Friedrich Engels
The English Ten Hours’ Bill

Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Politisch-ökonomische Revue.
H.4, April 1850

The English Ten Hours’ Bill.

The English workers have suffered a significant defeat, and from a quarter from which they least expected it. The Court of Exchequer, one of the four highest courts of England, delivered a judgment a few weeks ago by which the chief provisions of the Ten Hours’ Bill passed in 1847 are as good as abolished.

The history of the Ten Hours’ Bill offers a striking example of the peculiar mode of development of the class antagonisms in England, and therefore merits a closer examination.

It is well known how, with the rise of large-scale industry, an entirely new, boundlessly shameless exploitation of the working class by the factory owners came into being. The new machines made the labour of adult men superfluous; for their supervision they required women and children, who were far more suitable for this business and at the same time cheaper to obtain than the men. Industrial exploitation thus immediately took possession of the whole working-class family and locked it into the factory; women and children had to work day and night without respite until the most complete physical exhaustion laid them low. The pauper children of the workhouses became, with the rising demand for children, a complete article of commerce; from the age of four, even from the age of three, they were auctioned off by the score in the form of apprenticeship indentures to the highest bidding manufacturer. The memory of the shamelessly brutal exploitation of children and women in that period, an exploitation that did not relax so long as there remained a muscle, a sinew, a drop of blood to be exploited, is still very much alive among the older generation of English workers, and many a one of them bears this memory in the shape of a spinal curvature or a mutilated limb, all carry about with them their utterly ruined health. The lot of the slaves on the worst American plantations was golden compared with that of the English workers of that time.

At an early stage, measures had to be taken by the state to curb the completely ruthless frenzy of exploitation of the manufacturers, who trampled underfoot all the conditions of civilised society. These first legal restrictions were, however, extremely inadequate and were soon evaded. It was only half a century after the introduction of large-scale industry, when the stream of industrial development had found a regular bed, only in 1833 was it possible to carry an effective law, which at least put some check on the most crying excesses.

Already since the beginning of this century, a party had formed under the leadership of certain philanthropists, demanding the legal limitation of the working time in the factories to ten hours daily. This party, which in the twenties under the leadership of Sadler, and after his death under Lord Ashley and R. Oastler, continued its agitation up to the actual passing of the Ten Hours’ Bill, gradually united under its banner, besides the workers themselves, the aristocracy and all the factions of the bourgeoisie hostile to the manufacturers. This association of the workers with the most heterogeneous and most reactionary elements of English society made it necessary that the Ten Hours’ agitation be conducted entirely outside the revolutionary workers’ agitation. The Chartists were, to the last man, in favour of the Ten Hours’ Bill; they formed the mass, the chorus in all Ten Hours’ meetings; they placed their press at the disposal of the Ten Hours’ Committee. But not a single Chartist agitated in official community with the aristocratic and bourgeois Ten Hours’ men, or sat on the Ten Hours’ Committee (Short-Time Committee) in Manchester. This committee consisted exclusively of workers and factory overlookers. But these workers were completely broken, worn-out characters, quiet, godly and respectable people, who had a holy abhorrence of Chartism and Socialism, held throne and altar in due respect, and who, too exhausted to hate the industrial bourgeoisie, were only capable of humble veneration of the aristocracy, who at least deigned to interest themselves in their misery. The worker-Toryism of these Ten Hours’ men was the echo of that first opposition of the workers to industrial progress, which sought to restore the old patriarchal state of affairs and whose most energetic expression of life did not go beyond the smashing of machines. Just as reactionary as these workers were the bourgeois and aristocratic chiefs of the Ten Hours’ party. They were without exception sentimental Tories, mostly visionary ideologists, who revelled in the memory of the lost patriarchal cottage exploitation, with its retinue of piety, domesticity, virtue, and narrow-mindedness, with its stable, traditionally inherited conditions. Their narrow skulls were seized with dizziness at the sight of the industrial revolutionary whirlpool. Their petty-bourgeois minds were appalled by the new, magically and suddenly soaring productive forces, which in a few years swept away the most venerable, most inviolable, most essential classes of the previous society and replaced them by new, hitherto unknown classes, classes whose interests, whose sympathies, whose whole way of life and outlook stood in contradiction to the institutions of old English society. These tender-hearted ideologists did not fail to take the field, from the standpoint of morality, humanity, and compassion, against the pitiless harshness and ruthlessness with which this process of social upheaval imposed itself, and, in opposition to this process of upheaval, to set up the stability, the quiet comfort, and the modesty of the decaying patriarchalism as the social ideal.

