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SUMMARY
OF THE
PRINCIPLES OF SOCIALISM
Written for the Democratic Federation,
BY
H» M, Hyndman
and
William Morris,
LONDON!
THE MODERN
13
AND 14,
PRESS,
PATERNOSTER
1884.
ROW, E.C.
��A SUMMARY
OF THE
PRINCIPLES OF SOCIALISM.
O OCIALISM, as a social and political system, depends
altogether upon the history of mankind for a record
of its growth in the past, and bases its future upon a
knowledge of that history in so far as it can be accura
tely traced up to the present time. The groundwork
of the whole theory is, that from the earliest period of
their existence human beings have been guided by the
power they possessed over the forces of nature to
supply the wants arising as individual members of any
society.
Thus Socialism rests upon political economy in its
widest sense—that is, upon the manner in which wealth
is produced and distributed by those who form part of
society at a given time. Slavery, for instance, arose
when men had reached such a point in the progress
of the race that each labourer could produce by his
work for a day, a week, a month, or a year more than
was needed to keep him in health during that period.
Then captives in war, instead of being killed, were
enslaved, and the fruits of their labour, over and above
their necesssary food, were taken by the conquering
tribe; for though slavery arose in the nomadic state the
�earliest form of co-operation and ownership was by a
tribe; and in the tribal relations common property was
the rule alike in the soil and in the produce of labour.
As this common property broke up owing to the pro
gress of the economical forms, the growth of exchange,
the superiority of individuals or families in war or in
the chase, classes or castes were gradually formed, resting
in the first instance upon a necessary division of labour,
though often existing, as in village communities, where a
modified form of common property was still the rule.
Thence,again,institutions developed through custom and
law; religion sanctifying what had previously been found
to be on the whole necessary or expedient. These
institutions, though arising from the material power of
man over nature, had in turn a great influence upon the
manner in which that power was used, and appeared
as the conservative side of human development con
flicting with the progressive or revolutionary side,
which necessarily follows upon the improvement and
adaptation of the methods of producing food and wealth.
From this essential and constant antagonism arises the
conflict between classes in every civilisation of which
we have any knowledge; and upon the struggles due
to this conflict all progress has hitherto depended.
A slight consideration will serve to show that this
is the true explanation of the growth of mankind. The
first object of every animal, man included, is to feed
itself and its offspring ; and man began in the nomadic
state by feeding upon fruits and berries. That the
growth from the early brutish habits upwards to the
taming of beasts and ordered agriculture was the
process, not of thousands but of millions of years, is
�5
now admitted by all scientific writers on the records of
primeval man. But the need for food was followed by
the need for clothing, for warmth, for shelter; and each
of these wants corresponded in turn with changing forms
of social life as they were gratified. The whole, in fact,
moved in one piece as the economical forms developed :
the nomadic life of the woods and plains ; the common
property of the tribe or clan scanty and insufficient;
the more confined area of operations as agriculture
became an increasing business; the struggle with neigh
bouring tribes about rights of pasture or to obtain
coveted spoils; the earlier or later introduction of slavery
in place of wholesale slaughter of captives; the develop
ment of division of labour and exchange slowly break
ing up the common property ; the institution of private
property in land, rendered necessary by the simul
taneous improvements in agriculture; the increase of
individual wealth, as cultivation and division of
labour progressed on a larger scale, due to money
usury and slave-ownership ; the construction of classes
representing divergent interests; the struggle between
the various classes and those above them; the enormous
development of the slave class and the poorer citizens
in Greece and still more in Rome; the gradual forma
tion of customs, laws, religions growing out of these
ever-changing, ever-progressing, economical forms; the
constant appeals of the privileged orders to these cus
toms, laws, and religious doctrines as the wisdom of
the past not to be rudely shaken by the new-fangled,
subversive theories of revolutionists, who were them
selves but the unconscious exponents of such inevitable
modifications — a careful study of each link in the
�6
chain of this long development, will show clearly how
man in society has been the result of ages on ages of
slow growth, in which the individual is lost in utter
insignificance, and special inventions such as fire, the
wheel, the mining, smelting, and working of metals,
become manifestly but the inevitable results of the social
state which produces them.
Leaving on one side the civilisations of Egypt and
Eastern Asia, important as they are to a knowledge of our
social growth—for only seventy generations of thirty
years each take us back to a period when Britain was
practically unknown, and Roman civilisation was in its
infancy—it is sufficient to deal briefly with the decay of
the Roman Empire, the feudal institutions which
sprang up on its overthrow, and, more in detail, with
the special circumstances which have influenced the
progress of the people of Western Europe to the existing
capitalist rule. The fact that the ancient civilisations
of Greece and Rome were supported by open and
acknowledged slavery of the mass of the producing class,
renders all comparison of democracy, in the modern
sense, with the so-called democracies of Greek or
Roman society utterly futile. The economical and
social conditions are entirely different.
Those Greek republics, which have so often been the
theme for adulation on the part of democratic orators,
poets, and artists, were themselves but close oligarchies;
and the slave-class below was the basis of the whole
super-structure alike at Athens, Corinth, and Sparta.
The very numbers of the slaves show how completely the
social arrangement was accepted as inevitable ; for at
Athens there were at least 120,000 slaves’ to 20,000
�7
citizens, while at Corinth the slaves at one period
numbered 460,000. Moreover, economical causes hav
ing produced slavery, force was long little needed to
maintain the supremacy of the upper classes, who
could carry on their own warfare among themselves
almost undisturbed by fears of a slave revolt. In Rome
the same forms appeared in rather different clothing,
though in both the slaves were often learned, highlytrained men, widely different from the ignorant human
machines whom we are accustomed to associate in our
minds with the word slaves. In Rome, the insurrections
of the slaves were more numerous and more formidable
than in Greece. But, in this case, too, the conflicts
between the various sections of the privileged classes
were almost undisturbed, if we except the great insur
rection of Spartacus, by the efforts at enfranchisement
on the part of the slaves, who rarely timed their risings
well and were massacred wholesale in Italy and Sicily
at comparatively little cost of life to their masters.
Early in the record the slave-industry, controlled by
the powerful landlord-capitalists of Rome and the other
great cities of the Empire, began to crush out and even
to enslave the small freeholders who had arisen on the
break up of the tribes, or who belonged to conquered
nations. Their independent work, with a few slaves
around them, could make no head against the enormous
production for gain which their large competitors carried
on. The Licinian Law, and the agitations of the Gracchi
were meant to protect the vigorous yeomen from forcible
and still more from economical expropriation. But the
movement was too strong to be resisted. Large pro
perties grew steadily larger, and these great farms
�8
ruined not only Italy but other portions of the empire.
The soil, though rich, was exhausted in the course of
generations by ceaseless over-cropping for profit alone;
the slave class of the country supported a useless and
very numerous slave class in the towns ; and the con
dition of the poor, free, Roman citizen became so
bad that economically it could scarcely be worse.
Thus, the prosperity of the whole empire was steadily
sapped, and some regions have scarcely recovered the
process unto this day. The Eastern Provinces, which
had a history of their own even throughout the period
of Roman domination, suffered less than the rest,
whilst they provided the great proprietors of the metro
polis with their luxuries, and thus regained in part by
commerce what they lost by tribute.
The whole system of production and exchange was
such that mercenary armies were needed to replace the
old independent military service. Rome followed in
the path of Carthage. Slowly the economical forms
changed, and afterwards the social and political.
From what seemed to contemporary observers the
most dangerous or most worthless portions of the exist
ing civilisation, a new life arose and progress followed.
Out of the rottenness of the Roman Empire of the
West, the slaves within and the barbarians from with
out formed the nucleus of another society. The spread of
a new revolutionary Asiatic creed, with a higher morality
than the popular forms of Paganism, was accompanied
throughout the empire by a rising spirit among the
slave class which provided its earliest converts, and
the barbarian invaders, driven onwards probably by
the exhaustion of their own sources of food supply found
�that the inhabitants of the territories they overran
almost welcomed them. The downfall of the Roman
Empire of the West was, in short, due to the necessary
growth of fresh forces below, which took the place of
worn-out forms that hampered the advance.
Thenceforward slavery in its old form faded into
modern serfdom; and Catholicism, true to its origin,
strove to uproot both, whilst maintaining an equality of
conditions at the start within its own body. Organised
Christianity exercised, in some sense, as a religion, the
power which had belonged to Rome as a centre of
empire.
In Western Europe, through the long
period of the so-called dark ages—so hard to under
stand even by the full light of modern scientific
research—new methods of production and exchange
were taking the place of the old, new relations were
being established between men as individuals, and men
as classes. The decay of the Roman roads shut off the
new communities to a great extent from one another,
as the disbandment of the legions loosened the bonds of
authority; a new art and a new literature grew up in
each country, founded doubtless on the old, but fresh
and vigorous indeed compared with the bastard work
of servile copyists, which well reflected the degradation
of Greek as well as of Roman civilisation; new laws and
new customs necessarily grew out of the changed con
ditions, notwithstanding the partial influence of the
Roman codes. Above all there was the new religion,
which, rising triumphant over the old pagan creeds, had
nevertheless adopted, perforce, the old pagan ceremo
nial and the old pagan festivities; in the same way
that the serfs and domestic retainers, though holding
�far different relations to their superiors from those of
the slaves to their masters, still used the agricultural
implements and handled almost the same primitive
machines as the slave class, who were, so to say, their
economical ancestors.
Instead of the combined landlord and capitalist con
trolling tens, hundreds, or thousands of toilers on his
estate through a bailiff, we have the disruption again
of village communities of free men—traces of which can
be found in all European countries to this day—develop
ing into a system of serfdom where the serfs were bound
to the soil, but bound also by direct personal relations
to their masters. So, too, as these changes acted and
reacted new class-struggles took the place of the old.
Oppressors and oppressed, dominant and servile, lord
and burgher, master and craftsman, seigneur and serf,
stood in antagonism, as mankind were feeling their way
to a wider economical development. Centuries of dis
integration and reconstruction were needed to bring
forth the complete feudal system ; and the earliest
development of modern trade and commerce took place
on the shores of that great inland sea which for ages
was the cradle of western civilisation. Venice, Genoa,
Pisa, followed in the footsteps of Tyre, Corinth, and
Carthage. Rome, instead of being the metropolis of a
great empire, became the head-quarters of a religious
organisation which exercised an influence that reached
the uttermost parts of the western world.
