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Volume I: Capital Volume I

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table of contents
  1. Contents
  2. Prefaces
    1. Preface to the First German Edition (Marx, 1867)
    2. Preface to the French Edition (Marx, 1872)
    3. Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873)
    4. Afterword to the French Edition (1875)
    5. Preface to the Third German Edition (1883)
    6. Preface to the English Edition (Engels, 1886)
    7. Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels, 1890)
  3. Part 1: Commodities and Money
    1. Chapter 1: Commodities
    2. Chapter 2: Exchange
    3. Chapter 3: Money, Or the Circulation of Commodities
  4. Part 2: Transformation of Money into Capital
    1. Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital
    2. Chapter 5: Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital
    3. Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power
  5. Part 3: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value
    1. Chapter 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value
    2. Chapter 8: Constant Capital and Variable Capital
    3. Chapter 9: The Rate of Surplus-Value
    4. Chapter 10: The Working day
    5. Chapter 11: Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value
  6. Part 4: Production of Relative Surplus-Value
    1. Chapter 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value
    2. Chapter 13: Co-operation
    3. Chapter 14: Division of Labour and Manufacture
    4. Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry
  7. Part 5: Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value
    1. Chapter 16: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value
    2. Chapter 17: Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value
    3. Chapter 18: Various Formula for the rate of Surplus-Value
  8. Part 6: Wages
    1. Chapter 19: The Transformation of the Value (and Respective Price) of Labour-Power into Wages
    2. Chapter 20: Time-Wages
    3. Chapter 21: Piece Wages
    4. Chapter 22: National Differences of Wages
  9. Part 7: The Accumulation of Capital
    1. Chapter 23: Simple Reproduction
    2. Chapter 24: Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital
    3. Chapter 25: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
  10. Part 8: Primitive Accumulation
    1. Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation
    2. Chapter 27: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population From the Land
    3. Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament
    4. Chapter 29: Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer
    5. Chapter 30: Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home-Market for Industrial Capital
    6. Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
    7. Chapter 32: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
    8. Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation1

5 “Labour creates capital before capital employs labour.” E. G. Wakefield, “England and America,” Lond., 1833, Vol. II, p. 110.

6 The property of the capitalist in the product of the labour of others “is a strict consequence of the law of appropriation, the fundamental principle of which was, on the contrary, the exclusive title of every labourer to the product of his own labour.” (Cherbuliez, “Richesse ou Pauvreté,” Paris, 1841, p. 58, where, however, the dialectical reversal is not properly developed.)

7 The following passage (to p. 551 “laws of capitalist appropriation.”) has been added to the English text in conformity with the 4th German edition.

8 We may well, therefore, feel astonished at the cleverness of Proudhon, who would abolish capitalistic property by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity production!

9 “Capital, viz., accumulated wealth employed with a view to profit.” (Malthus, l. c.) “Capital ... consists of wealth saved from revenue, and used with a view to profit.” (R. Jones: “An Introductory Lecture on Polit. Econ.,” Lond., 1833, p. 16.)

10 “The possessors of surplus-produce or capital.” (“The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. A Letter to Lord John Russell.” Lond., 1821.)

11 “Capital, with compound interest on every portion of capital saved, is so all engrossing that all the wealth in the world from which income is derived, has long ago become the interest on capital.” (London, Economist, 19th July, 1851.)

12 “No political economist of the present day can by saving mean mere hoarding: and beyond this contracted and insufficient proceeding, no use of the term in reference to the national wealth can well be imagined, but that which must arise from a different application of what is saved, founded upon a real distinction between the different kinds of labour maintained by it.” (Malthus, l. c., pp. 38, 39.)

13 Thus for instance, Balzac, who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice, represents the old usurer Gobseck as in his second childhood when he begins to heap up a hoard of commodities.

14 “Accumulation of stocks ... non-exchange ... over-production.” (Th. Corbet. l. c., p. 104.)

15 In this sense Necker speaks of the “objets de faste et de somptuosité,” [things of pomp and luxury] of which “le temps a grossi l’accummulation,” [accumulation has grown with time] and which “les lois de propriété ont rassemblés dans une seule classe de la société.” [the laws of property have brought into the hands of one class of society alone] (Oeuvres de M. Necker, Paris and Lausanne, 1789, t. ii., p. 291.)

16 Ricardo, l.c., p. 163, note.

17 In spite of his “Logic,” John St. Mill never detects even such faulty analysis as this when made by his predecessors, an analysis which, even from the bourgeois standpoint of the science, cries out for rectification. In every case he registers with the dogmatism of a disciple, the confusion of his master’s thoughts. So here: “The capital itself in the long run becomes entirely wages, and when replaced by the sale of produce becomes wages again.”

18 In his description of the process of reproduction, and of accumulation, Adam Smith, in many ways, not only made no advance, but even lost considerable ground, compared with his predecessors, especially by the Physiocrats. Connected with the illusion mentioned in the text, is the really wonderful dogma, left by him as an inheritance to Political Economy, the dogma, that the price of commodities is made up of wages, profit (interest) and rent, i.e., of wages and surplus-value. Starting from this basis, Storch naively confesses, “Il est impossible de résoudre le prix nécessaire dans ses éléments les plus simples.” [... it is impossible to resolve the necessary price into its simplest elements] (Storch, l. c., Petersb. Edit., 1815, t. ii., p. 141, note.) A fine science of economy this, which declares it impossible to resolve the price of a commodity into its simplest elements! This point will be further investigated in the seventh part of Book iii.

19 The reader will notice, that the word revenue is used in a double sense: first, to designate surplus-value so far as it is the fruit periodically yielded by capital; secondly, to designate the part of that fruit which is periodically consumed by the capitalist, or added to the fund that supplies his private consumption. I have retained this double meaning because it harmonises with the language of the English and French economists.

20 Taking the usurer, that old-fashioned but ever renewed specimen of the capitalist for his text, Luther shows very aptly that the love of power is an element in the desire to get rich. “The heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that a usurer is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them in such honour, that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money.... Whoever eats up, robs, and steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder (so far as in him lies) as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits the while safe on his stool, when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there were so much flesh on him, that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves.... Little thieves are put in the stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk.... Therefore is there, on this earth, no greater enemy of man (after the devil) than a gripe-money, and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men. Turks, soldiers, and tyrants are also bad men, yet must they let the people live, and Confess that they are bad, and enemies, and do, nay, must, now and then show pity to some. But a usurer and money-glutton, such a one would have the whole world perish of hunger and thirst, misery and want, so far as in him lies, so that he may have all to himself, and every one may receive from him as from a God, and be his serf for ever. To wear fine cloaks, golden chains, rings, to wipe his mouth, to be deemed and taken for a worthy, pious man .... Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all, more than any Cacus, Gerion or Antus. And yet decks himself out, and would be thought pious, so that people may not see where the oxen have gone, that he drags backwards into his den. But Hercules shall hear the cry of the oxen and of his prisoners, and shall seek Cacus even in cliffs and among rocks, and shall set the oxen loose again from the villain. For Cacus means the villain that is a pious usurer, and steals, robs, eats everything. And will not own that he has done it, and thinks no one will find him out, because the oxen, drawn backwards into his den, make it seem, from their foot-prints, that they have been let out. So the usurer would deceive the world, as though he were of use and gave the world oxen, which he, however, rends, and eats all alone... And since we break on the wheel, and behead highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on the wheel and kill.... hunt down, curse and behead all usurers.” (Martin Luther, l. c.)

21 See Goethe’s “Faust.”

22 Dr. Aikin: “Description of the Country from 30 to 40 miles round Manchester.” Lond., 1795, p. 182, sq.

23 A. Smith, l. c., bk. iii., ch. iii.

24 Even J. B. Say says: “Les épargnes des riches se font aux dépens des pauvres.” [the savings of the rich are made at the expense of the poor] “The Roman proletarian lived almost entirely at the expense of society.... It can almost be said that modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians, on what it keeps out of the remuneration of labour.” (Sismondi: “études, &c.,” t. i., p. 24.)

25 Malthus, l. c., pp. 319, 320.

26 “An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand, &c.,” p. 67.

27 l. c., p. 59.

28 (Senior, “Principes fondamentaux del’Écon. Pol.” trad. Arrivabene. Paris, 1836, p. 308.) This was rather too much for the adherents of the old classical school. “Mr. Senior has substituted for it” (the expression, labour and profit) “the expression labour and Abstinence. He who converts his revenue abstains from the enjoyment which its expenditure would afford him. It is not the capital, but the use of the capital productively, which is the cause of profits.” (John Cazenove, l. c., p. 130, Note.) John St. Mill, on the contrary, accepts on the one hand Ricardo’s theory of profit, and annexes on the other hand Senior’s “remuneration of abstinence.” He is as much at home in absurd contradictions, as he feels at sea in the Hegelian contradiction, the source of all dialectic. It has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make the simple reflexion, that every human action may be viewed, as “abstinence” from its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking, abstinence from standing still, working, abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence from working, &c. These gentlemen would do well, to ponder, once in a while, over Spinoza’s: “Determinatio est Negatio.”

29 Senior, l. c., p. 342.

30 “No one ... will sow his wheat, for instance, and allow it to remain a twelve month in the ground, or leave his wine in a cellar for years, instead of consuming these things or their equivalent at once ... unless he expects to acquire additional value, &c.” (Scrope, “Polit. Econ.,” edit. by A. Potter, New York, 1841, pp. 133-134.)

31 “La privation que s’impose le capitalisté, en prêtant [The deprivation the capitalist imposes on himself by lending ...] (this euphemism used, for the purpose of identifying, according to the approved method of vulgar economy, the labourer who is exploited, with the industrial capitalist who exploits, and to whom other capitalists lend money) ses instruments de production au travailleur, au lieu d’en consacrer la valeur à son propre usage, en la transforment en objets d’utilité ou d’agrément.” [his instruments of production to the worker, instead of devoting their value to his own consumption, by transforming them into objects of utility or pleasure] (G. de Molinari, l. c., p. 36.)

32 “La conservation d’un capital exige ... un effort constant pour résister a la tentation de le consommer.” (Courcelle-Seneuil, l. c., p. 57.)

33 “The particular classes of income which yield the most abundantly to the progress of national capital, change at different stages of their progress, and are, therefore, entirely different in nations occupying different positions in that progress.... Profits ... unimportant source of accumulation, compared with wages and rents, in the earlier stages of society.... When a considerable advance in the powers of national industry has actually taken place, profits rise into comparative importance as a source of accumulation.” (Richard Jones, “Textbook, &c.,” pp. 16, 21.)

34 l. c., p. 36, sq.

35 “Ricardo says: ‘In different stages of society the accumulation of capital or of the means of employing’ (i.e., exploiting) ‘labour is more or less rapid, and must in all cases depend on the productive powers of labour. The productive powers of labour are generally greatest where there is an abundance of fertile land.’ If, in the first sentence, the productive powers of labour mean the smallness of that aliquot part of any produce that goes to those whose manual labour produced it, the sentence is nearly identical, because the remaining aliquot part is the fund whence capital can, if the owner pleases, be accumulated. But then this does not generally happen, where there is most fertile land.” (“Observations on Certain Verbal Disputes, &c.” pp. 74, 75.)

36 J. Stuart Mill: “Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy,” Lond., 1844, p. 90.

37 “An Essay on Trade and Commerce,” Lond., 1770, P. 44. The Times of December, 1866, and January, 1867, in like manner published certain outpourings of the heart of the English mine-owner, in which the happy lot of the Belgian miners was pictured, who asked and received no more than was strictly necessary for them to live for their “masters.” The Belgian labourers have to suffer much, but to figure in The Times as model labourers! In the beginning of February, 1867, came the answer: strike of the Belgian miners at Marchienne, put down by powder and lead.

38 l. c., pp. 44, 46.

39 The Northamptonshire manufacturer commits a pious fraud, pardonable in one whose heart is so full. He nominally compares the life of the English and French manufacturing labourer, but in the words just quoted he is painting, as he himself confesses in his confused way, the French agricultural labourers.

40 l. c., pp. 70, 71. Note in the 3rd German edition: today, thanks to the competition on the world-market, established since then, we have advanced much further. “If China,” says Mr. Stapleton, M.P., to his constituents, “should become a great manufacturing country, I do not see how the manufacturing population of Europe could sustain the contest without descending to the level of their competitors.” (Times, Sept. 3, 1873, p. 8.) The wished-for goal of English capital is no longer Continental wages but Chinese.

41 Benjamin Thompson: “Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, &c.,” 3 vols., Lond, 1796-1802, vol. i., p. 294. In his “The State of the Poor, or an History of the Labouring Classes in England, &c.,” Sir F. M. Eden strongly recommends the Rumfordian beggar-soup to workhouse overseers, and reproachfully warns the English labourers that “many poor people, particularly in Scotland, live, and that very comfortably, for months together, upon oat-meal and barley-meal, mixed with only water and salt.” (l. c., vol. i, book i., ch. 2, p. 503.) The same sort of hints in the 19th century. “The most wholesome mixtures of flour having been refused (by the English agricultural labourer)... in Scotland, where education is better, this prejudice is, probably, unknown.” (Charles H. Parry, M. D., “The Question of the Necessity of the Existing Corn Laws Considered.” London, 1816, p. 69.) This same Parry, however, complains that the English labourer is now (1815) in a much worse condition than in Eden’s time (1797.)

42 From the reports of the last Parliamentary Commission on adulteration of means of subsistence, it will be seen that the adulteration even of medicines is the rule, not the exception in England. E.g., the examination of 34 specimens of opium, purchased of as many different chemists in London, showed that 31 were adulterated with poppy heads, wheat-flour, gum, clay, sand, &c. Several did not contain an atom of morphia.

