The century of revolution has to all appearances passed En- 
gland by, causing little change. While on the Continent an entire 
old world was shattered, while a twenty-five-year war”! cleared the 
air, in England everything remained calm, neither state nor 
church were in any way threatened. And yet since the middle of the 
last century England has experienced a greater upheaval than any 
other country —an upheaval which is all the more momentous the 
more quietly it is brought about, and it will therefore in all 
probability attain its goal more readily in practice than the political 
revolution in France or the philosophical revolution in Germany. 
The revolution in England is a social one and therefore more 
comprehensive and far-reaching than any other. There are no 
fields—however remote—of human knowledge and no conditions 
of life which have not contributed to it and which in turn have not 
been affected by it. The only true revolution is a social revolution, 
to which political and philosophical revolution must lead; and this 
social revolution has already been in progress in England for 
seventy or eighty years and is rapidly approaching its crisis at this 
very time. 

The eighteenth century was the assembling, the gathering of 
mankind from the fragmentation and isolation into which it had 
been driven by Christianity; it was the penultimate step towards 
the self-understanding and self-liberation of mankind, but just 
because it was the penultimate step it was still partial and 
remained within the contradictions. The eighteenth century col- 
lated the results of the past, which had previously been scattered 
and appeared to be fortuitous, and laid bare their necessity 

and inner connection. The jumble of countless scientific discov- 
eries was put in order, classified and the causal connections 
shown; knowledge became science, and the sciences approached 
their perfection, that is to say, they took philosophy on the one 
hand and practice on the other as their point of departure. Before 
the eighteenth century science did not exist; the study of nature 
assumed its scientific form only in the eighteenth century or, in 
some fields, a few years earlier. Newton created scientific as- 
tronomy with the law of gravitation, scientific optics with the 
decomposition of light, scientific mathematics with the binomial 
theorem and the theory of infinity, and scientific mechanics with 
the analysis of the nature of forces. Physics likewise acquired its 
scientific character in the eighteenth century; chemistry was only 
brought into being by Black, Lavoisier and Priestley; geography 
became a science with the establishment of the form of the earth 
and the many voyages which only now were of benefit to science; 
with Buffon and Linné natural history too became a science;. even 
geology gradually began to struggle free from the whirl of fantastic 
hypotheses which threatened to engulf it. The concept of the 
Encyclopaedia was typical of the eighteenth century; it was based 
on the awareness that all these sciences were interconnected but it 
was not yet able to show these connections, so that only a simple 
juxtaposition could be achieved. History was in a similar position; 
now for the first time we find voluminous compilations of world 
history, as yet without any critical comment, and entirely without a 
philosophical approach, but nevertheless universal history instead 
of the previous historical fragments limited both in time and place. 
Politics was given a human foundation, and political economy was 
reformed by Adam Smith. The culmination of science in the 
eighteenth century was materialism, the first system of natural 
philosophy and the consequence of this development of the 
natural sciences. The struggle against the abstract subjectivity of 
Christianity forced the philosophy of the eighteenth century to the 
other extreme; it opposed subjectivity with objectivity, the mind 
with nature, spiritualism with materialism, the abstract individual 
with the abstract universal or substance. The eighteenth century 
represents the revival of the spirit of antiquity as against that of 
Christianity. Materialism and the republic; the philosophy and 
politics of the ancient world, arose anew, and the French, the 
exponents of the ethos of antiquity within Christianity, assumed 
the historical initiative for a time. 

The eighteenth century thus did not resolve the great antithesis 
which has been the concern of history from the beginning and 

The Condition of England, The Eighteenth Century 471 

whose development constitutes history, the antithesis of substance 
and subject, nature and mind, necessity and freedom; but it set 
the two sides against each other, fully developed and in all their 
sharpness, and thereby made it necessary to overcome the an- 
tithesis. The consequence of this clear final evolution of the 
antithesis was general revolution which spread over various na- 
tions and whose imminent completion will at the same time resolve 
the antithesis of history up to the present. The Germans, the nation 
of Christian spiritualism, experienced a philosophical revolution; the 
French, the nation of classical materialism and hence of politics, had 
to go through a political revolution; the English, a nation that is a 
mixture of German and French elements, who therefore embody 
both sides of the antithesis and are for that reason more universal 
than either of the two factors taken separately, were for that reason 
drawn into a more universal, a social revolution. 

This will need to be elaborated in greater detail, for the position of 
nations, at least with regard to recent times, has in our philosophy of 
history so far been dealt with very inadequately, or rather not 
at all. 

