Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable 
to all appearances by force only. The immense and _ rapid 
development of manufactures had outstripped the extension of 
foreign markets and the increase of demand. Every ten years the 
march of industry was violently interrupted by a_ general 
commercial crash, followed, after a long period of chronic 
depression, by a few short years of prosperity, and always ending 
in feverish over-production and consequent renewed collapse. The 
capitalist class clamored for Free Trade in corn,’ and threatened 
to enforce it by sending the starving population of the towns back 
to the country districts, whence they came: to invade them, as 
John Bright said, not as paupers begging for bread, but as an 
army quartered upon the enemy.’ The working masses of the 
towns demanded their share of political power—the People’s 
Charter '°°; they were supported by the majority of the small 
trading class, and the only difference between the two was 
whether the Charter should be carried by physical or by moral 
force.* Then came the commercial crash of 1847 and the Irish 
famine, and with both the prospect of revolution. 

The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle class. 
The Socialistic pronunciamentoes of the victorious French work- 
men frightened the small middle class of England and disorganised 
the narrower, but more matter-of-fact, movement of the English 
working class. At the very moment Chartism was bound to assert 
itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally, before even it 

collapsed externally on the 10th of April, 1848.5’ The action of 
the working class was thrust into the background. The capitalist 
class triumphed along the whole line. 

The Reform Bill of 1831'°° had been the victory of the whole 
capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn 
Laws'** was the victory of the manufacturing capitalists not only 
over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists 
too whose interests were more or less” bound up with the landed 
interest: bankers, stock-jobbers, fundholders, etc. Free Trade 
meant the re-adjustment of the whole home and _ foreign 
commercial and financial policy of England in accordance with the 
interests of the manufacturing capitalists—the class which now 
represented the nation. And they set about this task with a will. 
Every obstacle to industrial production was mercilessly removed. 
The tariff and the whole system of taxation were revolutionised. 
Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that end of the 
utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening 
of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living of the 
working class; the reduction of the cost of raw material, and the 
keeping down—if not as yet the bringing down—of wages. 
England was to become the “workshop of the world” 160. all other 
countries were to become for England what Ireland already 
was—markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in 
return with raw materials and food. England the great manufac- 
turing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing 
number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands,° revolving around 
her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect! 

The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this 
their great object with that strong common sense and_ that 
contempt for traditional principles which has ever distinguished 
them from their more narrow-minded“ compeers on the Conti- 
nent. Chartism was dying out. The revival of commercial 
prosperity, natural after the revulsion of 1847 had spent itself, 
was put down altogether to the credit of Free Trade. Both these 
circumstances had turned the English working class, politically, 
into the tail of the great Liberal party,’ the party led by the 

manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be per- 
petuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist 
opposition* not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free 
Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt and were 
learning more and more that the middle class can never obtain 
full social and political power over the nation except by the help 
of the working class. Thus a gradual change came over the 
relations between both classes. The Factory Acts,’*' once the 
bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, 
but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was 
tolerated. Trades’ Unions, lately considered inventions of the devil 
himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate 
institutions and as useful means of spreading sound economical 
doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing 
had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found 
out to be occassionally very useful, especially when provoked by 
the masters themselves, at their own time. Of the legal enactments, 
placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with 
regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed. 
And, practically, that horrid “People’s Charter” actually became 
the political programme of the very manufacturers who had 
opposed it to the last. “The Abolition of the Property Qualifica- 
tion”’ and “Vote by Ballot” are now the law of the land. The 
Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884'° make a near approach to 
“universal suffrage,” at least such as it now exists in Germany; the 
Redistribution Bill now before Parliament creates “equal electoral 
districts” —on the whole not more unequal than those of France 
or Germany; “payment of members” and shorter, if not actually 
“annual parliaments” are visibly looming in the distance—and yet 
there are people who say that Chartism is dead. 

The Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its predecessors, 
has had strange bed-fellows and successors.© The very people who 
put it down, have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its 
testamentary executors. Louis Napoleon had to create an independ- 
ent and united Italy, Bismarck had to revolutionise Germany and 
to restore * Hungarian. independence and the English manufactur- 
ers had“ to enact the People’s Charter. 

For England, the effects of this domination of the manufactur- 
ing capitalists were at first startling. Trade revived and extended 
to a degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; 
the previous astounding creations of steam and machinery 
dwindled into nothing compared with the immense mass of 
productions of the twenty years from 1850 to 1870, with the 
overwhelming figures of exports and imports, of wealth accumu- 
lated in the hands of capitalists and of human working power 
concentrated in the large towns. The progress was indeed 
interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in 1857 as well 
as in 1866; but these revulsions were now considered as natural, 
inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to, and 
which always set themselves right in the end. 