That the influence of the Catholic Church was, in
the main, used in the interest of the people against the
dominant classes can scarcely now be disputed ; nor
that the equality of conditions to start with in the
�II
organisation itself was one of the great causes of its
extraordinary success throughout the so-called dark ages.
Catholicism, in its best period, raised one continuous
protest against serfdom and usury, as early Christianity,
in its best form, had denounced slavery and usury too. But the economical tendencies were too strong for any.
protest to be much regarded at first. Divison of labour,,
and the structure of society thence resulting, at a time.
when the powers of man over nature were still limited,
gave power and importance to the warrior caste and
the priestly caste over the mere hinds and handicrafts
men. Yet, even in the earliest period of feudalism, the
risings of the trading class, and with them at times the
peasants and artizans, against the nobles and territorial
clergy, were neither few nor far between. The engage
ment of the knight and his retainers to defend the
agriculturists, handicraftsmen, and traders who
clustered round the fortress of which he was the lord,
led to demands on his side which the burghers and their
people resented. In Italy, in Germany, in France, and
in England, the great nobles and their feudatories were
in time confronted by municipalities with privileges
granted in return for services rendered, and the great
cities of Flanders and Western Germany almost rivalled
the Italian Republics in the influence they manifested
of town over country which then first began to be felt in
its modern form. The definite struggle between the
nobility and the bourgeoisie, therefore, took shape at the
same time, though assuming different aspects, in different
countries.
On, the other hand, the unorganised risings of the
peasantry, such as the Peasants’ War in England, the
�12
great insurrections of the J acquerie in France, and of the
serfs in Germany, were the attempts of the proletariat
of the middle-ages to obtain some improvement in their
lot apart from the traders, whose position was of course
very different. The serf of the middle-ages shows but
as a sorry figure, indeed, in all countries, as compared
with that splendid chivalry, whose resplendent armour
and noble individual prowess have been the theme of so
much glorification. Yet, for centuries, these despised
churls provided in the form of food and wares, furnished
by the number of days’ work due to their lord for
nothing, the means of providing all the magnificence
which decked out the baron, the abbot, and the
fair ladies of the court. Everywhere, however, at the
height of the feudal domination, the handicraftsman,
more especially at the later period which preceded its
disruption, was a free man. The contrast between
the position of such a man or the yeoman, and the
villeins, was most striking in every respect. The
latter were mere chattels: the former were independent
men; more independent perhaps in England than the
people as a body have ever been economically, socially,
and politically, at any other period of our history.
For in England—and this it is which renders our
own country the most fitting field for the study of
modern development — the enfranchisement of the
peasantry and their settlement upon the land as free
yeomen, took place at a much earlier date than in any
other nation. These yeomen were in fact the main
stay of England for several hundred years, and their
influence can be traced in our national history long
before the enfranchisement of the serfs as a body. The
�great risings, however, of the fourteenth century,
secured for the mass of our people that freedom and
well-being which made common Englishmen for at
least two centuries the envy of Europe. Serfdom was
almost entirely done away, men were masters of them
selves, their land, and their labour. Labourers and
craftsmen were alike well-paid, well-fed people, who
were not only in possession of the land which they
might occupy and till, but were also entitled to rights of
pasturage over large tracts of common land, since robbed
from their descendants by the meanness of an usurping
class who made laws in their own favour to sanctify
pillage.
England, far more densely peopled at that time than
is generally supposed, was in fact inhabited by perhaps
the most vigorous, freedom-loving set of men the world
ever saw, who, having shaken themselves free from
the slavery of the feudal system, were still untrammelled
by the worse slavery of commercialism and capital.
The economical forms, the methods of production, were
the direct cause of this universal well-being and sturdy
independence. Instead of men working under the con
trol of the landlord or the landlord-capitalist as slaves
or serfs for the sake of wealth and profit for their
owners, the yeomen were owners themselves of their
own means of production, and produced for the use of
the family, only paying a portion of such production as
tithes, or dues, or taxes. Rent, in the sense of a com
petition price paid for the occupation of land, was at
this period almost unknown'in Northern and Western
Europe as well as in these islands.
Production therefore being carried on for use, though
�i4
i
only in primitive fashion with small implements adapted to
individual handling, most of the products being consumed
or worked up into rude manufactures on the farm itself,
only the superfluity after the yeoman and his family
were well-fed and well-clothed came into exchange.
And this exchange itself, like the production, was carried
on by the individual. Craftsmen were economically as
independent as the yeomen and free-labourers, though
laws were early made (happily for many generations
without effect) to limit their powers of combination, and
to keep down the rates of wages which either they or
the agricultural labourers could command. They also
were in control of their means of production, and what
they made was the result of their own labour on raw
materials, which they in turn exchanged for other goods
made by men as free as themselves, or were paid for by
the lord or the abbot. Still the relations were in the
main personal, and not pecuniary, still a man who
earned wages for a day was by no means forced to
compete with his neighbour for hire by an employer as
a wage-earner all his life through.
The trade guilds which in the first instance were
thoroughly democratic in their constitution, protected
the craftsmen against unregulated competition, or from
the attempt to oppress them in any way. Moreover, as
it was easy then for a labourer to obtain a patch of
land, and to remove himself wholly or in part from the
.wage-earners, so a journeyman apprentice starting in
life as a mere worker could and generally did attain to
the dignity of a master craftsman in mature age. The
amount of capital to be amassed ere a man could work
for himself was so small that no serious barrier was
�placed between the journeyman and independence;
besides, the arrangements of the guilds were such that
wherever a craftsmen wandered he was received as a
brother of his particular craft. Although also the rest
of Europe was behind England in the settlement of the
people on the soil, the craft-guilds were even more
important in the Low Countries and part of Germany
in the Middle Ages than in England. Thus it should
appear that in the record of the feudal development the
period reached in each country when the peasant was a
free man working for himself upon the land, and the
craftsman was likewise a free man master of his own
means of production represents the time of greatest
individual prosperity for the people.
England, where this independence was on the whole
earliest developed, presented on this very account a
marked contrast to France where the risings of the
Jacquerie had not resulted so well for the people as our
Own peasant insurrections. In Germany and Italy the
rural population was much behind the townspeople
though in Spain, the early communal forms being there
retained, the peasants were better off. The really
important point is that, under such conditions of pro
duction as those described, where the means of pro
duction are at the disposal of the individual, who also
controls the exchange of the superfluity, perfect
economical freedom, as well as political freedom or
freedom before the law, is possible and indeed cannot be
avoided. Men then had something worth fighting for at
home and abroad, and were quite ready to spend theii" own
blood and their own money in fighting for a cause which
they held to be their own. Vicarious sacrifice of the
�i6
lives of mercenary troops and posterity’s money was
nowise to their minds; they took note that such
methods of warfare were at once cowardly and mean.
The Church as a collective body supplemented the
needs of this thoroughly individualist society. The
services rendered by the monasteries, priories, and
nunneries to the people in the shape of constant em
ployment on their estates, of almsgiving, maintenance of
hospitals, schools, inns, maintenance of roads, have been
systematically depreciated by middle-class historians;
but these semi-socialist bodies were of the highest
value in the economy of the middle-ages, more especially
in England, and the lands which they held were used
and their revenues applied in such manner that during
their most flourishing period the noblest institutions
were kept up by their aid. Permanent pauperism was un
known, and vagrancy was charitably restrained so long
as these institutions were in existence. The services
rendered by them in the direction of art and letters it is
needless to recount.
But at the risk of being compelled to repeat later
what is urged here, it is well to consider at this point
the effect which the full development of the individual
man and his power over his own tools, materials, and
the objects he worked upon, had upon art. The
ordinary opinion seems to be that art is bred and sus
tained by the luxury resulting from the present state of
society, with its monstrous contrasts of riches and
poverty. A very brief survey will be enough to show
the falsity of this notion. The slave-served society of
the classical peoples intellectual and highly-refined but
simple in life, and free, in Greece at any rate, from what
�*7
is now called luxury, looked upon art as a necessity,
and found no serious obstacle in the way of surrounding
the daily life of man with beauty. The rigid caste
system of the feudal hierarchy kept up the most vio
lent arbitrary distinctions between classes, but had no
temptation to extend those distinctions to the minds and
imaginations of men, and no means whereby it could
do so. Thus the artificer was left free to express, ac
cording to his capacity, the ideas which he shared with
the noble, developing as a class a hereditary skill and
dexterity in the handling of the simple tools of the time.
Under the craft-gilds of the latter middle-ages the
industrial arts were divided rigidly into corporations,
but inside those corporations division of labour was
yet in its infancy; so that each fully instructed crafts
man was master of his own handicraft, and was by all
surrounding circumstances encouraged to be an artist
whose labour could not be wholly irksome to him. By
this means the taste and knowledge of what art was
then possible were spread widely among the people and
became instinctive in them, so that all manufactured
articles as it were grew beautiful in the unobtrusive and
effortless way that the works of nature grow. The
result of five centuries of this popular art is obvious in
the outburst of splendid genius which lit up the days of
the Italian Renaissance: the strange rapidity with
which that splendour faded as commercialism advanced
is proof enough that this great period of art was
born not of dawning commercialism but of the freedom
of the intelligence of labour from the crushing weight
of the competition market, a freedom which it enjoyed
throughout the middle-ages.
G
�i8
The exquisite armour of the knights , their swords
and lances of perfect temper, the splendid and often
humorous decorations of the stone and wood-work in
the cathedrals, churches and abbeys, the illuminations
of the missals, the paintings of the time, the manner in
which beautiful designs and tracery nestled even in
places where it might be thought that the human eye
could rarely or never reach, nay, even such frag
ments of ordinary domestic furniture and utensils as
have been preserved, all show that the art of the
middle Ages, like the art of Greece, was something loved
and cherished and made perfect for its own sake, that
beauty welled up unbidden from the spontaneous flow
of the ideas of the time. But just at this period of the
fullest individual perfection the necessities of com
petition, arising out of economical changes in the
conditions of labour which have yet to be traced,
gradually turned the workman from the mediaeval artist
craftsman into the mere artisan of the capitalist sys
tem, and almost entirely destroyed the attractiveness of
his labour ; so that when about the end of the 17th
century the work-shop system of labour which had
pushed out the gild system was struggling to perfect its
speciality, the division of labour namely, wherein the
unit of labour is not a single workman but a group, it
found the romance, the soul, both of the higher and the
decorative arts, gone though the commonplace or
body of them still existed.
