upon the moral and intellectual plane of the
yeomen with whom they were usually immediately connected through their
little holdings.  They regarded their squire, the greatest landholder of
the region, as their natural superior; they asked advice of him, laid
their small disputes before him for settlement, and gave him all honour,
as this patriarchal relation involved.  They were "respectable" people,
good husbands and fathers, led moral lives because they had no temptation
to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low houses in their vicinity,
and because the host, at whose inn they now and then quenched their
thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who
took pride in his good order, good beer, and early hours.  They had their
children the whole day at home, and brought them up in obedience and the
fear of God; the patriarchal relationship remained undisturbed so long as
the children were unmarried.  The young people grew up in idyllic
simplicity and intimacy with their playmates until they married; and even
though sexual intercourse before marriage almost unfailingly took place,
this happened only when the moral obligation of marriage was recognised
on both sides, and a subsequent wedding made everything good.  In short,
the English industrial workers of those days lived and thought after the
fashion still to be found here and there in Germany, in retirement and
seclusion, without mental activity and without violent fluctuations in
their position in life.  They could rarely read and far more rarely
write; went regularly to church, never talked politics, never conspired,
never thought, delighted in physical exercises, listened with inherited
reverence when the Bible was read, and were, in their unquestioning
humility, exceedingly well-disposed towards the "superior" classes.  But
intellectually, they were dead; lived only for their petty, private
interest, for their looms and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty
movement which, beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind.  They
were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial
revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which,
cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings.
In truth, they were not human beings; they were merely toiling machines
in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that
time.  The industrial revolution has simply carried this out to its
logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from
them the last trace of independent activity, and so forcing them to think
and demand a position worthy of men.  As in France politics, so in
England manufacture, and the movement of civil society in general drew
into the whirl of history the last classes which had remained sunk in
apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind.

The first invention which gave rise to a radical change in the state of
the English workers was the jenny, invented in the year 1764 by a weaver,
James Hargreaves, of Standhill, near Blackburn, in North Lancashire.  This
machine was the rough beginning of the later invented mule, and was moved
by hand.  Instead of one spindle like the ordinary spinning-wheel, it
carried sixteen or eighteen manipulated by a single workman.  This
invention made it possible to deliver more yarn than heretofore.  Whereas,
though one weaver had employed three spinners, there had never been
enough yarn, and the weaver had often been obliged to wait for it, there
was now more yarn to be had than could be woven by the available workers.
The demand for woven goods, already increasing, rose yet more in
consequence of the cheapness of these goods, which cheapness, in turn,
was the outcome of the diminished cost of producing the yarn.  More
weavers were needed, and weavers' wages rose.  Now that the weaver could
earn more at his loom, he gradually abandoned his farming, and gave his
whole time to weaving.  At that time a family of four grown persons and
two children (who were set to spooling) could earn, with eight hours'
daily work, four pounds sterling in a week, and often more if trade was
good and work pressed.  It happened often enough that a single weaver
earned two pounds a week at his loom.  By degrees the class of farming
weavers wholly disappeared, and was merged in the newly arising class of
weavers who lived wholly upon wages, had no property whatever, not even
the pretended property of a holding, and so became working-men,
proletarians.  Moreover, the old relation between spinner and weaver was
destroyed.  Hitherto, so far as this had been possible, yarn had been
spun and woven under one roof.  Now that the jenny as well as the loom
required a strong hand, men began to spin, and whole families lived by
spinning, while others laid the antiquated, superseded spinning-wheel
aside; and, if they had not means of purchasing a jenny, were forced to
live upon the wages of the father alone.  Thus began with spinning and
weaving that division of labour which has since been so infinitely
perfected.

