It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not 
diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivalled 
for the development of its industry and the growth of its 
commerce. In 1850, a moderate organ of the British middle class, 
of more than average information, predicted that if the exports 
and imports of England were to rise 50 per cent, English 
pauperism would sink to zero.’ Alas! on April 7th, 1864, the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer? delighted his Parliamentary audi- 
ence by the statement that the total import and export trade of 
England had grown in 1863 

“to £443,955,000! that astonishing sum [...] about three times the trade of the 
[...] comparatively recent epoch of 1843!” 

With all that, he was eloquent upon “poverty”. 

“Think,” he exclaimed, “of those who are on the border of that region”, upon 
“wages ... not increased”; upon “human life ... in nine cases out of ten but a 
struggle for existence!” 

He did not speak of the people of Ireland, gradually replaced 
by machinery in the north, and by sheep-walks in the south, 
though even the sheep in that unhappy country are decreasing, it 
is true, not at so rapid a rate as the men. He did not repeat what 
then had been just betrayed by the highest representatives of the 
upper ten thousand in a sudden fit of terror. When the garotte* 

Times, No. 24841, April 8, 1864.— Ed. 

panic had reached a certain height, the House of Lords caused an 
inquiry to be made into, and a report to be published upon, 
transportation and penal servitude. Out came the murder in the 
bulky Blue Book? of 1863,* and proved it was, by official facts and 
figures, that the worst of the convicted criminals, the penal serfs 
of England and Scotland, toiled much less and fared far better 
than the agricultural labourers of England and Scotland. But this 
was not all. When, consequent upon the Civil War in America, the 
operatives of Lancashire and Cheshire were thrown upon the 
streets,” the same House of Lords sent to the manufacturing 
districts a physician commissioned to investigate into the smallest 
possible amount of carbon and nitrogen, to be administered in the 
cheapest and plainest form, which on an average might just suffice 
to “avert starvation diseases”. Dr. Smith, the medical deputy, 
ascertained that 28,000 grains of carbon, and 1,330 grains of 
nitrogen were the weekly allowance that would keep an average 
adult ... just over the level of starvation diseases, and he found 
furthermore that quantity pretty nearly to agree with the scanty 
nourishment to which the pressure of extreme distress had 
actually reduced the cotton operatives.* But now mark! The same 
learned Doctor was later on again deputed by the medical officer 
of the Privy Council to inquire into the nourishment of the poorer 
labouring classes. The results of his researches are embodied in 
the “Sixth Report on Public Health”, published by order of 
Parliament in the course of the present year.” What did the Doctor 
discover? That the silk weavers, the needle women, the kid 
glovers, the stocking weavers, and so forth, received,“ on an 
average, not even the distress pittance of the cotton operatives, not 
even the amount of carbon and nitrogen “just sufficient to avert 
starvation diseases”. 

, 

“Moreover,” we quote from the report, “as regards the examined families of the 
agricultural population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the 

* We need hardly remind the reader that, apart from the elements of water 
and certain inorganic substances, carbon and nitrogen form the raw materials of 
human food. However, to nourish the human system, those simple chemical 
constituents must be supplied in the form of vegetable or animal substances. 
Potatoes, for instance, contain mainly carbon, while wheaten bread contains 
carbonaceous and nitrogenous substances in a due proportion. 

estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less 
than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogenous food, and that in three counties 
(Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire) insufficiency of nitrogenous food was 
the average local diet.” “It must be remembered,” adds the official report, “that 
privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that, as a rule, great poorness of 
diet will only come when other privations have preceded it.... Even cleanliness will 
have been found costly or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours 
to maintain it, every such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger.” 
“These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to 
which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness; in all cases it is the 
poverty of working populations. Indeed, [...] the work which obtains the scanty 
pittance of food is for the most part excessively prolonged.” 

The report brings out the strange, and rather unexpected fact, 
“That of the divisions of the United Kingdom”, England, Wales, 
Scotland, and Ireland, “the agricultural population of England”, 
the richest division, “is considerably the worst fed”; but that even 
the agricultural labourers of Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and So- 
mersetshire, fare better than great numbers of skilled indoor 
operatives of the East of London. 

Such are the official statements published by order of Parlia- 
ment in 1864, during the millennium of free trade, at a time when 
the Chancellor of the Exchequer told the House of Commons 
that: 

“The average condition of the British labourer has [...] improved [...] in a 
degree [...] we know to be extraordinary and [...] unexampled [...] in the history of 
any country or any age.’’? 

Upon these official congratulations jars the dry remark of the 
official Public Health Report: 

“The public health of a country means the health of its masses, and the masses 

will scarcely be healthy unless, to their very base, they be at least moderately 
prosperous.” 

Dazzled by the “Progress of the Nation” statistics dancing before 
his eyes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in wild ecstasy: 

“From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country [...] increased by 6 per 
cent; [.:.] in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has increased from the basis 
taken in 1853 20 per cent! the fact is so astonishing to be almost incredible!... This 
intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,” adds Mr. Gladstone, “is entirely 
confined to classes of property!’ 