How then was the artist-craftsman thus turned into
a mere artisan ? How did the competition arise in such
shape that not free rivalry in the creation of beauty but
fierce antagonism in the greed for gain became the rule of
�19
production ? Once more the economical forms changed
and destruction of the old society was the inevitable
result.
As the feudal system was introduced into different
European countries at different periods, as again
the gradual conversion of serfs into free yeomen
and lifeholders was by no means simultaneous in every
nation, as further the formation of the craft-gilds
varied, so the decay and final disruption of the feudal
system took place at widely separated periods of time.
In England the end of the wars of the Roses saw the
commencement of this rapid disintegration. During
those wars the barons had largely increased the numbers
of their retainers, and had thus impoverished them
selves ; the people as a whole standing aloof from the
bootless and bloody Civil War between the houses of
York and Lancaster. Many of the ancient nobility
were utterly exterminated in the course of the struggle ;
and the successors to their estates, when peace was
finally proclaimed on the accession of Henry VII.,
carried on a process, which had begun even earlier, of
turning out their now useless retainers to shift for
themselves. These people formed the first set of
vagrants and wandering bands, who without house,
home, land or any recognised position in, or claim upon
society, roamed through the country in search of labour
and food. The monasteries, however, were still in full
organisation and provided to a large extent for these
wanderers.
But at the same time pressure was brought to bear
upon the innumerable small farmers and yeomen, common land was ruthlessly enclosed, and the nobles
51
/
�20
adopted every conceivable device to enrich themselves
at the expense of those who had a better title to the
land than they had. Hence more vagrants, more
homeless and a manifest decay in the real strength of
the kingdom. Here again the reasons of the change
were economical. The nobles wanted money to pay
the debts which they had incurred during the wars,
and also to maintain themselves at Court which they
now more regularly frequented; just at this time too
the Flanders market afforded a most profitable outlet
for wool. Hence it was advantageous for the land
holders in every way to remove men and substitute
sheep ; since pasture farming, needed fewer hands than
arable and sheep paid better than human beings. This
process of expropriation therefore' went relentlessly on
during the whole of the latter part of the sixteenth
century in spite of numerous statutes against such
action and the never-ceasing protests of men like More,
Latimer, &c., against the mischief that was being
done. Thus by degrees a landless class was being
formed with no property beyond the bare force of labour
in. their bodies; and these people were slowly driven
into the towns where they formed the germ of our
modern city proletariat.
The breakdown of the feudal system led in almost
every country to the establishment of a despotism,
and England formed no exception to the rule. . Henry
VIII. and Thomas Cromwell answer closely enough
. to Louis XIII. and Richelieu. It was the object of
king and minister alike that the crown should be
. supreme, and to a large extent they succeeded in
attaining it: though Cromwell, less dexterous than the
�31
French minister, lost his own head after having
removed the heads of so many others.
But the
Reformation and the consequent downfal of the monas
teries were the most important events in English
history between the Peasant’s War and the great
industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth
century. The Reformation in Germany was as far
from being a movement of the people as it was in
England; in France also the Protestants were as little
representative of peasantry as the Catholic nobles.
Luther himself, that fierce champion of individualism,
was a bitter opponent of the peasants in their risings
against the nobles. In fact the Reformation every
where, though partly directed against undoubted
abuses in the church, was a thorough middle-class
movement representing fully middle-class aspirations
for individual aggrandisement here and hereafter.
. In England the king was shrewd enough to put him
self at its head knowing that more solid gain was to be
had by the plunder of the church than by maintaining a
resolute attitude as Defender of a Faith that gave him
nothing and took much. Thus the monasteries were
destroyed, and the king was enabled to reconcile the
barons to this pillage by giving them a good share of
the plunder of the lands of the church and the people.
Nearly one-half of the land of England, which had up
to this time been used to a large extent for public
purposes, now became the property of a number of
nobles and courtiers who recognised little or no duty of
trusteeship, and who even allowed the public roads
which the monks had kept up to go to ruin, as they
suffered the magnificent abbeys to decay or be turned
�22
into quarries for building materials. Henceforth the
people of England had no hold upon their own land;
and all the duties which the monks and nuns had filled
in the economy of the middle-ages fell into abeyance
and were left unperformed. As to the inhabitants of the
monasteries, the monks and nuns, friars and sisters who
were turned out of their houses, they joined the army
of miserable vagrants now yearly increasing on the
public highways. With no means of earning a liveli
hood, they and the discharged retainers, the expropri
ated yeomen and the discharged hinds, were a neverceasing source of annoyance to the classes which had
driven them out to starve ; whilst the very abolition of
the monasteries, which intensified the mischief, deprived
these poor people of their last hope of succour.
Such was the pressure on the peasantry, owing to the
enclosures, the robberies of commons, and the seizure of
the Church Lands, that m spite of the infamous atrocities
wreaked upon all disturbers of order and upon the
wretched vagrants themselves, who were hanged and
disembowelled, tortured and flogged in batches, there
were a whole series of insurrections after the sup
pression of the monasteries, some of which were supported
by the well-to-do, and even, as in the case of the insurrec
tion of the Northern Earls, by the nobles themselves.
The new system of production for profit and constant
competition for wages, involving though it did progress,
in the sense of producing more wealth with fewer
hands, by the division of labour and co-operation, was
thus not introduced without a frightful and bloody class
struggle on the part of the people to maintain their old
individual independence. The risings were put down
�23
with frightful cruelty, however, and the laws against
vagrants who were forced to wander by the changed
conditions of agriculture, were harsher than ever
under the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the monarch
whose reign is supposed to embrace the most glorious
period of English history.
It is worthy of remark also that during the
whole Of the sixteenth century the attempts made
to stop the uprooting of the people from the soil by
law were absolutely unavailing.
The class now
gaining power in the country, namely the landlords
with bailiffs, and the large farmers, who both regarded
the land only as a means of making gain, rode rough
shod over the enactments of Parliament in favour of the
poor; though they took care to give full force to all
those which tended in any way to strengthen their own
power. The same with the rising bourgeoisie, who
rapidly gained influence under Elizabeth, and used it
as far as possible to remove those restrictions upon
usury, and laws in favour of the labourers, which in
the middle-age polity had balanced the futile statutes
against combination. By the end of the sixteenth
•century consequently all was ready in our country for
the gradual formation of a competitive wage-slave class
divorced from the soil and deprived of the means of
production, which class must therefore be in a growing
•degree at the mercy of the classes that possessed the
land and the capital.
The increasing amount of capital also needed for
success in business as the markets grew, and the town
supplied not only the country but foreign lands,
gradually broke down the democratic constitution of
/
�24
the trade-gilds. It was no longer a matter of course
for a capable apprentice and journeyman to become in
due time master of the craft. On the contrary, the
minority, the capitalist masters, exercised increasing
authority within the gild and turned its machinery to
the disadvantage of the poorer members.
Thus,
between the landless proletariat, which was being
created by social and economical oppression, and the
landlords letting land for money-rentals in place of the
old feudal services due to the nobles, the middle or
capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, was growing up, whose
bitter antagonism to the landlords has been carried on,
as the necessary result of economical progress, even to
our own day. Farmers who farmed for profit, and.
merchants and manufacturers who employed their men
to gain a profit from their competitive labour, quite
replaced the simpler economy of the middle ages,
when nearly all were farming or producing for direct
use.
During this period of fearful suffering for the mass
of the people, when the foundations of our modern
capitalist society were laid, the greatest and most
sudden development of commerce ever seen on the
planet took place, and international production and
exchange gradually overshadowed the old national
markets and methods of working up home products.
The discovery of America and of the new route round the
Cape to India and China, the conquest of Mexico and
Peru, the conquest of Asia Minor by the Ottoman
Turks, all took place within two generations.
A
new world of adventure, a new world of thought, were
opened up before mankind. A flood of the precious
�25
metals was poured into Europe from America giving in
many ways increased power to the trading and profit
making class, and increasing the accumulation of
capital. The spoils of Mexico and Peru, the wealth ol.
all kinds gained by commerce, forced on the develop
ment at headlong speed. Spain was ruined by the
very circumstances which gave her strength. The
Italian cities lost their commercial supremacy from this
time forward, owing in part to the decay of Asia
Minor and the breakdown of the overland connection .
with the East, following upon the Turkish rule, and
partly to the change in the relative importance of the
trade to America and the West Indies. In consequence
England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Low
Countries became the chief competitors for the com
merce of the world, Venice lending her spare capital to
the Dutch at good rates of interest, thus encouraging
the very competition that must eventually ruin her.
Hence arose the commercial wars and commercial
rivalries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in
which Spain at the first had every apparent advan
tage.
Meanwhile in England feudalism had been com
pletely destroyed as a system, and commercialism was
being substituted. Keeping pace with the change in ■
the forms of production, progress in all directions
helped on the new development. The spread of
printing destroyed the monopoly of letters which had
been enjoyed by the clergy and the learned of high'
rank ; the application of gunpowder to war rendered
the common man-at-arms the superior of the most
gorgeously equipped knight. Thus the increase of
t-
�26
general knowledge sapped superstition, and the
musket swept away the last relics of warrior chivalry.
As the markets expanded also, the results of these
great changes in every direction became more and more
apparent. The miserable state of the internal com
munications forced Englishmen more and more into
foreign commerce, which was rendered exceptionally
profitable, not only by the discovery of new markets
that gave great returns to the trader, but also by the
useful adjuncts of piracy and slavery. To keep pace with
this growth of commerce wider organisation of labour
was needed, and, therefore, as already stated, the group
of workmen toiling under the superintendence of
the master, with a more and more regulated
division of labour, supplanted the old handi
craft.
