with the greater part of their requirements in manufactured 
articles. No wonder, therefore, that England’s industrial progress 
was colossal and unparallelled, and such that the status of 1844 
now appears to us as comparatively insignificant, almost primitive. 

And in proportion as this increase took place, in the same 
proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moral- 
ised. The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by 
means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. 
Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; the 
manufacturing millionaire had to know better than waste his time 
on petty tricks of this kind. Such practices were good enough, at 
best, for small fry in need of money, who had to snap up every 
penny in order not to succumb to competition. Thus the rruck 
SYSTEM was suppressed, the Ten-Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a 
number of other secondary reforms introduced—much against 
the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as 
much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his 
less favoured brother. 

Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of 
workers, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every 
conflict with the workers and thus a new spirit came over the 
manufacturers, especially the largest ones, which taught them to 
avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and 
power of Trades Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes—at 
opportune times—a powerful means to serve their own ends. The 
largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the 
working class, were now the foremost to preach peace and 
harmony. And for a very good reason. 

All these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing 
else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the 
hands of the few and crushing the smaller competitors, who could 
not survive without extra receipts of this sort. To these few, the 
petty accessory extortions of earlier years had not only lost all 
significance but had turned, as it were, into hindrances to 
large-scale business. Thus the development of production on the 
basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed—at least in the 
leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is 
far from being the case—to do away with all those minor 
grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier 
years. And thus it renders more and more evident the great 
central fact that the cause of the miserable condition of the 
working class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in 
the capitalistic system itself. The worker sells to the capitalist his 

labour-force for a certain daily sum. After a few hours’ work he 
has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance of his 
contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete 
his working-day; and the value he produces during these 
additional hours of surplus labour is surplus value, which costs the 
capitalist nothing, but yet goes into his pocket. That is the basis of 
the system which tends more and more to split up civilised society 
into a few Rothschilds and Vanderbilts, the owners of all the 
means of production and subsistence, on the one hand, and an 
immense number of wage-workers, the owners of nothing but 
their labour-force, on the other. And that this result is caused, not 
by this or that secondary grievance, but by the system itself—this 
fact has been brought out in bold relief by the development of 
capitalism in England. 

Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and 
other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent 
necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save 
himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accord- 
ingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either 
disappeared or have been made less conspicuous. Drainage has 
been introduced or improved, wide avenues have been opened out 
athwart many of the worst “slums”. “Little Ireland” had 
disappeared, and the “Seven Dials”**° are next on the list for 
sweeping away. But what of that? Whole districts which in 1844 I 
could describe as almost idyllic have now, with the growth of the 
towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort, and 
misery. Only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longer 
tolerated. The bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art 
of hiding the distress of the working class. But that, in regard to 
their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place is 
amply proved by the Report of the Royal Commission “on THE 
Housing oF THE Poor’, 1885." And this is the case, too, in other 
respects. Police regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but 
they can only hedge in the distress of the workers, they cannot 
remove it. 

But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of 
capitalist exploitation described by me, other countries have only 
just attained it. France, Germany, and especially America, are the 
formidable competitors who, at this moment—as foreseen by me 

in 1844—-are more and more breaking up England’s industrial 
monopoly. Their manufactures are young as compared with those 
of England, but increasing at a far more rapid rate than the latter; 
and they have at this moment arrived at about the same phase of 
development as English manufacture in 1844. With regard to 
America, the parallel is indeed most striking. True, the external 
surroundings in which the working class is placed in America are 
very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and the 
results, if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same 
order. Hence we find in America the same struggles for a shorter 
working-day, for a legal limitation of the working-time, especially 
of women and children in factories; we find the Truck system in full 
blossom, and the corrace system,”*’ in rural districts, made use of by 
the “sosszs”, the capitalists and their agents, as a means of 
domination over the workers. When I received, in 1886, the 
American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 
Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district,”*? I seemed 
but to read my own description of the North of England colliers’ 
strike of 1844.* The same cheating of the workpeople by false 
measure; the same Truck system; the same attempt to break the 
miners’ resistance by the capitalists’ last, but crushing, resource— 
the eviction of the men out of their dwellings, the cottages owned 
by the companies. 