That Germany, France and England are the three foremost 
countries at the present moment in history, I can doubtless take 
for granted; that the Germans represent the Christian spiritual 
principle, the French that of classical materialism, in other words, 
that the former represent religion and the church and the latter 
politics and the state, is equally obvious or will be made so in due 
course; the significance of the English in recent history is less 
conspicuous and yet for our present purpose it is the most 
important. The English nation was formed from Germanic and 
Romance people at a time when the two nations had only just 
separated from one another and their development towards the 
two sides of the antithesis had scarcely begun. The Germanic and 
Romance elements developed alongside one another and eventual- 
ly formed one nation which contains the two unmediated sides. 
Germanic idealism retained abundant scope so that it was 
even able to turn into its opposite, abstract externalism; the fact 
that women and children may still be legally sold, and indeed the 
whole mercantile spirit of the English, must definitely be attrib- 
uted to the Germanic element. In a similar fashion, Romance 
materialism turned into abstract idealism, inwardness and piety; 
hence the phenomenon of Romance Catholicism persisting within 
Germanic Protestantism, the Established Church, the papacy of 
the sovereign and the thoroughly Catholic manner of disposing of 
religion with mere formalities. The English nation is characterised 

by this unresolved contradiction and the mingling of the sharpest 
contrasts. The English are the most religious nation on earth and 
at the same time the most irreligious; they worry more about the 
next world than any other nation, and at the same time they live 
as though this world were all that mattered to them; their 
expectation of heaven does not hinder them in the slightest from 
believing equally firmly in the “hell of making no money”. Hence 
the everlasting inner restlessness of the English, which is caused by 
the sense of being unable to resolve the contradiction and which 
drives them out of themselves and into activity. The sense of 
contradiction is the source of energy, but merely externalised 
energy, and this sense of contradiction was the source of colonisa- 
tion, seafaring, industry and the immense practical activity of the 
English in general. The inability to resolve the contradiction runs 
like a thread through the whole of English philosophy and forces 
it into empiricism and scepticism. Because Bacon could not resolve 
the contradiction between idealism and realism with his intellect, 
the intellect as such had to be incapable of solving it, idealism was 
simply discarded and empiricism regarded as the only remedy. 
From the same source derives the critical analysis of cognition and 
the whole psychological tendency within whose bounds English 
philosophy has moved from the outset, and in the end, after many 
unsuccessful attempts at resolving the contradiction, philosophy 
declares it to be insoluble and the intellect to be inadequate, and 
seeks a way out either in religious faith or in empiricism. Humean 
scepticism is still the form all irreligious philosophising takes in 
England today. We cannot know, this viewpoint argues, whether a 
God exists; if one exists, he is incapable of any communication with 
us, and we have therefore so to arrange our practical affairs as if he 
did not exist. We cannot know whether the mind is distinct from the 
body and immortal; we therefore live as if this life were the only 
one we have and do not bother about things that go beyond our 
understanding. In short, this scepticism is in practice exactly the 
same as French materialism, but in metaphysical theory it never 
advances beyond the inability of arriving at any definitive conclu- 
sion. 

However because the English embodied within them both the 
elements which were responsible for historical progress on the 
Continent, they were therefore able, even without having much 
contact with the Continent, to keep abreast of development there 
and at times even to be ahead of it. The English revolution of the 
seventeenth century provides the exact model for the French one 
of 1789. In the “Long Parliament” the three stages which in 

The Condition of England. The Eighteenth Century 473 

France took the form of Constituent and Legislative Assembly and 
National Convention, are easy to distinguish; the transition from 
constitutional monarchy to democracy, military despotism, resto- 
ration and juste-milieu revolution’ is sharply delineated in the 
English revolution. Cromwell is Robespierre and Napoleon rolled 
into one; the Presbyterians, Independents and Levellers corre- 
spond to the Gironde, the Montagnards and the Hébertists and 
Babouvists; in both cases the political outcome is rather pitiable, 
and the whole parallel, which could be elaborated in much greater 
detail, incidentally also proves that a religious and an irreligious 
revolution, as long as they remain political, will in the final analysis 
amount to the same thing. Admittedly, this lead the English had 
over the Continent was only temporary and was gradually evened 
out again; the English revolution ended in juste-milieu and the 
creation of two national parties, whilst the French one is not yet 
complete and cannot be so until it achieves the result which the 
German philosophical and the English social revolutions have to 
achieve as well. 

The English national character is thus substantially different 
both from the German and from the French character; the 
despair of overcoming the contradiction and the consequent total 
surrender to empiricism are its peculiar characteristics. The pure 
Germanic element converted its abstract inwardness into abstract 
outwardness, but this outwardness never lost the mark of its origin 
and always remained subordinate to inwardness and spiritualism. 
The French too are to be found on the side of materialism and 
empiricism; but because this empiricism is the primary national 
tendency and not a secondary consequence of a national con- 
sciousness divided within itself, it asserts itself nationally, generally 
and finds expression in political activity. The Germans asserted 
the absolute justification of spiritualism and hence sought to set 
forth the universal interests of mankind in religious and later in 
philosophic terms. The French opposed this spiritualism with 
materialism as something absolutely justified and consequently 
considered that the state was the eternal manifestation of these 
interests. The English however have no universal interests, they 
cannot mention them without touching that sore spot, the 
contradiction, they despair of them and have only individual 
interests. This absolute subjectivity, the fragmentation of the 
universal into the many individual parts, is admittedly of Ger- 
manic origin, but, as we have said, it is cut off from its roots and 

2 The French revolution of July 1830.—Ed. 

therefore only takes effect empirically, which is precisely what 
distinguishes English social empiricism from French political em- 
piricism. France’s actions were always national, conscious of their 
entireness and universality from the start; England’s actions were 
the work of independent coexisting individuals—the movement of 
disconnected atoms—who rarely acted together as one whole, and 
even then only from individual motives, and whose lack of unity is 
at this very time exposed to the light of day in the universal 
misery and complete fragmentation of society. 