And the condition of the working class during this period? 
There was temporary improvement even for the great mass. But 
this improvement always was reduced to the old level by the influx 
of the great body of the unemployed reserve, by the constant 
superseding of hands by new machinery, by the immigration of 
the agricultural population,* now, too, more and more superseded 
by machines. 

A permanent improvement can be recognised for two “pro- 
tected” sections only of the working class. Firstly, the factory 
hands. The fixing by Act of Parliament of their working day 
within relatively rational limits,” has restored‘ their physical 
constitution and endowed them with a moral superiority, en- 
hanced by their local concentration. They are undoubtedly better 
off than before 1848. The best proof is that out of ten strikes they 
make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in their own 
interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production. You 
can never get the masters to agree to work “short time,” let 
manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the workpeople 
to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man. 

Secondly, the great Trades’ Unions. They are the organisations 
of those trades in which the labor of grown-up men predominates, 
or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and 
children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised 
strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the brick- 
layers, are each of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case 
of the bricklayers and bricklayers’ labourers, they can even 

successfully resist the introduction of machinery. That their 
condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no 
doubt and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than 
fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but 
they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They 
form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded 
in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and 
they accept it as final. They are the model working men of Messrs. 
Leone Levi and Giffen,* and they are very nice people indeed 
nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and 
for the whole capitalist class in general. 

But as to the great mass of the working people, the state of 
misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if 
not lower. The East-end of London is an ever-spreading pool of 
stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work, 
and degradation, physical and moral, when in work. And so in all 
other large towns—abstraction made of the privileged minority of 
the workers; and so in the smaller towns and in the agricultural 
districts. The law which reduces the value of labor-power to the 
value of the necessary means of subsistence, and the other law 
which reduces its average price as a rule to the minimum of those 
means of subsistence: these laws act upon them with the irresistible 
force of an automatic engine, which crushes them between its 
wheels. 

This, then, was the position created by the Free Trade policy of 
1847, and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing 
capitalists. But then a change came. The crash of 1866 was, 
indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that 
did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the 
time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 
1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of 
industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of 
longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and 
after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all 
trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years. 
How is this? 

The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that 
England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an 
agricultural world. And the actual fact is that this assumption has 
turned out to be a pure delusion. The conditions of modern 

industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established where- 
ever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries beside 
England: France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia, have 
coals. And the people over there did not see the advantage of 
being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater 
wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set resolutely about 
manufacturing, not only for themselves but for the rest of the 
world; and the consequence is, that the manufacturing monopoly 
enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken 
UP 

But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the pivot of the 
present social system of England. Even while that monopoly lasted 
the markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity 
of English manufacturers; the decennial crises were the conse- 
quence. And new markets are getting scarcer every day, so much so 
that even the negroes of the Congo are now to be forced into the 
civilisation attendant upon Manchester calicoes, Staffordshire 
pottery, and Birmingham hardware. How will it be when 
Continental, and especially American goods, flow in in ever 
increasing quantities— when the predominating share, still held by 
British manufactures, will become reduced from year to year? 
Answer, Free Trade, thou universal panacea? 

I am not the first to point this out. Already, in 1883, at the 
Southport meeting of the British Association,’ Mr. Inglis 
Palgrave, the President of the Economical section, stated plainly 
that 

“the days of great trade profits in England were over, and there was a pause in 
the progress of several great branches of industrial labour. The country might almost 
be said to be entering the non-progressive state.” * 

But what is to be the consequence? Capitalist production cannot 
stop. It must go on increasing and expanding, or it must die. Even 
now, the mere reduction of England’s lion’s share in the supply of 
the world’s markets means stagnation, distress, excess of capital 
here, excess of unemployed work-people there. What will it be 
when the increase of yearly production is brought to a complete 
stop? 

Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles, for capitalist 
production. Its very basis is the necessity of constant expansion, 
and this constant expansion now becomes impossible. It ends in a 

deadlock. Every year England is brought nearer face to face with 
the question: either the country must go to pieces, or capitalist 
production must. Which is it to be? 

And the working class? If even under the unparalleled 
commercial and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1868, they 
have had to undergo such misery; if even then the great bulk of 
them experienced at best a temporary improvement of their 
condition, while only a small, privileged, “protected” minority was 
permanently benefited, what will it be when this dazzling period is 
brought finally to a close; when the present dreary stagnation shall 
not only become intensified, but this its intensified condition shall 
become the permanent and normal state of English trade? 

The truth is this: during the period of England’s industrial 
monopoly the English working class have to a certain extent 
shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very 
unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority 
pocketed most, but even the great mass had at least a temporary 
share now and then. And that is the reason why since the 
dying-out of Owenism there has been no Socialism in England. 
With the breakdown of that monopoly the English working class 
will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally —the 
privileged and leading minority not excepted—on a level with its 
fellow-workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will be 
Socialism again in England. 

Frederick Engels