If you want to know under what conditions of broken health, 
tainted morals, and mental ruin, that “intoxicating augmentation 
of wealth and power entirely confined to classes of property” was, 

on April 16, 1863.— Ed. 

and is being, produced by the classes of labour, look to the picture 
hung up in the last “Public Health Report” of the workshops of 
tailors, printers, and dressmakers!* Compare the “Report of the 
Children’s Employment Commission” of 1863, where it is stated, 
for instance, that: 

“The potters as a class, both men and women, [...] represent a much 
degenerated population, both physically and mentally”, that “the unhealthy child is 
an unhealthy parent in his turn”, that “a progressive deterioration of the race must 
go on”, and that “the degenerescence of the population of Staffordshire would be 

even greater were it not for the constant recruiting from the adjacent country, and 

Glance at Mr. Tremenheere’s Blue Book on the “Grievances 
complained of by the Journeymen Bakers” ‘! And who has not 
shuddered at the paradoxical statement made by the inspectors of 
factories, and illustrated by the Registrar General, that the 
Lancashire operatives, while put upon the distress pittance of 
food, were actually improving in health, because of their 
temporary exclusion by the cotton famine from the cotton factory, 
and that the mortality of the children was decreasing, because 
their mothers were now at last allowed to give them, instead of 
Godfrey’s cordial, their own breasts. 

Again reverse the medal! The Income and Property Tax 
Returns laid before the House of Commons on July 20, 1864, 
teach us that the persons with yearly incomes, valued by the 
tax-gatherer at £50,000 and upwards, had, from April 5th, 1862, 
to April 5th, 1863, been joined by a dozen and one, their number 
having increased in that single year from 67 to 80. The same 
returns disclose the fact that about 3,000 persons divide amongst 
themselves a yearly income of about £25,000,000 sterling, rather 
more than the total revenue doled out annually to the whole mass 
of the agricultural labourers of England and Wales. Open the 
census of 1861, and you will find that the number of the male 
landed proprietors of England and Wales had decreased from 
16,934 in 1851, to 15,066 in 1861, so that the concentration of 
land had grown in 10 years 11 per cent. If the concentration of 
the soil of the country in a few hands proceeds at the same rate, 
the land question will become singularly simplified, as it has 

become in the Roman Empire, when Nero grinned at the 
discovery that half the Province of Africa was owned by six 
gentlemen. 

We have dwelt so long upon these “facts so astonishing to be 
almost incredible”, because England heads the Europe of com- 
merce and industry.* It will be remembered that some months ago 
one of the refugee sons of Louis Philippe publicly congratulated 
the English agricultural labourer on the superiority of his lot over 
that of his less florid comrade on the other side of the Channel. 
Indeed, with local colours changed, and on a scale somewhat 
contracted, the English facts reproduce themselves in all the 
industrious and progressive countries of the Continent. In all of 
them there has taken place, since 1848, an unheard-of develop- 
ment of industry, and an undreamed-of expansion of imports and 
exports. In all of them “the augmentation of wealth and power 
entirely confined to classes of property” was truly “intoxicating”’. 
In all of them, as in England, a minority of the working classes got 
their real wages” somewhat advanced; while in most cases the 
monetary rise of wages denoted no more a real access of comforts 
than the inmate of the metropolitan poor-house or orphan 
asylum, for instance, was in the least benefited by his first 
necessaries costing £9 15s. 8d. in 1861 against £7 7s. 4d. in 1852. 
Everywhere the great mass of the working classes were sinking 
down to a lower depth, at the same rate, at least, that those above 
them were rising in the social scale. In all countries of Europe it 
has now become a truth demonstrable to every unprejudiced 
mind, and only denied by those, whose interest it is to hedge other 
people in a fool’s paradise, that no improvement of machinery,‘ 
no appliance of science to production, no contrivances of 
communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of 
markets, no free trade, nor all these things put together, will do 
away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but that, on the 
present false base, every fresh development of the productive 
powers of labour must tend to deepen social contrasts and point 
social antagonisms. Death of starvation rose almost to the rank of 
an institution, during this “intoxicating” epoch of economical 
progress, in the metropolis of the British Empire. That epoch is 

marked in the annals of the world by the quickened return, the 
widening compass, and the deadlier effects of the social pest called 
a commercial and industrial crisis. 

After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, all party organisa- 
tions and party journals of the working classes were, on the 
Continent, crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced 
sons of labour fled in despair to the Transatlantic Republic, and 
the short-lived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch 
of industrial fever, moral marasme, and political reaction. The 
defeat of the continental working classes, partly owed to the 
diplomacy of the English Government, acting then as now in 
fraternal solidarity with the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, soon spread 
its contagious effects on this side of the Channel. While the rout 
of their continental brethren unmanned the English working 
classes, and broke their faith in their own cause, it restored to the 
landlord and the money-lord their somewhat shaken confidence. 
They insolentl» withdrew concessions already advertised. The 
discoveries of new goldlands led to an immense exodus, leaving an, 
irreparable void in the ranks of the British proletariat. Others of 
its formerly active members were caught by the temporary bribe 
of greater work and wages, and turned into “political blacks”. All 
the efforts made at keeping up, or remodelling, the Chartist 
Movement, failed signally; the press organs of the working class 
died one by one of the apathy of the masses, and, in point of fact, 
never before seemed the English working class so thoroughly 
reconciled to a state of political nullity. If, then, there had been no 
solidarity of action between the British and the continental 
working classes, there was, at all events, a solidarity of defeat. 