To these elements there attached themselves, in periods when the Ten Hours’ question attracted public attention, all the factions of society that were injured in their interests or threatened in their existence by the industrial revolution. The bankers, the stockjobbers, the shipowners and merchants, the landed aristocracy, the great West Indian landowners, the petty bourgeoisie, united at such times more and more under the leadership of the Ten Hours’ agitators.

The Ten Hours’ Bill offered an excellent terrain for these reactionary classes and factions on which to ally themselves with the proletariat against the industrial bourgeoisie. While it significantly retarded the rapid development of the wealth, the influence, the social and political power of the manufacturers, it gave the workers a merely material, indeed an exclusively physical advantage. It protected them from the too rapid ruin of their health. But it gave them nothing by which they could become dangerous to their reactionary allies; it gave them neither political power, nor did it alter their social position as wage labourers. On the contrary, the Ten Hours’ agitation kept the workers continually under the influence and partly even under the direction of these their propertied allies, from whom they had been striving more and more to free themselves since the Reform Bill and the rise of the Chartist agitation. It was quite natural, especially at the beginning of the industrial revolution, that the workers, in direct struggle only with the industrial bourgeoisie, attached themselves to the aristocracy and the other factions of the bourgeoisie, by whom they were not directly exploited and who likewise fought against the industrial bourgeoisie. But this alliance adulterated the workers’ movement with a strong reactionary admixture, which only gradually disappears; it gave the reactionary element in the workers’ movement — those workers whose branch of labour still belongs to manufacture and is therefore threatened by industrial progress itself, such as the hand-loom weavers — a significant reinforcement.

It was therefore a piece of good fortune for the workers that in that confused epoch of 1847, when all the old parliamentary parties were dissolved and the new ones not yet formed at all, the Ten Hours’ Bill finally passed. It passed in a series of the most confused divisions, seemingly governed only by chance, in which, with the exception of the determinedly free-trade manufacturers on the one hand, and the enragé protectionist landowners on the other, no party voted in a united and consistent manner. It passed as a chicanery which the aristocracy, a portion of the Peelites and the Whigs, inflicted on the manufacturers in order to take revenge for the great victory which the latter had won in the abolition of the Corn Laws.

The Ten Hours’ Bill not only gave the workers the satisfaction of an indispensable physical need, by protecting their health to some extent from the frenzy of exploitation of the manufacturers. It also freed the workers from the fellowship of the sentimental enthusiasts, from the solidarity with all the reactionary classes of England. Oastler’s patriarchal drivellings, Lord Ashley’s touching assurances of sympathy found no more listeners, since the Ten Hours’ Bill no longer formed the point of these tirades. The workers’ movement now concentrated itself entirely for the first time upon the achievement of the political rule of the proletariat as the first means of transforming the whole existing society. And here they were confronted by the aristocracy and the reactionary factions of the bourgeoisie, just recently still the allies of the workers, as so many furious enemies, as so many allies of the industrial bourgeoisie.

Through the industrial revolution, industry, by the power of which England had conquered the world market and held it in subjection, had become the decisive branch of production for England. England stood and fell with industry, rose and sank with its fluctuations. With the decisive influence of industry, the industrial bourgeoisie, the manufacturers, became the decisive class in English society; the political rule of the industrialists, the removal of all social and political institutions that stood in the way of the development of large-scale industry, became a necessity. The industrial bourgeoisie set to work. The history of England from 1830 to the present is the history of the victories she has won, one after another, over her united reactionary opponents.

While the July revolution in France brought the financial aristocracy to power, the Reform Bill in England, which passed immediately afterwards, in 1832, was precisely the overthrow of the financial aristocracy. The Bank, the national creditors and stock exchange speculators, in a word the money dealers, to whom the aristocracy was deeply indebted, had hitherto, under the motley cloak of the electoral monopoly, ruled England almost exclusively. The further large-scale industry and world trade developed, the more intolerable became their rule, despite individual concessions. The alliance of all the remaining factions of the bourgeoisie with the English proletariat and with the Irish peasants overthrew it. The people threatened a revolution; the bourgeoisie returned its notes to the Bank in masses and brought it to the brink of bankruptcy. The financial aristocracy yielded in good time; its compliance spared England a February revolution.