In other words, only England has a social history. Only in 
England have individuals as such, without consciously standing for 
universal principles, furthered national development and brought 
it near to its conclusion. Only here have the masses acted as 
masses, for the sake of their interests as individuals; only here 
have principles been turned into interests before they were able to 
influence history. The French and the Germans are gradually 
attaining a social history too, but they have not got one yet. On the 
Continent too there have been poverty, misery and social oppres- 
sion, this however has had no effect on national development; but 
the misery and poverty of the working class in present-day’ 
England has national and even world-historical jmportance. On 
the Continent the social aspect is still completely hidden by the 
political aspect and has not yet become detached from it, whilst in 
England the social aspect has gradually prevailed over the political 
one and has made it subservient. The whole of English politics is 
fundamentally social in nature, and social questions are expressed 
in a political way only because England has not yet advanced 
beyond the state, and because politics is a necessary expedient 
there. 

As long as church and state are the only forms in which the 
universal characteristics of human nature are realised, there can 
be no question of social history. Antiquity and the Middle Ages 
were also therefore without social development; only the Reforma- 
tion, the first, as yet biassed and blundering attempt at a reaction 
against the Middle Ages, brought about a major social change, the 
transformation of serfs into “free” workers. But even this change 
remained without much enduring effect on the Continent, indeed 
it really took root there only after the revolution of the eighteenth 
century; whereas in England the category of serfs was transformed 
during the Reformation into villeins, bordars and cottars* and 
thus into a class of workers enjoying personal freedom,” and as 

* Engels gives the words “villeins”, “bordars” and “cottars” in English — Ed. 

The Condition of England. The Eighteenth Century 475 

early as the eighteenth century the consequences of this revolution 
became evident there. Why this happened only in England is 
explained above. 

[Vorwarts! No. 71, September 4, 1844] 

Antiquity, which as yet knew nothing of the rights of the 
individual, whose whole outlook was essentially abstract, universal 
and material, could therefore not exist without slavery. The 
Christian-Germanic view of the world, by contrast with antiquity, 
set up abstract subjectivity, and hence arbitrariness, inwardness 
and spiritualism, as the basic principle. However this subjectivity, 
precisely because it was abstract and one-sided, was bound to turn 
at once into its opposite and to engender, not the freedom of the 
individual, but the enslavement of the individual. Abstract inward- 
ness became abstract outwardness, the rejection and alienation of 
man, and the first consequence of the new principle was the 
restoration of slavery in another form, that of serfdom, which was 
less offensive but for that reason hypocritical and more inhuman. 
The dissolution of the feudal system, the political Reformation, in 
other words, the apparent acknowledgement of reason, and hence 
really the culmination of unreason, appeared to abolish this serf- 
dom, but in reality only made it more inhuman and more 
universal. It was the first to declare that mankind should no 
longer be held together by force, that is, by political means, but by 
self-interest, that is, by social means, and through this new 
principle it laid the foundation for social advance. But although it 
thus negated the state, on the other hand it actually revived the 
state by restoring to it the content which had previously been 
usurped by the church, and thus gave the state, which in the 
Middle Ages had been an empty form of little consequence, the 
strength for further development. The Christian state, the culmi- 
nation of the political aspect of the Christian world order, arose 
from the ruins of feudalism; another aspect of the Christian world 
order attained its culmination by elevating interestedness to a 
general principle. For interest is essentially subjective and egoisti- 
cal, it is the interest of the individual, and as such the highest 
point of the Germanic and Christian principle of subjectivity and 
particularisation. The consequence of elevating interest to the 
nexus of man to man—that is as long as interest remains directly 
subjective and purely egoistical—is bound to be universal frag- 
mentation, the concentration of each individual upon himself, 
isolation, the transformation of mankind into a collection of 

mutually repelling atoms; and this particularisation is again the 
ultimate consequence of the Christian principle of subjectivity, the 
culmination of the Christian world order. 

Moreover, as long as private property, the basic form of 
alienation, exists, interest must necessarily be the interest of the 
individual and its domination will be the domination of property. 
The abolition of feudal servitude has made “‘cash-payment the sole 
relation of human beings”.* Property, a natural, spiritless princi- 
ple, as opposed to the human and spiritual principle, is thus 
enthroned, and ultimately, to complete this alienation, money— 
the alienated, empty abstraction of property—is made master of 
the world. Man has ceased to be the slave of men and has become 
the slave of things, the perversion of the human condition is 
complete; the servitude of the modern commercial world, this highly 
developed, total, universal venality, is more inhuman and more 
all-embracing than the serfdom of the feudal era; prostitution is 
more immoral and more bestial than the jus primae noctis. 

The Christian world order cannot be taken any further than 
this; it must collapse under its own weight and make way for a 
humane, rational order. The Christian state is merely the last 
possible manifestation of the state as such; its demise will necessar- 
ily mean the demise of the state as such. The disintegration of 
mankind into a mass of isolated, mutually repelling atoms in itself 
means the destruction of all corporate, national and indeed of any 
particular interests and is the last necessary step towards the free 
and spontaneous association of men. The supremacy of money as 
the culmination of the process of alienation is an inevitable stage 
which has to be passed through, if man is to return to himself, as 
he is now on the verge of doing. 