Workshops grew larger and larger, small
factories were formed in certain trades. The workmen
ceased to own any portion of their own product: that, as
a whole, went into the hand of the employer who paid for
a part of its value in wages ; in the same way the agri
cultural labourer ceased to have any interest in the
crops which he raised: they, too belonged to the far
mer, subject to a deduction, for rent to the landlord;
and the labourer also received a part of the value of
his labour in wages. Production had become or was
rapidly becoming social: appropriation and exchange
remained under the control of the individual.
During the whole of the seventeenth and the first
half of the eighteenth century this process went on.
Organised handicraft, factory industry, and house
industry, were still to be seen together. A good many
yeomen remained in some districts, but they were becom-
�ing continually less numerous; though the agricul
tural regions were still much more populous than the
towns, and so remained until the end of the eighteenth
century. On every side commerce was the one prevail
ing object, and to that all was subordinated. Religion
naturally adapted itself to the tone of the time; and the
Protestantism of England became what it has ever since
remained—essentially a creed for the successful trafficker
in wares or in souls.
All through Europe the system of to-day in credit,
competition, and national rivalry was practically
established, and the era of foreign conquest and
colonial empire began.
But still the conflict
of the middle-class against the king and the landed
aristocracy loomed ahead. Wise sovereigns had shown
true policy in yielding to and even in fostering the grow
ing power. Others, perhaps more upright but certainly
less dexterous, precipitated the struggle. In England it
first took shape in serious organised warfare. The
bloody civil war of the seventeenth century was clearly
a, struggle between the ideas of divine right and land
owner supremacy on the one side, against the sanctity of
profit and freedom for the middle-class on the other.
The economical victory already gained in the counting
house was but confirmed in the field; and the reign of
Cromwell served as an introduction to the thorough
middle-class rule of William III.
From this time forward the question was merely
how long it would take for the middle-class to
establish in outward seeming that supremacy which,
in regard to production, they had already to a large
extent secured. Their power was still somewhat
�28
hampered by the relics of the old middle-age
restrictions even after the accession Of William ol
Orange and the House of Brunswick had virtually pro
claimed that capitalism, with its debt funded for
payment by posterity, its standing mercenary army,
and its worldwide international production and
exchange, had become master of the economical, and, in
the strict sense, social field. But division of labour
was carried farther and farther, trade and commerce
developed exceedingly, the settlements in America and
the factories in India helped on the growth, until in the
eighteenth century, the period had manifestly arrived
fpr yet another development which would enable the
productive forces to supply the ever-growing market.
Prior to this new manifestation of the powers of man
over nature and of the method in which, under such
social conditions, as now existed, these powers were
turned to the sole advantage of a class, the condition of
the English worker was better than it had been at any
period since the fifteenth century. His wages both in
town and country bore a higher ratio to the cost of
living than at any intermediate time. Agriculture had
recovered in some degree from the depression of the.
sixteenth century, owing to the demand for cereals in
the growing comercial cities; and the artisan, under the.?
division of labour and the group system of factory pro-,
due <. ion, was in a more favourable position than he had
been when home competition was more severe and
foreign markets were less open.
In France, on the contrary, the peasantry had not
gained ground against the barons to nearly the same,
extent, nor were the bourgeoisie nearly so advanced in
�29
their political struggle as the corresponding classes in
England. Though the serfs had to some degree been
settled upon the land, the oppression of the nobles and
the pressure of taxation, owing to the wars of
Louis XIV., ground down the poor to a level wholly
unknown on this side of the Channel. Moreover, the
rush of speculation and commercialism produced a far
more rapid and complete deterioration of the character
of the whole upper classes in Paris, and in France
generally, than it did in London and England.
' Thus at the end of the eighteenth century France was
fully prepared for a political and social, England was
more ready for an industrial, revolution. The ideas of the
time were much the same in both countries ; but whereas
our middle-class had taken order with their king and his
aristocrats in the seventeenth century, and capital had
secured its firm foothold at that time alike in town and
country, France had yet to pass through a whole series
of events parallel to what had already taken place here
generations before. The English Revolution, the
American War of Independence, stirring the minds of
the middle-class and the people, the utter degradation of
the French nobility by the scenes in the Rue Quincampoix occasioned by their endeavours to make gain out
of Law’s Mississippi scheme and similar ventures, the
destruction of faith in the prevailing religion among the
educated by Voltaire and Rousseau, and the Encyclopae
dists, the prevailing misery among the entire population,
which was totally disregarded by the nobles and the
court, were factors that all tended relentlessly to a
political overthrow.
.
. ’ .
The change in the conditions of the time had not
�30
been recognised. Those economical and social dis
placements which had already prepared the revolution
in the body of society had passed unheeded; and
thus the French Revolution, which was clearly
predicted by a few careful observers, came upon
the world at large as a surprise. It was a rising against
a tyranny alike corrupt, mean, and obsolete. Its
influence spread rapidly at first and, coming after the
noble American Declaration of Independence, produced
a great effect in every European country, not least in
England. That glorious struggle for Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity, which began in 1789, that temporary
alliance of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
though it gave rise to some splendid episodes for
the people, ended in victory for the bourgeoisie
alone. The really great names of the French revo
lution have, of course, been honoured by middle
class abuse. Napoleon, the hero of reaction, used the
enthusiasm born of revolution to spread his self
seeking imperialism through Europe, and enabled
reactionists in other countries to pose as the champions
of national freedom.
The effect of the great revolutionary war upon Eng
land, and the increased power which the long conflict
placed in the hands of the aristocratic and capitalist
classes, was most disastrous from every point of view.
Political progress was thrown back nearly a century,
social reforms were indefinitely postponed, and the
new industrial forces went almost without heed or pro
test into the hands of the profit-making class. And
these industrial forces were of a magnitude, and pro
duced effects the like of which had never been seen in
�3i
the world before. As the great geographical and mer
cantile discoveries at the end of the sixteenth century,
with the rapid development of shipping, ended by
giving England the control of commerce ; so the great
inventions at the end of the eighteenth century resulted
in giving this country the lead in industry. But the
effect upon the people was terrible almost from the
beginning. At first a few benefited by the increased
powers of production alike in labouring on the land and
with respect to working up raw materials.; and the initial
steps were taken towards the formation of an aristocracy
of labour to protect, by means of secret societies,
the interests of the skilled artisans. But the power of
machinery soon broke down these earlier combinations.
The cottage industry was ere long completely de
stroyed. In every branch of trade the development
became so extraordinary that nothing but a constant
supply of fresh hands to work the machines, and in turn
an improvement of machines to restrain the demands of
the hands could keep pace with the growing markets
opened by the increasing cheapness of production.
Competition took another great stride in advance.
Poor Irishmen, driven from their own country by land
lord rascality and oppression, came in to compete at the
lowest standard of life with the already impoverished
Englishmen. Towns grew in magnitude with amazing
rapidity as steam and greater knowledge of the use
of water power increased the size of the factories and
the number of, men, women, and children who could
work under the control of one employer. From being
an agricultural country England in the course of fifty
or sixty years became essentially a country of great.
�32
cities with a proletariat under the control of the capitalist
class in a worse condition (this all official reports show)
than any slave class of ancient times had ever lived in.
For ere long the capitalist class, now almost at the
height of its economical power, had swept away entirely
the restrictions imposed by the middle-age polity.
Freedom of contract between the pauper and the
plutocrat, unrestrained competition between men and
women in order that they might be able to get enough
out of the product of their labour merely to keep body
and soul together, wholesale slaughter of children by
overwork and insufficient nourishment in unhealthy,
overheated factories and ill-ventilated mines—the whole
system was based upon never-ending oppression of the
most horrible kind. Wages fell in proportion to the
cost of living at the very time when enormous fortunes
were being accumulated in the cotton, wool, silk, iron,
and other industries. Women and children were
brought in to reduce the wages of their own fathers and
brothers by competing for under-pay.
The legislature, under the direct control of the
classes interested in maintaining this atrocious slavery
under the guise of freedom, refused at first even to
bring in laws to prevent babes from three to nine years
of age from being worked fourteen,fifteen, sixteen hours
a day. Capital had full swing in every direction and
ground down the body of the people into a hopeless
degradation from which they have never yet emerged.
Risings there were from time to time in the earlier part
of this century against this fearful oppression brought
about by sheer greed for gain. But they were all unsuc
cessful, and not until the half of the century had passed
�33
away were any effective laws enacted, at the instance
of such men as Robert Owen, to check the capitalist
class in their furious haste to be rich at the expense of
the men, women, and children, whom they robbed
wholesale of their labour and ruined in their health.
For now man was slave to the machine, no longer a
free agent in any sense. Division of labour in the
workshop faded into the great factory industry ; and
machines, as they were introduced, served not to
benefit the community and lessen the amount of
labour needed to produce wealth but absolutely
to increase the hours of labour, to degrade the workers
more and more, and, by frequently throwing hands out into
street, gradually to form a fringe of labour, ever on the
verge of pauperism—ready to take the lowest wages,
even when an impetus to trade rendered the capitalist
class anxious for more hands. This introduction of
machinery, this complete domination of the capitalist
class and sweeping expropriation of the labour of the
workers, piled up the wealth for the few which enabled
us to come out triumphant from the great war.
But whence came the wealth thus accumulated by
the few out of the labour of others—by the capitalist
farmers in the country, by the capitalist factory owners
and loiterers in the towns ? Out of the excessive
labour of the workers who were hopelessly divorced from
the means of production, and were compelled to sell their
labour-force to the capitalist for the lowest subsistence
wages. The economical law of such competition
among the workers as that which has gone on in
England since the end of the eighteenth century, is
admitted by the capitalists, and their fuglemen, the
D
�political economists, themselves. The one object of
production being production for profit, the capitalist
of course buys the labour-force which the needy
worker is driven to sell at the lowest possible price in
wages. This price, it is now agreed, corresponds on
the average to the social needs represented by the
standard of life in the class to which the seller of the
labour-force belongs. At times the wages may, and do,
fall far below this level of necessary subsistence, at
other times combination among the workers, or a period
of exceptionally prosperous trade, may temporarily raise
them above this level. But the tendency is always as
stated ; nor does the existence of an aristocracy of
labour modify the truth of the proposition. But when the
capitalist, whether a farmer or a factory-lord, has
bought the destitute worker’s labour-force on the
market, he does so with the intention of applying it to
the growing of his crops, or to the manufacture of the
raw materials which he has purchased at their market
value. Labour-force embodied in commodities, the
cost of production or re-production, that is, of articlesreckoned useful in the social conditions of the time, is
the basis and measure of their average exchange-value
when brought forward for exchange. In the first two or
three hours of the day’s work, however, the labouring class
whose labour-force is thus purchased, refund to the em
ploying class the full value ofthe wages which they receive
in return for the whole day’s work. But the entire
product of the day’s work, or the week’s work, or the
month’s work, or the year’s work, is at the control of
the capitalist who thus appropriates two-thirds or three
quarters of the labourers’ work without paying for it.