Neither here nor in the English editions did I try to update the 
book, i.e. to list one by one the changes that have taken place since 
1844. I did not do it for two reasons. Firstly, I would have had to 
double the volume of the book. And secondly, Volume One of 
Marx’s Capital gives a detailed description of the condition of the 
British working class for about 1865, i.e. the time when Britain’s 
industrial prosperity had reached its peak. I would therefore have 
had to repeat what Marx says. 

It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general 
theoretical standpoint of this book—philosophical, economical, 
political—does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. 
Modern international socialism, since fully developed as a science, 
chiefly and almost exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not 
as yet exist in 1844. My book represents one of the phases of its 
embryonic development; and as the human embryo, in its early 
stages, still reproduces the gill-arches of our fish-ancestors, so this 
book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of modern 

socialism from one of its ancestors, German classical philosophy. 
Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that communism is not a 
mere party doctrine of the working class, but a theory compassing 
the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class, 
from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the 
abstract, but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. 
So long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any 
‘emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the 
working class, so long the social revolution will have to be 
prepared and fought out by the working class alone. The French 
bourgeois of 1789,? too, declared the emancipation of the 
bourgeoisie to be the emancipation of the whole human race; but 
the nobility and clergy would not see it; the proposition—though 
for the time being, with respect to feudalism, an abstract historical 
truth—soon became a mere sentimentalism, and disappeared 
from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary struggle. And 
to-day, the very people who, from the “impartiality” of their 
superior standpoint, preach to the workers a socialism soaring 
high above their class interests and class struggles—these people 
are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they 
are the worst enemies of the workers—wolves in sheep’s clothing. 

The recurring period of the great industrial crisis is stated in 
the text as five years. This was the period apparently indicated by 
the course of events from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history 
from 1842 to 1868 has shown that the real period is one of ten 
years; that the intermediate revulsions were secondary, and had 
been increasingly disappearing from 1842 onwards. Since 1868 the 
state of things has changed again, of which more anon. 

I have taken care not to strike out of the text the many 
prophecies, amongst others that of an imminent social revolution 
in England, which my youthful ardour induced me to venture 
upon. The wonder is, not that a good many of these prophecies 
proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved right, and 
that the critical state of English trade, to be brought on by 
Continental and especially American competition, which I then 
foresaw—though in too short a period—has now actually come to 
pass. In this respect I am bound to bring the book up to date, by 
placing here an article which appeared in the London Commonweal 

of March 1, 1885, in English and in Neue Zeit in June of the same 
year (Issue 6) in German.”*° 

“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 clamoured 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 pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen 
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 when Chartism was bound to 
assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally before even it 
collapsed externally, on the 10th of April, 1848.7°* The action of 
the working class was thrust into the background. The capitalist 
class triumphed along the whole line. 

“The Reform Bill of 18317 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 capitalist 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, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc. Free Trade 
meant the readjustment 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’*”*; 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 Continent. 
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 perpetuated. 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 manufactur- 
ers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into 
acts regulating almost all trades was tolerated. Trades Unions, 
hitherto 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 nefari- 
ous up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally 
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 Qualification and Vote by Ballot are now the 
law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 18847 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 bedfellows 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 
independent and united Italy, Bismarck had to revolutionise 
Germany and to restore Hungarian independence, and the 
English manufacturers 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 constitu- 
tion and endowed them with a moral superiority, enhanced 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 labour 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 & Giffen (and also the worthy Lujo 
Brentano), 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 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 everspreading 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 labour-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 wherever 
there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries besides 
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 consequence. 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 calicos, 
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 manufacturers, 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 Pal- 
grave, the President of the Economic 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 workpeople 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 
capitalistic 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 but 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.” 

So I wrote in 1885. In the Preface to the English edition written 
on January 11, 1892 I continued: 

“To this statement of the case, as that case appeared to me in 1885, 
I have but little to add. Needless to say that to-day there is indeed 
‘Socialism again in England’, and plenty of it—Socialism of all 
shades: Socialism conscious and unconscious, Socialism prosaic and 
poetic, Socialism of the working class and of the middle class, for, 
verily, that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only 
become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and 
lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses. That shows the incurable 
fickleness of that terrible despot of ‘society’, middle-class public 

opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we Socialists 
of a past generation always held that public opinion. At the same 
time we have no reason to grumble at the symptom itself. 