43 G. B. Newnham (barrister-at-law): “A Review of the Evidence before the Committee of the two Houses of Parliament on the Corn Laws.” Lond., 1815, p. 20, note.

44 l. c., pp. 19, 20.

45 C. H. Parry, l. c., pp. 77, 69. The landlords, on their side, not only “indemnified” themselves for the Anti-Jacobin War, which they waged in the name of England, but enriched themselves enormously. Their rents doubled, trebled, quadrupled, “and in one instance, increased sixfold in eighteen years.” (I. c., pp. 100, 101.)

46 Friedrich Engels, “Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England,” p. 20.

47 Classic economy has, on account of a deficient analysis of the labour process, and of the process of creating value, never properly grasped this weighty element of reproduction, as may be seen in Ricardo; he says, e.g., whatever the change in productive power, “a million men always produce in manufactures the same value.” This is accurate, if the extension and degree of intensity of their labour are given. But it does not prevent (this Ricardo overlooks in certain conclusions he draws) a million men with different powers of productivity in their labour, turning into products very different masses of the means of production, and therefore preserving in their products very different masses of value; in consequence of which the values of the products yielded may vary considerably. Ricardo has, it may be noted in passing, tried in vain to make clear to J. B. Say, by that very example, the difference between use value (which he here calls wealth or material riches) and exchange-value. Say answers: “Quant à la difficulté qu’élève Mr. Ricardo en disant que, par des procédés mieux entendus un million de personnes peuvent produire deux fois, trois fois autant de richesses, sans produire plus de valeurs, cette difficulté n’est pas une lorsque l’on considére, ainsi qu’on le doit, la production comme un échange dans lequel on donne les services productifs de son travail, de sa terre, et de ses capitaux, pour obtenir des produits. C’est par le moyen de ces services productifs, que nous acquérons tous les produits qui sont au monde. Or... nous sommes d’autant plus riches, nos services productifs ont d’autant plus de valeur qu’ils obtiennent dans l’échange appelé production une plus grande quantité de choses utiles.” [As for the difficulty raised by Ricardo when he says that, by using better methods of production, a million people can produce two or three times as much wealth, without producing any more value, this difficulty disappears when one bears in mind, as one should, that production is like an exchange in which a man contributes the productive services of his labour, his land, and his capital, in order to obtain products. It is by means of these productive services that we acquire all the products existing in the world. Therefore ... we are richer, our productive services have the more value, the greater the quantity of useful things they bring in through the exchange which is called production] (J. B. Say, “Lettres à M. Malthus,” Paris, 1820, pp. 168, 169.) The “difficulté” — it exists for him, not for Ricardo — that Say means to clear up is this: Why does not the exchange-value of the use values increase, when their quantity increases in consequence of increased productive power of labour? Answer: the difficulty is met by calling use value, exchange-value, if you please. Exchange-value is a thing that is connected one way or another with exchange. If therefore production is called an exchange of labour and means of production against the product, it is clear as day that you obtain more exchange-value in proportion as the production yields more use value. In other words, the more use values, e.g., stockings, a working day yields to the stocking-manufacturer, the richer is he in stockings. Suddenly, however, Say recollects that “with a greater quantity” of stockings their “price” (which of course has nothing to do with their exchange-value!) falls “parce que la concurrence les (les producteurs) oblige à donner les produits pour ce qu’ils leur coûtent... [because competition obliges them (the producers) to sell their products for what they cost to make] But whence does the profit come, if the capitalist sells the commodities at cost-price? Never mind! Say declares that, in consequence of increased productivity, every one now receives in return for a given equivalent two pairs of stockings instead of one as before. The result he arrives at, is precisely that proposition of Ricardo that he aimed at disproving. After this mighty effort of thought, he triumphantly apostrophises Malthus in the words: “Telle est, monsieur, la doctrine bien liée, sans laquelle il est impossible, je le déclare, d’expliquer les plus grandes difficultés de l’économie politique, et notamment, comment il se peut qu’une nation soit plus riche lorsque ses produits diminuent de valeur, quoique la richesse soit de la valeur.” [This, Sir, is the well-founded doctrine without which it is impossible, I say, to explain the greatest difficulties in political economy, and, in particular, to explain why it is that a nation can be richer when its products fall in value, even though wealth is value] (l. c., p. 170.) An English economist remarks upon the conjuring tricks of the same nature that appear in Say’s “Lettres”: “Those affected ways of talking make up in general that which M. Say is pleased to call his doctrine and which he earnestly urges Malthus to teach at Hertford, as it is already taught ‘dans plusieurs parties de l’Europe.’ He says, ‘Si vous trouvez une physionomie de paradoxe à toutes ces propositions, voyez les choses qu’elles expriment, et j’ose croire qu’elles vous paraîtront fort simples et fort raisonnables.’ [in numerous parts of Europe ... If all those propositions appear paradoxical to you, look at the things they express, and I venture to believe that they will then appear very simple and very rational] Doubtless, and in consequence of the same process, they will appear everything else, except original.” (“An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand, &c.,” pp. 116, 110.)

48 MacCulloch took out a patent for “wages of past labour,” long before Senior did for “wages of abstinence.”

49 Compare among others, Jeremy Bentham: “Théorie des Peines et des Récompenses,” traduct. d’Et. Dumont, 3ème édit. Paris, 1826, t. II, L. IV., ch. II.

50 Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is “useful,” “because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law.” Artistic criticism is “harmful,” because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, “nuila dies sine line!,” piled up mountains of books. Had I the courage of my friend, Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity.

51 “Political economists are too apt to consider a certain quantity of capital and a certain number of labourers as productive instruments of uniform power, or operating with a certain uniform intensity.... Those... who maintain ... that commodities are the sole agents of production ... prove that production could never be enlarged, for it requires as an indispensable condition to such an enlargement that food, raw materials, and tools should be previously augmented; which is in fact maintaining that no increase of production can take place without a previous increase, or, in other words, that an increase is impossible.” (S. Bailey: “Money and its Vicissitudes,” pp. 58 and 70.) Bailey criticises the dogma mainly from the point of view of the process of circulation.

52 John Stuart Mill, in his “Principles of Political Economy,” says: “The really exhausting and the really repulsive labours instead of being better paid than others, are almost invariably paid the worst of all.... The more revolting the occupation, the more certain it is to receive the minimum of remuneration.... The hardships and the earnings, instead of being directly proportional, as in any just arrangements of society they would be, are generally in an inverse ratio to one another.” To avoid misunderstanding, let me say that although men like John Stuart Mill are to blame for the contradiction between their traditional economic dogmas and their modern tendencies, it would be very wrong to class them with the herd of vulgar economic apologists.

53 H. Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. “The Economic position of the British labourer.” London, 1865, p. 120.

54 I must here remind the reader that the categories, “variable and constant capital,” were first used by me. Political Economy since the time of Adam Smith has confusedly mixed up the essential distinctions involved in these categories, with the mere formal differences, arising out of the process of circulation, of fixed and circulating capital. For further details on this point, see Book II., Part II.

55 Fawcett, l. c., pp. 122, 123.

56 It might be said that not only capital, but also labourers, in the shape of emigrants, are annually exported from England. In the text, however, there is no question of the peculium of the emigrants, who are in great part not labourers. The sons of farmers make up a great part of them. The additional capital annually transported abroad to be put out at interest is in much greater proportion to the annual accumulation than the yearly emigration is to the yearly increase of population.

1 Karl Marx, l. c., “A égalité d’oppression des masses, plus un pays a de prolétaires et plus il est riche.” (Colins, “L’Economie Politique. Source des Révolutions et des Utopies, prétendues Socialistes.” Paris, 1857, t. III., p. 331.) Our “prolétarian” is economically none other than the wage labourer, who produces and increases capital, and is thrown out on the streets, as soon as he is superfluous for the needs of aggrandisement of “Monsieur capital,” as Pecqueur calls this person. “The sickly proletarian of the primitive forest,” is a pretty Roscherian fancy. The primitive forester is owner of the primitive forest, and uses the primitive forest as his property with the freedom of an orang-outang. He is not, therefore, a proletarian. This would only be the case, if the primitive forest exploited him, instead of being exploited by him. As far as his health is concerned, such a man would well bear comparison, not only with the modern proletarian, but also with the syphilitic and scrofulous upper classes. But, no doubt, Herr Wilhelm Roscher, by “primitive forest” means his native heath of Lüneburg.

2 John Bellers, l. c., p. 2.

3 Bernard de Mandeville: “The Fable of the Bees,” 5th edition, London, 1728. Remarks, pp. 212, 213, 328. “Temperate living and constant employment is the direct road, for the poor, to rational happiness” [by which he most probably means long working days and little means of subsistence], “and to riches and strength for the state” (viz., for the landlords, capitalists, and their political dignitaries and agents). (“An Essay on Trade and Commerce,” London, 1770, p. 54.)

4 Eden should have asked, whose creatures then are “the civil institutions"? From his standpoint of juridical illusion, he does not regard the law as a product of the material relations of production, but conversely the relations of production as products of the law. Linguet overthrew Montesquieu’s illusory “Esprit des lois” with one word: “ L’esprit des lois, c’est la propriété.” [The spirit of laws is property]

5 Eden, l. c., Vol. 1, book I., chapter 1, pp. 1, 2, and preface, p. xx.

6 If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose “Essay on Population” appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused, was due solely to party interest. The French Revolution had found passionate defenders in the United Kingdom; the “principle of population,” slowly worked out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis, proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings of Condorcet, &c., was greeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development. Malthus, hugely astonished at his success, gave himself to stuffing into his book materials superficially compiled, and adding to it new matter, not discovered but annexed by him. Note further: Although Malthus was a parson of the English State Church, he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy — one of the conditions of holding a Fellowship in Protestant Cambridge University: “Socios collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem duxerit socius collegii desinat esse.” (“Reports of Cambridge University Commission,” p. 172.) This circumstance favourably distinguishes Malthus from the other Protestant parsons, who have shuffled off the command enjoining celibacy of the priesthood and have taken, “Be fruitful and multiply,” as their special Biblical mission in such a degree that they generally contribute to the increase of population to a really unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the labourers the “principle of population.” It is characteristic that the economic fall of man, the Adam’s apple, the urgent appetite, “the checks which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid,” as Parson Townsend waggishly puts it, that this delicate question was and is monopolised by the Reverends of Protestant Theology, or rather of the Protestant Church. With the exception of the Venetian monk, Ortes, an original and clever writer, most of the population theory teachers are Protestant parsons. For instance, Bruckner, “Théorie du Système animal,” Leyde, 1767, in which the whole subject of the modern population theory is exhausted, and to which the passing quarrel between Quesnay and his pupil, the elder Mirabeau, furnished ideas on the same topic; then Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus and his pupil, the arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing of lesser reverend scribblers in this line. Originally, Political Economy was studied by philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Hume; by businessmen and statesmen, like Thomas More, Temple, Sully, De Witt, North, Law, Vanderlint, Cantillon, Franklin; and especially, and with the greatest success, by medical men like Petty, Barbon, Mandeville, Quesnay. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Rev. Mr. Tucker, a notable economist of his time, excused himself for meddling with the things of Mammon. Later on, and in truth with this very “Principle of population,” struck the hour of the Protestant parsons. Petty, who regarded the population as the basis of wealth, and was, like Adam Smith, an outspoken foe to parsons, says, as if he had a presentiment of their bungling interference, “that Religion best flourishes when the Priests are most mortified, as was before said of the Law, which best flourisheth when lawyers have least to do.” He advises the Protestant priests, therefore, if they, once for all, will not follow the Apostle Paul and “mortify” themselves by celibacy, “not to breed more Churchmen than the Benefices, as they now stand shared out, will receive, that is to say, if there be places for about twelve thousand in England and Wales, it will not be safe to breed up 24,000 ministers, for then the twelve thousand which are unprovided for, will seek ways how to get themselves a livelihood, which they cannot do more easily than by persuading the people that the twelve thousand incumbents do poison or starve their souls, and misguide them in their way to Heaven.” (Petty: “A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions,” London, 1667, p. 57.) Adam Smith’s position with the Protestant priesthood of his time is shown by the following. In “A Letter to A. Smith, L.L.D. On the Life, Death, and Philosophy of his Friend, David Hume. By one of the People called Christians,” 4th Edition, Oxford, 1784, Dr. Horne, Bishop of Norwich, reproves Adam Smith, because in a published letter to Mr. Strahan, he “embalmed his friend David” (sc. Hume); because he told the world how “Hume amused himself on his deathbed with Lucian and Whist,” and because he even had the impudence to write of Hume: “I have always considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as, perhaps, the nature of human frailty will permit.” The bishop cries out, in a passion: “Is it right in you, Sir, to hold up to our view as ‘perfectly wise and virtuous,’ the character and conduct of one, who seems to have been possessed with an incurable antipathy to all that is called Religion; and who strained every nerve to explode, suppress and extirpate the spirit of it among men, that its very name, if he could effect it, might no more be had in remembrance?” (l. c., p. 8.) “But let not the lovers of truth be discouraged. Atheism cannot be of long continuance.” (P. 17.) Adam Smith, “had the atrocious wickedness to propagate atheism through the land (viz., by his “Theory of Moral Sentiments”). Upon the whole, Doctor, your meaning is good; but I think you will not succeed this time. You would persuade us, by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits, and the proper antidote against the fear of death.... You may smile over Babylon in ruins and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his overthrow in the Red Sea.” (l. c., pp. 21, 22.) One orthodox individual, amongst Adam Smith’s college friends, writes after his death: “Smith’s well-placed affection for Hume ... hindered him from being a Christian.... When he met with honest men whom he liked ... he would believe almost anything they said. Had he been a friend of the worthy ingenious Horrox he would have believed that the moon some times disappeared in a clear sky without the interposition of a cloud.... He approached to republicanism in his political principles.” (“The Bee.” By James Anderson, 18 Vols., Vol. 3, pp. 166, 165, Edinburgh, 1791-93.) Parson Thomas Chalmers has his suspicions as to Adam Smith having invented the category of “unproductive labourers,” solely for the Protestant parsons, in spite of their blessed work in the vineyard of the Lord.