�35
In the factory, that is to say, and to an ever increas
ing degree on the farm, the labourers work as a portion
of an association ; their labour is socialised in the
highest degree. But both their products and the
exchange of their products are at the disposal of
individuals who compete with one another for gain
above, as the workers compete against one another for
bare subsistence below.
Here then are the two main features of our modern
system of production for profit. First. The labourers on
the average replace the value of their wages for the
capitalist class in the first few hours of their day’s work ;
the exchange value of the goods produced in the remaining
hours of the day’s work constitutes so much embodied
labour which is unpaid; and this unpaid labour so
embodied in articles of utility, the capitalist class, the
factory owners, the farmers, the bankers, the brokers,
the shopkeepers, and their hangers-on the landlords,
divide among themselves in the shape of profits,
interests, discounts, commissions, rent, &c. Second.
The other feature is the antagonism between the
socialised method of production and the individualised
system of exchange. This brings about unmitigated
anarchy in the shape of a world-wide crisis every ten
years, which throws labourers out of work when they
are as anxious to toil for subsistence as ever they were;
and piles up quantities of goods which these very
labourers are eager to buy, but which owing to the
crisis they cannot earn the means of purchasing,
because the capitalist class will not employ them unless
a profit is to be made, and this profit is rendered
impossible by the very glut of the goods. Such crises
�3^
have now occurred every ten years since 1825, and
owing to these, men and women have been continually
thrown out of work and flung into misery from no fault
whatever of their own.
The introduction of fresh machines is similarly against
workers, tending as it does to increased uncertainty of
employment and to reduce skilled workers to a lower class.
Thus the tendency is to produce not merely a destitute
proletariat forced to remain as a class wage-slaves to
their m isters, body-slaves to the machine, their life long;
but also a fringe of labour employed at scant wages
in “ good times,” thrown into pauperism and starvation
in bad. Hence freedom of contract between those who
have no means of production, and those who have a
monoply of them, simply involves the most terrible
economical tyranny the world has yet seen : the surplus
value provided under this illusory freedom out of unpaid
labour enables the idle classes and their dependants to
live in luxury at the expense of persistent overwork and
misery for the producers themselves.
Thus individual exchange uncontrolled by thought of
collective advantage brings about fearful anarchy in
every direction, which is a satire indeed upon the
middle-class cuckoo cry of “order, order.”
Children are ill-nurtured and underfed, women are
worked to within a few hours of pregnancy, the condi
tions of existence for the mass of the people are such
that health, happiness, and morality are impossible, and
still the capitalist class and their champions, the political
economists, tell us that such is the inevitable outcome of
our mock civilisation. Nor is there any real standard
of honour among the competitors for wealth themselves.
�37
Having robbed the labourers wholesale of their labour,
they proceed to rob one another by underselling, adulter
ation and fraud. As a general result of the system mere
pecuniary relations are paramount. How to make money
is the be-all and end-all of this ruinous system of com
petitive production for profit. Love, honour, ability,
beauty, all are in the market—going, going, going, gone 1
knocked down to the highest bidder.
Art! that necessarily fades under such conditions ;
and machine-work, literally and figuratively, is the pro
duct of the time. This has been gradually brought about
through the operation of the economical forms whose
development has been briefly traced.
Throughout
the 18th century the idea that the making of goods is
the end and aim of manufacture still struggled, with
ever-increasing feebleness, against the real view of
capitalism, that manufacture has no essential aim
save profit for the capitalist-class, and mere occu
pation for the workman: occupation, that is, daily
leisureless labour with no pretence to attractiveness in
it, rewarded by a livelihood whose standard is forced
down by competition, to the lowest point which will be
endured without active discontent.
This view is accepted as a matter past discussion by
the fully-developed capitalism of the 19th century which
has in its turn supplanted the workshop, with its groups
of workmen each skilled in a narrow round of labour,
by the factory with its machines tended by women
and children or by a mere labourer of whom neither
skill nor intelligence is necessarily required. This
system withits unavoidable consequence that the greater
and (commercially) more important part of the wares it
�38
produces are made for the consumption of poor
and degraded people without leisure or taste wherewith
to discern beauty, without money or labour to
pay for excellence of workmanship—this system makes
labour so repulsive and burdensome that art, in the long
run, is impossible under it. Instead of the pleasant,
intellectual, fruitful labour of the middle-ages, we have
the barren, hideous drudgery of the factory and the
cotton-mill. While it lasts all the ordinary surround
ings of life must of necessity be ugly and brutal, and
’ what of art is left for a time, depending as it does, not on
' its own life, but on the memory of past days of glory
" and beauty, must be produced by men of exceptional
' gifts, living isolated amidst the ugliness and brutality of
' their own time and protesting against the spirit of their
own age. Thus the capitalist system threatens to dry
up the very springs of all art, that is, of the external
beauty of life, and to reduce the world to a state of
barbarism.
The proletariat, however, as already remarked, were
not crushed into this helplessness in England without
having struggled against the meanest tyranny that ever
oppressed them. From the end of the last century, when
Trade Societies were established throughout the king
dom, vainly endeavouring to make head against the
steadily growing power of capital, the working classes
kept up an increasing agitation in favour of a more
reasonable lot for themselves and their children.
Another serious class fight had begun. What the
workers saw was this: — that the introduction of
machinery, though it might give wealth to the capitalist
class and to the country at large, brought with it for them
�39
^starvation and intolerable misery, owing to the displace
ment of the old methods and the competition of the
labour of women and children with that of grown men.
During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth cen
tury also the people, as we have seen, were on the whole
better off, their wages would buy them more and better
food and raiment than for two centuries before. Con
sequently the pressure being sudden was more severely
felt and more vigorously resisted than it is to-day. The
'workers saw that the unregulated introduction of
machines meant for them ruin; as Sir James Steuart,
the famous economist, plainly stated it must, ten years
before the publication of “The Wealth of Nations.”
They, therefore, in the first place attacked the machines
themselves ; and bands of workpeople under the name of
Luddites destroyed machinery in many industrial centres,
with the impression that thus they were striking
heavy blows at the real enemy. As a matter of course
their adversaries were not the inert machines, which
"only produced more wealth at the cost of less and less
expenditure of human labour, but the class appropria
tion of these improvements which gave to the labourers,
owing to competition among themselves for employment,
a less and less proportionate share of the wealth
created.
For the cheapening of the products did not benefit
the workers as a class. It only enabled them to take a
lower average wage in times of pressure without ab
solute starvation; whilst the uncertainty arising from
constant improvements and the competition of their
own families rendered their position even worse than
the mere amount of wages for long hours and excessive
�40
overwork would betoken. Thus the very circumstances
which should have bettered their condition and rendered
their life more easy, actually pressed them down to a
K ,< lower standard of existence.
Not until 1802 was any step taken to recognise even
that children were overworked, and the Act then
passed was wholly abortive. In 1814 the capitalist
class even succeeded in removing the last vestige of the
old restrictions notwithstanding the overwhelming array
of petitions from the workers against any such action.
At this time it must be remembered that all combina
tions among the workers to raise wages, or to strike for
any reason whatsoever, were illegal. Soon afterwards
the great war came to an end which had so much
strengthened the power of the landowners, farmers and
capitalists, at the expense of the people; and with its
termination, and the consequent collapse of the fic
titious prosperity created for certain classes, came a
period of even greater pressure upon the people. From
1817 to 1848 was therefore one of almost continuous
turmoil. The middle-class were striving to secure their
complete control over the House of Commons by a
limited extension of the suffrage, and a disfranchise
ment of rotten boroughs; the wage-earners were
combining in all directions to obtain the suffrage for
their class, but also to relieve themselves from the
hideous economical injustice they suffered under.
Riots in the towns and rick-burnings in the country
were frequent.
The time of the fiercest struggle was shortly after the
enaction of the Reform Bill of 1832. Then the effect
of the New Poor Law, the constant immigration from
�41
Ireland owing to economical causes due to landlord
oppression, and the continuous operation of capitalism,
produced such distress that from 1835 to 1842 the country
was described by a careful foreign observer as in a state
of permanent revolt. Now it was that a portion of the
middle-class made common caus with the workers in
their agitation; that the Trade Unionists free to com
bine since 1824, acted in concert to a great extent
with the rank and file of labourers; and that utopian
Socialism, in the shape of schemes for the nationalisa
tion of the land, inherited from Spence and others, as
well as Robert Owen’s plans of co-operation, began to
be recognised as a definite school.
The Trade Unionists at this time were the advanced
guard of the working class party ; and although, early
in the day, the sense of superiority to the unskilled
workers began to show itself among the members, much
of the success which was obtained could never have
been got without their aid. Thus the gradual enaction
and enforcement of Factory Acts, in favour of the
restriction of the labour of women and children within
more reasonable limits as to the number of hours worked,
the rights of free meeting and a free press, were
obtained owing in large part to the steady organised
support given by the Trade Unionists to these mea
sures. In the chartist agitation also which was a
decided movement of the proletariat against the
landlord and capitalist class many Trade Unionists
took an active share, as also in the serious risings
which occurred in Wales, Manchester, Birmingham,
Nottingham and elsewhere.