While the industrial proletariat was thus developing with the first still
very imperfect machine, the same machine gave rise to the agricultural
proletariat.  There had, hitherto, been a vast number of small
landowners, yeomen, who had vegetated in the same unthinking quiet as
their neighbours, the farming weavers.  They cultivated their scraps of
land quite after the ancient and inefficient fashion of their ancestors,
and opposed every change with the obstinacy peculiar to such creatures of
habit, after remaining stationary from generation to generation.  Among
them were many small holders also, not tenants in the present sense of
the word, but people who had their land handed down from their fathers,
either by hereditary lease, or by force of ancient custom, and had
hitherto held it as securely as if it had actually been their own
property.  When the industrial workers withdrew from agriculture, a great
number of small holdings fell idle, and upon these the new class of large
tenants established themselves, tenants-at-will, holding fifty, one
hundred, two hundred or more acres, liable to be turned out at the end of
the year, but able by improved tillage and larger farming to increase the
yield of the land.  They could sell their produce more cheaply than the
yeomen, for whom nothing remained when his farm no longer supported him
but to sell it, procure a jenny or a loom, or take service as an
agricultural labourer in the employ of a large farmer.  His inherited
slowness and the inefficient methods of cultivation bequeathed by his
ancestors, and above which he could not rise, left him no alternative
when forced to compete with men who managed their holdings on sounder
principles and with all the advantages bestowed by farming on a large
scale and the investment of capital for the improvement of the soil.

Meanwhile, the industrial movement did not stop here.  Single capitalists
began to set up spinning jennies in great buildings and to use
water-power for driving them, so placing themselves in a position to
diminish the number of workers, and sell their yarn more cheaply than
single spinners could do who moved their own machines by hand.  There
were constant improvements in the jenny, so that machines continually
became antiquated, and must be altered or even laid aside; and though the
capitalists could hold out by the application of water-power even with
the old machinery, for the single spinner this was impossible.  And the
factory system, the beginning of which was thus made, received a fresh
extension in 1767, through the spinning throstle invented by Richard
Arkwright, a barber, in Preston, in North Lancashire.  After the steam-
engine, this is the most important mechanical invention of the 18th
century.  It was calculated from the beginning for mechanical motive
power, and was based upon wholly new principles.  By the combination of
the peculiarities of the jenny and throstle, Samuel Crompton, of Firwood,
Lancashire, contrived the mule in 1785, and as Arkwright invented the
carding engine, and preparatory ("slubbing and roving") frames about the
same time, the factory system became the prevailing one for the spinning
of cotton.  By means of trifling modifications these machines were
gradually adapted to the spinning of flax, and so to the superseding of
hand-work here, too.  But even then, the end was not yet.  In the closing
years of the last century, Dr. Cartwright, a country parson, had invented
the power-loom, and about 1804 had so far perfected it, that it could
successfully compete with the hand-weaver; and all this machinery was
made doubly important by James Watt's steam-engine, invented in 1764, and
used for supplying motive power for spinning since 1785.

With these inventions, since improved from year to year, the victory of
machine-work over hand-work in the chief branches of English industry was
won; and the history of the latter from that time forward simply relates
how the hand-workers have been driven by machinery from one position
after another.  The consequences of this were, on the one hand, a rapid
fall in price of all manufactured commodities, prosperity of commerce and
manufacture, the conquest of nearly all the unprotected foreign markets,
the sudden multiplication of capital and national wealth; on the other
hand, a still more rapid multiplication of the proletariat, the
destruction of all property-holding and of all security of employment for
the working-class, demoralisation, political excitement, and all those
facts so highly repugnant to Englishmen in comfortable circumstances,
which we shall have to consider in the following pages.  Having already
seen what a transformation in the social condition of the lower classes a
single such clumsy machine as the jenny had wrought, there is no cause
for surprise as to that which a complete and interdependent system of
finely adjusted machinery has brought about, machinery which receives raw
material and turns out woven goods.