7 “The limit, however, to the employment of both the operative and the labourer is the same; namely, the possibility of the employer realising a profit on the produce of their industry. If the rate of wages is such as to reduce the master’s gains below the average profit of capital, he will cease to employ them, or he will only employ them on condition of submission to a reduction of wages.” (John Wade, l. c., p. 241.)

8 Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to the Russian edition: The MS in the first case says “little” and in the second case “much”; the correction has been introduced according to the authorised French translation.

9 Cf. Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie,” pp. 166, seq.

10 “If we now return to our first inquiry, wherein it was shown that capital itself is only the result of human labour... it seems quite incomprehensible that man can have fallen under the domination of capital, his own product; can be subordinated to it; and as in reality this is beyond dispute the case, involuntarily the question arises: How has the labourer been able to pass from being master of capital — as its creator — to being its slave?” (Von Thünen, “Der isolierte Staat” Part ii., Section ii., Rostock, 1863, pp. 5, 6.) It is Thünen’s merit to have asked this question. His answer is simply childish.

11 Adam Smith, “Enquiry into the Nature of ...”, Volume I.

12 Note in the 4th German edition. — The latest English and American “trusts” are already striving to attain this goal by attempting to unite at least all the large-scale concerns in one branch of industry into one great joint-stock company with a practical monopoly. F. E.

13 Note in the 3rd German edition. — In Marx’s copy there is here the marginal note: “Here note for working out later; if the extension is only quantitative, then for a greater and a smaller capital in the same branch of business the profits are as the magnitudes of the capitals advanced. If the quantitative extension induces qualitative change, then the rate of profit on the larger capital rises simultaneously.” F. E.

14 The census of England and Wales shows: all persons employed in agriculture (landlords, farmers, gardeners, shepherds, &c., included): 1851, 2,011,447; 1861, 1,924,110. Fall, 87,337. Worsted manufacture: 1851, 102,714 persons; 1861, 79,242. Silk weaving: 1851, 111,940; 1861, 101,678. Calico-printing: 1851, 12,098; 1861, 12,556. A small rise that, in the face of the enormous extension of this industry and implying a great fall proportionally in the number of labourers employed. Hat-making: 1851, 15,957; 1861, 13,814. Straw-hat and bonnet-making: 1851, 20,393; 1861, 18,176. Malting: 1851, 10,566; 1861, 10,677. Chandlery, 1851, 4,949; 1861, 4,686. This fall is due, besides other causes, to the increase in lighting by gas. Comb-making: 1851, 2,038; 1861, 1,478. Sawyers: 1851, 30,552; 1861, 31,647 — a small rise in consequence of the increase of sawing-machines. Nail-making: 1851, 26,940; 1861, 26,130 — fall in consequence of the competition of machinery. Tin and copper-mining: 1851, 31,360; 1861, 32,041. On the other hand: Cotton-spinning and weaving: 1851, 371,777; 1861, 456,646. Coal-mining: 1851, 183,389, 1861, 246,613, “The increase of labourers is generally greatest, since 1851, in such branches of industry in which machinery has not up to the present been employed with success.” (Census of England and Wales for 1861. Vol. III. London, 1863, p. 36.)

15 Added in the 4th German edition. — The law of progressive diminution of the relative magnitude of variable capital and its effect on the condition of the class of wage workers is conjectured rather than understood by some of the prominent economists of the classical school. The greatest service was rendered here by John Barton, although he, like all the rest, lumps together constant and fixed capital, variable and circulating capital. He says:

“The demand for labour depends on the increase of circulating, and not of fixed capital. Were it true that the proportion between these two sorts of capital is the same at all times, and in all circumstances, then, indeed, it follows that the number of labourers employed is in proportion to the wealth of the state. But such a proposition has not the semblance of probability. As arts are cultivated, and civilisation is extended, fixed capital bears a larger and larger proportion to circulating capital. The amount of fixed capital employed in the production of a piece of British muslin is at least a hundred, probably a thousand times greater than that employed in a similar piece of Indian muslin. And the proportion of circulating capital is a hundred or thousand times less ... the whole of the annual savings, added to the fixed capital, would have no effect in increasing the demand for labour.” (John Barton, “Observations on the Circumstances which Influence the Condition of the Labouring Classes of Society.” London, 1817, pp. 16, 17.) “The same cause which may increase the net revenue of the country may at the same time render the population redundant, and deteriorate the condition of the labourer.” (Ricardo, l. c., p. 469.) With increase of capital, “the demand [for labour] will be in a diminishing ratio.” (Ibid., p. 480, Note.) “The amount of capital devoted to the maintenance of labour may vary, independently of any changes in the whole amount of capital.... Great fluctuations in the amount of employment, and great suffering may become more frequent as capital itself becomes more plentiful.” (Richard Jones, “An Introductory Lecture on Pol. Econ.,” Lond. 1833, p. 13) “Demand [for labour] will rise ... not in proportion to the accumulation of the general capital. ... Every augmentation, therefore, in the national stock destined for reproduction, comes, in the progress of society, to have less and less influence upon the condition of the labourer.” (Ramsay, l. c., pp. 90, 91.)

16 H. Merivale. “Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies,” 1841, Vol. I , p. 146.

17 Malthus, “Principles of Political Economy,” pp. 215, 319, 320. In this work, Malthus finally discovers, with the help of Sismondi, the beautiful Trinity of capitalistic production: over-production, over-population, over-consumption — three very delicate monsters, indeed. Cf. F. Engels, “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie,” l. c., p, 107, et seq.

18 Harriet Martineau, “A Manchester Strike,” 1832, p. 101.

19 Even in the cotton famine of 1863 we find, in a pamphlet of the operative cotton-spinners of Blackburn, fierce denunciations of overwork, which, in consequence of the Factory Acts, of course only affected adult male labourers. “The adult operatives at this mill have been asked to work from 12 to 13 hours per day, while there are hundreds who are compelled to be idle who would willingly work partial time, in order to maintain their families and save their brethren from a premature grave through being overworked.... We,” it goes on to say, “would ask if the practice of working overtime by a number of hands, is likely to create a good feeling between masters and servants. Those who are worked overtime feel the injustice equally with those who are condemned to forced idleness. There is in the district almost sufficient work to give to all partial employment if fairly distributed. We are only asking what is right in requesting the masters generally to pursue a system of short hours, particularly until a better state of things begins to dawn upon us, rather than to work a portion of the hands overtime, while others, for want of work, are compelled to exist upon charity.” (“Reports of Insp. of Fact., Oct. 31, 1863,” p. 8.) The author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce” grasps the effect of a relative surplus population on the employed labourers with his usual unerring bourgeois instinct. “Another cause of idleness in this kingdom is the want of a sufficient number of labouring hands .... Whenever from an extraordinary demand for manufactures, labour grows scarce, the labourers feel their own consequence, and will make their masters feel it likewise — it is amazing; but so depraved are the dispositions of these people, that in such cases a set of workmen have combined to distress the employer by idling a whole day together.” (“Essay, &c.,” pp. 27, 28.) The fellows in fact were hankering after a rise in wages.

20 Economist, Jan. 21. 1860.

21 Whilst during the last six months of 1866, 80-90,000 working people in London were thrown out of work, the Factory Report for that same half year says: “It does not appear absolutely true to say that demand will always produce supply just at the moment when it is needed. It has not done so with labour, for much machinery has been idle last year for want of hands.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866,” p. 81.)

22 Opening address to the Sanitary Conference, Birmingham, January 15th, 1875, by J. Chamberlain, Mayor of the town, now (1883) President of the Board of Trade.

23 781 towns given in the census for 1861 for England and Wales “contained 10,960,998 inhabitants, while the villages and country parishes contained 9,105,226. In 1851, 580 towns were distinguished, and the population in them and in the surrounding country was nearly equal. But while in the subsequent ten years the population in the villages and the country increased half a million, the population in the 580 towns increased by a million and a half (1,554,067). The increase of the population of the country parishes is 6.5 per cent., and of the towns 17.3 per cent. The difference in the rates of increase is due to the migration from country to town. Three-fourths of the total increase of population has taken place in the towns.” (“Census. &c.,” pp. 11 and 12.)

24 “Poverty seems favourable to generation.” (A. Smith.) This is even a specially wise arrangement of God, according to the gallant and witty Abbé Galiani “Iddio af che gli uomini che esercitano mestieri di prima utilità nascono abbondantemente.” (Galiani, l. c., p. 78.) [God ordains that men who carry on trades of primary utility are born in abundance] “Misery up to the extreme point of famine and pestilence, instead of checking, tends to increase population.” (S. Laing, “National Distress,” 1844, p. 69.) After Laing has illustrated this by statistics, he continues: “If the people were all in easy circumstances, the world would soon be depopulated.”

25 “De jour en jour il devient donc plus clair que les rapports de production dans lesquels se meut la bourgeoisie n’ont pas un caractère un, un caractère simple, mais un caractère de duplicité; que dans les mêmes rapports dans lesquels se produit la richesse, la misère se produit aussi; que dans les mêmes rapports dans lesquels il y a développement des forces productives, il y a une force productive de répression; que ces rapports ne produisent la richesse bourgeoise, c’est-à-dire la richesse de la classe bourgeoise, qu’en anéantissant continuellement la richesse des membres intégrants de cette classe et en produisant un prolétariat toujours croissant.” [From day to day it thus becomes clearer that the production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a simple, uniform character, but a dual character; that in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the selfsame relations in which there is a development of productive forces, there is also a force producing repression; that there relations produce bourgeois wealth, i.e., the wealth of the bourgeois class, only by continually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class and by producing an evergrowing proletariat] (Karl Marx: “Misère de la Philosophie,” p. 116.)

26 G. Ortes: “Delia Economia Nazionale libri sei, 1777,” in Custodi, Parte Moderna, t. xxi, pp. 6, 9, 22, 25, etc. Ortes says, l. c., p. 32: “In luoco di progettar sistemi inutili per la felicità de’popoli, mi limiterò a investigare la regione della loro infelicità.” [Instead of projecting useless systems for achieving the happiness of people, I shall limit myself to investigating the reasons for their unhappiness]

27 “A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Well-wisher of Mankind. (The Rev. J. Townsend) 1786,” republished Lond. 1817, pp. 15, 39, 41. This “delicate” parson, from whose work just quoted, as well as from his “Journey through Spain,” Malthus often copies whole pages, himself borrowed the greater part of his doctrine from Sir James Steuart, whom he however alters in the borrowing. E.g., when Steuart says: “Here, in slavery, was a forcible method of making mankind diligent,” [for the non-workers] ... “Men were then forced to work” [i.e.,to work gratis for others], “because they were slaves of others; men are now forced to work” [i.e., to work gratis for non-workers] “because they are the slaves of their necessities,” he does not thence conclude, like the fat holder of benefices, that the wage labourer must always go fasting. He wishes, on the contrary, to increase their wants and to make the increasing number of their wants a stimulus to their labour for the “more delicate.”

28 Storch, l. c., t. iii, p. 223.

29 Sismondi, l. c., pp. 79, 80, 85.

30 Destutt de Tracy, l. c., p. 231: “Les nations pauvres, c’est là où le peuple est à son aise; et les nations riches, c’est là où il est ordinairement pauvre.” [The poor nations are those where the people are comfortably off; and the rich nations, those where the people are generally poor]

31 “Tenth Report of the Commissioners of H. M. Inland Revenue.” Lond., 1866. p. 38.

32 lbidem.

33 These figures are sufficient for comparison, but, taken absolutely, are false, since, perhaps, £100,000,000 of income are annually not declared. The complaints of the Inland Revenue Commissioners of systematic fraud, especially on the part of the commercial and industrial classes, are repeated in each of their reports. So e.g., “A Joint-stock company returns £6,000 as assessable profits, the surveyor raises the amount to £88,000, and upon that sum duty is ultimately paid. Another company which returns £190,000 is finally compelled to admit that the true return should be £250,000.” (Ibid., p, 42.)

34 “Census, &c.,” l. c., p. 29. John Bright’s assertion that 150 landlords own half of England, and 12 half the Scotch soil, has never been refuted.

35 “Fourth Report, &c., of Inland Revenue.” Lond., 1860, p. 17.

36 hese are the net incomes after certain legally authorised abatements.

37 At this moment, March, 1867, the Indian and Chinese market is again overstocked by the consignments of the British cotton manufacturers. In 1866 a reduction in wages of 5 per cent. took place amongst the cotton operatives. In 1867, as consequence of a similar operation, there was a strike of 20,000 men at Preston. [Added in the 4th German edition. — That was the prelude to the crisis which broke out immediately afterwards. — F. E.]

38 “Census, &c.,” l. c., P. 11.

39 Gladstone in the House of Commons, Feb. 13th, 1843. Times, Feb. 14th, 1843 — “It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state of this country that we see, beyond the possibility of denial, that while there is at this moment a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, an increase of the pressure of privations and distress; there is at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means of enjoyment.” (Hansard, 13th Feb.)