These consequences of the abolition of the feudal system have 
been taken to such lengths by the social revolution in England that 
the crisis which will destroy the Christian world order can no 
longer be far away, and indeed that the time of this crisis can be 
predicted with certainty, even if not quantitatively, in years, at 
least qualitatively; for this crisis must begin when the Corn Laws 
are repealed and the People’s Charter introduced, in other 
words, when the aristocracy of birth has been politically overcome 
by the money aristocracy and the latter in turn by working-class 
democracy. 

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had brought into being 
all the preconditions for social revolution, they had destroyed the 

* Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, p. 198.—Ed. 

The Condition of England. The Eighteenth Century 477 

Middle Ages, established social, political and religious Protestant- 
ism, created England’s colonies, sea-power and trade, and set up 
alongside the aristocracy a growing and already quite powerful 
middle class. Social conditions gradually settled down after the 
disturbances of the seventeenth century and acquired a stable 
form which they retained until about 1780 or 1790. 

There were at that time three classes of landowners, the 
aristocratical landlords, still the only, and unchallenged, nobility of 
the kingdom, who leased their estates in parcels and consumed the 
income in London or while travelling; the non-aristocratical 
landlords or country gentlemen (usually called squires*), who lived 
at their country-seats, put out their land on lease and enjoyed 
among their tenants and other local inhabitants the aristocratic 
esteem which was denied to them in the town on account of their 
humble origin, Jack of education and unpolished country manners. 
This class has now totally disappeared. The old squires who ruled 
with patriarchal authority the countryfolk of the district and acted 
as advisers, arbiters and everything rolled into one, are quite | 
extinct; their descendants call themselves the untitled aristocracy 
of England, as regards education and fine manners, luxury and 
aristocratic demeanour they vie with the aristocracy, which has 
little advantage left over them, and all they have in common with 
their rude and unpolished forefathers are their estates. 

The third class of landowners was that of the yeomen,” who 
owned small plots of land which they worked themselves, usually 
in the good old careless manner of their forebears; this class too 
has disappeared from the face of England, the social revolution 
has expropriated it and brought about the curious situation, that 
at the same time as in France the large landed estates were being 
forcibly parcelled out, in England the parcels were being attracted 
by the large landed estates and swallowed up by them. Alongside 
the yeomen there were small tenant farmers who were usually 
engaged in weaving as well as farming; they too are no longer to 
be found in modern England; almost all the land belongs now to a 
small number of large estates and is thus let on lease. The 
competition of the large tenant farmers drove the small tenant 
farmers and yeomen out of the market and impoverished them; 
they became agricultural day-labourers and weavers dependent on 
wages and supplied the masses whose influx caused the towns to 
grow with such amazing rapidity. 

* Engels gives the words “countr entlemen” i i i 
a d “ec ” ae 
Engels gives this word in English Ed. Te eye ae oae 

The farmers of those days led a quiet and placid life of godliness 
and propriety, they lived with few cares, but also without any 
changes, without general interests, without culture and mental activi- 
ty; they were still at the prehistoric stage. The position in the towns 
was not very different. Only London was an important centre of 
trade; Liverpool, Hull, Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and 
Glasgow were still insignificant. The main industries, spinning and 
weaving, were carried on chiefly in the country or at least not 
within the towns, but in their vicinity; the production of metal and 
pottery wares was still at the handicraft stage of development; not 
much was therefore likely to happen in the towns. The extreme 
simplicity of the electoral system relieved the townsfolk of any 
political cares, they were nominally Whig or Tory, but knew very 
well that it really made no difference, for they did not have the 
vote; small merchants, shopkeepers and craftsmen made up the 
whole urban population and. led that familiar life of the small 
provincial town which is so totally incomprehensible to the English 
today. Little use was as yet made of the mines; iron, copper and 
tin lay more or less undisturbed below ground, and coal was only 
used for domestic purposes. In short, the situation in England was 
then similar to that which, alas, still exists in most of France and 
particularly in Germany, that is, a state of antediluvian apathy 
towards all general and intellectual interests, a state of social 
infancy, in which society does not as yet exist, where there is as yet 
no life, no consciousness, no activity. This state is in fact a con- 
tinuation of feudalism and of medieval thoughtlessness, and will only 
be overcome with the arrival of modern feudalism, with the divi- 
sion of society into owners of property and non-owners. We on the 
Continent, as we have said, are still deeply immersed in this state; 
the English fought against it for eighty years and overcame it forty 
years ago. If civilisation is a matter of practice, a social quality, 
then the English are indeed the most civilised people in the world. 

I mentioned above that the sciences had assumed their scientific 
form in the eighteenth century and were consequently connected 
on the one hand with philosophy and on the other with practice. 
The result of taking philosophy as the point of departure was 
materialism (for which Newton was just as much a prerequisite as 
Locke), the Enlightenment and the French political revolution. 
The result of taking practice as the point of departure was the 
English social revolution. 

