mists, the scientific representatives of bourgeois production, fall out with their own theory and different schools are formed.

We have the fatalist economists, who in their theory are as indifferent to what they call the drawbacks of bourgeois production, as the bourgeois themselves are in practice indifferent to the sufferings of the In this fatalist school proletariat who help them to gain wealth.

there are classics and romancists. The classics, like Adam Smith and Ricardo, represent a bourgeoisie which, still struggling with the remnants of the feudal society, only works to clear the economical relations from feudal blots, to increase the productive forces, and to The proletariat taking give a new outlet to industry and commerce. part in this struggle, absorbed in this feverish work, has only passing, Economists like accidental sufferings, and so regards them itself. Adam Smith and Ricardo, who are the historians of this epoch, have no other mission than to show how wealth is acquired in the relations of bourgeois production, to formulate these relations into categories, into laws, to demonstrate how these laws, these categories, are superior to the laws and categories of feudal society for the production of wealth. Misery in their eyes is only the suffering which accompanies all birth in nature as in industry.

The romancists belong to our epoch, where the bourgeoisie is in direct opposition to the proletariat; where misery is produced in as great abundance as wealth. The economists then figure as fatalists, who from their high position cast a proud glance of contempt on the men machines who make wealth. They copy all the developments given by their predecessors, and the indifference which to the others was simplicity becomes for them mere coquetry.

Then comes the humanitarian school which takes to heart the bad side of the actual relations of production. This school seeks to clear its conscience by palliating, however little, the real contrasts; it sincerely regrets the distress of the proletariat, the unbridled competition of the bourgeois with one another; it advises the workmen to be sober, to work hard and to have few children: it recommends the bourgeois to devote a regulated vigour to production. The entire theory of this school is founded on interminable distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results, between idea and application, between substance and form, between essence and reality, between right and fact, between the good and the bad side.

The philanthropic school is the humanitarian school perfected. It denies the necessity of the antagonism; it wants to make all men bourgeois; it wishes to realise theory in so far as it is distinguishable from practice and contains no antagonism. Needless to say, that in theory, it is easy to make abstraction of contradictions which one meets

every moment in reality. This theory becomes then idealised reality. The philanthropists wish therefore to keep the categories which express bourgeois relations without having the antagonism which constitutes and is inseparable from them. They fancy that they seriously fight against bourgeois practices, and they are more bourgeois than the others.

Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so are the socialists and communists the theorists of the proletariat class. So long as the proletariat is not sufficiently developed to constitute itself a class, and consequently even the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has not a political character, and the productive forces have not sufficiently developed in the womb of the bourgeoisie itself, to allow the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society to be developed, these theorists are only utopians who, to provide for the needs of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and seek for a regenerating science. But as history proceeds, and with it the conflict of the proletariat is shown more plainly, they need no more look for science in their mind, they have only to take account of what is passing under their eyes, and make themselves the expression of it. So long as they search for science and only erect systems, so long as they are at the opening of the struggle, they see in misery only misery without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overturn the ancient society. From this moment science, produced by the historical movement and associating itself with it in full knowledge of its basis, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary.-Karl Marx, “Misère de la Philosophie," pp. 113-119. 1847.

CHAPTER VI.

MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE.

THE history of the external affairs of England from the accession of George III. in 1760 until the revolt of the American Colonies in 1775, was little more than the continuance of the long career of victory which had gained her the first place as a commercial and colonial power. Clive's great victory at Plassey was followed by a succession of almost equally noteworthy achievements, which put India at the mercy of this country, whilst in the West Wolfe's triumph over Montcalm practically decided that the English, not the French, should be masters of North America; though the magnificent colony of Louisiana still remained to recall to the minds of Frenchmen Law's splendid but visionary scheme of colonial Empire. That the Dutch and afterwards Hanoverian connection, led us into wasting resources on the continent of Europe, which could have been far more profitably expended at home, cannot be doubted; but the Seven Years' War was an engagement which not even Lord Chatham's genius could clear us from, and the growth of Prussian power was regarded as a counterpoise to that of our "natural enemy.'

With the revolt of the American Colonies a new era began, which threatened England with a complete overthrow. It is remarkable that separation should have been forced upon the colonists at a time when they were proudest

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of their connection with the mother country, and so soon after the conquest of Canada bad relieved them from fear of French aggression. "The English plantations being ours should be us; and the more, considering the many advantages they bring us, whilst the dividing of countries in interest may be a preface to their future troubles, Englishmen under the English Government are, and should be accounted, in the interest of England in any part of the world." So wrote John Bellers at the end of the seventeenth century. And the famous Benjamin Franklin almost echoed his words nearly a century later, when he looked forward to the day that a great English-speaking empire should extend under the British flag from the Arctic region. to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific slope. But the hopes and visions of the Quaker economist and the American philosopher, were alike to be blighted by the incredible folly of a German king and the silly perverseness of a bigoted aristocracy.* Foreign mercenaries and murderous Indian savages were vainly employed to put down the justifiable insurrection of free Englishmen, who wished nothing better than to remain in connection with their old home, so long as they were not taxed without representation, or prevented from making the best use of their adopted country. With the miserable record of that great struggle, which was opposed by the noblest names in Great Britain, we have nothing to do, save in so far as its result influenced the course of opinion at home.

Already, prior to 1775, the writings of Wilkes, Tooke,

* I am quite content to bear the reproach of Chauvinism in regard to what I say about the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples. It is necessary to begin any combination, and the combination of modern prolectarians will, I am convinced, begin with the Celto-Teutonic peoples. Their constructive instincts will help in this direction.

Junius, Paine, and others, had produced a great effect upon the English public. The king was very roughly handled in such writings; the dominant aristocracy was painted in its true colours; and the current religion was ridiculed. At this time, also, the works of the French Encyclopedists, as well as of Voltaire and Rousseau, became known on this side. of the channel, and their "subversive" doctrines made way among the people. But the success of the American revolt and the publication of the noble Declaration of Independence, had, at the moment, a still greater apparent effect on men's minds. An organised agitation was set on foot in order to obtain those elementary political rights which the Americans had so boldly declared to be the heritage of all free-born men; and the period of failure and depression in our foreign policy which followed the loss of the American colonies, helped on the general discontent, then rapidly increasing by reason of the economical pressure recorded in the last chapter.

London at this period, and for many years after, was by no means the orderly, law-abiding city which we of the present generation have come to consider it. The mob had a shrewd idea that the interests of the few did not exactly fall in with the interests of the many, and that the law, which might very well suit the aristocracy then-as it has been fashioned to suit the middle-class now-only represented the determination of those who lived upon labour to maintain their domination over the classes who lived by labour. This turbulence was apparent in the great riot of the Spitalfields weavers, in 1765, when the working classes of that part of London banded themselves together as they had done thirty years before against cheap Irish labour, which was brought into competition with them, as well as