“What I consider far more important than this momentary 
fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of 
Socialism, and even more than the actual progress Socialism has 
made in England generally, that is the revival of the East End of 
London. That immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant 
pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid despair, has 
returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the 
‘New Unionism’, that is to say, of the organisation of the great 
mass of ‘unskilled’ workers. This organisation may to a great 
extent adopt the form of the old Unions of ‘skilled’ workers but 
it is essentially different in character. The old Unions preserve the 
traditions of the time when they were founded, and look upon the 
wages system as a once-for-all established, final fact, which they at 
best can modify in the interest of their members. The new Unions 
were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages 
system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were 
Socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose 
adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down 
upon by the working-class aristocracy; but they had this immense 
advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the 
inherited ‘respectable’ bourgeois prejudices which hampered the 
brains of the better situated ‘old’ Unionists. And thus we see now 
these new Unions taking the lead of the working-class movement 
generally, and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud 
‘old’ Unions. 

“Undoubtedly, the East Enders have committed colossal blun- 
ders; so have their predecessors, and so do the doctrinaire 
Socialists who pooh-pooh them. A large class, like a great nation, 
never learns better or quicker than by undergoing the consequ- 
ences of its own mistakes. And for all the faults committed in past, 
present and future, the revival of the East End of London remains 
one of the greatest and most fruitful facts of this fin de siécle, and glad 
and proud I am to have lived to see it.” 

Since I wrote the above, six months ago, the English 
working-class movement has again made a good step forward. The 
parliamentary elections which took place a few days ago gave both 
the official parties, Conservative as well as Liberal, notice in due 
form that from now on one and the other will have to reckon with 
a third party, the workers’ party. This workers’ party is now only 

in the process of formation; its elements are still engaged in 
shaking off traditional prejudices of all kinds—bourgeois, old 
trade-unionist, indeed, even doctrinaire-socialist—in order to be 
able to get together at last on ground common to all of them. And 
yet the instinct to unite which they followed was already so strong 
that it produced election results hitherto unheard-of in England. 
In London two workers’ have stood for election, and openly as 
Socialists at that; the Liberals did not dare to put up one of theirs 
against them, and the two Socialists have won by an overwhelming 
and unexpected majority. In Middlesbrough a workers’ candidate” 
has stood against a Liberal and a Conservative and been elected in 
the teeth of both; on the other hand, the new workers’ candidates 
who allied themselves with the Liberals have been hopelessly 
defeated, with the exception of a single one. Among those who so 
far have been called workers’ representatives, that is, those who 
are forgiven their quality of workers because they themselves 
would willingly drown it in the ocean of their liberalism, the most 
significant representative of the old Unionism, Henry Broadhurst, 
has suffered a striking defeat because he declared himself against 
the eight-hour day. In two Glasgow, one Salford, and several other 
constituencies, independent workers’ candidates stood against 
candidates of the two old parties; they were beaten, but so were 
the Liberal candidates. Briefly, in a number of large-town and 
industrial constituencies the workers have resolutely severed all 
connections with the two old parties and thus achieved direct or 
indirect successes such as they had never scored in any election so 
far. And the joy on this account among the workers is boundless. 
For the first time they have seen and felt what they can do when 
they make use of their electoral rights in the interest of their class. 
The superstitious belief in the “great Liberal Party” which had 
kept a hold on the English workers for nearly forty years has been 
destroyed. They have seen by striking examples that they, the 
workers, are the decisive force in England if only they have the 
will and know their own will; and the 1892 elections have been the 
beginning of that knowledge and that will. The workers’ move- 
ment on the Continent will see to the rest: the Germans and the 
French, who are already so strongly represented in parliaments 
and local councils, will keep the spirit of emulation of the English 
sufficiently high by further successes. And if in the not very 
distant future it turns out that this new parliament can get 

nowhere with Mr. Gladstone, nor Mr. Gladstone with this parlia-. 
ment, the English workers’ party will surely be sufficiently 
constituted to put an early end to the seesaw game of the two old 
parties which have been succeeding each other in power and 
thereby perpetuating bourgeois rule. 

F. Engels 
London, July 21, 1892