Meanwhile, let us trace the development of English manufacture {7}
somewhat more minutely, beginning with the cotton industry.  In the years
1771-1775, there were annually imported into England rather less than
5,000,000 pounds of raw cotton; in the year 1841 there were imported
528,000,000 pounds, and the import for 1844 will reach at least
600,000,000 pounds.  In 1834 England exported 556,000,000 yards of woven
cotton goods, 76,500,000 pounds of cotton yarn, and cotton hosiery of the
value of 1,200,000 pounds.  In the same year over 8,000,000 mule spindles
were at work, 110,000 power and 250,000 hand-looms, throstle spindles not
included, in the service of the cotton industry; and, according to
MacCulloch's reckoning, nearly a million and a half human beings were
supported by this branch, of whom but 220,000 worked in the mills; the
power used in these mills was steam, equivalent to 33,000 horse-power,
and water, equivalent to 11,000 horse-power.  At present these figures
are far from adequate, and it may be safely assumed that, in the year
1845, the power and number of the machines and the number of the workers
is greater by one-half than it was in 1834.  The chief centre of this
industry is Lancashire, where it originated; it has thoroughly
revolutionised this county, converting it from an obscure, ill-cultivated
swamp into a busy, lively region, multiplying its population tenfold in
eighty years, and causing giant cities such as Liverpool and Manchester,
containing together 700,000 inhabitants, and their neighbouring towns,
Bolton with 60,000, Rochdale with 75,000, Oldham with 50,000, Preston
with 60,000, Ashton and Stalybridge with 40,000, and a whole list of
other manufacturing towns to spring up as if by a magic touch.  The
history of South Lancashire contains some of the greatest marvels of
modern times, yet no one ever mentions them, and all these miracles are
the product of the cotton industry.  Glasgow, too, the centre for the
cotton district of Scotland, for Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, has
increased in population from 30,000 to 300,000 since the introduction of
the industry.  The hosiery manufacture of Nottingham and Derby also
received one fresh impulse from the lower price of yarn, and a second one
from an improvement of the stocking loom, by means of which two stockings
could be woven at once.  The manufacture of lace, too, became an
important branch of industry after the invention of the lace machine in
1777; soon after that date Lindley invented the point-net machine, and in
1809 Heathcote invented the bobbin-net machine, in consequence of which
the production of lace was greatly simplified, and the demand increased
proportionately in consequence of the diminished cost, so that now, at
least 200,000 persons are supported by this industry.  Its chief centres
are Nottingham, Leicester, and the West of England, Wiltshire,
Devonshire, etc.  A corresponding extension has taken place in the
branches dependent upon the cotton industry, in dyeing, bleaching, and
printing.  Bleaching by the application of chlorine in place of the
oxygen of the atmosphere; dyeing and printing by the rapid development of
chemistry, and printing by a series of most brilliant mechanical
inventions, a yet greater advance which, with the extension of these
branches caused by the growth of the cotton industry, raised them to a
previously unknown degree of prosperity.

The same activity manifested itself in the manufacture of wool.  This had
hitherto been the leading department of English industry, but the
quantities formerly produced are as nothing in comparison with that which
is now manufactured.  In 1782 the whole wool crop of the preceding three
years lay unused for want of workers, and would have continued so to lie
if the newly invented machinery had not come to its assistance and spun
it.  The adaptation of this machinery to the spinning of wool was most
successfully accomplished.  Then began the same sudden development in the
wool district, which we have already seen in the cotton districts.  In
1738 there were 75,000 pieces of woollen cloth produced in the West
Riding of Yorkshire; in 1817 there were 490,000 pieces, and so rapid was
the extension of the industry that in 1834, 450,000 more pieces were
produced than in 1825.  In 1801, 101,000,000 pounds of wool (7,000,000
pounds of it imported) were worked up; in 1835, 180,000,000 pounds were
worked up; of which 42,000,000 pounds were imported.  The principal
centre of this industry is the West Riding of Yorkshire, where,
especially at Bradford, long English wool is converted into worsted
yarns, etc.; while in the other cities, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield,
etc., short wool is converted into hard-spun yarn and cloth.  Then come
the adjacent part of Lancashire, the region of Rochdale, where in
addition to the cotton industry much flannel is produced, and the West of
England which supplies the finest cloths.  Here also the growth of
population is worthy of observation:

Bradford contained in 1801 29,000, and in 1831 77,000 inhabitants.
Halifax ,, ,, 68,000, ,, ,, 110,000 ,,
Huddersfield ,, ,, 15,000, ,, ,, 34,000 ,,
Leeds,, ,, 53,000, ,, ,, 123,000 ,,

And the whole West Riding 564,000, ,, ,, 980,000 ,,

A population which, since 1831, must have increased at least 20 to 25 per
cent. further.  In 1835 the spinning of wool employed in the United
Kingdom 1,313 mills, with 71,300 workers, these last being but a small
portion of the multitude who are supported directly or indirectly by the
manufacture of wool, and excluding nearly all weavers.