In 1760 George III began his reign, drove out the Whigs—who 
had held office almost uninterruptedly since the reign of George I 

The Condition of England. The Eighteenth Century 479 

but had of course governed in a thoroughly conservative man- 
ner—and laid the foundation of the Tory monopoly which lasted 
until 1830. The government thereby regained its inner truth; in a 
politically conservative period in England, it was quite appropriate 
that the conservative party should rule. From then on social 
developments absorbed the energies of the nation and ousted 
political interests, indeed destroyed them, for all domestic politics 
is from then on just concealed socialism, the form that social 
issues take to succeed in asserting themselves generally and na- 
tionally. 

In 1763 Dr. James Watt of Greenock began working on the design 
of the steam-engine, and completed it in 1768. 

In 1763 Josiah Wedgwood laid the foundations of the English 
pottery industry by the introduction of scientific principles. By his 
efforts a desolate area of Staffordshire has been turned into an 
industrial region—the Potteries—which now employs 60,000 
people and has played a very important part in the social and 
political movement of recent years. 

In 1764 in Lancashire James Hargreaves invented the spinning- 
jenny, a machine operated by one worker, which enabled him to 
spin sixteen times as much yarn as on the old spinning-wheel? 

In 1768 Richard Arkwright, a barber from Preston in Lanca- 
shire, invented the spinning-throstle, the first spinning-machine 
which was designed from the outset for mechanical power. It 
produced water-twist, that is, yarn used for warps in weaving. 

In 1776 in Bolton, Lancashire, Samuel Crompton invented the 
spinning-mule by combining the mechanical principles applied in 
the jenny and the throstle. The mule, like the jenny, spins the 
mule-twist, that is, the weaver’s weft; all three machines are 
designed for the working-up of cotton. 

In 1787 Dr. Cartwright invented the power-loom, which how- 
ever still had to undergo a number of improvements and could 
not be used in practice until 1801. 

These inventions stimulated social development. Their most 
immediate consequence was the rise of English industry, or more 
specifically of ‘cotton manufacture in the first instance. The jenny 
had, it is true, made the production of yarn cheaper, and by the 
expansion of the market that followed from this, it had given the 
first impetus to industry; but it left the social aspect, the character 
of the industrial enterprise, more or less unaffected. It was Ark- 

* Engels gives most of the technical terms in this and the following two 
paragraphs in English —Ed. 

wright’s and Crompton’s machines and Watt’s steam engine that 
first set the movement going, by creating the factory system. Smal- 
ler factories, driven by horses or water-power, arose first, but were 
soon displaced by the larger factories driven by water or steam. The 
first steam spinning-mill was set up by Watt in Nottinghamshire in 
1785; others followed it, and soon the new system became general. 
The spread of the steam spinning-mill, like all the other industrial 
improvements introduced simultaneously or later, proceeded with 
enormous speed. The import of raw cotton, which in 1770 was still 
less than five million pounds a year, rose to 54 million pounds 
(1800) and 360 million pounds (1836). Then the steam-loom was 
actually introduced and gave a new impetus to industrial progress; 
all the machines underwent countless small but, when taken 
together, very significant improvements, and each new improve- 
ment encouraged the spread of the industrial system as a whole. 
All branches of the cotton industry were revolutionised; printing 
was immensely improved by the introduction of mechanical aids 
and simultaneously by the advances made in chemistry, by which 
dyeing and bleaching profited as well. Hosiery manufacture too 
was carried along by this current; and since 1809 machines were 
used to manufacture fine cotton goods, tulle, lace, etc. I have not 
the space here to pursue the progress of cotton manufacture 
through all the details of its history; I can only indicate the 
outcome, and that, when compared with the antediluvian cotton 
industry with its four million pounds of imported cotton, with its 
spinning-wheel, hand-carding and hand-loom, cannot fail> to 
impress. 

In 1833, 10,264 million skeins of yarn were spun in Britain, 
their length amounting to over 5,000 million miles, and 350 
million ells of cotton fabric were printed; 1,300 cotton mills were 
in operation, which employed 237,000 spinners and weavers; over 
9 million spindles, 100,000 steam-looms and 240,000 hand-looms, 
33,000 hosiery looms and 3,500 bobbinet machines were in 
operation; cotton-manufacturing machinery used 33,000 h.p. of 
steam-power and 11,000 h.p. of water-power, and one and a 
half million people lived directly or indirectly from this industry. 
Lancashire derives its subsistence solely and Lanarkshire largely 
from the spinning and weaving of cotton; the subsidiary branches 
of the cotton industry are chiefly located in Nottinghamshire, 
Derbyshire and Leicestershire. The quantity of exported cotton 
goods has increased eightfold since 1801; the amount consumed in 
the country itself has increased a great deal more. 

