The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 | Page 5

now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and
as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the
workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up
to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful,
especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time.
Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a
disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were
repealed. And, practically, that horrid 'People's Charter' actually
became the political programme of the very manufacturers who had
opposed it to the last. 'The Abolition of the Property Qualification' and
'Vote by Ballot' are now the law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867
and 1884 make a near approach to 'universal suffrage,' at least such as it
now exists in Germany; the Redistribution Bill now before Parliament
creates 'equal electoral districts'--on the whole not more unequal than
those of Germany; 'payment of members,' and shorter, if not actually
'annual Parliaments,' are visibly looming in the distance--and yet there
are people who say that Chartism is dead.
"The Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its predecessors, has
had strange bedfellows and successors. The very people who put it
down have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary
executors. Louis Napoleon had to create an independent and united
Italy, Bismarck had to revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian
independence, and the English manufacturers had to enact the People's
Charter.

"For England, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing
capitalists were at first startling. Trade revived and extended to a
degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous
astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing
compared with the immense mass of productions of the twenty years
from 1850 to 1870, with the overwhelming figures of exports and
imports, of wealth accumulated in the hands of capitalists and of human
working power concentrated in the large towns. The progress was
indeed interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in 1857 as
well as in 1866; but these revulsions were now considered as natural,
inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to, and which
always set themselves right in the end.
"And the condition of the working-class during this period? There was
temporary improvement even for the great mass. But this improvement
always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of
the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of bands by new
machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural population, now, too,
more and more superseded by machines.
"A permanent improvement can be recognised for two 'protected'
sections only of the working-class. Firstly, the factory hands. The
fixing by Act of Parliament of their working-day within relatively
rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed
them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration.
They are undoubtedly better off than before 1848. The best proof is that,
out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in
their own interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production.
You can never get the masters to agree to work 'short time,' let
manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the workpeople to
strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man.
"Secondly, the great Trades' Unions. They are the organisations of
those trades in which the labour of _grown-up men_ predominates, or
is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and
children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength.
The engineers, the carpenters, and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of

them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and
bricklayers' labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction
of machinery. That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848
there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact, that for
more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them,
but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They
form an aristocracy among the working- class; they have succeeded in
enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they
accept it as final. They are the model working-men of Messrs. Leone
Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal
with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist
class in general.
"But as to the great mass of working-people, the state of misery and
insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower. The
East End of London is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and
desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical
and moral, when