neighbour, barbarous Russia leading the reactionary host. The French bourgeois Republic drove the Italian Republicans from Rome, the Hungarians helped to defeat the Croats, and England, not yet recovered from the Chartist scare or the Irish rising, was content to mutter liberal principles under her breath, and leave those whom we had promised to assist to be crushed without our aid. All this, however, is but a portion of middle-class history. The workers were beaten back to their hovels and workshops all over the civilised world. In 1848, as in 1789, the bourgeoisie had the organisation, the money, and an accurate knowledge of their own objects,

Yet those who held that in England, at least, a great social upheaval was inevitable, had some justification for their opinion. The awful famine of 1847 in Ireland had been followed by an organised revolt, which seemed more formidable than it really was, and the crisis of the same year had intensified the contrasts here at home. England with its great factories and impoverished work people, its great landlords and miserable agricultural labourers, its political freedom and social oppression, its balanced constitution and general disfranchisement, seemed the very country where such ideas as those embodied in the famous Socialist manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would find acceptance. The first point in that programme, Nationalisation of the Land, had been handed on from Thomas Spence to the most active of the Chartist leaders, the Irish in the great cities openly sympathised with their brethren on the other side of St George's Channel, and for the time were at one with English revolutionists. short, the situation looked so threatening that the upper and middle classes drew together in anticipation of grave trouble,

In

regarding every meeting of Trade Union representatives as indicative of organised revolt. Wild schemes of all sorts were discussed among the workers. Nevertheless with April 10th, 1848, all the serious agitation may be said to have come to an end, and for the leaders there was nothing left save to try to educate the working classes of their countrymen up to a higher standard of social and political intelligence. A few may still be found who are imbued with the teaching of the men of '48; but the mass of Englishmen of the producing class are at present far behind their brethren on the continent of Europe and in America, in all the qualities which can eventually lead to the emancipation of their fellows. A new generation, however, is now rising up, and new economical forces are at work which will probably renew in more formidable shape the agitations of the first half of the present century before its close.

CHAPTER VII.

THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY.

By the introduction of the great machine industry, where steam or water power replaced the motive power of human beings or animals, capital necessarily became more completely master of the situation than ever. From the end of the eighteenth century until the present time the economical history of England has been little more than the record of its conquests, and the annals of the increase of its domination, together with the growth of resistance by the workers. Middle-class economists define capital as simply the accumulation of the results of past labour devoted to assist present production. This is of course true, in a certain sense. Where capital, in the form of accumulated labour, belongs to the family or household, it is used for the benefit of all members of that family or household. So with the wider circle of a village community or tribe, where the accumulation of past labour is turned to the advantage of all who belong to the village, tribe, or collection of tribes, whose members live in collective communities, and all gain by the common industry.

But capital, in our modern sense, is something quite different from the results of past labour accumulated to serve the purposes of all. It constitutes an epoch in social production when the accumulated labour and the means of production, including the land, are in the hands of

one class, and are used, not for the advantage of all, but to pile up wealth for the few. The workers, where this system is in full development, are obliged to sell their labour-force for mere subsistence-wages, and the object of all production is to make a profit for the classes who own the capital. Dead labour and living labour are, so to say, placed in direct, and, for the living labour, ruinous antagonism. The labourers are not employed until it is quite clear to the capitalist that, on the average, the wage-earners will return the full value of the wages which he pays them out of the commodities they produce, and a surplus value, that is to say a good deal more than the value of their wages into the bargain for the benefit of the non-producers, who own the accumulated labour or capital.

In a society such as ours, where this system has been going on for generations, it is natural that men should think that there is really something in the very nature of labour itself which should produce a profit-that the labourers ought, of necessity, to give a profit to the class which is so good as to employ them and organise their labour for them. Or it has been urged that, for example, there is something in the "natural" increase of sheep or cattle, or the fecundity of seed-corn, a portion of which is but the due return to the capitalist who has made an advance to the agriculturist destitute of such cattle and sheep, or seedgrain, in the first instance.* In like manner, some have contended that machinery itself, being a labour-saving apparatus alike in agriculture and manufacture, producing, that is, a larger amount of wealth for a less expenditure of human labour-force, also gives large extra value in addition to the wear and tear, and to this extra value the capitalist

*See Henry George, for instance, "Progress and Poverty," p. 168.

is entitled. But here is manifestly a grave error. The value of cattle or of corn in exchange depends, on the average, simply upon the amount of social human labour needed to bring them forward for exchange. A good season means only that less labour has been required to produce a given number of beasts, or to grow a given weight of grain, and that, therefore, other things being equal, their value in exchange for other articles is less than it would be in a bad season, when the same amount of labour produced less of the same goods or food.

So in manufacture. What does a machine do in itself? It works up a useful article with less of human labour than if such a machine did not exist, and, therefore, if the same quantity of human labour is employed as before, produces a far greater amount of wealth. But the machine adds no value to the commodity beyond the wear and tear, or the amount of labour which would be needed, after having been used for a certain time, to put it in as good a condition as when work was begun. The value added to the raw material during the process of manufacture--and, strictly speaking, no material is so "raw raw" but that human labour has been expended upon it-is, therefore, no more than the quantity of human labour embodied in the commodity during such manufacture, including the necessary amount required to replace the oil, gas, coal, waste, and wear-andtear of the machine.

But the owner of a machine is of course anxious to make as much profit as he can, no matter whence the profit may be derived, and he, therefore, pushes on the work of the machine as quickly as he can. For the capitalist bas to face another danger besides the natural wearing-out of his machine, the possibility, namely, indeed the certainty,