Progress in the linen trade developed later, because the nature of the
raw material made the application of spinning machinery very difficult.
Attempts had been made in the last years of the last century in Scotland,
but the Frenchman, Girard, who introduced flax spinning in 1810, was the
first who succeeded practically, and even Girard's machines first
attained on British soil the importance they deserved by means of
improvements which they underwent in England, and of their universal
application in Leeds, Dundee, and Belfast.  From this time the British
linen trade rapidly extended.  In 1814, 3,000 tons of flax were imported;
in 1833, nearly 19,000 tons of flax and 3,400 tons of hemp.  The export
of Irish linen to Great Britain rose from 32,000,000 yards in 1800 to
53,000,000 in 1825, of which a large part was re-exported.  The export of
English and Scotch woven linen goods rose from 24,000,000 yards in 1820
to 51,000,000 yards in 1833.  The number of flax spinning establishments
in 1835 was 347, employing 33,000 workers, of which one-half were in the
South of Scotland, more than 60 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Leeds,
and its environs, 25 in Belfast, Ireland, and the rest in Dorset and
Lancashire.  Weaving is carried on in the South of Scotland, here and
there in England, but principally in Ireland.

With like success did the English turn their attention to the manufacture
of silk.  Raw material was imported from Southern Europe and Asia ready
spun, and the chief labour lay in the twisting of fine threads.  Until
1824 the heavy import duty, four shillings per pound on raw material,
greatly retarded the development of the English silk industry, while only
the markets of England and the Colonies were protected for it.  In that
year the duty was reduced to one penny, and the number of mills at once
largely increased.  In a single year the number of throwing spindles rose
from 780,000 to 1,180,000; and, although the commercial crisis of 1825
crippled this branch of industry for the moment, yet in 1827 more was
produced than ever, the mechanical skill and experience of the English
having secured their twisting machinery the supremacy over the awkward
devices of their competitors.  In 1835 the British Empire possessed 263
twisting mills, employing 30,000 workers, located chiefly in Cheshire, in
Macclesfield, Congleton, and the surrounding districts, and in Manchester
and Somersetshire.  Besides these, there are numerous mills for working
up waste, from which a peculiar article known as spun silk is
manufactured, with which the English supply even the Paris and Lyons
weavers.  The weaving of the silk so twisted and spun is carried on in
Paisley and elsewhere in Scotland, and in Spitalfields, London, but also
in Manchester and elsewhere.  Nor is the gigantic advance achieved in
English manufacture since 1760 restricted to the production of clothing
materials.  The impulse, once given, was communicated to all branches of
industrial activity, and a multitude of inventions wholly unrelated to
those here cited, received double importance from the fact that they were
made in the midst of the universal movement.  But as soon as the
immeasurable importance of mechanical power was practically demonstrated,
every energy was concentrated in the effort to exploit this power in all
directions, and to exploit it in the interest of individual inventors and
manufacturers; and the demand for machinery, fuel, and materials called a
mass of workers and a number of trades into redoubled activity.  The
steam-engine first gave importance to the broad coal-fields of England;
the production of machinery began now for the first time, and with it
arose a new interest in the iron mines which supplied raw material for
it.  The increased consumption of wool stimulated English sheep breeding,
and the growing importation of wool, flax, and silk called forth an
extension of the British ocean carrying trade.  Greatest of all was the
growth of production of iron.  The rich iron deposits of the English
hills had hitherto been little developed; iron had always been smelted by
means of charcoal, which became gradually more expensive as agriculture
improved and forests were cut away.  The beginning of the use of coke in
iron smelting had been made in the last century, and in 1780 a new method
was invented of converting into available wrought-iron coke-smelted iron,
which up to that time had been convertible into cast-iron only.  This
process, known as "puddling," consists in withdrawing the carbon which
had mixed with the iron during the process of smelting, and opened a
wholly new field for the production of English iron.  Smelting furnaces
were built fifty times larger than before, the process of smelting was
simplified by the introduction of hot blasts, and iron could thus be
produced so cheaply that a multitude of objects which had before been
made of stone or wood were now made of iron.