40 Gladstone in the House of Commons, April 16th, 1863. Morning Star, April 17th.

41 See the official accounts in the Blue book: “Miscellaneous Statistics of the United Kingdom,” Part vi., London, 1866, pp. 260-273, passim. Instead of the statistics of orphan asylums, &c., the declamations of the ministerial journals in recommending dowries for the Royal children might also serve. The greater dearness of the means of subsistence is never forgotten there.

42 Gladstone, House of Commons, 7th April, 1864. — “The Hansard version runs: ‘Again, and yet more at large — what is human life, but, in the majority of cases, a struggle for existence.’ The continual crying contradictions in Gladstone’s Budget speeches of 1863 and 1864 were characterised by an English writer by the following quotation from Boileau:

“Voilà l’homme en effet. Il va du blanc au noir,
Il condamne au matin ses sentiments du soir.
Importun à tout autre, à soi-même incommode,
Il change à tout moment d’esprit comme de mode.”
[Such is the man: he goes from black to white. / He condemns in the morning what he felt in the evening. / A nuisance to everyone else, and an inconvenience to himself, / he changes his way of thinking as easily as he changes his way of dressing]
(“The Theory of Exchanges, &c.,” London, 1864, p. 135.)

43 H. Fawcett, l. c., pp. 67-82. As to the increasing dependence of labourers on the retail shopkeepers, this is the consequence of the frequent oscillations and interruptions of their employment.

44 Wales here is always included in England.

45 A peculiar light is thrown on the advance made since the time of Adam Smith, by the fact that by him the word “workhouse” is still occasionally used as synonymous with “manufactory”; e.g., the opening of his chapter on the division of labour; “those employed in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse.”

46 “Public Health. Sixth Report, 1864,” p. 13.

47 l. c., p. 17.

48 l. c., p. 13.

49 l. c., Appendix, p. 232.

50 l. c., pp. 232, 233.

51 l. c., pp. 14, 15.

52 “In no particular have the rights of persons been so avowedly and shamefully sacrificed to the rights of property as in regard to the lodging of the labouring class. Every large town may be looked upon as a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where thousands pass yearly through the fire as offerings to the moloch of avarice,” S. Laing, l. c., p. 150.

53 “Public Health, Eighth Report. 1866.” p. 14, note.

54 . c., p. 89. With reference to the children in these colonies, Dr. Hunter says: “People are not now alive to tell us how children were brought up before this age of dense agglomerations of poor began, and he would be a rash prophet who should tell us what future behaviour is to be expected from the present growth of children, who, under circumstances probably never before paralleled in this country, are now completing their education for future practice, as ’dangerous classes’ by sitting up half the night with persons of every age, half naked, drunken, obscene, and quarrelsome.” (l. c., p. 56.)

55 l. c., p. 62.

56 “Report of the Officer of Health of St. Martins-in-the-Fields, 1865.”

57 “Public Health, Eighth Report, 1866,” p. 91.

58 l. c., p. 88.

59 l. c., p. 88.

60 l. c., p. 89.

61 l. c., p. 55 and 56.

62 l. c., p. 149.

63 l. c., p. 50.

64

COLLECTING AGENTS LIST (BRADFORD)

Houses

Vulcan Street, No. 122

1 Room

16 persons

Lumiev Street, No. 13

1 Room

11 persons

Bower Street, No. 41

1 Room

11 persons

Portland Street. No. 112

1 Room

10 persons

Hardy Street, No. 17

1 Room

10 persons

North Street, No. 18

1 Room

16 persons

North Street, No. 17

1 Room

13 persons

Wymer Street, No. 19

1 Room

8 adults

Jowett Street, No. 56

1 Room

12 persons

George Street, No. 150

1 Room

3 families

Rifle Court Marygate, No. 11

1 Room

11 persons

Marshall Street, No. 28

1 Room

10 persons

Marshall Street, No. 49

1 Room

3 families

George Street, No. 128

1 Room

18 persons

George Street, No. 130

1 Room

16 persons

Edward Street, No. 4

1 Room

17 persons

George Street, No. 49

1 Room

2 families

York Street, No. 34

1 Room

2 families

Salt Pie Street (bottom)

1 Room

26 persons

Cellars

Regent Square

1 cellar

8 persons

Acre Street

1 cellar

7 persons

33 Roberts Court

1 cellar

7 persons

Back Pratt Street used as a brazier’s shop

1 cellar

7 persons

27 Ebenezer Street

1 cellar

6 persons

l.c. p. 111 (no male over 18)

65 l. c., p. 114.

66 l. c., p. 50.

67 “Public Health. Seventh Report. 1865,” p. 18.

68 l. c., p. 165.

69 l. c., p. 18, Note. — The Relieving Officer of the Chapel-en-le-Frith Union reported to the Registar-General as follows: — “At Doveholes, a number of small excavations have been made into a large hillock of lime ashes (the refuse of lime-kilns), and which are used as dwellings, and occupied by labourers and others employed in the construction of a railway now in course of construction through that neighbourhood. The excavations are small and damp, and have no drains or privies about them, and not the slightest means of ventilation except up a hole pulled through the top, and used for a chimney. In consequence of this defect, small-pox has been raging for some time, and some deaths [amongst the troglodytes] have been caused by it.” (l. c., note 2.)

70 The details given at the end of Part IV. refer especially to the labourers in coal mines. On the still worse condition in metal mines, see the very conscientious Report of the Royal Commission of 1864.

71 l. c., pp. 180, 182.

72 l. c., pp. 515, 517.

73 l. c., p. 16.

74 “Wholesale starvation of the London Poor.... Within the last few days the walls of London have been placarded with large posters, bearing the following remarkable announcement: — ‘Fat oxen! Starving men! The fat oxen from their palace of glass have gone to feed the rich in their luxurious abode, while the starving men are left to rot and die in their wretched dens.’ The placards bearing these ominous words are put up at certain intervals. No sooner has one set been defaced or covered over, than a fresh set is placarded in the former, or some equally public place.... This ... reminds one of the secret revolutionary associations which prepared the French people for the events of 1789.... At this moment, while English workmen with their wives and children are dying of cold and hunger, there are millions of English gold — the produce of English labour — being invested in Russian, Spanish, Italian, and other foreign enterprises.” —Reynolds’ Newspaper, January 20th, 1867.

75 James E. Thorold Rogers. (Prof. of Polit. Econ. in the University of Oxford.) “A History of Agriculture and Prices in England.” Oxford, 1866, v. 1, p. 690. This work, the fruit of patient and diligent labour, contains in the two volumes that have so far appeared, only the period from 1259 to 1400. The second volume contains simply statistics. It is the first authentic “History of Prices” of the time that we possess.

76 “Reasons for the Late Increase of the Poor-Rates: or a comparative view of the prices of labour and provisions.” Lond., 1777, pp. 5, 11.

77 Dr. Richard Price: “Observations on Reversionary Payments,” 6th Ed. By W. Morgan, Lond., 1803, v. II., pp. 158, 159. Price remarks on p. 159: “The nominal price of day-labour is at present no more than about four times, or, at most, five times higher than it was in the year 1514. But the price of corn is seven times, and of flesh-meat and raiment about fifteen times higher. So far, therefore, has the price of labour been even from advancing in proportion to the increase in the expenses of living, that it does not appear that it bears now half the proportion to those expenses that it did bear.”

78 Barton, l. c., p. 26. For the end of the 18th century cf. Eden, l. c.

79 Parry, l. c., p. 86.

80 ibid., p. 213.

81 S. Laing, l. c., p. 62.

82 “England and America.” Lond., 1833, Vol. 1, p. 47.

83 London Economist, May 29th, 1845, p. 290.

84 The landed aristocracy advanced themselves to this end, of course per Parliament, funds from the State Treasury, at a very low rate of interest, which the farmers have to make good at a much higher rate.

85 The decrease of the middle-class farmers can be seen especially in the census category: “Farmer’s son, grandson, brother, nephew, daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece"; in a word, the members of his own family, employed by the farmer. This category numbered, in 1851, 216,851 persons; in 1861, only 176,151. From 1851 to 1871, the farms under 20 acres fell by more than 900 in number; those between 50 and 75 acres fell from 8,253 to 6,370; the same thing occurred with all other farms under 100 acres. On the other hand, during the same twenty years, the number of large farms increased; those of 300-500 acres rose from 7,771 to 8,410, those of more than 500 acres from 2,755 to 3,914, those of more than 1,000 acres from 492 to 582.

86 The number of shepherds increased from 12,517 to 25,559.

87 Census, l. c., p. 36.

88 Rogers, l. c., p. 693, p. 10. Mr. Rogers belongs to the Liberal School, is a personal friend of Cobden and Bright, and therefore no laudator temporis acti.

89 “Public Health. Seventh Report,” 1865, p. 242. It is therefore nothing unusual either for the landlord to raise a labourer’s rent as soon as he hears that he is earning a little more, or for the farmer to lower the wage of the labourer, “because his wife has found a trade,” l. c.

90 l. c., p. 135.

91 l. c., p. 134.

92 “Report of the Commissioners ... relating to Transportation and Penal Servitude,” Lond., 1863, pp. 42, 50.

93 l. c., p. 77. “Memorandum by the Lord Chief Justice.”

94 l. c., Vol. II, Minutes of Evidence.

95 l. c., Vol. 1. Appendix, p. 280.

96 l. c., pp. 274, 275.

97 “Public Health, Sixth Report,” 1864, pp. 238, 249, 261, 262.

98 l. c., p. 262.

99 l. c., p. 17. The English agricultural labourer receives only 1/4 as much milk, and ½ as much bread as the Irish. Arthur Young in his “Tour in Ireland,” at the beginning of this century, already noticed the better nourishment of the latter. The reason is simply this, that the poor Irish farmer is incomparably more humane than the rich English. As regards Wales, that which is said in the text holds only for the southwest. All the doctors there agree that the increase of the death-rate through tuberculosis, scrofula, etc., increases in intensity with the deterioration of the physical condition of the population, and all ascribe this deterioration to poverty. “His (the farm labourer’s) keep is reckoned at about five pence a day, but in many districts it was said to be of much less cost to the farmer” [himself very poor].... “A morsel of the salt meat or bacon, ... salted and dried to the texture of mahogany, and hardly worth the difficult process of assimilation ... is used to flavour a large quantity of broth or gruel, of meal and leeks, and day after day this is the labourer’s dinner.” The advance of industry resulted for him, in this harsh and damp climate, in “the abandonment of the solid homespun clothing in favour of the cheap and so-called cotton goods,” and of stronger drinks for so-called tea. “The agriculturist, after several hours’ exposure to wind and rain, pins his cottage to sit by a fire of peat or of balls of clay and small coal kneaded together, from which volumes of carbonic and sulphurous acids are poured forth. His walls are of mud and stones, his floor the bare earth which was there before the hut was built, his roof a mass of loose and sodden thatch. Every crevice is topped to maintain warmth, and in an atmosphere of diabolic odour, with a mud floor, with his only clothes drying on his back, he often sups and sleeps with his wife and children. Obstetricians who have passed parts of the night in such cabins have described how they found their feet sinking in the mud of the floor, and they were forced (easy task) to drill a hole through the wall to effect a little private respiration. It was attested by numerous witnesses in various grades of life, that to these insanitary influences, and many more, the underfed peasant was nightly exposed, and of the result, a debilitated and scrofulous people, there was no want of evidence.... The statements of the relieving officers of Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire show in a striking way the same state of things. There is besides “a plague more horrible still, the great number of idiots.” Now a word on the climatic conditions. “A strong south-west wind blows over the whole country for 8 or 9 months in the year, bringing with it torrents of rain, which discharge principally upon the western slopes of the hills. Trees are rare, except in sheltered places, and where not protected, are blown out of all shape. The cottages generally crouch under some bank, or often in a ravine or quarry, and none but the smallest sheep and native cattle can live on the pastures.... The young people migrate to the eastern mining districts of Glamorgan and Monmouth. Carmarthenshire is the breeding ground of the mining population and their hospital. The population can therefore barely maintain its numbers.” Thus in Cardiganshire:

 

1851

1861

Males

45,155

44,446

Females

52,459

52,955

 

97,614

97,401

Dr. Hunter’s Report in “Public Health, Seventh Report. 1865,” pp. 498-502, passim.

100 In 1865 this law was improved to some extent. It will soon be learnt from experience that tinkering of this sort is of no use.

101 In order to understand that which follows, we must remember that “Close Villages” are those whose owners are one or two large landlords. “Open villages,” those whose soil belongs to many smaller landlords. It is in the latter that building speculators can build cottages and lodging-houses.

102 A show-village of this kind looks very nice, but is as unreal as the villages that Catherine II. saw on her journey to the Crimea. In recent times the shepherd also has often been banished from these show-villages; e.g., near Market Harboro is sheep-farm of about 500 acres, which only employs the labour of one man. To reduce the long trudges over these wide plains, the beautiful pastures of Leicester and Northampton, the shepherd used to get a cottage on the farm. Now they give him a thirteenth shilling a week for lodging, that he must find far away in an open village.

