Neue Oder-Zeitung.  
No. 33, January 20, 1855.  
Midday Edition

X. London, January 16. (On the Commercial Crisis.) The *London Economist* remarks, with reference to the present commercial and industrial crisis:

“Whatever the result in the export of other articles may be, it does not extend to machinery. Instead of declining, the value of machinery exports has increased for 1854 compared with 1853. Other countries, therefore, are presently making use of our machinery. In this respect we no longer possess any advantage over them. France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and the United States are now all great manufacturing countries, and some of them have advantages over us. We have a race to run, and we cannot do so successfully if we tie our legs together. Experience has convinced the whole world that the restrictions invented for the advantage of the landlord injured him himself; that the restrictions invented in favour of the factory owners turned against themselves; and gradually the factory workers, too, will find out that the legal restrictions existing for their benefit can only harm them. It is to be hoped, however, that they will find this out before the above-mentioned countries have made such progress as to be able to shut England out from their own and third markets, and to reduce our factory workers to the most extreme misery.”

Mr. Wilson, the editor of the *Economist* and the factotum in the Treasury of the anointed and unctuous Gladstone, apostle of freedom and place-hunter in one person, a man who on one column of his paper denies the necessity of the state in general, and on the other proves the indispensability of the Coalition Ministry in particular – Mr. Wilson, then, begins his homily with a deliberately falsified fact. The export lists for 1854 contain, namely, a double heading for machinery exports. The first, relating to locomotives for railways, shows that £443,254 worth was exported in 1853, but £525,702 in 1854, which is indeed an increase of £82,448. The second heading, on the other hand, under which all machinery used in factories, and indeed every other kind of machinery except locomotives, is included, shows for 1853: £1,368,254, against £1,271,503 for 1854, thus a decrease of £96,524. Both headings taken together, a decrease of £14,076 therefore emerges. This detail characterises the gentlemen of the Manchester School. They consider the present moment suitable for the abolition of the “restriction” existing in favour of the factory workers, namely the legal limitation of the working hours of young persons under 18, of women, and of children under 12. To achieve such a lofty purpose, the falsification of a few figures is surely permissible. But according to the *Manchester Examiner* – the special organ of the Quaker Bright – and all the trade circulars from the factory districts, “the foreign markets, the customary channels through which the surplus of our manufactures flows off, are groaning under the weight of our over-production and over-speculation.” When such an overstocking of the world market has been reached, in spite of the improvisation of two new gold markets – Australia and California – in spite of the electric telegraph, which has transformed the whole of Europe into one great commercial exchange; in spite of railways and steamships, which have increased communication, and therefore exchange, to an incredible degree – how long would the crisis have been in coming if the factory owners had been free to work 18 hours instead of 11? The sum is too simple to require solving. However, the relative acceleration of the crisis would not have been the only difference. A whole generation of workers would have lost 50 percent of its physical strength, intellectual development, and viability. The same Manchester School that will answer this scruple with:

 “Should this torment torment us  
 Since our pleasure it enhances?”  
roars with sentimental lamentation over the human sacrifices which the war with Russia, which every war, costs! We shall hear Mr. Cobden in a few days at Leeds, protesting against the mutual slaughter of Christian men. We shall hear him in a few weeks in Parliament, protesting against the “restrictions” which hinder the over-rapid consumption of human children in the factories. Does he consider only one of all the heroic deeds justified – that of Herod?

We agree with the Manchester School in so far as legal compulsory restrictions on working hours do not exactly mark a high stage of social development. But we find the fault not in the laws, but in the conditions which make them necessary.