But for the counter-agitation got up by the capitalists
�42
in favour of Free Trade in corn it is even possible that
the Chartists and Socialists together might have
■achieved, at any rate, a temporary success for the cause
of the people. As it was the Corn Law League drawing
the people off on a false scent—for all can see nowadays
that cheap food meant little more than increased profits
for the capitalist class—the leaders were left almost
without followers; and though in 1848 the renewed stir
on the Continent of Europe gave the workers in this
country every encouragement and an exceptional
opportunity, they failed to resuscitate the energetic
movement of 1842. In fact almost the only great result of
all the long series of agitations for the benefit of the
workers was the final settlement and consolidation in
1852 of the Factory Act of 1847.
' .
But 1848 on the Continent of Europe was a far more
important date than in England. Then first, it may be
said, since Babceufs conspiracy in 1796,—for the
Days of July ” in 1830 in Paris or the outbreak at
Lyons in 1834.were comparatively trifling—did the pro
letariat again show that it had interests which were not
pnly not in accord with, but diametrically hostile to
the interests of the middle class. All over Europe
scientific, as distinguished from mere utopian, Socialism
now began to be felt beneath the efforts for
national independence.
The famous Communist
Manifesto of Marx and Engels which first formulated
in a distinct shape the great truth of the inevitable
Struggle of classes so long as classes exist, the agitations
of Blanqui and the theories of Louis Blanc, Ledru
Rollin, &c., all pointed to an international combination of
' the workers in the interests of the labouring class
�43
which should have a far wider, nobler and more
beneficial influence than endeavours, however glorious,
for mere national independence. It was Socialism as
an organised force based upon the sure ground of
science and political economy which frightened the
statesmen of all countries far more than any idea of
mere national movements in which class gradations
Would still be maintained.
The time was not yet. The middle class triumphed
not only in England but in every European country, the
thousands who fell fighting for the people in Paris died
vainly for the time, and the bourgeoisie gladly supported
order ” under President, King, or Emperor, which
ensured the butchery of the champions of the proletariat
and made them certain of the continuance of the
universal reign of production for profit and the conse
quent wage-slavery of the mass of the producers in all
lands. From 1848 onwards, however, Socialism itself,
international, organised Socialism, has been a moral,
intellectual and physical force to be counted with in all
the councils of Europe. Thenceforward the leaders of
■the proletariat of the world could feel assured that when
the time was ripe for action they had an unshakable
scientific foundation on which to build, to which indeed
each year has added another layer of solid theory and
fact combined.
England, unfortunately, the country where the struggle
between the workers and the capitalists first took an
organised and manifest shape, now, to all appearance,
fell behind. The working classes of England, owing to
the enormous expansion of foreign markets, to the fact
that this country was the first in the field with improved
�44
, .’*
K
machinery and highly socialised factories, to the earlier
development of railways here than elsewhere, to the Free
Trade Policy which kept the necessary standard of life
cheap, to emigration which took off the more energetic
political leaders of the people and afforded a further out
let for goods, to the stagnation of the Trade Unions
which, when they had got what the higher grade of
workers needed most, cared little or nothing for the
welfare of the other classes of labour—the workers of
England, we say, fell behind in their efforts for the
enfranchisement of their class and have been content
since 1848 with that moderation in their requirements
and that bated breath method of urging their simplest
demands which naturally find favour with their Capi
talist masters.
During the thirty-five years which have passed, how
ever, since 1848, wealth in England has increased far
beyond all previous computation or imagination. From all
quarters of the globe the profits ofthe world-market have
been poured into the lap of our merchants and Capitalists.
The landlords also , have gained in rents, but in a very
trifling degree compared with the gain ofthe trading class.
The income tax returns alone show that the increase in
assessable incomes has been from ^275,000,000 in 1848
to nearly £600,000,000 in 1882. The total of realised
wealth seems incredible, being given, by an official
statist, at over £8,500,000,000. In every direction this
expansion of wealth is to be observed. The rich quarters
of our cities have spread beyond all bounds ; numerous
and populous lounger towns have sprung up around our
coasts, where the indolent wealthy may conveniently kill
time in healthy uselessness; the standard of living among
�the middle-class is so high that their chief diseases arise
from gluttony or drink.
Yet at this very time official returns prove conclusively
that vast masses of our countrymen are living on the
very verge of starvation ; that much of the factory popu
lation is undergoing steady physical deterioration ; that
the agricultural labourers rarely get enough food to keep
them clear of diseases arising from insufficient nourish
ment ; while such is the housing of the wage-earners
in our great cities and in our country districts that even
the leading partisans of our political factions at length
have awakened to the fact that civilisation for the poor
has been impossible for nearly two generations under
these conditions, and that some steps ought really to be
taken to remedy so monstrous an evil. Drink, debauchery,
vice, crime inevitably arise under such conditions. For
indigestion arising from bad food, cold arising from insuf
ficient firing,depression arising from unhealthy air and lack
of amusement, necessarily drive the poor to the public
house ; while even the sober have had, too often, no edu
cation which should fit them for the full enjoyment of life.
And drunken and sober, virtuous and vicious—if they
can be called vicious who are steeped in immorality from
their very babyhood—are all subject to never-ceasing
uncertainty of earning a livelihood, due to the constant
introduction of fresh machines over which they have no
control, or to the great commercial crises which come
more frequently and last for a longer time at each recur
rence. There is therefore complete anarchy of life and
anarchy of production around us. Order exists, morality
exists, comfort, happiness, education, as a whole, exist
only for the class which has the means of production, at
�46
the expense of the class which supplies the labour-force
that produces wealth.
The total income of the country is ^1,300,000,000 ; of
this the producers receive ^300,000,000 in wages ; and
of these wages they pay back one-fifth to one-third to the
landlord and capitalist class in rent, apart from the
amount they refund in profits on retail and adulterated
goods. The producers live on the average one-half the
number of years the comfortable classes live. The total
amount of property owned by 220,000 families is nearly
/’6,ooo,ooo,oou, whilst millions are living on insufficient
food and 4,500,000 persons receive charitable relief in
England and Wales alone, in one shape or another,
during the course of the year. The land of England is
practically owned by 30,000 people against 30,000,000
and 8,000 landowners in Great Britain and Ireland
receive no less than ^"35,000,000 a year in rents. Such
plain facts as these are sufficient of themselves to show
the anarchy of what we call civilisation. There have
been no fewer than six commercial crises since the
beginning of the century to crush the workers, not count
ing the Lancashire cotton famine due to the American
Civil War. Meanwhile commercial war—competition
in cheapness, that is, adulteration to make great profits,
and attacks upon helpless people to open up new
markets—has been going on all round.
Yet in the face of all this a certain school still contend
that thei e is no class robbery; that there should be no
class antagonism; that the blessings of peace and
eternal money-getting for all would be ever with us if only
our people—our producing people—would cease to have
any families at all. What is it produces value ?—labour
�applied to natural objects. What is it produces sur
plus value, and thus provides profit, interest, rent,
commissions, &c.—labour applied to natural objects under
the control of the capitalist class who take all the
value produced less the mere average subsistence wages
of the labourer. Yet to provide more wealth we are to
cut off the supply of labour by breeding no labourers.
This foolish Malthusian craze is itself bred of our
anarchical competitive system; and those who are
smitten with it cannot see that the power of man over
nature is such that, if his labour were properly organised,
he would produce in food or its equivalent at least four
times more than the amount of wealth which he would
require, if he lived in absolute comfort, provided he
worked only six hours a day. Were machinery properly
applied, far less than two hours labour a day for each
male above twenty-one would suffice for all to live in
comfort, if none lived in excessive luxury on the labour
of others. As it is, about one-fourth of our adult
population are engaged in actual useful production, often
with inferior machinery, yet the total income is
£1,300 ,000,000 a year.
That the power of man over nature increases in a
far more rapid ratio in all progressive societies than the
increase of population ; that the well-to-do—such as all
would be in an organised Socialist community—breed,
slowly, the poor fast; that the supposed law of dimin
ishing returns to capital (which means in one shape and
another labour) expended on the soil is demonstrably
false ; that England alone could profitably produce food
enough to feed its present population, the return
increasing with each improvement in agriculture ; that
�48
North America by itself would still export enormous
quantities of food after all its inhabitants were well fed
even if it had 800,000,000 inhabitants: these are facts
and estimates of the very highest agricultural and
economical authorities which ought finally to dispose of
the so-called Malthusian theory, even if the supposed
necessity of fictitiously limiting the number of producers
were not on the face of it an absurdity where idlers
who eat enormously and produce not at all form the
majority ofthe population.
From 1848 to 1864 there was little sign of Socialist
movement of an international character, and although
Lassalle’s vigorous agitation in Germany which began
in 1862 produced a great effect in that country no
serious attempt was made to organise a general com
bination of Socialists until two years later.
In
November 1864 a meeting was held in London which
laid the foundation of the International Working Men’s
Association. Karl Marx was the brain of the move
ment which soon spread to every civilised country and
occasioned grave uneasiness to the courts and cabinets
of Europe. The International in effect proclaimed the
“ Solidarity ” of interest between the workers of all
nations, and called upon them to unite in order to
obtain control of the means of production, including the
land, in every country; its leaders declared also
that the war between classes in each state was the real
matter of importance to the labouring class, which every
where suffered from the oppression of the classes above;
that therefore they should sink national differences in a
great international struggle for the emancipation of the
�49
workers. These ideas obtained more ready acceptance
in Germany than elsewhere as might have been
expected from the superior education of the German
working classes and from the fact that the heads of the
movement were Germans; but up to the date of the
declaration of war between France and Germany
the International bid fair to become a most important
body, and to combine the proletariat in a really formid
able movement all over Europe.
When the war was over Paris found that though she
had got rid of the Emperor with his gang of profession
al gamblers and prostitutes, France was to be handed
to the exploitation of a reactionist Republic. The
Parisians, therefore, resenting this mean substitution,
made an attempt to secure perfect commercial indepen
dence before admitting the troops from without. The
movement was at first necessarily in middle-class hands,
and the Socialists of Paris were warned by the leaders
of the International that as a simultaneous rising in
Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, &c., had been impossible to
arrange, failure was certain. The French Socialists were
incensed at this prediction and set to work to discredit
its authors. But, when the Commune had once been
set on foot, it soon became clear that Paris was
destined to be the scene of another bloody but again for
the time, fruitless campaign of the proletariat against
the bourgeoisie. Yet the champions of that class alone
showed unfaltering resolution and dauntless courage
in the face of danger and in the face of death.