103 “The labourers’ houses (in the open villages, which, of course, are always overcrowded) are usually in rows, built with their backs against the extreme edge of the plot of land which the builder could call his, and on this account are not allowed light and air, except from the front.” (Dr. Hunter’s Report, l. c., p. 135.) Very often the beerseller or grocer of the village is at the same time the letter of its houses. In this case the agricultural labourer finds in him a second master, besides the farmer. He must be his customer as well as his tenant. “The hind with his 10s. a week, minus a rent of £4 a year ... is obliged to buy at the seller’s own terms, his modicum of tea, sugar, flour, soap, candles, and beer.” (l. c., p. 132.) These open villages form, in fact, the “penal settlements” of the English agricultural proletariat. Many of the cottages are simply lodging-houses, through which all the rabble of the neighbourhood passes. The country labourer and his family who had often, in a way truly wonderful, preserved, under the foulest conditions, a thoroughness and purity of character, go, in these, utterly to the devil. It is, of course, the fashion amongst the aristocratic shylocks to shrug their shoulders pharisaically at the building speculators, the small landlords, and the open villages. They know well enough that their “close villages” and “show-villages” are the birth-places of the open villages, and could not exist without them. “The labourers ... were it not for the small owners, would, for by far the most part, have to sleep under the trees of the farms on which they work.” (l. c., p. 135.) The system of “open” and “closed” villages obtains in all the Midland counties and throughout the East of England.

104 “The employer ... is ... directly or indirectly securing to himself the profit on a man employed at 10s. a week, and receiving from this poor hind £4 or £5 annual rent for houses not worth £20 in a really free market, but maintained at their artificial value by the power of the owner to say ‘Use my house, or go seek a hiring elsewhere without a character from me....’ Does a man wish to better himself, to go as a plate-layer on the railway, or to begin quarry-work, the same power is ready with ‘Work for me at this low rate of wages or begone at a week’s notice; take your pig with you, and get what you can for the potatoes growing in your garden.’ Should his interest appear to be better served by it, an enhanced rent is sometimes preferred in these cases by the owner (i.e., the farmer) as the penalty for leaving his service.” (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 132.)

105 “New married couples are no edifying study for grown-up brothers and sisters: and though instances must not be recorded, sufficient data are remembered to warrant the remark, that great depression and sometimes death are the lot of the female participator in the offence of incest.” (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 137.) A member of the rural police who had for many years been a detective in the worst quarters of London, says of the girls of his village: “their boldness and shamelessness I never saw equalled during some years of police life and detective duty in the worst parts of London .... They live like pigs, great boys and girls, mothers and fathers, all sleeping in one room, in many instances.” (“Child. Empl. Com. Sixth Report, 1867,” p. 77 sq. 155.)

106 “Public Health. Seventh Report, 1865,” pp. 9, 14 passim.

107 “The heaven-born employment of the hind gives dignity even to his position. He is not a slave, but a soldier of peace, and deserves his place in married men’s quarters to be provided by the landlord, who has claimed a power of enforced labour similar to that the country demands of the soldier. He no more receives market-price for his work than does the soldier. Like the soldier he is caught young, ignorant, knowing only his own trade, and his own locality. Early marriage and the operation of the various laws of settlement affect the one as enlistment and the Mutiny Act affect the other.” (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 132.) Sometimes an exceptionally soft-hearted landlord relents as the solitude he has created. “It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one’s country,” said Lord Leicester, when complimented on the completion of Hookham. “I look around and not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the giant of Giant Castle, and have eat up all my neighbours.”

108 A similar movement is seen during the last ten years in France; in proportion as capitalist production there takes possession of agriculture, it drives the “surplus” agricultural population into the towns. Here also we find deterioration in the housing and other conditions at the source of the surplus population. On the special “prolétariat foncier,” to which this system of parcelling out the land has given rise, see, among others, the work of Colins, already quoted, and Karl Marx “Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte.” 2nd edition. Hamburg, 1869, pp. 56, &c. In 1846, the town population in France was represented by 24.42, the agricultural by 75.58; in 1861, the town by 28.86, the agricultural by 71.14 per cent. During the last 5 years, the diminution of the agricultural percentage of the population has been yet more marked. As early as 1846, Pierre Dupont in his “Ouvriers” sang:

Mal vêtus, logés dans des trous,
Sous les combles, dans les décombres,
Nous vivons avec les hiboux
Et les larrons, amis des ombres.
[Badly clothed, living in holes, under the eaves, in the ruins, with the owls and the thieves, companions of the shadows]

109 “Sixth and last Report of the Children’s Employment Commission,” published at the end of March, 1867. It deals solely with the agricultural gang-system.

110 “Child. Emp. Comm., VI. Report." Evidence 173, p. 37.

111 Some gang-masters, however, have worked themselves up to the position of farmers of 500 acres, or proprietors of whole rows of houses.

112 “Half the girls of Ludford have been ruined by going out” (in gangs). l. c., p. 6, § 32.

113 “They (gangs) have greatly increased of late years. In some places they are said to have been introduced at comparatively late dates; in others where gangs ... have been known for many years ... more and younger children are employed in them.” (l. c., p. 79, § 174).

114 “Small farmers never employ gangs.” “It is not on poor land, but on land which affords rent of from 40 to 50 shillings, that women and children are employed in the greatest numbers.” (l. c., pp. 17, 14.)

115 To one of these gentlemen the taste of his rent was so grateful that he indignantly declared to the Commission of Inquiry that the whole hubbub was only due to the name of the system. If instead of “gang” it were called “the Agricultural Juvenile Industrial Self-supporting Association,” everything would be all right.

116 “Gang work is cheaper than other work; that is why they are employed,” says a former gang-master (l. c., p. 17, § 14 )."The gang-system is decidedly the cheapest for the farmer, and decidedly the worst for the children,” says a farmer (l. c., p. 16, § 3.)

117 “Undoubtedly much of the work now done by children in gangs used to be done by men and women. More men are out of work now where children and women are employed than formerly.” (l. c., p. 43, n. 202.) On the other hand, “the labour question in some agricultural districts, particularly the arable, is becoming so serious in consequence of emigration, and the facility afforded by railways for getting to large towns that I (the “I” is the steward of a great lord) think the services of children are most indispensable,” (l. c., p. 80, n. 180.) For the “labour question” in English agricultural districts, differently from the rest of the civilised world, means the landlords’ and farmers’ question, viz., how is it possible, despite an always increasing exodus of the agricultural folk, to keep up a sufficient relative surplus population in the country, and by means of it keep the wages of the agricultural labourer at a minimum?

118 The “Public Health Report,” where in dealing with the subject of children’s mortality, the gang-system is treated in passing, remains unknown to the press, and, therefore, to the English public. On the other hand, the last report of the “Child. Empl. Comm.” afforded the press sensational copy always welcome. Whilst the Liberal press asked how the fine gentlemen and ladies, and the well-paid clergy of the State Church, with whom Lincolnshire swarms, could allow such a system to arise on their estates, under their very eyes, they who send out expressly missions to the Antipodes, “for the improvement of the morals of South Sea Islanders” — the more refined press confined itself to reflections on the coarse degradation of the agricultural population who are capable of selling their children into such slavery! Under the accursed conditions to which these “delicate” people condemn the agricultural labourer, it would not be surprising if he ate his own children. What is really wonderful is the healthy integrity of character, he has, in great part, retained. The official reports prove that the parents, even in the gang districts, loathe the gang-system. “There is much in the evidence that shows that the parents of the children would, in many instances, be glad to be aided by the requirements of a legal obligation, to resist the pressure and the temptations to which they are often subject. They are liable to be urged, at times by the parish officers, at times by employers, under threats of being themselves discharged, to be taken to work at an age when ... school attendance ... would be manifestly to their greater advantage.... All that time and strength wasted; all the suffering from extra and unprofitable fatigue produced to the labourer and to his children; every instance in which the parent may have traced the moral ruin of his child to the undermining of delicacy by the over-crowding of cottages, or to the contaminating influences of the public gang, must have been so many incentives to feelings in the minds of the labouring poor which can be well understood, and which it would be needless to particularise. They must be conscious that much bodily and mental pain has thus been inflicted upon them from causes for which they were in no way answerable; to which, had it been in their power, they would have in no way consented; and against which they were powerless to struggle.” (l. c., p. xx., § 82, and xxiii., n. 96.)

119 Population of Ireland, 1801, 5,319,867 persons; 1811, 6,084,996; 1821, 6,869,544; 1831, 7,828,347; 1841, 8,222,664.

120 The result would be found yet more unfavourable if we went further back. Thus: Sheep in 1865, 3,688,742, but in 1856, 3,694,294. Pigs in 1865, 1,299,893, but in 1858, 1,409,883

121 The data of the text are put together from the materials of the “Agricultural Statistics, Ireland, General Abstracts, Dublin,” for the years 1860, et seq., and “Agricultural Statistics, Ireland. Tables showing the estimated average produce, &c., Dublin, 1866.” These statistics are official, and laid before Parliament annually.

Note to 2nd edition. The official statistics for the year 1872 show, as compared with 1871, a decrease in area under cultivation of 134,915 acres. An increase occurred in the cultivation of green crops, turnips, mangold-wurzel, and the like; a decrease in the area under cultivation for wheat of 16,000 acres; oats, 14,000; barley and rye, 4,000; potatoes, 66,632; flax, 34,667; grass, clover, vetches, rape-seed, 30,000. The soil under cultivation for wheat shows for the last 5 years the following stages of decrease: — 1868, 285,000 acres; 1869, 280,000; 1870, 259,000; 1871, 244,000; 1872, 228,000. For 1872 we find, in round numbers, an increase of 2,600 horses, 80,000 horned cattle, 68,609 sheep, and a decrease of 236,000 pigs.

122 The total yearly income under Schedule D. is different in this table from that which appears in the preceding ones, because of certain deductions allowed by law.

123 If the product also diminishes relatively per acre, it must not be forgotten that for a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without as much as allowing its cultivators the means for making up the constituents of the soil that had been exhausted.

124 As Ireland is regarded as the promised land of the “principle of population,” Th. Sadler, before the publication of his work on population, issued his famous book, “Ireland, its Evils and their Remedies.” 2nd edition, London, 1829. Here, by comparison of the statistics of the individual provinces, and of the individual counties in each province, he proves that the misery there is not, as Malthus would have it, in proportion to the number of the population, but in inverse ratio to this.

125 Between 1851 and 1874, the total number of emigrants amounted to 2,325,922.

126 According to a table in Murphy’s “Ireland Industrial, Political and Social,” 1870, 94.6 per cent. of the holdings do not reach 100 acres, 5.4 exceed 100 acres.

127 “Reports from the Poor Law Inspectors on the Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Dublin,” 1870. See also “Agricultural labourers (Ireland). Return, etc.” 8 March, 1861, London, 1862.

128 l. c., pp. 29, 1.

129 l. c., p. 12.

130 l. c., p. 12.

131 l. c., p. 25.

132 l. c., p. 27.

133 l. c., p. 25

134 l. c., p. 1.

135 l. c., pp. 31, 32.

136 l. c., p. 25.

137 l. c., p. 30.

138 l. c., pp. 21, 13.

139 “Rept. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866,” p. 96.

140 The total area includes also peat, bogs, and waste land.

141 How the famine and its consequences have been deliberately made the most of, both by the individual landlords and by the English legislature, to forcibly carry out the agricultural revolution and to thin the population of Ireland down to the proportion satisfactory to the landlords, I shall show more fully in Vol. III. of this work, in the section on landed property. There also I return to the condition of the small farmers and the agricultural labourers. At present, only one quotation. Nassau W. Senior says, with other things, in his posthumous work, “Journals, Conversations and Essays relating to Ireland.” 2 vols. London, 1868; Vol. II., p. 282. “Well,” said Dr. G., “we have got our Poor Law and it is a great instrument for giving the victory to the landlords. Another, and a still more powerful instrument is emigration.... No friend to Ireland can wish the war to be prolonged [between the landlords and the small Celtic farmers] — still less, that it should end by the victory of the tenants. The sooner it is over — the sooner Ireland becomes a grazing country, with the comparatively thin population which a grazing country requires, the better for all classes.” The English Corn Laws of 1815 secured Ireland the monopoly of the free importation of corn into Great Britain. They favoured artificially, therefore, the cultivation of corn. With the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, this monopoly was suddenly removed. Apart from all other circumstances, this event alone was sufficient to give a great impulse to the turning of Irish arable into pasture land, to the concentration of farms, and to the eviction of small cultivators. After the fruitfulness of the Irish soil had been praised from 1815 to 1846, and proclaimed loudly as by Nature herself destined for the cultivation of wheat, English agronomists, economists, politicians, discover suddenly that it is good for nothing but to produce forage. M. Léonce de Lavergne has hastened to repeat this on the other side of the Channel. It takes a “serious” man, à la Lavergne, to be caught by such childishness.

1In Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest, the dissolution of serfdom also took place earlier than elsewhere. The serf was emancipated in that country before he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil. His emancipation at once transformed him into a free proletarian, who, moreover, found his master ready waiting for him in the towns, for the most part handed down as legacies from the Roman time. When the revolution of the world-market, about the end of the 15th century, annihilated Northern Italy’s commercial supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set in. The labourers of the towns were driven en masse into the country, and gave an impulse, never before seen, to the petite culture, carried on in the form of gardening.

1 “The petty proprietors who cultivated their own fields with their own hands, and enjoyed a modest competence.... then formed a much more important part of the nation than at present. If we may trust the best statistical writers of that age, not less than 160,000 proprietors who, with their families, must have made up more than a seventh of the whole population, derived their subsistence from little freehold estates. The average income of these small landlords... was estimated at between £60 and £70 a year. It was computed that the number of persons who tilled their own land was greater than the number of those who farmed the land of others.” Macaulay: “History of England,” 10th ed., 1854, I. pp. 333, 334. Even in the last third of the 17th century, 4/5 of the English people were agricultural. (l. c., p. 413.) I quote Macaulay, because as systematic falsifier of history he minimises as much as possible facts of this kind.