The Condition of England. The Eighteenth Century 481 

[Vorwarts! No. 72, September 7, 1844] 

The impetus given to cotton manufacturing was soon communi- 
cated to other branches of industry. The woollen industry had until 
then been the most important branch of industry; it was now 
displaced by cotton, but instead of declining, it also grew. In 1785 
the whole wool crop of three preceding years lay unused; the 
spinners could not work it up as long as they had no alternative to 
their crude spinning-wheel. Then people began to apply the 
machines for spinning cotton to wool, and this, after a few 
modifications, was entirely successful; then the wool industry 
experienced the same rapid growth as we have already observed in 
the case of cotton manufacture. The import of raw wool rose from 
7 million pounds (1801) to 42 million pounds (1835); in the latter 
year 1,300 woollen mills employing 71,300 workers were in 
operation, not counting a host of hand-weavers who worked at 
home, and printers, dyers, bleachers, etc., etc., who also live 
indirectly from the wool industry. This industry is chiefly located 
in the West Riding of Yorkshire and the west of England 
(especially Somerset, Wiltshire, etc.). 

The linen industry was formerly located chiefly i in Ireland. The 
first factories for the processing of flax were built towards the end 
of the last century in Scotland. The machinery was however still 
very far from perfect; the material gave rise to difficulties which 
necessitated significant modifications in the machines. They were 
first improved by the Frenchman Girard (1810); but these im- 
provements acquired practical importance first of all in England. 
The introduction of steam-looms into the linen industry took place 
even later; and from this point on linen manufacture expanded at 
immense speed, although it suffered from the competition of 
cotton. In England Leeds became the centre of the linen industry, 
in Scotland Dundee and in Ireland Belfast. Dundee alone im- 
ported 3,000 tons of flax in 1814 and 19,000 tons in 1834. The 
export of linen from Ireland, where hand-weaving continued to 
exist alongside power-weaving, rose by 20 millicn yards from 1800 
to 1825, almost all of which went to England, and from there 
some of it was re-exported. Exports from the whole of Britain to 
foreign countries rose by 27 million yards between 1820 and 1833; 
in 1835 there were 347 flax mills in operation, 170 of these in 
Scotland; 33,000 workers were employed in these mills, not 
counting the many Irish artisans. 

The silk industry only became important after 1824 with the 
abolition of the heavy customs duties; since then the import of raw 

silk has doubled and the number of factories increased to 266, 
employing 30,000 workers. This industry is chiefly located in 
Cheshire (Macclesfield, Congleton and district), then follow Man- 
chester, and Paisley in Scotland. The centre of ribbon-making is 
Coventry in Warwickshire. 

These four industries which produce yarn and fabrics were thus 
totally revolutionised. Domestic industry was replaced by collective 
labour in large buildings; manual labour was supplanted by 
steam-power and the use of machinery. With the aid of the 
machine a child of eight was now able to produce more than 
twenty grown men before. Six hundred thousand factory workers, 
of whom half are children and more than half female, are doing 
the work of one hundred and fifty million people. 

But that is only the beginning of the industrial revolution. We 
have seen that dyeing, printing and bleaching expanded as a result 
of the advance in spinning and weaving and consequently sought 
the assistance of engineering and chemistry. Since the application 
of the steam-engine and of metal cylinders in printing, one man 
does the work of two hundred; the use of chlorine instead of 
oxygen in bleaching has reduced the time required for this 
operation from a few months to a few hours. While the industrial 
revolution thus affected the processes to which the product was 
subjected after spinning and weaving, its repercussions on the 
materials used by the new industry were even more significant. It 
was only through the steam-engine that the inexhaustible coal 
fields beneath the surface of England acquired their great impor- 
tance; new coal mines were opened in large numbers and the old 
ones worked with redoubled energy. The manufacture of spin- 
ning-machines and looms also began to constitute a separate 
branch of industry and reached a degree of perfection unattained 
by any other nation. The machines were made by machines, and 
by a division of labour extending to the minutest detail, it 
was possible to achieve the precision and exactitude which distin- 
guish English machines. The machine-building industry in 
its turn influenced iron and copper mining, which however 
received their chief impetus from another direction, but this too 
was caused by the original revolution effected by Watt and 
Arkwright. 

The consequences of an industrial impetus, once given, are 
endless. The progress made in one industry is communicated to all 
the others. The newly-created forces demand nourishment, as we 
have just seen; the newly-created working population brings in its 
wake new conditions of life and new needs. The mechanical 

The Condition of England. The Eighteenth Century 483 

advantages of factory production reduce the price of manufac- 
tured articles, and therefore make the necessities of life and in 
consequence wages in general cheaper; all other products can be 
sold more cheaply and thereby reach a wider market in propor- 
tion to their cheapness. Once the advantageous application of 
mechanical devices has been demonstrated, it is gradually imitated 
throughout industry; the advance in civilisation, which is the 
inevitable consequence of all industrial improvements, generates 
new needs, new industries and thus again new improvements. The 
consequence of the revolution in cotton-spinning was necessarily a 
revolution in the whole of industry; and if we cannot always trace 
how the motive forces are imparted to the more remote branches 
of the industrial system, only the absence of statistical and 
historical information is to blame. But we shall see everywhere that 
the introduction of mechanical devices and of scientific principles 
in general has been the mainspring of progress. 