Friedrich Engels

The English Ten-Hours Bill

The Reform Bill gave all propertied classes of the country, down to the smallest shopkeeper, a share in political power. All factions of the bourgeoisie thereby obtained a legal terrain on which they could assert their claims and their power. The same struggles between the individual factions of the bourgeoisie which have been waged in France under the republic since the June victory of 1848 have been waged in England, in Parliament, since the Reform Bill. It goes without saying that, given the entirely different conditions, the results in the two countries are also different.

Once the industrial bourgeoisie had conquered for itself in the Reform Bill the terrain for parliamentary struggle, it could not but win victory upon victory. With the restriction of sinecures, the aristocratic tail of the financiers was sacrificed to them; with the Poor Law of 1834, the paupers; with the reduction of the tariff and the introduction of the income tax, the tax exemption of the financiers and landowners. With the victories of the industrialists, the number of their vassals multiplied. Wholesale and retail trade became tributary to them. London and Liverpool fell on their knees before free trade, the Messiah of the industrialists. But with their victories their needs, their demands grew.

Modern large-scale industry can only exist on condition of continually expanding, of continually conquering new markets. The infinite ease of the most massive production, the incessant further development and perfection of machinery, and the consequent uninterrupted displacement of capitals and labour-powers compel it to do so. Every standstill here is only the beginning of ruin. But the extension of industry is conditioned by the extension of markets. And since industry, at its present height of development, increases its productive forces disproportionately faster than it can increase its markets, there arise those periodical crises in which, from superabundance of means of production and products, the circulation in the commercial body suddenly comes to a standstill and industry and trade almost completely cease, until the excess of products has found an outlet through new channels. England is the focal point of these crises, whose paralysing effect infallibly reaches the remotest, most hidden corners of the world market and everywhere drags a considerable part of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie down into ruin. In such crises, which, incidentally, demonstrate to all sections of English society their dependence on the manufacturers in the most palpable manner, there is only one means of rescue: extension of the markets, whether by the conquest of new ones or by the more thorough exploitation of the old. Apart from the few exceptional cases in which, as with China in 1842, a hitherto stubbornly closed market is burst open by force of arms, there is only one means of opening up new markets and exploiting the old ones more thoroughly by industrial means: through cheaper prices, i.e., through reduction of the costs of production. The costs of production are reduced by new, more perfect modes of production, by reduction of profit, or by reduction of wages. But the introduction of more perfect modes of production cannot rescue from the crisis, because it increases production, and thus itself necessitates new markets. In a crisis, there can be no question of reducing profit, when everyone is glad to sell even at a loss. The same thing applies to wages, which, moreover, like profit, are determined by laws independent of the will or opinions of the manufacturers. And yet wages form the chief component of the costs of production, and their permanent reduction is the only means of extending the markets and of rescue from the crisis. But wages will fall if the necessaries of life of the worker are produced more cheaply. In England, however, the necessaries of life of the worker were made dearer by protective duties on corn, English colonial produce, etc., and by indirect taxes.

Hence the constant, vehement, general agitation of the industrialists for free trade, and particularly for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Hence the significant fact that from 1842 onwards every trade and industrial crisis brought them a new victory. With the repeal of the Corn Laws the English landowners were sacrificed to them, with the repeal of the differential duties on sugar, etc., the landowners of the colonies, with the repeal of the Navigation Acts the shipowners. At this moment they are agitating for restriction of state expenditure and reduction of taxes, as well as for the admission of that section of the workers to the suffrage which offers the most guarantees. They wish to draw new allies into Parliament in order to conquer direct political rule all the more quickly, by means of which alone they can dispose of the senseless but very costly traditional appendages of the English state machine—the aristocracy, the Church, the sinecures, the semi-feudal jurisprudence. It is unquestionable that the new commercial crisis, which is now very close at hand and which, to all appearances, coincides with new and colossal collisions on the Continent, will at least bring about this advance in English development.

