And as regards the journeyman of all descriptions, in what 
relation does he stand to his employer? All know with what 
opposition the employers met the “Ten Hours” bill. The Tories, 
out of spite for the recent loss of the Corn Laws, helped the 
working class to get it; but when passed, the reports of the district 
supervisors show with what shameless cunning and petty under- 
hand treacheries it was evaded. Every subsequent attempt in 
Parliament to subject Labor to more humane conditions has been 
met by the middle class representatives with the catch-cry of 
Communism! Mr. Cobden has acted thus a score of times. Within 
the workshops for years the aim of the employers has been to 
prolong the hours of labor beyond human endurance, and by an 
unprincipled use of the contract system, by pitting one man 
against another, to cut down the earning of the skilled to that of 
the unskilled laborer. It was this system that at last drove the 
Amalgamated Engineers to revolt, and the brutality of the 
expressions that passed current among the masters at that time 
showed how little of refined or humane feeling was to be looked 
for from them. Their boorish ignorance was further displayed in 
the employment by the Masters’ Association of a certain third-rate 
litterateur, Sidney Smith, to undertake their defense in the public 
press and to carry on the war of words with their revolted hands. 
The style of their hired writer well fitted the task he had to 
perform, and when the battle was over, the Masters, having no 
more need of literature or the press, gave their hireling his congé. 
Although the middle class do not aim at the learning of the old’ 
school, they do not for that cultivate either modern science or 
literature. The ledger, the desk, business, that is education 


664 Appendix 


sufficient. Their daughters, when expensively educated, are 
superficially endowed with a few ‘ ‘accomplishments;” but the real 
education of the mind and the storing it with knowledge is not 
even dreamed of. . 

The present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, 
whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more 
political and social truths than have been uttered by all the 
professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together, have 
described every section of the middle class from the “highly 
genteel” annuitant and Fundholder who looks upon all sorts of 
business as vulgar, to the little shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk. And 
how have Dickens and Thackeray, Miss Bronté and Mrs. 
Gaskell painted them? As full of presumption, affectation, petty 
tyranny and ignorance; and the civilized world has confirmed 
their verdict with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this 
class that ‘ ‘they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those 
beneath them.” 

The cramped and narrow sphere in which they move is to a_ 
certain degree due to the social system of which they form a part. 
As the Russian nobility live uneasily betwixt the oppression of the 
Czar above them and the dread of the enslaved masses below 
them, so the. English middle class are hemmed in by the 
aristocracy on the one hand and the working classes on the other. 
Since the peace of 1815, whenever the middle class have wished to 
take action against the aristocracy, they have told the working 
classes that their grievances were attributable to some aristocratic 
privilege and monopoly. By this means the middle class roused the 
working classes to help them in 1832 when they wanted the 
Reform Bill, and, having got a Reform Bill for themselves, have ever 
since refused one to the working classes—nay, in 1848, actually 
stood arrayed against them armed with special constable staves. 
Next, it was the repeal of the Corn Laws that would be the 
panacea for the working classes. Well, this was won from the 
aristocracy, but the “good time” was not yet come, and last year, 
as if to take away the last possibility of a similar policy for the 
future, the aristocracy were compelled to accede to a tax on the 
succession to real estate—a tax which the same aristocracy had 
selfishly exempted themselves from in 1793, while they imposed it 
on the succession to personal estate. With this rag of a grievance 
vanished the last chance of gulling the working classes into the 
belief that their hard lot was due solely to aristocratic legislation. 
The eyes of the working classes are now fully opened: they begin 
to cry: “Our St. Petersburg is at Preston!” Indeed, the last eight 


Appendix 665 


months have seen a strange spectacle in the town—a standing 
army of 14,000 men and women subsidized by the trades unions 
and workshops of all parts of the United Kingdom, to fight out a 
grand social battle for mastery with the capitalists, and the 
capitalists of Preston, on their side, held up by the capitalists of 
Lancashire. 

Whatever other shapes this social struggle may hereafter 
assume, we have seen only the beginning of it. It seems destined 
to nationalize itself and present phases never before seen in 
history; for it must be borne in mind that though temporary 
defeat may await thé working classes, great social and economical 
laws are in operation which must eventually insure their triumph. 
The same industrial wave which has borne the middle class up 
against the aristocracy, is now assisted as it is and will be by 
‘emigration bearing the working classes up against ‘the middle 
classes. Just as the middle class inflict blows upon the aristocracy, 
so will they receive them from the working classes. It is the 
instinctive perception of this fact that already fetters the action of 
that class against the aristocracy. The recent political agitations of 
the working classes have taught the middle class to hate and fear 
overt political movements. In their cant, “respectable men don’t 
join them, Sir’. The higher middle classes ape the aristocracy in 
their modes of life, and endeavor to connect themselves with it. 
The consequence is that the feudalism of England will not perish 
beneath the scarcely perceptible dissolving processes of the middle 
class; the honor of such a victory is reserved for the working 
classes. When the time shall be ripe for their recognized entry 
upon the stage of political action, there will be within the lists 
three powerful classes confronting each other—the first represent- 
ing the land; the second, money; the third, labor. And as the 
second is triumphing over the first, so, in its turn, it must yield 
before its successor in the field of political and social conflict.