Paris was to a large extent injured by the attacks of
the troops, and partly by the action of the beaten forces
of the insurgents ; but the horrors of the cold-blooded
E
�So
massacre which followed, the infamous misdeeds of the
Versailles troops, with such monsters as Gallifet at
their head, and the fearful scenes on the plain of Satory
have effaced almost all memory of the errors of the
vanquished. Once more “ order *’ rose in place of the
best government for the many that Paris had ever seen.
Throughout the world to-day the remembrance of that
fearful struggle and defeat strengthens the determination
of the real leaders of the proletariat revolution.
From that date forward organised Socialism has
made way against many difficulties, the apathy of
Englishmen having largely contributed to check any
real re-commencement of the international movement.
But of late years a change has taken place and the
rapidly growing influence of the Democratic Federation
shows that an avowed Socialist propaganda of an
international character has at last taken root in this
country.
What we have to face now is a bitter class antagon
ism between the classes who own the means of
production which they use to enslave their fellows to
those means of production and the labourers who are
thus economically and socially enslaved. With these
labourers must be numbered a large portion of the lowest
middle-class who practically depend upon and are a
portion of the proletariat, certain of the intellectual
proletariat, clerks, &c., who are learning how they are
being exploited themselves by their employers, and the
domestic servants, whose servile, degraded position will
be felt more and more as education spreads. Here is
the last class antagonism, which indeed is world-wide—
the antagonism between the slaves of the machine, the
�mere social engines for producing surplus value and
contributing to luxury, against the capitalist class and
their hangers-on, the landlords. All other antagonisms,,
complicated as they were, have now faded into this
one simple unmistakeable hostility of clearly defined
inimical interests between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie.
Proletariat production—capitalist appropriation:
workers make—traders take. Socialised production ;
individual exchange. Work in concert: exchange at
war. Supremacy of town: subservience of country.
Overcrowded cities: empty fields.
Such are the
briefest possible statements of the economical and
social forms which result in our present anarchy, not
for one class alone, though that suffers far the most, but
for all. And the system as a whole, is now world-wide,,
though in different shapes. Capital dominates the
planet, acts irrespective of all nationalities, grabs itsprofits irrespective of all creeds and conditions:
capital is international, unsectarian, destitute of regard,
for humanity or religion. The proletariat must learn
from the system which they have to overthrow to be
equally indifferent to class, creed or colour, religion or
nationality, so long as the individuals sink their
personal objects in a resolute endeavour against the
common enemy. Unite ! for this we educate, to this,
end we agitate, to achieve a certain victory for all we
organise. Unite ! Unite ! Unite !
But we are all only working in a great economical
movement, which we can help in some degree to
advance or retard, but which will proceed whatever we
do to push on or to hinder. The very conditions o£
�52
production are bringing about changes in spite of the
efforts of the capitalist class themselves. It has been
found necessary to use the power of the State more and
more to check the unbridled greed of the classes who
confiscate labour. Even the middle-class debating club
at Westminster, which passes muster as the English
House of Commons, has found itself compelled by the
exigencies of the case to interpose between the employers
and their wage-slaves, between the Irish landlords and
their serfs, between adulterating poisoners and their
victims. The domain of laissez-faire, the hideous realm
of mis-rule, has been invaded year by year by the State,
controlled though it is by the oppressing classes,
because some steps were absolutely essential to save the
mass of the population from utter physical, moral and
intellectual deteroriation. Education Acts, Irish Land
Acts, Employers’ Liability Acts, Factory Acts, Artisans’
Dwellings Acts, these and others, are direct evidence of
the tendency to limit that unrestrained free contract so
dear to the capitalist slave-driver of modern times.
They are but half-way measures at best. What more
could they be when enacted, administered and applied
by the very classes which, according to the debased
estimate of the aims and pleasures of life commonly held
among those classes themselves, have most to lose by a
thorough reorganisation ? But their very appearance
•on the Statute Book proves that the era of middle
class rule, and the period of working class apathy are
alike coming to an end.
The fear of pressure from without of a threatening
kind leads the luxurious classes to try to negotiate.
Bankrupt of ideas, destitute of principles, their one
�53
endeavour is to compromise on favourable terms. But
for us no compromise is possible which shall carry with
it the continuance of the present misery.
Yet again we see the power of the State extending.
It organises as well as orders, developes as well as
restrains. This too in despite of huckster economy and
huckster economists, whose principal professors are
forced to eat their own words as administrators and to
stultify their teaching as thinkers by sheer pressure of
the course of events. At this hour the State is by far
the largest employer of labour in the kingdom. The
Post Office, the Telegraphs, the Parcels Post, the State
Banks, the Arsenals, the Dockyards, the Clothing
Establishments, the Army and Navy, are all managed
by the State, and administered by State officials, who
organise the labour below. The objection to the system
is not inefficiency nor even extravagance, but the fact
that those who labour are brought into competition
with the lowest wages outside; and that the profits of
their production or distribution are used by the State
to reduce the taxation which has to be paid by the
middle class.
But in this direction lies the best prospect for reform
and re-organisation without bloodshed. The Railways,
the Shipping Companies, the great Machine Factories,
are even now ready to be handled by the State through
their present officials, but under the direct control of
the producing class (which will comprise the whole
community) and without the endeavour to exact a
profit at the expense of the overwork of the em
ployes as is at present the case. Shareholders and
factory lords have no more power, as assuredly they
�54
have no more right, than landlords to keep back that
organisation of the labour of all, for the benefit of
all, which is the only possible outlet from our pre
sent anarchical system of production for profit and
never-ending round of commercial crises, due to the
revolt of the socialised method of production against
the individualised form of exchange.
When a glut of goods exists on one hand, and men
■eager for those goods and anxious to work stand idle
and foodless on the other, when these two factors of
well-being cannot be brought together because of the
necessity to produce for profit which the very glut
itself prevents, surely anarchy in production and exchange
has been driven to the last ditch of absurdity. When
hundreds of thousands of children are brought into the
world under such conditions that good food, good
health, good education, are for them impossible, the
essential foundations though all three are of true
morality and sound citizenship in later life, surely here
too the anarchy in our commonest social relations is
clearly manifested. When also we look around at the
complete divison between classes, their utter ignorance
of what one another think and feel, the incapacity of
men and women of different classes to sit comfortably
at the same meal table, though of the same race,
language and creed, here, even apart from the necessary
antagonism of economical interests, the social anarchy
which the middle-classes call order once more stares us
in the face.
After these instances of disintegration and disorder,
the ugliness, waste, and adulteration seem comparatively
trifling. Yet so long as competitive commerce and
�55
production for profit continue, based upon wage
slavery below, no change for the better can be
wrought. As capitalism saps :all healthy social
relations and reduces even the closest connection
between the sexes to a mere question of bargain and
sale, so it threatens to destroy the springs of all art, that
is of the external beauty of life, and to reduce the
world to a state of barbarism ; a threat which can only
be met by the demands of social order for the com
munising of exchange and the means of production,
so that labour may be freed from the merely useless
toil in which it is to a large extent at present employed,
so that while machinery is used for performing labour
repulsive to men, the intelligence of the workmen may
be made available for the higher needs of the community,
so that the greater and better part of productive labour
may become a voluntary, reasonable and pleasureable
exercise of the human faculties, instead of a compulsory,
degrading and unhappy struggle for existence, human
in nothing save its suffering, the tragedy of the battle
against starvation.
How then would individuality, that unceasing cry
of the bore and the dullard, be stunted by a
system which should leave full play to the highest
faculties of every man in return for trifling, pleasant
social labour, nay, which should develope those facul
ties for all classes far more than they are developed
to-day ? Under such a system, where mankind
collectively controlled their means of production, with
•machinery ever improving by the genius of their fellows,
but used for instead of against the mass of the human
race, men would at length be really free in every sense
�56
economical, social, and political, save that they
would no longer possess the freedom to enslave and
embrute their fellow men. Individuality is crushed to
day in every direction. The poor slave to the machine,
the overworked hind or domestic drudge have no time
for individuality, no strength left for their own education
or development. Under our present system there is no
individuality for the mass of mankind.
For re-construction and re-organisation, therefore, we
Socialists continually strive, looking to the completest
physical, moral and intellectual development of every
human being as the highest form of the social state, as
the best and truest happiness for every individual and for
every class, where, as none need overwork, so none
shall be able to force others to work for their profit.
And this is Utopian ! Nay; it was utopian perhaps, when
the powers of man over nature were trifling compared
with what they are to-day, and mere division of labour
almost necessarily involved the formation of castes and
classes. But now steam, electricity, the forces growing
daily under our hand, render equality a necessity unless
barbarism and bootless destruction are to come upon
us in our very midst. For as ideas grow, as education
spreads, so does the knowledge of how to turn the
increasing powers of devastation to account increase
among the needy and the oppressed. Gunpowder
helped to sweep away feudalism with all its beauty and
all its chivalry, when new forms arose from the decay of
the old; now far stronger explosives are arrayed
against capitalism; while the ideas of the time are as
rife with revolution as they were when feudalism fell.
To avoid alike the crushing anarchy of to-day and the
�57
fierce anarchy of to-morrow, we strive to help forward
the workers to the control of the State, as the only means
whereby such hideous trouble can be avoided, and
production and exchange can be organised for the
benefit of the country at large. Thus, therefore, we
propose that all should have the vote ; not that the vote
will free them from economical oppression, but because
in this way alone is a peaceable issue possible for the
possessing classes. It is better for them to yield to the
vote of organised numbers than to the victory of even
organised force.
What then are our objects at this hour ? Some of
them we have already stated. We can but point the
road that we believe will be travelled in the near future.