2 We must never forget that even the serf was not only the owner, if but a tribute-paying owner, of the piece of land attached to his house, but also a co-possessor of the common land. “Le paysan (in Silesia, under Frederick II.) est serf.” Nevertheless, these serfs possess common lands. “On n’a pas pu encore engager les Silésiens au partage des communes, tandis que dans la Nouvelle Marche, il n’y a guère de village où ce partage ne soit exécuté avec le plus grand succès.” [The peasant ... is a serf. ... It has not yet been possible to persuade the Silesians to partition the common lands, whereas in the Neumark there is scarcely a village where the partition has not been implemented with very great success] (Mirabeau: “De la Monarchie Prussienne.” Londres, 1788, t. ii, pp. 125, 126.)

3 Japan, with its purely feudal organisation of landed property and its developed petite culture, gives a much truer picture of the European middle ages than all our history books, dictated as these are, for the most part, by bourgeois prejudices. It is very convenient to be “liberal” at the expense of the middle ages.

4 In his “Utopia,” Thomas More says, that in England “your shepe that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so great devourers and so wylde that they eate up, and swallow downe, the very men themselfes.” “Utopia,” transl. by Robinson, ed. Arber, Lond., 1869, p. 41.

5 Bacon shows the connexion between a free, well-to-do peasantry and good infantry. “This did wonderfully concern the might and mannerhood of the kingdom to have farms as it were of a standard sufficient to maintain an able body out of penury, and did in effect amortise a great part of the lands of the kingdom unto the hold and occupation of the yeomanry or middle people, of a condition between gentlemen, and cottagers and peasants.... For it hath been held by the general opinion of men of best judgment in the wars.... that the principal strength of an army consisteth in the infantry or foot. And to make good infantry it requireth men bred, not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner. Therefore, if a state run most to noblemen and gentlemen, and that the husbandman and ploughmen be but as their workfolk and labourers, or else mere cottagers (which are but hous’d beggars), you may have a good cavalry, but never good stable bands of foot.... And this is to be seen in France, and Italy, and some other parts abroad, where in effect all is noblesse or peasantry.... insomuch that they are inforced to employ mercenary bands of Switzers and the like, for their battalions of foot; whereby also it comes to pass that those nations have much people and few soldiers.” (“The Reign of Henry VII.” Verbatim reprint from Kennet’s England. Ed. 1719. Lond., 1870, p. 308.)

6 Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 134. “The quantity of land assigned (in the old laws) would now be judged too great for labourers, and rather as likely to convert them into small farmers.” (George Roberts: “The Social History of the People of the Southern Counties of England in Past Centuries.” Lond., 1856, pp. 184-185.)

7 “The right of the poor to share in the tithe, is established by the tenour of ancient statutes.” (Tuckett, l. c., Vol. II., pg. 804-805.)

8 William Cobbett: “A History of the Protestant Reformation,” § 471.

9 The “spirit” of Protestantism may be seen from the following, among other things. In the south of England certain landed proprietors and well-to-do farmers put their heads together and propounded ten questions as to the right interpretation of the poor-law of Elizabeth. These they laid before a celebrated jurist of that time, Sergeant Snigge (later a judge under James I.) for his opinion. “Question 9 — Some of the more wealthy farmers in the parish have devised a skilful mode by which all the trouble of executing this Act (the 43rd of Elizabeth) might be avoided. They have proposed that we shall erect a prison in the parish, and then give notice to the neighbourhood, that if any persons are disposed to farm the poor of this parish, they do give in sealed proposals, on a certain day, of the lowest price at which they will take them off our hands; and that they will be authorised to refuse to any one unless he be shut up in the aforesaid prison. The proposers of this plan conceive that there will be found in the adjoining counties, persons, who, being unwilling to labour and not possessing substance or credit to take a farm or ship, so as to live without labour, may be induced to make a very advantageous offer to the parish. If any of the poor perish under the contractor’s care, the sin will lie at his door, as the parish will have done its duty by them. We are, however, apprehensive that the present Act (43rd of Elizabeth) will not warrant a prudential measure of this kind; but you are to learn that the rest of the freeholders of the county, and of the adjoining county of B, will very readily join in instructing their members to propose an Act to enable the parish to contract with a person to lock up and work the poor; and to declare that if any person shall refuse to be so locked up and worked, he shall be entitled to no relief. This, it is hoped, will prevent persons in distress from wanting relief, and be the means of keeping down parishes.” (R. Blakey: “The History of Political Literature from the Earliest Times.” Lond., 1855, Vol. II., pp. 84-85.) In Scotland, the abolition of serfdom took place some centuries later than in England. Even in 1698, Fletcher of Saltoun, declared in the Scotch parliament, “The number of beggars in Scotland is reckoned at not less than 200,000. The only remedy that I, a republican on principle, can suggest, is to restore the old state of serfdom, to make slaves of all those who are unable to provide for their own subsistence.” Eden, l. c., Book I., ch. 1, pp. 60-61, says, “The decrease of villenage seems necessarily to have been the era of the origin of the poor. Manufactures and commerce are the two parents of our national poor.” Eden, like our Scotch republican on principle, errs only in this: not the abolition of villenage, but the abolition of the property of the agricultural labourer in the soil made him a proletarian, and eventually a pauper. In France, where the expropriation was effected in another way, the ordonnance of Moulins, 1571, and the Edict of 1656, correspond to the English poor-laws.

10 Professor Rogers, although formerly Professor of Political Economy in the University of Oxford, the hotbed of Protestant orthodoxy, in his preface to the “History of Agriculture” lays stress on the fact of the pauperisation of the mass of the people by the Reformation.

11 “A Letter to Sir T. C. Bunbury, Bart., on the High Price of Provisions. By a Suffolk Gentleman.” Ipswich, 1795, p. 4. Even the fanatical advocate of the system of large farms, the author of the “Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions,” London, 1773, p. 139, says: “I most lament the loss of our yeomanry, that set of men who really kept up the independence of this nation; and sorry I am to see their lands now in the hands of monopolising lords, tenanted out to small farmers, who hold their leases on such conditions as to be little better than vassals ready to attend a summons on every mischievous occasion.”

12 On the private moral character of this bourgeois hero, among other things: “The large grant of lands in Ireland to Lady Orkney, in 1695, is a public instance of the king’s affection, and the lady’s influence... Lady Orkney’s endearing offices are supposed to have been — fœda labiorum ministeria.” (In the Sloane Manuscript Collection, at the British Museum, No. 4224. The Manuscript is entitled: “The character and behaviour of King William, Sunderland, etc., as represented in Original Letters to the Duke of Shrewsbury from Somers Halifax, Oxford, Secretary Vernon, etc.” It is full of curiosa.)

13 “The illegal alienation of the Crown Estates, partly by sale and partly by gift, is a scandalous chapter in English history... a gigantic fraud on the nation.” (F. W. Newman, “Lectures on Political Economy.” London, 1851, pp. 129, 130.) [For details as to how the present large landed proprietors of England came into their possessions see “Our Old Nobility. By Noblesse Oblige.” London, 1879. — F. E.]

14 Read, e.g., E. Burke’s Pamphlet on the ducal house of Bedford, whose offshoot was Lord John Russell, the “tomtit of Liberalism.”

15 “The farmers forbid cottagers to keep any living creatures besides themselves and children, under the pretence that if they keep any beasts or poultry, they will steal from the farmers’ barns for their support; they also say, keep the cottagers poor and you will keep them industrious, &c., but the real fact I believe, is that the farmers may have the whole right of common to themselves.” (“A Political Inquiry into the Consequences of Enclosing Waste Lands.” London, 1785, p. 75.)

16 Eden, l. c., preface.

17 “Capital Farms.” Two letters on the Flour Trade and the Dearness of Corn. By a person in business. London, 1767, pp. 19, 20.

18 “Merchant Farms.” “An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions.” London, 1767, p. 11. Note.— This excellent work, that was published anonymously, is by the Rev. Nathaniel Forster.

19 Thomas Wright: “A Short Address to the Public on the Monopoly of Large Farms,” 1779, pp. 2, 3.

20 Rev. Addington: “Inquiry into the Reasons for or against Enclosing Open Fields,” London, 1772, pp. 37, 43 passim.

21 Dr. R. Price, l. c., v. ii., p. 155, Forster, Addington, Kent, Price, and James Anderson, should be read and compared with the miserable prattle of Sycophant MacCulloch in his catalogue: “The Literature of Political Economy,” London, 1845.

22 Price, l. c., p. 147.

23 Price, l. c., p. 159. We are reminded of ancient Rome. “The rich had got possession of the greater part of the undivided land. They trusted in the conditions of the time, that these possessions would not be again taken from them, and bought, therefore, some of the pieces of land lying near theirs, and belonging to the poor, with the acquiescence of their owners, and took some by force, so that they now were cultivating widely extended domains, instead of isolated fields. Then they employed slaves in agriculture and cattle-breeding, because freemen would have been taken from labour for military service. The possession of slaves brought them great gain, inasmuch as these, on account of their immunity from military service, could freely multiply and have a multitude of children. Thus the powerful men drew all wealth to themselves, and all the land swarmed with slaves. The Italians, on the other hand, were always decreasing in number, destroyed as they were by poverty, taxes, and military service. Even when times of peace came, they were doomed to complete inactivity, because the rich were in possession of the soil, and used slaves instead of freemen in the tilling of it.” (Appian: “Civil Wars,” I.7.) This passage refers to the time before the Licinian rogations. Military service, which hastened to so great an extent the ruin of the Roman plebeians, was also the chief means by which, as in a forcing-house, Charlemagne brought about the transformation of free German peasants into serfs and bondsmen.

24 “An Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions, &c.,” pp. 124, 129. To the like effect, but with an opposite tendency: “Working-men are driven from their cottages and forced into the towns to seek for employment; but then a larger surplus is obtained, and thus capital is augmented.” (“The Perils of the Nation,” 2nd ed. London., 1843, p. 14.)

25 l. c., p. 132.

26 Steuart says: “If you compare the rent of these lands” (he erroneously includes in this economic category the tribute of the taskmen to the clanchief) “with the extent, it appears very small. If you compare it with the numbers fed upon the farm, you will find that an estate in the Highlands maintains, perhaps, ten times as many people as another of the same value in a good and fertile province.” (l. c., vol. i., ch. xvi., p. 104.)

27 James Anderson: “Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National Industry, &c.,” Edinburgh, 1777.

28 In 1860 the people expropriated by force were exported to Canada under false pretences. Some fled to the mountains and neighbouring islands. They were followed by the police, came to blows with them and escaped.

29 “In the Highlands of Scotland,” says Buchanan, the commentator on Adam Smith, 1814, “the ancient state of property is daily subverted.... The landlord, without regard to the hereditary tenant (a category used in error here), now offers his land to the highest bidder, who, if he is an improver, instantly adopts a new system of cultivation. The land, formerly overspread with small tenants or labourers, was peopled in proportion to its produce, but under the new system of improved cultivation and increased rents, the largest possible produce is obtained at the least possible expense: and the useless hands being, with this view, removed, the population is reduced, not to what the land will maintain, but to what it will employ. “The dispossessed tenants either seek a subsistence in the neighbouring towns,” &c. (David Buchanan: “Observations on, &c., A. Smith’s Wealth of Nations.” Edinburgh, 1814, vol. iv., p. 144.) “The Scotch grandees dispossessed families as they would grub up coppice-wood, and they treated villages and their people as Indians harassed with wild beasts do, in their vengeance, a jungle with tigers.... Man is bartered for a fleece or a carcase of mutton, nay, held cheaper.... Why, how much worse is it than the intention of the Moguls, who, when they had broken into the northern provinces of China, proposed in council to exterminate the inhabitants, and convert the land into pasture. This proposal many Highland proprietors have effected in their own country against their own countrymen.” (George Ensor: “An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations.” Lond,. 1818, pp. 215, 216.)

30 When the present Duchess of Sutherland entertained Mrs. Beecher Stowe, authoress of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” with great magnificence in London to show her sympathy for the Negro slaves of the American republic — a sympathy that she prudently forgot, with her fellow-aristocrats, during the civil war, in which every “noble” English heart beat for the slave-owner — I gave in the New York Tribune the facts about the Sutherland slaves. (Epitomised in part by Carey in “The Slave Trade.” Philadelphia, 1853, pp. 203, 204.) My article was reprinted in a Scotch newspaper, and led to a pretty polemic between the latter and the sycophants of the Sutherlands.

31 Interesting details on this fish trade will be found in Mr. David Urquhart’s Portfolio, new series. — Nassau W. Senior, in his posthumous work, already quoted, terms “the proceedings in Sutherlandshire one of the most beneficent clearings since the memory of man.” (l. c.)

32 The deer-forests of Scotland contain not a single tree. The sheep are driven from, and then the deer driven to, the naked hills, and then it is called a deer-forest. Not even timber-planting and real forest culture.