After spinning and weaving, metal-working is the most impor- 
tant industry in England. It is chiefly located in Warwickshire 
(Birmingham) and Staffordshire (Wolverhampton). Steam-power 
was very soon employed in this industry and this, together with 
division of labour, cut the production costs of metal goods by 
three-quarters. On the other hand, exports multiplied fourfold 
from 1800 to 1835. In the former-year 86,000 cwt. of iron goods 
and the same quantity of copper goods were exported, in the latter 
year 320,000 cwt. of iron and 210,000 cwt. of copper and brass 
goods. The export of bar-iron and pig-iron became significant at the 
same time; in 1800, 4,600 tons of bar-iron were exported, in 1835, 
92,000 tons of bar-iron and 14,000 tons of pig-iron. 

English cutlery is made exclusively in Sheffield. The use of 
steam-power, especially for grinding and polishing blades, the 
conversion of iron into steel, which only then became important, 
and the newly-invented method of casting steel, brought about a 
complete revolution here too. Sheffield alone consumes annually 
500,000 tons of coal and 12,000 tons of iron, of which 10,000 tons 
come from abroad (particularly from Sweden). 

The use of cast-iron goods also dates from the second half of 
the last century and has attained its present importance only in the 
last few years. Gas-lighting (introduced, in effect, since 1804) 
created an enormous demand for cast-iron pipes; the railways, 
suspension bridges, etc., machinery, etc., increased this demand 
still more. In 1780 puddling was invented, that is, the conversion 
of cast into wrought iron by heating and removing the carbon, 
and this gave new importance to the English iron-ore mines. For 

lack of charcoal the English had until then to obtain all their 
wrought iron from abroad. Since 1790 nails have been made by 
machine, and screws since 1810; in Sheffield Huntsman invented 
crucible steel-making in 1760; wire was drawn by machinery, and 
generally a host of new machines was introduced throughout the 
iron and brass industry, manual labour was ousted and, insofar as 
the nature of the business permitted, the factory system was 
established. 

The increase in mining was only the necessary consequence of 
this. Until 1788 all iron-ore had been smelted with charcoal and 
iron extraction had therefore been limited by the small quantity 
of fuel available. After 1788 coke (coked coal) began to be 
used instead of charcoal and the amount produced annually was 
as a result multiplied by six in six years. In 1740, the annual 
output was 17,000 tons, in 1835, 553,000 tons. Extraction from 
the tin and copper mines has trebled since 1770. But along with 
the iron mines the coal mines are the most important in England. 
The growth of coal production since the middle of the last century 
cannot be assessed. The vast quantity of coal which is now 
consumed by the countless steam-engines working in the factories 
and mines, by the forges, by the smelting-furnaces and casting- 
works and by the domestic heating of a population that has 
doubled, bears no relation whatever to the amount consumed one 
hundred or eighty years ago. The smelting of pig-iron alone 
devours over three million tons a year (at twenty cwt. a ton). 

The most immediate consequence of the creation of industry 
was the improvement of the means of communication. In the last 
century the roads in England were just as bad as elsewhere and 
remained so until the celebrated McAdam based road-building on 
scientific principles and thereby gave a new impetus to the 
advance of civilisation. From 1818 to 1829 new highways with a 
total length of 1,000 English miles were laid down in England and 
Wales, not counting smaller country lanes, and almost all the old 
roads were reconstructed according to McAdam’s principles. In 
Scotland the public works authorities have built over 1,000 bridges 
since 1803. In Ireland, the wide, desolate bogs of the south, 
inhabited by half-wild robbers, were traversed by roads. By these 
means the remotest localities in the country, which had previously 
had no contact with the outside world, were now made accessible; 
in particular the Celtic-speaking areas of Wales, the Scottish 
Highlands and the south of Ireland were thereby compelled to 
make acquaintance with the outside world and accept the civilisa- 
tion imposed upon them. 

The Condition of England. The Eighteenth Century 485 

In 1755 the first canal of any note was constructed in Lanca- 
shire; in 1759 the Duke of Bridgewater started to build a canal 
from Worsley to Manchester. Since then canals have been con- 
structed to a total length of 2,200 miles; in addition England has 
another 1,800 miles of navigable rivers, which for the most part 
have also been opened up only recently. 

Since 1807, steam-power has been used for the propulsion of 
ships, and since the construction of the first British steamship 
(1811), 600 others have been built. In 1835 there were some 550 
steamships sailing from British ports. 

The first public railway was built in Surrey in 1801; but only 
with the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester railway (1830) did 
the new form of transport become important. Six years later, 680 
miles of railway had been constructed and four major lines—from 
London to Birmingham, Bristol and Southampton, and from 
Birmingham to Manchester and Liverpool—were in operation. 
Since then the network has been extended over the whole of 
England; London is the junction of nine railways, and Manchester 
of five.* 

This revolution through which British industry has passed is the 
foundation of every aspect of modern English life, the driving 
force behind all social development. Its first consequence was, as 
we have already indicated, the elevation of self-interest to a 
position of dominance over man. Self-interest seized the newly- 
created industrial powers and exploited them for its own pur- 
poses; these powers, which by right belong to mankind, became, 
owing to the influence of private property, the monopoly of a few 
rich capitalists and the means to the enslavement of the masses. 
Commerce absorbed industry into itself and thereby became 
omnipotent, it became the nexus of mankind; all personal and 
national intercourse was reduced to commercial intercourse, 
and—which amounts to the same thing—property, things, be- 
came master of the world. 