In 1788, Thomas Paine, the famous democrat, built in Yorkshire the first
iron bridge, which was followed by a great number of others, so that now
nearly all bridges, especially for railroad traffic, are built of cast-
iron, while in London itself a bridge across the Thames, the Southwark
bridge, has been built of this material.  Iron pillars, supports for
machinery, etc., are universally used, and since the introduction of gas-
lighting and railroads, new outlets for English iron products are opened.
Nails and screws gradually came to be made by machinery.  Huntsman, a
Sheffielder, discovered in 1790 a method for casting steel, by which much
labour was saved, and the production of wholly new cheap goods rendered
practicable; and through the greater purity of the material placed at its
disposal, and the more perfect tools, new machinery and minute division
of labour, the metal trade of England now first attained importance.  The
population of Birmingham grew from 73,000 in 1801 to 200,000 in 1844;
that of Sheffield from 46,000 in 1801 to 110,000 in 1844, and the
consumption of coal in the latter city alone reached in 1836, 515,000
tons.  In 1805 there were exported 4,300 tons of iron products and 4,600
tons of pig-iron; in 1834, 16,200 tons of iron products and 107,000 tons
of pig-iron, while the whole iron product reaching in 1740 but 17,000
tons, had risen in 1834 to nearly 700,000 tons.  The smelting of pig-iron
alone consumes yearly more than 3,000,000 tons of coal, and the
importance which coal mining has attained in the course of the last 60
years can scarcely be conceived.  All the English and Scotch deposits are
now worked, and the mines of Northumberland and Durham alone yield
annually more than 5,000,000 tons for shipping, and employ from 40 to
50,000 men.  According to the Durham _Chronicle_, there were worked in
these two counties: In 1753, 14 mines; in 1800, 40 mines; in 1836, 76
mines; in 1843, 130 mines.  Moreover, all mines are now much more
energetically worked than formerly.  A similarly increased activity was
applied to the working of tin, copper, and lead, and alongside of the
extension of glass manufacture arose a new branch of industry in the
production of pottery, rendered important by the efforts of Josiah
Wedgewood, about 1763.  This inventor placed the whole manufacture of
stoneware on a scientific basis, introduced better taste, and founded the
potteries of North Staffordshire, a district of eight English miles
square, which, formerly a desert waste, is now sown with works and
dwellings, and supports more than 60,000 people.

Into this universal whirl of activity everything was drawn.  Agriculture
made a corresponding advance.  Not only did landed property pass, as we
have already seen, into the hands of new owners and cultivators,
agriculture was affected in still another way.  The great holders applied
capital to the improvement of the soil, tore down needless fences,
drained, manured, employed better tools, and applied a rotation of crops.
The progress of science came to their assistance also; Sir Humphrey Davy
applied chemistry to agriculture with success, and the development of
mechanical science bestowed a multitude of advantages upon the large
farmer.  Further, in consequence of the increase of population, the
demand for agricultural products increased in such measure that from 1760
to 1834, 6,840,540 acres of waste land were reclaimed; and, in spite of
this, England was transformed from a grain exporting to a grain importing
country.

The same activity was developed in the establishment of communication.
From 1818 to 1829, there were built in England and Wales, 1,000 English
miles of roadway of the width prescribed by law, 60 feet, and nearly all
the old roads were reconstructed on the new system of M'Adam.  In
Scotland, the Department of Public Works built since 1803 nearly 900
miles of roadway and more than 1,000 bridges, by which the population of
the Highlands was suddenly placed within reach of civilisation.  The
Highlanders had hitherto been chiefly poachers and smugglers; they now
became farmers and hand-workers.  And, though Gaelic schools were
organised for the purpose of maintaining the Gaelic language, yet Gaelic-
Celtic customs and speech are rapidly vanishing before the approach of
English civilisation.  So, too, in Ireland; between the counties of Cork,
Limerick, and Kerry, lay hitherto a wilderness wholly without passable
roads, and serving, by reason of its inaccessibility, as the refuge of
all criminals and the chief protection of the Celtic Irish nationality in
the South of Ireland.  It has now been cut through by public roads, and
civilisation has thus gained admission even to this savage region.  The
whole British Empire, and especially England, which, sixty years ago, had
as bad roads as Germany or France then had, is now covered by a network
of the finest roadways; and these, too, like almost everything else in
England, are the work of private enterprise, the State having done very
little in this direction.

