profit, interest-to those who buy their labour and live upon it.* Never at any previous period has capital in this form obtained complete control of any human society; yet what is really in the present shape only two hundred years old is frequently spoken of as eternal; and the competitive ideas which are the necessary growth of the society in which we live, just as the ideas of personal superiority and ecclesiastical hierarchy were the ideas of the middle ages, are applied to all the centuries, and treated as if they must necessarily be permanent.

Unfortunately the full explanation of surplus value, the exposition of how it is that, under the guise of freedom, the workers hand over the bulk of the value they produce to other classes for nothing was not fully given until within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years. Even now the overwhelming majority of employers and employed are either ignorant of the truth or cannot understand it. Had mankind seen two or three hundred years ago, or even a hundred years ago, that the growth of capital, the increased socialisation of labour, and the extension of exchange at the command of the individual, could not but mean the slavery of the producing class, some remedy might have been provided to control the development for the common good. But in a class struggle it is not reason but force that wins the day. From the date of about a hundred years ago force, economical, social, and political, became more and more at the disposal of capitalists either in one way or another. Their power extended over the whole field with a rapidity quite unexampled in the records of any other age or country ; and before any steps were taken to regulate the process in

*The capitalist system in ancient Rome so vividly depicted by Mommsen was different in kind, though similar in effects produced.

the interests of the nation at large, the class struggle which hitherto has been the necessary companion or fore-runner of all progress had begun. The endeavours of the middle class to obtain control of the political, as they practically had of the economical, and in the strict sense social sphere of action, were accompanied by hopeless efforts to keep back their extending power from below. A fight between the proletariat and the middle class has kept pace step by step with the more manifest antagonism between the capitalist or mercantile class and the landowner.

All was now ready for the introduction of machine industry in England, but by the light of the above explanations of the simpler phenomena relating to surplus value, the whole evolution will be followed more easily; and the risings of the workers against the capitalists, their apparently meaningless destruction of machinery, their furious insistance upon the right of combination, barely won as yet, their efforts for a reasonable day's work, can at least be cleared from calculated middle-class misrepresentation. Individual competition unregulated either by collective ordinance or by any thought for the general good governs alike production and exchange under the laissez-faire capitalist system of "freedom of contract." This freedom of contract is still accepted as the economical gospel by the leaders of our political parties and our principal political economists, though all can see that the tendency of the modern legislation carried out by these very statesmen and economists is in direct opposition to their own theories. Such is the irony of our modern society, the one object of the possessing classes being not to understand and prepare for the necessary evolution, but to disguise it and retard it to the fullest extent possible.

CHAPTER V.

THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT.

THE Social and industrial history of England from the year 1750 or thereabouts divides itself into two periods, though properly speaking of course it forms one continuous record. But assuming a division for the purpose of greater convenience in dealing with the facts, the first period would extend from the introduction of machinery up to the repeal of the Corn Laws and the collapse of the Chartist and Socialist movement that is from 1760 to 1848: the second would reach from 1848 to the present date. The political history of the time must necessarily be dealt with separately. Great as was the effect upon this country of the revolt of the American colonies, of the French Revolution, and the long war which followed, the change in the method of production which was going on all the while was even more important, and brought about in the long run still more serious results.

In England our revolution at the end of the last century was industrial; whilst that of France was in the main political, and that of Germany philosophical. Each no doubt has ultimately reacted upon the other, but it is possible to follow the course of the development of the great machine industry in England, the growth of the powerful capitalist class on the one hand, and of the proletariat or hand-to-mouth wageearners on the other, without reference to what went on,

either across the channel or on the other side of the Atlantic. England is the classic land of capitalist production; yet, strange to say, the record and criticism of what we have done has been written almost exclusively by foreigners, so far as the condition of the real supporters of that and of every other system of production-the labourers-is concerned. There has been some marked influence running through the whole period which has prevented our middle-class writers themselves from thoroughly examining the true condition of our people. England possesses parliamentary papers and blue books which contain most valuable facts and most accurate information on all subjects connected with the welfare of the mass of the people; but these, when they run counter to received middle-class notions, are thrown aside into the lumber room, only the manner in which the wealth produced by the workers is absorbed by the idlers being thought worthy the attention of our economists and statesmen.

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A hundred years or a little more ago, England resembled many respects the other nations of Europe. Although our commercial marine was already preponderant, the people of this country like the people of France and Germany lived for the most part in the rural districts, and much of the manufacture was carried on in the agricultural villages scattered over the face of the land. Great Britain was

The agricultural

then actually a corn-exporting country. labourers, and the skilled artisans who worked in the country, were also far better off than the similar class in France; and the poor laws liberally administered, as they then were, kept the more needy from absolute want, maint a reasonable rate of wages and recognised the right women and children born into these islands to be P with food enough to keep them in health and st

There is nothing whatever to show that the physical condition of the people had begun seriously to deteriorate at the time spoken of. On the contrary there is every reason to believe that the mass of the workers had better wages in proportion to the price of food just before the beginning of the American war than they had been in enjoyment of for some long years previously, Moreover there were still commons left which the householder could turn to account, though private enclosure bills were being passed through the landlord legislature almost as fast as they could be drafted. The reasons urged for this process of enclosure were specious, but their results have been very disastrous for the great body of country labourers.

Grave drawbacks therefore, as undoubtedly there were, to the whole system of parish settlement, which confined the workers to the region where they were born if they wished to obtain some provision for themselves or their children in sickness or old age; preposterous as seem to us the arrangements whereby the territorial magnates and their parsons were masters of all they surveyed; iniquitous as we may deem the disfranchisement of those whose labour supplied the privileged classes with their luxuries, and the violence and political corruption by which these privileged classes maintained their supremacy; nevertheless, when every possible allowance is made, we cannot but admit that in the main there was far less misery and far less physical deterioration during the middle of the eighteenth century in proportion to the population than there is to-day. Men and women were still fed almost as well as horses or mules, and the idea that starvation was a sure remedy for poverty had not yet become the accepted creed of the well-to-do.

It needs, however, an effort of the imagination to recall