33 Robert Somers: “Letters from the Highlands: or the Famine of 1847.” London, 1848, pp. 12-28 passim. These letters originally appeared in The Times. The English economists of course explained the famine of the Gaels in 1847, by their over-population. At all events, they “were pressing on their food-supply.” The “clearing of estates,” or as it is called in Germany, “Bauernlegen,” occurred in Germany especially after the 30 years’ war, and led to peasant-revolts as late as 1790 in Kursachsen. It obtained especially in East Germany. In most of the Prussian provinces, Frederick II. for the first time secured right of property for the peasants. After the conquest of Silesia he forced the landlords to rebuild the huts, barns, etc., and to provide the peasants with cattle and implements. He wanted soldiers for his army and tax-payers for his treasury. For the rest, the pleasant life that the peasant led under Frederick’s system of finance and hodge-podge rule of despotism, bureaucracy and feudalism, may be seen from the following quotation from his admirer, Mirabeau: “Le lin fait donc une des grandes richesses du cultivateur dans le Nord de l’Allemagne. Malheureusement pour l’espèce humaine, ce n’est qu’une ressource contre la misère et non un moyen de bien-être. Les impôts directs, les corvées, les servitudes de tout genre, écrasent le cultivateur allemand, qui paie encore des impôts indirects dans tout ce qu’il achète.... et pour comble de ruine, il n’ose pas vendre ses productions où et comme il le veut; il n’ose pas acheter ce dont il a besoin aux marchands qui pourraient le lui livrer au meilleur prix. Toutes ces causes le ruinent insensiblement, et il se trouverait hors d’état de payer les impôts directs à l’échéance sans la filerie; elle lui offre une ressource, en occupant utilement sa femme, ses enfants, ses servants, ses valets, et lui-même; mais quelle pénible vie, même aidée de ce secours. En été, il travaille comme un forçat au labourage et à la récolte; il se couche à 9 heures et se lève à deux, pour suffire aux travaux; en hiver il devrait réparer ses forces par un plus grand repos; mais il manquera de grains pour le pain et les semailles, s’il se défait des denrées qu’il faudrait vendre pour payer les impôts. Il faut donc filer pour suppléer à ce vide.... il faut y apporter la plus grande assiduité. Aussi le paysan se couche-t-il en hiver à minuit, une heure, et se lève à cinq ou six; ou bien il se couche à neuf, et se lève à deux, et cela tous les jours de la vie si ce n’est le dimanche. Ces excès de veille et de travail usent la nature humaine, et de là vient qu’hommes et femmes vieillissent beaucoup plutôt dans les campagnes que dans les villes.” [Flax represents one of the greatest sources of wealth for the peasant of North Germany. Unfortunately for the human race, this is only a resource against misery and not a means towards well-being. Direct taxes, forced labour service, obligations of all kinds crush the German peasant, especially as he still has to pay indirect taxes on everything he buys, ... and to complete his ruin he dare not sell his produce where and as he wishes; he dare not buy what he needs from the merhcants who could sell it to him at a cheaper price. He is slowly ruined by all those factors, and when the dirct taxes fall due, he would find himself incapable of paying them without his spinning-wheel; it offers him a last resort, while providing useful occupation for his wife, his children, his maids, his farm-hands, and himself; but what a painful life he leads, even with this extra resource! In summer, he works like a convict with the plough and at harvest; he goes to bed at nine o’clock and rises at two to get through all his work; in winter he ought to be recovering his strength by sleeping longer; but he would run short of corn for his bread and next year’s sowing if he got rid of the products that he needs to sell in order to pay the taxes. He therefore has to spin to fill up this gap ... and indeed he must do so most assiduously. Thus the peasant goes to bed at midnight or one o’clock in winter, and gets up at five or six; or he goes to bed at nine and gets up at two, and this he does every day of his life except Sundays. These excessively short hours of sleep and long hours of work consume a person’s strength and hence it happens that men and women age much more in the country than in the towns] (Mirabeau, l. c., t.III. pp. 212 sqq.)

Note to the second edition. In April 1866, 18 years after the publication of the work of Robert Somers quoted above, Professor Leone Levi gave a lecture before the Society of Arts on the transformation of sheep-walks into deer-forest, in which he depicts the advance in the devastation of the Scottish Highlands. He says, with other things: “Depopulation and transformation into sheep-walks were the most convenient means for getting an income without expenditure... A deer-forest in place of a sheep-walk was a common change in the Highlands. The landowners turned out the sheep as they once turned out the men from their estates, and welcomed the new tenants — the wild beasts and the feathered birds.... One can walk from the Earl of Dalhousie’s estates in Forfarshire to John O’Groats, without ever leaving forest land.... In many of these woods the fox, the wild cat, the marten, the polecat, the weasel and the Alpine hare are common; whilst the rabbit, the squirrel and the rat have lately made their way into the country. Immense tracts of land, much of which is described in the statistical account of Scotland as having a pasturage in richness and extent of very superior description, are thus shut out from all cultivation and improvement, and are solely devoted to the sport of a few persons for a very brief period of the year.” The London Economist of June 2, 1866, says, “Amongst the items of news in a Scotch paper of last week, we read... ’One of the finest sheep farms in Sutherlandshire, for which a rent of £1,200 a year was recently offered, on the expiry of the existing lease this year, is to be converted into a deer-forest.’ Here we see the modern instincts of feudalism ... operating pretty much as they did when the Norman Conqueror... destroyed 36 villages to create the New Forest.... Two millions of acres... totally laid waste, embracing within their area some of the most fertile lands of Scotland. The natural grass of Glen Tilt was among the most nutritive in the county of Perth. The deer-forest of Ben Aulder was by far the best grazing ground in the wide district of Badenoch; a part of the Black Mount forest was the best pasture for black-faced sheep in Scotland. Some idea of the ground laid waste for purely sporting purposes in Scotland may be formed from the fact that it embraced an area larger than the whole county of Perth. The resources of the forest of Ben Aulder might give some idea of the loss sustained from the forced desolations. The ground would pasture 15,000 sheep, and as it was not more than one-thirtieth part of the old forest ground in Scotland ... it might, &c., ... All that forest land is as totally unproductive.... It might thus as well have been submerged under the waters of the German Ocean.... Such extemporised wildernesses or deserts ought to be put down by the decided interference of the Legislature.”

1 The author of the “Essay on Trade, etc.,” 1770, says, “In the reign of Edward VI. indeed the English seem to have set, in good earnest, about encouraging manufactures and employing the poor. This we learn from a remarkable statute which runs thus: ‘That all vagrants shall be branded, &c.’” l. c., p. 5.

2 Thomas More says in his “Utopia": “Therfore that on covetous and unsatiable cormaraunte and very plage of his native contrey maye compasse aboute and inclose many thousand akers of grounde together within one pale or hedge, the husbandman be thrust owte of their owne, or els either by coneyne and fraude, or by violent oppression they be put besydes it, or by wrongs and iniuries thei be so weried that they be compelled to sell all: by one meanes, therfore, or by other, either by hooke or crooke they muste needes departe awaye, poore, selye, wretched soules, men, women, husbands, wiues, fatherlesse children, widowes, wofull mothers with their yonge babes, and their whole household smal in substance, and muche in numbre, as husbandrye requireth many handes. Awaye thei trudge, I say, owte of their knowen accustomed houses, fyndynge no place to reste in. All their housholde stuffe, which is very little woorthe, thoughe it might well abide the sale: yet beeynge sodainely thruste owte, they be constrayned to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they haue wandered abrode tyll that be spent, what cant they then els doe but steale, and then iustly pardy be hanged, or els go about beggyng. And yet then also they be caste in prison as vagaboundes, because they go aboute and worke not: whom no man wyl set a worke though thei neuer so willyngly profre themselues therto.” Of these poor fugitives of whom Thomas More says that they were forced to thieve, “7,200 great and petty thieves were put to death,” in the reign of Henry VIII. (Holinshed, “Description of England,” Vol. 1, p. 186.) In Elizabeth’s time, “rogues were trussed up apace, and that there was not one year commonly wherein three or four hundred were not devoured and eaten up by the gallowes.” (Strype’s “Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion and other Various Occurrences in the Church of England during Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign.” Second ed., 1725, Vol. 2.) According to this same Strype, in Somersetshire, in one year, 40 persons were executed, 35 robbers burnt in the hand, 37 whipped, and 183 discharged as “incorrigible vagabonds.” Nevertheless, he is of opinion that this large number of prisoners does not comprise even a fifth of the actual criminals, thanks to the negligence of the justices and the foolish compassion of the people; and the other counties of England were not better off in this respect than Somersetshire, while some were even worse.

3 “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters,” says A. Smith. “L’esprit des lois, c’est la propriété,” says Linguet.

4 “Sophisms of Free Trade.” By a Barrister. Lond., 1850, p. 206. He adds maliciously: “We were ready enough to interfere for the employer, can nothing now be done for the employed?”

5 From a clause of Statute 2 James I., c. 6, we see that certain clothmakers took upon themselves to dictate, in their capacity of justices of the peace, the official tariff of wages in their own shops. In Germany, especially after the Thirty Years’ War, statutes for keeping down wages were general. “The want of servants and labourers was very troublesome to the landed proprietors in the depopulated districts. All villagers were forbidden to let rooms to single men and women; all the latter were to be reported to the authorities and cast into prison if they were unwilling to become servants, even if they were employed at any other work, such as sowing seeds for the peasants at a daily wage, or even buying and selling corn. (Imperial privileges and sanctions for Silesia, I., 25.) For a whole century in the decrees of the small German potentates a bitter cry goes up again and again about the wicked and impertinent rabble that will not reconcile itself to its hard lot, will not be content with the legal wage; the individual landed proprietors are forbidden to pay more than the State had fixed by a tariff. And yet the conditions of service were at times better after war than 100 years later; the farm servants of Silesia had, in 1652, meat twice a week, whilst even in our century, districts are known where they have it only three times a year. Further, wages after the war were higher than in the following century.” (G. Freytag.)

6 Article I. of this law runs: “L’anéantissement de toute espèce de corporations du même état et profession étant l’une des bases fondamentales de la constitution française, il est défendu de les rétablir de fait sous quelque prétexte et sous quelque forme que ce soit.” Article IV. declares, that if “des citoyens attachés aux mêmes professions, arts et métiers prenaient des délibérations, faisaient entre eux des conventions tendantes à refuser de concert ou à n’accorder qu’à un prix déterminé le secours de leur industrie ou de leurs travaux, les dites délibérations et conventions... seront déclarées inconstitutionnelles, attentatoires à la liberté et à la declaration des droits de l’homme, &c.;” felony, therefore, as in the old labour-statutes. [As the abolition of any form of association between citizens of the same estate and profession is one of the foundations of the French constitution, it is forbidden to re-establish them under any pretext or in any form, whatever they might be. ... citizens belonging to the same profession, craft or trade have joint discussions and make joint decisions with the intention of refusing together to perform their trade or insisting together on providing the services of their trade or their labours only at a particular price, then the said deliberations and agreements ... shall be declared unconstitutional, derogatory to liberty and the declaration of the rights of man, etc.] (“Révolutions de Paris,” Paris, 1791, t. III, p. 523.)

7 Buchez et Roux: “Histoire Parlementaire,” t. x., p. 195.

1 Harrison in his “Description of England,” says “although peradventure foure pounds of old rent be improved to fortie, toward the end of his term, if he have not six or seven yeares rent lieng by him, fiftie or a hundred pounds, yet will the farmer thinke his gaines verie small.”

2 On the influence of the depreciation of money in the 16th century, on the different classes of society, see “A Compendium of Briefe Examination of Certayne Ordinary Complaints of Divers of our Countrymen in these our Days,” by W. S. Gentleman (London 1581). The dialogue form of this work led people for a long time to ascribe it to Shakespeare, and even in 1751, it was published under his name. Its author is William Stafford. In one place the knight reasons as follows: Knight: You, my neighbor, the husbandman, you Maister Mercer, and you Goodman Cooper, with other artificers, may save yourselves metely well. For as much as all things are dearer than they were, so much do you arise in the pryce of your wares and occupations that ye sell agayne. But we have nothing to sell whereby we might advance ye price there of, to countervaile those things that we must buy agayne.” In another place, the knight asks the doctor: “I pray you, what be those sorts that ye meane. And first, of those that ye thinke should have no losse thereby? Doctor: I mean all those that live by buying and selling, for as they buy deare, they sell thereafter. Knight: What is the next sort that ye say would win by it? Doctor: Marry, all such as have takings of fearmes in their owne manurance [cultivation] at the old rent, for where they pay after the olde rate they sell after the newe — that is, they paye for theire lande good cheape, and sell all things growing thereof deare. Knight: What sorte is that which, ye sayde should have greater losse hereby, than these men had profit? Doctor: It is all noblemen, gentlemen, and all other that live either by a stinted rent or stypend, or do not manure [cultivate] the ground, or doe occupy no buying and selling.”

3 In France, the régisseur, steward, collector of dues for the feudal lords during the earlier part of the middle ages, soon became an homme d'affaires, who by extortion, cheating, &c., swindled himself into a capitalist. These régisseurs themselves were sometimes noblemen. E.g., “C'est li compte que messire Jacques de Thoraine, chevalier chastelain sor Besançon rent és-seigneur tenant les comptes à Dijon pour monseigneur le duc et comte de Bourgoigne, des rentes appartenant à la dite chastellenie, depuis xxve jour de décembre MCCCLIX jusqu'au xxviiie jour de décembre MCCCLX.” [This is the account given by M. Jacques de Thoraisse, knight, and Lord of a manor near Besançon, to the lord who administers the accounts at Dijon for his highness the Duke and Count of Burgundy, of the rents appurtenant to the above-mentioned manor, from the 25th day of December 1359 to the 28th day of December 1360] (Alexis Monteil: “Traité de Matériaux Manuscrits etc.,” pp. 234, 235.) Already it is evident here how in all spheres of social life the lion's share falls to the middleman. In the economic domain, e.g., financiers, stock-exchange speculators, merchants, shopkeepers skim the cream; in civil matters, the lawyer fleeces his clients; in politics the representative is of more importance than the voters, the minister than the sovereign; in religion, God is pushed into the background by the “Mediator,” and the latter again is shoved back by the priests, the inevitable middlemen between the good shepherd and his sheep. In France, as in England, the great feudal territories were divided into innumerable small homesteads, but under conditions incomparably more favorable for the people. During the 14th century arose the farms or terriers. Their number grew constantly, far beyond 100,000. They paid rents varying from 1/12 to 1/5 of the product in money or in kind. These farms were fiefs, sub-fiefs, &c., according the value and extent of the domains, many of them only containing a few acres. But these farmers had rights of jurisdiction in some degree over the dwellers on the soil; there were four grades. The oppression of the agricultural population under all these petty tyrants will be understood. Monteil says that there were once in France 160,000 judges, where today, 4,000 tribunals, including justices of the peace, suffice.