To assert definitely that this or that step must be taken
at any given time would be directly contrary to our
general principles, which depend for their full develop
ment upon the reasoning action ot the class still to be
set free. Forms of government, political devices, party
arrangements, the devious tricks of faction, we contemn
as useless or denounce as harmful. The only end
to be sought in the organisation and representation of
the people is the domination by the people of all
social forces now and in the future. We claim then the
land for the people, that the soil of our country with
whatever is useful or beautiful in or upon it, should no
longer be held by a small minority for their aggrandise
ment and greed, but that it should be owned by all for
all collectively, to be occupied, cultivated, enjoyed,
mined or built over as the majority of the people shall see
fit to ordain. That the economical forms are not yet
fully ready for the completest development of agricul-
�58
rural management is no reason why a handful of persons
should draw vast revenues from a monopoly fraudulently
seized from their countrymen ; still less why the land in
towns, and the minerals below the land in country should
be held for the benefit of the few.
But Socialists have no factious prejudices, and are
influenced by no jealousies of a clique. We call there
fore also for the immediate management and ownership
of the railways by the State, so that the inland
communications of the country may be under the control
of the people at large, and carried on for their benefit,
regard being had to the full remuneration of the labour
of all who are engaged in the work of transport. Here
is no difficulty beyond the prejudice born of a flagitious
monopoly, wrongfully granted by the landlord and
capitalist House of Commons in favour of the capitalist
class. Labour made the railways, and living labour is
confiscated daily to pay interest to the labour of the
dead. It would be far better and easier for the State as
the organised representative of a thorough democratic
community to manage the railways through the present
paid officials than to leave them under the control of a
coterie of political and social adventurers, who use their
railways to serve their politics, and their politics to serve
their railways.
As with railways so with shipping. There the whole
economical forms are ready, in the same way, for
immediate management by the State, and the transfer,
could be arranged almost without a hitch. With mines,
factories, and workshops more direct interest by the
workers engaged in them would be needed, but as
education extends, and the habit of economical collective
�59
freedom grows, it will be as easy for the labourers to
choose their own superintendents, and apply the best
machinery, as it is for the capitalist to choose and use
them to-day. The inventor, the organiser, the manager
are not the people who sweep off the bulk of the surplus
value made by labour as it is, but the idle, useless
capitalists who sit at home and appropriate other men’s
work by means of social conventions which they them
selves have formulated, and they themselves give effect
to by force of law.
Similarly the handling of money and credit must neces
sarily be carried on in future for the advantage of the com
munity at large. National banks, national credit establish
ments, State and Communal centres of distribution for
the purchase and exchange of goods will supplant and
take over the huge enterprises for the gain of a class
which now exercise such enormous influence, and accu
mulate such vast profits under protection of the
middle-class State. As production is inevitably social,
exchange must be social too. Simply as a steppingstone to the attainment of this State organisation of
production and exchange do we advocate the heaviest
cumulative taxation rising upon all incomes derived
from trade or business, as well as upon those drawn
from the land. Only by collective superintendence of
production and exchange, only by the scientific organi
sation of labour at home and supply of markets abroad,
can our present anarchy be put an end to, and a better
system be allowed to grow up. Removal and recon
struction must go on together, and at the same time.
The very existence and increase of Companies, the very
development of State management now going on, point out
�II
6o
'
clearly the lines of necessary progress: with the com
plete organisation of democracy the State, in its present
meaning of class predominance, necessarily disappears.
But this is confiscation. Far from it, it is restitution.
Those who cry for compensation for past robbery, and
shriek confiscation because the right to rob in future is
challenged, should bear in mind that the men and
women whom we would compensate are those who are
now stumbling half-clothed and half-fed from a pauper
cradle to a pauper grave, in order that capitalists and
landlords may live in luxury and excess. The dead have
passed beyond compensation : it will be well if the
living do not call for vengeance on their behalf. Our first
principle as Socialists is that all should be well-fed, wellhoused, well-educated. For this object we urge forward
the Revolution which our enemies hysterically shriek at,
and frantically try to dam back. But we mean wrong
to none. Rather would we claim the aid of such of
the luxurious classes as are willing, so long as they have
still enough and to spare, to forego the frightful privilege
of feeding fat upon the wretchedness of others. Good
housing for all cannot be got if greed is to organise the
new arrangements: good food and physical, mental,
and moral education for all classes cannot be obtained
if factitious superiority and harmful social distinctions
are to be kept up.
Therefore, we say once more this is a class war ; we
know it; we are preparing for it; we rejoice at its near
approach. We mean to break down competition, and
to substitute universal organisation and co-operation.
There lie around us the necessary methods: they need
but to be applied. But there are many difficulties and
�6i
dangers, the power of wealth is great, the unscrupulous
ness of property knows no bounds ? We are well aware
of this : we see and do not shrink from the inevitable
struggle.
But the numbers over against us, the
hosts who may be bribed to fight for their oppressors,
even to their own hurt; there are thousands, perhaps
millions, of such men ? There are. We know that too.
But in a cause like ours, we refuse to recognise difficulties, with such misery around us we cannot stop to
calculate forces, with such a future before us we will
never count heads.
The Revolution is prepared in the womb of society, it
needs but one strenous and organised effort to manifest
the new period in legal and acknowledged shape to the
world. To attempt to return to the old forms of
individual production, would be at the same reactionary
and anarchical. We cannot, if we would, so put back the
hands upon the dial of human development. It is nowise
desirable we should. The increased power of man
over nature is gained by co-operation, by social machinery,
by associated labour, by skilfully concerted work. This
has been due to countless ages of growth and develop
ment, involving often the most horrible oppression, but
ever producing more wealth with less labour. We
inherit the results of this long martyrdom of man to the
forms of production and exchange. It is for us to
take hold of and use these improvements for the
enfranchisement of the people, and for the establish
ment of happiness and organised contentment for man
kind. We in England have arrived at the completest
economical development. Our example therefore, will
guide and encourage the world. All over the planet the
�62
same ideas are abroad. In Germany, France, Scandi
navia, Russia, Italy, Spain, far away in the ancient
empires of Asia, as well as in America, and the other
flourishing Colonies of our days, the labourers stretch out
their hands to one another for help, co-operation and
encouragement in the struggle which manifestly draws
near. Confident in their cause the Socialists alone of
modern parties can march steadily forward in inter
national comity, to the assurance of victory for all.
Thus then, based upon science and political economy,
rejoicing in the beauty of an enfranchised art, with our
social creed as our only religion—the scientific organi
sation of labour, and the universal brotherhood of man
we appeal to men and women of all classes, all creeds
and all nationalities to join us in the struggle wherein
none can fail, to prepare for themselves, and for their
children a nobler, higher lot than has hitherto been
theirs, and to pass on to countless generations that joy,
that beauty and that perfect contentment which can
arise from true Socialism alone.
Signed the Executive Committee of the Democratic Federation.
Herbert Burrows.
R. D. Butler.
H. H. Champion,
Hon. Secretary.
W. J. Clark,
Lecture Secretary.
H. A. Fuller.
H. M. Hyndman,
Chairman.
J. L. JOYNES.
Tom. S. Lemon.
James Macdonald.
William Morris,
Hon. Treasurer
James F. Murray.
H. Quelch.
A. Scheu.
Helen Taylor.
John E. Williams.
�THE MODERN PRESS.
16 pp., Crown 8-vo., in wrapper.
SOCIALISM
versus
SMITHISM,
An open letter from H. M. Hyndman to Samuel Smith,
M. P. for Liverpool.
PRICE TWOPENCE.
*** A reply to an attack by Mr. Smith on “ Socialism made
"Plain,” the manifesto issued by the Democratic Federation..
THE NEW BOOK OF KINGS,
By j. Morrison Davidson.
Price 6d.
Henry George says:—" It would be a great thing if it could be scattered
broadcast over England by hundreds of thousands.”
“ Vivacious and trenchant. . . . Is calculated to open the eyes of
people who now worship monarchy as a fetish."—London Echo.
Monthly, Price One Shilling
“TO-DAY,”
THE
SOCIALIST
MAGAZINE.
Amongst the Contributors are
H. M. HYNDMAN,
STEPNIAK,
WILLIAM MORRIS,
W. HARRISON RILEY,
ELEANOR MARX,
EDWARD CARPENTER,
MICHAEL DAVITT,
E. B. AVELING,
PAUL LAFARGUE,
VERA SASSULITCH,
E. BELFORT BAX,
REV. S. D. HEADLAM,
J. L. JOYNES,
WILLIAM ARCHER,
Win. LIEBKNECHT,
&c., &c.
THE ADVENTURES OF A TOURIST IN IRELAND.
By J. L. Joynes.
Second Edition. (Reduced to) Is.
SOCIALISM AND SLAVERY,
A Reply to Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Article on “The Coming
Slavery,” by H. M. Hyndman. Price 6d.
13 and 14, Paternoster Row, London, E.C.
�THE MODERN PRESS.
NOW READY.
PRICE SIXPENCE.
The Working Man’s Programme,
(A RBEITER-PROGRA MM}
By FERDINAND LASSALLE,
Translated hy EDWARD PETERS (late of the Madras Civil Service)
THE COMING FREEDOM,
A Reply to Mr. Herbert Spencer
ON
THE
COMING SLAVERY.
“Out of thine own mouth will I condemn thee.”
PRICE ONE PENNY.
HYMNS OF PROGRESS,
SPECIALLY COMPILED FOR
THE PROGRESSIVE ASSOCIATION.
A Collection of Songs not directly founded on theological
conceptions, nor directly antagonistic thereto, but dealing
solely with the largest and simplest aspects of human life,
human love, and human Dope.
_ _______ Price Twopence.
Cloth Fourpenee.
Demy, 8-vo., in wrapper, One Shilling.
THE
ROBBERY OF THE POOR,
By W. H. P. Campbell,
The writer shows in this pamphlet the justice of the attack
of the Socialists on private property and vindicates the right
to “ expropriate the expropriators.”
13
and
14, Paternoster Row, London, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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A summary of the principles of socialism: written for the Democratic Federation
Creator
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Hyndman, Henry Mayers [1842-1921]
Morris, William
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 62, [2] p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Publisher's advertisements on unnumbered pages at the end. Written for the Democratic Federation.
Publisher
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The Modern Press
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1884
Identifier
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T463
Subject
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Socialism
Rights
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (A summary of the principles of socialism: written for the Democratic Federation), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Socialism
Socialism-Europe
Socialism-Great Britain
William Morris