In the midst of these uninterrupted victories of the industrial bourgeoisie, the reactionary factions succeeded in forging the fetter of the Ten-Hours Bill upon it. The Ten-Hours Bill was passed at a moment which was neither one of prosperity nor one of crisis, in one of those intervening periods in which industry is still sufficiently labouring under the effects of overproduction to be able to set only a part of its resources in motion, in which the manufacturers themselves therefore do not work full time. In such a moment, when the Ten-Hours Bill restricted competition among the manufacturers themselves, and in such a moment alone, was it tolerable. But this moment soon gave way to renewed prosperity. The markets, emptied by buying, demanded fresh supplies; speculation revived and doubled the demand; the manufacturers could not work enough. Now the Ten-Hours Bill became an intolerable fetter for industry, which needed more than ever the fullest independence, the most unrestricted disposal over all its resources. What was to become of the industrialists during the next crisis, if they were not permitted to exploit the short period of prosperity with all their might? The Ten-Hours Bill had to fall. If they were not yet strong enough to have it repealed in Parliament, they had to seek to circumvent it.

The Ten-Hours Bill restricted the working time of young people under 18 years of age and of all female workers to ten hours daily. As these and the children are the decisive class of workers in the factories, the necessary consequence was that the factories in general could only work ten hours a day. The manufacturers, however, when prosperity made an increase in the hours of work a necessity for them, found a way out. As had already been the case with children under 14, whose working time is still more restricted, they engaged a few more women and young people than before for relief and relay purposes. In this way they could let their factories and their adult workers work thirteen, fourteen, fifteen hours, without a single one of the individuals falling under the Ten-Hours Bill having worked more than ten hours a day. This was partly contrary to the letter, but even more so to the whole spirit of the law and the intention of the legislators; the factory inspectors complained, the magistrates were divided and gave different judgments. The higher prosperity rose, the louder the industrialists protested against the Ten-Hours Bill and against the interference of the factory inspectors. The Home Secretary, Sir G. Grey, ordered the inspectors to tolerate the relay (or shift) system. But many of them, relying on the law, did not allow themselves to be disturbed by this. At last a glaring case was brought before the Court of Exchequer, and it pronounced in favour of the manufacturers. With this decision the Ten-Hours Bill is factually abolished, and the manufacturers have again become the complete masters of their factories; in a crisis they can work two, three or six hours, in prosperity thirteen to fifteen hours, and the factory inspector may no longer interfere.

If the Ten-Hours Bill was mainly advocated by reactionaries, and exclusively carried through by reactionary classes, we see here that, in the manner in which it was carried through, it was a thoroughly reactionary measure. The whole social development of England is bound up with the development, with the progress of industry. All institutions which hamper this progress, which seek to restrict it or to regulate and control it according to standards lying outside it, are reactionary, are untenable, and must succumb to it. The revolutionary force which has so playfully disposed of the whole patriarchal society of old England, of the aristocracy and the finance bourgeoisie, will certainly not allow itself to be dammed up into the moderate channel of the Ten-Hours Bill. All attempts by Lord Ashley and his associates to restore the fallen Bill by an authentic interpretation will be fruitless, or will, in the most favourable case, achieve only an ephemeral semblance of a result.

And yet for the workers the Ten-Hours Bill is indispensable. It is a physical necessity for them. Without the Ten-Hours Bill the whole English working generation goes physically to ruin. But between the Ten-Hours Bill which the workers demand today and the Ten-Hours Bill which was propagated by Sadler, Oastler and Ashley and carried through by the reactionary coalition in 1847, there is an enormous difference. Through the short duration of the Bill, through its easy destruction—a simple court decision, not even an Act of Parliament, sufficed to annul it—through the subsequent behaviour of their reactionary former allies, the workers have learned what value an alliance with reaction has. They have learned what it avails them to carry through isolated partial measures against the industrial bourgeois. They have learned that the industrial bourgeois are, for the time being, still the class which alone is capable of taking the lead in the movement at the present moment, that it would be futile to work against them in this progressive mission. Despite their direct and by no means dormant enmity against the industrialists, the workers are therefore now much more inclined to support them in their agitation for the complete implementation of free trade, financial reform and extension of the suffrage, than to allow themselves once more to be lured under the banner of the united reactionaries by philanthropic delusions. They feel that their time