[Vorwarts! No. 73, September 11, 1844] 

The domination of property was bound to turn first against the 
state and to destroy it, or, at least, as it cannot do without it, to 
undermine it. Adam Smith began this undermining at the very 
time of the industrial revolution by publishing in 1776 his Inquiry 
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and thereby 

* The above statistical data are mainly drawn from The Progress of the Nationby G. 
Porter, a Board of Trade official under the Whig Ministry, that is, from official 
sources.— Note by Engels.4 

created the science. of finance. Up to now all finance had been 
entirely national; the economy had been regarded as a mere 
branch of affairs of the state as a whole and subordinated to the 
state as such; Adam Smith subordinated cosmopolitanism to na- 
tional aims and raised the economy of the state to the very essence 
and purpose of the state. He reduced politics, parties, religion, 
indeed everything, to economic categories and thereby recognised 
property as the essence of the state and enrichment as its purpose. 
On the other hand, William Godwin (Political Justice, 1793*) sup- 
ported the republican political system, propounded, at the same 
time as J. Bentham, the principle of utility, whereby the republi- 
can salus publica suprema lex’ was taken to its legitimate conclusions, 
and attacked the very essence of the state itself with his aphorism 
that the state is an evil. Godwin still defines the principle of utility 
quite generally as the duty of the citizen to live only for the 
general good without regard to his individual interest; Bentham, 
on the contrary, takes the essentially social nature of this principle 
further and in accordance with the national trend of that time 
makes the individual interest the basis of the gerieral interest: he 
recognises that the two are identical in the proposition, which his 
pupil Mill in particular developed, that charity is nothing but 
enlightened egoism, and he substitutes the greatest happiness of 
the greatest number for the “general good”. Bentham here makes 
the same error in his empiricism as Hegel made in his theory; he 
does not seriously try to overcome the contradictions, he turns the 
subject into the predicate, subordinates the whole to the part and 
in so doing stands everything on its head. First he says that the 
general and individual interests are inseparable and then he stays 
unilaterally at the crudest individual interest. His proposition is 
only the empirical expression of another one, namely, that man is 
mankind, but because it is expressed empirically it grants the 
rights of the species not to the free, self-conscious, creative man, 
but to the crude and blind man who remains within the confines 
of the contradictions. Bentham makes free competition the essence 
of morality, regulates human relations according to the laws of 
property, of things, according to the laws of nature, and thus 
represents the culmination of the old, naturally evolved Christian 
world order, the highest point of alienation, and not the beginning 
of a new order to be created by self-conscious man in full free- 
dom. He does not advance beyond the state, but strips it of all 

* An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. —Ed. 
> The public good is the supreme law.— Ed. 

The Condition of England. The Eighteenth Century 487. 

meaning, substitutes social principles for political ones, turns the 
political organisation into the form of the social content and thus 
carries the contradiction to its extreme limit. 

The democratic party originated at the same time as the indus- 
trial revolution. In 1769 J. Horne Tooke founded the Society of 
the Bill of Rights,in which, for the first time since the republic,’ 
democratic principles were discussed again. As in France, the 
democrats were exclusively men with a philosophical education, 
but they soon found that the upper and middle classes were 
opposed to them and only the working class lent a ready ear to 
their principles. Amongst the latter class they soon founded a 
party, which by 1794 was already fairly strong? and yet still only 
strong enough to act by fits and starts. From 1797 to 1816 it 
disappeared from view; in the turbulent years from 1816 to 1823 
it was again very active but then subsided once more into inactivity 
until the July revolution. From then on it has maintained its 
importance alongside the old parties and is making steady prog- 
ress, as we shall later see. 

The most important effect of the eighteenth century for En- 
gland wasthe creation ofthe proletariat by the industrial revolu- 
tion. The new industry demanded a constantly available mass of 
workers for the countless new branches of production, and 
moreover workers such as had previously not existed. Up to 1780 
England had few proletarians, a fact which emerges inevitably 
from the social condition of the nation as described above. Indus- 
try concentrated work in factories and towns; it became impossible 
to combine manufacturing and agricultural activity, and the new 
working class was reduced to complete dependence on its labour. 
What had hitherto been the exception became the rule and spread 
gradually outside the towns too. Small-scale farming was ousted by 
the large tenant farmers and thus a new class of agricultural 
labourers was created. The population of the towns trebled and 
quadrupled and almost the whole of this increase consisted solely 
of workers. The expansion of mining likewise required a large 
number of new workers, and these too lived solely from their daily 
wage. 

On the other hand, the middle class rose to become definitely 
aristocratic. During the industrial advance manufacturers multi- 
plied their capital in an amazingly rapid fashion; the merchants 
likewise received their share, and the capital created by this rev- 

? Of 1649-60.—Ed. 

olution was the means by which the English aristocracy fought the 
French Revolution. 

The result of this whole development was that England is now 
split into three parties, the landed aristocracy, the monied aristoc- 
racy, and working-class democracy. These are the only parties in 
England, they alone act as driving forces, and how they act we will 
perhaps try to describe in a later article.