The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 | Page 4

them have
proved right, and that the critical state of English trade, to be brought
on by Continental and especially American competition, which I then
foresaw--though in too short a period--has now actually come to pass.
In this respect I can, and am bound to, bring the book up to date, by
placing here an article which I published in the London Commonweal
of March 1, 1885, under the heading: "England in 1845 and in 1885." It
gives at the same time a short outline of the history of the English
working-class during these forty years, and is as follows:
"Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all
appearances by force only. The immense and rapid development of
manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the
increase of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was
violently interrupted by a general commercial crash, followed, after a
long period of chronic depression, by a few short years of prosperity,
and always ending in feverish over-production and consequent renewed
collapse. The capitalist class clamoured for Free Trade in corn, and
threatened to enforce it by sending the starving population of the towns
back to the country districts whence they came, to invade them, as John
Bright said, not as paupers begging for bread, but as an army quartered
upon the enemy. The working masses of the towns demanded their
share of political power--the People's Charter; they were supported by
the majority of the small trading class, and the only difference between
the two was whether the Charter should be carried by physical or by
moral force. Then came the commercial crash of 1847 and the Irish
famine, and with both the prospect of revolution
"The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle-class. The
Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen

frightened the small middle-class of England and disorganised the
narrower, but more matter-of-fact movement of the English
working-class. At the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert
itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally, before even it collapsed
externally on the 10th of April, 1848. The action of the working-class
was thrust into the background. The capitalist class triumphed along the
whole line.
"The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist
class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the
victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed
aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests
were more or less bound up with the landed interest,--bankers,
stock-jobbers, fund-holders, etc. Free Trade meant the re-adjustment of
the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of
England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing
capitalists--the class which now represented the nation. And they set
about this task with a will. Every obstacle to industrial production was
mercilessly removed. The tariff and the whole system of taxation were
revolutionised. Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that
end of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the
cheapening of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living of
the working-class; the reduction of the cost of raw material, and the
keeping down--if not as yet the _bringing down_--of wages. England
was to become the 'workshop of the world;' all other countries were to
become for England what Ireland already was,--markets for her
manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and
food. England the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world,
with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands
revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect!
"The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this their
great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for
traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their
more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent. Chartism was dying
out. The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of
1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free

Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working-class,
politically, into the tail of the 'great Liberal party,' the party led by the
manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated.
And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist opposition, not to
Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the one vital
national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the
middle-class can never obtain full social and political power over the
nation except by the help of the working-class. Thus a gradual change
came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once
the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to,
but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated.
Trades' Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself,
were