be examined, and it will be found that the increase in the total national wealth was enormous beyond all precedent. Even in years of apparent depression and crisis, the expansion really went on steadily for the benefit of the wellto-do classes. Exports and imports are not a test of prosperity; but public buildings, inhabited houses above a certain rental, the vast development of large factories, the value of real and personal property, the improved communications in every branch the change was marvellous. The amounts insured against fire rose from £230,000,000 for the whole United Kingdom in 1801 to over £800,000,000 in 1848. The increased rental of real property in England and Wales alone in the thirty years, 1815 to 1845, actually amounted to £40,000,000 a year. The total cost of domestic servants-a non-producing class, administering only to the luxuries of others was little less than £50,000,000 a year. The tonnage of vessels trading to British ports had swollen six-fold since the beginning of the century.

That very improvement in means of communication also which had been one of the most marked features of the period, was carried out, not in the interest or under the organised direction of the nation at large, but in a strange hap-hazard competitive fashion, which greatly injured their usefulness and inflamed the cost. Even a thorough middleclass writer, so early as 1845, could not but see the mischiefs of this anarchical policy. Railways were essential to the industrial progress of the country. The development of the home trade, the vast importations of raw material, the unprecedented out-put of our coal and iron mines, following upon the revolution in the methods of manufacture already described, led up to this improvement by a necessary

progression. George Stephenson was like Hargreaves or Crompton, but the happy individual who gave the last practical push to ideas which would have been turned to account almost at the same time if he had never existed.

But by this time the laissez-faire system had gained full control in matters of public business. The State, which should only mean the power of the people organised and used for the good and welfare of the whole community, had come to be regarded as hostile to progress and its influence as sure to be exerted to the general detriment. As a result, sums were spent on the construction of the railway system of England altogether out of proportion to the real necessary cost, legal expenses were piled up to a height which was nothing short of monstrous, landowners were granted vast sums for rights of way, which they had no title whatever to hold against the English people, competing lines were sanctioned which involved the worst kind of waste of labour. More permanently injurious to the country than all, a monopoly was gradually created, arising even out of the nature of this competition, which put the traffic of the country as well as its production under the control of another branch of the great system of capitalism. It was indeed a most short-sighted arrangement this, which the landlord's Parliament began prior to 1832, and the middle-class Parliament has sanctioned ever since. In any case, by the year 1848 the main railway system, as we now know it, was laid down and constructed, though not fully used, and from that time to this the great railway interest in the House of Commons has been the representation of a monopoly which takes its share out of the produce of the country, as a permanent return payable by the labour of the living to the labour of the dead.

There is, however, no need to insist further upon the contrast between the wealth piled up for the luxurious classes between 1760 and 1848, and the miserable conditions created at the same time for the poor. Every record of the period tells the same tale. There were times of less oppression, years when the distress of the people was less deplorable than at others, but in the long run the mass of the workers suffered beyond measure, and the rich went heedlessly on their way. The American War, the great French War, the Reform Bill, the new Poor Law, the Chartist agitation, the Repeal of the Corn Laws, all passed by without affecting in any great degree the position of those who worked for a livelihood. Such reforms and ameliorations as were brought about met with the most vigorous opposition from the capitalist class as a body. Two generations grew up in the manufacturing towns under conditions so fatal to health, strength, morality and education that the mischievous effects of the unregulated oppression are easily traceable, and have been by no means remedied yet.

As the sixteenth century was the period of horror for the vagrant and the labourer, so the fifty or sixty years from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth was the period of utter misery for the men, women, and children of our town proletariat, as well as for the agricultural labourers. Religion, law, justice, humanity were trodden under foot by the landlord and capitalist class, and England became the leader of the great industrial development of our time at the expense of the degradation and embrutement of our working population.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER V.

Economists have a strange way of proceeding. For them there are but two sorts of institutions, those of art and those of nature. Feudal institutions are artificial institutions, bourgeois institutions are natural institutions. They resemble in this respect the theologians who also establish two sorts of religion. Every religion but theirs is an invention of man, whilst their own particular religion is an emanation from God. In saying that the existing relations-the relations of bourgeois production—are natural the economists mean to say that these are the relations in which wealth is created and the productive forces are developed in conformity with the laws of nature. Hence these relations are themselves natural laws, independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history since there have been feudal institutions, and in these feudal institutions are found relations of production quite different from those of bourgeois society, which economists wish to pass off as natural, and consequently eternal.

Feudalism had its proletariat too-serfdom-which contained all the germs of the bourgeoisie. Feudal production also had its two antagonistic elements, which are equally labelled the noble side and the bad side of feudalism, without regard to the fact that it is always the bad side which ends by prevailing over the noble side. It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history by forcing on the class struggle. If at the epoch of the domination of feudalism economists full of enthusiasm for the virtues of chivalry, enamoured of the charming harmony between rights and duties, proud of the patriarchal life of the towns, anxious to maintain the prosperous domestic industry in the country, full of admiration for the development of organised industry by corporations, in short, if the economists in their regard for all that constitutes the noble side of feudalism had proposed to themselves to efface the whole of the shady side of this picture-serfdom, privilege, anarchy-what would have come of it? They would have destroyed all the elements which involved struggle, and would have nipped in the bud the development of the bourgeoisie. They would have proposed to themselves the absurd problem how to eliminate history.

When the bourgeoisie had won the day there was no longer any question of the good or bad side of feudalism. The productive forces which had been developed by it under feudalism were acquired. All

the ancient economical forms, the civil relations which corresponded to them, the political state which was the official expression of the ancient civil society were broken up.

Thus to judge properly of feudal production it must be considered as a method of production founded on antagonism. It must be shown how wealth was produced within this antagonism, how the productive forces were developed at the same time as the antagonism of classes, how one of the classes, the bad side, the nuisance of society, was always increasing until the material conditions of its emancipation had arrived at maturity. Is it not enough to say that the method of production, the relations in which the productive forces are developed are anything rather than eternal laws, that they correspond to a definite development of men and of their productive forces, and that a change in the productive forces of men necessarily brings with it a change in the relations of production? As it is specially important not to be deprived of the fruits of civilisation, of the productive forces already gained, the traditional forms in which they have been produced must be broken. From that moment the revolutionary class becomes conservative.

The bourgeoisie begins with a proletariat which is itself the remains of the proletariat of feudal times. In the course of its historical development the bourgeoisie necessarily develops its own antagonistic character, which at the beginning was more or less disguised, which existed only in a latent shape. As the bourgeoisie is developed, there is developed in its bosom a new proletariat, a modern proletariat: a struggle develops between the proletariat class and the bourgeois class, a struggle which before being felt on the two sides, perceived, appreciated, comprehended, avowed, and proclaimed aloud only manifests itself in the first instance by partial and momentary conflicts, by subversive events. On the other hand, if all the members of the modern bourgeoisie have the same interests, so far as they form a class over against another class, they have opposite antagonistic interests so far as they find themselves face to face with one another. This opposition of interests flows from the economical conditions of their bourgeois life. Every day it becomes therefore clearer that the relations of production in which the bourgeoisie moves, have not a single character, a simple character, but a double-faced character; that in the same relations in which wealth is produced misery is produced also; that in the same relations in which there is development of productive forces there is a force which produces repression; that these relations only produce bourgeois wealth, that is to say wealth for the bourgeois class, by continually destroying the wealth of the individual members of this class, and by producing an ever-increasing proletariat.

The more the antagonistic character is revealed, the more the econo