Before 1755 England possessed almost no canals.  In that year a canal was
built in Lancashire from Sankey Brook to St Helen's; and in 1759, James
Brindley built the first important one, the Duke of Bridgewater's canal
from Manchester, and the coal mines of the district to the mouth of the
Mersey passing, near Barton, by aqueduct, over the river Irwell.  From
this achievement dates the canal building of England, to which Brindley
first gave importance.  Canals were now built, and rivers made navigable
in all directions.  In England alone, there are 2,200 miles of canals and
1,800 miles of navigable river.  In Scotland, the Caledonian Canal was
cut directly across the country, and in Ireland several canals were
built.  These improvements, too, like the railroads and roadways, are
nearly all the work of private individuals and companies.

The railroads have been only recently built.  The first great one was
opened from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830, since which all the great
cities have been connected by rail.  London with Southampton, Brighton,
Dover, Colchester, Exeter, and Birmingham; Birmingham with Gloucester,
Liverpool, Lancaster (via Newton and Wigan, and via Manchester and
Bolton); also with Leeds (via Manchester and Halifax, and via Leicester,
Derby, and Sheffield); Leeds with Hull and Newcastle (via York).  There
are also many minor lines building or projected, which will soon make it
possible to travel from Edinburgh to London in one day.

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

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

We have already seen how the proletariat was called into existence by the
introduction of machinery.  The rapid extension of manufacture demanded
hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the agricultural
districts to the towns.  Population multiplied enormously, and nearly all
the increase took place in the proletariat.  Further, Ireland had entered
upon an orderly development only since the beginning of the eighteenth
century.  There, too, the population, more than decimated by English
cruelty in earlier disturbances, now rapidly multiplied, especially after
the advance in manufacture began to draw masses of Irishmen towards
England.  Thus arose the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the
British Empire, in which at least three-fourths of the population belong
to the working-class, while the lower middle-class consists only of small
shopkeepers, and very very few handicraftsmen.  For, though the rising
manufacture first attained importance by transforming tools into
machines, workrooms into factories, and consequently, the toiling lower
middle-class into the toiling proletariat, and the former large merchants
into manufacturers, though the lower middle-class was thus early crushed
out, and the population reduced to the two opposing elements, workers and
capitalists, this happened outside of the domain of manufacture proper,
in the province of handicraft and retail trade as well.  In the place of
the former masters and apprentices, came great capitalists and working-
men who had no prospect of rising above their class.  Hand-work was
carried on after the fashion of factory work, the division of labour was
strictly applied, and small employers who could not compete with great
establishments were forced down into the proletariat.  At the same time
the destruction of the former organisation of hand-work, and the
disappearance of the lower middle-class deprived the working-man of all
possibility of rising into the middle-class himself.  Hitherto he had
always had the prospect of establishing himself somewhere as master
artificer, perhaps employing journeymen and apprentices; but now, when
master artificers were crowded out by manufacturers, when large capital
had become necessary for carrying on work independently, the
working-class became, for the first time, an integral, permanent class of
the population, whereas it had formerly often been merely a transition
leading to the bourgeoisie.  Now, he who was born to toil had no other
prospect than that of remaining a toiler all his life.  Now, for the
first time, therefore, the proletariat was in a position to undertake an
independent movement.

In this way were brought together those vast masses of working-men who
now fill the whole British Empire, whose social condition forces itself
every day more and more upon the attention of the civilised world.  The
condition of the working-class is the condition of the vast majority of
the English people.  The question: What is to become of those destitute
millions, who consume to-day what they earned yesterday; who have created
the greatness of England by their inventions and their toil; who become
with every passing day more conscious of their might, and demand, with
daily increasing urgency, their share of the advantages of society?--This,
since the Reform Bill, has become the national question.  All
Parliamentary debates, of any importance, may be reduced to this; and,
though the English middle-class will not as yet admit it, though they try
to evade this great question, and to represent their own particular
interests as the truly national ones, their action is utterly useless.
With every session of Parliament the working-class gains ground, the
interests of the middle-class diminish in importance; and, in spite of
the fact that the middle-class is the chief, in fact, the only power in
Parliament, the last session of 1844 was a continuous debate upon
subjects affecting the working-class, the Poor Relief Bill, the Factory
Act, the Masters' and Servants' Act; and Thomas Duncombe, the
representative of the working-men in the House of Commons, was the great
man of the session; while the Liberal middle-class with its motion for
repealing the Corn Laws, and the Radical middle-class with its resolution
for refusing the taxes, played pitiable roles.  Even the debates about
Ireland were at bottom debates about the Irish proletariat, and the means
of coming to its assistance.  It is high time, too, for the English
middle-class to make some concessions to the working-men who no longer
plead but threaten; for in a short time it may be too late.