And yet the period passed since the revolutions of 1848 has not 
been without its compensating features. We shall here only point 
to two great facts. 

After a thirty years’ struggle, fought with most admirable 
perseverance, the English working classes, improving a momen- 
taneous split between the landlords and money-lords, succeeded in 
carrying the Ten Hours’ Bill.’ The immense physical, moral, and 
intellectual benefits hence accruing to the factory operatives, 
half-yearly chronicled in the reports of the inspectors of factories, 
are now acknowledged on all sides. Most of the continental 
governments had to accept the English Factory Act in more or less 
modified forms, and the English Parliament itself is every year 
compelled to enlarge its sphere of action. But besides its practical 
import, there was something else to exalt the marvellous success of 
this working men’s measure. Through their most notorious organs 

of science, such as Dr. Ure, Professor Senior, and other sages of 
that stamp, the middle class had predicted, and to their heart’s 
content proved, that any legal restriction of the hours of labour 
must sound the death knell of British industry, which, vampire 
like, could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too. In 
olden times, child murder was a mysterious rite of the religion of 
Moloch, but it was practised on some very solemn occassions only, 
once a year perhaps, and then Moloch had no exclusive bias for 
the children of the poor. This struggle about the legal restriction 
of the hours of labour raged the more fiercely since, apart from 
frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest. between 

the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the 
_ political economy of the middle class, and social production 
controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of 
the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great 
practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first 
time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle 
class succumbed to the political economy of the working class. 

But there was in store a still greater. victory of the political 
economy of labour over the political economy of property.* We 
speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative 
factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. 
The value of these great social.experiments cannot be over-rated. 
By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production 
on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, 
may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters 
employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour 
need not be monopolised as a means of dominion over, and of 
extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave 
labour, like serf labour, hired: labour is but a transitory and 
inferior” form, destined to disappear before associated labour 
plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous 
heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown 
by Robert Owen; the working men’s experiments, tried on.the 
Continent, were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not 
invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848. 

At the same time, the experience of the period from 1848 to 
1864 has proved‘ beyond doubt that, however excellent in 

principle, and however useful in practice, co-operative labour, if 
kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private 
workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical 
progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to 
perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. It is perhaps for 
this very reason that plausible noblemen, philanthropic middle- 
class spouters, and even keen political economists, have all at once 
turned nauseously complimentary to the very co-operative labour 
system they had vainly tried to nip in the bud by deriding it as the 
Utopia of the dreamer, or stigmatising it as the sacrilege of the 
Socialist. To save the industrious masses, co-operative labour 
ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, 
to be fostered by national means. Yet, the lords of land and the 
lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the 
defence and perpetuation of their economical monopolies. So far 
from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impedi- 
ment in the way of the emancipation of labour. Remember the 
sneer with which, last session, Lord Palmerston put down the 
advocates of the Irish Tenants’ Right Bill. The House of 
Commons, cried he, is a house of landed proprietors.” 

To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty 
of the working classes. They seem to have comprehended this, for 
in England, Germany, Italy, and France there have taken place 
simultaneous revivals, and simultaneous efforts are being made at 
the political reorganisation of the working men’s party. 

One element of success they possess—numbers; but numbers 
weigh only in the balance, if united by combination and led by 
knowledge. Past experience has shown how disregard of that bond 
of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of 
different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other 
in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by the 
common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts. This thought 
prompted the working men of different countries assembled on 
September 28, 1864, in public meeting at St. Martin’s Hall, to 
found the International Association. 

Another conviction swayed that meeting. 

If the emancipation of the working classes requires their 
fraternal concurrence,” how are they to fulfil that great mission 
with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon 

4 John Palmerston’s speech in the House of Commons on June 23, 1863, The 
Times, No. 24593, June 24, 1863.— Ed. 

national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s 
blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, 
but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working 
classes of England that saved the West of Europe from plunging 
headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and 
propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.’ The 
shameless approval, mock sympathy, or idiotic indifference, with 
which the upper classes of Europe have witnessed the mountain 
fortress of the Caucasus falling a prey to, and heroic Poland being 
assassinated by, Russia; the immense and unresisted encroach- 
ments of that barbarous power, whose head is at St. Petersburg, 
and whose hands are in every Cabinet of Europe, have taught the 
working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of 
international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their 
respective Governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all 
means in their power; when unable to prevent, to combine in 
simultaneous denunciations, and to vindicate the simple laws of 
morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private 
individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations. 
The fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general 
struggle for the emancipation of the working classes. 
Proletarians of all countries, Unite!