… only come when the industrialists have worn themselves out, and for that reason they have the right instinct to accelerate the developmental process which is bound to give the latter supremacy and thereby prepare their own downfall. But on that account they do not forget that in the industrialists they are bringing to power their very own, most direct enemies, and that they can only attain their own liberation through the overthrow of the industrialists, through the conquest of political power for themselves. The repeal of the Ten-Hours’ Bill has given them yet another striking proof of this. The restoration of this bill now only has any meaning under the rule of universal suffrage, and universal suffrage in an England two-thirds of whose inhabitants are industrial proletarians means the exclusive political rule of the working class, together with all the revolutionary changes in social conditions inseparable from it. The Ten-Hours’ Bill for which the workers are now demanding is therefore a quite different one from that just overthrown by the Court of Exchequer. It is no longer an isolated attempt to cripple industrial development; it is a link in a long chain of measures that will turn upside down the entire present form of society and gradually destroy the class antagonisms that have existed up to now; it is not a reactionary but a revolutionary measure.

The effective abolition of the Ten-Hours’ Bill, first by the manufacturers on their own account, and then by the Court of Exchequer, has above all helped to shorten the period of prosperity and accelerate the crisis. But what accelerates the crises likewise accelerates the course of English development and its next goal, the overthrow of the industrial bourgeoisie by the industrial proletariat. The means available to the industrialists for expanding markets and removing crises are very limited. The Cobdenite reduction of state expenditure is either a mere Whig phrase, or, if it is to help even momentarily, it amounts to a complete revolution. And even if it were carried out in the most sweeping, most revolutionary manner – as far as the English industrialists can be revolutionary – how is the next crisis to be met? It is evident that the English industrialists, whose means of production possess an incomparably greater power of expansion than their outlets, are advancing with rapid strides towards the point where their expedients will be exhausted, where the period of prosperity that still now separates each crisis from the next will completely vanish under the weight of the relentlessly pressing, excessively swollen productive forces, where crises will be separated only by short periods of faint, half-slumbering industrial activity, and where industry, trade, the whole of modern society, will have to perish from excess of unusable vital energy on the one side and total emaciation on the other, unless this abnormal condition contained its own remedy within itself, and unless industrial development had simultaneously called forth the class which alone can then take over the direction of society: the proletariat. The proletarian revolution is then unavoidable, and its victory is certain.

That is the regular, normal course of events as it emerges with inevitable necessity from the whole of the present social conditions of England. To what extent this normal course can be shortened in England by continental collisions and revolutionary overhastiness will soon be seen.

And the Ten-Hours’ Bill?

From the moment when the limits of the world market themselves become too narrow for the full development of all the resources of modern industry, when it requires a social revolution to win free play again for its forces – from that moment the restriction of working time is no longer reactionary, no longer a hindrance to industry. On the contrary, it establishes itself quite automatically. The first consequence of the proletarian revolution in England will be the centralisation of large-scale industry in the hands of the state, i.e. of the ruling proletariat, and with the centralisation of industry all those competitive relations will fall away which nowadays bring the regulation of working time into conflict with the progress of industry. And thus the only solution of the Ten-Hours’ question, as of all questions resting on the antagonism between capital and wage-labour, lies in the proletarian revolution.

Friedrich Engels.

Karl Marx

Louis Napoleon and Fould

Neue Rheinische Zeitung,
Politisch-ökonomische Revue.
H.4, April 1850

Louis Napoleon and Fould.

Our readers will recall that in the previous issue we demonstrated how the finance aristocracy in France had come to power again. On that occasion we pointed to the association of Louis Napoleon and Fould for carrying through lucrative stock exchange coups. It has already been remarked that since Fould’s entry into the ministry, Louis Napoleon’s incessant demands for money from the Legislative Assembly suddenly ceased. Since the last elections, however, facts have become known that cast a very glaring light on the sources of income of President Bonaparte. Only one example.

In our account we shall rely principally on the “Patrie”, the decent sheet of the Union électorale, whose owner, the banker Delamarre, is himself one of the most important Paris stock exchange gamblers.