In spite of all this, the English middle-class, especially the
manufacturing class, which is enriched directly by means of the poverty
of the workers, persists in ignoring this poverty.  This class, feeling
itself the mighty representative class of the nation, is ashamed to lay
the sore spot of England bare before the eyes of the world; will not
confess, even to itself, that the workers are in distress, because it,
the property-holding, manufacturing class, must bear the moral
responsibility for this distress.  Hence the scornful smile which
intelligent Englishmen (and they, the middle-class, alone are known on
the Continent) assume when any one begins to speak of the condition of
the working-class; hence the utter ignorance on the part of the whole
middle-class of everything which concerns the workers; hence the
ridiculous blunders which men of this class, in and out of Parliament,
make when the position of the proletariat comes under discussion; hence
the absurd freedom from anxiety, with which the middle-class dwells upon
a soil that is honeycombed, and may any day collapse, the speedy collapse
of which is as certain as a mathematical or mechanical demonstration;
hence the miracle that the English have as yet no single book upon the
condition of their workers, although they have been examining and mending
the old state of things no one knows how many years.  Hence also the deep
wrath of the whole working-class, from Glasgow to London, against the
rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to
their fate, a wrath which before too long a time goes by, a time almost
within the power of man to predict, must break out into a Revolution in
comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794, will
prove to have been child's play.




THE INDUSTRIAL PROLETARIAT.


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

Since, however, at the present moment, pretty much the whole industrial
proletariat is involved in the movement, and the condition of the
separate sections has much in common, because they all are industrial, we
shall have first to examine the condition of the industrial proletariat
as a whole, in order later to notice more particularly each separate
division with its own peculiarities.

It has been already suggested that manufacture centralises property in
the hands of the few.  It requires large capital with which to erect the
colossal establishments that ruin the petty trading bourgeoisie and with
which to press into its service the forces of Nature, so driving the hand
labour of the independent workman out of the market.  The division of
labour, the application of water and especially steam, and the
application of machinery, are the three great levers with which
manufacture, since the middle of the last century, has been busy putting
the world out of joint.  Manufacture, on a small scale, created the
middle-class; on a large scale, it created the working-class, and raised
the elect of the middle-class to the throne, but only to overthrow them
the more surely when the time comes.  Meanwhile, it is an undenied and
easily explained fact that the numerous, petty middle-class of the "good
old times" has been annihilated by manufacture, and resolved into rich
capitalists on the one hand and poor workers on the other. {20}

The centralising tendency of manufacture does not, however, stop here.
Population becomes centralised just as capital does; and, very naturally,
since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a
piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest
under the name of wages.  A manufacturing establishment requires many
workers employed together in a single building, living near each other
and forming a village of themselves in the case of a good-sized factory.
They have needs for satisfying which other people are necessary;
handicraftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stonemasons,
settle at hand.  The inhabitants of the village, especially the younger
generation, accustom themselves to factory work, grow skilful in it, and
when the first mill can no longer employ them all, wages fall, and the
immigration of fresh manufacturers is the consequence.  So the village
grows into a small town, and the small town into a large one.  The
greater the town, the greater its advantages.  It offers roads,
railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour increases constantly, new
establishments can be built more cheaply because of the competition among
builders and machinists who are at hand, than in remote country
districts, whither timber, machinery, builders, and operatives must be
brought; it offers a market to which buyers crowd, and direct
communication with the markets supplying raw material or demanding
finished goods.  Hence the marvellously rapid growth of the great
manufacturing towns.  The country, on the other hand, has the advantage
that wages are usually lower than in town, and so town and country are in
constant competition; and, if the advantage is on the side of the town to-
day, wages sink so low in the country to-morrow, that new investments are
most profitably made there.  But the centralising tendency of manufacture
continues in full force, and every new factory built in the country bears
in it the germ of a manufacturing town.  If it were possible for this mad
rush of manufacture to go on at this rate for another century, every
manufacturing district of England would be one great manufacturing town,
and Manchester and Liverpool would meet at Warrington or Newton; for in
commerce, too, this centralisation of the population works in precisely
the same way, and hence it is that one or two great harbours, such as
Hull and Liverpool, Bristol, and London, monopolise almost the whole
maritime commerce of Great Britain.