             

 

1 In his “Notions de Philosophie Naturelle.” Paris, 1838.

2 A point that Sir James Steuart emphasises.

3 “Je permettrai,” says the capitalist, “que vous ayez l’honneur de me servir, à condition que vous me donnez le peu qui vous reste pour la peine que je prends de vous commander.” [I will allow you ... to have the honour of serving me, on condition that, in return for the pains I take in commanding you, you give me the little that remains to you] (J. J. Rousseau: “Discours sur l’Economie Politique.”)

4 Mirabeau, l.c., t.III, pp.20-109 passim. That Mirabeau considers the separate workshops more economical and productive than the “combined,” and sees in the latter merely artificial exotics under government cultivation, is explained by the position at that time of a great part of the continental manufactures.

5 “Twenty pounds of wool converted unobtrusively into yearly clothing of a labourer’s family by its own industry in the intervals of other works — this makes no show; but bring it to market, send it to the factory, thence to the broker, thence to the dealer, and you will have great commercial operations, and nominal capital engaged to the amount of twenty times its value.... The working-class is thus emersed to support a wretched factory population, a parastical shop-keeping class, and a fictitious commercial, monetary, and financial system.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.120.)

6 Cromwell’s time forms an exception. So long as the Republic lasted, the mass of the English people of all grades rose from the degradation into which they had sunk under the Tudors.

7 Tuckett is aware that the modern woollen industry has sprung, with the introduction of machinery, from manufacture proper and from the destruction of rural and domestic industries.

“The plough, the yoke, were ‘the invention of gods, and the occupation of heroes’; are the loom, the spindle, the distaff, of less noble parentage. You sever the distaff and the plough, the spindle and the yoke, and you get factories and poor-houses, credit and panics, two hostile nations, agriculture and commercial.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.122.)

But now comes Carey, and cries out upon England, surely not with unreason, that it is trying to turn every other country into a mere agricultural nation, whose manufacturer is to be England. He pretends that in this way Turkey has been ruined, because “the owners and occupants of land have never been permitted by England to strengthen themselves by the formation of that natural alliance between the plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow.” (“The Slave Trade,” p.125.) According to him, Urquhart himself is one of the chief agents in the ruin of Turkey, where he had made Free-trade propaganda in the English interest. The best of it is that Carey, a great Russophile by the way, wants to prevent the process of separation by that very system of protection which accelerates it.

8 Philanthropic English economists, like Mill, Rogers, Goldwin Smith, Fawcett, &c., and liberal manufacturers like John Bright & Co., ask the English landed proprietors, as God asked Cain after Abel, Where are our thousands of freeholders gone? But where do you come from, then? From the destruction of those freeholders. Why don’t you ask further, where are the independent weavers, spinners, and artisans gone?

[2] “The Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted.” Lond., 1832, pp. 98-99. Author of the anonymous work: “Th. Hodgskin.”

[3] Even as late as 1794, the small cloth-makers of Leeds sent a deputation to Parliament, with a petition for a law to forbid any merchant from becoming a manufacturer. (Dr. Aikin, l. c.)

[4] William Howitt: “Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in all their Colonies.” London, 1838, p. 9. On the treatment of the slaves there is a good compilation in Charles Comte, “Traité de la Législation.” 3me éd. Bruxelles, 1837. This subject one must study in detail, to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself and of the labourer, wherever it can, without restraint, model the world after its own image.

[5] Thomas Stamford Raffles, late Lieut-Gov. of that island: “The History of Java,” Lond., 1817.

[6] In the year 1866 more than a million Hindus died of hunger in the province of Orissa alone. Nevertheless, the attempt was made to enrich the Indian treasury by the price at which the necessaries of life were sold to the starving people.

7 William Cobbett remarks that in England all public institutions are designated “royal”; as compensation for this, however, there is the “national” debt.

8 “Si les Tartares inondaient l’Europe aujourd’hui, il faudrait bien des affaires pour leur faire entendre ce que c’est qu’un financier parmi nous.” [if the Tartars were to flood into Europe today, it would be a difficult job to make them understand what a financier is with us] Montesquieu, “Esprit des lois,” t. iv., p. 33, ed. Londres, 1769.

9 Mirabeau, l. c., t. vi., p. 101.

10 Eden, l. c., Vol. I., Book II., Ch. 1., p. 421.

11 John Fielden, l. c., pp. 5, 6. On the earlier infamies of the factory system, cf. Dr. Aikin (1795), l. c., p. 219. and Gisborne: “Enquiry into the Duties of Men,” 1795 Vol. II. When the steam-engine transplanted the factories from the country waterfalls to the middle of towns, the “abstemious” surplus-value maker found the child-material ready to his hand, without being forced to seek slaves from the workhouses. When Sir R. Peel (father of the “minister of plausibility"), brought in his bill for the protection of children, in 1815, Francis Homer, lumen of the Billion Committee and intimate friend of Ricardo, said in the House of Commons: “It is notorious, that with a bankrupt’s effects, a gang, if he might use the word, of these children had been put up to sale, and were advertised publicly as part of the property. A most atrocious instance had been brought before the Court of King’s Bench two years before, in which a number of these boys, apprenticed by a parish in London to one manufacturer, had been transferred to another, and had been found by some benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine. Another case more horrible had come to his knowledge while on a [Parliamentary] Committee ... that not many years ago, an agreement had been made between a London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer, by which it was stipulated, that with every 20 sound children one idiot should be taken.”

12 In 1790, there were in the English West Indies ten slaves for one free man, in the French fourteen for one, in the Dutch twenty-three for one. (Henry Brougham: “An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers.” Edin. 1803, vol. II., p. 74.)

13 The phrase, “labouring poor,” is found in English legislation from the moment when the class of wage labourers becomes noticeable. This term is used in opposition, on the one hand, to the “idle poor,” beggars, etc., on the. out and out vulgar bourgeois. “The laws of commerce are the laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” (E. Burke, l. c., pp. 31, 32.) No wonder that, true to the laws of God and of Nature, he always sold himself in the best market. A very good portrait of this Edmund Burke, during his liberal time, is to be found in the writings of the Rev. Mr. Tucker. Tucker was a parson and a Tory, but, for the rest, an honourable man and a competent political economist. In face of the infamous cowardice of character that reigns today, and believes most devoutly in “the laws of commerce,” it is our bounden duty again and again to brand the Burkes, who only differ from their successors in one thing — talent.

14 Marie Angier: “Du Crédit Public.” Paris, 1842.

15 “Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.” (T. J. Dunning, l. c., pp. 35, 36.)

1 “Nous sommes dans une condition tout-à-fait nouvelle de la societé... nous tendons a séparer toute espèce de propriété d’avec toute espèce de travail.” [We are in a situation which is entirely new for society ... we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour] (Sismondi: “Nouveaux Principes d’Econ. Polit.” t.II, p.434.)

2 The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.... Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes perish and disappear in the face of Modern Industry, the proletariat is its special and essential product.... The lower middle classes, the small manufacturers, the shopkeepers, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class... they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei,” London, 1848, pp. 9, 11.

1 We treat here of real Colonies, virgins soils, colonized by free immigrants. The United States are, speaking economically, still only a Colony of Europe. Besides, to this category belong such old plantations as those in which the abolition of slavery has completely altered the earlier conditions.

2 Wakefield’s few glimpses on the subject of Modern Colonisation are fully anticipated by Mirabeau Pere, the physiocrat, and even much earlier by English economists.

3 Later, it became a temporary necessity in the international competitive struggle. But, whatever its motive, the consequences remain the same.

4 “A negro is a negro. In certain circumstances he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances, it is no more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the price of sugar.... Capital is a social relation of production. It is a historical relation of production.” (Karl Marx, “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,” N. Rh. Z., No.266, April 7, 1849.)

5 E. G. Wakefield: “England and America,” vol.ii. p.33.

6 l.c., p.17.

7 l.c., vol.i, p.18.

8 l.c., pp.42, 43, 44.

9 l.c., vol.ii, p.5.

10 “Land, to be an element of colonisation, must not only be waste, but it must be public property, liable to be converted into private property.” (l.c., Vol.II, p.125.)

11 l.c., Vol.I, p.247.

12 l.c., pp.21, 22.

13 l.c., Vol.II, p.116

14 l.c., Vol.I, p.131.

15 l.c., Vol.II, p.5.

16 Merivale, l.c., Vol.II, pp.235-314 passim. Even the mild, Free Trade, vulgar economist, Molinari, says: “Dans les colonies où l’esclavage a été aboli sans que le travail forcé se trouvait remplacé par une quantité équivalente de travail libre, on a vu s’opérer la contre-partie du fait qui se réalise tous les jours sous nos yeux. On a vu les simples travailleurs exploiter à leur tour les entrepreneurs d’industrie, exiger d’eux des salaires hors de toute proportion avec la part légitime qui leur revenait dans le produit. Les planteurs, ne pouvant obtenir de leurs sucres un prix suffisant pour couvrir la hausse de salaire, ont été obligés de fournir l’excédant, d’abord sur leurs profits, ensuite sur leurs capitaux mêmes. Une foule de planteurs ont été ruinés de la sorte, d’autres ont fermé leurs ateliers pour échapper à une ruine imminente.... Sans doute, il vaut mieux voir périr des accumulations de capitaux que des générations d’hommes [how generous Mr. Molinari!]: mais ne vaudrait-il pas mieux que ni les uns ni les autres périssent? [In the colonies where slavery has been abolished without the compulsory labour being replaced with an equivalent quantity of free labour, there has occurred the opposite of what happens every day before our eyes. Simple workers have been seen to exploit in their turn the industrial entrepreneurs, demanding from them wages which bear absolutely no relation to the legitimate share in the product which they ought to receive. The planters were unable to obtain for their sugar for a sufficent price to cover the increase in wages, and were obliged to furnish the extra amount, at first out of their profits, and then out of their very capital. A considerable amount of planters have been ruined as a result, while others have closed down their businesses in order to avoid the ruin which threatened them ... It is doubtless better that these accumulations of capital should be destroyed than that generations of men should perish ... but would it not be better if both survived?] (Molinari, l.c., pp.51,52.) Mr. Molinari, Mr. Molinari! What then becomes of the ten commandments, of Moses and the prophets, of the law of supply and demand, if in Europe the “entrepreneur” can cut down the labourer’s legitimate part, and in the West Indies, the labourer can cut down the entrepreneur’s? And what, if you please, is this “legitimate part,” which on your own showing the capitalist in Europe daily neglects to pay? Over yonder, in the colonies where the labourers are so “simple” as to “exploit” the capitalist, Mr. Molinari feels a strong itching to set the law of supply and demand, that works elsewhere automatically, on the right road by means of the police.

17 Wakefield, l.c., Vol.II, p.52.

18 l.c., pp.191, 192.

19 l.c., Vol.I, p.47, 246.

20 “C’est, ajoutez-vous, grâce à l’appropriation du sol et des capitaux que l’homme, qui n’a que ses bras, trouve de l’occupation et se fait un revenu... c’est au contraire, grâce à l’appropriation individuelle du sol qu’il se trouve des hommes n’ayant que leurs bras.... Quand vous mettez un homme dans le vide, vous vous emparez de l’atmosphère. Ainsi faites-vous, quand vous vous emparez du sol.... C’est le mettre dans le vide le richesses, pour ne la laisser vivre qu’à votre volonté.” [It is, you add, a result of the appropriation of the soil and of capital that the man who has nothing but the strength of his arms finds employment and creates an income for himself ... but the opposite is true, it is thanks to the individual appropriation of the soil that there exist men who only possess the strength of their arms. ... When you put a man in a vacuum, you rob him of the air. You do the same, when you take away the soil from him ... for you are putting him in a space void of wealth, so as to leave him no way of living except according to your wishes] (Collins, l.c. t.III, pp.268-71, passim.)

21 Wakefield, l.c., Vol.II, p.192.

22 l.c., p.45.

23 As soon as Australia became her own law-giver, she passed, of course, laws favorable to the settlers, but the squandering of the land, already accomplished by the English Government, stands in the way. “The first and main object at which new Land Act of 1862 aims is to give increased facilities for the settlement of the people.” (“The Land Law of Victoria,” by the Hon. C. G. Duffy, Minister of Public Lands, Lond., 1862.)

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First published: in German in 1867, English edition first published in 1887; Source: First English edition of 1887 (4th German edition changes included as indicated) with some modernisation of spelling; Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR; Translated: Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels; Transcribed: Zodiac, Hinrich Kuhls, Allan Thurrott, Bill McDorman, Bert Schultz and Martha Gimenez (1995-1996); Proofed: by Andy Blunden and Chris Clayton (2008), Mark Harris (2010), Dave Allinson (2015).
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