On the occasion of the elections of 10 March a large speculation à la hausse was organised. M. Fould was at the head of the intrigue; the leading friends of order took part in it; the camarilla of M. Bonaparte as well as he himself were interested in it for considerable sums.

On 7 March the 3 per cents rose by 5 centimes, and the 5 per cents by 15 centimes; the Patrie had, namely, made known the result of the preliminary election of the friends of order. This rise was, however, too small for our speculators; things had to be “stoked up”. The Patrie of 8 March, issued the evening before, therefore announced in its Bourse bulletin that not the slightest doubt whatever existed of the victory of the party of order. Among other things it says: “We shall certainly not censure the reserve of the capitalists; yet if there are circumstances in which doubt is not permissible, it is here, after the result obtained in the preliminary election.” – In order to appreciate the influence of the Bourse bulletin and of the communiqués of the Patrie in general upon the Bourse, one must know that it is the actual Moniteur of the present government, and receives official news before the Moniteur. Nevertheless, the coup fails this time.

On the 8th some reports from the army of voting favourable to the Red party become known, and immediately the prices fall. A panic terror seems to seize the speculators; every means must now be mobilised. The Bourse bulletin of the Patrie holds its post; all the journals of the Union électorale are ordered into the fray; a few inaccuracies in insignificant votes are debated with emphasis; one journal publishes on its front page the votes of a regiment that voted monarchically; the republican journals, finally, are compelled to print some official denials, which a few days later prove to be just so many lies.

These combined efforts succeed, on the 9th at the opening of the Bourse, in bringing about a small rise in the government securities, which, however, does not last long. The price remains fairly low until 2 1/2 o’clock; from that moment it rises continuously until the close of the Bourse. The causes of this sudden reversal are blabbed out by the Patrie itself, as follows: “It is asserted that some speculators, very deeply interested in a rise, made considerable purchases near the close of the Bourse in order to make people in the provinces favourably disposed at the moment of the election, and to provoke, through the confidence that the provinces would be seized with, new purchases which were bound to force prices still higher.” This operation amounted to several millions, its result being that the 3 per cents rose by 40 centimes and the 5 per cents by 60 centimes.

So much is clear then: there were speculators who were interested in a rise and who therefore, at the decisive moment, made substantial new purchases in order to bring about a new rise. Who were these speculators? Let the facts answer.

On 11 March a fall on the Bourse. All the attempts of the speculators are powerless against the vacillations of the election results.

On 12 March a new, considerable fall, since the result of the elections is almost known and it is practically certain that the three socialist candidates have an imposing majority. The speculators à la hausse now make a desperate attempt. The Patrie and the Moniteur du Soir publish, under the heading of official telegraphic dispatches, election results from the provinces that were purely invented. The manoeuvre succeeds. In the evening, at Tortoni’s, a slight rise in prices. The only thing now is to continue “stoking”. The Patrie prints the following report: “According to the votes so far known, Citizen de Flotte has only a majority of 341 votes over Citizen J. Foy. This election result may still be decided in favour of our candidate by the votes of the mobile gendarmerie. – It is asserted that the government will present two laws tomorrow to the Assembly, on the press and on electoral meetings, and will demand urgency for them.” The second report was false; only after long hesitation, after protracted consultations with the chiefs of the party of order, and after a ministerial change did the government decide to present these laws. The first report was an even more impudent lie; at the very moment it was published in the Patrie, the government sent a telegraphic dispatch into the departments that de Flotte had been elected.

Nevertheless, the coup succeeded; the securities rose by 1 franc 35 centimes, and the gentlemen speculators realised between 3 and 4 millions. Certainly one cannot take it amiss of the “friends of property” if they seek to grab hold of as much of their fetish as possible in the interests of order and society.

In consequence of this successful dodge the gentlemen speculators became so insolent that they immediately undertook new purchases on the grandest scale and thereby induced a host of other capitalists to buy as well. The rise was so pronounced that even the prospective profits on this transaction were already being traded again on the Bourse. Then on the morning of the 15th came the devastating blow – the proclamation of Carnot, de Flotte and Vidal as people’s representatives; the prices fell suddenly and irresistibly, and the defeat of our speculators could no longer be checked by any fabricated reports or telegraphic inventions.