Since commerce and manufacture attain their most complete development in
these great towns, their influence upon the proletariat is also most
clearly observable here.  Here the centralisation of property has reached
the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are
most completely obliterated; here it has gone so far that the name Merry
Old England conveys no meaning, for Old England itself is unknown to
memory and to the tales of our grandfathers.  Hence, too, there exist
here only a rich and a poor class, for the lower middle-class vanishes
more completely with every passing day.  Thus the class formerly most
stable has become the most restless one.  It consists to-day of a few
remnants of a past time, and a number of people eager to make fortunes,
industrial Micawbers and speculators of whom one may amass a fortune,
while ninety-nine become insolvent, and more than half of the ninety-nine
live by perpetually repeated failure.

But in these towns the proletarians are the infinite majority, and how
they fare, what influence the great town exercises upon them, we have now
to investigate.




THE GREAT TOWNS.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   "But let all men remember this--that within the most courtly precincts
   of the richest city of God's earth, there may be found, night after
   night, winter after winter, women--young in years--old in sin and
   suffering--outcasts from society--ROTTING FROM FAMINE, FILTH, AND
   DISEASE.  Let them remember this, and learn not to theorise but to
   act.  God knows, there is much room for action nowadays." {32}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in another place:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I
am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from
black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and
uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness,
ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this
single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand
inhabitants.  And such a district exists in the heart of the second city
of England, the first manufacturing city of the world.  If any one wishes
to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air--and
_such_ air!--he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and
yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither.  True, this is the _Old_
Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one
mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but
what does that prove?  Everything which here arouses horror and
indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the _industrial epoch_.  The
couple of hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long
since abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone
has crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter; the
industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between these old houses
to win a covering for the masses whom it has conjured hither from the
agricultural districts and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone
enables the owners of these cattle-sheds to rent them for high prices to
human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the
health of thousands, in order that they _alone_, the owners, may grow
rich.  In the industrial epoch alone has it become possible that the
worker scarcely freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere
material, a mere chattel; that he must let himself be crowded into a
dwelling too bad for every other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys
the right to let go utterly to ruin.  This manufacture has achieved,
which, without these workers, this poverty, this slavery could not have
lived.  True, the original construction of this quarter was bad, little
good could have been made out of it; but, have the landowners, has the
municipality done anything to improve it when rebuilding?  On the
contrary, wherever a nook or corner was free, a house has been run up;
where a superfluous passage remained, it has been built up; the value of
land rose with the blossoming out of manufacture, and the more it rose,
the more madly was the work of building up carried on, without reference
to the health or comfort of the inhabitants, with sole reference to the
highest possible profit on the principle that _no hole is so bad but that
some poor creature must take it who can pay for nothing better_.  However,
it is the Old Town, and with this reflection the bourgeoisie is
comforted.  Let us see, therefore, how much better it is in the New Town.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Guardian_, June 19, Rochdale Sessions.--One dealer fined five, and two
farmers ten shillings.

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

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

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

_Guardian_, July 13, Manchester.--Nine dealers fined from two shillings
and sixpence to twenty shillings.

_Guardian_, July 24, Rochdale.--Four dealers fined ten to twenty
shillings.

_Guardian_, July 27, Bolton.--Twelve dealers and innkeepers condemned to
pay costs.

_Guardian_, August 3, Bolton.--Three dealers fined two shillings and
sixpence, and five shillings.

_Guardian_, August 10, Bolton.--One dealer fined five shillings.

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

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

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




COMPETITION.


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

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

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

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

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

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